Fox News Escalates Obama Selfie Into An “International Incident”

Posted by on December 12, 2013 at 12:05 pm. 7 Comments :

Having failed to ignite a fire under Obama’s presidency with such memorable pseudo-scandals as Benghazi, Solyndra, Fast & Furious, gun confiscations, the climate change hoax, Sharia Law, death panels, pallin’ around with terrorists, and the Kenyan nativity, Fox News has latched onto an innocent moment of human behavior that took place at the memorial for Nelson Mandela.

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As ludicrous as it was for so much of the media to focus attention on this dab of triviality, leave it to Fox News to escalate it into an international incident. If they could they would surely find a way to turn it into an Archduke Ferdinand moment that will precipitate World War III (Don’t laugh. Glenn Beck’s been doing it for years).

The article associated with this absurd headline did not in any way support the matter-of-fact declaration that Obama had created an international incident. There was no author identified and it was filled with erroneous assertions and commentary from partisan pundits like Fox News contributor Erick Erickson. Not a single reference to any diplomatic agency or individual was included. So how did this qualify as an international incident?

Well, obviously, it was because Fox could manufacture lies and fling them feverishly at the President they so fervently despise. Never mind that it wasn’t Obama taking the selfie, it was the Danish Prime Minister, Helle Thorning Schmidt. And forget that British Prime Minister David Cameron was also in the picture but the white guy has not been accused of creating an international incident. And don’t bother mentioning that the photographer dismissed all the hyperventilation about whether the First Lady was upset in a blog post he wrote saying that “photos can lie. In reality, just a few seconds earlier the first lady was herself joking with those around her, Cameron and Schmidt included. Her stern look was captured by chance.”

But if you think that fabricating an international incident is the worst that the propagandists of the Murdoch empire can do, you clearly don’t appreciate the depths of their determination and depravity. Fox’s community website, the lie-filled Fox Nation, has had three stories on this so far. And Murdoch’s New York Post weighed in on the matter with an article titled “Flirty Obama owes us an apology.” The article was filled with gratuitously insulting and sexist remarks such as…

  • [The President] lost his morality, his dignity and his mind.
  • [The President] made a damn fool of himself at first sight of Denmark’s voluptuously curvy and married prime minister.
  • The Danish hellcat hiked up her skirt to expose long Scandinavian legs covered by nothing more substantial than sheer black stockings.
  • The president leaned into the air space of the cross-legged Danish cupcake.
  • The president’s cackling head moved inches from the Danish tart’s.

That’s the Prime Minister of Denmark that they are calling a hellcat, a cupcake, and a tart, and implying is a conniving slut. And they say that Obama is creating an international incident? Obama owes us an apology?

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Megyn Kelly Lies To Jay Leno: “I’m Not One Of The Opinion Hosts At Fox News”

Posted by on December 10, 2013 at 2:24 pm. 19 Comments :

Last night the newest primetime attraction on the Fox News Channel ventured off the reservation to hype her program on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. In the process Megyn Kelly delivered some of the most unintentionally funny perversions of reality you can imagine.

Megyn Kelly

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From the outset, the interview was a fluff piece designed to promote Kelly and her new role as a primetime anchor at Fox News. But the conversation devolved into the absurd when Leno started to ask a modestly interesting question, but swerved midway through and turned it into an open-ended (and false) compliment.

Leno: People assume that if you’re on Fox News, just as they do if you’re on MSNBC, you have a certain bias. How do you deal with…you seem pretty straight down the line.

Kelly: I am, thank you. I’m a straight news anchor. I’m not one of the opinion hosts at Fox. But I always laugh because I’ll have a conservative pull me aside and say “I love your conservative principles,” and I’ll say “You assume too much.” And then the liberals will pull me aside and say, “I know you’re one of us,” and I’ll say, “You assume too much.” But I always say that if you assume that I’m this conservative operative, ask Karl Rove if that’s true.

It’s a pretty safe bet that, if challenged, Kelly could not produce a single liberal that ever claimed that she is one of them. It was just a line that Kelly used to feign balance. The same is true of her reference to Karl Rove. Kelly was likely harking back to the incident on election night November 2012, when Rove refused to concede defeat. But Kelly’s performance did nothing to refute Rove’s conservatism, just his obstinance in light of the polling results. Rove certainly regards Kelly as a reliable conservative and an ideological ally. She has made him a frequent guest despite his role as one of the most prolific fundraisers for the GOP, which she never bothers to disclose to her audience.

