Barack Obama

Fox News Throws Out Benghazi With Yesterday’s Scandal Trash

Posted by on May 26, 2013 at 10:00 am. 8 Comments :

Remember way back to those forgone days when spring was nascent and Benghazi was blooming like kudzu on crack? All the way back to the first week of May 2013, a time of carefree apoplexy over impetuous and exploitable tragedies. The old-timers will recall just how vibrant and fulfilling it was for the demagogues and scavengers who feast on scandal, but whose appetite has now moved on to fresher carcasses.

Used Scandals
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Those days are now faint memories. All those week or two ago, when outraged conservatives in the press could think of nothing other than the horror that took place some eight months earlier in a remote Libyan outpost, are like whispers on the lips of ghosts.

It seems incomprehensible that there were once such emphatic calls for Barack Obama’s impeachment due to the Libyan attacks; that pundits envisioned him being driven from office; that Watergate analogies spread like a plague. Because in recent days there has been hardly a mention of any of it. Fox News, who was blanketing their airwaves with Benghazi Fever a week ago, have all but ignored the story this week. Having failed to ignite a fire under Obama’s presidency, the Benghazi affair has been consigned to the garbage heap of history. Along with such other notable pseudo-scandals as Solyndra, Fast & Furious, gun confiscations, the climate change hoax, Sharia Law, death panels, pallin’ around with terrorists, and the Kenyan nativity, Benghazi has been picked clean by the vultures of the Tea-publican prairie, and having concluded that there is no meat left on the bones, they see no reason to stick around.

That is not to say that the rightist mobs have abandoned their mission to destroy Obama. They have just refocused their attention on a younger, prettier scandal peeking out from behind the skirts of the sultry Internal Revenue Service. This is now the new gate-suffixed controversy that demands immediate impeachment hearings and affiliated witch trials.

The ease with which the Wingnut Inquisitionists shift from one hysteria to another reveals something foundational about their character. It is obvious that they couldn’t care less about the patriots who died in Benghazi or their grieving families. They don’t care about the policies that impact the security of Americans in foreign territories. They only care about how tragedies such as these can be exploited politically, and when it becomes apparent that their political punch has petered out, they can’t abandon them quickly enough.

So it’s off with Benghazi and on to the IRS – for now. Rest assured that this too shall pass as soon as the Obama-bashers realize that they can’t hang this one around his neck either. So even the legitimate concerns raised with regard to the abuse of power and politicization of the taxing agency will go unanswered. Without an Obama angle, Fox and their GOP benefactors see no reason to pursue it. They would rather not waste their time cleaning up the IRS – or securing diplomatic embassies, or mandating universal background checks for assault weapons, or stimulating the economy and creating jobs, or performing any of the other functions of governing – unless it could lead to toppling Obama.

One thing you can say for them is that they have a single-minded devotion to purpose. And their purpose has nothing whatsoever to do with serving America or its people. Their purpose is, and has always been, to deep-six a president they never considered legitimate; who was never patriotic enough, Christian enough, smart enough, or white enough.

Roger Ailes’ Limp Dictum: Keep Flinging Scandals Until Something Sticks

Posted by on May 19, 2013 at 5:00 pm. 9 Comments :

Last week has been described by many in the press as the worst week yet for the Obama presidency. It was a week that saw purported scandals hyped furiously by Fox News and other right-wing media. They almost cheerfully segued from Benghazi to the IRS to the Associated Press, and then looped back for more of the same.

Most of the reports were rife with falsehoods and errors. Most striking was the story aired by ABC’s Jonathan Karl who blatantly lied about his “exclusive” access to internal administration emails but, as it turned out, he not only did not have any emails, he unethically regurgitated false and damaging misrepresentations fed to him by Republicans in congress. And while he issued a vague note of regret for the phony attributions, he has yet to admit that his sources were partisans with an axe to grind. [NOTE: David Shuster appeared on CNN’s Reliable Sources this morning and smacked down GOP apologist Jennifer Rubin in grand fashion on this subject. Video below].

