Fox Nation vs. Reality: The IRS Commish On ObamaCare

Posted by on August 1, 2013 at 7:35 pm. 4 Comments :

Fox News must have a battalion of glassy-eyed interns locked up in a basement somewhere watching congressional hearings all day to find snippets of testimony that they can deceitfully distort. And one of those scalawags is gonna find an extra lump of high fructose corn syrup in his satchel for this one:

Fox Nation

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Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Community’s Assault on Truth

During a House Ways and Means Committee hearing on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), the Commissioner of the IRS, David Werfel, was asked a question regarding the application of the law to IRS staff. Texas Republican Rep. Sam Johnson asked, “Why are your employees trying to exempt themselves from the very law that you’re tasked to enforce?”

To be clear, the issue was not really about any request to be exempted from the existing terms of the law. It was actually about an amendment offered by another Republican, Dave Camp of Michigan. Camp’s proposal would force federal workers into ObamaCare exchanges, and out of the federal health care plans they currently have. So what the IRS employees were requesting was that Camp’s amendment be rejected so that they could keep the plans they are on now, which is what President Obama had intended in the bill as it was passed. Camp’s attempt to amend the bill would profoundly alter the impact it would have on federal employees. Not surprisingly, they opposed this change, as did Commissioner Werfel who responded saying…

“[W]e have right now, as employees of the government or the IRS, affordable health care coverage. I think the ACA was designed to provide an option or an alternative for individuals that do not. And all else being equal, I think if you’re an individual who is satisfied with your health care coverage, you’re probably in a better position to stick with that coverage […] I would prefer to stay with the current policy that I’m pleased with rather than go through a change if I don’t need to.”

Exactly. The President has said many times that one of the features of ObamaCare was that people who were satisfied with their current plan would be able to keep it. Those without coverage, or who were not satisfied with the coverage they had, would have the option of shopping for a plan through the new exchanges. The effort by the GOP to screw with that formula was designed to sabotage the whole program.

So contrary to the false quote by the Fox Nationalists, the IRS commissioner never said that he didn’t want ObamaCare. He was saying that he didn’t want the Camp amendment that would force him and his department into a situation where they had fewer options than the law presently provides.

This is all a part of the larger strategy that the GOP is deploying to sabotage ObamaCare before it even gets underway. That strategy includes forty meaningless votes in the House to repeal the law, threats to withhold funding for it, and amendments to cripple or deform it. And, as always, Fox News is ready to lend a hand with any misinformation and propaganda that they might need.

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Seriously? Fox News Complains About Liberal Media Attacking Fox News

Posted by on August 1, 2013 at 2:14 pm. 6 Comments :

The Fox News interview of Reza Aslan, author of Zealot, was one of the most pathetic displays of journalistic bias and incompetence in recent memory. The interviewer, Lauren Green, has been roundly and deservedly criticized for her amateurish attempt to ambush her guest and foment a fake controversy. The response from media professionals has been been nearly unanimous that Fox botched the affair.

However, Fox, true to form, stiffens their back and refuses to accept responsibility for an embarrassing episode and slink away with some sense of humility. They have characteristically fought back with ferocious intensity, defending their anchor and slandering their guest. Numerous articles have already appeared on FoxNews.com, but the full-on blitzkrieg took place on the air with anchor Shannon Bream fluffing the head of the uber-rightist Media Research Center, Brent Bozell.

Bozell led off his sycophantic exculpation by declaring that “I’ll be the first one to applaud Lauren Green for the question that she asked.” Bozell insisted that it was entirely appropriate to impugn Aslan repeatedly while ignoring any actual discussion of his book. He further asserted that Aslan should have confessed to having a bias, saying that…

“If he is going to take the attitude that he is just a scholar, he just happens to be Muslim, that he really doesn’t care about this issue so much, he’s not a very good Muslim.”