Megyn Kelly GQHowever, the real whopper of the evening was Kelly’s assertion that she’s a “straight news anchor” and “not one of the opinion hosts on Fox” Kelly has been a rabid right-winger for as long as she has had a perch at the painfully conservative network. She rudely lambastes Democratic guests and has pushed numerous fallacious stories aimed at discrediting liberals and progressive policy. In fact, her editorial bias generally produces little more than partisan tripe and manufactured outrages that have little basis in fact. For example, her near-obsession with the irrelevant New Black Panther Party was a months long excursion into fantasy. She was also one Fox’s most virulent proponents of the phoney IRS/Tea Party affair. And her stubborn attachment to a trumped up Benghazi scandal wasted hundreds of hours of valuable airtime. And then there were these crackpot diversions:

  • Kelly defended a criminal anti-Islam filmmaker as a “patsy” of the Obama administration.
  • Kelly asserted that Americans have “gotta get a little squeamish” about the prospect of being killed by drones.
  • Kelly told her colleague Bill O’Reilly that pepper spray used against student protesters was just “a food product, essentially.”
  • Kelly moderated a discussion that was based on a series of “Fox Facts” that were cribbed directly from a Republican National Committee press release.
  • Kelly featured a disreputable reporter with a history of violence (who was later arrested for sexually assaulting a four year old girl) in her frequent attacks on the funders of the Islamic Center that Fox derisively referred to as the “Ground Zero Mosque.”
  • Kelly misrepresented the results of a Fox News Opinion Dynamics poll to argue that Democrats are defying the will of the people.
  • Kelly helped to cover up the extra-marital affair of GOP senator John Ensign and failed to disclose her personal involvement in the story.

These are not the sort of stories attributed to a straight shooting, non-opinionated journalist. It is this record of partisan propagandizing that led to my article three years ago asking “Is Megyn Kelly Worse Than Glenn Beck?” More recently Media Matters conducted a survey of Kelly’s new primetime program and found that she “has hosted conservatives (56%) significantly more often than progressives (18%) and has surpassed even Fox’s Hannity in its divide between guests on the left and right.”

For Kelly to go on the Tonight Show and tell Jay Leno that she’s a straight news anchor is a blatant and deliberate lie. There is no question about her political leanings. She would not have been hired by Roger Ailes if she were anything but a rightist tool and a willing mouthpiece for the conservative agenda that Ailes, and his boss Rupert Murdoch, are peddling. And anyone who falls for her dishonest self-appraisal is terminally naive (I’m lookin at you Leno).

[Addendum:] The day after Kelly appeared the Tonight Show, this “straight news anchor” returned to her own program and, speaking to her kiddie viewers, said that “Santa Claus just IS white.” She later included Jesus as well saying that it is “a historical fact.” It’s pretty safe to say that this is how Fox sees it:

Fox News - Black Santa Claus


Amazing America: Sarah Palin To Headline Another Dopey Reality Series

Posted by on December 9, 2013 at 10:21 pm. 14 Comments :

The Sportsman Channel is boldly demonstrating how gamey they really are by signing the Mother of all Quitters to star in a new reality series: Amazing America. The only thing that is actually amazing about this is that anyone would be so foolish as to hire Palin after she bombed so pitifully in her prior television outings.

Sarah Palin

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Who can forget Sarah Palin’s Alaska? The program debuted on The Learning Channel in November of 2010, and signed off two months later in January of 2011, after losing half its audience in nine unwatchable episodes. Even Fox News recognized Palin’s negligible worth when they declined to renew her contract at the end of 2012 unless she agreed to take a hefty salary cut. Palin’s ego refused to suffer that indignity and she was off the air. But a few months later, when her less-than-SuperPac’s donations slowed to a trickle, she swallowed her pride and re-upped at Fox.

On The Sportsman Channel Palin will join fellow crackpot Ted Nugent, an NRA sponsored gun-nut talk show, and a bevy of programs that feature sadists killing defenseless animals to affirm their flaccid masculinity. This should put to rest the incessant media blathering about whether Palin will make another run for political office. She is clearly more driven by enriching herself through pseudo-entertainment projects rather than exposing herself to doing any real work. It should end the blathering, but probably won’t because the media blatherers aren’t any more interested in working than Palin is.


Republican Congressional Candidate Ties Obama To Crack-Smoking Toronto Mayor

Posted by on December 9, 2013 at 12:36 pm. 6 Comments :

There really is no bottom to the well of indecency that Republicans dig for themselves. If they aren’t challenging the citizenship of President Obama, they assert that he palls around with terrorists. Now we have a GOP candidate for congress in New York who has made the incoherent leap from Rob Ford, Toronto’s crack-smoking mayor, to his opponent and to Obama as well.


