Crybaby Donald Trump Calls For NBC Debate Boycott But Still Wants To Host SNL

Posted by Mark NC on October 31, 2015 at 3:19 am. 4 Comments :

Following the debate fiasco on CNBC, the Republican candidates announced that they would be meeting to discuss how they could could strong arm the media into producing debates that weren’t so hard on their fragile and weak-kneed candidates. They are exposing themselves as the cowards that they are and responding like bullies, as cowards often do. I wrote a more detailed analysis of this situation yesterday, but there is a new development that requires attention.

The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, announced that he would punish NBC for what took place on CNBC by suspending the agreement to have NBC host a GOP debate that was scheduled for February. It’s another act of Republican cowardice with a side of revenge. And shortly after this announcement, Donald Trump’s campaign came aboard saying that he “supports the RNC’s decision to suspend the debate on February 26th due to the total lack of substance and respect.”

What a pompous act of hypocrisy. If a “total lack of respect” is sufficient justification for the RNC to cut NBC’s debate, then it’s more than sufficient for NBC to cut Trump from hosting Saturday Night Live. Trump’s disrespect to Latinos (and so many others) is far worse than anything that happened at the CNBC debate. And now that he is attacking NBC and Telemundo, they should respond in kind. What obligation do they have to allow him to host their program while he is advocating a boycott of their network?

Trump should not be surprised if NBC decides to do the right thing and cancel his SNL hosting gig. After all, he is currently forbidding any reporters from Univision (another Latino news outlet) to cover his campaign events. The nonsensical reason he gives is that he is suing the network’s entertainment division because it canceled their contract to broadcast his Miss Universe pageant after he disparaged Latinos as murderers and rapists. He says it would be a “conflict of interest” – a phrase he apparently doesn’t know the meaning of – to admit Univisions’s reporters. Don’t try to figure that out, it’s the Trumpian anti-logic that he uses to justify his bigotry.

The invitation to host SNL came after NBC had broken business ties with Trump due to his “derogatory statements” about Latinos. NBC said such rhetoric was contrary to their values. Have their values changed? Is it now acceptable to do business with the same noxious blowhard who’s pushing a boycott of your network? What’s more, Latino groups are appalled that SNL would allow an overtly racist hate monger like Trump to appear as host, especially considering the fact that there are zero Latinos in the current SNL cast, and only two in the whole forty-one year history of the program. What message does the network send by embracing Trump?

In conclusion, if it’s OK for Trump to banish Univision’s Latino reporters from his campaign events, and to advocate a prohibition of Republican debates on NBC and Telemundo, then it is more than justified for NBC to retract their offer to let him host SNL, and they should do so immediately. [There is a petition to urge NBC to rescind the offer here.] The question is, do they have the principles and the backbone to do it, or will they kneel before The Donald in utter disgrace?

GOP Candidates Frightened Away From Scary Debates They Can’t Control

Posted by Mark NC on October 30, 2015 at 3:44 pm. 10 Comments :

The Republican field of presidential primary candidates are cowering together to formulate a new debate process that isn’t so darn frightening to them. Following the debacle on CNBC, they are taking steps to insure that such ghastly encounters are avoided in the future in favor of more friendly frolics through the political pastures of pussy willows and wingnut trees.

The Republicans spent two hours Wednesday night whining about how the debate questions were framed. They had some justification, but they carried it so far as to dodge even the substantive questions, using their frothy indignation as an excuse. Immediately afterward they went into high hysterics over what they asserted was a fiendish plot by commie instigators to tarnish them and their party. But accusing the Wall Street defenders at CNBC of being ultra-liberal conspirators against these poor, dumbfounded conservatives smacks of severe mental breakdown.

See how badly the GOP’s meeting to reform debates went here.

Now the GOP contenders are planning to huddle together to come up with a new debate format that better suits their needs. They intend to address how they might take more control over the process, diminish the role of the Republican National Committee, and decide how the debates are conducted, including the selection of moderators. It’s an unprecedented initiative to transform what is supposed to be an open dialog that provides voters with an informative look at the candidates, into a PR vehicle that functions more like propaganda.

