WorldNetDaily continued its Trump Regime Media duty over President Trump’s missile strikes on Iran by lashing out at a CNN story that reported those airstrikes may not have been effective as claimed. An anonymously written June 24 article huffed:
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is rebuking CNN after the network ran a story based on “leaked” sources claiming that the damage the U.S. attack on Iran inflicted over the weekend only set Tehran’s nuclear ambitions behind by “a few month.”
CNN reported Tuesday that three sources indicate the attack Saturday “did not destroy the core components of the country’s nuclear program and likely only set it back a few months.”
The network claims the information was based on a bombing assessment report done by the Defense Intelligence Agency after the strikes.
Leavitt rebutted the report on social media, pointing out the CNN story was put together “by the same ‘reporter’ who wrote the very first FAKE NEWS story claiming the Hunter Biden laptop was disinformation.”
That reporter is Natasha Bertrand.
Besides Leavitt, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also discounted the report, telling Fox News the attack “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
“Based on everything we have seen — and I’ve seen it all — our bombing campaign obliterated Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons,” Hegseth said. “Our massive bombs hit exactly the right spot at each target — and worked perfectly. The impact of those bombs is buried under a mountain of rubble in Iran; so anyone who says the bombs were not devastating is just trying to undermine the President and the successful mission.”
The article did not note that either Leavitt or Hegseth provided any actual evidence to back up their claims.
Joe Kovacs followed up with a June 25 article quoting Trump whining that not everyone was buying into his narrative:
President Donald Trump says the U.S. pilots who bombed three nuclear sites in Iran Saturday are “devastated” by negative news reports in American media minimizing the damage inflicted on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear weapons development.
Speaking to reporters Wednesday at the NATO Summit in the Netherlands, Trump said: “I got a call that the pilots and the people on the plane were devastated because they (the media) were trying to minimize the attack. And they all said it was hit.”
“They were devastated. They put their lives on the line and they have … real scum come out and write reports that are as negative as they could possibly be. It should be the opposite. You should make them heroes and heroines.
“There were so devastated when they heard this news. And you know what they said? I spoke to one of them. He said, ‘Sir, we hit the site. It was perfect, it was dead-on!’
“Because they don’t understand fake news because they have a normal life, except they have to fly very big, very fast planes. But it’s a shame. You should be making them heroes.”
At another press availability earlier in the day, Trump said: “This was an unbelievable hit by genius pilots and genius people in the military, and they’re not being given credit for it because we have scum … CNN is scum. MSDNC is scum. The New York Times is scum. They’re bad people. They’re sick.
“What they’ve done is, they’re trying to make this unbelievable victory into something less. Now even they admit that it was hit very hard. But it wasn’t hit hard. It was hit brutally, and it knocked it out.”Appearing with Trump at The Hague was U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who stressed Iran’s nuclear weapons program is indeed “obliterated.”
“Those that dropped the bombs precisely in the right place know exactly what happened when that exploded,” Hegseth said.
[…]“And then the intact, the instinct of CNN, the instinct of the New York Times is to try to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons to try to hurt President Trump or our country. They don’t care what the troops think. They don’t care what the world thinks. They want to spin it to try to make him look bad based on a leak.”
“What do leakers do? They have agendas. And what do they do? Do they share the whole information or just the part that they want to introduce.”
Again, Kovacs cited no evidence from Trump or Hegseth that directly contradicts the CNN story, nor did he explain why they must be believed over CNN without such evidence.
Bob Unruh served up another stenography special in a June 26 article:
The American media missed, “or intentionally ignored,” something that came out of the White House, something that probably never before has happened in the modern era.
It occurred during the aftermath of the American strike on facilities in Iran that were intended to help the rogue Islamic regime create and use nuclear weapons against Israel.
It was documented in a commentary from the James Dobson Family Institute that was authored by Gary Bauer, president of the Family Research Council and longtime associate of Dobson.
