ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi is dead, and American manufacturing is alive.
In light of the great news, the media somehow found “problematic” elements in the Trump administration killing the most notorious terrorist leader of the past decade.
The Washington Post took the cake, referring to Baghdadi as a “austere religious scholar” in a headline for an article that offered a strangely humanizing obituary for a man who would’ve killed billions if he was able. These are the same journalists who never fail to refer to anyone moderately right-wing as “far-right,” but evidently are willing to give some nuance when it comes to terrorists.
Even more bizarre, they originally referred to him as the “extremist leader of the Islamic State” before changing to the headline to the widely-ridiculed variant.
They make Baghdadi seem so gentle you’d think he was a student at Covington Catholic High School!
Oddly fitting for a business publication, Bloomberg spoke of Baghdadi as if he were a CEO who persevered against all odds. “…Baghdadi transformed himself from a little-known teacher of Koranic recitation into the self-proclaimed ruler of an entity that covered swaths of Syria and Iraq.”
Vox’s Aaron Rupar decried how Trump described the killing “in grisly detail.” I reached out to offer my condolences for his loss.
Here's Trump describing the killing of al-Baghdadi in grisly detail pic.twitter.com/yPWYjdEB8z
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 27, 2019
Meanwhile at CNN, Chris Cillizza found Trump’s speech following Baghdadi’s death problematic, headlining his article “The 41 Most Shocking Lines From Trump’s Baghdadi Announcement.”
He leads with Trump saying “He [Baghdadi] died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way.” What was their problem? That it was in contrast to Barack Obama’s rhetoric after the death of Osama Bin Laden, who was “light-on-details.”
How shocking! (But not really).
CNN also didn’t like that Trump talked about killing Hamza Bin laden, completely obliterating the ISIS Caliphate, describing Baghdadi as “dying like a dog,”
Shocking stuff, I know.
MSNBC decided to try to strip all credit from Trump in their reporting, claiming that the Baghdadi mission succeeded in spite of Trump, not because of him. Their basis of the claim was that Trump’s pullout of troops from Syria somehow would’ve impacted an operation that was going to happen regardless. And even they admit that regarding the anonymous intelligence officials they quoted in their article to make their case that “This reporting has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News.” So then why report it?
They also attacked Trump for decrying leaks from his political enemies while sharing sensitive details about a raid that killed the world’s most notorious terrorist, which for unknown reasons they saw as contradictory.
Of course, when Osama Bin Laden was killed, this was something CNN and MSNBC rightly celebrated (and then used as something else to attack Republicans over).
What a world we live in, where the same journalists who shriek every-time Trump describes them as “enemies of the American people” are running damage control for Jihadists.
