Hoplophobia: Pro-Gun ‘Doctors’ Invent Psychological Disorder To Discredit Victim Activists

Posted by Mark NC on May 2, 2013 at 3:39 pm. 12 Comments :

This may one of the most repulsive moves yet by gun worshiping extremists bent on preserving the legitimate rights of the 2nd Amendment for murderers and madmen.

The Daily Caller, a web site run by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, posted an article that posits a theory about people who have survived gun violence or the families of deceased victims. The authors propose that such people are mentally unfit to express their opinions about the tragedies that they and their loved ones endured. These committed reformers, the authors allege, are suffering from “hoplophobia,” a fake condition that is not recognized by the American Psychiatric Association or any other mental health authority.

The term was coined by the late Jeff Cooper, a former board member of the National Rifle Association (NRA), and is defined by him as “a morbid fear of guns.” TheDC argues that people who have had traumatic experiences involving gun violence cannot construct rational opinions about public firearms policy because they have been damaged psychologically. The article falsely asserts that hoplophobia is “a real, extremely dangerous, widespread, and clinically recognizable complex specific phobia.” No, actually, it is none of those things. It is the creation of a politically motivated lobbyist for weapons manufacturers. Which makes this statement from the article all the more absurd:

“Many doctors are guilty of ‘boundary violations’ when they, with some frequency, inject anti-gun political opinions or content into their clinical work as health-care providers. It is our assertion that this constitutes several serious ethical violations including at least: mixing politics and health care.”

As a representative of the NRA, and not a medical professional, it is undeniable that Cooper’s conflation of politics and medicine is an outright ethical violation that the article itself later condemns as “practicing outside one’s recognized fields of expertise.” As the article progresses interminably through its jargon-laden mush of pseudo-science, it never makes a coherent argument to support its premise that victims are not credible witnesses or activists. Yet it does glorify its own intellectual silliness with the hyperbolic claim that “Hoplophobia is far and away the most dangerous of all phobias.”

It is easy to assert that a phobia you make up yourself is the worst one ever, but it is much harder to support such a claim. In fact, hoplophobia is a cognitive disaster area that makes little sense. One of the obvious flaws of this crackpot theory is the assertion that gun violence victims have a generalized fear of guns. To the contrary, many are themselves gun owners and continue to endorse the right to keep and bear arms even after their traumatic episodes. There is nothing inconsistent (or insane) in advocating reasonable regulations for obtaining dangerous weapons and supporting legislation to keep such items out of the hands of those who will misuse them.

Which brings us to another glaring flaw. The authors attribute opposition to unfettered access to any type of weapon as evidence of hoplophobia. Were that the case it would mean that in excess of 80% of the American people are sufferers, because that’s how many support the expanded regulations currently being debated in congress. Obviously, 80% of the country has not been victimized by gun violence, so TheDC will have to come up with another theory to explain this discrepancy. And luckily, they have one handy:

“The large-scale support such a program sometimes finds, including within the media, implies a mass-hysteria or mass-hypnosis effect.”

See? We’re all hypnotized and/or hysterical. Never mind the fact that many of us own guns and happily concede that right to others in an environment that is responsible and filters out felons and other unstable individuals. And set aside the reasonable perspective that a certain measure of managed fear is appropriate when dealing with instruments that are so potentially injurious. Far too many devastating accidents have occurred when people failed to respect the inherent destructive force that guns possess.

In the end, it seems that the inventors of the phony phobia are themselves the ones who suffer from irrational fears. They consider any approach to public safety that addresses guns is a covert attempt to disarm them, enslave them, and confiscate their guns and other private property. They explicitly state in this article that hoplophobia “can compromise the U.S. Constitution and human freedom itself.” If that isn’t an expression of a hyper-phobic personality, then what is?

So F**king What? Obama Supporter Wears Hat

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

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

So F**king What?

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

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

The Ostrich Effect: Fox News And Right-Wing Media Bury Their Heads (And Truth) In The Sand

Posted by Mark NC on March 25, 2013 at 3:48 pm. 9 Comments :

It’s more difficult being a shill for ultra-conservative propaganda than you might think. On the surface it appears to be merely an exercise in fabricating false narratives and phony scandals. Any two-bit, dime-store, novelist can whip up a salacious melodrama in short order and disseminate it to a gullible flock of lemmings.

However, to be really good at shaping fantastical versions of unreality, you need to be alert and organized to prevent your plot lines from getting away and destroying the illusions you worked so hard to create.

One of the techniques that Fox News has perfected is to broadcast a slanderous allegation as widely as possible when it is no more than a wispy speculation. Then, after it is discovered that the whole affair was constructed from lies and innuendo, simply neglect to ever bring it up again.

