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

Posted by 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.

Sean Hannity Dumbass

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…

“You see the backlash emerging now in Europe over the refugee problem from Syria and Iraq. The president said he’s going to bring in 250,000 refugees into this country.”

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:

Hannity: Let me teach you simple addition. I was quoting an AP article, entitled ‘Kerry: US to accept 85,000 refugees in 2016, 100,000 in 2017.’ Well, that equals 185,000 right? But that’s not all; according to the same report, the State Department is accepting 70,000 refugees in 2015. In other words, they said the 85 on top of the 70 they took in this year, that equals 255,000. That’s how I came to the number. And by the way, for the record, if you watch my TV show, I never said all of the refugees were Syrian.

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.”

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

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

Posted by 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?

Fox News Donald Trump

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…

“…there is a demographic in the Republican electorate that can best be described as batshit insane. And Trump has managed to secure a near monopoly on that addle-brained GOP faction. […] Trump’s confederacy of dunces is sufficient in numbers to rise above his rivals, so long as there’s a lot of them. That’s because when you divide the remaining Republicans who are not wacko-birds (h/t John McCain) among the fifteen other candidates, there aren’t enough of them left to surpass the Trump/crazy constituency. That does not mean that Trump has a commanding lead. It means that there are way too many players on the field diluting the results for each of them. As they whittle down to a more manageable number, the 82% of non-Trump supporters will disperse to other candidates who will then tower over his paltry flock.”

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?

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

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 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.

Ben Carson

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.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.


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

Posted by 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.

Donald Trump

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.

Trump: I have disavowed all Super PACs, requested the return of all donations made to said PACs, and I am calling on all presidential candidates to do the same.

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.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

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 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.

Trey Gowdy Hillary Clinton

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.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

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 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.”

Fox News Bill O'Reilly

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:

“We cannot allow hateful conservative news stations to drive how we respond to incidents in our city. I’m not afraid of Fox News and they don’t influence how I make my policy decisions here in San Francisco.”

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…

“Now let me be very clear. That woman is a disgrace. And if I were the Attorney General of the United States I would immediately place her under arrest. I might not win the case, but I would send a message to all subversive office holders in this country that if you do not obey federal law you yourself will be prosecuted.”

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:

“If Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we’re not going to do anything about it. We’re going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco.”

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.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

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Fox Nation Wants To Know: Is Campbell’s Soup ‘Pushing Gay Agenda’

Posted by on October 22, 2015 at 3:03 pm. 4 Comments :

The outrage meter is once again spinning off the dial at the Fox News community website, Fox Nation. This time they are fretting over the threat to traditional American values caused by a TV commercial for Campbell’s Soup (video below).

Fox Nation

The objection to the fearsome soup advertisement was that the people featured enjoying a hot bowl of Campbell’s goodness were a gay family with two fathers and their young son. They sat at the dinner table mimicking Darth Vader’s famous line, “I am your father,” as they fed the boy. Most people would find it a heartwarming presentation of family life in an American home.

However, the Fox Nationalists considered the ad an abomination and posted a link to a right-wing website that accused Campbell’s Soup of “Pushing [A] Gay Agenda.” Because obviously, just showing a gay family is a provocative act that will result in hapless saps being indoctrinated into a deviant lifestyle against their will. Think of all the marriages that will be dissolved after watching this ad. And what about the damage done to the wholesome reputations of both Campbell’s and Star Wars?

The comments of the Fox Nationalists are at once horrifyingly bigoted and endlessly comical. The ad, they say, makes them ill, and promotes an unnatural, anti-God culture. They pledge to never buy Campbell’s soup again, switching to Progressive (which is actually Progresso, but still too close to sounding socialist). They are convinced that the ad (which I doubt any of them have seen on TV unless they’re watching the LogoTV network on cable) will destroy the Campbell’s Soup Company because America cannot abide such tolerance for diversity, which is evident by their rejection of television programs like Modern Family (the #8 ranked show among viewers 18-49).