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The ad features George Demos who is running against Democratic incumbent Tim Bishop. It begins by asking viewers if they are “tired of politicians?” Behind this narration is a picture of Bishop, Obama and Ford. Demos has an peculiar definition of politicians in that it includes substance abusers in Canada, but not himself, even though he is running for political office.

But it’s the juxtaposition of the repulsive Rob Ford with Obama and Bishop, who have nothing in common with him, that is such a heinous act of character assassination. Demos might have been a little closer to the mark had he used a picture of freshman Tea Party Republican Trey Radel of Florida, who was recently arrested for cocaine possession.

Clearly Demos is more interested in slandering his enemies than in being honest or ethical. His behavior reeks of the bitter, tired politics he pretends to denounce. In that respect, he makes a perfect Fox News-style candidate who projects his own flaws onto his opponents. Although Fox has gone even further to mastering the tactic of labeling Republican miscreants as Democrats.

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Constitution Nazi: Sarah Palin Calls Constitution “Irrelevant” To Non-Religious Americans

Posted by on December 8, 2013 at 11:07 am. 19 Comments :

A few weeks ago Sarah Palin said the nastiest thing she could think of about Pope Francis, all because he took a stand against economic inequality. She called him a liberal (ouch). A couple of days later she had second thoughts and apologized to the Pontiff, who probably couldn’t have cared less. But that wasn’t the end of her pontificating on faith.

Sarah Palin

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Last week Palin made an appearance to peddle her “War On Christmas” book to the Tea-vangelicals at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. Her standard stump speech was typically littered with patriotic cliches and liberal bashing. But she introduced a new theme in this theo-con venue that goes a step further than her routine divisiveness and exclusionist rhetoric, saying that…

Palin: …our Constitution was created wholly for a moral and religious people and our Constitution would be irrelevant and impossible to follow, it would be no good, it would be inadequate for any other people.

So Sarah Palin, and her Liberty U. hosts who heartily agreed with her, regard the United States Constitution as a document that is “irrelevant” and “inadequate” to all but the devoutly religious like themselves. Never mind that the first amendment explicitly states that there shall be “no establishment of religion.” Palin is essentially denying the benefits of constitutional liberties to the 20% of Americans who describe themselves as non-religious. For these wayward heathens the Constitution is “impossible to follow.” In fact, she goes so far as to say that the absence of religion removes all reason to follow it.

Palin: [T]here will be no reason to follow our Constitution because it is a moral and religious people who understand that there is something greater than self, we are to live selflessly, and we are to be held accountable by our creator, so that is what our Constitution is based on.

Where Palin gets the notion that understanding the Constitution requires living selflessly she didn’t bother to explain. However, if she believes that, she has a funny way of showing it. Was she being selfless when she betrayed the people of her state so that she could pursue a lucrative career as a talking head at Fox News? Are her positions against food stamps, health care, the minimum wage, and tax fairness for the wealthy (like herself) examples of selflessness?

What’s more, her assertion that the Constitution is based on being “held accountable by our creator” was apparently manufactured from the thin air circulating between her ears. Nothing in the Constitution even hints at that. To the contrary, it is evident that the Founders intended to place the power to govern in the hands of the people and their designated representatives, not their deities.

The hypocritical and false piety of grifters like Palin is all too common coming from right-wingers who wish they could restrict our nation’s liberties to just themselves. It’s the sort of country club constitutionality that forbids membership for people who are different, like minorities, immigrants, and those unclean peasants who populate our working class. But rarely do cretins like Palin come right out and say that, unless you believe like they do, you are incapable of understanding freedom and are therefore undeserving of it. And when they do come right out and say it, they demonstrate that they know as little about the Constitution as they do about morality.


For Immediate Release: Secret Tea Party Conference Announced With Stephen Colbert (Invited)

Posted by on December 6, 2013 at 1:34 pm. 1 Comments :

As the public view of the rightmost fringe of the Republican Party (aka the Tea Party) continues in a downward spiral, the measures they are taking to rehabilitate themselves get increasingly pathetic. Take, for instance, today’s press release announcing the third annual Tea Party Conference.

The big attraction this year, that they say “will mark a turning point in Tea Party history,” is declared in the their opening question and answer: “What do Jewish, Black, Environmentalist and LGBTQ leaders have in common? They are all coming to The 3rd Annual Tea Party Conference.”

Wow! That IS historic. A Tea Party event that aims to represent the diversity of America. And it’s uncharacteristically honest of them to admit that their past has been dominated by straight, white, Christians, although everyone else has known this all along.