This was expertly demonstrated recently when Fox News participated in blowing up a smear job aimed at Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey. The story sprung from the right-wing Internet rag, The Daily Caller, which happens to be run by Fox News flunky, Tucker Carlson. TheDC purported to have evidence that Menendez hired prostitutes in the Dominican Republic and ran several articles on the subject. Fox News and other right-wing media picked up the story and turned it into a mini-scandal that erupted in the closing days of Menendez’s reelection campaign.

However, in the past couple of weeks the story has disintegrated as the prostitutes were questioned by police and recanted their statements, even going so far as to confess that they were paid to make false statements incriminating Menendez. And last week the deceit escalated as the man on whom TheDC based its story changed his tune and told the Domincan district attorney that he too was paid – by TheDC – to find and coach the prostitutes.

In the wake of these revelations, Media Matters has scoured Fox News for any sign of a retraction, correction, or apology, or even just an acknowledgement of the new disclosures. But for some reason, the network that aired segments of this story twenty times has ignored it completely since it has been debunked.

This is nothing new for Fox. Here are some additional stories where they heavily hyped questionable reporting that reflected poorly on Democrats or anyone to the left of center, only to scuttle the matter when it backfired on them:

Fox News gleefully pounces on any hint of scandal involving a competing news enterprise, but when their parent corporation News Corp was found to have hacked hundreds of phones, including one belonging to a murdered schoolgirl, Fox feverishly ran from the story, even agreeing on the air not to question Rupert Murdoch about it.
Fox News ran multiple stories about donors to Democratic candidates with implications of some dubious relationship, but when Rupert Murdoch gave $1 million to the Republican Governor’s Association and the right-wing U.S. Chamber of Commerce, it was not considered newsworthy.
There has been no shortage of reporting by Fox that negatively frames the issue of marriage equality, but when a Republican senator, Rob Portman, announces that because of his gay son he now supports it, Fox nearly ignores the subject entirely.
One of Fox’s favorite stories of the past several years involved the videos of James O’Keefe, whose editing was deliberately misleading and dishonest, but when one of his victims, Juan Carlos Vera, forced O’Keefe into a $100,000 settlement, Fox abstained from reporting it.
Perhaps the most significant news story in last year’s election was the release of the infamous “47% video” wherein Mitt Romney admitted that he didn’t much care about half of the country. When the identity of the man who made the video, Scott Prouty, was finally made public, Fox chose not cover the news. Well, other than to report that Prouty might have been delinquent on his taxes (which Prouty denied).

The behavior of Fox News is less like a journalistic organization than a frightened ostrich who sticks its head in the sand to avoid confronting what it fears. This pattern of blaring disparaging news aimed at Democrats, and cowering when that news is discovered to be false, reflects the cynical attitude of an enterprise that doesn’t care about accuracy or ethics. Fox simply wants to take a sledgehammer to their ideological foes, and if the tables turn, Fox slips away hoping that no one will notice.

It’s even worse, however, than what one might expect for an anxious ostrich. When Fox buries its hyperbolic head it isn’t immersed in a cavernous darkness. Rather, it sees more of the fictional world it created for itself. Fox, and it’s glassy-eyed audience, remains blissfully unaware of realities that the rest of take for granted. That’s why they were so astonished by the results of last November’s election that they were certain would result in a Romney landslide. It’s why they think that Benghazi is the biggest scandal since Watergate although the facts fail to indicate even a hint of wrongdoing. And it’s why a boneheaded congressional creature that has come to be known as the “Sequester” can threaten to wreak havoc for the economy and produce tens of thousands of personal hardships, but the big takeaway for Fox is that there may be a suspension of White House tours.

Living in the Fox bubble must be an endlessly painful experience. In case after case they are jolted by news that is at odds with the fragile pseudo-reality that cloaks them. But the most intriguing question has got to be: When will they cast it off? How many times must they get burned before they learn?

Right-Wing Rag Allegedly Paid Prostitues To Malign Democratic Senator

Posted by Mark NC on March 23, 2013 at 12:40 pm. NO Comments :

Fox News flunkie Tucker Carlson is in deep water over allegations that his web site, The Daily Caller, orchestrated a smear campaign against Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) that included paying prostitutes to make up stories about having had sex with the senator.

The story originally published by TheDC featured a pair of alleged prostitutes who claimed to have been hired by Menendez. The web site did not identify the women or most of the other sources they relied on. Subsequent to the posting of that article it was severely ripped apart by a Washington Post investigation that turned up a prostitute who confessed that her allegations were false and that she was paid to lie.