This isn’t the first time that such an insidious threat has been forced on the American public by dastardly marketing villains who seek to shove multiculturalism down the nation’s throat. Last year they went berserk over an allegedly controversial Cheerios commercial that featured a bi-racial family with an adorable mixed-race daughter. And they also lost their lunch when Coca-Cola produced an ad for the Superbowl that featured a variety of people from different ethnic and national backgrounds singing “America the Beautiful.” What could be uglier?

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

The inbred prejudices of the rightist Fox News audience are fairly predictable. They simply hate anyone that doesn’t conform to their narrow definition of a traditional, conservative, white, Christian, American. Unfortunately for them, that definition is outdated and irrelevant in the twenty-first century. And one of the best demonstrations of how detached they are from reality is the treatment this issue got by Stephen Colbert, whose commentary was devastating and includes the Campbell’s ad in full.


Fox News Was So Sure That Joe Biden Was Running For President Yesterday

Posted by on October 21, 2015 at 4:29 pm. 9 Comments :

In remarks delivered today in the White House Rose Garden, Vice-President Joe Biden announced that he will not be a candidate for president in 2016. After a painfully long decision-making process, Biden stood with President Obama and his wife Jill to dash the hopes of right-wingers everywhere who were yearning for a more contentious Democratic primary.

Fox News

However, Fox News may not be satisfied with this announcement. After all, just yesterday their senior White House correspondent, Ed Henry, appeared on the air (video below) to reveal that…

“He’s likely in. […] I’ve got three sources close to the Vice-President who are saying that, in meetings and in phone calls, he has said that he’s likely to get in.”

Three sources! That settles it. Biden is only a single source, so it’s three against one and, therefore, he must be lying. The folks at Fox News can mark this down as another example of the dishonesty of the Obama administration. Trey Gowdy is expected to call for hearings on whether or not Biden lied about his presidential ambitions and what email account he used to convey them to Obama.

Henry was not alone in his assessment of Biden’s intentions. His Fox News colleague Bill O’Reilly said weeks ago that Biden was “ramping up to challenge Hillary Clinton” and that he “believes he will be in the race.” Another colleague, Monica Crowley, insisted repeatedly that “As I have been saying… He’s running.”

Other media figures have also chimed in. For instance, Diane Francis of the National Post said that “#Biden definitely running, good source, amid concern about Clinton skeletons;” Roger Simon of PJMedia tweeted “BREAKING> Big financial backer says #Biden definitely running;” Gabriel Sherman of New York Magazine wrote “Joe Biden is running for president — a fact that has been obvious, and true, for weeks;” and The Most Wrong Man in America, Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard, couldn’t be more certain saying…

“I’m told by Democrat I trust that Biden ‘almost certain’ to run, will announce this week in time to speak at the Iowa J-J dinner Sat night.”

…and…

Biden confirms to Obama at lunch today he’s running, announces at U Delaware tomorrow. You can feel the Joementum!

There is never a shortage of idiotic punditry surrounding any event in American politics. But with so many instances of certainty, backed by allegedly unassailable sources, you have to wonder how these people keep their jobs. Will Ed Henry go back and grill his three sources to find out why they were so horribly wrong? Will he apologize to his viewers? And coming on the heels of the Fox News intelligence analyst who was just arrested for falsifying his credentials, you have to wonder if anything that anyone says on the network is worthy of consideration.

Even as I’m writing this, Charles Krauthammer is on Fox saying that Biden’s speech today was a actually a secret announcement that he IS running, and that he will step in as soon as Clinton is indicted. So we can all feel a little more at ease knowing that, no matter what is happening anywhere in the world, the conspiracy kooks are working hard to invent crazy theories based on nothing but their unique brand of dementia.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.


Fear Of A Black Captain America: Fox News Is Outraged That Hero Opposes Racist Vigilantes

Posted by on October 20, 2015 at 10:52 am. 46 Comments :

Exercising their renowned obsession for inventing trite pseudo-controversies, Fox News has managed to imagine a travesty in the latest issue of Marvel Comic’s Captain America. And not surprisingly, it revolves around an overtly racist theme stemming from the superhero’s new alter ego, African-American Sam Wilson, and a confrontation with undocumented immigrants.