Ever since these stories emerged, Republicans have been spinning with feverish glee in the expectation that they might bring down this president that they hate with such vicious intensity. And as an added bonus, refocusing attention on manufactured melodramas allows them to avoid doing any actual work for the people they supposedly represent. The GOP House has voted 38 times to repeal ObamaCare, but not once for a jobs bill.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the witch hunt. Obama’s approval rating has risen 6 points since March in a new CNN poll. And majorities say that they believe Obama’s statements about Benghazi and the IRS. So despite the aggravated bluster of the right, Obama’s fortunes have been faring well.

So how does Fox News react to a scenario wherein they have flung virtually all of the feces they could gather and none if it sticks to their target? Being Fox News they simply get dirtier and more insane as their desperation builds.

Ailes Limp Dictum

Each of the headlines in these stories were built from scratch to disparage the President. And each has not even a smidgen of truth.

The item asserting that Obama “Admits He’s A Socialist,” was wrenched from an article in the New York Times where the author offered his opinion that Obama longed to “go Bulworth.” That was a reference to the Warren Beatty movie where he played a senator who abandoned the pretenses of politicking and went out to say what he really thought, including some positive remarks about socialism. However, the author of the Times article never mentioned the socialism part of the story. He only meant to refer to the straight-talk that Beatty embraced. And more importantly, Obama never mentioned any of it. It was all the musings of the Times author. So there was no “admission” by Obama by any stretch of the imagination.

In the article from the Wall Street Journal, Kimberly Strassel presents her theory that Obama was secretly signalling to people way down the ladder from the White House, his desire that they target conservative non-profits seeking tax-exempt status. The method he used was to say things that he believed. How insidious. Strassel’s idiotic theory would mean that anything any public figure says is evidence of complicity if some other people he’s never met do something illegal or unethical connected to that opinion. For instance, George W. Bush would be guilty of homicide because he publicly stated his opinion that abortion is murder and then George Tiller, a doctor who provides abortions, was fatally shot at his church. See how easy that was?

In the other two headlines Fox simply plucked the word “irrelevant” out of comments made by White House Senior Adviser Dan Pfeiffer without providing any context. In the first one Pfeiffer was asked about whether any laws were broken in the IRS affair. His answer merely reflected the fact that he was not a lawyer, but that regardless of whether laws were broken, the behavior was inexcusable. He was not saying that “the law” was irrelevant, but that it wasn’t relevant to the determination that what happened was wrong even if not unlawful.

Finally, Pfeiffer’s remarks about the relevance of Obama’s whereabouts during the Benghazi attack came in the course of Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace repeatedly asking him where Obama was that night. Wallace seemed obsessed with which particular rooms in the White House the President might have visited. Eventually Pfeiffer responded by bluntly saying “I don’t remember what room the president was in on that night. That’s a largely irrelevant fact.” Which is unarguably true. Wallace was wandering down some weird and delusional path that had no bearing on anything. But Fox spun Pfeiffer’s response to suggest that it meant something broader with regard to Obama’s overall attention to the unfolding crisis.

This is the kind of nuttiness that ensues when liars become increasingly desperate as they see their lies falling flat. They get more and more surreal as they strain to have an effect. And when the effect turns out to be the opposite of what they hoped (i.e. Obama’s approval rising), they keep walking down that dead-end path, accelerating their pace, until it leads to a cliff. In the next few days and weeks we will see if Fox and the GOP are crazy enough to keep walking right over the edge. This should be fun.

And now for something completely different: Shuster Mauls Rubin…

Republicans Succeed In Turning Americans Against The IRS – And Other Fairy Tales

Posted by on May 17, 2013 at 4:04 pm. 20 Comments :

The hyper-partisan political landscape in America has been heating up in the past week or so. Despite the numerous issues that Americans are anxious for their representatives to address (jobs, economy, guns, healthcare, immigration, defense, etc.), Republicans in congress have signaled that they have no intention of moving a legislative agenda that could benefit the nation – otherwise known as doing their job.