The RNC, which is taking some heat from the candidates, had already barred MSNBC from hosting any debates when they originally published their schedule back in January. That admission of fear has now escalated as the RNC chairman, Reince Priebus, advised NBC today that the one debate they had scheduled (Fox News has four), in partnership with Telemundo, has been “suspended,” whatever that means. So the RNC intends to punish NBC for the perceived wrongs committed by a separate unit of the Comcast/NBC family, And in the process they are also risking their only access to a minority audience, via Telemundo, that the GOP desperately needs to make inroads with. Will Republicans make demands as to who will moderate or what can be asked in order to lift the suspension? Well, Priebus is now saying that “Every debate on the calendar is going to be reevaluated, reset — look at the format, the moderators, everything,”

What really makes this whole phony controversy ridiculous is that it doesn’t benefit any political party to impose such strict demands. First of all, if they get their wish and appear before “friendly” moderators like Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Rush Limbaugh (as Ted Cruz actually suggested last night on Hannity’s show), they might find the questioning even more damaging. The rightist Taliban, as represented by Limbaugh et al, will be more likely to force candidates to stake out extreme positions which they will be unable to “Etch-a-Sketch” away after the primaries. The wingnut media are notoriously committed to the sort of ideological purity that voters find repugnant. What’s more, even if they got the sympathetic treatment they desire, it would only result in the candidates being woefully unprepared for the full-contact combat they will eventually encounter in the general election.

If Republicans go through with this dictatorial mission to force news networks to obey their commands, the networks must refuse to participate and decline to broadcast any such manipulated program. In fact, networks that aren’t directly affected should also boycott the Republican debates in solidarity with the independence of the press. It would be a journalistic atrocity to submit to such interference in the role of the media. If Republicans want a fully scripted television farce, let them buy the time like any other telemarketer.

In the end, what Republicans are proposing now is not only hostile to freedom of the press, it is also horribly bad judgment with regard to their own interests. It will leave their candidates unprepared for debates with Democrats, and mired in ultra-rightist ideologies that will alienate voters. And if that weren’t enough, it also reveals them to be afraid of being exposed to the sort of tough questions that will occur throughout any political campaign. And if they can’t handle a few questions from reporters, how will they ever handle Vladimir Putin and ISIS?

What We Learned From The GOP’s Trainwreck Debate On CNBC: Republicans Hate The ‘Liberal’ Media

Posted by Mark NC on October 29, 2015 at 4:24 pm. 6 Comments :

In the best of circumstances, a political debate should be illuminating in a manner that allows voters to assess the fitness of candidates for public office. However, the best that can be said about the Republican primary debate on CNBC (transcript) is that it illuminated the rabid opportunism of the candidates and the penchant for provocation on the part of the moderators.

See the update to this article here.

While there was an attempt by the moderators to inject some substance into their questions, they inexplicably capped their queries with an inappropriate zinger that only left them wide open for criticism. For example, John Harwood constructed a perfectly legitimate question for Donald Trump that called on him to explain how his wall building, tax slashing, immigrant deporting policies could be achieved without wreaking havoc on the economy. But then Harwood finished off with “Is this a comic book version of a presidential campaign?” Regardless of the aptness of the imagery, the only conceivable purpose for that framing would be to give Trump something to complain about. This pretentious strategy was repeated throughout the debate.

And the complaints veritably gushed from debaters who were eager to hear some reasonable questions and avoid answering them (which they did all night). The backlash directed at the media and the moderators easily became the dominant feature of the debate, and it was almost the only thing that was discussed in the post-debate analyses. The most replayed moments included Marco Rubio tagging the mainstream media as a SuperPAC for the Democrats, and Ted Cruz lamenting that “The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media.” Consequently, the only takeaway from this debate was that Republicans hate the media, something everybody already knows.

