Should Alex Ward be fired by vox.com?

Ward of the imperial state

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he neocon ‘journalist’ Alex Ward, at the neocon ‘news’-site vox.com, criticized U.S. President Donald Trump for having supposedly allowed Russian President Vladimir Putin to get away with 7 specific alleged bad things that Ward thinks Trump should have publicly lambasted Putin for during the joint Trump-Putin summit press conference that occurred on June 16th. But every one of Ward’s 7 accusations is actually factually dubious at best, and is unquestioningly accepting of the truthfulness of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies. Is that behavior professional for a journalist to do — to unquestioningly accept as Truth a routinely lying government’s (in his case, the U.S. Government’s) account of international affairs?

Here is the core of Ward’s article, along with my own questions regarding each one, to Ward, on each of the seven points he raised — and I also question here each of the three allegations he made in his introduction:

https://www.vox.com/world/2018/7/17/17577476/trump-putin-meeting-intelligence-win

Why Trump’s Putin meeting was worse than you think

It’s not just that Trump trashed America’s intelligence community [Alex, you trust the CIA on Kennedy’s assassination, or on Saddam’s WMD, or on what — and why?] — it’s that he did so while getting very little from Putin. [How do you know what was agreed-to at that secret meeting?]

By Alex Ward@AlexWardVox alex.ward@vox.com  Jul 17, 2018, 12:50pm EDT

US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s press conference on Monday after their meeting in Helsinki was, by many accounts, a disaster.

But that’s not even the worst part.

Yes, Trump bashed America’s intelligence agencies while siding with Putin — and he received basically nothing in return for it. [How do you know? Did you interrogate the translators, to learn what the secret agreements were?]

Here’s what Putin “got” during his 45-minute press conference with Trump:

• He got recognition on the world stage alongside the US president. [That’s not appropriate and customary for summits?]
• Trump didn’t criticize Putin for interfering in the 2016 US presidential election, or in European allies’ elections [all of which are unproven allegations made by U.S. intelligence, which jiggered the evidence on ‘Saddam’s WMD’ so as to invade]
• Trump said Putin’s offer to send Russian government investigators to look into Moscow’s election hacking was “an interesting idea.” [Why isn’t it, and even if it were, why should he have been hostile to Putin there — that would have been diplomatic?]
• Trump didn’t shame Putin for working with Iran to prop up Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and relentlessly bombing innocent civilians. [That links to a 4 Jan. 2018 article “Syria: Dozens of civilians killed in suspected Russian airstrikes” but what about the many U.S. bombings in Syria — and Russia is legally there, but the U.S. is not?]
• Trump didn’t push back on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine [you don’t mention Obama’s prior coup that seized Ukraine in February 2014 and installed racist-fascists who terrorized Crimeans] or annexation of Crimea in 2014 [which the Soviet dictator had arbitrarily transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1954] or his attempt to take over Georgia in 2008. [No such thing as an ‘attempt to take over Georgia’ is documented there.]
• Trump didn’t condemn Russia for shooting down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH-17 in 2014 or Moscow’s apparent use of a deadly nerve agent in the UK this year. [No evidence is presented there that Russia did either of those; and all members of the Dutch-led committee that wrote the official report on MH-17 are U.S. allies and thus not to be trusted on the matter.]
• Putin made Trump look bad by refusing to deny he had “compromising material” on the American leader. [If Putin has compromising material on Trump, are you demanding that Putin say yes to that, or that Putin should have lied instead?]

That’s a lot of points on the board for Putin …

It seems to me that, on all ten of those hits by Ward against the abysmal Trump, Ward scores 0 — 0 for 10.

What does it say when a major ‘news’medium is so unquestioning as this, of its lying Government, just like had happened with the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Fox ‘News’, etc., when this Government raped Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, Syria in 2012-, Ukraine in 2014, and Yemen now?

So, should Vox fire Alex Ward and the others like him? Or should the public fire such ‘news’media instead?