Coronavirus

Fox News Piñata, Peter Doocy, Gets Psaki Bombed for ‘Loaded and Inaccurate Question’

Posted by on July 16, 2021 at 4:53 pm. 3 Comments :

If there’s one thing that Peter Doocy of Fox News should get credit for, it’s his tolerance for being made to look like an utter fool over and over again, without showing the slightest bit of the embarrassment that most other human beings would experience. He takes a beating and keeps on licking his wounds as if he’s actually enjoying the humiliation.

Psaki Lightening

Like a masochist unable to control his perverse compulsions, Doocy keeps coming back for more. On Friday he drenched himself in disgrace again by asking White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki a question that had to have been market tested by a committee in the bowels of the Fox News Propaganda Factory:

Doocy: For how long has the administration been spying on people’s Facebook profiles looking for vaccine misinformation?

Seriously? Doocy’s assertion that the administration is “spying” on Facebook profiles was pulled straight from his asinine notebook of nonsense questions. And this one was a slow pitch right across the strike zone for Psaki who replied…

Psaki: That is quite a loaded and inaccurate question, which I would refute.
Doocy: Inaccurate how?
Psaki: Well, Peter, first of all, as you know we’re in regular touch with a range of media outlets … as we are in regular touch with social media platforms. This is publicly open information, people sharing information online. Just as you are all reporting information on your news stations.

Psaki had addressed this issue on Thursday in stark detail. She spoke about the unprecedented finding by the Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, that vaccine disinformation is a serious threat to public health. Her remarks included how the Biden administration is working to counter potentially deadly anti-vaccine propaganda. She explained in clear and concise terms that the federal government is not commanding or controlling Facebook. Nor is it colluding with them to attack political foes. They are merely alerting them to posts that Facebook itself deems harmful, something every Facebook user can do. But that wasn’t sufficient for Doocy, who came back on Friday, clearly still confused and thirsting for more punishment:

Doocy: Okay, so these 12 people you have on list, do they know that somebody at the Surgeon General’s office is going through their profiles?
Psaki: I’m happy to get you the citation of where that comes from. There’s no secret list.

Doocy was referring to the 12 people who are responsible for 65% of the online disinformation about vaccines. Psaki mentioned it on Thursday, so Doocy had the time to look it up and come prepared on Friday. He chose not to. Had he done so he would have found that it was not a government list, but one produced by the private non-profit Center for Countering Digital Hate. And despite his deliberate fear mongering, there is nothing untoward about being apprised of harmful disinformation online so that legal countermeasures can be taken to save lives. Psaki attempted to educate Doocy saying that…

Psaki: Our biggest concern here – and frankly I think it should be your biggest concern – is the number of people who are dying around the country because they are getting misinformation that is leading them to not take a vaccine. Young people, old people, kids, children, a lot of them are being impacted by misinformation.

However, Doocy wasn’t having any of it. Still unable to grasp the simplest notion that government has a responsibility to protect its citizens from scammers and con artists, he went off on a tangent about “Big Brother” watching you. Psaki concluded by patronizing Doocy. “If you have the data to back that up,” she offered, “I’m happy to discuss it.” For his part, Doocy left the briefing room and did a remote on Fox News that confirmed that he completely failed to comprehend everything Psaki had just said:

“The White House is now trying to change the conversation from ‘is the Biden Administration censoring people’ to ‘is Facebook killing people.'”

Fer chrissakes. That display of incoherence isn’t even worth responding to.

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

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

Trump World Freaks Out Over Jen Psaki ‘Flagging’ Anti-Vax Disinformation on Facebook

Posted by on July 15, 2021 at 5:40 pm. 3 Comments :

The curmudgeons of the Cult of Donald Trump continue to be obsessed with insuring that the American people preserve their freedom to die – and to kill others – due to their politically driven and mindless opposition to getting vaccinated. That perverse expression of pseudo-patriotism has already resulted in regional spikes of COVID-19 infections, hospitalization, and deaths, in Republican counties and states throughout the nation.