Of course, it remains to be seen who actually shows up for this conference and whether their attempt at inclusion is successful. One impediment to that is that the conference is something of mysterious affair. Their press release notes that the event will be held at “an undisclosed location In Marietta, GA.” That might make it difficult for people to attend. Further limiting attendance is the fact that it is an “invitation-only” affair, so I hope you got your invitation.

The organizers are promoting the conference with a press release that proudly declares that Stephen Colbert is one of those lucky invitees. That bit of hype is emblazoned in the headline and repeated in the body of the release saying…

“In order to ensure a fair and balanced dialogue on diversity, an invitation to speak is also being extended to America’s most beloved ‘conservative’ comedian: Stephen Colbert.”

What they don’t explicitly note is that Colbert has not accepted the invitation, nor is there any evidence that he even received it. Consequently, he has not indicated that he has any intention of attending the event, or even knows that it exists. But that didn’t stop the Tea Partiers from exploiting his name for its publicity value.

And in that same spirit of promotional quackery, I’d like to announce that Colbert, along with Michelle Obama and Batman, have been invited to my house for dinner to endorse my ebook “Fox Nation vs. Reality.” It’s a compendium of more than 50 examples of outright lies published on the Fox News community website. Like the Tea Party event, this dinner is invitation-only and will be held at an undisclosed location. That reminds me – I need to invite Dick Cheney.

Fox Nation vs. Reality

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Fox News Compares Obama To Pope Francis – And Not In A Good Way

Posted by on December 5, 2013 at 10:33 am. 10 Comments :

Here it comes, folks. The Fox News sufferers of ODS (Obama Derangement Syndrome) are exhibiting advanced symptoms of ever greater severity. Their determination to demonize President Obama is returning to the absurdly elevated levels that characterized the last two elections when they portrayed him as a friend to terrorists and a foreign-born Marxist who hates America.

The latest in their cavalcade of lunacy is a report that compares Obama to Pope Francis with a headline feature, “Pope Francis is the Catholic Church’s Obama – God help us,” that is insulting to both of them.

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The story, in predictable Fox fashion, assails the President as a weak, ineffective leader who naively panders to his enemies. What was less predictable is the attribution of the same failings to the previously infallible Pope. The author, Fox News editor and self-described Catholic, Adam Shaw, begins by declaring that the popular new Pope is already headed in the wrong direction and that “just as President Obama has been a disappointment for America, Pope Francis will prove a disaster for the Catholic Church.” That’s a pretty strong condemnation directed at God’s anointed representative on Earth. Either Shaw knows better about what’s best for the church than the Lord Almighty, or he just wants to exploit this matter to beat up on a president he and his bosses despise.

Shaw’s argument supporting this view loiters around feverish criticisms that the Pope is insufficiently dismissive of gays, contraception, and those churchly nuisances, the poor. He chastises the Pope by grumbling that “Francis thinks by talking vacuously about the poor, he will be respected.” What Shaw means by “vacuous” is the Pope’s remarkable exhortation on economic inequality that rebuked the idolatry of money and trickle-down economics (you know, like Jesus did). It’s a theme the President picked up on yesterday in his speech on the same subject, but what Shaw called “vacuous” Obama called “eloquent.”

“The Pope himself spoke about this at eloquent length. ‘How can it be,’ he wrote, ‘that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?'”

Shaw sums up his screed with a twin-barrel attack on both Obama and the Pope as confused and deceived dupes of some sort of covert socialist cabal:

“Like Obama, Francis is unable to see the problems that are really endangering his people. Like Obama he mistakes the faithful for the enemy, the enemy for his friend, condescension for respect, socialism for justice and capitalism for tyranny.”

There is nothing particularly new in Shaw’s offensive rhetoric. It is a rather typical example of the Fox News, right-wing disparagement of any advocacy on behalf of society’s less fortunate. Any public activism that doesn’t inure to the benefit of elite, wealthy individuals and corporations is looked upon as tantamount to Marxist tyranny in the eyes of modern Tea Party conservatives. And the opportunity to wrap their hostility in a blanket of feigned spirituality proved just to compelling to resist. God help us, indeed.


So F**KING What? Fox News Goes After America’s Disabled

Posted by on December 4, 2013 at 6:03 pm. 1 Comments :

Just in time for Christmas, Fox News has found time to publish distorted information about American beneficiaries of disability insurance. On their community website Fox Nation (a notorious peddler of lies), they posted an item sourced to the uber-conservative CNSNews that expressed concern that there are “More Americans on Disability Than Population of Greece.”

Fox Nation

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SO F**KING WHAT?

The apparent purpose of this ludicrous comparison is to stir up animosity toward people who are already suffering. It’s a recurrent theme for Fox who are also hostile toward the poor, the sick, victims of discrimination, veterans, etc. However, their attempt at fomenting faux outrage fails at the outset.