Fox News Captain America

The Curvy Couch Potatoes of Fox & Friends were terribly upset by the news that the new black Captain America was going after an armed band of vigilantes who called themselves the “Sons of the Serpent.” The vigilante crew’s mission was to seek out and apprehend immigrants crossing the border illegally. Such vigilantism is blatantly unlawful and, in the real world, often ends up with people being severely harmed or even killed. Nevertheless, the folks at Fox & Friends regarded the Serpents as the heroes and Captain America as a villain stomping on the rights of free, nativist citizens. Here is an exchange from the segment (video below):

Clayton Morris: Comics books have been struggling to get readership, and so here you have Marvel doing a little bit of a PR stunt. In fact, they’ve made Sam Wilson, who was formerly The Falcon, he’s an African-American, he’s taking over as Captain America now. But he’s got a new odd enemy. Instead of going against Hydra and the typical Captain America villains, he’s going up against conservatives. That’s his new enemy.
Tucker Carlson: So who is this Serpent? Is this Serpent an Islamic extremism, an ISIS member bent on destroying western civilization? Nooo. The Serpent is an American who has misgivings about unlimitted illegal immigration and the costs associated with it. That, according to the comic book, is evil. […] The whole theme is the same, which is out there in the middle of the country, between Malibu and Georgetown, everyone is an ignorant snake-handling bigot and they need to be held in place or else they’ll turn this into Nazi Germany. […] Now the threat comes from ordinary Americans. Probably some of you watching at home. They think you’re dangerous.

The first hint that this segment was going to be dripping with racism was Morris’ assertion that making Captain America an African-American is just a PR stunt, and that an armed militia of xenophobes were simply ordinary conservative citizens. Carlson took over from there to trivialize the noxious bigotry of the vigilantes as merely em>”misgivings.” They certainly didn’t intend to use their abundant weaponry or follow through with their violent threats. Carlson was clearly disturbed that such decent thugs were characterized so poorly in the comic book, and how it reflected on the viewers of his program. While the Fox Friends highlighted some of the dialog from the comic, one part they conspicuously left out said…

“While others are content to peacefully protest or vote in rigged elections, the Sons of the Serpent believe that aggression must answer aggression. I declare you all enemy combatants.”

So the characters that Fox regards as garden variety conservatives are overtly threatening to abandon peaceful behavior. And they regard the immigrants, who they earlier said were disease-ridden criminals, to be combatants as if at war. Considering that fact that most immigrants who enter the country illegally are seeking work in agriculture or other menial labor jobs, they probably don’t qualify as fearsome warriors. But that didn’t stop Fox from casting a black Captain America, who takes the side of brown invaders, as an abomination.

Oddly enough, this isn’t the first time that Captain American has stirred up the ire of Fox News. A few years back the comic got Fox all huffy with a single frame that accurately portrayed the Tea Party. However, the source from which Fox got this new story appears to be a video produced by the MacIver Institute. Fox’s video even includes segments clipped directly from MacIvers’s video. For the record, the MacIver Institute is a right-wing think tank funded by the Koch brothers and the neo-fascist John Birch Society. Which explains a lot. And it certainly explains where Fox News goes when they need a new racist scandal to fire up their dimwitted viewers.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.


Not The Onion: GOP Congressman Already Floating Impeachment For Hillary Clinton

Posted by on October 19, 2015 at 9:57 pm. 7 Comments :

The Huffington Post is reporting that Alabama’s Mo Brooks isn’t taking any chances when it comes to hounding Hillary Clinton out of an office that she hasn’t even won yet:

“Hillary Clinton isn’t president yet. She hasn’t even won the Democratic nomination. But a Republican congressman is already getting ready for the opportunity to impeach her — on the first day of her hypothetical presidency.”

[Brooks said that] “In my judgement, with respect to Hillary Clinton, she will be a unique president if she is elected by the public next November, because the day she’s sworn in is the day that she’s subject to impeachment because she has committed high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Where do Republicans find these weasels? What’s especially funny to me about this is that two years ago I wrote a satirical article that proposed this very same idea – except I was joking. This seems like a good time to re-post it here in full:

May 12, 2013
Vowing to get an early start on efforts to remove Hillary Clinton from the White House, Republican leaders in congress have announced their intention to hold hearings on what they claim are the high crimes and misdemeanors that Hillary Clinton will commit once she assumes the presidency in January of 2017.