Jen Psaki, Donald Trump

Consistent with that stubborn embrace of suicide-by-pandemic, the anti-vax brigades on social media have affixed themselves to a sentence fragment from Thursday’s White House press briefing. Press Secretary Jen Psaki was addressing the profusion of purposeful lies about the pandemic, and the vaccines that prevent it, that are being posted on Facebook and other social media platforms. She was highlighting the unprecedented finding by the Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, that vaccine disinformation is a serious threat to public health. Her remarks included how the Biden administration is working to counter anti-vax propaganda, most of which is spread by a few dogged online hoaxters. She said in part that…

“In terms of actions that we’re working to take from the federal government, we’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General’s office. We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. We’re working with doctors and medical professionals … to get trusted content out there.”

And that…

“Facebook needs to move more quickly to remove harmful, violative posts. Posts that would be within their policy for removal often would remain up for days. That’s too long. The information spreads too quickly.”

All of that would would appear to be a reasonable agenda to advance the health and safety of an at risk population. Unless, that is, you’re a right-wing Trump cultist intent on finding horrors nestled into every crevice of rational dialogue. And, unfortunately, there are way too many of them littering the InterTubes.

Consequently, an array of stupefied outrage has arisen online over Psaki’s remarks. The vax-averse trolls are aghast at what they call an affront to free speech. They are misinterpreting Psaki’s comments as government intrusion into Facebook’s private rights of expression. Which is peculiar considering they have also recently been supporting Trump’s ludicrous lawsuit aimed at undermining those rights. Fox News even featured Sean Hannity and Alan Dershowitz making asses of themselves while attempting to make that legal argument.

Other Inter-trolls are saying that Psaki is proposing censorship. Or that she is revealing a conspiracy between government and business to silence critics. Some are associating it with communism or fascism or some other repellent ideology that they don’t even know how to define.

For the benefit of the Trumpists, whose reading comprehension skills are sorely lacking, Psaki said none of that. The entirety of her comments were clearly describing an intention to “flag” (i.e. bring to the attention of) vaccine disinformation and outright lies that have the potential to cause real harm. She explicitly notes that the content she’s referring to is that which has already been identified – by Facebook – as violating their policies.

Psaki is not commanding or controlling Facebook. She isn’t colluding with them to attack political foes. She is doing nothing more than alerting them to posts that Facebook itself deems harmful and not permitted. These are not Psaki’s or Biden’s rules that are being violated. They are Facebook’s rules. And anyone – Psaki, Trump, and every Facebook user – can report a violative post. Facebook even has a “report” function on every post for people to do this on their own.

Nevertheless, the Trumpian crackpots are up in arms again, over an offense that exists only in their warped imaginations. It’s reminiscent of their freak out over Psaki allegedly dispatching door-to-door forced vaccinator squads. Which, of course, was never even remotely suggested. These nutballs are just ultra-sensitively tuned for hyperbolic rage spasms whenever something infects their pre-misconstrued thoughts. Sadly, in this matter it is likely to lead to unnecessary suffering and grief.

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

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

Tucker Carlson’s Insane Rant that Democrats Are Plotting to Censor Your Text Messages

Posted by on July 13, 2021 at 12:24 pm. 5 Comments :

STOP THE MADNESS! Fox News is demonstrating both their full blown devotion to the Cult of Trump and their impotence with regard to managing the worst purveyors of flagrantly dishonest propaganda and conspiracy crackpottery that populate their network. And both of those obscene circumstances come in the form of perpetually ticked off and furrow-browed Tucker Carlson.

Fox News. Tucker Carlson

On Monday night Carlson delivered another of hallmark harangues. The subject of this one was an atrocity that exists only in his diseased brain. Stepping off the ledge even further into dementia territory, Carlson is now alleging that Democrats are plotting to censor your text messages and other private communications. The very first paragraph was a study in professional bullshittery:

“Last March, as the first big clusters of coronavirus cases started to appear in this country, media executives in Silicon Valley coordinated with officials in Washington to determine how much the public was allowed to know about the growing epidemic that was killing them.”

So Carlson is alleging as fact that there was a convocation of media and techies to coordinate a blueprint for abridging freedom of speech. As usual, he doesn’t bother to present any proof of this gathering, but that’s only because there isn’t any. He went on to say that…

“Today we learned the Biden administration considers censorship is applicable to private speech as well. What you say in private, when you’re alone with your phone, you won’t be able to say or read what you want because the DNC plans to control – and apparently have the ability to control – the flow the information you receive on your phone.”