First of all, the number of disability beneficiaries in the U.S. is about eleven million and, yes, that is slightly more than the population of Greece. What that has to do with anything is a mystery? It is also only about 3% of the U.S. population. What’s more it includes a couple of million children and spouses of disabled persons. But driven by their hunger to disparage these folks, the Fox Nationalists took the number and shopped around for a small nation whose population was lower. And if silly, unrelated comparisons are all they are interested in then they might want to take note that there are more people on disability…

  • …than saw The Hunger Games last Saturday
  • …than are vegan.
  • …than condoms used in 18 days.
  • …than people who like to watch bowling.
  • …than people who watch Fox News (three times more).

Stupid comparisons notwithstanding, it is obvious that Fox is focused solely on making the lives of people who are already struggling, even harder. It’s fair to say that the point they are making is not that the population of Greece is too low. Consequently, it’s clear that they are advocating a reduction in benefits for the disabled, just as they do for recipients of food stamps and the unemployed. And they went out of their way to make this point in the days before the celebration of the birth of their savior who is so well known for refusing to help those poor, sick, hungry, moochers. Merry Christmas.


War On Christmas: Sean Hannity And Glenn Beck Join The Other Side

Posted by on December 4, 2013 at 9:36 am. 4 Comments :

With Thanksgiving safely out of the way, it is time for Fox News to buckle down and concentrate on the ongoing (and fake) War on Christmas. Bill O’Reilly is doing his part by declaring his intention to continue his watchful policing of the secular-progressive forces who are bent on the elimination of Santa Claus and Christianity.

However, there is an ominous development in Foxland. Sean Hannity welcomed Glenn Beck to his program on Monday to discuss the rift in the Republican Party between their insane, right-wing establishment faction, and their insane, right-wing Tea Party faction. But prior to the fascinating conversation between these two deep-thinkers. Hannity greeted Beck with a hearty “Happy Holidays.” Which Beck graciously returned.


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If that isn’t a harbinger of Armageddon, what is? While the rest of the wingnut-osphere is railing against efforts to remove Christ from the pagan holiday that was falsely converted into the birthday of Jesus, Hannity and Beck are exchanging salutations that advance Satan’s mission of tolerance. Will O’Reilly condemn this atrocity? Stay tuned.


Fox News Terror Alert: Muslims Girls Are Learning To Swim At YMCA

Posted by on December 2, 2013 at 10:35 am. 17 Comments :

The hyper-alarmists at Fox News can’t go a single day without manufacturing a new horror over which to panic. If it isn’t Obama’s Peace Corps operatives coming to collect your guns, or immigrant farm workers selling crack to your children, it’s identity thieves laying in wait for people buying health insurance. And now there is a new fear causing the curvy couch potatoes on Fox & Friends to cower in their studio/bunker.

This morning Fox News reporter Heather Nauert reported that a YMCA in St. Paul, Minnesota has succumbed to Sharia Law in an attempt to promote Islamic terrorism. Well, more precisely, they have set aside one hour a week to offer basic swimming lessons to Muslims girls in an environment where they can observe the modesty dictated by their faith. But it’s really the same thing, isn’t it?

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Nauert whipped up the standard Fox News fear machine to frighten their dimwitted viewers over something that most people would regard as a practical safety measure and a fun leisure activity. But to Fox it’s a foreboding preamble to catastrophe. Says Nauert…

“Well the minority becoming the majority at one community pool. Sharia law is now changing everything. A YMCA in Minneapolis-St. Paul is starting a swim group for Muslim girls but special considerations have to be made to keep with their religious beliefs. Now this means during the one-hour class, the pool is being shut down, the men’s locker room is being locked, and female lifeguards are being brought in. Similar classes are now starting at towns across the Midwest. We’ll keep watching this story for you.”

Boob BombsAside from the fact that learning to swim in Minnesota, the land of a thousand lakes, is practically a mandatory public safety measure for all residents, especially children, Fox News is escalating the fear factor by injecting the specter of Sharia Law “changing everything.”

However, this swimming class has nothing to do with any law. The program is being offered by a local, non-profit, Christian organization and no one is required to participate. It may, in fact, prove popular with girls from other faiths whose parents would prefer that their daughters be separated from boys while learning to swim.

True to form, Fox News turns anything they can into a reason for outrage and dread. It is their purpose for being. And it is particularly noticeable when they can combine it with overt racism and anxiety over terror. This episode may not rival Fox’s idiotic story about terrorist Boob Bombs, but it comes close, and it strikes a sadder note when it is directed at harming kids.