Hillary Clinton

Although she has not yet been sworn in to office (or elected, or announced her candidacy) Republicans are determined not waste any time in initiating her impeachment. House Speaker John Boehner told reporters that…

“We do not want to repeat the mistakes we made in the previous [i.e. current] administration where we waited too long to get the ball rolling. After all, President Obama was in office for nearly a month before we took meaningful action to remove him.”

Some members of the GOP attribute the failure to impeach Obama on the late start they got on manufacturing allegations of malfeasance and ginning up outrage over imaginary scandals. Consequently, they chased after flimsy accusations of foreign birth and socialist aspirations that never caught on with the public. That left them facing a reelection campaign dominated by impotent sound bites of whether or not small businesses “built that” and desperate rejections of real data including poll results and unemployment numbers. Republican strategist Karl Rove Rove addressed these shortcomings saying…

“We are proud of the fallacies we created and promoted. No one worked harder to invent phony issues than we did. Could we have done better? Should we have connected Obama to Hitler more often, or the spread of the Bubonic Plague? Sure, but it’s always easier to criticize with hindsight.”

This is not to say that there weren’t zealous attempts to plunder the Obama presidency. Republican politicians, with the help of Fox News and the Koch brothers, worked feverishly to construct controversies designed to hobble the administration. They labored over “Fast and Furious,” Solyndra, Bill Ayres, and ObamaCare, which they unsuccessfully took all the way to the Supreme Court. Each of these affairs, and several more, were alleged to be “Obama’s Watergate,” but none of them gained any traction with a populace that proved to be smarter than the Tea Party – admittedly, not a very high bar.

The latest episode for which conservative muckrakers are crying wolf (or Watergate, as the case may be) is the tragedy that took the lives of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya. However, even with the help of near blanket broadcasting of Benghazi hysteria by Fox News, the utter lack of any compelling evidence of wrongdoing has turned the whole affair into a mushy smear campaign notable only for the tacky theatrics of the accusers. Even the specter of a cover-up fell flat when the proponents of that theory could not explain what exactly was being covered-up. “We forgot that little detail,” said Rep. Jason Chaffetz (Tea Party-UT).

Rather than risk a similar fate in the event that Clinton runs for and wins the presidency in 2016, Republicans are casting their lots now. Since it doesn’t matter whether the object of their scorn has actually done anything unlawful, why wait until the former senator and Secretary of State is in office to try her for the crimes they are planning to pin on her no matter what reality ultimately serves up. It’s a strategy that they believe conserves a great deal of political energy that would otherwise be wasted on honest politicking and the responsible stewardship of government.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Senator Mitch McConnell, who declared shortly after Obama’s first election victory that his primary legislative goal was to “make him a one-term president,” is devoting the same measure of commitment to the effort to pre-impeach Clinton. In remarks to the GOP caucus last week he reminded his fellow Republicans that their priorities ought not to change just because the complexion and gender of the person in the White House does.

“We have spent five years obstructing everything this president has attempted to do, from passing bills, to appointing judges and cabinet officials. This is not the time to let our guard down and be distracted by the burdens of actually governing or helping the nation recover from adversity.”

Asked for a comment when Clinton was told of the Republican campaign to impeach her, she said incredulously “What the fuck?” And walked away laughing uncontrollably. Her office later followed up with this statement:

“We have always known that these clowns were certifiable, and now we are seeing some of the best evidence of that. The Secretary has not yet made a decision as to whether or not she will run for president, but if she does she expects to campaign vigorously and appeal to the hearts and minds of the American people.

She also expects to face dipshits in the Republican Party who, with their pals at Fox News, will manufacture insane theories and conspiracies, and she plans to wipe up the pavement with their lame asses.”

Like it was yesterday. And once again, reality trumps satire. But don’t get me started on Trump.