Instead Republicans appear hell-bent on throwing fuel on a variety of incendiary claims of scandal that are being peddled by the GOP, but with time and honest research have proven to be insubstantial at best, and dishonest at worst. For example…

Republicans Succeed In Turning Americans Against The IRS

This week the Republican Party, and their PR division Fox News, pulled off a political miracle that no one could have predicted a week or two ago. By the sheer determination of their will and endless repetition, The GOP has managed to transform the legendary public affection for the Internal Revenue Service into deep animosity and distrust. Prior to these late-breaking events the IRS had a 40% approval rating (note: that was still better than congress at 9%)

How could this have happened? The foundation of good will that has long been the envy of every other government agency has cracked and now Americans are, for the first time, eying the IRS suspiciously and recoiling in disgust. From a political standpoint, all the effort that Republicans have been pouring into this affair has yielded them an unexpected victory. They must be so proud now that they have masterfully maneuvered public opinion away from the big government bureaucracy that was once such an object of adoration.

This remarkable achievement was engineered by relentless condemnation of a branch of the IRS whose purpose is to affirm that organizations seeking tax-exempt status are complying with the legal requirement to be doing social welfare work and not politics. That seems like an important function that protects taxpayers from having to pick up the tab for political operatives who try to evade their fiscal responsibilities. The problem occurred when some low-level employees sought to identify potential evaders by imposing stricter standards of scrutiny on presumably conservative groups associated with the Tea Party. What on earth might have caused anyone at the IRS to think the Tea Party could be conducting political activities?

Tea Party IRS

Don’t Do As We Said. Do As We Say Now

The revelation that phone records for the Associated Press were secretly subpoenaed by the Justice Department has rocked the media world. It is being portrayed as a gross violation of the First Amendment right to Freedom of the press. And no one is more outraged than congressional Republicans who have pounced on the disclosure and exploited it to elaborate on their assertions that the Obama administration has become tyrannical in their abuse of power.

However, further investigation into the controversial activity revealed that the DOJ was acting on requests from Republicans in congress who were worried that leaks to the media were endangering national security operations. So what we have here is GOP anger at the DOJ for doing what the GOP asked them to do. What’s more, the very same Republicans who are freaking out over the seizure of AP’s records, voted against a media shield law that would have made such seizures illegal without prior approval from a judge.

Benghazi Benghazi Benghazi

Another feather in the GOP cap is their persistent drum-beat of horror over what they say was President Obama’s shameful mismanagement of a diplomatic facility in Libya that resulted in the deaths of an ambassador and three other Americans. Never mind that they have never been able to tie the President to any specific action that might have made him responsible, they continue to blame him for the whole thing and are even raising the specter of impeachment.

Most recently, Jonathan Karl of ABC News broadcast an exclusive report wherein he claimed to have obtained emails from the CIA and State Department that proved that the White House tried to alter the narrative in a way that diminished the participation of Al Qaeda. This was done, Republicans allege, to benefit the President in the midst of his reelection campaign.

Like every other Republican-built scandal, this one has withered in the light of principled journalism that unraveled the embarrassing stenography practiced by Jonathan Karl. Contrary to his reporting, Karl did not actually have the emails he said he had. CBS’s Major Garrett did acquire the actual emails and reported significant discrepancies between what they said and what Karl reported. Subsequently, Karl admitted that he had only interviewed someone who said they had seen the emails and had taken notes.

As it turns out, Karl’s anonymous source was likely a Republican congressman who had seen these classified emails when they were presented in closed session by the DOJ. The source then relayed a falsified version of what the emails contained to Karl in order to damage the President. Karl graciously went along with the obviously partisan source without demanding any further corroboration. For that malfeasence, and his lying about having possession of the emails, Karl ought to be fired. Of course, he could always get a new job at Fox News where his reporting on the emails was lavishly praised. Fox then patted themselves on the back for so doggedly pursuing the phony story.