Bozell, a devout Catholic, may not be the best person to make that judgment. But more to the point, Aslan is indeed taking the attitude that he is a scholar who happens to be Muslim. Therefore, according to Bozell, he is not biased. Bozell actually seems to be complaining that Aslan isn’t more deferential to his faith, in which case he would be a “good” Muslim and biased. But Aslan isn’t cooperating with Bozell’s conspiracy theory.

As for anchor Shannon Bream, she could not have been more complicit with Bozell’s determined smear tactics. She opened her report saying…

“It started out with very far-left media questioning Lauren, criticizing her, saying she shouldn’t have asked the question, or that it was any of her business what his prerogative may have been on writing the book. It then trickled out into more and more mainstream media and it’s taken on a life of its own – the discussion about Lauren versus the book or the author.”

In point of fact, not a single critic ever suggested that Green should not have asked Aslan about his faith or his motivation. The criticism was that she never stopped asking about it. She obsessed over it despite his having answered her several times. Then Bream has the gall to complain that the story in the media was more focused on Green than on the book. That’s exactly what Aslan complained about throughout Green’s ridiculous interview.

The blockheaded incoherence exhibited by Green, Bream, and Bozell, was illustrated perfectly by the graphic that Fox displayed during Bozell’s segment. It read, “Liberal media attacks Fox reporter.”

Fox News
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In case you’ve been stationed on a lunar base for the past several years, Fox whining about attacks from the liberal media is evidence that their cerebral cortexes have atrophied. Fox has been on a non-stop campaign of attacking every other media outlet as dishonest, dangerous, even treasonous, since the day they launched. Fox’s slogan, “fair and balanced,” is itself an assault on the integrity of their competitors. For a sampling of how Fox deals with their media peers…..

  • Liberal media spin Benghazi scandal to protect Team Obama
  • Scandals raise new questions about liberal media bias
  • Gosnell had an accomplice in murders — the liberal media
  • Liberal media will ‘shut you down, stab you, kill you, fire you’ if you disagree
  • Liberal media lash out at Romney for daring to criticize Obama
  • Liberal media lavish praise on Obama but mercilessly mock Rubio
  • Did Liberal Media Plot Against Sarah Palin?
  • Bias Bash: Liberal Media slam possible conservative suitors
  • Bozell: Liberal Media Censoring Information About ObamaCare
  • Liberal media attacks as Woodward ‘threat’ seen as political threat to Obama
  • What the Liberal Media Are Missing
  • Racism charges a first-class way for liberal media to attack
  • Liberal media’s hateful obsession with Sarah Palin
  • Liberal Media Admits ‘The Democrats Have Lost on Sequestration
  • Liberal Media’s Dilemma Covering Obama’s Libya Decision
  • The Liberal Media’s Assault on Christianity
  • Opinion: The Liberal Media Loved Obama To Death
  • Liberal Media Panic Reaches Boiling Point

This list could go on and on. And it doesn’t even include the personal attacks leveled by Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Eric Bolling, the Fox & Friends crew, etc. Fox spends more time on attacking the rest of the media than they do on reporting the news. But to be fair, they hardly ever report actual news, so that isn’t a particularly revealing criticism.


Tea Party Poopers: Old, White, Evangelical, Men Spell Doom For The GOP

Posted by on July 31, 2013 at 7:48 pm. 15 Comments :

Tea PartyThe fortunes of the Tea Party have declined considerably since their founding a couple of years ago. Majorities of Americans view them unfavorably and they have caused some notable electoral losses where otherwise a conservative Republican was expected to win.

A new survey by Pew Research reveals an even more troubling future if you’re an aspiring Republican. The survey indicates that most Republicans want to see their Party change. As a group there is some ambiguity about the direction of the change with some wanting to shift further right, and others wanting to become more moderate. However, when looking at the Tea Party, the favored direction is crystal clear. They want Republicans to be more conservative and less willing to compromise with Democratic colleagues.

In addition to the starkly partisan bent of the Tea Party, the survey also shows that they regard themselves as more likely to vote, particularly in primaries. That’s incredibly good news for Tea Partiers – and Democrats. For example, polls show Sarah Palin as the favorite for the Republican nomination for the senate in Alaska. However, the same poll shows her getting crushed by Democratic incumbent, Mark Begich.