Cruz went on to argue that the media treated Democrats differently, “fawning” over “Which of you is more handsome and wise?” That characterization of the Democratic debate is wholly inconsistent with reality. From the transcript of their CNN outing, moderator Anderson Cooper asked Democrats the following questions:

[To Clinton] Plenty of politicians evolve on issues, but even some Democrats believe you change your positions based on political expediency. […] Will you say anything to get elected?
[To Sanders] A Gallup poll says half the country would not put a socialist in the White House. You call yourself a democratic socialist. How can any kind of socialist win a general election in the United States?
[To O’Malley] Why should Americans trust you with the country when they see what’s going on in the city that you ran for more than seven years?
[To Clinton] Russia, they’re challenging the U.S. in Syria. According to U.S. intelligence, they’ve lied about who they’re bombing. You spearheaded the reset with Russia. Did you underestimate the Russians?

Those were not fawning, softball questions by any stretch of the imagination. But Republicans only retain information that comports with their preconceptions. Therefore, the liberal media is invariably portrayed as fiercely pro-Democrat and virulently anti-Republican. What’s more, the conservatives never apply the same standards to their benefactors at Fox News, to whom they still suck up despite the tough questioning they got when Fox hosted their debate.

One of the more shameful exchanges of the CNBC debate was when Becky Quick posed this query to Trump: “You had talked a little bit about Marco Rubio. I think you called him Mark Zuckerberg’s personal senator because he was in favor of the H1B.” Trump interrupted to insist that “I never said that. I never said that.” So Quick quickly apologized. The problem is that Trump actually says exactly that on his own website. When the debate came back from a commercial, Quick noted that fact but never challenged Trump’s denial. And to make matters worse, this segment of the debate was discussed on Fox News the next day and host Jon Scott falsely asserted that it was Quick who was wrong, saying that “it seems that the research was not necessarily done.” This was after he already knew that she was correct and had cited her source during the debate.

In addition to that, the debate featured a couple of statements that were highly significant, but are not likely to garner much attention. First, Carly Fiorina said that “There is no Constitutional role for the Federal Government to be setting minimum wages.” Apparently ignorant of the Commerce Clause, Fiorina boldly came out in favor of ditching the minimum wage. Secondly, Carl Quintanilla directed a question to Trump with the preface that the site of the shootings at Umpqua Community College in Oregon “was a gun-free zone,” Trump readily agreed. But not only is that untrue, there were actually people there with guns who did not engaged the shooter.

So aside from all of the misinformation, the inter-party hostilities, and the failings of the moderators, the one thing that will persist as the defining characteristic of this debate is the intense loathing that Republicans have for the media. It is that rancorous acrimony that will supplant any useful knowledge that might have been gained about the candidates. And since everyone already knew that Republicans hate the press, the whole affair was a complete waste of time.

Republicans Launch Proxy Impeachment Proceedings Against Obama

Posted by Mark NC on October 29, 2015 at 8:03 am. 30 Comments :

There is a nasty streak of vengeance that runs through the Republican Party. They have been lusting for an opportunity to impeach President Obama since the day that he was inaugurated. It didn’t matter what excuse they drummed up, it could have been over anything from Fast and Furious, to the IRS, to ObamaCare, to immigration, to executive orders, to his birthplace. They even alleged that – and this is all too real – Obama was actually trying to impeach himself.

Having been denied their heart’s deepest desire, an actual reason to impeach Obama, the GOP went after administration stand-ins for the President. One of those was Lois Lerner, who was running the IRS Exempt Organizations Unit during a period when it was alleged that they were improperly targeting conservative applicants. There was never any evidence to prove the allegations, and last week the Justice Department announced that they had closed the investigation and would not be bringing any charges. They said that “We found no evidence that any IRS official acted based on political, discriminatory, corrupt, or other inappropriate motives that would support a criminal prosecution.”

In response to the DOJ’s determination, Republicans sought to lash out any convenient victim who might be available. Someone had to suffer their wrath if it wasn’t Lerner. So Jason Chaffetz (R-Wacko), chairman of the House Oversight (Overreach?) Committee, and his Republican Retributionists, have introduced a resolution to begin impeachment proceedings of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. The resolution accuses Koskinen of making false statements under oath and failing to comply with a subpoena.

