Fox Nation’s War on Women: Sarah Palin vs. Jane Fonda

Posted by Mark NC on March 12, 2012 at 12:44 pm. 8 Comments :

I am now firmly convinced that the Fox Nation web site is edited by a high school intern. When you consider the absurdly hyperbolic verbs that animate their headlines (i.e. “Cheney’s Daughter Annihilates MSNBC Anchor”), and their infantile pet names for people they don’t like (i.e. “Pig” Maher), the only conclusion is that either they have recruited from a remedial program at a local high school or Fox has implemented an IQ cap of 95 for all employees (so as not to exceed Fox celebrity Sean Hannity).

Today the Fox Nationalists are featuring a story about a video produced by President Obama’s reelection campaign committee. The video (below) addresses comments made last week by Sarah Palin that accuse the President of wanting to take the country back to the days before the civil war.

Palin: “What Barack Obama seems to want to do is go back to before those days when we were in different classes based on income, based on color of skin.”

As usual, Palin’s comment makes perfect sense if you are suffering from schizophrenic hallucinations while in the midst of an alien abduction. Otherwise, you probably can’t help but laugh at the notion that America’s first black president wants to return to the days when he would have been shackled in chains and traded in slave markets.

The item posted on Fox Nation was accompanied by text that declared with astonishment that, “Four years later, President Obama is still running against Sarah Palin.” What makes this particularly amusing is that a little further down the page, Fox Nation’s juvenile and incompetent editor also posted this item: Hanoi Jane Says Fire Nazi Limbaugh. The article referenced in the title was an editorial Jane Fonda co-wrote with Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan. The article never called Limbaugh a Nazi, although it did criticize Limbaugh for using such rhetoric against his opponents.

“Limbaugh doesn’t just call people names. He promotes language that deliberately dehumanizes his targets. Like the sophisticated propagandist Josef Goebbels, he creates rhetorical frames — and the bigger the lie, the more effective — inciting listeners to view people they disagree with as sub-humans. His longtime favorite term for women, ‘femi-Nazi,’ doesn’t even raise eyebrows anymore”

So according to the Fox Nationalists there is something profoundly odd about responding to Sarah Palin because she was a candidate for vice-president four whole years ago, but making a big fuss about Jane Fonda’s adventures in Vietnam forty years ago (for which she later expressed genuine regret) is perfectly reasonable. The absurdity of that distinction is obvious. But it should also be noted that Fonda is a celebrity who makes movies and occasionally comments on public affairs, while Palin is currently a Fox News political analyst and still a potential candidate for office (she recently said that she would be open to being drafted as the Republican presidential nominee at the GOP convention).

And yet, the pimply-faced editor of Fox Nation thinks that engaging with Palin is a throwback to a bygone era and one of its most inconsequential and meaningless characters. He seems to regard Palin as a has-been who deserves to be ignored. He may just have a point.

Fox News Hypes Last Year’s Sarah Palin Documentary As “New”

Posted by Mark NC on March 9, 2012 at 9:17 am. 1 Comments :

This weekend HBO is premiering its much anticipated adaptation of the book “Game Change,” the story of Sarah Palin’s selection to be John McCain’s running mate in 2008. The film stars Julianne Moore, Ed Harris, and Woody Harrelson, and has received glowing reviews from critics, although Palin defenders have trashed it despite never having seen it.

In a clumsy attempt at counter-programming, the Reelz cable channel has scheduled an airing of last year’s box office bomb, “The Undefeated” on the same day. The Undefeated is the painfully sycophantic Palin crocumentary that couldn’t make it through three weeks in movie theaters last year. In its opening weekend it made less than 1/10th of what “An Inconvenient Truth” made, despite plying on twice as many screens. In less than a month it was headed for the discount video bins at Wal-Mart.

Undefeated On Fox & Friends this morning, Steve Bannon, the producer of the Palin flop, was interviewed about its upcoming airing on cable. Bannon was introduced by Eric Bolling who dishonestly told Fox viewers that, “This is a follow up, right? This is the real Sarah Palin story.” Of course it isn’t a follow up; it isn’t new; and it isn’t real.