On almost every issue – immigration, abortion, marriage equality, guns – the Tea Party is decidedly more right-wing. They advocate the most conservative policies across the board, and are the least accommodating to negotiations with Democrats. The problem this presents to the GOP is that their current batch of representatives have actual records that contain evidence of legislative bargaining. That is anathema to the Teabaggers. Consequently, they are more likely to back opponents in Republican primaries to oust the offending members.

Stalwart conservatives like Lamar Alexander and Mitch McConnell are already drawing primary challengers. Tea Partiers are blasting them as liberals who are in league with President Obama’s mission to destroy America. It takes a pretty hefty serving of delusion to accuse McConnell, who declared that his highest priority was to make Obama a one-term president, of being a progressive partner to the President.

Should the extremist faction of the party prevail, they will create opportunities for Democrats to swoop in and grab a seat they would not have otherwise had a chance to win. Just ask Senators Claire McCaskill and Joe Donnelly, or even Harry Reid. And the Republicans in congress are already setting the stage for defeat. They have the lowest favorable ratings in history, and they are responding to that by threatening to shut the government down, wasting time with meaningless votes, and performing in ridiculous pseudo-scandal hearings.

The most obvious differentiating characteristics of the Tea Party is that they are older, whiter, more devoutly Christian, and more likely to be men. That puts them at odds with the general population. Therefore, while they may enjoy some primary victories, the general elections will be more problematic. They are out of sync with the electorate both demographically and ideologically.

Last year Democrats defied the odds and toughed out some unexpected wins. In a year that many predicted would be bloody for them, Democrats gained seats in both the House and the Senate, and of course, Obama won reelection. Some of the credit for that goes to Tea Party Republicans who simply had no chance of carrying their races. And now they seem hell-bent on repeating that performance. Democrats should be prepared to send thank you notes to the GOP in November of 2014 if this trend keeps up.

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REVEALED: Here Is Why Sarah Palin Crawled Back To Fox News

Posted by on July 31, 2013 at 1:08 pm. 29 Comments :

Sarah PalinLast month the media world was stunned – er, scratch that – bored by news that Sarah Palin had re-signed with Fox News after a very public falling out. It was pretty well known by insiders that Fox had low-balled Palin and that her acceptance of the offer months later was proof of her desperation (and Fox’s too).

Now we have evidence of another factor in Palin’s supplication to Fox. And it points to precisely what any Palin watcher would have expected: Sarah Palin PAC Takes Fundraising Nosedive.

That’s right. It’s all about money for the Grifter from the North. The Center for Public Integrity reports that Palin’s PAC has brought in less than half of her take by this time in 2012, and less than a third of 2011’s first half earnings. The difference is that in both of the prior years she still had her perch at Fox News. The first six months of this year Palin was nearly invisible. Consequently, her ability to con gullible Tea Party rubes out of their meager funds was greatly diminished. Even in her home state of Alaska she is not regarded favorably. Recent polls show her getting crushed by incumbent Democratic Senator Mark Begich.

Fox News has long been a Republican ATM where conservatives would go to hawk their Apocalypse Accessories and beg for donations so that they could save the world from communism, Islam, gays, blacks, and, of course, our gay, black, Muslim, communist president, Barack Obama. The Palin debacle will now serve as a warning to right-wingers that they cannot dismiss the power of Fox News. It is the source of their strength and they will wither and die without it.

Also notable in the CPI report is that Palin was especially stingy with her declining wealth. She virtually ignored her political pals, instead choosing to spend “the vast majority of that money on consultants, travel, speechwriting and other logistical fees.”

Palin’s financial woes will help to keep the GOP establishment in line. They know now that they must acquiesce to the omnipotence of Fox. They must appear at will, and they must recite the doctrine just as they are told. Should they try to rebel they will suffer just as Sister Sarah did.

This represents an unprecedented and frightening transfer of power from authentic public leaders to a giant media conglomerate with an obvious political mission. And the fact that Fox can continue to operate without being compelled to declare their donations of airtime as in-kind campaign contributions, illustrates how deformed our political and media institutions have become.