This a curious persecution considering that Koskinen had nothing to do with the alleged targeting. He didn’t became IRS Commissioner until December of 2013, three years after the Tea Party’s whining about being scrutinized for improper political activity, of which they were clearly guilty. And back in the 2010 time frame, the IRS Commissioner was Douglas Shulman, an appointee of George W. Bush. Nevertheless, Koskinen is the target of opportunity, so the GOP is spewing their venom at him. They have determined that they need a scalp and they aren’t going home without trying at least once more.

This is just the latest in a string of partisan, expensive, and futile legislature abuse. The Republicans have already proven that they have no aptitude for governing, so they have adopted an agenda of hostility that relies on ludicrous hearings on Benghazi, Planned Parenthood, and now the impeachment of an IRS Commissioner. But make no mistake, all of these actions are thinly disguised swipes at President Obama. It is he that they wish they were impeaching, but they have even less justification for it than the phony scams they have already run. Even uber-conservative Fox News Yoda, Charles Krauthammer, is less than enthused with the GOP’s latest proxy attack on the President:

If the Republicans go through with impeachment proceedings against Koskinen they will only embarrass themselves further. There is no case to be made against him, and their transparent animosity will reveal them for the partisan hate mongers that they are. Their visceral disgust for Obama has driven them to extremes that only make them more repugnant to the average American voter. And as much as it would be in their best interests to try to at least pretend to be sane, expect more craziness to come. They obviously can’t help themselves.

After Falling For Hoax News Site, Sean Hannity Takes On PolitiFact’s ‘Stupidity’

Posted by Mark NC on October 28, 2015 at 12:49 pm. 4 Comments :

You really have to give the wingnut media credit for standing firm in the face of flagrant ridicule. On Sean Hannity’s Fox News program last week he cited a statistic that was not only wildly implausible, it was sourced to an Internet website that was obviously satirical.

The hoax website, Real News Right Now, also prominently displayed plainly absurd (and humorous) articles like “Starbucks Opens Five Stores in Jordan’s 2nd Largest Refugee Camp,” and “Trump: I Would Have Prevented the Asteroid From Killing the Dinosaurs.” The author of these articles is R. Hobbus J.D, who the website says is the recipient of the Stephen Glass Distinction in Journalistic Integrity (Glass was caught making up stories for the New Republic), and the Oscar Mayer Award for Journalistic Excellence. And from this source Hannity reported that…

Of course, President Obama never said any such thing. The fallacy of this statement was reviewed by PolitiFact who gave it their lowest rating of “Pants On Fire.” They noted that neither the President, nor anyone in his administration, had ever articulated a policy to allow anything close to 250,000 refugees from Syria and Iraq. In fact, they note that that number is “three times bigger than the total number of refugees Obama has asked to bring in during 2016 from all around the world.”

Following the exposé of Hannity’s gullibility, he went on the air to denounce PolitiFact as a “liberal website” that was “attacking” him. And after saying that he doesn’t normally waste his time “responding to stupidity” (because he’s normally creating it), he proclaims that “this one time, I’m going to break my rule.” Whereupon he delivers his rebuttal to PolitiFact:

As it turns out, addition must not be as simple for Hannity as he suggests. The AP article he referenced did cite John Kerry’s statement that there would be 85,000 refugees in 2016 and 100,000 more in 2017. However, he was referring to “the number of worldwide migrants,” not just those from Iraq and Syria. What’s more, the other 70,000 refugees Hannity mentioned were also worldwide and not exclusively from the troubled region.

So Hannity found a month old article from the Associated Press and distorted the numbers to try to come up with a justification for his prior disinformation. He failed miserably. He also blatantly lied when he said that he “never said all of the refugees were Syrian.” If you read the verbatim quote above, it’s clear that he was explicitly talking about “the refugee problem from Syria and Iraq.” Consequently, it’s Hannity who is stupid and partisan, not PolitiFact. And to top it off, he’s also a liar. It seems like he might have been better off had he just apologized for the incorrect data and moved on to a new bit of dishonest propaganda. But then he’s Hannity and he’s on Fox News. He’s fulfilling his “Special Purpose.”

