Barack Obama

Rush Limbaugh: Flu Epidemic Is “Trained Media” Making Excuses For Obama

Posted by on January 11, 2013 at 4:35 pm. 2 Comments :

In an epic rant that abandons all semblance of sanity, Rush Limbaugh today blasted media outlets that have been alerting the public to the serious nature of this year’s flu season. Already dozens of Americans have died and thousands have been hospitalized across the nation. But Limbaugh sees a conspiracy in the press to use this “phony” flu epidemic as a preemptive explanation for the coming economic collapse. He says…

“The purpose of this story is to give everybody in Washington an excuse before the flu outbreak even hits. I know that the reports of the flu outbreak are starting to trickle in now. But we do not have an epidemic yet. We may, who knows? But what’s being established now is that if and when we have a flu epidemic, that’s why the economy slowed down.”

The news that set Limbaugh off was a story published by CNBC that noted that a “Major Flu Outbreak Threatens to Slow Economy Further.” Limbaugh declared that “This headline is a made-to-order, built-in excuse to cover for slipshod economic policies out of Washington.” The article on CNBC stated correctly that…

“On average, seasonal flu outbreaks cost U.S. employers $10.4 billion in direct costs of hospitalization and outpatient visits, according to the Centers for Disease Control. That doesn’t include the indirect costs related to lost productivity and worker absenteeism.”

Apparently, amongst the news outlets that are serving as “trained media” for Obama is Fox News. All day they have been broadcasting warnings about how serious the flu is, including its potential cost to the economy. Neil Cavuto’s business program featured both Fox Business Network contributor, Charles Payne And Fox’s senior medical contributor, Dr. Marc Siegel, to specifically discuss the flu’s impact on business.

If it weren’t already clear that Limbaugh had degenerated into an incoherent nut case spewing delusional tales for his dimwit followers, this nonsensical commentary should remove all doubt. And his dittoheads would do well to recall what he said on election day back in November:

Rush Limbaugh

Fox Nation vs. Reality: The ‘King Obama’ Delusion

Posted by on January 7, 2013 at 2:49 am. 23 Comments :

Apparently there were not already enough paranoid fantasies about President Obama circulating amongst right-wing conspiracy theorists. All that socialist, Muslim, Kenyan, Manchurian stuff is getting old and losing its capacity to invoke fear. So now these psycho Chicken Littles have a new nightmare to ponder:

Fox Nation

At Fox Nation they are all worked up about a bill just introduced by a Democratic congressman. Rep. Jose Serrano is proposing to repeal the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution that mandated that presidents could serve no more than two terms. To the Fox Nationalists that means that Obama is plotting to convert America into a monarchy with him on the royal throne.

To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, “Nobody has ever gone broke underestimating the intelligence of America’s Fox News viewers.” But the overarching stupidity of this misadventure truly boggles the mind. And that’s even if you set aside the fact that they are implicitly admitting that Obama would be reelected forever if he were permitted to continue running. Darn that democracy.

However, Constitutional amendments generally take years implement, They need to be passed by two-thirds of both houses of congress and then ratified by three-fourths of the states. If the Fox Nationalists think that’s going to occur at all, much less while Obama is still in office, they are in serious need of intravenous Xanax. What’s more, this amendment has been offered by Serrano in every congress since 2001, shortly after George W. Bush was elected. Was this Serrano’s attempt to crown Bush, or did he have secret knowledge that in the future an African without a birth certificate would inhabit the White House?

Republicans have also proposed repealing the 22nd, including Rep. Guy Vander Jagt in 1986, thinking it would allow Ronald Reagan to seek a third term. And speaking of Reagan, he was so supportive of this idea that he said he “would like to start a movement” so that people could “vote for someone as often as they want to do.”

Term limits were never a good idea. They are an undemocratic and artificial constraint that insults voters by treating them like children who cannot manage their own affairs. The problem with longevity in political office is the result of self-serving, gerrymandered districts and the fact that elections are dominated by wealthy special interests. If these corrupting influences were removed from the process, voters could be trusted to elect people who represent their interests and to remove those who do not.

And the beauty of democracy is that the idiots who buy into the nonsense that Fox Nation peddles would be overwhelmed by responsible citizens with reason and common sense, attributes that Fox works so hard to eliminate from the electorate.

Fox News Fux Up: The 12 Worst Wrongs Of 2012

Posted by on January 2, 2013 at 4:30 am. 10 Comments :

2012 was a dismal year for Fox News. The PR arm of the GOP (Greedy One Percent) failed to fulfill its prime directive: advancing the interests of Mitt Romney and the Republican Party. They spent much of the year constructing an alternative reality that left millions of their flock in shock when President Obama won an overwhelming reelection. They refused to accept the facts on the ground and denigrated polls (even their own) when the results conflicted with the fictional narrative they were peddling. And perhaps most painful of all, they surrendered their ratings lead to MSNBC. Two-thirds of their primetime lineup (Hannity and Van Susteren) dropped to second place behind the competition on MSNBC (Maddow and O’Donnell).

However, Fox’s travails did not occur for lack of effort. They were clearly operating at the top of their capacity to distort and deceive. They carefully aligned all of their resources in the battle against honest discourse, including the Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network, the Wall Street Journal, and the abhorrent and vulgar Fox Nation web site (see Fox Nation vs. Reality). In the process they unleashed some of the most feverishly biased reporting, even for Fox News. But what’s worse is that these examples of media malpractice constitute a fundamental debasement of journalism and democracy.

1) Romancing Petraeus: Fox News CEO Roger Ailes Tries To Recruit For The GOP

Roger AilesThe Washington Post’s Bob Woodward revealed that Fox News CEO Roger Ailes had dispatched a Fox News defense analyst, to Kabul, Afghanistan, to recruit Gen. David Petraeus as a GOP candidate for president. The notion of a news network soliciting candidates for political office is a perversion of the role journalists play in society.

In response, Ailes claimed that it was “a joke” and that he “thought the Republican [primary] field needed to be shaken up.” Where Ailes got the idea that it was his right and/or duty to shake up the GOP primaries is unexplained. News people are supposed to report the news, not make it. Woodward’s story affirms that Fox News is a rogue operation. Their intrusion into the political process debases journalism by breaching all standards of ethical conduct. And they debase democracy as well by exploiting their power and wealth to manipulate political outcomes.