It is no wonder that the Foxies have to pretend that this is something new. They can hardly pitch it as the same old garbage that moviegoers so markedly rejected almost a year ago. And the box office failure occurred despite a massive effort by Fox News to promote it. But do they have to be so brazenly dishonest? At Fox Nation they continued the hype campaign with this headline: “New Documentary Takes Intimate Look at Sarah Palin.” Not only does that misrepresent the film as new, it makes it sound a little pornographic. I guess they think that’s the only way they can trick people into watching it.

Sarah Palin’s Anti-Reality Energy Rant Invites Mockery

Posted by Mark NC on February 24, 2012 at 1:00 pm. 5 Comments :

The increasingly irrelevant VP-losing, half-term serving, un-reality TV has-been, Sarah Palin, has climbed atop her Facebook soapbox once again to show the world that she has not yet exhausted her supply of incoherent policy positions and dopey cliches.

In a posting titled, “Obama’s Anti-American Energy Policies Invite the Next Crisis,” Palin gets just about everything wrong and calls President Obama a traitor in the process. The woman who coined the term “death panel” obviously has no better understanding of international energy markets than she does of health insurance reform. And the purpose of her posting is to advance the same tired myth about oil production and prices that she and the GOP have been peddling for years.

The posting begins on a note of delirium with Palin asserting that Obama “likes to take credit for actions initiated by the last administration.” Credit? Credit for what? Destroying the economy? Starting two wars? $4.00 per gallon gasoline? I think the word Palin is looking for is blame. And since Obama certainly doesn’t want any of that, her point is pure lunacy. Particularly the part where she says…

“[Obama]’s not interested in lowering the price of gas because exorbitantly high gas prices are one of his campaign promises.”

Of course. Because every political analyst knows that higher gas prices are the one sure way to guarantee reelection. It’s almost as good as high unemployment, which Republicans have also accused Obama of causing deliberately (to enslave people, or something).

The crux of Palin’s argument is a regurgitation of the standard Republican mantra to “drill, baby, drill.” She and her GOP comrades have invented a theory that gas prices are increasing because of low supply and that if we have more of it prices would decline. The problem with that theory is that all of the evidence refutes it.

McClatchy: “U.S. demand for oil and refined products — including gasoline — is down sharply from last year, so much that United States has actually become a net exporter of gasoline, unable to consume all that it makes.”

So what benefit would there be to producing more domestic oil if we are just going to ship it to other countries? If more supply would lower prices all we would have to do is stop exporting the gas we are producing now, but the domestic market would not support that. So what is the cause of higher prices? According to experts it is the inordinate impact of speculators and the instability in the Middle East, a point on which both Palin and Obama agree. However, Palin’s solution is “to drill here and drill now,” which we already know is no solution at all.

In a speech on energy yesterday, Obama responded to criticisms from his opponents by noting that “Only in politics do people root for bad news.” Palin took that missive as advice and declared that “I guarantee the rising prices will only get worse.” Nowhere does Palin cite the basis for her guarantee, nor how the guarantee will compensate anyone foolish enough to put their faith in it. I’d want to get it in writing. Obama also mocked the right’s energy strategy as a political stunt:

“You can bet that since it’s an election year, they’re already dusting off their 3-point plan for $2 gas. And I’ll save you the suspense. Step one is to drill and step two is to drill. And then step three is to keep drilling.”

Once again, Palin took Obama’s mockery as a model for her platform. She literally proposed a 3-point plan, the day after Obama predicted it, that consisted of drilling (in Alaska), drilling (in Canada), and more drilling (for natural gas). And all the while she continues to ignore the reality that there is no deficiency in supply. In fact, the right’s (and Palin’s) favorite energy boondoggle, the KeystoneXL pipeline, is specifically designed to transport oil from Canada to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico so that it can be exported. If it were intended for domestic use they could build a much shorter pipeline to refineries in the Midwest.

