Porn-obsessed JournoLister cranks up the Rhodes slime machine against Gorka

The left is really scraping bottom in its serial attacks on Dr. Sebastian Gorka.

Gorka, if you have not seen him on Fox News or at other outlets, is President Trump's counterterrorism adviser.  He's an effective spokesman for the administration and has an interesting role: he's kind of the Sean Spicer for nerds and intelligent members of the public, not the person who issues sound bites and takes "gotcha" questions from a hostile press pool.

It's his very effectiveness that makes him subject to a kitchen sink of personal and professional attacks, most of which have the fingerprints of an embittered Obama administration spinmeister, Ben Rhodes.

This time, they're really calling in the D team.  The point man for the latest scurrilous attack is a 35-year-old porn-obsessed hipster JournoLister, who writes for the Daily Beast as its "senior national security correspondent," named Spencer Ackerman.

It's the worst "reporting" I've ever seen.  Seriously, he doesn't know anything about national security, and his "narrative" is a series of distortions and made-up facts intermeshed with heaping doses of sloppiness.

Ackerman claims in his headline that Dr. Gorka was "fired" from the Federal Bureau of Investigation "for anti-Muslim diatribes."

Let's just start with that.  Was Gorka ever an FBI employee?  Our money says no.  If he wasn't, he couldn't have been fired.  The subhed says he was "taking money from the FBI" as if he were an informant.  But he wasn't that, either; it was just fun to get "taking money from the FBI" into the subhed to pile the whisper-factor on.  Ackerman then writes that Gorka was a "paid consultant."  So we've got three different work classifications for Gorka from Ackerman and haven't even gotten past the lede.  Only someone who knows nothing about the differences among employees, informants, and contractors would make that sort of mistake – unless, of course, he wanted a flashier, more innuendo-filled headline, which seems to be the aim.

It gets worse.

Ackerman claims that Gorka was fired.  Was he really fired?  You can't be fired from a place if you don't have a boss there.  Or was his contract not renewed, as is likely what happened?  Way down farther in the fill, you find that Gorka's contract was "ended," and further still, it occurred after four years' work.  That's quite a run for someone Ackerman claims was thrown out for his "diatribes" – quite a lot of time to listen to him.

This doesn't sound like "fired."

The likely backstory is that the FBI leadership under the Obama administration was in the throes of political correctness and didn't like the blunt truths about the nature of the enemy.  The Obama administration, remember, refused to call terrorism "terrorism" and was in complete denial about Islamism as a cause of the problem.  To them, it was simply "extremism."  It also had many Muslim Brotherhood-linked officials in the White House and at various agencies.  Obviously, there could have been some policy difference, given Gorka's straightforward assessment of the ongoing threat.  "Fired" might have meant that the man's contract was not renewed, but it would have been over a policy difference, not a personnel matter, as Ackerman would have you believe.  How long was the contract?  Was it years?  And then Ackerman says it "ended just months" before Gorka joined Team Trump?  That is weird sequencing – why would Obama keep Gorka on that long and then get rid of him near the end of his term?  A far more likely occurrence is that Gorka finished his contract or perhaps got out of it early to join Team Trump.

We're not even done with the headline yet.  Now let's go to "diatribes."

Did Ackerman provide any supporting evidence that Gorka engaged in diatribes?  (The kind Ackerman, noted to be "excitable" by none other than Media Matters, likes to engage in?)  There sure isn't any evidence of it based on Gorka's smooth, controlled Fox News appearances.  Frankly, I cannot imagine Gorka engaging in diatribes, at least not the way I can with Pajama Boy Ackerman.  Ackerman, as you may expect, is unable to support the "diatribes" claim in his piece. Naturally, Ackerman brings up an old false Nazi accusation as he offers his meager claims on 'diatribe.'

Law-enforcement officials attending an August 2016 lecture from Gorka, whose academic credentials and affiliation with a pro-Nazi group have recently come under fire, were disturbed to hear a diatribe against Muslims passed off as instruction on the fundamentals of counterterrorism.