OMG! According to Carlson the Democratic National Committee can – and is – monitoring your text messages and is intent on censoring what you read and write. That would be horrifying, but for the fact that it’s a claim that isn’t remotely associated with reality. Carlson based the whole thing on an excerpt from an article in Politico that said…

“Biden allied groups, including the Democratic National Committee, are planning to engage fact-checkers more aggressively, and work with SMS carriers to dispel misinformation about vaccines that is sent over social media and text messages.”

Notice that there is nothing in that sentence that asserts any attempt to monitor or censor anything at all. The article was referring to Democratic organizations having ready responses to the potentially deadly lies being peddled by Republican operatives via mass SMS messaging. Liars like Carlson are understandably frightened by fact-checkers and initiatives aimed at disseminating the truth. Politico notes – and Carlson failed to acknowledge – that the goal is to counter right-wing misinformation. For example…

“Turning Point USA has also sent out SMS messages urging people to sign petitions on the topic [of vaccinations]. In one message, viewed by POLITICO, [TUSA Chief Charlie] Kirk contends, ‘Biden is sending goons DOOR-TO-DOOR to make you take a Covid-19 vaccine.'”

That, of course, is a blatant and dangerous lie. It’s fear mongering that has been all over Fox News for the past couple of weeks. And speaking of misinformation, Carlson is engaging in a new rebranding of “alternative facts” wherein he proclaims that “misinformation very often is factually true.” However, anyone with a smidgen of cognitive coherence knows that, by definition, misinformation is literally false. Unfortunately, that standard of cognition would exclude Carlson, who has his own definition of misinformation, and he exploits it to spread more irrational fear about life-saving vaccines:

“Misinformation is anything the Biden administration doesn’t want you to know – including, for example, how effective the COVID vaccines actually are, and what the potential side effects from them might be from taking them.”

Carlson went on to reveal his ignorance of virology – or deliberate deception – by asserting that vaccinated people have no reason to worry about unvaccinated people. “So why is official Washington so angry,” Carlson asks, “at the people who won’t get vaccinated? How precisely do they propose a threat? It makes you think that maybe none of this is really about COVID. Maybe it’s about social control.” No, Tucker, it makes you think that the more available hosts there are, the more the virus can mutant into variants that could put everyone, including vaccinated people, at risk.

Carlson is coming full circle and exposing his true agenda. It is all about “social control,” and his ludicrous claim that “Your private conversations will be controlled by the DNC.” Which he still has failed to affirm with any shred of evidence. But then, nobody expects Carlson to deal in facts, not even his Fox News or their lawyers who defended him court by arguing that no reasonable person would believe anything he says.

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

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

Psaki to GOP: Failure to Provide Accurate Public Health Info…is Literally Killing People

Posted by on July 9, 2021 at 5:01 pm. 4 Comments :

This week President Biden discussed his administration’s outreach program aimed at getting more people vaccinated against the coronavirus. The details were presented by Press Secretary Jen Psaki at the Daily Briefing on Tuesday. And that discussion triggered an ongoing freak out by Republicans and their mouthpieces on Fox News.

Jen Psaki

The frantic freaking is still in effect as Brian Kilmeade of Fox and Friends babbled deliriously about government goons who are “gonna knock on your door. They’re gonna demand that you take it. And they’re gonna give you a third shot.” Needless to say, that crackpot conspiracy exists only the minds of Kilmeade, his Fox confederates, and their dimwitted viewers.

But it doesn’t stop there. Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-QAnon) attended the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas on Friday and told an interviewer that Biden’s door-to-door informational effort is really just a prelude to the wholesale confiscation of every American’s guns and bibles:

If Cawthorn thinks that the “mechanisms” that would be in place to send the feds to every home in the country is an evil plot, I hope nobody tells him about the Census or the Post Office, who have been doing that for decades.

In the interest of providing a definitive rebuttal to this avalanche of asininity, posted below is Jen Psaki’s response (video and transcript) to a question on this subject by ABC News White House correspondent, Karen Travers. Psaki spells out precisely what the outreach program is and isn’t. Not that it will will satisfy the glassy-eyed cult followers of Donald Trump, but at least it can be referenced when needed to rebut the right-wing crazy:

Travers: There’s still pushback about the President’s comments about going door-to-door to encourage vaccination. The South Carolina Governor said today that “enticing, coercing, intimidating, mandating, or pressuring anyone to take the vaccine is bad policy that will deteriorate the public trust and confidence in the state’s efforts.”

