Colin Powell

Biden Restores Respect for America Worldwide After the Abominable Era of Trump: Poll

Posted by on October 19, 2021 at 2:35 pm. 4 Comments :

Nearly a year after the 2020 presidential election that Donald Trump has still not conceded he lost, the former reality TV game show host’s legacy of embarrassing America continues to unfold. Trump remains the loser with the lowest approval ratings ever recorded, having never even reached 50%.

Joe Biden, Donald Trump

As it turns out, the American people are not the only ones disgusted by Trump’s anti-democratic antics and authoritarian aspirations. A new Gallup Poll just published its findings after surveying 46 nations. The results reveal how the rest of the world has warmed up to the United States since Trump was disposed of by a significant majority of voters:

“Six months into Joe Biden’s presidency, approval ratings of U.S. leadership around the world had largely rebounded from the record-low ratings observed during the Trump administration.

“A new Gallup report shows that as of early August 2021, across 46 countries and territories, median approval of U.S. leadership stood at 49%. This rating is up from the 30% median approval at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency and matches the rating during former President Barack Obama’s first year in office in 2009.”

The difference between Biden’s approval and Trump’s is profound. An increase of 19 points cannot be dismissed as routine or attributed to political partisanship. Clearly Trump was an anchor around America’s neck, and the negativity that he excreted has been largely eliminated by Biden in less than a year. In fact, Gallup’s analysis found that the roots of the positive effects of the new administration were observable much sooner than that:

“In the first few hours of his presidency, Biden rejoined the Paris Climate Accord and halted Trump’s decision to leave the World Health Organization. And, in his first foreign policy speech as president, Biden vowed to repair U.S. alliances through diplomacy and restore the image of the U.S.”

Biden is continuing on a path that is quickly rehabilitating the nation’s reputation at home and abroad. He recently put the U.S. back on the United Nations Human Rights Council. He has donated 140 million doses of COVID vaccines to at least 93 countries. He has reversed the Trump doctrine of embracing enemy tyrants and alienating allies.

Ironically, there were just three countries where U.S. approval declined. At the top of that list was Trump’s favorite dictatorship, Russia (along with Serbia and Benin). As for Trump, he has been making noises for months about the U.S. losing respect since his electoral smackdown. He recently tweeted (via his Twitter ban defying proxy) that…

“A year ago we were respected all over the world under President Trump. Now the Biden regime has made us a humiliated laughingstock without a real president.”

Obviously, that couldn’t further from the truth. Which is something that it has in common with almost everything that Trump says. His abhorrent and infantile “personality” is reflected in the way he just eulogized Colin Powell, a former Secretary of State and our nation’s top diplomat. Powell’s death was reported less than 24 hours ago, but Trump, utterly lacking in decorum, common decency, or consideration for a grieving family, has already lashed out at him tweeting that “He made big mistakes” and that “He was a classic RINO, if even that, always being the first to attack other Republicans.”

This Gallup poll isn’t the first one to show how despised Trump is around the world. In July Pew Research published a survey that found…

“…a significant uptick in ratings for the U.S., with strong support for Biden and several of his major policy initiatives. […] Looking at 12 nations surveyed both this year and in 2020, a median of 75% express confidence in Biden, compared with 17% for Trump last year.”

So there is a pretty consistent consensus that Trump was a repulsive figure who soured America’s relations with its international allies. Fortunately, he has been disposed of and replaced by Joe Biden, a leader that the world respects and admires. And time will only reinforce these views as Biden’s achievements are accrued, and Trump’s crimes are revealed.

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 Exploits Colin Powell’s Death to Fear Monger About Breakthrough COVID Cases

Posted by on October 18, 2021 at 12:18 pm. 7 Comments :

America’s most notoriously pro-COVID cable “news” network, Fox News, is demonstrating just how grossly callous they can be in pursuit of their reprehensible political agenda. There’s a reason that the current state of the coronavirus in the United States can be accurately called the Fox News Pandemic.

Fox News, Covid

On Monday morning it was announced that former Secretary of State Colin Powell had died. The cause of death was revealed by his family as complications from COVID-19. Sec. Powell is now another tragic statistic of a viral plague that has resulted in more than 700,000 deaths and brought grief to millions of American families.

So leave it to Fox News to leap on this announcement in a way that manipulates it in order to bleed some smarmy partisan gain out of it. On Monday’s episode of Fox and Friends, the “Curvy Couch” potatoes couldn’t let this personal misfortune go by without profiting from it politically. Co-host Will Cain offered a perverse eulogy that furthered Fox’s mission to increase the death toll from COVID (video below). After reporting Powell’s demise, Cain said that…

“There will also be conversations about the fact that he was fully vaccinated according to his family and he died from complications from COVID. We are beginning to see statistics like this grow in frequency. We know that the vaccine does wane over time and its ability to protect you from, not just transmission and infection, but from severe complications and hospitalization, and obviously death as well.” [adding that] “all of us are at potential risk.”