Fox News

In Conclusion…

The cornucopia of crackpottery to which the GOP is clinging becomes more absurd by the hour. And yet they are feverishly pushing these fairy tales so as to avoid doing any real work. The American people deserve a legislative branch that accomplishes something every now and then. It is why they are elected and what we pay them for. Enduring countless fake scandals that have never even come close to implicating Obama in any wrongdoing is not a substitute for leadership. In fact, the only party in any of these affairs that could be guilty of a crime is the source who leaked classified information (albeit falsified) to Jonathan Karl.

Republicans are striving mightily to compare Obama to Richard Nixon and Watergate. But a more apt comparison would be Whitewater. In that trumped-up controversy Bill and Hillary Clinton were alleged to have committed everything from tax fraud to murder. But none of it proved to be true. And even after a surreal impeachment over consensual sex, Clinton rose again and Republicans lost seats in the following election. At the rate things are going, that is a likely fate for Republicans in 2014. And it would serve them right. Maybe then the country could get around to actually working on the real problems we have that affect the lives of real people – not just the political fortunes of power-hungry losers.

Obama’s IRS Probes Tax-Exempt Status Of Abortion Doctor’s Benghazi Tea Party

Posted by on May 14, 2013 at 2:42 pm. 7 Comments :

The media has been in a virtual orgasmic frenzy for the past 24 hours as reports come out about troubling behavior by government agencies. Make no mistake, what appears to have been done by individuals in the IRS and the Justice Department is of enormous concern to Americans who are justifiably suspicious of the potential for abuse of government power. There is good reason to be outraged by recent events and it is clear that there is such outrage from across the political spectrum.

An equal amount of outrage must also be directed at the idiotic people at the IRS who thought that what they were doing was helpful to progressive affairs. Not only does that sort of behavior contradict the most basic principles of liberalism, the high risk of discovery and subsequent scandal ought to have brought anyone whose common sense had lapsed straight back to reality. The damage done by this stupidity could not have been more successfully achieved if it were a deliberate plot by GOP plants in the agencies.

Jon Stewart

That is why the exasperation expressed by Jon Stewart last night (video below) was so appropriate. By committing some obviously nefarious acts of abuse, these miscreants have also made it harder to advance the rational and necessary legislative initiatives aimed at restoring jobs and economic growth, fixing the immigration system, implementing healthcare, battling terrorism, etc. It was bad enough when all we had to deal with was obsessively obstructionist Tea-publicans in congress, but now, as Stewart put it so well…

“This has, in one seismic moment, shifted the burden of proof from the tin-foil behatted to the government.”

Indeed. Now, along with wingnuts like Michelle Bachmann, Louis Gohmert, and Ted Cruz, we have every psychotic from Alex Jones to Glenn Beck to Ted Nugent insisting that they were right all along when they said that Obama was a reptilian space alien sent here to breed. Never mind that their delusions are just as schizoid today as they were yesterday, they are basking in the limelight created by a few low-level dumb-asses who have nothing to do with the bigger agenda our nation needs to pursue.

Not to be left out, Fox News is all over these wannabe scandals. They are interviewing Darrell Issa about the AP phone records without disclosing that Issa voted against the bill that would have made such seizures unlawful. They hosted Dick Cheney on Sean Hannity’s program to say that Benghazi is “one of the worst incidents, frankly, that I can recall in my career.” And remember, his career encompasses Nazi concentration camps and nuclear bombings in Japan, as well as those for which he bears some personal responsibility, like 9/11.

Some news outlets have made the effort to demonstrate that these sort of IRS transgressions were not invented last week. During the Bush administration there were abuses like these on multiple occasions. Alex Seitz-Wald at Salon has enumerated a few: The IRS threatened to revoke the tax-exempt status of the All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena following an anti-war sermon; The IRS audited the NAACP after its chairman criticized President Bush; The IRS audited and threatened to revoke Greenpeace’s tax-exempt status.