Good Timing: Media Now Says Donald Trump Can Win, Just As His Polling Is Collapsing

Posted by Mark NC on October 27, 2015 at 9:55 am. 16 Comments :

When Donald Trump began jaw-flapping about becoming president a few months ago, the media quite properly regarded his delusions as a joke, and a bad one at that. Most were reluctant to take him seriously due to his utter ignorance of governing and the issues that impact the nation. Add to that his clumsy, racist, boorish rhetoric and childish insults, and why would anyone with a functioning brain stem consider him viable?

News Corpse was among those ridiculing Trump and his lunatic, unachievable aspirations. I explained then that the only reason Trump was leading in the polls was that the field of candidates was so large that it diluted all of the opposing support between more than a dozen non-Trump candidates. I wrote that…

Nothing has substantively changed since then. Now, however, the political pundits that were dismissing Trump as the clown that he is, are beginning to warm up to the notion that he is electable. They generally propose that, despite their prior skepticism, the duration of his poll-leading candidacy requires them to reconsider and concede that he is a plausible contestant in the reality show of GOP politics. For example:

Joe Scarborough, MSNBC: The Republican establishment for the first time saying, off the record, this guy could win.
Alex Castellanos, GOP strategist: The odds of Trump’s success have increased and been validated in the past few weeks.
Brit Hume, Fox News: His nomination now becomes something everybody has to say is possible.
Ed Rollins, GOP strategist: Trump is a serious player for the nomination at this time.
Chris Wallace, Fox News: I am beginning to believe he could be elected president of the United States.

On Fox News’ MediaBuzz, host Howard Kurtz devoted a segment to the media’s new found faith in Trump’s viability with a graphic reading “Media admit Trump could win after months of being in denial.” First of all, the media aren’t “admitting” anything. They are altering their previously held position. And secondly, they were not in “denial” at the outset. They were uncharacteristically correct in assessing Trump as unserious.

The only problem with this rush to anointing The Donald’s campaign as realistic is that it comes just as his poll numbers are sinking like a stone. There have been several polls in the past week that show him trailing Ben Carson in early primary states, and one showing him behind Carson nationally (not that Carson should be taken seriously either). On top of that, a new poll shows that the Tea Party, whose dying remnants have morphed into Trumpers, has dropped to its lowest level of support ever recorded.

Leave it to the media to crumble and adopt a lazy analysis about an alleged Trump rise to legitimacy just he is being rejected in ever-growing numbers. All of the reasons for treating Trump’s candidacy like a farce headed by a fool are still in place. He still caps out at about a quarter of the GOP vote in a field that is still crowded with rivals. Since when is a candidate considered serious when 75% of those polled choose someone else?

The myopic view that suddenly Trump is worthy of being called plausible runs contrary to all the evidence available. He is still what he has always been – a joke who most Americans hate and who can’t corral anything near majority. There are only two places where the Plausible Trump Theory resonates: 1) in his own party where “seven in 10 Republican and Republican-leaning registered voters say Trump could win in November 2016 if he is nominated.” And 2) in the media that has been seduced by a hostile, immature, intellectually lightweight, bigoted, celebrity candidate. You think that their assessment of Trump has anything to do with their ratings?

Ben Carson Takes Lead In Polls – Still A Complete Lunatic

Posted by Mark NC on October 26, 2015 at 5:03 pm. 16 Comments :

The big news from the Republican primary this week is that Ben Carson has been rising in the polls and has overtaken Donald Trump in Iowa and New Hampshire. While it is good news that Trump’s descent is beginning to build up steam, we must not forget that Carson has produced a steady stream of nonsense that is both idiotic and dangerous.

ThinkProgress compiled a list of “13 Ridiculous Things Ben Carson Actually Believes.” It’s a pretty definitive collection of the inanities that Carson has unleashed over the past few months. Here are the headings, but be sure to visit ThinkProgress for the details:

Women who get abortions are like slaveholders.
Obamacare is the worst thing since slavery.
‘Hitler’ could happen in the U.S. today.
Jews could have prevented the Holocaust if they had guns.
College campuses should be monitored for liberal political speech.
Muslims should be disqualified from the presidency.
There’s a war on ‘what’s inside of women.’
Being gay is a choice because prison turns people gay.
There’s no such thing as a war crime.
Obama is depressing the economy to keep people on welfare.
Obama signed immigration reform to bring in government-dependent voters.
Congress should be able to remove judges for voting for marriage equality.
Anarchy could cancel the 2016 election.

