Demonstrating their blatant hostility to fairly representing the American people, Fox News broadcast an election special on the Fourth of July that consisted of almost exclusively conservative Republicans. Out of eleven political guests there was only one Democrat (Rep. Rob Andrews of New Jersey).
Balancing out that lone voice was Supreme Wacko Allen West (who thinks that there are 80 card-carrying Democratic communists in Congress), virulent Democrat hunter Darrell Issa (who never met a Democrat he doesn’t hold in contempt), and a panel of eight all-GOP House freshmen. Even for Fox this is a strikingly unbalanced division of ideologies.
The host of the program was the GOP “Word Doctor,” Frank Luntz. Luntz is best known for developing rhetoric and catch phrases to deceive people into supporting programs they would never back if they were told the truth about them. Recently Luntz held a seminar with GOP leaders advising them on how to mislead their constituents. Luntz advised Republicans to avoid certain words and replace them with others that he had focus-group tested. For instance: “Out: Capitalism / In: Economic Freedom.” When conservative PR flacks tell Republicans not to talk about capitalism, a significant shift is taking place.
The program’s highlights included Allen West reiterating his belief about communists infiltrating Congress. No one bothered to challenge his nightmarish delusions. Darrell Issa was allowed to defend his inquisition of the Obama administration via a softball question about whether he thought he was too hard on Democrats. Did they really expect him to say “yes?” No one bothered asked him why his Committee on Oversight never held hearings on Republican malfeasance.
The program was so steeply slanted that the set was decorated with paintings of past presidents, but not a single Democratic president was on display. It was a feast of both overt and subliminal propaganda that sought to pretend that there was only one political opinion that encompassed the whole of the American population. For Fox News to schedule this brazenly partisan hour of Republican PR on Independence Day and label it an “American Roundtable” is evidence of just how far they will go to promote their benefactors in the party of the Greedy One Percent (aka GOP). They are going to be unpleasantly surprised when they discover that there are millions of Americans who do not share their self-serving, elitist views, but who aspire to a more inclusive and uplifting agenda that seeks to make “liberty and justice for all” more than just a slogan to be exploited by cynical Republicans and deceitful “news” networks.