"Diatribe against Muslims"?  Gorka, remember, has been criticized for making distinctions on different kinds of Islam and not just throwing them all in one terrorist bin as some on the right (and for that matter, the left) do.  He has used correct terms such as "Islamist extremism" and "Islamism" and noted that most Muslims do not advocate terrorism.  He has been a scholar of how advocates of Islamism use the religion to foment terrorism.  This is far from any sort of "anti-Muslim diatribe" claimed by Spencer.  "Passed off as instruction"?  Note the unsupported innuendo again.  We're deep into scurrilous-ville and barely into the meat of the article.

Here's more Ackerman dreck:

Gorka told attendees at the Joint Terrorism Operations Course, an introductory-level class for participants in the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force, that all Muslims adhere to Sharia law, which he said is in conflict with the U.S. Constitution and American democratic values.

"Adhere to Sharia law," full stop.  To be a Muslim, yes, you do.  Ackerman apparently doesn't know this.  Islam does permit individual interpretations of the law, which is why devout Muslims aren't out slaughtering people.  But apparently, it's a lot more fun to spread ignorance than enlighten, as Dr. Gorka has done.

Then there's this:

Officials familiar with his lecture said Gorka taught law-enforcement officials there is no such thing as mainstream Muslims – only those radicalized and those soon to be radicalized.

File under "not believable."  When has Gorka ever spoken like that in any of his public, and many of them televised, appearances?  Shouldn't this be a signal to Ackerman that he's got a problem with his sourcing?  This kind of garbage from bad sources is what brought Rolling Stone's credulous reporter down and landed it with gigantic lawsuit bills.

How about this?

The following month, a senior FBI official assured outraged and embarrassed colleagues that the bureau would no longer use Gorka for any subsequent lectures or instructions, according to documents reviewed by The Daily Beast.

OK – publish them, then.  Every other news outlet publishes these things.  Why is Ackerman withholding them?  His big bombshell scoop, and he withholds the documents.  Something is fishy right there.

Ackerman then tries to delve into Gorka's discourse on the philosophy behind terrorist leaders such as Osama bin Laden, but he doesn't get much traction because there isn't much to argue about.  He just wants to show that he's been Googling.

He goes back off the rails when he gets back into the contractor relationship Gorka must have had with the FBI, something he still doesn't understand:

By then, Gorka was already doing work for the bureau. According to The Wall Street Journal, Gorka's company received $103,000 from the FBI for training materials between 2012 and 2016. While he was still lecturing for the FBI, the Trump campaign paid him $8,000 for consultations in 2015.

Someone who works for a contact consulting firm having more than one client?  He still doesn't understand what contractors do.

Here's another idiocy:

The FBI has long had a problem with fringe and Islamophobic pseudo-scholars making their way into the bureau's training on counterterrorism. Gorka's presentation occurred five years after instructions from Barack Obama's White House to get rid of the bigoted presentations.

Ackerman writes that as if there's no such thing as a hiring agency and a contracting agency, and these "pseudo-scholars" just somehow fling themselves at the agency like seagulls upon the hapless bureau.  Did he do any digging as to why someone like Gorka got his four-year contract?  Of course not.

Ackerman blathers on about "holy war" and Nazis and other rubbish he claims Gorka said or thought, or didn't say.  Don't bother reading it unless you like being bored or savor lies – Ackerman's credibility is shot with his opening claims, and it's nothing but wading in swamp water to dissect every other scurrilous JournoList-inspired Ben Rhodes talking point he claims.

Maybe the most interesting thing is that the leftist "narrative" against Gorka has shifted now from Gorka somehow being anti-Jewish to Gorka now being anti-Muslim.  For the Rhodes circle attacking Gorka, when you fail at one smear, you move on to the next.  Gorka himself has no such biases – and not one of his attackers has ever been able to produce any.  But the Obama Slime Machine wants a haze of innuendo to keep repeating in its "reporting" as the "B-roll" to appear at the bottom of each piece out there.  Disgracefully, the Washington Examiner, an otherwise nobody's fool paper, has already bit the bait and allowed itself to be played like Ben Rhodes's banjo, reporting the smear as straight news and covering itself by putting "report" in the headline.

It's disgusting to see this happen.  But it's very interesting that the regulars of the Rhodes cavalcade of reporters apparently isn't interested in attacking Gorka lately.  All of their attacks have failed.  Now they're sending in the clowns.

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