2) Fox News Produces Their Own Anti-Obama Video

Last May on Fox & Friends, the program’s hosts introduced a video that purported to examine “Four Years of Hope and Change.” What it was in reality was a four-plus minute campaign video that presented a variety of soundbites by President Obama accompanied by ominous graphics and eerie music that falsely implied that his campaign promises were unkept. The video (which Media Matters thoroughly debunks here) could not have been a more pro-Romney, anti-Obama attack had it been produced by the Republican National Committee.

Apparently Fox News also recognized the gross inappropriateness of their anti-Obama attack ad. Minutes after the video was posted online it was removed from every place it had been posted. Later, an edited version of it was re-posted, and then that too was removed. Eventually, Fox EVP Bill Shine issued a statement scapegoating an “associate producer” and concluding that the matter “has been addressed.” But it’s difficult for Fox to absolve itself of responsibility for this atrociously unethical affair. By now it is so obvious that Fox exists only to promote Republicans and bash Democrats that this video fits squarely within their twisted mission.

3) Question For Fox News: How Much Rape Is Too Much Rape?

Liz TrottaIn a discussion of the role of women in the military, Fox News contributor Liz Trotta expressed an opinion about new rules from the Pentagon that would permit women to serve closer to the front lines. Trotta’s take on this centered on the problems faced by servicewomen who are sexually assaulted by fellow soldiers whom she regards as whiners because they won’t shut up accept the fact that if they work closely with men they should expect to be assaulted.

And if that weren’t bad enough, Trotta went on to complain about the expensive military bureaucracy set up to “support women in the military who are now being raped too much.” I would really like to know precisely how much rape is acceptable before it crosses Trotta’s line. Is there any context in which she might have meant that that isn’t unfathomably repulsive?

4) Fox News Conning Latinos For Politics And Profit

Fox viewers are accustomed to stories about “illegals” swarming across the border to take up residency in the U.S. and sponge off of our prosperity. There is hardly a mention of immigrants on Fox that isn’t associated with crime, joblessness, or drug cartels. Lately, however, someone at Fox News has recognized a major flaw in their strategy to demonize immigrants, particularly Latinos, who are a growing constituency of both consumers and citizens who can vote and are registering in record numbers. So how does Fox maintain their editorial animosity toward immigrants without alienating an increasingly important voter group?

The answer appears to be by developing news content specifically for this demographic and sequestering it from the rest of their viewership. This has resulted in a flurry of disparaging articles on the Fox News flagship, while the same story is presented on their new Fox News Latino in a far less bigoted fashion. And the pinnacle of this hypocrisy occurred during a Fox report on the election when they displayed video of illegal border crossers with a caption reading “The Hispanic Vote.”

5) Fox News Lies About Military Access To Voting In Ohio

This year Republicans engaged in a widespread and blatant effort to suppress voting by Democratic-leaning constituencies such as seniors, minorities, students and low income citizens. In the state of Ohio they sought to amend a law that granted early voting to everyone so that only members of the military would be permitted to vote early in the three days prior to the election. Democrats objected to this as it discriminates against certain voters, and they filed suit to preserve the right of every Ohio citizen to vote early.

Fox News picked up the story advancing the premise that Democrats were seeking to take something away from our military. Anchor Shannon Bream falsely declared that “If President Obama gets his way, the special voting rights of some of America’s finest will be eliminated.” The truth however, is that Democrats in Ohio were suing to insure that nobody’s rights were eliminated. The Ohio GOP was deliberately attempting to suppress the votes of citizens they presumed would vote Democratic. And Fox News helped them in that mission by brazenly lying about the substance of the debate and pushing the GOP opinion as if it were fact.

6) Graphic Evidence Of The Racism Of Fox News: Racial Photoshopping

Coverage of the Trayvon Martin shooting was handled by Fox News in a manner that is revealing and offensive. On the day that Florida law enforcement authorities planned to file charges against George Zimmerman, Fox ran a story that featured a photo of Zimmerman with a beaming smile alongside one of Martin that looked foreboding and was obviously darkened. This was nothing less than a journalistic lynching. The editors at this alleged “news” network were demonstrating their overt hostility to both African-Americans and journalistic ethics.

Fox News Racial Photoshopping

Later in the day a more impartial photo was inserted that was not as overtly disparaging of the victim. You think they got a few complaints about the previous photo? Fox had numerous pictures from which to choose of both Martin and Zimmerman, and they chose the most negative picture of Martin which they paired with the most positive picture of Zimmerman. That was not an accident. It was the result of deliberate editorial judgment. And it tells us everything we need to know about Fox’s editors.

7) The Polling Schizophrenia At Fox News

Throughout the year Fox News led their audience on a roller coaster ride of propaganda and censorship as they shifted from celebrating what they regarded as positive electoral news to suppressing the negative. They persistently sought to cloister their audience in a bubble that filtered out any facts that might upset their viewers or political patrons. Fox was so determined to shut out anything that might challenge their narrative that they even failed to report their own Fox News polls if Obama was ahead.

This was a part of a broader effort to deceive their audience by castigating or ignoring polls when they didn’t like the results and praising the same pollsters when their numbers were more favorable. They launched a campaign to demean professional pollsters and prop up disreputable charlatans with their “unskewed” versions. Not surprisingly, this led to the unprecedented post-election state of shock experienced by those who were foolish enough to rely on Fox for information.

8) Fox News Psycho Analyst: Newt Gingrich’s Adultery Means A Stronger America

The in-house Fox News psychiatrist, Keith Ablow, has offered his embarrassingly ridiculous diagnoses on a number of occasions. Without ever having examined (or even met) the President, Ablow has declared him to be contemptuous of the judiciary and devoid of all emotion. He further assessed that Obama has “got it in for this country” and doesn’t like Americans. These are, of course, the delusional ramblings of a quack who is more preoccupied with his own animosity for the President than with credible psychiatric analysis.

During the GOP primary, Ablow chimed in on criticism of Newt Gingrich for his serial marriages that ended when his wives became ill or failed to serve his political purposes. Ablow’s astonishing diagnosis was that Gingrich as president would make America stronger specifically because of his multiple infidelities. Ablow actually thinks that three wives and two extramarital affairs (that we know about) enhance Gingrich’s qualifications to be president. His reasoning had something to do with the fact that multiple homewreckers found him to be marriageable material and that that was a mark of character. This is what passes for family values in today’s GOP.