There is a reason that Sarah Palin has become so irrelevant, and it has to do mostly with what she does and says herself. This Facebook energy treatise is merely the latest example of her monumental inability to shape a coherent thought. To say that she invites mockery is an understatement. She literally begs for it.

Sarah Palin’s Top Seven CPAC Hack Attacks And Lies

Posted by Mark NC on February 12, 2012 at 12:00 pm. 7 Comments :

There is no better example of the right’s embrace of idiocy than the rise of Sarah Palin. Conservatives take great pains to refudiate attacks on her intelligence (or lack thereof), but the very fact that they have to rush to her defense so often is evidence of her stupefying ignorance. You never see conservatives forced to defend Karl Rove on those grounds. Liberals may strongly disagree with him but they don’t doubt his IQ.

Palin, on the other hand, is a walking fountain of embarrassing witlessisms. And her keynote speech yesterday at CPAC contributed another mother lode of lunacy. As was to be expected, the bulk of her bluster was aimed squarely at Barack Obama, whom she can only see in terms of evil and strident anti-Americanism. This approach is well received by the simple-minded audience at CPAC that regards cracks about community organizing as worthy of a standing ovation. Surprisingly, the crowd was unfazed by Palin’s use of Satan’s own speaking device: the TelePrompTer.

However, Palin saved some of her bile for fellow Republican Mitt Romney. She did not mention him by name, but it was clear to whom she was referring when she said that she hoped the nominating process would continue, even to the convention. And it was likewise obvious that Palin was smacking Romney when she said that…

“Our candidate must be someone who can instinctively turn right to constitutional, conservative principles. It’s too late in the game to teach it or spin it at this point. It’s either there or it isn’t.”

But the real entertainment was spread throughout Palin’s address. While there was virtually nothing of substance, there was an abundance of blatant applause lines that fed the Pavlovian lust of the CPACers. Here are just a few of the most mentally deficient snippets from her harangue:

1) [Obama] promised to transform America, and that’s one promise he kept, transforming a shining city on a hill into a sinking ship.
Remember how shiny America was in 2008 when the McCain/Palin ticket was so soundly defeated? The economy was in free fall, we were bleeding jobs, and there were two wars in progress. Obama took command of this ship after Bush and the GOP had already run it into an iceberg, and he has managed to keep it afloat and steer it back into safer waters.

2) When I listened to his State of the Union last month, I was really struck that he barely mentioned unemployment.
Which State of the Union was she listening to? It certainly wasn’t the one Obama delivered where he mentioned “jobs” 33 times. Her dreadful comprehension skills may explain why she was unable to answer a gotcha question like “What do you read?”

3) He’ll invest your money in bullet trains to nowhere, but he’ll stop Boeing from building airplanes anywhere.
It takes balls for Palin to reference the “bridge to nowhere” that was a boondoggle she supported in her home state of Alaska. And it’s no less ballsy to berate initiatives like high-speed rail that would create jobs and improve the infrastructure for commerce. Also, The NLRB decision to oppose Boeing’s plan to to move their facilities to South Carolina was intended to save the jobs of workers that Boeing proposed to abandon in Washington state.

4) We have a better job plan and it’s called the free market. And it worked before this president, and it will work again after this president.
Well, except for this:

5) He says that we need more of his financial regulations. We say go ask MF Global customers how happy they are with his regulatory agencies. Where were they when Jon Corzine lost $1.2 billion of customer funds?
Exactly! Where were Obama’s regulatory agencies? They were tied up by Palin’s Republican pals in Congress who refused to pass the bills that would create them or to confirm the department heads who would manage them. And isn’t Palin thoughtful for showing her concern about a billion dollars lost by wealthy hedge fund investors, but no such concern for hundreds of billions lost by average American homeowners?

