Cooper: Dreadlocks and Ukraine calls

The recent reporting of a racist incident — now recanted — involving a 12-year-old girl at a Northern Virginia Christian school used the name of Karen Pence (wife of Vice President Mike Pence), left, who teaches part time at the school, in an effort to smear President Donald Trump.wife of Vice President Mike Pence, center, teacheshis wife Karen Pence and his mother Nancy Pence Fritsch, right, arrive in Doonbeg, Ireland, Tuesday Sept. 3, 2019.
The recent reporting of a racist incident — now recanted — involving a 12-year-old girl at a Northern Virginia Christian school used the name of Karen Pence (wife of Vice President Mike Pence), left, who teaches part time at the school, in an effort to smear President Donald Trump.wife of Vice President Mike Pence, center, teacheshis wife Karen Pence and his mother Nancy Pence Fritsch, right, arrive in Doonbeg, Ireland, Tuesday Sept. 3, 2019.

The incident is emblematic of the current political animus writ large on the country.

Mainstream and left-wing media bit hard last week on the story of a 12-year-old black girl in a private Virginia Christian school who reportedly was held down by three white students and had her dreadlocks cut.

NBC, MSNBC, CNN and HLN (formerly Headline News), among others, were breathless in their anxiety to report the story.

"A disturbing story tonight involving a school outside Washington, D.C. ... ," NBC News anchor Lester Holt intoned as the words "racist bullying attack" filled one-half of the screen.

But what's even more titillating than a story in which pro-left media can report a seemingly racist attack on a minority group? The same story with ties to President Donald Trump.

"Karen Pence [the wife of Vice President Mike Pence] teaches art part time at Immanuel," the CNN reporter told viewers.

"3 boys at a Christian school where Karen Pence teaches allegedly cut black girl's dreadlocks," an NBC News headline read.

"SIXTH GRADERS HOLD DOWN CLASSMATE, CUT HER DREADLOCKS AT PRIVATE CHRISTIAN SCHOOL WHERE KAREN PENCE TEACHES," the Newsweek headline said.

"Karen Pence, the wife of Vice President Mike Pence, accepted a part-time art teaching position there in January," The New York Times noted in its report.

But the Washington Post went further, attempting to add homophobia to racism and bullying at the school.

"This is the school where Karen Pence, wife of Vice President Mike Pence teaches," Washington Post reporter Eugene Scott tweeted. "This school previously made headlines when Karen Pence was criticized for joining its staff despite the school's position on not hiring LGBT employees."

However, as with the Covington Catholic High School incident at the Lincoln Memorial in January, as with the Jussie Smollett attack in Chicago later that same month, and as with the robbery and racist vandalism of a former NFL player's shop in metropolitan Atlanta last month, among many other similar reports, the attack at Immanuel Christian School in Springfield, Virginia, never happened.

It. Never. Happened.

The school and the girl's parents, to their credit, admitted the lie on Monday, with the parents saying "to those young boys and their parents, we sincerely apologize for the pain and anxiety these allegations have caused."

But individual scenarios invented to accuse others of wrongdoing are not isolated to schoolchildren and celebrities. This is what the investigation of Trump being involved in Russian election meddling was. This is what the attempt to derail the Supreme Court appointment of Justice Brett Kavanaugh was. And this is what the impeachment investigation of Trump's call to the Ukrainian president is.

Where did the Immanuel student get the idea to blame students of another race and say the boys had called her hair "ugly" and "nappy"? Fellow students? Her parents? A Trump-hating teacher? The media for making victims of the Native American man in the Covington student incident and of Smollett?

We know the motivation of the Russia and Ukraine accusations and the Kavanaugh smear. All three can be attributed to the upset win of Trump and loss of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.

Since before the president took office, the left organized efforts to ruin him and keep him from having any legislative success. After more than two years of investigation and millions of tax dollars spent, the left's great hope, special counsel Robert Mueller, concluded this spring the president had not colluded with Russia.

Unable to stop Trump's first Supreme Court appointment, Democrats put all their efforts into trying to tar Kavanaugh with 35-year-old accusations of sexual assault. Since his successful confirmation hearings, many of the accusations were recanted; others did not likely happen.

That brings us to the president's July phone call to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which he supposedly improperly tried to put pressure on the Eastern European leader to look into allegations concerning the business dealings of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, with a Ukrainian natural gas firm. A transcript of the call doesn't show such pressure, but the left is trying to figure out how to pin something on the president.

The victims in the recent Immanuel Christian incident were not a little girl with dreadlocks but three schoolboys and one vice president's wife who had the temerity to use her skills teaching art while her husband is the country's vice president. The victims in the larger incidents are Trump and Kavanaugh, sure, but more so the country.

Imagine how much more might have been accomplished in this administration had the president not had to spend so much time playing defense on the Russia investigation, the Supreme Court confirmation and now the Ukraine kerfuffle, and had Democrats tried to work with him rather than against him.

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