9) Fox News Airs An Hour Long Commercial For An Anti-Obama Film On Hannity

In the heart of the presidential campaign season, Sean Hannity’s program on Fox News devoted the full hour to a blatant infomercial promoting an anti-Obama movie by the people who brought us Citizens United. The program featured lengthy clips from the film as well as interviews with the film’s creators, David Bossie and Steve Bannon. Bossie is the head of Citizens United, the organization that prompted the abhorrent Supreme Court decision that made it possible for individuals and corporations to donate unlimited sums of cash to political candidates and causes. Bannon is chairman of Breitbart News and was the director of the monumental flop, “Sarah Palin: Undefeated,” a movie that managed to fail miserably despite millions of dollars in free publicity courtesy of Fox News.

What’s particularly disturbing about this is that the producers freely admit that their purpose is not so much to promote the film, but to let their ads serve as disguised political messages aimed at disparaging the President and affecting the outcome of the election. The reason that they chose October to release the film was so their advertising would appear during the campaign season and they could pretend that it was merely marketing for the movie. And I repeat, this is not a conspiracy theory, it is something they specifically admit to and boast about. Fox News was merely the first stop on their media blitz.

10) Fox News “Democrat” Kirsten Powers Accuses Obama Of Sympathizing With Terrorists

Kirsten PowersThe next time you hear the Fox News slogan “fair and balanced,” be sure to remember that their rendering of fairness is to trot out covert conservatives and label them Democrats. A perfect illustration of this is alleged Democrat Kirsten Powers, who took to Fox News to attack President Obama in an article titled: “President Obama, stop blaming the victim for Mideast violence.”. If you changed the name to Ann Coulter nobody would have blinked an eye.

Powers was addressing the violence at American facilities in Libya and Egypt when she wrote that respecting religious beliefs “is implicit sympathy for the claims of some of the attackers and rioters.” So Powers thinks that respect for the diversity of faith is tantamount to sympathizing with terrorists. She cannot comprehend that such respect is offered to the vast majority of peaceful Muslims who had nothing to do with the violence. And allowing her to spew that bile while posing as a Democratic analyst is part of how Fox distorts their presentation of fairness and balance.

11) Fox News Spinning Furiously On Unemployment Rate

Behaving entirely consistently with a network that harbors politcos who want to see President Obama fail, Fox News cavalierly dismissed the October unemployment report showing a drop to 7.8 percent. Heaven forbid anything good happens in this country while a black, socialist, Muslim from Kenya is in charge. So while having the unemployment rate drop from 8.1 to 7.8 will bring the rest of the country some solace, it just creates headaches for the doomsayers at Fox.

Fox spent the whole morning trying to hatch skeptics. They brought in former General Electric CEO Jack Welch to explain his delusional Tweet: “Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers.” Fox’s Stuart Varney concurred along with Donald Trump and a bevy of correspondents and guests. None of them could explain why an independent agency of career economists, without a single Obama appointee, would fudge the numbers for a president to whom they owed nothing.

12) Fox News Opposes Ban On Assault Weapons But Imposes Ban On Talking About It

The most heartbreaking news of 2012 was surely the massacre in Newtown, CT, that saw twenty schoolchildren and six adults senselessly murdered. The resultant outcry from concerned Americans about the easy access to weapons that are capable of such carnage was met by Fox News as an unspeakable attack on the Second Amendment and free enterprise. Their response was to slaughter the First Amendment by prohibiting any discussion of gun safety on the network.

Sources told Gabriel Sherman of New York Magazine that “David Clark, the executive producer in charge of Fox’s weekend coverage, gave producers instructions not to talk about gun-control policy on air.” This is how Fox directs the editorial content of the network. They have a heavy hand enforcing what people may, and may not, say on the air. It’s also worthwhile to note that while Fox banned all talk of gun control, they did not similarly banish talk of other explanations for the atrocity in Connecticut. For instance, they had no problem with laying the blame on mental illness, movies, or video games. And Fox host Mike Huckabee was permitted to go on the air and blame the killings on the absence of God in the classroom (which does nothing to explain similar shootings that have taken place in churches).

NRA Ad

While Fox News broadcasts flagrant distortions of reality on a daily basis, the examples above transcend the conventional dishonesty and bias that is their hallmark. These assaults on ethical journalism demonstrate how dangerous it is to permit a political enterprise to disguise itself as a news network in order to shape an extreme political agenda. It is evidence of social programming and manipulation at its worst. And the sad part is that we can expect much more of this in 2013. Happy New Year!

The News Corpse Person Of The Year: The Anonymous 47% Video Guy

Posted by on December 31, 2012 at 1:47 pm. 5 Comments :

2012 was a year of monumental achievements and deplorable failures. Chief among these are President Obama’s historic reelection despite harrowing obstacles, particularly an economy that was stubbornly weak and an opposition with nearly unlimited resources and animus. Then there was Gov. Romney’s surprisingly incompetent campaign that wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on a losing effort that never seemed to have a coherent strategy.

There was no shortage of contestants in the competition to declare the person who had the most impact on the course of the year. Aspirants as diverse as Karl Rove and Donald Trump and Sandra Fluke and Nate Silver all vied for the top spot. But there can be only one Person of the Year, and in 2012 the person deemed by News Corpse to have had the most striking impact on shaping the affairs of the nation was – The Anonymous 47% Video Guy!

News Corpse Person of the Year

The still unidentified person who caught Mitt Romney at a private fundraiser candidly saying what he actually believes about nearly half the country, exposed what was the most profound revelation of the campaign.

Romney: There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

With that statement Romney was confessing that his view, and that of the Republican Party, was that middle and lower class Americans were moochers who hinged their votes on what they could scam from the public trough. It was an insensitive and unretractable insult that buried any hopes of Romney gathering enough votes to prevail in November. But we must not forget that Romney didn’t invent this line of attack. He adopted it from other conservative voices, mostly emanating from Fox News. For instance, all of these quotes predated Romney’s speech:

  • Bill O’Reilly: 50 percent of Americans don’t pay any federal income tax now.
  • Stuart Varney: About half the people who work in America, half the households, actually, pay any federal income tax at all.
  • Donald Trump: You do have a problem because half of the people don’t pay any tax.
  • Dave Briggs: [A]lmost half of this country pays no income tax whatsoever.
  • Gretchen Carlson: But what does that mean when you factor in that 50 percent of the nation doesn’t even pay federal income tax?
  • Steve Doocy: With 47% of Americans not paying taxes – 47% – should those who don’t pay be allowed to vote?
  • Sean Hannity: 50 percent of Americans no longer pay taxes.
  • Neil Cavuto: I’ve discovered nearly half of this country’s households don’t pay any taxes at all.
  • Dave Ramsey: This idea that 42% of Americans don’t pay anything…that’s just morally wrong.
  • Brian Kilmeade: Fifty-one percent of the country isn’t paying any taxes at all.
  • Eric Bolling: 43 percent of households don’t pay any federal tax.
  • Glenn Beck: There was like 48 percent say they pay their right amount of taxes and 49 percent don’t pay any tax.