Now the already tattered reputation of The DC has been shredded further with a new report from WaPo that the attorney who represented the prostitutes in the scandal was himself paid to solicit women willing to make the false allegations, and that the source of the payments was [insert trumpet here] The Daily Caller:

“A top Dominican law enforcement official said Friday that a local lawyer has reported being paid by someone claiming to work for the conservative Web site the Daily Caller to find prostitutes who would lie and say they had sex for money with Sen. Robert Menendez.”

The lawyer making this assertion is Melanio Figueroa, who was the only named source in TheDC’s original story. Now TheDC is in the uncomfortable position of having to denounce their primary source as a liar without retracting the story that relied on his testimony. It isn’t easy for a “news” enterprise to say “The guy that we relied on for everything is a big liar, and we stand by everything he said.”

In response to WaPo’s latest revelations TheDC, not surprisingly, issued a blanket denial that they had paid anyone connected to the affair. However the article they posted containing the denial was blatantly spun to misrepresent the facts. TheDC’s Vince Coglianese wrote that…

“Figueroa blamed four news outlets — CNN, The Daily Caller, Telemundo and Univision — for allegedly encouraging him to fabricate false accusations about Menendez.”

That sentence is an artificial blending of responsibility for the dishonest reports in an obvious attempt to distribute the blame. However, a more detailed account of events appeared in the WaPo and pointed to just TheDC as the instigator.

“In comments reported by Univision, [District Attorney] Polanco said that Figueroa stated he was been contacted by four media outlets — Telemundo, Univision, CNN en Español, and the Daily Caller — that were interested in having interviews with the women. But Figueroa told police it was only ‘Carlos,’ who identified himself as working for the Daily Caller, who came to the Dominican Republic and paid him to arrange the recorded interviews, according to an interview with Polanco.”

In TheDC’s account all four media outlets were accused of encouraging false statements. But in the WaPo’s story it was only TheDC who did so, and the other three only sought to interview the women. The is evidence that The Daily Caller is scrambling desperately to extricate themselves from a web of deceit of their own making.

To be sure, the credibility of the persons connected to this affair is suspect all around. But that only affirms the careless and/or corrupt practices at TheDC. If their primary source, Figueroa, is telling the truth about receiving payments from TheDC, then they are guilty of bribing a source to lie. If he is lying about the payments, then they are guilty of publishing a story based on the testimony of a liar. It’s a lose-lose for Tucker Carlson whose own credibility is not much better than the cretins he hangs around with.

Daily Caller’s Videos Of Alleged Menendez Prostitution Scandal Were Faked

Posted by Mark NC on March 4, 2013 at 10:16 pm. 1 Comments :

It is long past the point when any reputable news enterprise should take seriously any story emanating from the pathological liars at The Daily Caller, or Breitbart News, or even Fox News. Particularly if the story hinges on videos of unknown origin with anonymous sources and fraudulent editing.

The latest example of the unscrupulous deceit practiced by right-wing media involves an undocumented accusation that Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey was cavorting with prostitutes in the Dominican Republic. Menendez denied the charges from the start, but that didn’t stop the unethical reporters at The Daily Caller from disseminating the story, which eventually wormed its way up the media food chain from Breitbart to Fox to other more mainstream outlets.

The scandalous tales told by the Daily Caller peaked when they posted exclusive videos of the alleged hookers confessing to their association with Menendez. All of this just happened to go down during the final days of Menendez’s reelection campaign.

Today the Washington Post published an article that blows the whole story apart. The headline, “Escort says Menendez prostitution claims were made up,” sums up the affair and should put to rest any question about the Daily Caller’s credibility. The article begins…

“An escort who appeared on a video claiming that Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) paid her for sex has told Dominican authorities that she was instead paid to make up the claims and has never met or seen the senator, according to court documents and two people briefed on her claim.

“The woman said a local lawyer had approached her and a fellow escort and asked them to help frame Menendez and a top donor, Salomon Melgen, according to affidavits obtained by The Washington Post.”

The Washington Post sought a statement from the Daily Caller’s chief, Tucker Carlson (also a Fox News contributor), but Carlson, despite his usual enthusiasm for media attention, refused to make a comment. There have been no corrections or updates to any of the reports previously published by the Daily Caller, Breitbart, or Fox. This is consistent with their standard operating practice of hyping smears and innuendos, but neglecting to set the record straight when their lies are exposed.

Menendez Valentine Another player to jump on the Menendez bandwagon is the Republican National Committee who put out a satirical “valentine” slamming the Senator with a snide reference to the phony sex scandal. Undoubtedly they will neglect to apologize now that they know the charges were false. What makes the GOP attack even worse is that their own senator David Vitter was caught with actual hookers in Washington, D.C. and subsequently admitted his criminal behavior. Yet he continues to represent Louisiana and, so far as we know, has not received any snarky valentines from the GOP.

