White House Bullies ABC Into Suspending Journo Who Hurt Sweet Stephen Miller's Feelings
Terry Moran is of course correct that Stephen Miller is a hateful sack of bile.
Something happened to ABC News reporter Terry Moran over the weekend: He was brought low by a brutal attack of unvarnished honesty.
Sir, really. Honesty? In Donald Trump’s America?
Even better, Moran’s honesty was an assessment of the character — or complete and utter lack thereof — of Stephen Miller, the irredeemably evil sack of donkey vomit who does whatever it takes to stay on Donald Trump’s good side, all so he can continue to hold the power — as shadow president, basically — to destroy lives for no other reason than his parents apparently never hugged him and told him he was worthy of love.
Which, quite frankly, can you blame them? We imagine raising Stephen Miller involved mysterious supernatural happenings around the house and nannies hanging themselves from the top floor of the family manor in full view of the guests at Miller’s birthday party.
The trouble started, as it so often does, with a tweet. On Saturday, Moran posted his opinion, for which your Wonkette congratulates him even though we know this sort of thing is frowned upon by the giants of journalism:
The thing about Stephen Miller is not that he is the brains behind Trumpism.
Yes, he is one of the people who conceptualizes the impulses of the Trumpist movement and translates them into policy.
But that's not what's interesting about Miller.
It's not brains. It's bile.
Miller is a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred. He's a world-class hater.
You can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.
Trump is a world-class hater. But his hatred only a means to an end, and that end is his own glorification. That's his spiritual nourishment.
None of this is news about Stephen Miller to anyone who has ever known him, going back to his high school days when he once got booed off a stage for excoriating his fellow students for being nice to the school’s janitors. A journalist who wrote a book about Miller during Trump’s first term titled it Hatemonger, and we doubt many people blinked an eye.
Shoot, the man’s own family disowned him, and his childhood rabbi called him out in a sermon on Rosh Hashanah. Do you know how horrible of a person you have to be to get a rabbi to denounce you from the bema during the High Holidays? That’s an honor usually reserved for biblical villains and Adolf Hitler, and we are not glibly invoking Godwin’s Law when we say that. We have sat through a lot of High Holiday sermons.
Moran deleted the tweet at some point, but the damage was done. The White House jumped all over Moran in defense of Miller. Vice President JD Vance called the tweet “an absolutely vile smear” and declared that Miller is motivated by “a love of country.” White House Press Nazi Karoline Leavitt, perhaps forgetting who she works for and what kind of crap he puts out every day, called it “unhinged and unacceptable” in a tweet.
Then the press secretary, her face shining like a highly polished apple, went on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox Business show and said that “ABC is gonna have to answer” for Moran’s comments:
Miller himself called Moran a radical “adopting a journalist’s pose.” Oh no, was he so upset he couldn’t eat his usual Sunday brunch consisting of a live bat?
Moran posted his screed at 12:06 a.m. Sunday morning, the “drunk texting your ex because you’ve been drinking all night and are now all caught up in your lonely feels” hour. Nothing good ever comes of picking up your phone at that hour.
ABC News promptly suspended Moran. Via Deadline:
“ABC News stands for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage and does not condone subjective personal attacks on others,” a network spokesperson said. “The post does not reflect the views of ABC News and violated our standards — as a result, Terry Moran has been suspended pending further evaluation.”
ABC should try being like Wonkette, whose only standard is the truth. Then Moran could have called Stupid Nosferatu whatever he wanted: hideous shit goblin, Skeletor, fascist taint shavings, a lower life form than the crud under the fridge, a loser husband who rumors are abounding may have been cucked by Elon Musk, a motherfucking shanda fur di goyim … the list goes on and on and on.
We are not in the habit of giving ABC any advice, but we think their response to Leavitt’s demand that they “answer for” Moran should be two middle fingers raised high, accompanied by a sneer that could melt the press secretary’s face off. It is way past time for high-level journalists to be consistently frank about what Stephen Miller is and what he’s doing, instead of couching his vile bigotry and single-minded pursuit of extremist actions as some sort of polite disagreement between right and left over immigration policy.
Unfortunately, ABC is in the habit of caving like a coal mine to the Trump administration when one of its reporters says something vaguely impolite. Recall that when George Stephanopoulos mentioned that Trump had been found liable for the rape of E. Jean Carroll, the convicted felon filed for defamation because the court had found him liable for sexual assault, which for some reason he seems to think is a less reputation-ruining term than rape. Never mind that the judge in the case made clear that in the eyes of the laws of the state of New York, it’s a distinction without a real difference.
“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote.
Nonetheless, ABC settled by forking over $15 million to Trump’s library slush fund, plus another $1 million to cover his legal fees. So Terry Moran can probably look forward to some sort of punishment utterly unbefitting of the crime.
One irony here is that it was only a few weeks ago that Moran gave Trump a softball interview in which he tried to let the president off the hook for his belief that an obviously doctored photo of the tattoos on Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s hand was real, and Trump wouldn’t take the out. Because he’s a huge idiot.
We can’t believe we’re saying this, but free Terry Moran!
[Deadline]
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My boss just walked past me and said "Hey, no pornography at work!"
"Pardon?"
"That is very clearly a dick on your screen."
If my wife ran off with Elon Musk I wouldn't be in a very good mood either.