Aside from being profoundly disrespectful to the passing of Powell, this is nothing but pure scare tactics to create more of the doubt and hesitancy about vaccines that Fox News has been disseminating since they became available. It is servile conformity to Donald Trump’s anti-vax alt-facts.

Fox News is lying that “statistics like this grow in frequency.” The truth is that deaths from breakthrough cases are extremely rare. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention there have been about 7,000 such fatalities out of more than 187 million vaccinated Americans. That’s about 0.0037%. Not exactly a threat that suggests that “all of us are at potential risk.” To the contrary, it underscores how effective the vaccines are.

Fox also failed to mention that Powell, who was 85 years old, was also diagnosed previously with multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer that weakens the body’s ability to protect against infections. These are conditions that put him at greater risk. But Cain wasn’t finished with his dishonest fear mongering. He continued with what he falsely said were “the implications on everyday Americans…”

“The family has made a point on their post on Facebook this morning that Colin Powell was fully vaccinated. And as Americans out there wonder what lies ahead for them and they search and they need truth moving forward, we’re seeing data from across the world. We’re seeing data from Europe, from the United Kingdom, the fully-vaccinated people are being hospitalized and fully-vaccinated are dying from COVID. And here we have a very high-profile example that is going to require more truth, more truth from our government, from our health leaders as well.”

Once again, Cain is repeating the deceitful implication that “fully-vaccinated people are dying” in order to frighten Fox’s already panicky viewers. He also baselessly implies that government and healthcare leaders are being insufficiently truthful. And he goes even further to criticize rational measures to mitigate the pandemic, including mandates for vaccination such as the one that is place at Fox News.

Fox News couldn’t wait even a single day before launching this political exploitation of Powell’s death. They are single-mindedly focused on telling tales of terror to keep their audience shivering and glued to their rancid rhetoric. Consequently, they weren’t about to miss out on this fleeting opportunity to stir dread and doubt among their dimwitted devotees.

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.

Colin Powell’s LEAKED EMAILS Reveal What He Really Thinks Of Donald Trump

Posted by on September 14, 2016 at 8:10 am. 1 Comments :

For several weeks the media has fixated on emails associated with Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. Some of them were obtained by anti-Democratic organizations and Republicans in Congress. Others were stolen by hackers affiliated with Russian intelligence operations. Now, if the story reported by BuzzFeed pans out, the GOP may get a taste of their own medicine.

Powell/Trump

Personal emails from former Secretary of State Colin Powell have been obtained by BuzzFeed News. Among the revelations in them is his assessment of Donald Trump as “a national disgrace” and an “international pariah.” BuzzFeed writes that:

“The remarks came in a June 17, 2016, email to Emily Miller, a journalist who was once Powell’s aide. In that same email Powell also said Trump ‘is in the process of destroying himself, no need for Dems to attack him.'”

Powell is not just a former Secretary of State. he is also a retired four-star general, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and was National Security Adviser to President Ronald Reagan. His reputation took a hit when he shilled for George Bush’s invasion of Iraq, but as a Republican icon of international diplomacy he is without peer. For him to dismiss Trump in such potent terms could have a significant impact on right-leaning Republicans and independents.

Additionally, Powell’s emails revealed his disgust for the Birther movement which he described as racist. In fact, he said that “the whole birther movement was racist.” With respect to Trump’s leading role in it, Powell wrote “When Trump couldn’t keep that up he said he also wanted to see if the certificate noted that he was a Muslim.”

Powell even commented on Trump bringing disgraced former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes into his campaign. Ailes, you recall, was ousted from the network he founded after numerous women came forward with complaints of sexual harassment. Powell made the cogent observation that “Ailes as an advisor wont heal women.” And he criticized the overall press coverage of Trump saying “You guys are playing his game, you are his oxygen.”

[UPDATE] Additional reporting has revealed another fascinating email from Powell. In this one he says that “Benghazi is a stupid witch hunt.”

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

Colin Powell continues to be a respected figure in the Republican Party and more broadly across a swath of independents. Until the release of these emails his opinions of Trump were not publicly known. Trump will surely renounce Powell as a dummy and loser, and his supporters won’t be moved by these criticisms. But Powell is expressing the views of many conservatives who are troubled by Trump’s ignorance and repulsed by his bigotry. Only time will tell if enough of them are dissuaded to prevent a Trump victory from bringing shame to our nation.

