Watch Sen. Durbin Scorch the ‘Braying Chorus’ at Fox News for Defaming the Police

Every now and then a political leader expresses thoughts that are so compelling and compassionate that they need no elaboration. And in the wake of the first hearing of the House Select Committee investigating Trump’s January 6th insurrection, Sen. Dick Durbin delivered just such a speech on the floor of the Senate.

Fox News, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham

What follows is a transcript and video of Sen. Durbin’s inspirational condemnation of Fox News cretins Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham:

In an effort to plumb the depths of political meanness and irresponsible, it is just too hard to choose between Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. First they became our nation’s leading anti-vax quacks making their specious arguments against life-saving COVID-19 vaccines and sowing doubt among their viewers who are literally putting their lives at risk because of lies that these two individuals [and Donald Trump] are spouting.

And now they are creating a braying chorus focused on the police who defended this building on January 6th. Their mockery of the bravery of the Capitol D.C. Police who risked – and some lost – their lives in the January 6th situation in this Capitol building is cowardly and shameful.

It took courage for the police to face the Trump mob. It takes no courage for these Fox talking heads to belittle these officers. It takes no courage to practice their well worn smirks reacting to the bravery in these pleas. It’s hard to imagine reading a press account of what they said yesterday and last night about the hearing that took place, the things that they did.

Ingraham gave the “Best Performance in an Action Role” to Washington Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone, who during the testimony recalled hearing he’d be shot with his own gun. Ingraham said, and I quote, “Well there was certainly a lot of violence that day. But it wasn’t a terrorist attack. It wasn’t 9/11. It wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to America. It wasn’t an insurrection.”

And then Tucker Carlson responding with a smirk to footage of Fanone telling the hearing he experienced Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Throughout the monologue Carlson piled on to his previous claims about the violence being just quote, “A political protest that got out of hand.”

First the vaccines. Now defaming the police. This is irresponsible from start to finish. I would ask those at Fox network – not exactly my friends and allies in politics – to show common decency and common sense. Common sense when it comes to these vaccines, which we know if more people were vaccinated we wouldn’t be facing this resurgent need for masks and fear of this new variant. And common decency when it comes to the men and women in uniform who risked their lives for this building, this Capitol, this democracy, and this government.

Certainly there’s freedom of speech, but let’s hope that good sense will dominate this discussion over at the Fox network as to whether these two ought to be allowed to continue their rant.

The only problem with Durbin’s eloquent address came at the end when he suggested that Fox News was capable of either common decency or common sense. Neither of those traits have ever been evident on the network devoted to right-wing lies and propaganda, to dividing America, and more recently to Donald Trump and his aspirations of tyranny built on pathological lies and malignant narcissism. Other than that, Durbin was spot on.

NOTE: Twitter suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

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

Snowflakes Gaetz, Greene, et al, Flee Their Paltry Pro-Insurrection Press Conference

On Capitol Hill Tuesday morning a bipartisan committee initiated hearings on the January 6th insurrection incited by Donald Trump. The first session (which Trump to upstage) focused on the testimony of heroic police officers who were among the victims of the riotous mobs that hoped to disrupt the functions of Congress and to overturn the will of the American people. They failed.

Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene

Also on Tuesday morning, another less ethical group of representatives staged their own partisan sideshow in a pitiful attempt to draw attention away from the hearings. They also failed. However, the Republican Pro-Insurrection Caucus press conference did manage to score a mention in the congressional hearing by Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, who noted that…

We’ve got people right now in front of the Justice Department asking to release some of the very same people to be released, even though we’re testifying about the trauma and the agony and everything that happened to us. It’s pathetic, and they shouldn’t be elected officials anymore.”

https://twitter.com/JanNWolfe/status/1420053505205735428

The people that Sgt. Gonell was referring to at the Justice Department were the cream of the GOP’s Lunatic Brigade: Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Louis Gohmert, and Paul Gosar. They gathered together in support of the domestic terrorists who tried to shut down the U.S. Congress as it was carrying out its constitutional duty to certify the election. It did not go well for them.

https://twitter.com/WUTangKids/status/1420092248994242569

First of all, it’s clear that the press didn’t appear to be particularly interested. The StormTrumpers were outnumbered by protesters and security. The protesters made sure to get their signs in front of the cameras with messages like “Pedophiles for Trump” and “Traitors and Rapists Sit down.” And a lone whistleblower added some audio activism to the affair.

Facing this handful of “intolerant leftists” (as one of the GOP shills called them) was apparently too much for the Trumpublicans. So they turned tail and bravely ran away. All the while complaining about having been “shut down.” Which is ironic considering that they didn’t care at all about their own Capitol being shut down by the cretins they were there to defend.