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The “Phony Scandal” Division At Fox News Has Lost Its Mind

Posted by on July 30, 2013 at 11:00 pm. 4 Comments :

Deep in the basement of Fox News headquarters in New York, there is windowless suite of offices staffed with social misfits who shun sunlight and reason. They have been trained by specialists in disinformation and propaganda to manipulate stories and statements in a manner that reflects badly on President Obama and his administration.

The “Phony Scandals Unit” (PSU) has been busy during Obama’s term as president. Their production has been industrious and creative. Some of their notable achievements include Fast and Furious, Solyndra, New Black Panthers, Benghazi, and Tea Party targeting at the IRS. Of course, none of these have been associated with the White House, but that’s beside the point. The PSU’s purpose is not to report factually. It is to create suspicion and innuendo, and to give useless members of congress excuses to conduct frivolous hearings.

However, something is obviously wrong with the PSU team. While their previous scandal output was weak and contrived, it managed to draw the attention of the media to some degree. But their current projects seem to be lacking in plausibility to the extent that the whole division could become an embarrassment. For instance…

Hurtful Tax Cuts

The GOP has spent decades defining itself as the enemy of taxes in any form. No matter what the state of the economy, they advocate cutting taxes as the best way forward. In boom times or bust, it’s cut, cut cut, those taxes. After all, the government doesn’t need any money to operate or provide services or fight wars. If children starve of senior citizens suffer, it’s their own fault for not being wealthy.

So what might have caused the anti-tax Republicans to suddenly advance the notion that a corporate tax cut would hurt small businesses?

Fox News Tax Cut

How could this happen when tax cuts are deemed by the GOP to be ordained by God? The answer is that the corporate tax cuts in question were proposed by President Obama, and the only doctrine that Republicans adhere to more strictly than tax cuts, is to oppose Obama regardless of what he says. So as soon as he proposed cutting taxes, Fox’s PSU went to work.

Government Nudging

The PSU was working overtime to uncover a clandestine White House operation that they contend has a sinister mission. The “Behavioral Insights Team” is alleged by Fox wingnuts to be a Svengali-like operation charged with “tweaking behavior so people do everything from saving more for retirement to saving more in energy costs.” Saints preserve us. It’s the devil’s work.

Fox News Nudge Squad

The seeds of this dastardly plot lay in the work of a former White House aide, Cass Sunstein. He actually wrote the book “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.” Glenn Beck, when he was still on Fox News, had singled Sunstein out as “the most dangerous man in America.” And with good reason. The tactics about which he wrote could be used to get people to pay their taxes on time, or buckle their seat belts, or “say no to drugs” (thanks Nancy “the Nudge” Reagan).

The IRS Army

Finally, The right wing freakout hit a new low with the folks at Fox Nation, who are prone to freaking out without much encouragement. It appears that the number of agents at the IRS was a problem for the conservatives who hate the agency anyway.

Fox Nation IRS Army

So the PSU and the Fox Nationalists looked around and found that there were other organizations that had fewer people than the IRS. For some reason they settled on the German army as their comparison. Certainly they had no intention of implying anything.

Now, what does the number of German soldiers have to do with the number of IRS agents? Absolutely nothing. The IRS staff is determined by the workload and operational efficiencies. It’s requirements are in no way similar to those of the German military. General Motors has twice as many employees as either of them. So what? Walmart has 20 times as many employees. Does that suggest something evil about Walmart? Well, that might be a bad example.

Aside from being irrelevant, The story is wrong. It assumes that every employee of the IRS is an agent. Obviously that would come as news to the accountants, secretaries, lawyers, computer techs, file clerks, etc. This phony scandal is almost as idiotic as the one when Fox fear mongers said that the IRS was hiring thousands of armed agents to enforce ObamaCare.

Conclusion

What these three stories tell us is that the ability of the Phony Scandals Unit has deteriorated substantially. They are apparently incapable of developing a new scandal that isn’t laughably asinine. If this is the standard for the types of scandals that Fox News will be foisting on the American public for the next couple of years, then we are in for some rollicking good times. I can’t wait to see what they will cook up for Hillary. Perhaps it will have something to do with the buttons on her pants suits transmitting state secrets to the planet Kardash.


Stephen Colbert On The Tea Party Burning ObamaCare Cards That Don’t Exist

Posted by on July 30, 2013 at 5:00 pm. 2 Comments :

The Tea-publican brain trust is at it again. It’s not enough that they campaigned feverishly to prevent the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) from becoming law; followed by an eye-popping 40 useless, symbolic votes in the House of Representatives to repeal the law; followed by Republican-led states refusing to participate in the health exchanges, transferring responsibility to the federal government they claim to hate; followed by efforts to intimidate schools, libraries, and sports teams from helping to educate Americans about a program that is available to them that can save money and even lives. And of course, Fox News is at the forefront of this festival of disinformation.

Fox News
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Nope. None of that was enough. So now they are embarking on a coordinated campaign to convince people that they should not sign up for ObamaCare when it becomes available. That’s right…If you are a young person with no health care, a family with over-priced private insurance, a patient with a preexisting condition, a senior on a fixed income, the GOP thinks you should forgo the benefits to which you are entitled and risk having expensive medical costs keep you from getting necessary care, or drive you into bankruptcy. Nice of them isn’t it.

The centerpiece of their campaign is a program to get people to burn their ObamaCare cards. There’s just one problem with that – as Stephen Colbert reveals, there is no such thing as ObamaCare cards. But never fear, the folks at the Koch-funded Tea Party asylum, FreedomWorks, are planning to make their own cards which will be suitable for burning. Watch Colbert spell out out the whole process works:

This is so typical of how the right works. Their most fervent desire is to see people suffer, rather than adjust their demented viewpoints. That’s true with regard to health care. It’s true with regard to the economy and jobs. It’s true with regard to foreign policy. And it’s really kind of depressing that so many people fall for it. Thank goodness for Colbert whose perspective on this sort of lunacy can bring laughter back into the debate, along with a big scoop of wisdom.

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Fox News Inadvertently Proves Phoniness Of Phony Scandals

Posted by on July 29, 2013 at 11:13 pm. 18 Comments :

When President Obama correctly noted that Republicans have spent an inordinate amount of time obsessing over so-called “scandals,” rather than addressing the real issues that matter most to Americans, it touched off a spate of pundits spending an inordinate amount of time obsessing over Obama’s remarks, rather than addressing real news.

Fox News, of course, created a bunch of fancy new graphics with scary fonts alerting their perpetually frightened viewers that the President had called a bunch of phony scandals phony. Which makes it all the more delicious that a Fox News contributor pulled the veil aside this morning and exposed the fallacy at the center of one of the alleged scandals.

Radio loudmouth Lars Larson squared off with Democratic strategist Mark Hannah over the question of whether the IRS targeting of Tea Partiers was a legitimate scandal. The answer is obvious in that the GOP, despite a concerted witch hunt, has never found the least bit of evidence that the White House was connected to any of it.

The real scandal in all of this is that most of the groups seeking tax-exempt status, whether from the left or the right, should never have received it. They are overtly political operations disguising their activities as educational or charitable. They deserve to be scrutinized and rejected. They are the detritus of the Citizens United decision that effectively legalized special interest and corporate influence peddling. But this larger question always seemed to get lost in the skirmish over trivialities. Until today.

Near the end of what was otherwise a typical cable news spitting match, Larson let his guard down and expectorated some truth:

Did you catch that? Larson admitted that the activities of the Tea Partiers are political. And as Hannah astutely noted, that is not permitted under the law that governs tax exempt organizations. Here is the transcript:

Larson: The fact is that those groups were delayed. The law says that they are supposed to get an answer within 180 days. Some of them were delayed up to 27 months. And they described in detail to congress what those delays do in an election year to the ability of political groups to engage in politics, which is protected by the Constitution.

Hannah: You mean social welfare organizations, right?

Larson: No. I’m telling you that when they go out to educate people about the issues.

Hannah: They’re not allowed to be political.

To be clear, this was not a gaffe. This was an accidental articulation of the truth. Larson even brushed back Hannah’s polite (and somewhat snarky) correction before stumbling toward a step-back. The IRS is entirely justified in denying preferential tax treatment to these sort of groups, and they should be even more aggressive in doing so. And now we have a conservative on Fox News making the need for enforcement and reform abundantly clear.

This is precisely why Citizens United is so dangerous. It allows Super PACs to game the system, collect unlimited donations from conflicted parties, and keep their identities secret. And while pretending to be non-partisan, social welfare organizations, they brazenly engage in political activities. Everyone in politics knows it and, on occasion, when they aren’t carefully watching their words, it slips out.

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Limbaugh And Hannity Getting Heaved From 40+ Radio Stations: Glenn Beck Nervous

Posted by on July 29, 2013 at 8:30 am. 15 Comments :

Limbaugh Hannity
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Earlier this year a fierce feud broke out between Rush Limbaugh and one of his radio distributors, Cumulus Media. The Cumulus CEO, Lew Dickey, went public with his observation that Limbaugh’s vulgar misogyny and hate speech was sending advertisers fleeing. Dickey told the company’s shareholders that they were losing millions of dollars as a result of an audience and advertiser boycott that began after Limbaugh had called student activist Sandra Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute”

Limbaugh took umbrage at the suggestion that his boorishness was responsible for the lost ads and threatened to take his program elsewhere. However, it seems that Cumulus has beaten him to the punch according to sources who spoke to Politico, who say that Cumulus will drop both Limbaugh and Sean Hannity by year’s end:

“Cumulus has decided that it will not renew its contracts with either host, the source said, a move that would remove the two most highly rated conservative talk personalities from more than 40 Cumulus channels in major markets.”

There is the possibility that the parties are still posturing in an attempt to secure better deals, but Politco’s sources say that Limbaugh’s syndicator is unlikely to come down to a figure that Cumulus would accept. Cumulus, in the meantime, has been scouting new talent for replacement hosts. And when 48 of your 50 biggest advertisers have directed that their ads not be placed on Limbaugh and Hannity, Cumulus has little incentive to negotiate.

If Limbaugh and Hannity are evicted from their radio perches at the Cumulus stations they currently occupy, their distributor, Clear Channel, will likely find them new digs on their own Premier network. This move will not be without a fair amount of turbulence. The shows could go dark for some weeks or months while new stations are found and the contracts of the hosts residing there are unwound. Which raises another problem that is probably keeping Glenn Beck up tonight. That’s because Premiere already distributes Beck who broadcasts at the same time as Limbaugh. So if Limbaugh is moved to the Premiere stations it may be Beck who is shoved aside.

While there is a certain amount of schadenfreude derived from watching these rightist dinosaurs flailing in the tar pits of their own making, the end result is not much prettier a picture. Limbaugh and Hannity are likely to land somewhere eventually. And Cumulus could replace them with Mike Huckabee, Mark Levin, and/or Michael Savage. So the airwaves will end up with just as much repugnant blather. But the show will have an entertaining, if too brief, intermission.


Fox News Presents: Islamophobia On Parade

Posted by on July 28, 2013 at 3:57 pm. 9 Comments :

For years Fox News has been the central clearinghouse for bigoted attacks on the Islamic faith. They have featured anchors and guests who assert that all Muslims are terrorists. They openly oppose freedom of religion when it is Muslims who are seeking it (remember the Ground Zero Mosque?). They virulently assault any person or group who advocates tolerance and cooperation with peaceful Islamic representatives, including American citizens. And this week they demonstrated their repugnant hatred once again.

On Friday, Sean Hannity converted his Fox News program into a liberal bashing festival of hate and deceit. He assembled a studio panel heavily weighted to conservative extremists to take on the subject of “Saving America.”

For some reason, the task of saving America had much to do with Anthony Weiner’s troubled campaign for mayor of New York City. There was little controversy on this matter since every participant agreed that Weiner’s behavior was unconscionable. However, one participant was critical of the debate because she felt it distracted from a much bigger problem:

Brooke Goldstein: “What’s amazing to me is that we’re spending time debating ‘Shmecklegate’ when Huma Abedin, who has connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, who is connected to the chief financier of Al Qaeda, is his wife and has top security clearance.”

To which Hannity replied: “This is a great point.”

Goldstein is regurgitating, and Hannity is concurring with, a long ago debunked lunacy that was invented by noted Islamophobe, Pamela Geller. The falsehood that Abedin is a Muslim Brotherhood double agent in the Obama administration has been spread by the likes of David Horowitz, Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann, Steve King, and more. These cretins stuck to their slander even after GOP House Speaker John Boehner called their remarks “dangerous,” and Sen. John McCain slammed them as “an unwarranted and unfounded attack on an honorable citizen, a dedicated American, and a loyal public servant.”

Later on Fox News, anchor Lauren Green conducted an interview with author Reza Aslan whose new book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, explores the historical life of Jesus. Aslan is professor of religion with four degrees (including one in the New Testament) and twenty years experience studying, teaching, and writing about world religions. Nevertheless, the only thing that Green thought was relevant to the discussion was that Aslan is also a Muslim.

Green berated Aslan repeatedly about why he would write a book about Jesus. She seemed to be unable to comprehend that a scholar with impressive credentials in the subject would concern himself with a major historical religious figure who was not of his faith. Aslan politely pointed out that it is his job as an academic to write about these things. But after numerous efforts, Green continued to question his motives.

After enduring this barrage of nonsense, Aslan addressed it specifically wondering aloud why, instead of discussing the content of his book, they were arguing about whether he had a right to write it. He also pointed out that Green’s insinuations that he would have a negative bias toward Christianity were absurd considering that his mother and his wife are both Christians. But none of this seemed to have an effect on Green’s determination to find something sinister in Aslan’s intentions.

At one point, Aslan touched on an obvious hypocrisy in Green’s questioning. He wondered whether she would have any problem with a Christian author writing a book about Mohammed. As it turns out, a colleague of Pamela Geller, and the director of the anti-Islam Jihad Watch, Robert Spencer, wrote a book titled “The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion.” The title pretty much gives away the perspective of the author. However, that didn’t stop Fox News from interviewing him on numerous occasions. He has appeared on Hannity, Glenn Beck, Happening Now, and Fox & Friends, among others. They even identified this obviously biased Christian on the air as an “expert in Islamic law and history.”

Fox News

So, for some reason Fox considers it OK for a Christian extremist to write a viciously derogatory book about Muslims, but they find it totally inappropriate for a respected academic, who happens to be Muslim, to write fair and balanced historical look at Christianity. If there was ever any ambiguity as to whether Fox News harbored overt religious prejudice, these incidents should put the question to rest.

[Update] Media Matters has dug into the background of Fox anchor Lauren Green and found that she has reported on Muslims on several occasions despite being a devout Christian. She even wrote that only Christians can be truthful journalists:

“Journalists’ first obligation is to seek truth, and the only way absolute truth can be found is by measuring humanity’s idea of truth against God’s standards, she said. Therefore, the only way for a journalist to achieve ultimate success is to hold to the Christian faith.”

This really helps to explain the astonishingly twisted behavior of Green during her segment with Aslan. She doesn’t believe that Aslan, or any non-Christian, is capable of telling the truth. And this is the sort of openly bigoted reporter that Fox employs.


Phony Scandals? Sarah Palin Brings Her “Redneck Whiteboard” To Fox News

Posted by on July 27, 2013 at 1:49 pm. 39 Comments :

As they are wont to do, Fox News is again ginning up outrage over a sentence fragment uttered by President Obama. And as usual, Fox not only misrepresents what the President said, they completely fail to grasp the meaning of his larger point. The fragment in question was…

“With this endless parade of distractions and political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball.”