Colin Powell Gets It (almost) Right

Posted by on January 24, 2011 at 12:56 pm. 2 Comments :

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday and addressed the “nastiness” in our public dialogue:

“There has crept in our society and our public dialogue, a coarseness, a nastiness, an attack of people who don’t share the same views as you do,” he said. “All sorts of nastiness. And it is not just politicians who are doing this to each other, and, frankly, politics has always been a contact sport in this country, but with all of the cable channels and talk radio and blogs, especially blogs, where people can be anonymous with their nastiness, I think has caused a level of coarseness in our society that we’ve all got to think about.”

Especially blogs? That was a gratuitous dig that doesn’t really advance the point he was making. Blogs don’t have nearly the influence that politicians and national television and radio commentators have. Their contribution to the coarseness in public dialogue is tiny by comparison.

I’m glad to hear that Powell agrees that violent rhetoric directed toward political adversaries has escalated beyond reason and can result in potential harm, but did he really have to shift the responsibility from the media to anonymous commenters on blogs? That just diminishes the message and lets characters with millions of followers, like Glenn “Shoot them in the head” Beck, and Rush “Don’t kill all the liberals” Limbaugh, off the hook.

Who Do The Troops Support? Don’t Ask Fox News

Posted by on October 21, 2008 at 3:44 pm. 3 Comments :

Yesterday Barack Obama received the endorsement of General Colin Powell. This is a significant endorsement from a respected public figure who is a Republican that has served as Secretary of State, National Security Adviser, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he is a decorated veteran of the Vietnam war. And it was no ordinary endorsement. Powell was as effusive in his praise of Obama as he was dismissive of John McCain.

Immediately following his appearance on Meet the Press, the Republican smear machine cranked up their toxic rhetoric to belittle Powell with allegations of everything from naivete to racism. But that wasn’t enough to blunt the impact of Powell’s support for Obama. So Fox News is now promoting what they call “poll” that shows overwhelming support (68% to 23%) for McCain by members of the military. In the segment, Fox’s Megyn Kelly introduces the poll and leads off with some broad conclusions about its results:

“Well the Military Times is polling active service members on their pick for president, and it seems pretty clear from that poll who the armed services would like as a Commander in Chief.”

What Kelly fails to mention is that the “poll” is not a scientifically conducted survey designed to represent the views of the military community. It is merely an expression of preference by a self-selecting group of respondents who happened to return a questionnaire sent to subscribers to the Military Times. There was no attempt to create a sample group whose responses could be expanded to the military at large. There was no demographic targeting. This poll has no more relevance than an online poll that simply collects the responses of those who feel like clicking on it. But none of that stopped Kelly from casting the results as “pretty clear,” nor did it stop reporter Jennifer Griffin from surmising that…

“Democrats, in essence, have not made the inroads into the military vote that they hoped to in the last four to eight years.”


[Update – 1/20/09: Sorry. It appears that the original video with Megyn Kelly has been removed. However, Fox News did exactly the same thing two weeks ago with John Kasich guest hosting on the O’Reilly Factor]

This deliberate distortion is wholly the work of Fox News. The Military Times responsibly reported their methodology for the poll on their web site. It says in part that…

“Characteristics of Military Times readers may also affect the results. The group surveyed is significantly older than the military as a whole, and the survey group contains a higher percentage of officers than is present in the military.”

“Conversely, junior enlisted troops, women and racial and ethnic minorities made up a smaller share of the sample than of the military at large. While it is difficult to predict how those factors affect the results, those groups are generally regarded as more supportive of Democratic candidates.”

Fox News purposely left out this information because it didn’t advance their agenda. Clearly their intention is to inject an argument to mitigate the newsmaking endorsement by Powell. So Fox News went looking for something to counter the credibility that Powell has with the military and the general public. They found this survey that was actually published two weeks ago, and they have elevated it to a major story that has run multiple times throughout the day.

So who do the military really support? The non-partisan Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) released a report grading the candidates on their support for military legislation. Obama received a “B”, while McCain barely passed with a “D”. Perhaps a better measure is one where troops are putting their money where their mouths are. A survey last August by the Center for Responsive Politics revealed that…

“U.S. soldiers have donated more presidential campaign money to Democrat Barack Obama than to Republican John McCain, a reversal of previous campaigns in which military donations tended to favor GOP White House hopefuls.”

It’s no coincidence that Fox News began touting the two week old Military Times poll on the day after Powell’s surprise announcement. And it’s no surprise that Fox would deliberately distort the poll and its meaning. What continues to surprise me is that anyone still gives any credence to anything that Fox News reports.