Day: 8/7/2013

BREAKING: Obama Does Something, Fox News Opposes It

Posted by on August 7, 2013 at 4:14 pm. 10 Comments :

This just in from our Washington bureau. The White House has announced that President Obama will be taking decisive action on a critical foreign and/or domestic policy matter effective immediately.

Fox News Alert
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The American people are paying close attention and we will be monitoring their reaction to this story as we indoctrinate them with the approved response. In the meantime, we have twenty or thirty Fox News contributors and Republican operatives standing by to renounce the President’s move as irresponsible, premature, overdue, and too costly, divisive, and impractical. Some analysts are already saying that it won’t work and is politically motivated.

That is pretty much the standard Fox News response to anything that President Obama has done for the past five years. And today is no exception. Shortly after the news broke that the administration had filed charges against several suspects in the attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Fox went to work implementing the above protocol. One of the most entertaining, and farthest removed from reality, instances occurred (where else) on Fox & Friends.

Substitute host Clayton Morris asked Fox legal analyst (and Rupert Murdoch’s personal attorney) Peter Johnson, Jr. “What took so long?” Johnson bit into the leading question with a tirade of absurdity that began with his accusation that the filing was purely political.

Johnson: After a terroristic act, after an act of war in which four Americans were killed and others wounded, we’re gonna take this to the civil courts […] because there’s no will in this government today to bring people to task in a military sense. If we’re really engaged in a worldwide war on terror, which the White House doesn’t like to admit, then we’re gonna act in ways that are consistent with times of war.”

Johnson’s assertion that these charges will bring the suspects into a civil court illustrate just how dishonest he is from the start. He is a lawyer and knows very well that the charges filed are for criminal, not civil, violations. Johnson and Morris also belittled the filing of charges because they were not followed up with an arrest, even though they well know that the United States has no power to arrest foreigners in other countries. These charges are a preliminary measure taken so that if the suspects are apprehended by Libyan authorities, there is a pretext for requesting extradition.

But even more ridiculous is Johnson’s characterization that the Obama administration “has no will” to prosecute terrorists “in a military sense,” or that his actions are not “consistent with times of war.” After all, this is the President who orchestrated the killing of Osama Bin Laden and dozens of high-ranking Al Qaeda operatives. Johnson is aware of these facts, he just chooses to suppress them in order to disseminate his lies.

This is an all too predictable reaction from the Fox News team that is more fixated on disparaging the President than on delivering actual news. They regard their mission as misinforming their audience of weak-minded goons and muddying the political discourse. It’s something they are quite good at as long as they are dealing with gullible and incurious viewers. Fortunately for Fox, that is pretty much their key demographic.

Fox Nation vs. Reality: Clinton Polling Ahead Of Every Republican Is “Underwhelming”

Posted by on August 7, 2013 at 10:50 am. 6 Comments :

While it is still more than three years before the next presidential election, Fox News is desperately spinning polling results in order to diminish the broad popularity of Hillary Clinton.

In an article on Fox Nation (the notoriously dishonest Fox News community site), a poll conducted (pdf) by Monmouth University is given a thorough, four paragraph, analysis by conservative fabulist Michael Barone. The conclusion he draws from his careful examination of the poll data is that Clinton’s showing is “underwhelming.”

Fox Nation

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Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Community’s Assault on Truth

It takes a seriously determined feat of self-delusion to make that assessment. Clinton is shown to be beating every prominent Republican matched against her in the poll. She is ahead of Chris Christie 43-39; Marco Rubio 47-36; Jeb Bush 47-37; and Ted Cruz 48-32. She has the highest favorable rating (52%) of anyone in the field, including a net positive in the survey’s “red” states. The GOP’s Tea Party all-stars fare considerably worse: Rand Paul, 34%, Rubio, 33%; Cruz, 22%. And, not that this will be any factor in 2016, but Sarah Palin’s unfavorability soars over everyone else at a whopping 61%.

This tendency for Republicans to mis-read polling seems to be a permanent part of their character. During the 2012 campaign they famously embraced what they called “unskewed” polls, but were actually perversions of polling data that proved to be astronomically wrong. Facilitated by Fox News, these defective analyses produced a reality shock when President Obama was handily reelected. There was a near mental collapse on the right who didn’t think that such a thing was possible, despite all the legitimate polling that predicted it. Even Karl Rove persisted in an embarrassing on-air denial as the race was called for Obama.

After the election, the GOP and Fox News resolved to reexamine their perspectives on strategy, analysis, and reporting. However, it now appears that they have sunk back into their old habits of self-deception and disinformation. It’s fair to assume that this psychosis will produce the same results in 2014 and 2016 as they did in 2012. If you can’t face the reality of a situation, you can’t respond to what is actually taking place. And Fox seems determined to maintain their aversion to reality which, as Stephen Colbert has revealed, has “a well known liberal bias.”