Topic: CNSNews.com
It's pure opinion -- and a ridiculous, unsupported one at that -- but CNSNews.com portrayed it as news. Penny Starr wrote in a Dec. 2 CNS "news" article:
Conservative attorney Cleta Mitchell said on Friday that Barack Obama has acted more like a dictator than a president, and that President-elect Donald Trump should make it a priority to “restore the rule of law.”
“We have been living under a dictatorial tyrant for the last eight years,” Mitchell said at the Conservative Women’s Network event, co-hosted by the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute and the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C.
“And one of the most important things that Donald Trump can do as president is to restore the rule of law,” Mitchell said.[...]
“As an attorney I’m going to tell you that the most important thing that Donald Trump can do … and that is to restore the rule of law in America,” said Mitchell, who has represented the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, the National Rifle Association and many Republican members of the U.S. Congress.
“America is a nation of laws, not of men,” Mitchell said. “But what we’ve seen in the last eight years is a president with a cell phone and a pen who has made law as though he were an emperor and a complicit liberal media that has found that completely acceptable.”
Mitchell said if Trump were to govern with a cell phone and a pen his critics would accuse him of acting as a dictator. But it is Obama, Mitchell said, who has conducted the office of the presidency in that manner.
“We have been living under a dictatorial tyrant for the last eight years,” Mitchell said. “And one of the most important things that Donald Trump can do as president is to restore the rule of law.”
Starr cites -- and Mitchell apparently didn't provide -- any example of Obama governing like a "dictatorial tyrant." The "cell phone and a pen" is a reference to Obama's decision to use executive orders and work with outside groups in the face of the Republican Congress' unwillingness to work with him on legislation. Both actions are legal and constitutional -- in other words, the complete opposite of a "dictatorial tyrant."
But Starr was once again in stenography mode, and she treated Mitchell's words as undisputed and unimpeachable. If Starr were a real reporter, she would have interviewed others at the conservative event she attended to gauge reaction to Mitchell's ludicrous statement -- but she couldn't be bothered.
But then, stenography to attack Democrats and in the service of Republicans is how CNS rolls these days.