Surely ThinkProgress did not intend this list to be comprehensive, but there are a few omissions that really need to be added. So here is my addendum:

Says evolution and the Big Bang theory are the work of the devil.
Asked why victims of mass shootings don’t just attack the gunman.
Thinks that atheism is a religion.
Says it’s unconstitutional for courts to rule on the constitutionality of laws.
Referred to President Obama as a psychopath because he looks great “like most psychopaths.”
Late addition: Thinks the pyramids were for grain storage.

These are things that we need to remember should he continue to be a leader in the GOP primary. And we need to make sure that the nation is aware of what a full-fledged fruitcake Ben Carson is. He is not a just a soft-spoken former neurosurgeon. He is a radical Christianist who supports his own brand of Sharia law and has no knowledge of government, law, or public service. It would be as stupid to choose Carson for the presidency as it would be to choose George W. Bush as a brain surgeon.

Dictator Donald Trump Calls On All Presidential Candidates To Surrender The Election To Him

Posted by Mark NC on October 24, 2015 at 5:13 pm. 3 Comments :

In the spirit of great tyrants like Joseph Stalin and Benito Mussolini, who commandeered their electoral systems in order to insure near unanimous support, Donald Trump has stumbled into a scheme that would cripple the campaigns of his political rivals.

The Billionaire Don was recently caught allegedly violating election laws by coordinating his campaign with a SuperPAC operating on his behalf. The “Make America Great Again PAC” is run by a close associate of Trump’s campaign manager and Trump held fundraisers for the PAC before he announced his candidacy while it was still legal to do so. However, the Washington Post reports that principals connected to the PAC were regular visitors to Trump’s campaign office and communicated with his staff. Trump’s campaign manager was even caught lying when he denied knowing a key PAC official, but later was forced to admit that he did.

The result of this budding scandal was that Trump made a public announcement denouncing all PACS and disassociating himself with those operating in his name. But he went even further than that.

Taken at face value, that could be seen as a magnanimous gesture to remove unaccountable, big donor contributions from the political system, a worthy goal. But coming from Trump, further scrutiny is required. First of all, the only reason Trump is saying this is because he was caught cheating. He regularly accuses his opponents of being beholden to wealthy donors and has avoided taking any responsibility for his own obligations. But the real hypocrisy in this is his demand that other candidates ask any PACs supporting them to return all the money they’ve collected.

This would amount to a unilateral disarmament because Trump is the only candidate in the race that can self-finance his campaign. Consequently, he said nothing about candidates contributing unlimited amounts of their own money to electing themselves. In effect, Trump is asking every candidate to accept only the permitted donations for federal office (maximum $2,700.00), except for himself. A few candidates (i.e. Bernie Sanders) can generate significant sums from large numbers of small-dollar donors. Everyone else would be severely disadvantaged. What’s more, not many people could generate funds by pitching their branded campaign swag the way Trump does. He recently tweeted “Remember, official campaign merchandise (hats, apparel etc.) can only be bought at http://www.donaldjtrump.com . Be careful, don’t get ripped-off.” He is more Snake Oil salesmen than candidate.

The only way for Trump to fairly suggest this course of action would be if he were to also promise not to self-finance. Then all candidates would have to rely on building grassroots support. Then the country could have an honest democracy that wasn’t dominated by clandestine elites or wealthy megalomaniacs who buy their way into power.

Of course, that is not what Trump wants. He wants to be the only candidate with sufficient funds to mount a credible campaign. He wants to kneecap everyone that can challenge him. It is the sort of suggestion that would make Stalin blush. It is how dictators insure that they win elections with ninety-five percent of the vote. And combined with Republican efforts to suppress access to voting and to gerrymander districts to favor themselves, they might just approach that level of electoral corruption.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Trump is exhibiting these despotic tendencies. It is the lifestyle of privilege and entitlement that he has known his whole life. It is evident in his public commentaries that disparage minorities and women and the poor, while simultaneously embracing power structures that favor corporations and the imposition of government mandates on personal choices and religious practices.