Clearly this was a well coordinated effort to demonize half the electorate. By documenting that Romney himself held the same views that the Fox Borg mind held, the Anonymous 47% Video Guy performed a valuable service to the nation. Romney could no longer toil in his Etch-a-Sketch world inventing himself anew and erasing any prior inconvenient opinions that threatened his fictional character development.

So congratulations to the Anonymous 47% Video Guy on being named the News Corpse Person of the Year. We hope to meet you someday and thank you personally.

Sarah Palin Drips With Envy Over Obama’s Selection As Time Magazine’s Person Of The Year

Posted by on December 20, 2012 at 3:36 am. 18 Comments :

Last night Sarah Palin once again appeared on her old pal Greta Van Susteren’s show on Fox News. She was asked to comment on Time Magazine’s selection of President Obama as “Person of the Year.” And, what a surprise, the ego-driven Queen of the North could only find nasty things to say about Obama, who was chosen, not as an endorsement of his agenda, but as recognition of the reelection victory that illustrated the changes in America’s identity. Time wrote…

“We are in the midst of historic cultural and demographic changes, and Barack Obama is both the symbol and in some ways the architect of this new America. In 2012, he found and forged a new majority, turned weakness into opportunity and sought, amid great adversity, to create a more perfect union.”

Sarah Palin

Perhaps Palin was upset that the article accompanying the choice never mentioned her by name, but did note that her characterization of Obama’s tenure as “hopey/changey” was passe. Her sour grapes session criticized Time Magazine’s choice due to some vague, unspecified allegation that Obama doesn’t support the Constitution. She complained that he wants to change the Constitution, which is, of course, constitutional and is provided for in the document. It has been done twenty-seven times already. But she concluded with a statement I agree with wholeheartedly:

“Time Magazine, you know, I think there’s some irrelevancy there to tell you the truth. I mean consider their list of the most influential people in the country and in the world, some who have made that list – yours truly – that ought to tell you something right there regarding the credence that we should give Time Magazine and their list of people.”

She is referring to her place on the Time 100 back in 2010. The tribute to her was composed by washed-up schlock-rocker Ted Nugent, who continues to embarrass himself in public with demented, anti-American rants. And not to be outdone, Palin also embarrassed herself with Van Susteren in a discussion about the newly released report on the State Department’s handling of security in Benghazi, Libya.

Van Susteren and Palin both complained that there was no accountability for security failings, despite the fact that three State Department officials resigned shortly after the report’s release. And they both knew of the resignations because they mentioned them in the segment. Palin also asserted without support that “Americans were lied to.” She went on to whine…

“For the President even to get out there on a national stage and tell Americans untruths about this situation in Benghazi really begs you to ask the question, what else does he say and do that would be deceptive. I believe that it’s many, many things that he would say and do being deceptive.”

Neither Palin nor Van Susteren gave a single example of anyone being less than truthful. And neither did the report, which addressed the security situation in Benghazi, not the subsequent media frenzy Fox tried to incite.

It’s a little sad to see the pathetic scratching on the screen door by Palin who has all but vanished from public view. She is probably milking these appearances with Van Susteren because there is a high probability that her contract with Fox will not be renewed when it expires next year. And who else would have her? Her books don’t sell, her reality TV shows fail, and her own party is so ashamed to be associated with her that she wasn’t even invited to the Republican convention this year.

It may be fair (and balanced) to say that Palin is over – you betcha!

Cue The “Obama Plotted The Newtown Massacre” Conspiracy Theories

Posted by on December 14, 2012 at 5:18 pm. 13 Comments :

The nation is once again grieving the senseless loss of innocent life at the hands of a mentally unstable gunman. Compounding the tragedy, this time the majority of victims were children. As President Obama said this afternoon…

“As a country, we have been through this too many times. Whether it’s an elementary school in Newtown, or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago — these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods, and these children are our children. And we’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.”

Unfortunately, the politics will eventually seep into this as it always does. Gun rights advocates may try to evade a public debate by claiming that it is inappropriate to discuss responsible gun policy after a notorious crime, but in truth there is no better time. And waiting until the nation is crime-free would mean putting off the debate forever (which, of course, is their intent).

The President’s message explicitly addressing the need for meaningful action is bound to set off a flurry of paranoia from the Second Amendment set. It is just the sort of soundbite that triggers their imaginations. During the campaign, NRA president Wayne LaPierre wrote in a fundraising letter that Obama’s re-election would result in the “confiscation of our firearms” His proof of that was the fact that Obama had not taken any actions against gun ownership throughout his first term. To LaPierre, and many other right-wingers, that meant that Obama was lulling gun owners into a false sense of security and that Obama would proceed with the gun roundup in his second term. Of course, Fox News was a principle proponent of these conspiracy theories. Here are a few headlines from Fox’s community web site Fox Nation:

  • Obama Starts Pushing Gun Control
  • Obama: We’re Working on Gun Control ‘Under the Radar’
  • Obama May Use Executive Orders to Bypass Congress on Gun Control Laws
  • Obama to Push for New Gun Laws in Wake of Colorado Massacre?
  • Chuck Norris: Obama’s Stealth Gun Control
  • WSJ: Second Obama Term Could Kill Second Amendment

There were similar conspiratorial prophesies percolating in the midst of the “Fast and Furious” affair. Many conservative pundits and politicians believed the whole thing was a covert plot to impose stricter gun laws in the United States. Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips said as much on Fox News earlier this year.

“This was purely a political operation. You send the guns down to Mexico, therefore you support the political narrative that the Obama administration wanted supported; that all these American guns are flooding Mexico, that they’re the cause of the violence in Mexico and therefore we need draconian gun control laws here in America.”