And Gov. McMaster said he’s going to prohibit the state health agencies from using the administration’s targeted tactics. Can you respond to the Governor and explain what is being done and what is not being done in this outreach?

Psaki: Sure. Let me first say that the failure to provide accurate public health information, including the efficacy of vaccines and the accessibility of them to people across the country, including So. Carolina, is literally killing people. So maybe they should consider that.

But I would say that what this is, and what this is not, it is not federal employees going door-to-door. This is grassroots volunteers. This is members of the clergy. These are volunteers who believe people across the country, especially in low vaccinated areas, should have accurate information; should have information about where they can get vaccinated; where they can save their own lives and their neighbors’ lives and their family members’ lives.

That’s exactly what this is. It’s something that’s been going on since April. And it’s something where we’ve seen an impact in states where there are lower vaccination rates. So it’s something that we will continue to work with local groups to do. And it’s a disservice to the country, and to the people who may lose their lives, may lose family members, to provide inaccurate disinformation at a moment when we’re still fighting a pandemic.

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

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

Fox News Can’t Keep Its Lies Straight About Biden’s Vaccine Outreach Initiative

Posted by on July 9, 2021 at 11:57 am. 4 Comments :

As the nation continues to battle the deadly coronavirus pandemic that Donald Trump so badly mismanaged, Fox News continues to mislead their viewers and foment irrational fears based on outright lies. They have a burning obsession with finding fault for anything and everything President Biden does whether it’s real or not, and regardless of the harm it causes.

Donald Trump, Fox News, Coronavirus

On Friday morning’s episode of Fox and Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade unleashed another of his frantic, factless tirades aimed at disseminating a flagrantly false narrative about Biden. The subject was the President’s latest initiative to save American lives by promoting the safety, effectiveness, and availability of vaccines. Fox News and the Republican Party of Death have already been maligning this initiative, with some characterizing it as a Nazi-style infringement on freedom. And in the spirit of that insanity, Kilmeade said to…

“Ask yourself if you have a problem with this. They’re gonna knock on your door. They’re gonna demand that you take it. And they’re gonna give you a third shot.”

Of course, none of that has even a passing resemblance to the truth. Nevertheless, Kilmeade went on to rant that “It’s unbelievable how offensive his administration is getting with a pandemic that is clearly on the run.” Apparently Kilmeade hasn’t heard that the Delta variant of the virus is surging in (mostly Trump) parts of the country. For the first time in months the infection and hospitalization rates are going up.

However, in a rare display of honesty, another Fox News anchor delivered some factual information about the Biden outreach program. Gillian Turner interviewed Fox News contributor Marc Thiessen and presented him with what the program is actually doing. Thiessen, however, wasn’t moved:

Turner: In the Biden administration’s defense, they’re insisting with this door-to-door strategy they’re not showing up with needles. They’re not showing up with shots. Nothing is happening on your front doorstep in front of your neighbors. They are not gonna come jab you. But what they are trying to do is get information to you. They are trying to make sure that you know these shots are free, that you are eligible, where you can go to get one. It’s an information sharing operation, they say. Does that assuage some of your concern at all, or not really?
Thiessen: Not really. I don’t want people showing up on my doorstep before knowing my vaccine history.

Turner made some excellent points, putting the program’s mission into the proper context. So expect Fox News to make her disappear for a few weeks while she is undergoing reeducation. As for Thiessen, what the heck is he talking about? Does he want people to get his vaccine history before showing up on his doorstep? To be clear, the outreach program will not collect information about people’s vaccination status. It will be targeting geographic areas that are known to have low vaccination rates. And no one will be required to get a shot, or even listen to the volunteers in the field.

Thiessen went on to complain that Trump wasn’t included in a public service ad that featured all of the living former presidents promoting the vaccine. He implies that Trump was deliberately left out. There is, however, no proof of that. In fact, it was Trump who demonstrated his disinterest in promoting the vaccine (that he nevertheless claims credit for) by getting vaccinated secretly in January and not disclosing it until weeks after he left office.