Notice that none of the protesters vandalized any property or assaulted anyone with flagpoles or bear mace. This is what a peaceful protest actually looks like. And it didn’t take much to send the QAnon Quartet scampering off. Greene tried to show some gumption. “To the guy that’s blowing the whistle,” she gamely declared, “we are not deterred.” Then she immediately deterred herself into her getaway car.

Gaetz was followed by a persistent reporter, Lauren Windsor, asking a perfectly relevant question. “Are you a pedophile, Congressman Gaetz” she aske at least eleven times. And with all of those opportunities, Gaetz didn’t bother to deny it even once.

This fiasco comes on the heels of another recent catastrophic political event headlined by Gaetz and Greene. They went on a national “Put America First” tour. But they forgot to put their financial house in order and, as a result

“Their campaigns and joint fundraising committee reported a combined loss of $342,000 within two months after kicking off their tour on 7 May at The Villages in Florida while pulling in less than $60,000 in contributions, according to Federal Election Commission reports reviewed by the publication.”

If this is any indication of how the 2022 congressional mid-term election is going, Republicans may be in a heap of trouble. But that is no reason for Democrats to get complacent. The future of American democracy is on the table, and those who value it need to work harder than ever to keep and expand the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. While episodes like this are entertaining and encouraging, they must not lead to letting down our guard. The stakes have never been higher.

NOTE: Twitter suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

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

Trump Rants About Crime to Deflect From the January 6th Hearing Probing His Crimes

Tuesday morning the House of Representatives held its first hearing to investigate the January 6th insurrection incited by Donald Trump. The bipartisan committee is looking into what happened, what caused it, and what actions were taken to respond. Much is already in the public record, and most of it incriminates Trump and his Republican confederates.

Donald Trump

The committee has already been dismissed by Republicans as partisan, despite the fact that GOP House Leader, Kevin McCarthy, is the one who refused to allow three of his members to take seats on the panel. Now he’s whining about the absence of the GOP perspective that he prohibited. Meanwhile, Fox News covered portions of the hearing with a chyron that politicized and belittled the probe reading “Pelosi-Selected Committee Holds First Jan 6 Hearing.”

However, as usual it is Trump who is desperately yearning to be the center of attention. Consequently, he released another of his pseudo-tweets that is a pitifully transparent attempt to deflect from the hearings that he knows expose his guilt. Trump began…

“The fraudulent nightly network newscasts have devoted ZERO minutes to crime recently, even though crime is eating away at our cities and our Country.”

That is an easily provable lie. All of the cable and broadcast news networks have been reporting regularly on crime. Trump must be watching channels that don’t cover news, like Fox “News,” Newsmax, and OAN. He went on to babble that…

“They don’t want to talk about it because it will hurt the political narrative of the Communist Democrats.”

Trump has called Democrats “communists” before, but now he is doing it almost daily. For him it is just a handy epithet in his 3rd grade vocabulary, because he surely couldn’t define it if his life depended on it. And he went on to say…

“Just think, six months ago we had the most secure border in our history. Today, it is the least secure in our history with criminals illegally flooding into our Country-many spreading COVID into our communities-and other Countries prisons being emptied into out neighborhoods.”

There isn’t a single word in that that is true. It is merely more of Trump’s robo-talking points. Refugees at the border have a COVID positivity rate of less than 6%, lower than the Texas average. And there is no evidence whatsoever of “prisons being emptied.” Trump just makes this stuff up as he goes along.

[By the Way: It should not go without notice that Harrington’s postings are blatant violations of Twitter’s terms of service that prohibit attempts to circumvent a suspension. (more on that here). She has posted Trump’s pseudo-tweets at least 60 times just this month. Harrington’s account should be reported and suspended for her repeated breach of Twitter rules]

Trump and the Republican Cult are struggling to malign Democrats in order to avoid being held accountable for their complicity in the insurrection. Lindsey Graham went on Fox News Monday night to lie to Sean Hannity about crime. He blamed it all on Democratic states like California saying that…

“If you do this crap in South Carolina, you’ll be lucky if you go to jail. You’ll be lucky if someone doesn’t shoot you. So I say that because we’ve lost deterrence. These big Democratic cities and states have lost deterrence. People no longer feel afraid to assault someone in the street. Nobody feels afraid to go into Walmart and clean out the place because nobody in the prosecution level is gonna do a damn thing.”

Graham apparently knows nothing about his own state, much less California. South Carolina is currently #7 nationally for homicides (11.0 per 100,000), a ten year high. That’s more than twice the rate of California at #29 (4.5 per 100,000), a ten year low.

So using crime as a deflection from the January 6th hearings might not have been a very good idea after all. But then again, what else do they have? They could reprise the old “lock her up” chant about Hillary Clinton. Or they could complain about the dozen or so Trump associates who have been indicted on felonies. Or they could brag that Trump is only responsible for a few hundred thousand of the 600,000 dead Americans due to his negligent and incompetent mismanagement of pandemic. After you’ve been called a war criminal by Carl Bernstein, there really isn’t any place left to go.

