If the press doesn't like being called "FAKE NEWS," they could maybe stop doing this...

Almost every gun nut in the U.S. of freakin' A knows what the Knob Creek Gun Range in Bullitt County Kentucky is. They all know what it's famous for.  A lot of'em have been there just for the opportunity to "oooh" and "ahh" at awesome displays of firepower like that displayed in the video that appeared and went viral Sunday night. Unfortunately for ABC, it went viral for the wrong reasons.

So why did ABC News think they could get away with hijacking a video of a Knob Creek show finale and pawn it off as footage of an attack half the world away from Knob Creek?

I have a theory that makes perfect sense. The producers, technical staff and copy editors at ABC have never been to Knob Creek, or any gun range anywhere in the country. They've never held a gun, much less fired one. Because they live, work and recreate in their little concrete bubble of the urban echo chamber, they think everyone living out here in the real world is just like them.

They all live in the same kind of apartments. They all ride the same trains, stop at the same Starbucks, eat at the same Chipotle, yack on the same phones, listen to the same music and hit the same websites and use the same apps. They all like the same pictures, downvote the same posts and block the same trolls. They're automatons.

So when they went to Youtube or Vimeo for some footage they could use in a story about how bad orange man was getting people killed in Syria, they ran across the Knob Creek Gun Shoot from 2017 and said "wow... I've never seen anything like this before. It only has a few thousand(!) views so no one we know will know what this really is!"

By doing so, they played right into the "FAKE NEWS!" narrative, thereby reinforcing everything Donald Trump and smart Republicans have been talking about since the media stopped worrying about objectivity during the Clintonista Regime of the 1990's.

The news media really, really dislike being called out with  the "FAKE NEWS!" rant. They are their own worst enemies when they make unforced errors like this. They're incapable of helping themselves. Their echo chamber is so tight that when Beto O'Rourke talks about confiscating semi-automatic rifles, all of the millennials in the room are shocked when the hunters and ranchers in Arizona, Iowa and Pennsylvania go berserk and turn red. When Pocahontas says "Medicare for All!" the retirees in Florida go red with rage at the prospect of a youngster jumping to the front of a line they worked decades to be the head of.

ABC has apologized online for running the segment, but not on the air, or during prime time. Even if they did an on-the-air mea culpa, they can't un-ring the bell. This will be coming to a small city/small town/farm community near you. It will live for a very long time.

FAKE NEWS! pic.twitter.com/ta8ii8yetP

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2019

As you may know, President Trump decided last weekend to pull U.S. Special Forces out of a hotly disputed area between Turkey and Syria that had also been fought over by Kurds. This group has long sought an independent homeland and have been willing to fight for it for a very long time. From time to time, they have been U.S. allies in the fight against Al Qaeda, ISIS and Syrian forces backed by Russia and Iran. Turkey, Syria and Iraq have all had their issues with the Kurds. Turkey in particular has had a long and violent history with ethnic Kurds--they were a major part of the old Ottoman Empire before and during World War I. The Ottomans used Kurds extensively as part of their irregular forces called the Bashi Bazouks. Modern Turkey emerged from that war as an independent state, and the Turkish people have long memories of atrocities committed by the Bash Bazouk "terrorists" during the centuries of Ottoman rule.

Asia Minor is a seething hotbed of conflict and has been that way for centuries. Peace has traditionally been maintained from the Levant up through The Dardanelles and over through the Caucasus region by brutal force. It's a mix of ethnic friction, tribal feuds and turmoil. It's the main corridor of commerce between western Europe and Asia proper since antiquity. And... there's lots of petroleum in the area. "Regime change" conflicts are not new. They're baked into the area's daily bread.

Was Trump right or wrong to get U.S. Special operators out of there? We don't know, but the area of concern was going to be fought over sooner or later, whether our guys were there or not. Keeping them as a buffer between people who have hated each other since before this country was even a good idea... maybe not a smart bet. The issues are much too complicated for a bunch of young, pampered and insulated American urbanites to even understand. No wonder this "FAKE NEWS!" video popped up.

Project Veritas plans to expose CNN with insider video

From the folks that went inside the infanticide mills of Planned Parenthood...

From the group who exposed election fraud in the 2018 Florida Governor's race...

Project Veritas is about to expose the ugly truth inside CNN's "news-gathering."

This week, a CNN insider will blow the whistle and through Project Veritas will release dozens of recordings made of officials at the highest levels of CNN, revealing a political agenda, bias and misconduct hidden from public view.