As for Fox News, they also did a report on the over-reaching of past presidents. And look at who they identified as violators:

Fox News - IRS Presidents

Fox managed to find two Democratic presidents (Kennedy and Clinton), who were never found to have done anything unlawful or even unethical via the IRS, and matched them up with one of histories most flagrant criminals (Nixon) whose abuse of IRS power is well documented and even recorded on tape. And somehow, George W. Bush, despite the cases noted above, was left out of Fox’s report entirely. Fair and What the Fuck?

Later in the day, Fox moved on to the story about Bloomberg News snooping on the users of their financial terminals. What could be more unsettling than the prospect of a powerful media institution secretly monitoring your private Internet and telecommunications activities?

Fox News - Bloomberg

Perhaps it might be a private media institution secretly hacking into the phones of thousands of individuals, including politicians, celebrities, and even a murdered schoolgirl. That, of course, is what Rupert Murdoch’s enterprise has admitted doing, but was never covered with the enthusiasm as Fox is now covering the story about their competitor, Bloomberg.

Murdochalypse

So for the foreseeable future, American news viewers are going to be bombarded with a flurry of sensationalistic stories bursting with speculation and hyperbole. We are already seeing reports that crunch together some of these affairs into conspiracies that assume a role by President Obama that no one has yet proven exists. Fox’s Neil Cavuto devoted a segment of his program to imply that the malfeasance in the IRS’s tax-exempt division will somehow spill over to the group that audits elements of ObamaCare, although they are not even remotely affiliated. The upshot of this conspiracy dementia is that if anyone in any agency does something untoward, then everyone in every agency is guilty.

What’s truly unfortunate is that the investigations into the failings that led to these abuses at the IRS and elsewhere, investigations that are warranted and could be beneficial, will undoubtedly distract both the media and the political class from working to resolve the many serious issues our nation is facing. So instead of creating jobs, protecting and educating children, addressing immigration, or pursuing terrorists, we will be inundated with ever more stories about Benghazi, the IRS, and Jodie Arias-style crime dramas.

If and when we get back to more substantive matters that affect the lives of real people, the scent of scandal will linger and further hamper progress. Consequently, without efficient and effective management of recent events, the nation may have to accept a period of stagnation, which is not what we need right now. And those jerkwads at the IRS are largely responsible for screwing over every citizen who had hoped that the country could move forward just a little bit. I hope they (figuratively) fry.

Sarah Palin Is Pissed That She Couldn’t Get A Date For The Nerd Prom

Posted by on April 28, 2013 at 12:21 am. 5 Comments :

It’s hard to even know where to begin to respond to this:

Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin calling anybody else pathetic is a textbook example of Acute Delusional Projection. But for her to direct that criticism at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner that she herself has been affiliated with in the past reflects her envy and bitterness that she is now such a washed up old Tea Hag that no one will pay her any attention unless she belches out idiotic tripe like this Tweet. (And I’m happy to oblige).

Palin hilariously includes herself among those Americans who are “working our asses off.” But she’s best known for having quit her job as governor half way through her term so that she could take a cushy million dollar job at Fox News spewing poorly reasoned diatribes once or twice a week in something that sounded a little like third-grade English. To add to her ass-load of work she had a book ghost-written for her and she hosted a reality cable TV show. Well, her show was canceled after tanking in the ratings and Fox declined to renew her contract. Today she has no visible means of support other than her Super PAC that scams donations from misguided Teabaggers.

All in all, her criticism is preposterous. She thinks that it’s inappropriate, in these challenging times, to have any fun and that hard-working Americans are all off somewhere stewing in their misery. Sarah Palin must not know any hard-working people. She clearly doesn’t have the foggiest notion herself of what it means to work hard. However, she does know something about being pathetic.

Here are a couple of choice moments from the White House Correspondent’s Dinner.

Obama dings Fox News:

Obama-Satan

Conan Dings Justice Scalia (sitting with Bill O’Reilly).