6) We’re gonna put our confidence in the strength of our armed forces, not the hollow promises of our adversaries and not the cleverness of our diplomats and our bureaucrats.
So Palin advocates only military solutions to foreign policy disputes. She just can’t abide clever diplomats that could defuse an international crisis and avoid putting American lives at risk, not to mention saving billions of dollars that would be spent at war. Something tells me that even our armed forces would rather rely on diplomacy first.

7) We’ve suffered massive job losses out there. But Washington is hiring.
Actually, there have been 3,000,000 jobs created in the private sector in the past two years. Government jobs, however, have declined by 2.6% during the Obama administration. That’s a record. Obama has done more to shrink government than even Ronald Reagan.

Sitting through Palin’s speech was an excruciating ordeal. Her screechy whine was itself torturous, but the ignorance infused with every sentence, and the cheers it elicited from the undiscriminating crowd, was like aural tasering. Imagine my relief when she came to the obligatory “God bless America” and the end was in sight. However, the final punch line was her selection of Shania Twain’s “Not Just A Pretty Face” to accompany her exit from the stage. It’s amazing that the ego that approved that song can fit into her miniaturized brain.

Retch Against the Machine: Sarah Palin vs. Stalinist Cannibals

Posted by Mark NC on January 29, 2012 at 9:47 am. 7 Comments :

Now you’ve done it. Yeah you, you Republican presidential primary contenders. You’ve gone and made Sarah Palin mad. This is a day you will live to regret. After all, Palin is still the leader of a fearsome army of Facebook fanatics that worship her despite the fact that she hasn’t done a damn thing since she lost the campaign in 2008 and quit her job as governor half way through. That’s over three years as a professional slacker, leeching off of her PAC contributors and phoning in her insipid commentaries to Fox News.

Palin’s latest Facebook harangue is aimed squarely at her fellow Republicans vying for the GOP nomination. And she doesn’t like what she’s seeing. The tirade titled “Cannibals in GOP Establishment Employ Tactics of the Left,” commences with a blistering assault on the lack of civility that she has always cherished:

“We have witnessed something very disturbing this week. The Republican establishment which fought Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and which continues to fight the grassroots Tea Party movement today has adopted the tactics of the left in using the media and the politics of personal destruction to attack an opponent.”

Yes, the Rogue Warrior is not about to sit still for the Republican establishment, which embraced the Tea Party so tightly, and has elevated Reagan to sainthood, as they sink down to the politics of personal destruction to attack an opponent. The woman who charged that her opponent was “pallin’ around with terrorists” would never behave so abysmally.

Palin invokes the sacred creed of Reagan’s “11th Commandment” which deemed that Republicans never speak ill of other Republicans. To sane outsiders that always seemed to be a call for self-censorship, but to GOP partisans it was simply an edict to coordinate their propaganda and speak with one robotically undifferentiated voice. While Palin says that she has “no problem with the routine rough and tumble of a heated campaign,” she never explains how to tumble roughly in a campaign limited to reciprocal pleasantries.

Palin further asserts that she has never before seen the equivalent of this past week’s political brawl in a GOP primary race. For a woman who could not answer a question about what she reads, I suppose we can forgive her for not knowing about some famous incidents in the not-to-distant past. For instance when George H. W. Bush called Reagan’s economic plan “voodoo economics.” Or when his son George W. Bush spread rumors that John McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child. Or when McCain likened Mitt Romney’s position on waterboarding to Pol Pot’s. Palin even resorts to the sort of incivility about which she is complaining in this Facebook post:

“What we saw with this ridiculous opposition dump on Newt was nothing short of Stalin-esque rewriting of history. It was Alinsky tactics at their worst.”

Stalin-esque? Palin is comparing Republican criticisms of Gingrich to a brutal dictatorship that was responsible for the deaths of millions of its own people. And she wants to lecture others about the politics of personal destruction? Then she throws in an Alinsky reference for good measure even though there is nothing in her remarks that is associated with any “tactic” advocated by Alinsky. Right-wingers just like to say his name every few minutes. Following that they like to pretend that they are anti-establishment crusaders. Palin asserts that…

“…this whole thing isn’t really about Newt Gingrich vs. Mitt Romney. It is about the GOP establishment vs. the Tea Party.”