Furthermore, Trump has declined all previous attempts to appear with the other former presidents. And when asked about his non-participation in this ad, Trump repeatedly refused to respond. That doesn’t sound like he was left out. Were that the case he would be whining about it ceaselessly and complaining about how mean everyone is to him.

Thiessen concedes that it is Trump country that is lagging in vaccinations. So he wonders why the Biden administration doesn’t recruit Trump to]“go to Mississippi and do a public service ad, or do something out there telling people to get vaccinated.” As if Trump would do anything at the request of the President that he has been yammering about for months, saying that he isn’t really the President. Turner reminds Thiessen that Trump “could also do that on his own” and that he doesn’t need “to wait for a formal invitation from the White House.”

I hope no one is holding their breath for Trump to visit Mississippi to help their residents get vaccinated and avoid severe illness and death. That would take time away from his golfing and his cult rallies where he pays tribute to himself, insults his critics, and perpetuates the “Big Lie: that the election was stolen from him. And everybody knows that those are his only priorities. He can’t be bothered with saving lives.

UPDATE: Press Secretary Jen Psaki makes it abundantly clear what the outreach program is all about:

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

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

Trump World FREAKS OUT Over Jen Psaki’s Community Outreach to Promote Vaccinations

Posted by on July 6, 2021 at 5:04 pm. 3 Comments :

The sensitivity setting for right-wing snowflakes has long been set at abnormally low levels. It doesn’t take much more than a subtle breeze to trigger a monsoon of outrage. Anything from gross misunderstanding of Critical Race Theory to the scandalous horror of “Dandelion-Gate” can set them off for weeks on end. And don’t even mention Donald Trump losing the election due to millions of dead, Mexican voters with bamboo ballots, who got free water while waiting in line to vote.

Donald Trump, Woman, Fear

At Tuesday’s White House press briefing, press secretary Jen Psaki announced a series of five measures to promote COVID vaccinations to those who have not yet gotten theirs. While the Biden program has been pretty successful, it just missed meeting a 70% goal for vaccinations of adults 18 and over by July 4th. It got to 67% and they expect the goal to be reached in a couple of weeks.

One of the five measures announced Tuesday was a community outreach program. Psaki described it to the press corps in plain terms that were still too confusing for the Trumpists, including this Junior one:

“The President will outline five areas his team is focused on to get more Americans vaccinated. One: targeted, community-by-community, door-to-door outreach to get remaining Americans vaccinated by ensuring they have the information they need on how both safe and accessible the vaccine is.”

Uh-Oh! Not an “ANALOGY!” Psaki’s simple and unassuming proclamation was more than enough to light a fire under the Trumpian Alarmist Brigades. What appears to have incited their wrath were the frightening words “door-to-door.” Consequently, they amassed in formation at their Twitter outposts to derisively characterize the program as an evil plot akin to something out of the Third Reich.

They posted veiled threats about what they would do to anyone coming to their door. They appeared to believe that vaccines would be forced on them by government agents. They asked if those conducting the outreach would be wearing armbands. Some of them seemed to think that Psaki herself would be knocking on their door and – oh boy – was she gonna regret it.

Never mind that the statement Psaki gave was very clear that the outreach would be conducted by community members, not government agents from the basements of Washington pizza parlors. They would be recruited locally and include health professionals, clergy, educators, and local representatives.

What’s more, their purpose would be solely to provide information and answer questions. The objective of the program is to talk to those who still have concerns about getting vaccinated. This outreach would address whatever their concern is and try to refute some of the disinformation that has been disseminated by Trump and his Republican con gamers, and by the lie factory of Fox News. Everyone would still be free to make their own decisions about whether to get the shot. And just maybe some lives could be saved.

However, if you observe the reaction in Trump World it would appear that the Bolsheviks were advancing on subversive vaccine resisters to stab them with hypodermic needles full of microchips and anti-fertility drugs. It truly is a dystopian wonder to see. And it affirms just how deranged Trumpian America has become in these strange and trying times.

UPDATE: Naturally Fox News piles on with an utterly dishonest article about the community outreach program. The article quoted only Republican crackpots like Lauren Bobert, Dan Crenshaw, Thomas Massie, and Andy Biggs, making the same bogus and paranoid claims.