NOTE: Twitter suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

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

Why Is Fox News Racist Tucker Carlson Smearing a January 6th Capitol Police Hero?

On Wednesday afternoon House Speaker Nancy Pelosi responded appropriately to GOP leader Kevin McCarthy’s transparent attempt to make a mockery of the House Select Committee on the January 6th Insurrection. McCarthy tried to stack the Committee with a pair of fervent foes of democracy, Jim Jordan and Jim Banks. Both of these extremist Republicans are devoted members of the Cult of Trump who support his “Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” from him. The very lie that Trump used to incite the riots in Washington, D.C. in the first place.

Fox News, Tucker Carlson, QAnon

No rational person could criticize Pelosi’s decision not to seat Jordan and Banks. It would be like seating Harvey Weinstein or Bill Cosby (or Donald Trump) on a committee to probe sexual harassment. But Fox News isn’t known for their rational people or analyses. And that’s especially true with regard to Fox’s Senior White Nationalist, Tucker Carlson, who has been on a tear recently with idiocy like his paranoid delusion that the National Security Agency (NSA) is spying on him. Or his dangerously dishonest claim that health authorities know that vaccines don’t work and they aren’t telling you. Or his baseless accusation that the FBI orchestrated the January 6th insurrection.

Consequently, Carlson immediately launched into a predictable condemnation of Pelosi and the Committee’s effort to get to the truth of what happened on January 6th, why it happened, and what led up to it. In the course of his knee-jerk jabbering he somehow managed to take a detour toward a racist attack on a Capitol Police officer who courageously defended the seat of America’s democracy.

Officer Harry Dunn put his own life at risk to protect members of Congress, their staffs, and the Constitution, whose duties the House was in the progress of undertaking. But Carlson was focused solely on his ultra-partisan obsession with slandering Democrats and any unfortunate who happened to be in line of fire. He said (video below)

“So the Committee will proceed with one party. What will it look like. Well, think MSNBC with subpoena power.

“On Tuesday Pelosi will call a Capitol police officer called Harry Dunn. Dunn will pretend to speak for the country’s law enforcement community. But it turns out Dunn has very little in common with your average cop. Dunn is an angry left-wing political activist whose social media feeds are full of praise, not coincidentally, for Nancy Pelosi. Here’s a picture of the two of them together.

“‘Racism is so American,’ Harry wrote in one post, ‘that when you protest it, people think you are protesting America.’ Hashtag ‘Leave it to whites to tell blacks what is racist,’ hashtag ‘I stand with Ilhan Omar,’ hashtag ‘Squad.’ Harry Dunn, ladies and gentlemen. Just another fact-based witness to the insurrection.”

Where upon Carlson introduced his guest, Jim Jordan. Carlson’s rant presents a dumpster of derp that requires some further exploration. First of all, the Committee will not proceed with one party. Pelosi has already appointed one Republican, Liz Cheney, and there could be more. If Carlson has a problem with the make up of the Committee, he should direct his whining to McCarthy who childishly took his ball and scampered away after Pelosi nixed his two most radical opponents of an honest probe.

Secondly, Carlson’s assertion that Dunn would “pretend to speak for the country’s law enforcement community,” is pure fiction. Dunn never claimed to do so, and he isn’t the only member of law enforcement who will be testifying. What’s more, Carlson’s characterization of Dunn as “an angry left-wing political activist” is wholly inappropriate. He is a police officer who was doing his duty during a violent riot without any of the political posturing that marks everything Carlson does or says. Which means that Dunn actually has much “in common with your average cop,” but nothing in common with Carlson.

Thirdly, Dunn is an citizen who has every right to express his opinion outside of his official duties. But Carlson apparently doesn’t believe that Dunn is entitled to the freedoms that every other American enjoys. Could it be because he’s black and proudly supports his people? Well, it’s interesting that Carlson chose to attack Dunn, but not the white officers who are scheduled to testify before the Committee.

Finally, there is another element to this melodrama that needs further attention. Carlson is obviously very upset that Pelosi rejected Banks and Jordan for seats on the Committee. However, he failed to disclose that his son, Buckley Carlson, is Banks’ communications director. So Carlson is enraged that his son’s boss was denied the opportunity to dishonestly distort the events of January 6th, but he didn’t think it was important to reveal that familial connection, a clear conflict of interest and breach of ethics.

That’s the sort of white privilege that is present in much of Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson’s elitist life as the son of a diplomat and the heir to a frozen food fortune. Only now he is combining it with a hatred for police officers, African-Americans, Democrats, and patriots who respect the Constitution. And as usual, Fox News is behind him all the way.

NOTE: Twitter suspended the News Corpse account after 11 years without giving a reason. So if anyone wants to tweet articles from my website, please feel free to do so often and repeatedly. Also, Be sure to visit and follow News Corpse on Instagram. Thanks for your support.

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