So I’ll give it about forty-eight hours before some gun nut charges that Adam Lanza was an Obama operative sent to Connecticut to create havoc that would open the door for federal agents to clamp down on the rights of gun owners to possess assault weapons and other military grade munitions that our Founding Fathers could never have imagined. It could be Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh or Allen West or Michelle Bachmann. There are plenty of delusional crackpots on the right who could advance this theme. And if all else fails, the NRA could take it up themselves. Seriously…I wonder how long it will take them to run an ad like this:

NRA Ad

Today America is mourning again. We all send our condolences to the families of the victims. But the most meaningful thing we can do for them is to start tomorrow to insist that rational and reasonable steps be taken to prevent tragedies like this from happening in the first place. That means adopting a sane approach to gun ownership and compassionate access to mental health care. Not to do so would be to rub salt in the wounds of everyone who has lost a loved one to gun violence, and it would also be an invitation for more of these horrific events in the future. We need to stop this, and we need to do it now.

Fox Nation vs. Reality: 10 Flagrant Falsehoods From The Fox News Community Site

Posted by on November 29, 2012 at 10:08 am. 5 Comments :

Fox Nation vs. Reality[This article was previously published on Alternet and contains a few excerpts from my new eBook, Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Community’s Assault On Truth. The book contains more than fifty additional examples of Fox’s dishonesty.]

When Fox News debuted sixteen years ago, it was crafted from scratch to be a partisan outlet for right-wing propaganda and a platform for advancing a conservative agenda. Its founder, Rupert Murdoch, was already an internationally known purveyor of right-slanted newspapers and broadcasters. Complimenting Fox’s television presence is its Internet community web site, Fox Nation. The statement of purpose posted on the Fox Nation web site says that it is “committed to the core principles of tolerance, open debate, civil discourse, and fair and balanced coverage of the news.” However, a cursory glance at the site reveals that they have fallen wide of their stated purpose by several light years.

Fox Nation is layered thickly with far-right extremist diatribes and links to disreputable articles plucked from the Internet’s fringes. And the notion that civil discourse can take place on Fox Nation is quickly dispelled by reading their user forums with their frequent use of the “N” word and juvenile references to the President as “Odumbo” and the First Lady as “Moo-chelle.” These sorts of comments are not anomalies. Fox Nation is deliberately catering to this caliber of audience who revel in overt racist and hostile dialogue. This is not the conventional, freewheeling online chatter that is found on comment boards and is particularly unusual for a site sponsored by a major national news network.

Not much is known about the operations of Fox Nation. Unlike other news enterprises that identify their principle staff, Fox Nation treats their publishers, editors, etc., as if they were covert agents of espionage. There is no masthead or bylines or any other indication of who is responsible for the repugnant content posted daily on the web page. Requests for this information from Fox corporate communications officers went unanswered. And given the dishonesty, unprofessionalism, ignorance, and immaturity of the tone and substance on the site, perhaps it is their intention to remain anonymous in order to avoid the shame that would come with an association to such puerile trash.

Fox CEO Rupert Murdoch was a harsh critic of Google News, calling them “parasites,” because he said they steal his content by posting headlines and short blurbs and linking to the source articles. But that’s pretty hypocritical because it’s exactly what Fox Nation does. There is almost no original content, and what they harvest from other sources is often planted on affiliated sites like those of Fox News contributors Tucker Carlson, Michele Malkin, and Dick Morris.

What follows are ten excerpts from my ebook, Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Community’s Assault On Truth. The book chronicles more than fifty flagrantly dishonest reports by the Fox Nationalist team of faux journalists. These are not mere differences of opinion or discussions that might have varying degrees of perspective. They are obvious, provable, outright lies, and they are manifestations of a disconnect with the real world.

1) Human Carbon Emissions Could Put OFF a Lethal New Ice Age
According to the Fox Nationalists, the perpetrators of Global Warming are actually rescuing the planet from a frigid doom. They quote Cambridge University research published in the journal Nature Geoscience. The only problem with their conclusion is that the scientist they reference in the article, Luke Skinner, has a completely different conclusion. He says that he anticipated this response amongst climate crisis deniers and said that they are…

“…missing the point, because where we’re going is not maintaining our currently warm climate but heating it much further, and adding CO2 to a warm climate is very different from adding it to a cold climate.

“The rate of change with CO2 is basically unprecedented, and there are huge consequences if we can’t cope with that.”

Skinner told the BBC that the results of the study point to the sensitivity of the climate system to “quite small changes in CO2, let alone the huge changes that we’ve been responsible for over the last 200 years.” Of course, none of that is included in the Fox Nation article. They deliberately neglect the obvious point that by the time the presumed ice age begins, in 1,500 years, global warming, if unchecked, would have already put half the planet’s current land mass under water. But these facts do not sway Fox from cherry-picking out-of-context soundbites to mislead their audience.

2) College Mate: Obama Was An Ardent Marxist-Leninist
In this episode Fox Nation posted as their featured headline story an article with the title: College Mate: Obama Was an ‘Ardent’ ‘Marxist-Leninist.’ In order to fabricate this wholly dishonest smear, Fox sunk to re-posting a column written by conservative bomb-thrower Selwyn Duke. Duke’s article was originally published by The New American, the periodical of the extremist and notoriously fascistic John Birch Society.

In the article, Duke relied entirely on the testimony of John Drew, a man who has been pushing his dubious and uncorroborated account of a college relationship with Obama for years. He claims that Obama was a close friend and confidant. The truth is he only met Obama casually a handful of times at gatherings with many others present. He never attended college with Obama because the future President didn’t enter Occidental College until after Drew had graduated.

It’s painfully clear to anyone paying attention that Drew is attempting to exploit his brief encounters with Obama to exalt himself, disseminate his rightist propaganda, and earn a few bucks in the process. Now, after years of plodding through radical right-wing rags and Internet backwater rabble, Drew and Duke have succeeded in getting Fox Nation to sling their stale mud.

3) Obama Selling Amnesty For $465
The issue of immigration is one that the Fox Nationalists relish in demagoguing. They publish numerous stories that are openly racist, as has been thoroughly documented. This is just such a story that was designed to inflame prejudice with its utterly dishonest skewing of the facts. The headline composed by Fox Nation is wholly untrue. Not only is amnesty not a part of the administration’s program, nothing in it is for sale.

In truth, President Obama directed the Department of Homeland Security to exercise prosecutorial discretion so that innocent children who were brought to this country by undocumented parents are not unduly punished while a more comprehensive solution is negotiated with Congress. The program does not provide amnesty. The fee to apply for this program is intended to offset costs, but can be waived on a case by case basis for applicants unable to pay.