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

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

GOP Attack on Biden’s Job Creation Success Actually Exposes Trump’s COVID Failures

Posted by on July 3, 2021 at 12:04 pm. 1 Comments :

There is a peculiar tendency on the part of Republicans to brag about things that, in reality, demonstrate their own negligence, incompetence, or deliberate malfeasance. For example, there was the time that a Fox News guest once inadvertently affirmed that Donald Trump has Been a lifelong racist. Or the time that Trump inadvertently admitted that he caused hundreds of thousands of COVID deaths.

Joe Biden, Tweet

These are not merely episodes of inattention to the criticism they’re attempting to dispense. They are the result of being so determined to invent some hurtful scandal that they completely lose track of their own false and vicious narrative. And on Saturday, the Republican Party provided another example of this mental defect as they attempted to disparage President Biden’s historic success with job creation. The GOP tweeted that…

Oddly enough, this political assault differs from the usual malarkey emanating from the Republican’s knee-jerk negativity in that it contains a morsel of truth. There are about 9.5 million Americans still unemployed. However, there are a couple of glaring problems with what the GOP is whining about.

First and foremost, they are purposefully ignoring the indisputable good news that 850,000 jobs were created in the latest report for the month of June. And three million jobs have been created in the five months since Biden was inaugurated. That is, as Biden noted, “more jobs than have ever been created in the first five months of any presidency in modern history.” Wages are also reportedly higher.

Where the GOP lost this argument with themselves is their complaint that “At the current pace under Biden, the economy WILL NOT recover all the lost jobs until JUNE 2022!” Conceding for the moment that the pace of job creation won’t increase, Republicans are still admitting to a fact that they don’t seem to recognize. The reason that so many jobs need to be created is that Donald Trump so badly mismanaged the COVID pandemic that millions of jobs were lost that otherwise would not have been.

And that says nothing about the hundreds of thousands of lives lost unnecessarily due to Trump “downplaying” the deadly crisis (which he admitted), his hostility to scientific guidance on social distancing and mask wearing, and his bungling of the vaccine distribution. All of which was aided by Fox News, especially pandemic “truther” Tucker Carlson.

In the end, the only thing that the GOP tweet does is reinforce how dreadfully bad Trump and his Republican confederates failed the American people in their time of need. And when the facts are spelled out, it makes it all the more clear that the Biden administration was there for the people, providing competence and compassion. So perhaps we should thank the GOP for creating an opportunity to clear this all up.

Nah, never mind. After all, they didn’t do it on purpose. And they don’t deserve thanks for their continuing idiocy.

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

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

DELUSIONAL: Trump Wants China to Pay $10 Trillion for COVID Damages that He Caused

Posted by on June 3, 2021 at 5:28 pm. 3 Comments :

The former reality TV game show host and failed blogger, Donald Trump, is disgorging new, and typically incoherent, press releases. These commentaries are harder to find now that he has been banished from Twitter and other social media for lying, and he has “canceled” his own much ballyhooed “communications platform.”

Donald Trump, Insane, Straight Jacket

In his latest public whining, Trump is making absurd statements about the coronavirus pandemic that he so disastrously mismanaged. He wrote that…

“Now everyone, even the so-called ‘enemy,’ are beginning to say that President Trump was right about the China Virus coming from the Wuhan Lab. The correspondence between Dr. Fauci and China speaks too loudly for anyone to ignore. China should pay Ten Trillion Dollars to America, and the World, for the death and destruction they have caused!”

Let’s break that down, shall we?

First of all…
It is patently false that “everyone” is saying that “Trump was right.” The only people saying that with a straight face are the same cult disciples who have been worshiping at the alter of Trump all along. He was not, is not, and will likely never be, right about the coronavirus or anything else.

Secondly…
Trump did not say that the COVID -19 came from “the Wuhan lab.” He often said that it came from Wuhan, but his most frequent comments dismissed it as nothing more than a common flu that would soon disappear by magic. In fact, Trump was effusively praising China and its president Xi Jinping. For instance…

China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!

…and…

[President Xi] will be successful, especially as the weather starts to warm & the virus hopefully becomes weaker, and then gone. Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation. We are working closely with China to help!”