Conan-Scalia

Glenn Beck: Our President Aided And Abetted This Guy

Posted by on April 19, 2013 at 11:41 am. 5 Comments :

Ladies and gentleman, if you’re looking for Grade-A, certified, delusional paranoia, there is no better source than Fox News alum, and current Internet vlogger, Glenn Beck. Sure, Fox News leaped to the conclusion that the suspects in the Boston marathon bombing were Al Qaeda jihadists, and Fox Nation posted its usual lie-soaked chatter, but who else did you think would win the race to implicate President Obama in the terrorist attack?

Glenn Beck

For two days now Beck has been ranting about a man described as a Saudi national who was briefly questioned while hospitalized after the Boston attack. The FBI and Police determined that he was not involved in the affair and released him. But that hasn’t softened Beck’s acute hysteria.

Along with the crackpots at Breitbart, WorldNetDaily, and Alex Jones’ Infowars, Beck is outraged that the Obama administration is shielding this person whom they are certain is a dangerous terrorist. They go on to lambaste the Department of Homeland Security for initiating deportation proceedings against him in what they insist is an attempt to help him flee justice. That might be a curious development, except for the fact that it isn’t true. The Saudi who was in the hospital is not the same man that the DHS is deporting.

Beck’s dementia has escalated today to the point where he is now demanding that Obama be impeached for having “aided and abetted this guy.”

Beck: Our president, this administration, the Department of Homeland Security, and everything else – how they have covered this up, how they have aided and abetted this guy – is obscene, it’s criminal, it is out of control. And when America knows the full story on this, if she doesn’t stand up and, quite honestly, demand impeachment and the mass firing – if not shutting down – of agencies, we don’t stand a chance.

Do you hear that America? We don’t stand a chance! It is highly unlikely that Obama will shut down all of our law enforcement agencies which, for some reason, Beck thinks is a good idea. Go ahead – send all the FBI agents searching for the marathon bomber home. Cease all investigations into potential terrorist acts currently being plotted. But make sure that anyone who wants to buy assault weapons (including terrorists) is able to walk into a gun show and leave with a deadly arsenal without a background check. That will make us all safer. It’s really very simple. Beck has explained it all in a perfectly rational and sane manner:

Beck's Wall of Crazy

See? It couldn’t be more obvious. Except that Beck and his fellow lunatics never explain why Obama would want to protect someone who just blew up nearly 200 innocent bystanders. He leaves dangling the only possible explanation – that Obama himself is the terrorist mastermind and he is executing his evil plot to rule the world as the Grand Lizard of the Global Caliphate and Secular Progressive Emporium. It’s the unfolding of the Perfect Storm, Agenda 21, Common Core, Climate Changed, ObamaCare, Fundamental Transformation to Universal Gay Marriage. Be afraid, America.

Update: Beck is now threatening the administration with an expose that he will unveil Monday, April 22, if the they don’t reveal the “truth” first. It’s fair to say that Beck’s bluster is as impotent as a castrato in a coma. What’s more, if he has information that he says may be the most important story in history, why is he making us wait until after the weekend to report it (other than to build up his audience of nitwits)? Stay tuned.

So F**king What? Obama Supporter Wears Hat

Posted by on April 17, 2013 at 12:44 pm. 1 Comments :

The Obama haters seem to be struggling to come up with new scandals to hang on the President. They have already run through his Kenyan birth, his Marxist father, his gun confiscations, his economic sabotage, and his treasonous golf schedule. Now, grasping for anything with which to hammer the President, the congenital liars at Fox Nation have uncovered something so spine-chillingly horrific that they had to feature it on their news feed.

Fox Nation

So F**king What?

The Fox Nationalists sourced this ridiculous article to the laughably inept Daily Caller. The author, Patrick Howley, is actually identified as an “Investigative Reporter,” despite his history as a violent right-wing activist who admitted to infiltrating OccupyDC for the purpose of undermining it. Howley also recently alleged an absurd scheme by a media investor to buy up all the gun-related magazines in order to shut them down.

Now that Hat-Gate has been revealed we can concentrate on more important matters like how often the President flosses and whether the First Lady is a Belieber.