None of those facts stopped Fox from deliberately misrepresenting the matter in a way that leads their audience to presume that the administration is peddling citizenship to foreigners who come here to steal our jobs. It appears that Fox picked up the story from the juveniles at Breitbart News where John Nolte published an article that implied that Obama’s goal is to mint new voters. Never mind that the immigrants partaking of this program will not have voting rights because they will not be citizens.

4) Americans Not Buying Buffett Rule
The Buffett Rule that Americans are not buying refers to his remarks that wealthy folks like him should not be paying lower tax rates than average folks like his secretary. So all that the Fox Nationalists had to do to validate their headline was produce the results of a poll that shows that a majority of respondents do not believe that raising taxes on millionaires will do any good. And since, in this case, they are relying on the results of a poll conducted by Fox News, they should be able to support whatever preconceived myth they want to invent.

However, the very first paragraph of their own story states that “more voters think raising taxes on wealthy Americans will help (40 percent) rather than hurt the economy (24 percent).” And the margin of difference (16%) isn’t even close. Yet somehow the headline atop the article overtly refutes the facts in their own survey. Are these people even trying anymore? They must really think their readers are idiots. And since they must know their audience better than anyone else, I will defer to their assessment.

5) NBC News Hires Anchor Who Pledged to Not Criticize Obama About Anything
In this episode of Fox Nation’s departure from reality, the Fox Nationalists jumped on remarks by Al Sharpton suggesting that he intends to refrain from ever criticizing President Obama. But that isn’t what he said.

Sharpton: “What I don’t want to see is because he is black we act like he’s not the real president – he ought to be leading the black cause or the labor cause. He’s the President. To minimize who he is, I think, is an insult to the achievement of having him there.”

So this was not about Sharpton never criticizing Obama, just not constraining Obama to being merely the president of black Americans as opposed to all Americans. Fox, on the other hand, should acknowledge that their whole business model rests on not criticizing Republicans and conservatives. In a specific example you have Dick Morris, who has been on the Fox payroll for years, and pledged never to criticize Mitt Romney:

“I decided a couple of – a month or two ago to stop dumping on Mitt Romney, for example … Not because I approve of Romneycare, not because I approve of his flip-flops, flip on abortion, but because I may have to be one of those who carries this guy for a couple of months when he’s running against Obama and I don’t want to make my own task harder.”

Morris fulfilled that promise by becoming one of Romney’s most ardent cheerleaders. Just days before Obama won with a commanding Electoral College victory, Morris told Fox News that a Romney landslide was a virtual certainty.

6) Elizabeth Warren Praises Communist China
In response to an ad by Massachusetts senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, the Fox Nationalists have not only lied, but exposed their latent unpatriotic tendencies as well. To state bluntly that “Elizabeth Warren Praises Communist China” is a thoroughly manufactured falsehood. She never did anything remotely of the kind. What she did was advocate for the importance of America remaining competitive on an international basis and not permit China to take the lead. Here is what she said:

“We’ve got bridges and roads in need of repair, and thousands of people in need of work. Why aren’t we rebuilding America? Our competitors are putting people to work, building the future. China invests 9 percent of its GDP in infrastructure. America, we’re at just 2.4 percent. We can do better. We can build a foundation for a strong new economy and get people in Massachusetts to work right now.”

The Fox Nationalists have a decidedly shallow grasp of world affairs. They think that lamenting America falling behind on matters critical to international competitiveness is the same as praising a political system of government. Were these same conservatives outraged when Reagan, and other cold warriors, argued that the U.S. was falling behind the Soviet Union militarily and, therefore, they were praising Russia’s communism?

For Fox News, and its conservative benefactors, to criticize Warren for these comments is akin to advocating for America to succumb to foreign competitors. In effect, it’s conservatives who are acceding to China’s superiority – not the other way around.

7) Stocks Tumble Worldwide After Obama Speech
The implication of this headline is that Obama’s speech had something to do with a stock market decline. However, the very first paragraph of the Bloomberg News article Fox cites specifically states that the decline is due to…

“…escalating concern about Greece’s debt crisis and speculation congress won’t pass President Obama’s plan to boost the economy.“

In other words, the markets favor Obama’s plan and want it to be implemented. So a more honest headline would have read “Stocks Tumble Worldwide Due To Republican Obstructionism.” But then again, if you’re looking for a more honest headline then you probably wouldn’t be reading Fox Nation in the first place.

8) Guess Who Tried To Break Into Southwest Cockpit?
Notice that in this headline the Fox Nationalists explicitly describes Ali Reza Shahsavari as trying to break into the cockpit of a Southwest Airlines plane. But anyone who read a little further down would have seen that the article unambiguously contradicts the headline saying “Initially, authorities said the man had tried to break into the cockpit but Amarillo Aviation Director Patrick Rhodes later said that he was ‘not trying to break into the cockpit, but was unruly and had confronted the cabin crew.'”

The headline was wholly the creation of Fox News. The story itself was sourced to the Associated Press, whose article got the headline right: “Southwest flight makes emergency landing in Texas.” So what we have here is Fox deliberately falsifying the headline in order to make a derogatory insinuation about a man of Iranian descent who just happens to be an American citizen born in Mississippi. The article states that there is no indication of terrorism and additional reporting describe the incident as an episode of mental illness triggered by an argument with another passenger. The only conclusion is that Fox saw a brown man with Middle-Eastern features and decided to invent an international terrorism incident where none existed by appending a provocative question to the story that contradicted the article’s content.

9) Man Linked to ‘Occupy’ Protest Charged With Attempted Assassination of Obama
The Fox News Channel ran a story with this same deceptive theme. They hosted Michelle Malkin to engage in a discussion that was deliberately designed to smear the Occupiers. During the segment they displayed a picture of the suspect, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez, with a caption that said: “‘Occupy’ Shooter.” There was no question mark or other qualifying notation to indicate that this was merely speculation on the part of Fox News.

For the record, the only link between this guy and the Occupy movement is the one invented by Fox. The Washington police have stated unequivocally that they have no evidence that he was affiliated in any way with the protesters. Reports that he may have tried to hide in the crowds at the Occupy DC site should not surprise anyone. Any densely populated location would attract somebody trying to elude law enforcement. A football game or an Alzheimer’s Walkathon would serve the same purpose.

What little is known about Ortega-Hernandez would likely lead objective analysts to suspect him of being a Teabagger. He is said to be anti-government, hates President Obama, and has a history of mental illness. That’s a profile that would fit perfectly for say … Glenn Beck.

