The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.

~Edward R. Murrow

I know, this may be the fifth or sixth time I have opened a post with this quote.  But there is a reason.  It is the only thing which explains how an obvious fact can so easily be ignored or dismissed by the mainstream media.

This morning the Wall Street Journal reported the following:

In early 2015, a man [John Gauger] who runs a small technology company showed up at Trump Tower to collect $50,000 for having helped Michael Cohen, then Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, try to rig online polls in his boss’s favor before the presidential campaign.

However titillating this latest chapter of the 2016 election might seem, it was paragraph four of the story which caught my attention.

Mr. Gauger owns RedFinch Solutions LLC and is chief information officer at Liberty University in Virginia, where Jerry Falwell Jr., an evangelical leader and fervent Trump supporter, is president. (Emphasis added.)

While both CNN and MSNBC covered the Journal’s report, neither made the connection to Liberty University. One can imagine Cohen paraphrasing Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) in Casablanca, “Of all the IT firms, in all the towns, in all the world, I chose this one.”  (From the Duh Department, Fox News did not cover the story at all preferring to inform its viewers how an Indonesian woman was mauled to death by her pet alligator.)

Why does this matter?  Go back to the Deprogramming101 post from December 11, 2018 titled “J. Edgar Cohen,” in which I questioned whether Donald Trump’s fixer had blackmailed Falwell to obtain his early support for Trump’s presidential run.  It’s not like Falwell did not have his choice of kindred spiritualists including three Southern Baptists–Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham–and two nondenominational evangelicals–Rick Perry and Scott Walker.  In what I’m sure is just one more “coincidence” in the Trump campaign timeline, the payment to Gauger occurs around the same time Cohen confidently claims Falwell’s endorsement is forthcoming.  In what must surely be a second “coincidence,” the link to “TEAM” on the RedFinch Solutions web site is no longer active.

I have no doubt Robert Mueller will get to the bottom of this.  The question is who will hold the media, especially the cable news networks, accountable for their inability to see the forest for the trees.

POSTSCRIPT/An Already Broken New Year’s Resolution

Remember Mitt Romney, the Senator from Utah, who rolled into DC and made waves with a January 1 opinion piece in the Washington Post titled “The president shapes the public character of the nation.  Trump’s character falls short,” which included the following:

The world needs American leadership, and it is in America’s interest to provide it. A world led by authoritarian regimes is a world — and an America — with less prosperity, less freedom, less peace.

His New Year’s resolution?

I will act as I would with any president, in or out of my party: I will support policies that I believe are in the best interest of the country and my state, and oppose those that are not. I do not intend to comment on every tweet or fault. But I will speak out against significant statements or actions that are divisive, racist, sexist, anti-immigrant, dishonest or destructive to democratic institutions.

Yesterday, Romney voted with 42 other Senate Republicans to uphold Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s lifting sanctions against Russian companies partly owned by oligarch Oleg Derispaska, a Putin ally who had a relationship with convicted felon Paul Manafort.

So much for Mitt being the new John McCain.  More like Cain in the Book of Genesis.

GOD: Where is your conscience, Mitt?
ROMNEY: Am I my party’s keeper?

Obviously NOT.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP