Fox & Friends

Trump Brags About the ‘Great Honor’ of Record Approval in a Fox News Poll that Doesn’t Exist

Posted by on November 4, 2018 at 10:58 am. 5 Comments :

Trying to analyze the presidency of Donald Trump gets harder with each passing day. The primary difficulty is attempting to discern whether Trump is lying or stupid or suffering from senile dementia. The unarguable signs of one or more of all three of these Trump deficiencies are evident in nearly everything he says. Although, in the end, it hardly matters which one stands out at any given time because they are all alarming and unacceptable traits in an American president.

Donald Trump

Case in point: On Sunday morning Trump awoke and took to his twitter machine to communicate directly with his Deplorable cult disciples. He re-tweeted some twenty previous tweets from last week, including the most flagrantly racist campaign ad ever produced. And mired in that muck of mainly endorsements of Republican Nationalist Party candidates was this display of Trump fluffing his own ego:

Any conscious observer would recognize right off the bat that there is something terribly wrong with this tweet. Trump’s actual approval rating among African-Americans is in single digits. A recent Washington Post poll put the number at three percent. Even a Trump-friendly Fox News poll last month reported that all non-white respondents combined totalled only Twenty-nine percent approval.

However, an even more troubling part of this tweet is Trump’s assertion that the forty percent approval among African-Americans came from a Fox News poll. The only problem with that is that no such poll exists. So this is Trump either lying, being too dumb to understand simple news reporting, or sinking into a blissful dementia.

There is, however, some evidence that stupidity is the cause of this particular mental failure. There was a segment on Trump’s favorite Fox program, Fox and Friends (video below), wherein contributor Deroy Murdock cited a poll that did put Trump’s African-American approval at forty percent. The program blasted a full screen graphic of this “news” to introduce the Murdock interview. But right at the bottom of the graphic was an attribution of the polling data to Rasmussen Reports, the notoriously right-leaning survey outfit that exists only to give conservatives some positive poll results when reputable pollsters have none. Murdock repeated the number in the interview, but neither he nor co-host Pete Hegseth bothered to identify the utterly non-credible source.

So apparently Trump was engaged in his customary practice of watching hours and hours of Fox News and happened to see this bogus story on how much African-Americans adore him. Then he had to immediately share this falsehood with his (many fake) Twitter followers. It’s cute that he feels “honored” by the imaginary approval that he thinks he has among a demographic group that almost universally despises him and his racist agenda. But it’s disturbing that he continues to have such an acutely distorted perception of the nation he is supposedly leading.

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

Fox News ‘Judge’ Wonders If Trump Aides and Republicans Have Infiltrated the Refugee Caravan

Posted by on November 2, 2018 at 12:55 pm. 3 Comments :

As the midterm election gets closer, the deranged conspiracy theories of Fox News Trump-fluffers get more perverse and mired in absurdity. Donald Trump is the point man in this mission with his increasingly offensive, racist, and dishonest ravings from the podium at his cult rallies. But his minions at State TV (aka Fox News) are dutifully backing him up (when they aren’t occasionally repudiating him) with ludicrous fictions aimed at their willfully ignorant audience.

Jeanine Pirro Fox News

On Friday’s episode of Fox and Friends, the “Curvy Couch” potatoes hosted one of their own, “Judge” Jeanine Pirro, the Executive Harpy of Fox’s Libtard Attack Squad. Pirro came prepared with her unique brand of partisan tripe. The panel was discussing the “caravan” of migrants fleeing the violence and poverty in their home countries. However, on Fox News these refugees were portrayed as invaders intent on storming the U.S. borders to rape and pillage innocent Americans. It’s the same noxious bigotry that Trump has been prattling about for weeks as he attempts to exploit the fear and prejudices of his glassy-eyed disciples. But Pirro took it a step further (video below):

“I wanna know who’s in that caravan? Are there pedophiles? Are there career criminals? Are there people who think they can beat their wives without consequence? We don’t know, and that’s the whole issue.”

Indeed. That is the whole issue. We definitely need to know if there are menacing cretins infiltrating the caravaners that mean to harm our families and neighbors. Are there pedophiles like Roy Moore and Strom Thurmond? Are there wife abusers like former Trump staffer Rob Porter? Are there criminals like Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Tom Price, and Donald Trump himself? In short, is the entire caravan made up of members of Trump’s Republican Nationalist Party? Because we surely don’t want to allow any of those thugs into the country. They would just being more crime, disease, and probably some Russian subversives to undermine our democracy.

These are good questions that Pirro is raising, and we need to get the answers. But she wasn’t through with her prescient observations. She had some constructive opinions about how to protect us from these foreign threats. And her solutions were tightly intertwined with her infatuation for Trump:

“So the President, by taking a hard line saying look, you can only now seek asylum at ports of entry, and then dealing with the birthright citizenship issue, which has been like an anchor on our necks, is recognizing that this is an issue that we need to address.”

That’s an interesting set of proposals. Except for the fact that the invading refugees have always intended to present themselves to border officials at legal ports of entry to request asylum. And Trump’s assault on birthright citizenship is actually an assault on the U.S. Constitution that he swore to preserve and protect. But other than that, it’s super-keen. Hopefully Fox News will follow up on these questions and get to the bottom of the controversy over the GOP invaders threatening to destroy America. And if they don’t, the people need to take action by voting in massive numbers on November 6.

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

Trump Warns the Enemy (i.e. Media) via Fox News: Report the Story the Way I Want it Reported

Posted by on November 1, 2018 at 2:56 pm. 3 Comments :

Following the attempted mail bombings of at least fourteen critics of the President, there has been renewed focus on Donald Trump’s reckless rhetoric, particularly with regard to the press. The brazen hostility that Trump lobs at the media was bound to incite the sort of violence that now threatens every journalist in the country – and the world for that matter. Placing a target on your critics as “enemies” escalates common disagreements to outright war.

Donald Trump, Fox News

Despite the obvious danger imposed by provoking the mentally unstable malcontents who populate Trump’s cult rallies, he continues to inflame the division, hatred, and fear that inevitably leads to tragedy. And naturally, the sycophantic trolls at Fox News are on 24/7 standby to shield him from any loose barbs aimed in his direction. At the head of that class are the “Curvy Couch” potatoes of Fox and Friends. And they take their jobs seriously.

While there was a brief interlude last week wherein it appeared that some of the Fox Friendlies recognized that it wasn’t a very good idea to portray the free press as enemies of the state, it didn’t last long. Co-host Brian Kilmeade explicitly rebuked Trump for calling the media “the enemy of the people.” But at roughly the same time Trump was confessing that the network was his personal Pravda. Then, on Thursday morning, the tide receded again to reveal the network’s customary bias, as demonstrated in this show of empathy, by co-host Ainsley Earhardt, for the beleaguered leader of the free world (video below):

“How frustrating would it be when you’re the president of the United States and every single time you turn on the TV, on most of the channels, they’re misconstruing what you say? And you know your heart, and you know your words, and you know your voice. And you watch other people report on what you say and it’s completely different than what you mean.”

Heaven’s to Betsy. How can Trump ever be expected to withstand the onslaught of those ever-so-scary reporters constantly telling the American people what he actually says and does? After all, he’s just a weak, unprotected political head of the most powerful nation on Earth. He is forced to characterize the press as mortal enemies in his speeches and tweets because “It’s my only form of fighting back.” But the Fox News crew gets it. And Earhardt poignantly expresses the grief that must be roiling our Victim-in-Chief:

“That has to be frustrating. And that’s why he’s saying it’s fake news. And he’s saying if you don’t want to be called the enemy, then get the story right. Be accurate. And report the story the way I want it reported.”

See? That’s all Trump wants. Just report the news the way he wants it reported and he’ll stop maligning you as traitorous vermin worthy of extermination. Just regurgitate his propaganda the way that State TV (aka Fox News) does and he’ll call off his hit men and allow you to peacefully compose the adoring fluff pieces that he deserves. Is that too much to ask?

Remember, even though Trump lies virtually every time he opens his mouth, it isn’t because he wants to. Like he told Jonathan Karl of ABC News Thursday, “I always want to tell the truth. When I can, I tell the truth.” So we just have to be patient. When Trump can tell the truth, he will. And when the press starts reporting the way wants them to, he’ll refrain from telling his Deplorables to threaten and assault them. That’s fair, isn’t it?

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

The Most Devoted Trump-Fluffers on Fox News Repudiate His ‘Enemy of the People’ Spiel

Posted by on October 30, 2018 at 7:46 pm. 2 Comments :

Donald Trump is losing his grip on the most reliable lap dogs that State TV has to serve up. The “Curvy Couch” potatoes of Fox and Friends have long been Trump’s goto toadies. Even before he was a candidate for president, he had his own weekly segment on the program called “Mondays with Trump.” And ever since it has been the Fox News show that he has appeared on most frequently when he needed some ego stroking or damage control.

Fox News Friends

The hosts of Fox and Friends rarely have any disagreement with Trump. But on Tuesday’s program there was a surprising rift on a matter that Trump holds dear. His frequent references to the media in language he stole from Joseph Stalin as “the enemy of the people” has become almost as ubiquitous in his public pronouncements as “Make America Great Again, “Lock Her Up,” or “Build the Wall.” So this exchange between co-hosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade is bound to rattle his dentures (video below):

Doocy: So there he is talking about his term, “enemy of the people.”
Kilmeade: I really wish he would lose that term. It doesn’t help anybody. It doesn’t push back on the media that he wants to push on…The press isn’t the enemy of the people.

Kilmeade added that “that broad statement does a lot of damage.” And Doocy joined in saying that Trump “probably feels like they are not doing him any favors, and so he doesn’t like them,” but “are they the enemy of the people? I don’t think so, either.” So even though Doocy tried to soften the blow, they both firmly rejected Trump’s favorite hateful characterization of the press that he despises so much. In fact, Doocy’s soft-serve actually makes the criticism even more harsh because it implies that Trump has only been saying that about the media to punish them for not being more adoring. Which, of course, is true.

UPDATE: Fox’s Martha MacCallum has also condemned Trump’s reckless rhetoric:

“When he points at the press in the back of the room and calls them the enemy of the people, that is wrong,” MacCallum said in a Women Rule podcast interview earlier this fall. “And it exacerbates the situation.” When asked her perspective on the president’s calling the media “fake news,” the host added: “I find it disturbing. I think it’s a mistake.”

Lately Trump himself has tried to walk back his neo-fascist approach to the free press. He now says that he never meant the phrase to apply to all of the media, just the “fake” media. That, however, is typical Trumpian bullshit. Because he also says that the fake media is the largest percentage of the media. How large? According to Trump, “A big chunk, okay? … ‘80%.’”

Consequently, Trump can’t pretend that he’s just singling out a few bad apples. He still wants to malign the whole field of journalism, especially when it doesn’t sufficiently suck up to him. But now he is losing the support of the most glassy-eyed disciples in the Church of Trump. That’s gotta hurt the big Narcissist-in-Chief. Where does he go if he can’t go to Fox News?

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

Trump Mindlessly Parrots Fox News Lies About ISIS Mixing with Migrant Refugee Caravan

Posted by on October 22, 2018 at 12:41 pm. 2 Comments :

One of the most frequent personal observations expressed by Donald Trump is his insistence that he is a bottomless vessel of boundless knowledge. He claims that he knows more about defense than his generals; more about climate than scientists; and more about the law than his army of lawyers. He may be right about the latter considering that Rudy Giuliani is the head of his laughably inept legal team.

Donald Trump Fox News

However, the evidence of Trump’s brilliance must be buried deeper than the Mariana Trench. He is wrong more often than a chimpanzee predicting the stock market. Although it’s hard to know whether his mistakes are due to common ignorance or, more likely, to flagrant lying. And so much of what he professes to know absolutely is just stuff he heard on Fox News, another disseminator of poorly manufactured fabrications. It’s a sign of his acutely shallow intellect that he relies so heavily on the alternative facts of a TV network staffed by proud foes of intelligence.

Nevertheless, that’s where Trump got his latest bit of bullpucky regarding the nearly 7,000 migrants marching toward the United States in hopes of escaping the poverty and violence in their home countries. Trump posted a tweet on Monday morning that was chock full of falsehoods with racist overtones:

Trump is so enamored of his ability to invent cute nicknames for the objects of his wrath that he came up with one for imposing crises. But the “National Emergy” that he’s panicking about is a figment of his overactive imagination. Especially the part about the “unknown Middle Easterners” allegedly mixing in. Trump appears to have absorbed this non-fact from the “Curvy Couch” potatoes of Fox and Friends. Co-host Pete Hegseth ranted incoherently about the migrant “caravan” in a segment that backed up Trump’s asinine proposal to deploy the military to confront peaceful, unarmed, refugee families. But the centerpiece of this nonsense was the allegation that members of ISIS were infiltrating the marchers (video below):

Hegseth: You got the president of Guatemala saying to a local newspaper down there just last week, they caught over a hundred ISIS fighters in Guatemala trying to use this caravan or other processes.
Steve Doocy: Are we sure that’s true?
Hegseth: He talked to their local newspaper, we don’t know it, it hasn’t been verified. But even one poison pill is too many in a caravan.

Virtually none of that is true. To begin with, President Jimmy Morales of Guatemala didn’t talk to a local newspaper. He made remarks at the Conference on Prosperity and Security in Central America, an event whose attendees included Vice-President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Secondly, President Morales was not talking about ISIS fighters caught in conjunction with the migrant caravan. In fact, the caravan had not even begun when Morales spoke at the Conference. Thirdly, there is no evidence whatsoever that any apprehensions of terrorists were ever made. And finally, in his remarks Morales said that the alleged terrorists had all been deported, in which case they would no longer be in the country or able to sneak into the caravan. Therefore, no National Emergy.

From that basket of nothingness, the ultra-conservative shills at Judicial Watch published a thoroughly false report that implied that Morales had revealed an ongoing effort by ISIS to clandestinely enter the U.S. by disguising themselves as migrants. That work of fiction was picked up by Fox News, and then blasted out by Trump to his millions of Deplorable Twitter followers. And to reiterate, none of it was true. But that didn’t stop Trump from doubling with another inane tweet:

Let’s just set aside the fact that Congress had drafted a comprehensive, bipartisan immigration reform bill, but Trump’s stubborness to compromise killed it. Now he’s imploring his cult followers to “think of and blame the Democrats” whenever they see refugees seeking asylum in America. Note that he doesn’t want you to think of the hardships they’ve suffered, or even the impact on the U.S. by their being granted asylum. He sees this a purely political matter and he’s exploiting these human tragedies to try to offset the expected Republican losses in the upcoming midterm election.

What’s worse is that Trump’s response to this is to threaten to cut off aid to the countries these refugees are fleeing. So the inhumane conditions that led to their exodus will now get exponentially worse and more of them will take the risks to escape. That’s the sort of thinking that can only come from someone steeped in ignorance and hatred. It’s the thinking of television pundits whose expertise is in celebrity gossip. And sadly, it’s typical of what America has been having to tolerate for as long as Trump has occupied our White House.

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

Racist Fox News Hosts Smear Democrat Stacey Abrams as Promoting an ‘MS-13 Blue Wave’

Posted by on October 14, 2018 at 4:04 pm. 2 Comments :

It really doesn’t take much to set off the “Curvy Couch” potatoes of Fox and Friends when a Republican candidate is trouble. That’s the current state of the gubernatorial election in Georgia where Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams is in a dead heat with her GOP opponent Brian Kemp. This is a deep red state where Democrats aren’t supposed to win, so Fox News has bolted onto the scene to muck it up.

Fox News, Stacey Abrams

On Sunday morning’s episode of Fox and Friends (video below), the three co-hosts set out to malign Abrams, who would be the first African-American women governor in the U.S. But they had to manufacture a controversy by taking her comments out of context so they could align her with criminal gangs. Co-host Ed Henry began by saying:

“As if on cue, Stacey Abrams, who is the Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Georgia […] sounds like, she thinks at least, that that the Blue Wave is gonna include illegal immigrants voting.”

Then they run a video clip of Abrams saying:

“The thing is that the Blue Wave is African-Americans. It’s white, it’s Latino, it’s Asian-Pacific Islanders. It is made up of those who were told that they are not worthy of being here. It is comprised of those who are documented and undocumented.”

Coming out of the video, Henry says that “If you’re undocumented you’re not supposed to be able to vote.” Whereupon his co-host Pete Hegseth asks:

“What should we label it? Is it an illegal Blue Wave? An alien Blue Wave? If you’ve got criminal gangs coming across, is it an MS-13 Blue Wave?”

Really? First of all, it needs to noted that Abrams was not talking about voters. And nowhere in the clip that Fox played did she say that. She was talking about all of the people who can contribute to an awakening of progressive change in the country. That includes many people who don’t vote but care about the direction this nation takes. It includes students who are not yet eighteen, like the survivors of the Parkland massacre. It includes Dreamers who fulfill every criteria of citizenship except for the technicality that they are undocumented. And it includes the tens of thousands of citizens in Georgia that are being unlawfully removed from the voter rolls by a corrupt Republican secretary of state who happens to be Brian Kemp, Abrams’ opponent.

However, for Fox News to go so low as to associate Abrams with the MS-13 gang is way beyond the pale. As an aside, the MS-13 gang did not come across the border. It’s a home grown gang from southern California. Nevertheless, this proves that Fox News has a complete lack of integrity, honesty, and ethics. And it proves their intention to advance a racist theme that African-American candidates must be connected to criminal elements simply because of the color of their skin. It’s a theme that Fox’s audience will readily accept due to the priming they’ve had from years of watching Fox.

There is going to be a Blue Wave in November, and Fox News is going to have to live with it. Of course, they will lie their butts off and spread bigoted propaganda like they did here, but they can’t prevent the coming progressive tsunami by exposing how hateful and prejudiced they are. They are just going to make matters worse for themselves and the Republican Party they are shilling for as America becomes more diverse. And maybe Democrats and progressives should welcome any actions they take to destroy their own Deplorable right-wing.

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

HUH? White House Will ‘Look Into’ Why State TV (Fox News) Stopped Airing Trump’s Rallies Live

Posted by on October 11, 2018 at 10:38 am. 4 Comments :

Trump delivered another tedious and repetitive stump speech at one of his, now frequent, cult rallies Wednesday in Erie, Pennsylvania. It was a showcase for all of his “greatest hits” featuring “Build the Wall,” “Lock Her Up,” “Witch Hunt,” and many more. However, there was difference with this revival meeting that sets it apart from most of those in the past.

Fox News, Donald Trump

Politico reports that the Trump Broadcasting Network’s State TV (aka Fox News), declined to air the event live and uninterrupted as they usually do. Fox News has been a devoted servant of this administration when it comes to disseminating propaganda via their airwaves. They even promote on air with chyrons that read “Trump Rally Live & Only on Fox News, Other Networks Ignore Presidential Rally.” But it’s possible that Trump’s floundering popularity and financial concerns may be influencing their programming going forward. Politico notes that:

“As he’s ramped up his rally schedule ahead of the midterms, viewership numbers for the raucous prime-time events have been roughly similar to — sometimes dipping below — Fox News’ regular programming, and the network has recently stopped airing most evening events in full.”

That’s right. Trump is losing fans on the network that has been his official fan club for more than two years. This cannot be good news for the President, especially since he is increasing the number of these affairs specifically to boost the campaign prospects of Republican candidates in the cities where he is performing.

Consequently, Trump is compensating for this reduced coverage by calling into Fox News programs by phone. In the past three days he’s done that three times, ringing up his buddies Jeanine Pirro, Shannon Bream, and the “Curvy Couch” potatoes of Fox and Friends. But this is not likely to satisfy the White House. They have grown accustomed to the fawning attention they get from Fox News and expect it to continue. And they aren’t sitting around waiting for Fox to correct the situation. According to Politico:

“One senior White House official was unsure why the network would decide to cut away from presidential rallies, saying officials planned ‘to look into that’ and wouldn’t be surprised if White House communications director Bill Shine, a former Fox News executive, was in touch with former colleagues about the trend.”

Let that sink in. The White House believes that they have some sort of right to free airtime on Fox News, and if they aren’t getting it they will take action to set the network straight. Notice that they aren’t talking about looking into CNN or MSNBC. They are focusing on their wholly owned platform for media exposure and dispatching Bill Shine to address this outrageous policy shift. Shine is the former president of Fox News and Trump’s current deputy chief of staff for communications. And if you think that this isn’t explicitly about having an impact on the upcoming midterm election, just take it from the mouth of a GOP campaign operative who worries about the loss of Trump’s TV time because:

“‘It exposes us to a national audience that we normally don’t get to,’ a Senate Republican campaign staffer said of the coverage of Trump rallies. ‘We tend to see lots of new sign-ups and small-dollar donations. There’s obviously folks streaming [rallies] online, but being able to be onstage with the president in front of a prime-time audience is huge for a campaign trying to reach conservatives across the country who will open up their wallets.'”

Among the other observations made by Politico are that Trump’s rallies are drawing fewer viewers. “His events at times popped for more than 4 million viewers on Fox News,” a source said. Which is “a number he hasn’t come close to in 2018.” What’s more, “network officials’ fear was that too much repetition would lead to lower ratings,” and that Fox News could lose millions of dollars in ad revenue because they “can’t take commercial breaks while Trump is speaking.”

Perhaps the decision to cut back on live rally airings led to Trump making a blatant promotional pitch for Fox in order to get more airtime via flattery. He gave a shout out on Wednesday to Foxies who he praised for maligning Democrats as “the Dimms,” saying:

“The great Lou Dobbs, he says that, right? Sean Hannity says that. ‘The Dimms.’ Judge Jeanine says that, doesn’t she? Laura [Ingraham]. Laura. How good has Laura been, right? Do we like Tucker? I like Tucker.”

Actually, only Lou Dobbs says that, but getting the facts straight has never been of much concern to Trump. All he wants is to have his face in front of the Deplorables who are glued to Fox News all day and night. He wants to make sure his perverse and incoherent message is being injected into the already acutely ill-informed brains of Fox’s loyal audience. And if Fox News thinks they can get away with reducing his airtime, they better be prepared for more of this:

Yeah, that’ll happen. More likely Fox will cave in to Trump’s tantrum and resume their live broadcasts. They can make up the lost revenue with the tax cuts Trump will promise them. And their hosts who get preempted by the rallies will all get “exclusive” interviews. That’s how State TV works. Trump is learning well from his friends in Russia and North Korea.

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

Fox News Guest Dinesh D’Souza Honors the Humanitarian Slave Owners of the Old South

Posted by on October 8, 2018 at 3:50 pm. 3 Comments :

Leave it to Fox News to find the bright side of slave owners. While the rest of the civilized world condemns human trafficking, the “Curvy Couch” potatoes of Fox and Friends managed to produce a segment that highlighted the freedom loving Confederates on the old plantations of Dixie.

Fox News, Dinesh D'Souza

Co-host Steve Doocy interviewed one of Fox’s favorite shameless disseminators of flagrant lies, confessed felon Dinesh D’Souza. Earlier this year Donald Trump pardoned D’Souza for the federal crime that he had pleaded guilty to. The Fox segment began as an attempt to mock Democratic congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for what they asserted was a gaffe. It wasn’t. She tweeted that:

Ocasio-Cortez was replying to a tweet that noted that two recent presidents who lost the popular vote have put four justices on the Supreme Court. Doocy then asked D’Souza “Why does the Electoral College matter,” and “what do you think she was talking about?” D’Souza’s reply began by mansplaining what Ocasio-Cortez really meant (video below):

“Well, first of all, I think she’s confusing the Electoral College with the “three-fifths” laws. The three-fifths laws was about slavery, and it had to do with an argument between the North and the South over representation. Ironically, the North, which was the anti-slavery side, wanted blacks to count for zero because they wanted to reduce the representative power of the slave states. The South wanted blacks to count for a full person. So the three-fifths laws which was usually presented to show that the founders didn’t consider blacks to be fully human, doesn’t actually show that at all.”

D’Souza is almost right. The problem is that he leaves out the fact that the South only wanted to count slaves because it gave the region more clout in the federal government. Slaves would still be denied any rights and considered to be property. The South wanted it both ways: to own blacks like chattel, but count them to increase the political power of their white masters. Then D’Souza swung back around to the Electoral College:

“Now the Electoral College was a different matter. The Electoral College emerges out of this contest between the large states and the small states. Not an antiquated issue. We have that now. We have large states, we have small states. And if we had a system that gave power only to the large states, the small states would essentially be unrepresented. The whole point, remember, the core of our founding is the consent of the governed. So to create the union the founders needed the consent of the large states and the small states. The Electoral College is a part of that arithmetic.”

Once again, D’Souza os only partly correct. Much of the dispute between the large and small states was still a matter of north and south. The population of the North far exceeded that of the South. So Ocasio-Cortez was correct in associating the Electoral College with slavery. What’s more, D’Souza is wrong in stating that smaller states would be unrepresented without the Electoral College. Their representation in Congress would be identical. The only difference would be in presidential elections.

However, that difference has become a useless and undemocratic anachronism. Given the boundaryless mobility of the modern U.S., we should not still be electing the president by states, but rather by voters. There is no coherent reason why the tiny populations of Idaho or Wyoming should have a greater say in presidential elections than the vastly more numerous populations of California or Texas. And it’s fair to say that there are a lot of former residents of Idaho and Wyoming who now live in California and Texas. Should their votes be diluted simply because they moved?

Ocasio-Cortez is right to raise the issue of eliminating the outdated Electoral College. It should have been done long ago. Hopefully her colleagues in Congress join her in that initiative when she gets there in January. In the meantime, Fox News needs to stop hosting racists who talk down to women and demean them personally as incapable of grasping these issues. But then they would have hours and hours of dead air.

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

The Trump/Fox News Revolving Door Spins Again as Hope Hicks Takes PR Post at State TV

Posted by on October 8, 2018 at 11:24 am. NO Comments :

For the past two years there has been an unprecedented embrace between a media organization and the presidency. Donald Trump’s close association with Fox News began well before his election in 2016, when he had a regular segment on Fox and Friends called “Mondays with Trump.” And throughout his occupation of the White House that relationship has only grown stronger.

Hope Hicks

On Monday morning it was announced that Trump’s former communications director, and official Trump Whisperer, Hope Hicks, was appointed the executive vice-president and chief communications officer for the new Fox, the remnants of the conglomerate that weren’t sold off to Disney earlier this year. It includes Fox News and Fox Business, two cable “news” networks that are conspicuously friendly to Trump and the Republican Party.

Hicks role at Fox won’t be especially different from her role at the White House. She will continue to promote Trump and the agenda of the ultra-rightist GOP along with her new colleagues at Fox. Those new colleagues include former Trump staffers Sebastian Gorka, Anthony Scaramucci, and Sean Spicer. However, they are all on-air contributors, while Hicks will be a top executive. And her appointment comes just as Fox News and the President are gearing up for the presidential election in 2020.

Of course, revolving doors spin all the way around. And it isn’t coincidental that many Fox Newsers have made the switch to the Trump White House. They include National Security advisor John Bolton, State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert, and Director of the National Economic Council Larry Kudlow. Even Fox’s former president, Bill Shine, is now working for Trump as his Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications. In a less official capacity are Trump’s “Shadow Cabinet” consisting of Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Lou Dobbs, and the “Curvy Couch” potatoes of Fox and Friends. So the marriage of Fox News and the Trump administration is now sealed and consecrated before Rupert Murdoch.

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

Just prior to her resignation from the White House, Hicks testified before a closed session of the House Intelligence Committee regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election. She admitted to telling “white lies” for Trump. In her new position her ability to lie will be unfettered by even the lax standards imposed by Trump’s White House. So going forward we can expect a new rainbow of lies that are consistent with the total absence of standards at Fox News.

Tucker Carlson of Fox News Confesses that he ‘Can’t Look in the Mirror Without Self Loathing’?

Posted by on October 2, 2018 at 3:14 pm. 3 Comments :

On Tuesday, the morning crew at Fox News invited their primetime colleague, Tucker Carlson, to visit with the “Curvy Couch” potatoes of Fox and Friends for a masters class in mind-numbing hypocrisy. Of course, that’s standard fare on Fox News, but this episode stretched the boundaries of the journalistic quackery that Fox is famous for. And it gave Carlson an opportunity to expound on something other than his white nationalist dogma.

Fox News, Tucker Carlson

The segment that featured Carlson was focused on criticizing the New York Times for a recent report about Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. The story concerned an incident in 1985 when Kavanaugh was involved in a bar fight investigation. Co-host Ainsley Earhardt introduced the segment with a graphic showing the Times’ headline: “Kavanaugh was questioned by police after bar fight in 1985.” So it was a pretty straight forward account of something that no one disputes took place.

Nevertheless, Fox and their friends were aghast that anyone would bring up an incident that occurred when Kavanaugh was only twenty years old. As everyone knows, it’s improper to investigate a public figure’s past unless they are Democrats. In which case, you can go all the way back to their birth certificate. Consequently, Carlson reacted with shock and sarcastically proclaimed that “I wish they’d have told me that. I never would’ve supported him.” He dismissed the article as “stupid and irrelevant” and generally mocked the Times for having published it. But the discourse sunk even lower as this exchange with Steve Doocy demonstrates (video below):

Carlson: This is the problem with so much of our coverage, and so much of the way we think about things. No self awareness at all. […] If you’re writing that story does part of you think “Is this why I got into journalism? To carry water for a political party? To be a propagandist? To write something so stupid that I can’t look in the mirror without self loathing?”
Doocy: Don’t you know the answer to that question?
Carlson: Some people never pause to ask “What am I doing with my life?”

Imagine having such a pitiful lack of self awareness that you can ask about the self awareness of others while you’re oblivious to what you’re saying at that exact moment. Tucker Carlson was actually chastising the Times for “carry[ing] water for a political party” and for being “a propagandist.” Those are two things that Fox News in general, and Carlson in particular, are best known for. So if Carlson thinks that someone being that big a suck-up “can’t look in the mirror without self loathing,” then he’ll have to remove every mirror from his home and office in order to get through the day. And knowing his degree of narcissism, that’s a lot of mirrors.

It was also somewhat curious that Doocy asked Carlson if he already knew the answer to his own questions. That sounds like Doocy was accusing Carlson of the political sycophancy he was complaining about. Which would be wildly out of character for Doocy. Regardless, Carlson just laughed it off with his patented smuggery. And in the end, none of them realized that what they were criticizing was what has been the central mission of Fox News for twenty years – if we’re allowed to go back that far.

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