10) Poll: Majority Blame Obama For Bad Economy
There have been numerous polls asking respondents to say who they hold responsible for the state of the American economy. In every one of them George W. Bush ranks at or near the top, with Congress and Wall Street following close behind. Usually President Obama is not the target of most of the blame.

Leave it to Fox News to come up with a poll that contradicts the others. And it should come as no surprise that the poll they’ve latched onto is the work of Rasmussen’s Pulse Opinion Research. However, even with a fixed pollster, and a rabidly partisan news outlet, Fox still finds it necessary to outright lie about the poll’s results.

In Rasmussen’s poll 34% said that Obama is the most to blame for the slow economic recovery. Most elementary school graduates know that that is not a majority. What’s more, if you add the responses of those who said that it was either Congress, Wall Street, or George W. Bush, it comes to a clear majority of 61% saying that Obama is not to blame. The Fox Nationalists must take great comfort in the knowledge that their audience is too incurious to actually look into anything themselves.

Bonus #11) Obama More Unpopular Than Tea Party
Here we have Fox Nation with a headline that is diametrically opposed to the actual results of a poll. From the New York Times:

“The public’s opinion of the Tea Party movement has soured in the wake of the debt-ceiling debate. The Tea Party is now viewed unfavorably by 40 percent of the public and favorably by just 20 percent, according to the poll.

“The president’s overall job approval rating remained relatively stable, with 48 percent approving of the way he handles his job as president and 47 percent disapproving.”

To repeat, 48% approve of Obama while only 20% approve of the Tea Party. That means Obama’s approval is more than twice that of the Tea Party. What’s more, Obama is viewed favorably by slightly more people than view him unfavorably. The Tea Party is viewed unfavorably by twice as many people as view it favorably.

The only way to spin this poll positively for the Tea Party is to deliberately misconstrue the data by taking into account only the unfavorable numbers as if they existed in a vacuum. Leave it to Fox to lie to their audience and produce a community characterized by ignorance and wishful thinking.

These are just a few examples of the veracity-challenged deceptions that appear everyday on Fox Nation. In the ebook, Fox Nation vs. Reality, there are dozens more examples of the documented, deliberate dishonesty that is the hallmark of Fox News. It’s a handy reference for rebutting those crazy uncles who keep sending you conspiracy theory chain letters and berating you for having missed Hannity last night.

Fox Nation is an integral part of the Fox News family and a critical component of their mission to deceive the general public and reinforce the partisan tunnel-blindness of their glassy-eyed disciples. This makes it all the more necessary to shine a light on their cynical mauling of truthfulness in media. Mark Twain said that “Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.” And the fabulists at Fox have imagination in abundance as evidenced by all the tales they make up on their web site. So the more they seek to deceive, the more the rest of us need to be prepared to rebut and confront them. As difficult as that task may seem, we can take heart in Stephen Colbert’s observation that “Reality has a well known liberal bias.” Which explains why it is so at odds with what Fox represents.

Right-Wing Blames God For Romney Loss And America’s Descent Into Socialism

Posted by on November 23, 2012 at 2:48 pm. 7 Comments :

The Republican Party has been suffering debilitating and very public seizures produced by the results of the election a couple of weeks ago. They are desperately attempting to find explanations for how they could have lost on such a grand scale an election they presumed was in the bag. After spending unprecedented amounts of money, Republicans still had to wake up Wednesday morning with Obama returning to the White House for another four years, two more Democrats in the senate, and nine more in the House. Even with the propaganda power of Fox News, the top rated cable news network, and its frothing companion web site Fox Nation, conservative fanatics were unable deceive enough citizens to vote against their own best interests.

At first the excuses focused on typically lame dodges involving the weaknesses of their candidates. Then they shifted to assertions that it was a failure from not being sufficiently conservative. Eventually they trotted out accusations directed at the allegedly negative, Chicago-style campaigning of the Democrats. And sprinkled in amidst all of this were hysterical wails of imaginary corruption and voter fraud.

Now that some time has passed, the forlorn right-wingers have been able to reflect on these events and discovered the true source of their despair: GOD!

That’s right. The Heavenly Father on whom they had entrusted so much of their hopes had betrayed them. It has become impossible to ignore that God clearly preferred Obama and other Democrats to the roster of GOP loonies that pretended to speak in His name.

Prior to the election, folks like Pat Robertson had confidently declared that God had personally assured them of a Republican victory. Now Robertson has had to backtrack saying that “I thought I heard from God, I thought I had heard clearly from God, what happened?” What happened was that you were unable to distinguish the voice of God from the hallucinatory voices rattling around in your senile head.

And speaking of hallucinatory, Glenn Beck had his own divine prophesies mangled when he spoke of an inner certainty that the Lord was preparing the path for righteous Republicans to prevail:

“I am to the point to where I think that God is trying to make this so clear to us that if it happens, it’s his finger. Because, boy, nothing looks good. And yet, everybody I know who I consider a spiritual giant feels good.”

Glenn Beck Messiah

The day after the election Beck was singing a different hymn when he said “Man, sometimes God really sucks.” But what else can he say when the day before he declared “If [voters are] so dead inside that they can no longer see the difference between good and evil, we have to be destroyed.”

That’s typical of the sanctimonious zealots who believe that they are the only ones with a direct line to God. They exalt themselves and their imagined favor with a deity that their principles mock. They blithely ignore biblical instructions to “judge not, lest ye be judged,” and openly denigrate the faith of others – particularly President Obama, who is wrongly believed to be a Muslim by about one-third of Republicans.

Right-wingers on the Fox News community web site Fox Nation even go so far as to explicitly state that Obama is “God-Less.” This article linked to the execrable conspiracy obsessed Breitbart News.

Fox Nation

The spiritual consternation of the right is thoroughly understandable. They had just run a campaign that fervently tried to paint Democrats as socialists bent on imposing a secular, atheist dictatorship on America. They condemned their policies as big-government takeovers that would throw freedom-loving patriots into bondage. They cast Democrats as leaning far too extremely to the left to be acceptable to voters. Yet people voted for them anyway. That could be interpreted in some circles as a mandate for the sort of socialism that the GOP was running against.

What the right missed was that all of the left-leaning agenda of the Democratic Party had far more in common with God’s agenda than the rank selfishness and greed of the GOP. Democrats advocated for health care (healing the sick), immigration (brotherhood), financial assistance (caring for the least among us), income equality and separation of church and state (giving Caesar his due), and deescalation of hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan (blessed be the peacemakers). What’s surprising is that Republicans could oppose all of these things and still think they were doing God’s work.

