{"id":17949,"date":"2017-06-04T01:13:55","date_gmt":"2017-06-04T07:13:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=17949"},"modified":"2017-06-05T14:35:45","modified_gmt":"2017-06-05T20:35:45","slug":"prairie-lights-when-taking-responsibility-is-not-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2017\/06\/prairie-lights-when-taking-responsibility-is-not-enough\/","title":{"rendered":"Prairie Lights: When ‘taking responsibility’ is not enough"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"RMC\"<\/a>

Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News<\/p>

Things weren’t quite so tumultuous for Greg Gianforte when he gave the commencement address at Rocky Mountain College in 2014.<\/p><\/div>\n

If Congressman-elect Greg Gianforte appears in Justice Court in Bozeman this week to enter a plea on a charge of misdemeanor assault, he won\u2019t be able to say anything deliberately untrue without putting himself at risk of being charged with perjury.<\/p>\n

So, is there nothing we can do about the deliberate untruth his campaign released in the immediate aftermath of Gianforte\u2019s attack on a newspaper reporter?<\/p>\n

\"Ol<\/a>

Ed Kemmick<\/p><\/div>\n

In an interview<\/a> with Montana Television Network, which aired on Friday, Gianforte was asked why his campaign issued a statement that \u201cappeared to blame the reporter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gianforte, according to MTN\u2019s online report<\/a>, \u201csaid he\u2019d rather focus on \u2018taking responsibility for my actions, and that\u2019s what I\u2019ve done.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, yes, he did \u201ctake responsibility,\u201d after he\u2019d safely won the election. But that original statement<\/a> not only blamed reporter Ben Jacobs for provoking the attack, it gave a confusing, untrue explanation of how Gianforte, in trying to get the reporter\u2019s microphone out of his face, supposedly grabbed his wrist, causing both men to fall.<\/p>\n

The only member of Gianforte\u2019s campaign who was in the room was Gianforte, so either he formulated that misleading description or allowed an underling to fabricate it from whole cloth.<\/p>\n

Gianforte \u201ctook responsibility\u201d only after a Fox News reporter who witnessed the event said Gianforte, under no provocation, grabbed Jacobs by the neck, body-slammed him to the ground and begun punching him.<\/p>\n

Everybody knows this by now, but it needs to be repeated until Gianforte does something more than \u201ctake responsibility.\u201d He has not apologized personally to Jacobs and he has not repudiated the lies released by his campaign.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the opinions of willfully blind followers of Gianforte, while mildly interesting from a sociological point of view, don\u2019t matter anymore. No thoughtful people, no true patriots, have yet come forward to argue that politicians should be allowed to assault reporters for asking them questions.<\/p>\n

In journalism circles, there is a statement by Thomas Jefferson that has been repeated so often that it is almost hackneyed, but it\u2019s worth mentioning again in this context. And please remember that in Jefferson\u2019s time there was really no such thing as an \u201cobjective\u201d press. Virtually every newspaper was owned or controlled by a political party or faction.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>Jefferson himself endured attacks in the press that even by the standards of, say, Facebook commentary, might be considered extreme, but here is what he said in a letter to a friend: \u201cwere it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspaper or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.\u201d<\/p>\n

If the opinion of Jefferson doesn\u2019t carry any weight, consider the National Review, the voice of conservatism for more than 60 years. It did not try to defend Gianforte\u2019s actions, though it did defend Trump against the charge that his hot-blooded rhetoric was somehow responsible for Gianforte\u2019s outburst.<\/p>\n

Even the headline on the National Review piece<\/a> in question shows how it was leaning: \u201cGianforte Wins, Continuing GOP Stranglehold on Montana House Seat.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much of the piece quotes Allahpundit<\/a>, the anonymous conservative-libertarian blogger, who downplayed the \u201cTrump effect\u201d by saying that \u201cthe Gianforte incident is shocking because it\u2019s unusual.\u201d He went on to say that Gianforte\u2019s \u201cwhitewash account\u201d of the incident, in other words his lie, proves that he wasn’t thinking he could get away with it just because\u00a0Trump apparently could.<\/p>\n

What Gianforte did, according to Allahpundit, was \u201cNot calculation, not grandstanding for the benefit of media-hating Republican voters. He snapped, and he was sufficiently embarrassed about it afterward to have tried in a half-assed way to cover it up.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the rest of us in Montana, the embarrassment over Gianforte\u2019s crude actions, and his half-assed attempt to cover his tracks, is not going to go away. It was reported Friday<\/a> that four media groups wrote to the House Committee on Ethics and Office of Congressional Ethics, asking for an investigation of the Gianforte-Jacobs incident.<\/p>\n

It will be a miracle if the House leadership orders such an investigation. House Republicans already have their hands full trying to get anything done while dealing with a president who can\u2019t take the trouble to actually read a piece of legislation, or even to determine if a piece of legislation exists<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So Gianforte will enter the House under a very dark cloud, and in the annals of history his name will always have an asterisk next to it.<\/p>\n

And Ben Jacobs\u2019 glasses\u2014broken in the line of duty, when he had the effrontery to ask Gianforte a question about the GOP healthcare bill\u2014are headed for the Newseum<\/a> in Washington, D.C., where they will remain as a lasting symbol of contempt for the First Amendment, and a badge of shame for the state of Montana.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If Congressman-elect Greg Gianforte appears in Justice Court in Bozeman this week to enter a plea on a charge of misdemeanor assault, he won\u2019t be able to say anything deliberately untrue without putting himself at risk of being charged with perjury. So, is there nothing we can do about the deliberate untruth his campaign released […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17950,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[5892,335,5911,629],"class_list":["post-17949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-prairie-lights","tag-ben-jacobs","tag-greg-gianforte","tag-newseum","tag-u-s-house","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17949"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17970,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17949\/revisions\/17970"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17950"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}