Birther, Marxist, Treason Conspiracies Still Hound Obama At Fox News

Posted by on April 15, 2013 at 12:29 pm. 6 Comments :

On the Fox News community web site Fox Nation (whose grip on reality is suspect), the top featured story today is an article from the uber-conservative blog Human Events with the provocative headline “Obama’s Plan Hatched at Columbia University.”

Fox Nation

The article by diehard birther Wayne Allyn Root begins by asserting that a poor child of a single mother grew up to become the first African-American president of the United States despite being “hostile and resentful towards anyone who has achieved self-made success through American values.” And it gets even crazier from there.

Root’s premise is that while he was a student at Columbia University “Obama and his Marxist cronies hatched a secret plan to destroy our country.” Root apparently has some personal knowledge of this nefarious plot as a result of his being a classmate of Obama. Where he acquired his information is a mystery since he admits that while at Columbia he “never met him, never saw him, never even heard of him.” Having established that as the shaky foundation for his expose, Root speculates that the reason their paths never crossed was because Obama “was busy attending communist party meetings.” Along with everything else in Root’s harangue, that bit of speculative nonsense is unsupported and untrue.

Root then relates a story about how he had learned of the assassination attempt of Ronald Reagan while in class, and the response of his classmates. “They cheered. They clapped,” Root says. “They yelled, they high-fived, and whooped in sheer unadulterated joy.” Once again, there is no corroboration of this account, but the next revelation from Root’s imagination is even more surreal and unfounded. He said that “if Obama actually went to Columbia, he’d almost certainly have to have been in that class leading the cheers.”

That sentence is ripe with a dementia fermented in hatred. Root prefaces his remark by questioning whether Obama was in the class at all. In fact, it is one of his primary hypotheses that Obama’s academic history is a complete fabrication. But he doesn’t let his own lunatic theories stop him from placing Obama in the classroom anyway. And after inventing Obama’s presence (and remember, Root claims to never have even seen him), Root assigns to him the mantle of leadership. So Root’s position is that Obama must have been in the classroom leading the cheers despite having never seen him and not believing he was ever a student there at all. Makes perfect sense – if someone laced your Twinkies with LSD. “But wait,” Root exclaims, “The most frightening and eye-opening is still to come.”

The horrific plot Root has uncovered is based on “a detailed plan designed by two former Columbia professors named Cloward & Piven.” Here Root is borrowing from the moth-eaten, psychotic ramblings of Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, and other conspiracy theorists who have mangled the teachings of Cloward and Piven for years. They assert that a scheme is underway to overweight the welfare system until it collapses the economy. Root alleges that Obama “is using that plan to destroy America, capitalism, and the U.S. economy right in front of our eyes.”

The objective of destroying America and its economy is never revealed by Root or any of his deranged predecessors. Certainly a bankrupt nation would not be an ideal starting point for a power mad socialist since there would be no funding available for the welfare state he allegedly seeks to form.

More to the point, the only evidence of any policy that has approached an end result of collapsing the economy is the policy of the previous Republican administration and its right-wing overseers. These lackeys of Wall Street, defense contractors, and multinational corporatist interests brought our nation closer to insolvency than anything since the crash of 1928 and the Great Depression.

For Root to stir the historical facts into a soup of cranial mush that contradicts his own wingnut crackpottery is not surprising. He is merely plagiarizing the dimwitted, paranoid fears of the many Psycho-Chicken Littles that have preceded him with panicky tales of Cloward, Piven, Soros, Alinsky, et al. However, it is notable that Fox News has seen fit to headline this tripe as if it were newsworthy – or even sane. And to those pundits who suggest that Fox has moderated its fringy, tea-sotted extremism as a result of the drubbing they took last November, clearly that is not the case.

BREAKING: Fox News Suddenly Cares About The Poor (Not!)

Posted by on April 9, 2013 at 12:09 pm. 2 Comments :

In an article aimed at criticizing President Obama’s handling of poverty in America, the reality-challenged Fox Nation re-posted a column by Stuart Stevens of the Daily Beast that makes a valid point about the absence of the media on the issue of poverty. Stevens notes that “An economy inflicting this much pain is a national crisis that should dominate discussion as we marshal our collective attention.”

