Day: 1/25/2013

Sarah Palin Refudiates Fox News – Or You Can’t Fire Me, I Quit

Posted by on January 25, 2013 at 7:03 pm. 8 Comments :

A source close to Sarah Palin says she has declined to accept the offer from Fox News to renew her contract which expired at the end of 2012. This brings an end to the three year relationship wherein Fox sucked in hordes of dimwitted Palin fans and Palin peddled her almost literate books. A classic case study in parasitic synergy.

Sarah PalinThis news should not come as a surprise to media watchers who will remember that Roger Ailes was reported to have told confidants that “he thinks Palin is an idiot.” That probably set the stage for contract negotiations that resulted in unsatisfactory terms for the Tea Party queen. Perhaps Ailes offered her a moose burger and parking validation to re-up – and even that would have been more than she’s worth.

Palin’s star has been fading for quite some time. Her books have brought in sequentially less with each new release. Her cable reality show was canceled after losing viewers every week. Her movie was a colossal box office bomb. Her popularity has been in a steep dive for the past couple years with a 55% unfavorable rating and two-thirds of the country saying she was not qualified to be president.

What more could be expected from a woman who was plucked from obscurity by a desperate John McCain, lost the election, quit halfway through her one term as governor, and proceeded to rack up embarrassments like her “Lie of the Year” from PolitiFact for the famous “Death Panel” nonsense.

With her departure from Fox comedians across the country will be mourning. However, she is now free to join fellow losers like Glenn Beck and Allen West in their basement InterTubes studios (although Palin’s is a million dollar facility at her home in Wasilla that she scammed out of Fox while still in their good graces), webcasting to glassy-eyed disciples in their jammies.

Fox has released a statement thanking Palin for her service and ominously saying “We wish her the best in her future endeavors.” That particular phrase has some baggage attached to it. When Fox wishes you well it is often a back-handed slap at anyone they regard as undesirable. For example, Fox hammered George Clooney with it saying “We wish him well in his struggle to regain relevancy.” So should we infer something from that?

Palin still has her Facebook page and an army of Mama Grizzlies who will prop her up for a while. But given her already cratering career, the loss of her platform on Fox signals the closing act in her public farce, just as Glenn Beck’s exodus lowered his profile to near invisibility. While it may be bad for comedy, it will be good for America. And for those who need one last fix, here is the Palin retrospective for 2012 published on News Corpse at the end of last year. My personal favorite was her saying that you “diminished [yourself] by even mentioning my name.” I may be compelled to agree.

So F**king What? Fox News Panics Over Spanish Speaking Muslims

Posted by on January 25, 2013 at 1:02 pm. 3 Comments :

Can anyone explain what the Fox Nationalists find so newsworthy about this?

Fox Nation

A billboard that gives information about where people can go to learn more about Islam doesn’t seem like something that would stir up much controversy. It isn’t espousing a point of view. It isn’t disparaging any other faith. It would only be of interest to people who have a desire for the information.

Nevertheless, Fox manages to fire up the panicky bigots who populate their web site by focusing on a small disclosure at the bottom of the billboard that simply says “Se Habla Espanol.”

So F**king What?

It’s not enough that Fox News routinely maligns Muslims by associating them all with terrorism. Now they seem to be matching up their viewers fear of Muslims with their anxiety over Latinos, whom they regard universally as illegal aliens. It’s a Fox twofer. With a single news item they can whip up hysteria about Islamic terrorists sneaking into the country, taking our jobs, and blowing them up, all while refusing to learn our language. Ethnic and religious bigotry all rolled up into one posting about a conventional advertisement that has the audacity to address Spanish speakers in (of all places) south Florida.

Women In Combat: A Social Experiment?

Posted by on January 25, 2013 at 11:02 am. 1 Comments :

Colonel Eugene Householder on opposing reforms to combat protocol:

“The army is not a sociological laboratory; to be effective it must be organized and trained according to the principles which will ensure success … Experiments are a danger to efficiency, discipline and morale and would result in ultimate defeat.”

That was the argument in 1941 against integrating army units and permitting black soldiers to fight alongside white soldiers. It is the same argument that is used against gays in the military. Bigots have a tendency to declare that morale and unit cohesion will suffer if soldiers are asked to serve with like-minded patriots who they regard as “different.” And now this insipid and disproven viewpoint is being aimed at women in the wake of the recent order by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to integrate women into combat units under certain conditions.

Allen West: “Now is not the time to play a social experiment with our ground combat forces…This is the misconceived liberal progressive vision of fairness and equality which could potentially lead to the demise of our military.”

Nothing hyperbolic about that, is there? It’s the typical alarmist overreaction that one would expect from West, who has so little faith in the integrity and loyalty of America’s soldiers that he actually believes that serving with women (which already occurs) would “lead to the demise of our military.” And there is retired Army Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, whose military career ended after making disparaging remarks about Muslims. Boykin is currently an executive at the right-wing Family Research Council. He had this to say about Panetta’s decision:

Boykin: “The people making this decision are doing so as part of another social experiment, and they have never lived nor fought with an infantry or Special Forces unit.”

It is not a coincidence that the arguments in favor of discrimination sound so similar. They are always efforts on the part of intolerant, exclusionary elitists to dismiss the humanity of those they cannot abide. They aspire to keep the military (and America) a straight, white, male club that designates everyone else as second-class citizens. And, not surprisingly, Fox News concurs with those aspirations by promoting the views of the bigots.

Fox Nation