Tuesday's Terrific Absurdities: A Pecker on the Stand, a Cheney in the Times, and Nazis on Campus

Don’t look now, but the first witness to take the stand for the prosecution in the Trump hush money trial was a real Pecker:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I always go for the cheap laughs.

That would, of course, be the famous former Editor of the National Enquirer, David Pecker. Pecker was called by the prosecution to testify about the fact that his publication conspired with Trump to buy the rights to the Stormy Daniels story related to Trump and then refuse to publish anything about it.

I don’t think anyone involved even denies that allegation is true at this point, mainly because buying up rights to stories is a common practice in our legacy media, especially yellow tabloid rags like the Enquirer, and, say, the Washington Post. The key here is that it’s not any sort of crime at all, although the prosecution’s goal is to make it seem so.

The prosecution’s big problem is that this practice is far from limited to the tabloids and is also a standard practice among more “mainstream” legacy operations like ABC News. Only these “mainstream” corrupt media operations refer to their payoffs as “licensing fees” to construct a pretense of legitimacy around the practice. But it’s the same thing.