The funny thing is that they had plenty of signs. The religious right is fond of ascribing meaning to significant events such as natural disasters. Many of them told their disciples that Katrina was God’s wrath on the sinfulness of New Orleans. Why, then, did they not see that God was sending them a warning when Hurricane Isaac slammed down on Tampa, scuttling day one of the GOP convention? Why didn’t they hear God’s message when Sandy battered the New England states just days before the election, giving Obama an opportunity to look presidential?

Now that we know whose side God was really on, Republicans are expressing their bitterness and disappointment with the Lord. That doesn’t seem like a particularly good way to get back in His good graces. But then the GOP was never very good at humility or admitting their mistakes. So what we see now is an escalation of apocalyptic doomsday scenarios that thrust the weak-minded into fearful panics. Leading the way is Fox News who broadcast this cheerful special on Thanksgiving Eve: “Countdown to Doomsday.”

Fox News Doomsday

They might make out better if they take some time to study the teachings of their Savior and seek to integrate them into their political philosophy. But then that would just make them liberals, wouldn’t it?

Greta Van Susteren: The Obama Administration Is Trying To Punish Fox News

Posted by on November 21, 2012 at 1:10 pm. 8 Comments :

Poor Greta Van Susteren. Her Fox News program has lately been lagging in the ratings behind MSNBC’s “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.” And now she is feeling neglected by the Obama administration.

In a post on her Gretawire blog, Van Sustern has resorted to copious use of BRIGHT RED FONTS WITH ALL CAPITAL LETTERS to express her dismay at being left out of all the reindeer games. She laments that Fox News was overlooked by the State Department when media briefings were held for various news organizations. She whines that this is “playing dirty” and was being done “to punish Fox” for their critical reporting.

Van Susteren: The Administration in what looks like a coordinated effort is denying Fox access to information that they are handing out to other news organizations. Why exclude Fox? That is simple – to punish — to try to teach us a lesson not to pry, not to look further for facts.

Van Susteren fails to disclose that the State Department had previously explained why Fox was not included in previous briefings and press releases. It had nothing to do with punishment. The State Department distributed their information to news organizations that had reporters who were assigned to cover the department. Fox News has no such reporters so they didn’t get on the list. In fact, Fox has a shoe-string news operation that doesn’t concentrate on actual reporting. Most of their “news” assets are allocated to anchors, analysts, and pundits, who are not doing any bona fide journalism. In short, the State Department had no one to notify and they weren’t going to send notices to everyone with a Fox News email address.

The administration would, nevertheless, be justified in bypassing Fox even if they did assign a reporter to the beat. Contrary to Van Susteren’s kvetching, Fox has not been “looking for facts” about the Benghazi attacks. Rather, they have been wallowing in speculation and wild conspiracy theories. Fox anchors and guests have dispensed absurd declarations that President Obama had deliberately allowed Ambassador Stevens to be murdered; that he personally ordered rescuers to stand down; that he refused requests for additional security (actually it was congress who voted to cut funding for embassy security); and that he could be subject to impeachment for unspecified high crimes and misdemeanors.

None of these assertions have any bearing in fact, but that doesn’t stop Van Susteren from yammering about Fox getting a cold shoulder from the administration. Fox deserves to be shunned. They are not a credible news enterprise. They are no more entitled to press passes than the UFO Gazette or the Hogwarts Herald. If Van Susteren did a little self-analysis before ripping into her imaginary slights by Obama, she might be better situated to complain. As it is, her post includes a curious admission/excuse for Fox getting the facts wrong:

Van Susteren: To the extent we get anything wrong is because the Administration is doing whatever it can to thwart us from getting the facts.

On the contrary, it would be more correct to say that to the extent you deliberately distort the facts, the administration is under no obligation to help you continue to get everything wrong. Van Susteren is, incredibly, blaming Fox’s mistakes on Obama. Nobody forced Fox to wade so far out into delusional speculation. In fact, based on their body of work, it appears to be their corporate mission. And the administration can hardly be criticized (or accused of punishment) if they should be reluctant to further that mission.

Fox Nation vs. Reality: The White House Did Not Edit CIA Talking Points

Posted by on November 19, 2012 at 9:33 am. 10 Comments :

Earning a place at the top of the Fox Nation web site this morning is story that complies perfectly with the non-existent journalistic standards of Fox News. The article cites the uber-conservative blog FreeBeacon and features the headline “White House Deleted Al Qaeda From CIA Talking Points.”

Get the New eBook Fox Nation vs. Reality from Amazon.com.
Fox Nation

As usual, the Fox Nationalists only got one thing wrong with their story: the whole story. As it turns out, there is no evidence that the White House deleted Al Qaeda from the CIA talking points. What’s more, there is nothing in the article that affirms the falsehood in the headline.

This story hinges on the latest effort by the right and Fox News to malign President Obama and to politicize the tragic deaths of Americans in Benghazi, Libya. There has been a well coordinated smear campaign seeking to blame Obama not only for attacks perpetrated by terrorists, but also for a cover-up of information about those attacks. The GOP is also exploiting the affair to derail the possible appointment of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to be the next Secretary of State.

However, the partisan outrage has been woefully short of any substance. The right has been clamoring for answers from the White House, but when they get the answers they pretend that they didn’t hear anything. The official White House response from Ben Rhodes, Deputy National Security Advisor, stated clearly that…

“This question came up as to whether the White House had edited Susan Rice’s points and the points that were provided to Congress and the administration — the only edit that was made to those points by the White House, and was also made by the State Department, was to change the word “consulate” to “diplomatic facility” since the facility in Benghazi had not — was not formally a consulate. Other than that, we worked off of the points that were provided by the intelligence community.”


And if that weren’t clear enough, recent testimony by Gen. Petraeus backed up the White House’s version of events in closed-door testimony before congress. Rep. Peter King (R-NY), a harsh critic of the President, spoke with reporters after the testimony and said that Gen. Petraeus told the committee that the CIA approved the talking points after they were edited and said it was “Okay for it to go.” When asked if he was upset about Al Qaeda being removed, he said that he was not, according to King.

Ordinarily that would suffice to quell speculation about some far-ranging conspiracy to murder American diplomats and sweep the scandal under the rug. But Fox News was never interested in the facts in the first place. They have latched unto this invented controversy to damage the President and they don’t intend to let go merely because the truth contradicts their narrative.