Donald Trump’s acceptance speech last night at the Republican National Convention must have been easy to write. Anyone with a modicum of communication skills who had been paying attention the past eight years and isn’t either in denial or thoroughly corrupted could have written it. I could have written it. President Obama and Hillary Clinton, as well as their supporters, have provided so much material, or, if you like, ammunition. No wonder the speech was so long: it was the longest acceptance speech since 1972. It easily could have been longer.

There is no honest or reasonable argument to be made against Trump’s recitation of what is wrong in America. Escalating class, racial, gender and ethnic divisions, uncontrolled illegal immigration, handicapped law enforcement, sluggish economic growth, over-regulation, dangerous debt, incompetent foreign policy, weak national leadership, corruption, attacks on individual rights, and more…the speech hit a lot (not all, because there are so many) of the obvious failures of the Obama presidency, one of the most disappointing and disastrous in U.S. history. Most astute of all, the speech correctly painted Hillary Clinton as a candidate pledged to continue disastrous policies and anti-American philosophies. Read the text here.

The criticism of the speech from the left and mainstream media journalists (all together now: “But I repeat myself!”) was both predictable and telling. “Trump delivered a deeply negative speech that described a darkening America,” wrote Politico.” He spoke of spiking crime, “third-world” airports, growing trade deficits, “chaos in our communities,” and terrorism on the home front. Abroad, he said, the situation was “worse than it has ever been before.” On CNN, former Obama “czar” Van Jones said that “What Donald Trump did tonight was a disgrace. That was a relentlessly… dark speech. He was describing some Mad Max America.” Jones continued:

“I’ve never felt this way in my life. I have read in history being in moments where there’s some big authoritarian movement and some leader that’s rising up, and I felt that way tonight, and it was terrifying for me. This speech divided the country… It terrified me.”

The speech divided the country? That’s hilarious! The fact that Trump reached this stunning moment shows how thoroughly Barack Obama has divided the country, and intentionally too. Eight years of demonizing white citizens, conservatives, business, men, lawful gun-owners, police, religious Americans, free speech, dissent, and centuries-old concepts of the family; two terms of deriding reasonable concerns about a massive religious group with increasingly aggressive radical and murderous elements breeding within it;  a Presidency that has habitually blamed past administrations for current problems while one agency after another is shown to be dangerously inept and unmanaged; Obama’s party’s  institution of the oppressive tactic of tarring any critic of a floundering black President as motivated by racism, and any critic of his incompetent anointed replacement as sexist…and Van Jones blames the speech that properly and accurately responds to all of this? That is award-winning gall.

But the media’s reaction was pre-ordained, was it not? The stance of the news media throughout the Obama Administration has been to spin or bury bad news and even outright scandals, and adopt as truth the happy-talk deception and partisan blame-shifting coming out of the White House.  Ethics Alarms has pointed out this phenomenon all along. Under Obama, the Democratic Party’s theory, endorsed by most journalists, is that only one side of any policy equation matters: the good part. Negative consequences, even when they engulf all of the over-hyped benefits, don’t matter, and it’s rude and distracting to even mention them.  How dare Donald Trump portray the post-Obama U.S. as anything but rosy? After all, that would mean that Barack Obama has been a preening, sanctimonious flop. See, we told you Trump was a racist!