The poor pitiful Tea Party is being persecuted by the big, bad GOP establishment. You know, the one that created it, funded it, and pandered to it during the last election cycle. And it’s now up to Palin to defend the Tea Partiers who are nothing more than a widely disliked, far right faction of her own party. She expanded on that whining in an appearance on the Tea Party Network (aka Fox News) where she inexplicably connected herself to the leftist punk rock band Rage Against the Machine. And her manner of raging means “vote for Gingrich.” The former members of Rage are surely retching upon hearing this.

But Mama Grizzly isn’t through yet…

“[T]rust me, during the general election, Governor Romney’s statements and record in the private sector will be relentlessly parsed over by the opposition in excruciating detail to frighten off swing voters. This is why we need a fair primary that is not prematurely cut short by the GOP establishment using Alinsky tactics to kneecap Governor Romney’s chief rival.”

There’s Alinsky again. But more to the point, Palin is at once advocating prolonging the primary contest so that Romney’s record can be picked apart by Republican rivals, while lambasting the party for “crucifying” Gingrich. She really needs to pick an argument and stick to it. But the best part of Palin’s Facebook frenzy comes at the close:

“We will not save our country by becoming like the left. And I question whether the GOP establishment would ever employ the same harsh tactics they used on Newt against Obama. I didn’t see it in 2008.”

If she didn’t see it 2008 it was because she was blinded by the right. Her campaign was amongst the harshest purveyors of attacks on Obama that ran the gamut of absurd allegations casting him as a communist, a Muslim, a Kenyan, and more. But now she questions whether the GOP establishment would ever employ such harsh tactics against Obama. Furthermore, she resorts to portraying Romney as the establishment’s favorite son and even uses the phrase “chosen one.” Hmm, where have we heard that before?

Finally, in this Facebook offensive Palin helpfully admits that Fox News is not the fair and balanced news enterprise it pretends to be. She reminisces wistfully about “a time when conservatives didn’t have Fox News.” I wonder if her boss, Roger Ailes, minds that she is spilling her guts about the intentional bias of the network that employs her. And I wonder if he minds that she is bashing the party that the network was created to promote.

Double Jeopardy: Rachal Maddow vs. Sarah Palin

Posted by Mark NC on January 27, 2012 at 4:03 pm. 5 Comments :

The folks at NewsBusters think they have stumbled on the ultimate put down of one of the left’s favorite spokespersons. Last night on Jeopardy the contestants blanked out on the following question:

“This cable TV newswoman received a doctorate in politics from Oxford”

Accompanying the question was a picture of Rachel Maddow, but that still didn’t help the contestants come up with a correct response. The NewsBusters then opined that…

“This can’t possibly be great news to MSNBC execs given Maddow’s lead role in the network’s recent debate coverage.”

I’m inclined to agree. If I were an MSNBC exec I would be concerned that a panel of intelligent, well-informed players couldn’t identify the network’s star attraction. However, another star of the political universe met with the same fate last year when the Jeopardy answer was…

“Her latest book is titled ‘America by Heart: Reflections on Faith, Family and Flag.'”

Fox Nation - Rachel Maddow Not one of the contestants knew that the correct question was “Who is Sarah Palin.” So if it is an indication of the irrelevance of Maddow that she was unknown to the Jeopardy panel, how much worse is that Palin, who had run for Vice-President and become a regular contributor on Fox News, was also unknown in the same venue? Palin has had far more media exposure throughout the media world than Maddow, who is mostly limited to appearances on MSNBC.

Not surprisingly, the right-wing media noise machine quickly pounced on this story and regurgitated it throughout the blogosphere. Of course that included Fox News whose Fox Nation posted the item with a snarky headline reading, “Rachel Who?” But don’t bother looking for their article about Sarah Palin’s turn on Jeopardy. Fox is not about to reveal the truth about their overpaid, irrelevant leading lady.