[…]“The president said something that I believe brought joy to the heavens and our Creator. The media missed it, of course, or intentionally ignored it. Here is the quote that grabbed my attention: ‘I want to just thank everybody and, in particular, God. I want to just say, we love you, God, and we love our great military. Protect them. God bless the Middle East. God bless Israel, and God bless America.'”
[…]“‘We love you, God.’ I am virtually certain that no modern president has ever uttered those powerful words. Many presidents will ask God to bless America, especially in times of trouble and fear. ‘God bless America’ has almost been mechanical or merely a habit. Some have pondered in recent years whether we can ask for God to bless our nation if His innocent children continue to be destroyed in the womb. Corruption has grown in our country, and our culture is more decadent. Should we expect God to bless us?” Bauer said.
Unruh served up more whining from Hegseth later that day:
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has unleashed a response that scorched a reporter demanding to know why administration references to the pilots who bombed Iranian nuclear weapon sites did not pointedly note that some were male, and some female.
“We don’t play your little games,” he said. “When you spin it as because I say ‘our boys in bombers’ as a common phrase – I’ll keep saying things like that, whether they’re men or women. I’m very proud of that female pilot, just like I’m very proud of those male pilots.
“I don’t care if it’s a male or a female in the cockpit, and the American people don’t care. But it’s the obsession with race and gender in this department that’s changed priorities, and we don’t do that anymore.”
Unruh didn’t mention that Hegseth was indeed playing such games just a few weeks earlier when he renamed a Navy ship that had been named after gay activist (and Navy veteran) Harvey Milk, which WND cheered.
A June 29 article by Kovacs hyped Trump whining more about the CNN report:
President Donald Trump on Sunday said whoever leaked an initial, low-confidence Defense Intelligence Agency report on the success of U.S. military strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites “should be prosecuted,” and floated the notion of journalists revealing the perpetrator.
Appearing on “Sunday Morning Futures” on the Fox News Channel, Trump told anchor Maria Bartiromo: “They should be prosecuted.”
“Who specifically?” asked Bartiromo.
“The people that leaked it,” replied Trump.
“We can find out. If they want to, they could find out easily. You go up and tell the reporter, ‘National security, who gave it [to you]?’
“You have to do that, and I suspect we’ll be doing things like that,” Trump continued.
Once again, Kovacs did not quote Trump releasing evidence that definitively disputed the accuracy of the report.
Meanwhile, Don Feder spent his June 24 WND column sucking up to Trump over the airstrikes:
Thank God President Trump acted decisively and did what had to be done to prevent a nuclear Iran.
Still, the debate leading up to Operation Midnight Hammer revealed a dangerous strain of isolationism in the MAGA movement, reflected in the incessant caterwauling over our possible involvement: “But you promised to keep us out of foreign wars,” they whined.
With almost a quarter century of interventions since 9/11, we should be wary of another. Nation-building is futile. Foreign interventions are costly in terms of military expenditures and lives lost, and regime change can be risky.
After two decades of U.S. fighting in Afghanistan, the Taliban are back in power, enriched by $7 billion in military equipment we left behind. The last resulted from one of the most disastrous withdrawals in military history, orchestrated by a man who trips walking up stairs.
However, Mr. Trump understands what MAGA mega-isolationists do not: Foreign intervention is sometimes unavoidable.
Negotiations fail. The regimes that brutalize their own people and have auxiliaries that commit the most heinous acts imaginable often aren’t amenable to reason. Or, as John Wayne said in “Dark Command,” “It takes a good fire to burn down the weeds … to let the flowers grow.” Israel lit the fire. America fanned the flames.
[…]To make America great again, we must make America safe again. That means safe streets, a secure border and a nation safe from foreign predators.
That is why we had to stop a bloodthirsty seventh-century theocracy from acquiring the means to launch a nuclear holocaust.
When they start loading you onto cattle cars, it’s too late to protest.
Feder has likened Democrats to Nazis and doesn’t like educated women, so he seems more likely to be loading certain people into cattle cars than Iran.