As late as February 29, 2020, Trump was still impressed that “China seems to be making tremendous progress. Their numbers are way down.” And in his own remarks, Trump relentlessly downplayed the known dangers of the virus:

  • “We have it very much under control in this country.”
  • “It’s going to be just fine.”
  • “It’s one person coming in from China.”
  • “We’re doing a great job with it.”
  • “It’s going to have a very good ending for us.”
  • “We’re in great shape.”
  • “We have 12 cases – 11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now.”
  • “Just stay calm. It will go away.”
  • “You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”
  • “It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”

Most of those remarks were made when Trump already knew they were lies. He revealed in tape recorded comments to Bob Woodward – for his book RAGE! – that he knew just how dangerous the virus was, saying that…

“You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus. This is deadly stuff. […] I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down.”

Thirdly…
There is nothing controversial in the correspondence recently released between Dr. Fauci and China. It is simply being exploited by dishonest purveyors of right-wing propaganda who are trying to manufacture controversy where none exists.

Finally…
Trump’s demand that “China should pay Ten Trillion Dollars to America” is just the latest manifestation of his utter impotence, since he has no authority to issue such commands. Maybe he could get Mexico to pay for it.

More to the point, even if the virus had escaped from a Chinese lab, the responsibility for the “death and destruction” in America falls to Trump, his Republican Party, and Fox News. It was Trump’s negligence, incompetence, and deliberate malfeasance that was most responsible for the spread of the Pandemic in the U.S.

Trump was aided by a glassy-eyed Republican Party that devoured everything their Dear Leader excreted. And Fox News played its role as Trump’s Ministry of Disinformation. They obediently regurgitated Trump’s dismissal of the pandemic and opposed any common sense measures to mitigate it.

Other than that, Trump’s statement was still pitifully stupid and self-serving. As usual.

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

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

Tucker Carlson: Proof of Vaccination and Jim Crow Laws are Exactly the Same Thing

Posted by on June 2, 2021 at 12:26 pm. 2 Comments :

The ability of Fox News hacks to conflate wildly dissimilar subjects is pretty astonishing. And no one is more adept at this than Fox’s Senior White Nationalist, Tucker Carlson. His arguments on any subject are generally devoid of reason and crammed with racial animus. But on his Wednesday evening Hour of Hate he may have outdone himself.

Fox News, Tucker Carlson, Klan

Carlson has been an ardent opponent of COVID-19 vaccinations for months. He railed against them as fake and ineffective. He spread conspiracy theories asserting that they don’t work and “they” aren’t telling you. He even ordered his dimwitted viewers to harass mask wearers and file false police reports.

Now Carlson is combining his two favorite tirades: Anti-vaccine hysteria and racism (video below). The segment featured a chyron that read conspiratorially, “This is About Finding Out Who Dissents.” And in a manically obtuse bit of blathering, Carlson bellowed that…

“Everybody agrees that segregation was the worst thing this country ever did. Forcing certain categories of citizens into separate, lesser accommodations, barring them from public places, treating them like lepers or untouchables, that was completely immoral and wrong. We were told that a lot and most of us strongly agreed. It was wrong.”

So far, so good. Never mind that Carlson himself never agreed to the proposition he’s making here. And while segregation was awful, there are arguably worse things that this country has done. For instance, slavery, Hiroshima, and more recently, Trump’s negligent and incompetent mismanagement of the coronavirus, resulting in the deaths of more than half a million Americans. But Carlson was just getting started…

“So imagine our confusion today looking out across the country. The very same people, literally the very same, who just the other day told us that segregation was immoral, are now enforcing segregation. Should we be surprised? Probably not, but we still are.”

As usual, Carlson doesn’t identify the “very same people” he’s referring to. He’s also lying that anyone is “enforcing segregation,” as the term is commonly understood. Using Carlson’s alleged logic, quarantining Ebola victims is a form of bigoted segregation. He continued…

“Just this morning the New York Times informed us that unless you can prove that you’ve taken the injection that the Democratic Party demands that you take, you are no longer permitted in bars, comedy clubs, even some dance competitions, in the state of New York. You’re too dirty to appear in public. You’re not welcome near normal people.”

