JUST SAYING
BY RAUL HERNANDEZ
ZUCKER’S TRAINED SEALS
Anderson Cooper: If Trump ‘Took A Dump On His Desk,’ Jeffrey Lord Would Defend It.
Yeah, but Anderson Cooper conveniently ignores the fact that his boss and CNN’s executive Jeff Zucker pays Trump apologists, zealots, and party loyalists like Lord to show up on panels and defend Trump like political pit bulls.
Zucker is okay with his panels, and he likes Trump.
He also said in a new profile that even with the attacks on his network coming from Trump, he still enjoys him on a personal level.
“I like Donald,” Zucker said in a recent New York Times profile. “I guess I shouldn’t call him that. I like President Trump. He’s affable. He’s funny.”
Zucker added that he found Trump to be “good company.”
Lord is one of Trump’s head cheerleaders and knows that putting down the pom poms would result in his disappearance from Zucker-engineered panels and the end of fat CNN paydays.
Zucker is about ratings and profits.
This means allowing outrages lies and political stump speeches to be dispensed through the filter of entertainment —finger pointing, shouting and interruptions.
When a trained seal does a trick, he is rewarded with a fish. Lord is simply fulfilling his CNN performance/entertainment contract and didn’t deserve the scathing criticism from Anderson.
ZUCKER NO PROBLEM WITH TRUMP PANELISTS
CNN’s Jeff Zucker sees no problem in giving Donald Trump surrogates airtime, according to an article in the New York Times.
The article published in April is titled, “CNN Had a Problem.Donald Trump Solved It.”
In part, here is what Zucker said in the lengthy interview with the NYT about his panelists:
“As Zucker sees it, his pro-Trump panelists are not just spokespeople for a worldview; they are “characters in a drama,” members of CNN’s extended ensemble cast. “Everybody says, ‘Oh, I can’t believe you have Jeffrey Lord or Kayleigh McEnany,’ but you know what?” Zucker told me with some satisfaction. “They know who Jeffrey Lord and Kayleigh McEnany are.”
A Chip Off the Old, Old Block
During the Saturday funeral service for Fox News’ founder and former CEO Roger Ailes, his son reportedly made a point to threaten the people who had “betrayed” his father, the Huffington Post reported.
“I want all the people who betrayed my father to know that I’m coming after them, and hell is coming with me,” Zachary Ailes, 17, said during a speech at the service, according to Lifezette.
Okay, General Zachary Sherman, but don’t forget to burn down Fox News on the way to the sea.
MONUMENTS COMING DOWN
Another Confederate monument was taken down in New Orleans last week amid cheers, according to published reports.
This statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was on New Orleans busy Lee Circle for 133 years.
It was the fourth and final monument of the city.
“This ‘cult’ had one goal,” he explained, “through monuments and through other means, to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity.”
I like to read history books about the Civil War and enjoyed Ken Burns’ PBS series, “The Civil War.”
Many who fought in that war didn’t do so to keep slavery. They did so because they were defending their homeland against an invasion from the North or were looking for adventure so they went off to war.
Most people aren’t aware that at least 2,500 Mexican Texans joined the Confederate Army, according to the Texas State Historical Association.
The most famous was Santos Benavides, who rose to command the Thirty-third Texas Cavalry as a colonel, and thus became the highest ranking Tejano to serve the Confederacy. Though it was ill-equipped, frequently without food, and forced to march across vast expanses of South Texas and northern Mexico, the Thirty-third was never defeated in battle.
Other Texas Mexicans, resentful of growing non-Hispanic political dominance of their communities, enlisted in federal blue, according to the Texas State Historical Association.
“Many joined the Union Army for the bounty money offered upon enlistment, but some enlisted because they opposed slavery or to satisfy grudges against landowners, attorneys, and politicians who had used the American legal system to take valuable land from Tejanos during the preceding decade,” the Texas State Historical Association.
There were more than 600,000 lives lost during the Civil War because people thought they had a right to own other human beings and treat them like animals.
History should not honor with monuments those leaders and generals who lead others to bloody battlefields that caused so much death, destruction, and suffering.
They aren’t heroes but were aiders and abetters of a lost cause and share the responsibility for the death and damage they caused.
Some argue that slavery was one cause of the Civil War to justify this relics to racism.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author James McPherson writes that “The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become states.”
Noting, “When Abraham Lincoln won election in 1860 as the first Republican president on a platform pledging to keep slavery out of the territories, seven slave states in the deep South seceded and formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America.”
Adding, “The incoming Lincoln administration and most of the Northern people refused to recognize the legitimacy of secession. They feared that it would discredit democracy and create a fatal precedent that would eventually fragment the no-longer United States into several small, squabbling countries.”