DISGUSTING! Fox News Web Site Thinks John Edwards’ Illness Is Funny

Posted by Mark NC on January 13, 2012 at 3:06 pm. 9 Comments :

It’s bad enough that Fox News disseminates lies and propaganda while pretending to be a “news” enterprise. It’s just as bad that they routinely slander good people and projects with hyperbolic howls of treason and hate. But this is so far beyond the bounds of decency it is difficult to comprehend:

The Fox Nation republished an article from Politico that announced that former Senator John Edwards has been diagnosed with a heart condition that is life-threatening and requires immediate surgery. Upon reading this article the Fox Nationalists rated it as “Funny.” That is about as repulsive as it gets.

These are the same people who complain when they are criticized for being uncaring toward their less fortunate fellow citizens. They whine about being portrayed as insensitive when they advocate for eliminating Social Security and cutting everything from food stamps to salaries for teachers and firefighters.

Yet this is the best representation of what the Fox/Tea Party cult in America truly believes. They are expressing themselves in an open forum and letting their true feelings show. The depths of their nauseating hostility seems to have no bottom. In some respects this should not surprise anyone who has seen the Fox Nationalists relentlessly bashing President Obama, even calling for his assassination. And it isn’t just the puerile morons on their web site, it is also their on-air commentators like Liz Trotta who joked about “knocking off” the President.

It’s all very funny to these misanthropes. So long as the tragedy befalls someone with whom they disagree politically, anything goes. But just imagine their brain-melting hysteria if the situation was reversed and it was Sarah Palin who was ill. I would never wish this sort of hardship on anyone. But they not only wish it, they revel in their wishful depravity.

This really illustrates the dictionary definition of “Sick Fucks.” And if I wish anything, it is that they learn how hurtful and inhumane their despicable behavior is. And I also wish Sen. Edwards a speedy recovery.

Fox Nation’s Extra Special Stupidest Lies About Obama In 2011

Posted by Mark NC on December 28, 2011 at 8:46 am. 2 Comments :

In compiling another retrospective of the soon to be completed year, I thought I would present a list of all of the lies featured by the folks at Fox News for 2011. Turns out that there isn’t enough bandwidth on the Internet for that. So I sought to narrow down the list by only including the lies that appeared on Fox Nation, the Fox News web site and community of glassy-eyed disciples. That was still too voluminous. So I filtered it even further by selecting just the lies that appeared on Fox Nation that concerned President Obama. That didn’t narrow it down much further. Finally I chose to feature only the lies that appeared on Fox Nation, concerned President Obama, and were really, really stupid. Since that was a more subjective criteria I was able to shorten the list to a manageable and entertaining length. So without further ado here are…..

Fox Nation’s Stupidest Lies About Obama In 2011

Fox Nation - Marxist College Mate: Obama Was an ‘Ardent’ ‘Marxist-Leninist’
In this article the Fox Nationalists rely on the testimony of one person who now admits that he was never a “college mate” of the president. It is a wholly uncorroborated account that smears Obama as a Marxist despite the contrary accounts of virtually everyone else that knew him, including those cited by the article’s dubious source.

Fox Nation - Christmas Tree Tax Obama’s New ‘Christmas Tree Tax’
This was not actually a tax at all, and wasn’t proposed by Obama. It was a fee requested by the National Christmas Tree Association during the Bush administration, passed by a Republican controlled Senate and House, and was co-sponsored by John Boehner.

Fox Nation - Ohio Ugly For Obama In Ohio
To support this declaration, Fox Nation referenced a poll by Quinnipiac University that shows Obama out-polling every leading Republican challenger at the time. Obama beat Cain 47–39, Romney 45–41, and Perry 47–36. I can see why Fox thinks that’s ugly. Apparently they also thought no one would click through to read the actual poll.

Fox Nation - Stocks Stocks Tumble Worldwide After Obama Speech
Despite the deceptive headline, the article states that it is actually the “speculation congress won’t pass” the President’s proposals that contributed to the market decline. In other words, the markets favored Obama’s plan but declined due to the obstruction of the GOP Congress. And it even said just that in the text below the photo.