Trump’s aspirations to monarchy are also apparent in his treatment of the press. He just held a rally in Florida where he barred any Univision reporters from attending. Univision is the nation’s largest Spanish language network. He said that because he is suing the network over their dissolution of a business arrangement with his Miss Universe pageant, it would be a “conflict of interest” to allow them into his campaign events. Apparently he has no idea what “conflict of interest” means. Nor does he have any understanding of the concept of freedom of the press. And this isn’t his first run-in with Univision.

All of this is typical Trumpery. He lambastes other politicians for things he does routinely, then he blames anyone but himself when his corruption is uncovered. He displays a flagrant streak of superiority, but reverts to being a shameless crybaby when he doesn’t get his way. He’s an unrepentant narcissist who is convinced that he deserves special privileges. And somehow he has conned some really dumbass Americans into supporting him, much the same way religious hucksters dupe their followers into believing the End Times are beginning next Thursday.

How Fox News Proved That Hillary Clinton Won The Benghazi Games

Posted by Mark NC on October 23, 2015 at 12:44 pm. 23 Comments :

The long awaited battle between Hillary Clinton and the Republican’s Committee to Politicize Benghazi is now in the history books. It was a marathon eleven hour affair that featured the top names in partisan propaganda as they tried in vain to wear down Clinton and force an error.

The details are hardly relevant because even the committee’s chairman, Trey Gowdy, admitted that nothing new was learned from the inquisition. When asked by reporters what the hearing had achieved, he said that “In terms of her testimony? I don’t know that she testified that much differently today than she has the previous times she testified.”

In other words, this committee has been just as incapable of manufacturing a scandal as the seven other committees before it. And even though Gowdy, in his opening statement, vilified his fellow Republicans on prior committees by repeatedly maligning their efforts as not being “serious and thorough,” he was unable to achieve anything more than they did, by his own admission.

Meanwhile, Clinton held up impressively well for the entire hearing, even though she was the only person involved who had to be aware and engaged throughout. The committee members all got to rest between each of their five minute question periods, but Clinton had no such relief. Kinda puts into perspective Donald Trump’s wimpy whining about standing for a three hour debate where he would only be required to speak for about fifteen minutes.

But the real indication that this hearing was a total bust for the Republican scandal machine was that Fox News cut out long before it was over. Both CNN and MSNBC covered the eleven hour hearing wall-to-wall, but Fox News bailed after only seven hours, when they flipped back to their regularly scheduled programming (The Five). So they left out fully one-third of the proceedings. Do you think they would have done that if they thought that Clinton was bombing? Of course not. They were more worried that she looked strong, confident, knowledgeable, and (gasp) presidential. That was something they didn’t want their viewers exposed to, so the decision was made to ditch the live hearings and return to their panel of wingnut pundits on whom they could rely for continued Clinton bashing.

To underscore the significance of this editorial cowardice, we must remember that Fox News has always been the network most obsessed with Benghazi. They even celebrated their own reporting, and particularly their CEO Roger Ailes, for being the “driving force” pushing to “keep Benghazi alive.” After devoting that much effort to turn a tragedy into political theater, Fox wouldn’t even stick with the live broadcast of the headlining act.

What viewers who watched the whole session would come away with is that GOP inquisitors were mainly concerned with emails from Clinton friend Sidney Blumenthal (whose transcripts the GOP committee members voted not to release), and the administration’s references to an anti-Muslim video following the attacks in Benghazi. Both of those were purely political subjects and neither could possibly shed any light on how the attacks occurred or what could be done to prevent similar attacks in the future.

So Gowdy and his cohorts can cite at least one thing that this hearing succeeded in achieving: That Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy was correct when he said that the committee’s purpose was to bring down Hillary Clinton. And they even failed on that score. Congratulations.