Naturally, Carlson is politicizing this matter by falsely asserting that the Democratic Party is “demanding” vaccinations. To be sure, Democrats have been far more responsible about measures to mitigate the spread of a deadly pandemic. But many of the more sensible Republicans have advocated getting the shot. Even Carlson’s boss Rupert Murdoch bragged about getting vaccinated. It isn’t about people being “dirty” or “normal,” It’s about people being smart and having concern for others. But he still wasn’t finished. Carlson whined that attending sporting events would mean that…

“…you will be sitting in your own roped off section, marinating in your shame with the other disobedient bad people. Medical Jim Crow has come to America. We still have water fountains. The unvaccinated would have separate ones.”

And there you have it. The fabled conflation of vaccine disinformation and outright racism. Carlson thinks that protecting people from a very real virus that is killing people is equivalent to the forced suppression of civil liberties based on skin color. In one fell swoop Carlson has diminished both the deadly consequences of the COVID pandemic and the overt bigotry of Jim Crow laws. And this is an achievement that you can rest assured he is proud of. It’s the sort of nauseating bullpucky that made him the number one show on Fox News. Which says a lot about Fox News – and it’s audience.

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

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

HOLY SHHH! Fox News Links Mass Shootings to the COVID Vaccine

Posted by on May 26, 2021 at 12:52 pm. 6 Comments :

Wednesday morning the nation awakened to yet another mass shooting. We can expect the usual NRA apologists to begin sending out their “thoughts and prayers,” while doing their best to obstruct any constructive reforms. But we could not possibly have expected that Fox News would feature an “expert” law enforcement analyst speculating that mass shootings were somehow linked to the COVID-19 vaccine. Could we?

Fox News, Guns Logo

Never mind that Fox News and the Republican Party have laid out an agenda that calls for less voting and more guns. And set aside that their proposed solution to the epidemic of mass shootings is to initiate “Idiot Control.”

In the course of breaking news coverage of yet another active shooter incident, this one in San Jose, California, Fox’s Harris Faulkner invited retired NYPD detective Pat Brosnan to provide his analysis fo the situation. Brosnan began with a bizarre commentary on the “Summer of Love of 2020” (presumably a facetious reference to the Black Lives Matter demonstrations), but then launched into this bit of brain-damaged commentary (video below):

“Crimes are no longer illegal. There’s no longer an enforcement of lots of laws. And there’s an empowerment of these active shooters.”

Say what? Needless to say, those deranged observations were not supported by any coherent discussion of how, precisely, crimes ceased to be illegal or active shooters have been “empowered.” But Brosnan was just getting started:

“Once COVID starts to lift, these cowardly shooters will come out exactly in tandem with the number of vaccinations. You can be sure they probably got vaccinated. They were just scared to come out. And they’re coming back, and you can see the numbers don’t lie. The shootings are up dramatically. Skyrocketing, actually, on active shootings throughout the United States as we’ve come through this pandemic. It’s really terrifying stuff.”

Brosnan was speaking out of a bodily orifice that is significantly below his mouth. His speculation about shooters having been vaccinated is pure fantasy and utterly insane. There’s a vague insinuation in there that the vaccine is turning otherwise ordinary people into mass murderers. The reality, of course, is that it’s the unvaccinated who are more likely to cause deaths by furthering the transmission of the coronavirus and its variants.

What’s more, there is no evidence whatsoever of mass shootings in the United States occurring “in tandem with vaccinations.” If anything, it was the administration of Donald Trump that produced a spike in gun violence. And Brosnan wants you believe that shooters were too “scared to come out,” but not too scared to grab a gun and shoot people with the certain knowledge that the police will show up and shoot back. If there was a decline in mass shootings in the past year, it wasn’t because the shooters were too scared to come out. It was because their potential victims were.

This is another example of Fox News trying desperately to muddle the discourse on an issue that their right-wing, ammosexual, GOP patrons are too scared to face honestly. They have no rational arguments to support their gun worship, or to deal with the fact that the vast majority of the American people support the reforms proposed by Democrats. So they fling rhetorical feces in an effort to numb the minds of their dimwitted viewers. Which really shouldn’t take much effort at all. And as always, now will not be the right time to talk about reform.

UPDATE: The Los Angeles times is now reporting that the gunman “set his own house on fire before he drove to a Valley Transportation Authority union meeting and began shooting.” Also, “Sources said the suspect is believed to have killed himself after the mass shooting.” So he really fits the profile of someone who was concerned about getting vaccinated to keep from catching a deadly virus, huh?

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

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