However, the nauseating hypocrisy of Fox News seeps through this reporting and drenches it with a shameful, self-serving, political partisanship. Fox is not known for its advocacy of the downtrodden. To the contrary, they generally regard the poor as lazy moochers sucking at the government teat. They repeatedly air segments by rich anchors and pundits disparaging low-income workers and single mothers who use food stamps to feed their children. For example, Fox has hosted Robert Rector, a researcher from the ultra-rightist Heritage Foundation, on multiple occasions to argue that the poor are actually living luxuriously at the taxpayer’s expense.

Fox News

According to Rector, the “New Poor” are livin’ large in their big homes, chillaxin’ in the AC, and watching cable TV on big screens. Needless to say, Rector’s arguments don’t hold water factually or logically, but that isn’t even the point. Just last December, Rector appeared on Fox & Friends with a crackpot theory that poverty measurements are just “an advertising tool for expanding the welfare state and for spreading the wealth by pretending there’s a massive amount of hardship that really doesn’t occur anymore in our society.” He went further to make the astonishingly ignorant and insensitive claim that the poor “have no hardship whatsoever.” Rector’s ability to make poverty seem like a day at the beach is profoundly delusional.

Here’s the larger point: If characterizations of poverty as presented by Fox are true, then why is Fox now complaining that Obama is at fault for a “plague” of poverty? And why does Fox whine about the lack of media coverage when they themselves have provided coverage that denies the existence (or at least any hardship) of the poor?

Clearly the answer is that Fox couldn’t care less about the poor or about the the coverage that poverty receives in the media. They only care about exploiting every opportunity to criticize the President whether there is any merit in the arguments or not. And that’s how they can muster the audacity to feign concern for the poor whom they don’t think are suffering any hardship whatsoever. It’s a cynical and repulsive perversion of journalism at which Fox excels. It’s also a heartless exploitation of fellow citizens who have fallen on hard times, which Fox advances for the benefit of the Greedy One Percent who don’t want to hear about the poor anyway.

Fox Nation vs. Reality: Obama Takes A Dive Within The Margin Of Error

Posted by on April 8, 2013 at 7:11 pm. NO Comments :

Fox News seems not to understand the meaning of common figures of speech. It’s another way that they manifest their departure from the real world that the rest of us inhabit.

For instance, in a posting today on Fox Nation, they reported the results of a poll conducted by CNN with a headline declaring that “Obama Takes a Dive on Guns, Immigration, Deficit.” Ordinarily Fox would not give any credence to a poll by the socialist apparatchiks at CNN, but since they managed to spin this negatively for the President they have a new found regard for the network.

Fox Nation

The actual results of the poll are mixed from the President’s perspective. However, the key finding is that Obama’s approval rating went up 4% (to 51%) while his disapproval went down 3% – a seven percent swing in Obama’s favor. If that’s taking a dive, we should all jump in.

To be fair, the Fox headline did specify three issues as having dived, so let’s take a look at those. On immigration it would be fair to say that Obama’s handling of the matter suffered somewhat with approval/disapproval percentages declining to 44/50 from 51/43. However on guns, the numbers hardly budged from 46% approval in January to 45% today. And on the deficit the numbers ticked down slightly from 41% to 38%. On guns and the deficit, the shifts were both within the margin of error which means that there was no shift at all from a statistical perspective.

It is notable that, while Obama’s numbers were lower than they were in the previous poll (taken the week before the inauguration when traditionally polls spike up), they were higher than at any other time for the past year. That suggests an upward trending that was merely interrupted by an abnormally high reading in January.

So the President’s numbers were essentially stagnant on the deficit and guns; they were notably improved overall; and that is what the Fox Nationalists consider a dive. Not reported at all by Fox is that approval for Republicans in Congress is a pitiful 25% with 73% disapproving. The President’s approval is a full 26 points higher. He must be terribly disappointed, poor fella.