Bill O’Reilly: If I Were Attorney General I Would Arrest People I Don’t Like

Posted by Mark NC on October 22, 2015 at 9:44 pm. 18 Comments :

As the Grand Poobah of Insufferable Sanctimony on Fox News, Bill O’Reilly takes his role very seriously. That’s why he exhibited a particularly grating level of angst after the Senate declined to pass legislation that he personally proposed and promoted. The bill that he called “Kate’s Law” would impose mandatory sentencing (never a good idea) for certain undocumented immigrants convicted of a felony. And the failure of that vote inspired his commentary entitled “Anarchy in America.”

O’Reilly took out his anger on a variety of victims (video below), starting with the senators who voted against his pet bill. And for some reason he leaped out of reality to accuse them of having violated some unnamed law themselves. “Forty-five senators failed to uphold federal law,” he said, “violating their oath of office. Where is the outrage?” It appears that O’Reilly thinks that not voting for passage of a bill that he supports makes them guilty of not upholding federal law. That, of course, is just plain nuts. However, if wants to know where the outrage is, all he has to do is look in the mirror.

Next O’Reilly laid into Malia Cohen, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He was furious that the local government (something conservatives usually revere) voted to maintain their “sanctuary city” ordinances. But he was probably even more upset by what she said:

Uh oh. Now she’s done it. Because the hateful news station to which she referred was, of course, Fox News, and specifically O’Reilly’s grandstanding on the subject of sanctuary cities, and his revolting exploitation of the tragic death of Kate Steinle. After playing the video of Cohen’s remarks, O’Reilly said…

Imagine for a moment how O’Reilly would react if a Democratic Attorney General suggested using the authority entrusted to him by his position to harass and threaten people with whom he disagreed. O’Reilly would regard that as a blatant abuse of power that bordered on tyranny. What’s more, he would be right. Law enforcement agencies are not permitted to use their legal authority to intimidate or to “send a message.” He’s probably thinking of the Mafia. In fact, it is illegal to arrest anyone, or to bring charges against them, without having a reasonable prospect of obtaining a conviction. So O’Reilly is admitting that he would break the law were he in that position.

O’Reilly’s hatred for San Francisco is all consuming. He went on to say that “The city of San Francisco is hopeless. It’s a free-fire zone of anti-establishment behavior.” That’s an interesting comment considering how often he himself criticizes the establishment. But O’Reilly has had it in for San Francisco for a long time. Way back in 2005 he even gave permission to Al Qaeda to destroy the city:

You have to wonder what has gotten into these wingnuts. O’Reilly articulates his desire to break the law by using government powers to intimidate his ideological foes. Ben Carson recently said that he would use the Department of Education to police college campuses “for extreme political bias and deny federal funding if it exists.” And Donald Trump just said that he would support closing down mosques.

These extremist conservative sentiments should be remembered whenever you hear Republicans claim to care about the Constitution. Each of these examples of their true beliefs violate constitutional laws. The party of small government wants it to big enough to arrest its dissidents, to tell women what they can and can’t do with their bodies, to force its favored religion on all citizens, to censor speech and thought, and to enrich the upper-crusters who keep them in power. And every now and then, like O’Reilly, they admit it.

The Internet's Chronicle of Media Decay

Month: October 2015

Crybaby Donald Trump Calls For NBC Debate Boycott But Still Wants To Host SNL

GOP Candidates Frightened Away From Scary Debates They Can’t Control

What We Learned From The GOP’s Trainwreck Debate On CNBC: Republicans Hate The ‘Liberal’ Media

Republicans Launch Proxy Impeachment Proceedings Against Obama

After Falling For Hoax News Site, Sean Hannity Takes On PolitiFact’s ‘Stupidity’

Good Timing: Media Now Says Donald Trump Can Win, Just As His Polling Is Collapsing

Ben Carson Takes Lead In Polls – Still A Complete Lunatic

Dictator Donald Trump Calls On All Presidential Candidates To Surrender The Election To Him

How Fox News Proved That Hillary Clinton Won The Benghazi Games

Bill O’Reilly: If I Were Attorney General I Would Arrest People I Don’t Like

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