Fox Nation - Unpopular NYT Poll: Obama More Unpopular Than Tea Party
In truth the New York Times poll reported just the opposite – that Obama was viewed favorably by 48% with the Tea Party at only 20%. What’s more, Obama was viewed favorably by slightly more people than viewed him unfavorably, while the Tea Party was viewed unfavorably by twice as many people as view it favorably.

Fox Nation - Palin Bus Tour Obama Copies Palin, Plans Bus Tour
In their own photo accompanying the article about how Obama allegedly stole the idea for a bus tour from Sarah Palin (as if she were the first), there is an “Obama 08” poster in the window of Obama’s bus proving that he was doing bus tours long before Palin’s 2011 excursion. Did I mention that this was their own photo?

Fox Nation - White Women AP: Obama Has A Big Problem With White Women
Here we have the Fox Nationalists attributing a repulsively racist headline to the Associated Press However, the AP’s actual headline was: “Economic worries pose new snags for Obama.” And the article’s focus was also on polling concerning economic issues like jobs, housing, and gas prices. So Fox had to purposefully stretch the story to fit their predetermined racist theme.

There was so much more dishonesty and deception disseminated by Fox News this year that it could not possibly be recounted in full. But these are some of the most egregiously idiotic. Sometimes Fox spends considerable energy and effort to construct their falsehoods. They hire specialists like Frank Luntz and partisans like Karl Rove to deliberately mislead their naive viewers. But these examples show that at other times they don’t even seem to be trying. Their own texts and images expose their deceit. Lucky for them their audience is too dumb and too deluded to detect the vast quantities of bullshit that Fox passes off as news.

Andrew Breitbart’s Imaginary Republican Primary

Posted by Mark NC on December 27, 2011 at 3:37 pm. 2 Comments :

Last week Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment published an unintentionally hilarious column that sought to offer Democratic alternatives to President Obama. The choices included non-Democrats like Fox News anchor Chris Wallace and Independent senator Joe Lieberman.

Not content to embarrass himself with his incoherent analysis of Democratic politics, the author and editor of Breitbart.com, Joel Pollak, followed up the story this week with even less plausible suggestions for his own Republican Party. Pollak advocates for a brokered convention that would nominate a candidate not currently in the field. He runs down the GOP wish list of familiar names like Mitch Daniels and Chris Christie, and threw in some of the most unpopular characters the Republicans have ever hatched like Eric Cantor, Jim DeMint, and Paul Ryan. These folks might get the Tea Party extremists sweaty, but they would alienate the general public to an unprecedented degree. However, Pollak saved his top recommendations for last, and they are doozies.

Pollak’s number two choice for president is one of the nation’s most ridiculed and disrespected politicians, Sarah Palin. Despite starring in a documentary bomb, ironically titled “The Undefeated,” Palin has a resume chock full of defeat. She bailed out of her governorship half way through her first term. She lost the 2008 vice-presidential campaign and is credited with having been responsible for the fall of the ticket. Her book sales have been declining with each new release. Her canceled Alaska tourism program on TLC lost viewers almost every week it aired. She is currently trying to pitch a new TV show featuring her husband’s snowmobile exploits, but no one is biting. When Republicans are polled as to whether they want her to run for president, majorities say unequivocally NO! So of course, she’s the perfect candidate.

Well, almost perfect. Palin was, after all, Pollak’s second choice. So who could Pollak come up with that would surpass Palin’s extraordinary credentials? He would have to dig deep to uncover someone even more ludicrous than Palin. And Pollak does not disappoint when he reveals his first choice, the governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker.

There may be no politician in America who is more reviled by average citizens and working families. Scott Walker is renowned for his arrogant attempts to roll back collective bargaining rights that were in effect for decades. He managed to anger nurses and firefighters, and even his own police departments, as he battled for lower wages, pensions, and budgets that would mandate extensive and dangerous layoffs. His state has lost jobs for five consecutive months as job creation grew nationally. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics place Wisconsin last in the nation.

