Chuck Todd and His Lügenpresse Comrades at MSNBC: Assumptions = “Evidence,” and Todd even Lied about The Godfather: Part II!
On Friday, I watched Todd and his panel of alleged reporters, talking about newly indicted Roger Stone, Wikileaks, and Trump. One female “reporter” kept asserting that the Wikileaks revelations of hacked, DNC emails were based on information that the Russians had fed them.
She kept acting as if everyone had known all along that this was a Russian operation, and finished with a flourish, “How much more evidence do you need?!”
What evidence? There had never been any evidence. The Democrats, including the Lügenpresse, had created their “collusion” story, as soon as they lost the election. They then kept smugly acting as if the story had been proven, when nothing had been proven. Like the fake reporter on MSNBC, they just keep on acting as if their case had already been proven, by simply repeating the same assumptions.
Wikileaks’ Julian Assange stated at the time, that he had not gotten the information from the Russians, or any other state actor. The Lügenpresse typically ignores Assange, because he has a much better reputation than they do. I have never heard them assert that he is a Russian tool and a liar, both of which would necessarily be the case, for their assertion to be true.
The fake news reporter was left with nothing but bluster, acting as if there were now “more” evidence, when she and her seditious collaborators had never had had any evidence, to begin with.
One of Chuck Todd’s weapons is a smirk. Somehow, when a devout, white, 16-year-old Catholic boy smirks in the face of racist harassment by adults, he must apologize, but Todd can smirk and lie all he wants.
One of the Lügenpresse’s favorite current lies is the assertion that President Trump has “threatened” his previous attorney, Michael Cohen. Trump did no such thing. He merely criticized Cohen.
That’s another typical leftwing tactic. If they have targeted you, you have no right of freedom of speech, or opinion, and no right to self-defense. If a female charges you with rape/sexual harassment/whatever, and you defend yourself, you are then guilty of “retaliation” and “sexual harassment,” on top of the other charges, no matter how fake they were. (And of course, if you don’t defend yourself, that also means you’re guilty of the charges. “Heads we win, tails you lose.”)
In Trump’s case, the lying is even worse, so they up the ante, and call it “threatening.”
Then came more lies, because there can never be enough.
Todd mentioned that Stone had referred to the gangster character, Frankie Pentangeli (Michael V. Gazzo), nicknamed Frankie Five Angels, the English translation of his name, from The Godfather: Part II.
Todd asserted of “Frankie Five Angels” that “the Corleone family threatened him,” and then showed a clip from the picture, in which a senate chief counsel upbraids Frankie for contradicting, in sworn testimony, all of his previous testimony.
The Corleone family never threatened Frankie.
Anyone who loves The Godfather: Part II will recall that Frankie Five Angels is the most tragic figure in the story, and the bridge between the old-style gangsterism of Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) and the new-style, corporate/political gangsterism of Vito’s son, Michael (Al Pacino). (God forgive me for romanticizing cut-throats!)
You get a taste of that in the first scene. Instead of being set at Long Beach (my hometown, and the Corleones’ home in The Godfather), or Little Italy, the Mafiosi are at a luxury resort at Lake Tahoe. But the orchestra doesn’t know their kind of music! Frankie tries to hum the song he wants, and the orchestra mocks him, turning it into “Pop Goes the Weasel”!
Later, after a drunk and disappointed Frankie visits and leaves Michael, Michael utters the clever-sounding phrase that became the big line of the picture, that explains so much of it, yet which was really stupid: “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”
Frankie had broken in with Don Vito, and served him for many years. Loyalty was a simple matter with the Don, but Michael’s sometime partner and mortal enemy, Hyman Roth (based on Meyer Lansky, and played by Lee Strasberg) and Michael are playing 3-D chess, with Frankie as a pawn.
Roth has some gangsters attack Frankie, in what appears to be a hit, saying
“Michael Corleone says, ‘Hello.’”
That’s to make Frankie think Michael has turned on him, just as the feds—as Roth knew via his own contact, the Senate committee chief counsel—were closing in on him.
Frankie no longer knows who his friends and his enemies are.
Frankie takes the deal, which requires that he testify against the Corleone family.
(Historical note: Cut-throats may go into the Witness Protection Program all the time now, but back in the late 1950s, when the picture was set, “Omerta” was the word, the word meant “silence,” and the word was kept.)
Frankie contradicts his previous testimony, because Michael Corleone did something, but that something was not a threat. Michael simply reminded Frankie of who he was.
Michael brought Frankie’s older brother, who spoke not a word of English, from Sicily, to be present in the courtroom, where Frankie could see him.
Honor. Frankie was in danger of dishonoring not only the Corleones, but everything that he and his own family stood for.
Seeing his brother in the courtroom, Frankie thinks to himself, “Jesus Christ! What have I done?,” and puts on a stupid act.
The next scene has Michael’s Irish lawyer and adopted brother, Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall) visiting Frankie in his open-air lockup, with the feds.
Tom Hagen: Frankie, you were always interested in politics, in history. I remember you talking about Hitler back in '43. We were young then.
Frankie Pentangeli: Yeah, I still read a lot. They bring me stuff.
Tom Hagen: You were around the old-timers who dreamed up how the Families should be organized, how they based it on the old Roman Legions, and called them “Regimes” ... with the “Capos” and “Soldiers,” and it worked.
Frankie Pentangeli: Yeah, it worked. Those were great old days. We was like the Roman Empire. The Corleone family was like the Roman Empire.
Tom Hagen: (sadly) Yeah, it was once. (Very gently) The Roman Empire... when a plot against the Emperor failed, the plotters were always given a chance to let their families keep their fortunes.
Frankie Pentangeli: Yeah, but only the rich guys. The little guys got knocked off. If they got arrested and executed, all their estate went to the Emperor. If they just went home and killed themselves, up front, nothing happened.
Tom Hagen: Yeah, that was a good break. A nice deal.
[Pentangeli looks at Hagen; he understands.]
Frankie Pentangeli: They went home and sat in a hot bath and opened their veins, and bled to death. Sometimes they gave a little party before they did it.
If Roger Stone was serious in his mention of Frank Pentangeli, it meant that he was considering suicide.
But Chuck Todd cares nothing about the truth, much less about honor or tragedy.
Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.
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