The President was referring to the failure of Washington to address the issues that Americans are concerned about most: the economy and jobs. He has tried numerous times to guide the attention of legislators to these matters, but has been met with obstructionism and distractions. Then when he makes high profile speeches to get citizens involved, he accused of “pivoting” to the economy despite his frequent efforts to address it. And it goes without saying that if he were not to talk about the economy, the same people would accuse him of ignoring it.

However, the really big deal, according to the media and Obama’s political foes, is his use of the phrase “phony scandals.” The right-wing media calliope has gone into convulsive fits over what is a demonstrably accurate description of current events. Whether it’s Benghazi, the IRS, ObamaCars (yes, cars), or frantic allegations that the Department of Homeland Security is trying to buy up all the bullets in America, Fox News has been feverishly promoting trumped-up Republican schemes to throw the President off his game.

Fox News has featured several guests who they contend were victims of one scandal or another. They predictably tell their stories with great passion and umbrage. The complaint Fox has is that by using the word “phony” Obama is saying that the tragedy in Benghazi, for instance, didn’t happen. But that’s simply untrue. He is saying that the allegation of a scandal is phony. And that is true. Despite their caterwauling, there has never been any connection to the White House for any of these so-called scandals. They are transparent attempts to sabotage the administration of government by a president they never considered legitimate.

Enter Sarah Palin. The recently re-employed pundit appeared with her pal, Greta Van Susteren, and introduced her latest wingnut innovation, the “Redneck Whiteboard.” The segment was preceded by a two minute long anti-Obama campaign commercial produced by Fox News. If you have the stomach for it, the video is below.

Fox News Sarah Palin

Palin rattled on furiously about how Obama has been given a free ride. She reached back to her 2008 campaign when she contends that she was muzzled by her handlers and “was banned from talking about Jeremiah Wright and Obama’s friend, Bill Ayres.”

“This is important for Americans to understand. I was not allowed to talk about things like that because those elitists, those who are the brainiacs in the GOP machine running John McCain’s campaign at the time, said that the media would eat us alive if we brought up these things. So what did that get us, though? What that got us this kind of complacency and self-censoring of a campaign where we weren’t allowed to tell the truth about who this candidate was, Barack Obama.”

[Update: PolitiFact rated Palin’s claim of being muzzled a Pants-On-Fire Lie]

Of course. It was Sarah Palin being prevented from talking about Rev. Wright that caused Benghazi. It was the suppression of Palin’s “palling around with terrorists” theme that led to Fast and Furious (a Bush administration policy) and Tea Party targeting by the IRS. It’s all about Sarah, after all. Had she been able to hammer Obama freely on his Kenyan birth, America would be enjoying the most prosperous renaissance in history. She went on to hold up an envelope on which she had scrawled a list of the aforementioned phony scandals and said…

“What it got us was a list of these scandals. This is kind of the redneck version of one of those elitist tactics of Karl Rove, how he uses his white board. This is the redneck version of a white board. And on this list the scandals that are destroying America.”

It’s just fascinating to watch conservatives dumbing down their messages to their mentally challenged constituents. It started with Fox News deploying bright colors, hypnotic motion graphics, and game show sound effects. Then Glenn Beck devolved by eschewing modern electronics in favor of an old school blackboard. Then Karl Rove dug deeper by making use of a hand-held whiteboard. Now Palin sucker punches Rove with her redneck version, something even the most remedial Teabagger can understand. Obviously these people know their audience and, therefore, continually craft their communications to match their intellectual level (which is at about the 4th grade, according to the super-secret, exalted, conservative message masters).

I just wonder what’s next. Hand signals and a series of grunts? Given the importance of conveying that Obama is destroying America, the right needs to make sure that their message is received and understood. And that’s why they have adopted intellectual giants like Plain, Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh, Bachmann, Trump, etc., as their thought leaders. It’s a strategy aimed at taking America back – to the Dark Ages, when science was considered blasphemy, and education was reserved for the aristocrats.