This series of tapes — which we think will be the biggest story of the year for Project Veritas — blends two extraordinary series of events; a brave insider secretly recording at work. This is a hard-hitting piece of hidden camera muckraking into one of the supposed “most trusted names in news.”

Get some popcorn, folks. It's gonna be a very entertaining week.

What will be the most entertaining: The shock value of the raw, unedited footage, or the squirming and sweating of CNN execs and talking heads?

No... What will be most fun is watching Your President Donald Trump use the footage in TV campaign ads.

Schadenfreude, baby.

Associated Press publishes blatantly false characterization of Trump-Zelensky phone call

This is why the American public has lost faith in the integrity and objectivity of the news media. This is why people don't roll their eyes when someone yells "FAKE NEWS!"

Here is the key excerpt from an AP "news" story from Deb Riechmann that ran Oct 12, 2019:

By the time staffers in the Situation Room got the president of Ukraine on the phone at 9:03 a.m., Trump had just finished firing off tweets claiming complete vindication from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s congressional testimony the day before about the Russia investigation. On the call, Trump was first to speak. He showered the 41-year-old Ukrainian, a novice politician and former comedian, with praise following his party’s victory in parliamentary elections. Zelenskiy chatted about how he wanted to “drain the swamp” in Kyiv and how he wished the European Union would provide more financial support. He told Trump that Ukraine was ready to buy more Javelin anti-tank missiles from the United States.

The next 10 words that came out of Trump’s mouth — “I would like you to do us a favor, though” — are what triggered the House impeachment inquiry that has imperiled his presidency.

Trump asked Zelenskiy to work with Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr to look into Biden and his son, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.

This is a blatantly false characterization of the content and context of this conversation. Here is the relevant exchange as provided in the official, undisputed transcript of the call:

President Zelenskyy: Yes you are absolutely right. Not only 100%, but actually 1000% and I can tell you the following; I did talk to Angela Merkel and I did meet with her I also met and talked with Macron and I told them that they are not doing quite as much as they need to be doing on the issues with the sanctions. They are not enforcing the sanctions. They are not working as much as they should work for Ukraine. It turns out that even though logically, the European Union should be our biggest partner but technically the United States is a much bigger partner than the European Union and I'm very grateful to you for that because the United States is doing quite a lot for Ukraine. Much more than the European Union especially when we are talking about sanctions against the Russian Federation. I would also like to thank you for your great support in the area of defense. We are ready to continue to cooperate for the next steps specifically we are almost. ready to buy more Javelins from the United States for defense purposes.
The President: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike... I guess you have one of your wealthy people... The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you're surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it's very important that you do it if that's possible.
President Zelenskyy: Yes it is very important for me and everything that you just mentioned earlier. For me as a President, it is very important and we are open for any future cooperation. We are ready to open a new page on cooperation in relations between the United States and Ukraine. For that purpose, I just recalled our ambassador from United States and he will be replaced by a very competent and very experienced ambassador who will work hard on making sure that our two nations are getting closer. I would also like and hope to see him having your trust and your confidence and have personal relations with you so we can cooperate even more so. I will personally tell you that one of my assistants spoke with Mr. Giuliani just recently and we are hoping very much that Mr. Giuliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and we will meet once he comes to Ukraine. I just wanted to assure you once again that you have nobody but friends around us. I will make sure that I surround myself with the best and most experienced people. I also wanted to tell you that we are friends. We are great friends and you Mr. President have friends in our country so we can continue our strategic partnership. I also plan to surround myself with great people and in addition to that investigation, I guarantee as the President of Ukraine that all the investigations will be done openly and candidly.. That I can assure you.

The AP story will run in newspapers and on news websites around the world, and ordinary folks who have neither the time nor the interest nor the energy to find out what was actually said will read this. They will come away from this article thinking that President Zelensky asked for Javelin anti-tank missiles and President Trump said "I need a favor; go get Joe Biden for me. You can have your missiles."

That is not what happened and the official record clearly shows it.

The publisher of the Washington Post has said that calling stuff like this "FAKE NEWS!" is corrosive.

No sir, Mr. Ryan. The corrosive agent isn't the President's willingness to cry foul when he and his allies see stories like this. The corrosion in our public discourse is the national media's blatant bias and your complete inability to resist any contortion of the truth necessary to unseat a duly elected President.

We the People are onto you. We're not going stop yelling "FAKE NEWS!" until you spoiled brats stop publishing it.