SCANDALOUS: Fox News Is Appalled That Obama Didn’t Jet To Paris For Unity Rally

While more than a million people took to the streets to pay tribute to the victims of the terrorist attack on the satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, the miscreants at Fox News were concocting new ways to exploit the tragedy to demean President Obama. A rapidly forming theme at Fox is that Obama snubbed the rally by not dropping everything and boarding Air Force One to Paris.

Fox Nation

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It needs to be noted that most of the world leaders who attended the rally were not more than an hour away from Paris. Obama’s trip from Washington, D.C. would have been more than five hours there, and five more back. The U.S. Ambassador to France was already there, as was Attorney General Eric Holder. They could both ably represent the United States in a rally that had an important symbolic purpose, but would not have any productive impact on diplomacy or other legal matters related to international terrorism.

A presidential visit might have been nice, but it certainly was not required. And the fact that Obama is now taking heat for not attending is irrelevant because he would have been criticized just the same if he had gone. It’s falls into the Fox News editorial mission of being against the President, no matter what he does or says. I can just imagine the headlines that Fox and other right-wing media would have generated if he had chosen to go to Paris:

  • President Obama Spends $12,000,000 To Attend Street Rally In Paris
  • President Obama Jets To Paris While Congress Is Working To Restore Jobs In America
  • President Obama Links Arms With Socialist French President François Hollande, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas
  • President Obama Pays Tribute To Murdered Parisian Cartoonists, But Would Not Attend Funeral of Murdered New York Cops
  • President Obama’s Security Detail Disrupts Paris Unity Rally

See how easy it is when you know how Fox thinks?

The tone of the article on the Fox News community website, Fox Nation, suggests not only that Obama doesn’t care about the victims (note the dismissive wave), but also that he must be pro-terror for not participating in an anti-terror rally (even though it was actually a “unity rally”). But it is hard not to notice that there weren’t any Republicans there either, so they must all be uncaring terrorist supporters too.

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In the final analysis, Fox News has demonstrated that they will take the most trivial things and blow them up into phony scandals that draw attention away from the issues that matter most. And they will exploit any opportunity to malign the President or other Democrats regardless of how it harms individuals, institutions, or the nation.

[Addendum] As Fox doubles and triples down on this alleged story, let the record show that of the 50 leaders reported to have participated in the Paris staged photo-op (they didn’t actually march in the rally), 35 (70%) were from nearby European countries. Most of the remainder were from Africa and the Middle East. There was only one from the Americas (Canada sent their Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney). There were none from Asia.

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Fox News Obama Paris Headlines

Fox Nation vs. Reality: Republican vs. Democratic Billionaires

The toxic effect of the billions of dollars in special interest donations to political candidates and causes can be seen every day in the way that politicians rewards their most generous benefactors. It is not a coincidence that the first bill brought to a vote in the Republican-dominated 114th Congress was one to advance the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline favored by wealthy oil barons like the Koch brothers.

The current corrupt state of political funding was made possible by the notorious Citizen’s United decision that freed donors to make virtually unlimited contributions without disclosing their identity. Despite the fact that Republicans defend this practice, their media mouthpiece, Fox News, tries to play both sides of the debate by accusing Democrats of being equal offenders. Or, in the case of a new item posted on Fox Nation, even worse.

Fox Nation

According to Fox, “Dem Billionaires Donate More To Politicians Than Republicans.” The article that the Fox Nationalists cited as their source was originally published by Politico. Fox posted the first three paragraphs from the Politico story that said in part…

“Democrats spent much of the 2014 campaign castigating Republican big money, but, it turns out, their side actually finished ahead among the biggest donors of 2014 – at least among those whose contributions were disclosed.”

The key portion of that quote are the eight words at the end. It is impossible to do an analysis of political donations without taking into consideration the “dark money” made possible by Citizen’s United. In the beginning of Politico’s article they noted that donations attributed to Democrats from disclosed sources totaled $174 million in 2014. Donations from Republicans came to only $140 million. And from that data Fox declared that Democrats were the bigger donors.

However, in the fourth paragraph of the article, the one right after the point where Fox Nation cut off their excerpt, a far more relevant statistic was reported:

“Of course, that edge doesn’t take into account contributions to deep-pocketed non-profit groups that don’t disclose their donors. They heavily favored Republicans […] For instance, the network of mostly secret-money non-profit groups helmed by the billionaire industrialist Koch brothers was on pace to spend $290 million in 2014.”

So the truth is that the Koch brothers all by themselves donated more money than all of the Democrats cited by Fox combined. It’s a fact that Fox left out of their excerpt and blatantly lied about in their headline.

To illustrate how dishonest it is to use numbers that only include disclosed donors, David and Charles Koch rank only 10th and 29th on the list of such contributions. But clearly they are number one by a wide margin if all of their donations are counted, including those from the dark money organizations they run like Americans for Prosperity, Freedom Partners, and Donors Trust. But don’t expect to learn about any of this from Fox News. Their mission is to disinform and to prop up the right-wing elitists, bankers, and captains of industry.

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See also this analysis of the stark differences between the Republican rich and the Democratic rich: What’s The Difference Between Wealthy (Koch) Republicans And (Soros) Democrats?