But the biggest obstacle to Walker being drafted for a presidential run is that he is about to be recalled. The organizers of the campaign to recall Walker have already announced that in less than half the allotted time they have over 500,000 of the 540,000 signatures required for a recall election. Walker’s popularity in the state is abysmal and his prospects for fending off the recall are, let’s say challenging. Earlier this year Democrats successfully recalled two of Walker’s Republican legislative allies.

The notion of a brokered GOP convention is music to the ears of Democrats. It’s an admission that the candidates put forth so far are inadequate to the job. Should one of them prevail in such an environment they would emerge greatly weakened. Should a new name emerge, it would be someone that did not endure the primary process of vetting that is so critical to assessing the viability of a candidate. Imagine if any of the previous Republican frontrunners (Bachmann, Cain, Perry, Trump) had been selected by acclamation in a brokered convention. They would have been quickly dispensed with in the general election because their obvious flaws would not have been revealed until it was too late. That will surely be the fate of any of the candidates that Pollak is setting up now.

So I wish him well. I completely agree with his choices. It would bring me great pleasure if Walker or Palin or Christie or DeMint were thrust to the head of the line and were chosen to face Obama in the general election. Obama has some very real hurdles to overcome in his quest for another term. The economy has to continue to show signs of improvement. Unemployment has to keep going down. And any number of international hotspots need to be carefully managed in order to avoid tragic flareups. But the most consistently positive advantage that Barack Obama has over his prospective opponents is that he is running against the sort of contemporary Republicans that have lost all semblance of sanity. How lucky can a guy get?

The Annual Fox News Tradition Of Bashing The Obama’s Holiday Greeting

Posted by Mark NC on December 19, 2011 at 4:07 pm. 7 Comments :

It’s that time of year again. The time when winter’s chill nips at your nose and poinsettia blooms abound. The time when children’s laughter echos through the streets and families come together for joyous feasts. And the time when Fox News lambastes the President and his family for not celebrating the holiday in the manner that they think good American, Christian, patriots ought to.

What would the season be without Fox News dredging up this absurd and insulting story as they do every year? It is a tradition that really makes the holiday complete. And this year it is extra special because they brighten it with the cheerful words of Sarah Palin who calls the Obama’s holiday greeting “odd” and “strange,” and, in the spirit of the season, she complains that it doesn’t reflect the…

“…American foundational values illustrated and displayed on Christmas cards and on a Christmas tree. […] It’s just a different way of thinking coming out of the White House.”

Indeed, the current residents of the White House are so “different” than the rest of us. They look different and think different and pray different, but mostly look different. And they express their warm wishes to the nation differently than other “normal” presidents like, for instance, George W. Bush, whose Holiday greetings also didn’t mention Christmas:

Click to enlarge:

Along with the Bush family, Rupert Murdoch declined to mention Christmas in his greeting to the tens of thousands of people who work for him. And Fox News itself aired “Holiday” greetings to their television viewers.

But the cherished holiday tradition of bashing a family for choosing to include people of all faiths (or none) in their hopes for joy and peace and well being, is reserved only for the Obamas. It’s that special treatment Fox saves for those they hate during this season of love.

[Addendum] To complete the hypocrisy, Fox has unveiled their own Christmas card that Palin might also consider lacking the “American foundational values.” In fact, it is downright mean-spirited as it delivers a message of competition and acrimony.

The card mockingly depicts the Fox sled (drawn appropriately by sheep) as winning the race against ABC, NBC, and CBS. What a heartwarming tribute to the birth of their savior, a man of peace and acceptance, who beseeched his followers to love their enemies. And in addition to being self-serving and tasteless, the card is also a barefaced lie. The highest rated program on Fox News (The O’Reilly Factor) has about half the audience of the the lowest rated network news program (CBS Evening News). So the Fox sled should be in the rear, if they cared about telling the truth.

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Fox Nation’s Stupidest Lies About Obama In 2011

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