The question for the media at large is, when will they finally stop paying attention to the cretinous slime merchants at the Daily Caller, Breitbart, etc.? After notorious failures like the ACORN affair, the Shirley Sherrod debacle, and just last month, Breitbart’s expose about Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel taking money from a terrorist group that, as it turns out, doesn’t exist, there should be no doubt that these pseudo-news manglers are undeserving of any respect. They should be left to peddle their tripe to the glassy-eyed blockheads who don’t know any better and the rest of the world should tune them out entirely. At this point, anyone who gives credence to these fakers is just an embarassment.

Right-Wingers Think Obama Donor Is Buying Up Gun-Related Media To Shut It Down

Posted by Mark NC on March 1, 2013 at 2:22 pm. 1 Comments :

FERCHRISSAKES!!! I just can’t take it anymore.

There have been a plethora of utterly insane notions floated by cretins on the right that make no rational sense whatsoever. They range from non-existent “death panels,” to FEMA concentration camps, to Kenyan-born presidents, and those are the least deranged among them. Recently the Tea-publicans were aghast at a ridiculous claim that the Department of Homeland Security was stockpiling munitions in preparation to wipe out large swaths of the American population. Seriously, they really believe that.

But now they are venturing further afield into territory that is unexplored by even the most severely hallucinatory meth freaks. An article published on Fox Nation cries “Obama Donor Buying Up and ‘Destroying’ America’s Top Pro-gun Media Outlets.”

The article is a re-posting from the Daily Caller web site which is run by Fox News contributor Tucker Carlson. It was written by Patrick Howley, someone they identify as an “Investigative Reporter,” despite his history as a violent right-wing activist who admitted to infiltrating OccupyDC for the purpose of undermining it. Howley asserts in his opening paragraph that…

“Employees of Obama donor Leo Hindery Jr.’s media conglomerate Intermedia Partners, which now owns most of the top gun-culture media outlets in the country, believe that Hindery plans to gut and destroy all of them.”

What a perfectly devious plot. Hindery is an investor with more than thirty years in the media business. He has been a significant figure in sports programming, cable television, telecommunications, and other properties that have made him one of America’s wealthiest businessmen. Yet the paranoia-racked brains of conservative dimwits think that he is plotting to “consolidate all of the major pro-Second Amendment media titles in this country, strip them down, and destroy them.” For some reason they think that Hindery has suddenly cast off his mantle of capitalist media baron and is willing to lose millions of dollars in a scheme to deprive magazine readers of titles like “Shooting Times” and “Gun Dog.” That’ll show the NRA. And he and Obama will have a good laugh.

The evidence presented by Howley consists mainly of testimony from anonymous employees who are afraid they are about to be laid off. Imagine that – there are magazines and media companies that are struggling in these digital times and may have to downsize or close. Who knew? Howley also cites the reduction in work at a Minnesota studio that he describes as a “beautiful” facility that had “60 employees, a massive studio, at least nine editing bays and fully-wired machine rooms and was conducting about four studio shoots per year.” Pardon me but, it doesn’t seem like four shoots a year is enough to sustain the studio he just described.

The weakness of the arguments in the article are almost irrelevant when considering that the premise is so bonkers to begin with. This is nothing more than an investment company pulling together assets and then seeking ways to mitigate expenses through operational mergers. There may be a case to be made that such consolidation negatively impacts employees and public choice, but that’s not a case that Republicans ever seem to be concerned about. In fact, they generally defend and celebrate such monopolistic corporate behavior as the workings of the glorious free market. There is nothing here, however, that any sane observer could claim is a plot to deliberately destroy these businesses in league with the Obama administration as an assault on the Second Amendment.

It is just astonishing that people will put stories like this out and expect to have any credibility. They are cognitively numb and running on the fumes of conspiracy theories and delusional psychoses. Their audience must be on feeding tubes waiting for someone to declare them legally brain-dead and pull the plug. And when their businesses fail I’m sure they will have an explanation at hand that blames it all on Obama, George Soros, and eco-terrorists.

Fox News, Daily Caller, Admit That Fox News Is Not A Legitimate News Outlet

Posted by Mark NC on October 17, 2012 at 12:26 pm. 1 Comments :

One of Mitt Romney’s most reality-detached comments of this campaign came when he declared that “We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.” The Olympian ignorance of that remark says a lot about Romney’s elitist upbringing and orientation. The truth is that thousands of people die every year due to lack of health care coverage – more than 26,000 in 2010. And it isn’t just people who get sudden illnesses in their apartments, but people who have untreated and/or undiagnosed problems that lead to more severe disorders and fatalities.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman addressed this matter in an editorial where he thoroughly demolished Romney’s preposterous theory:

“Even the idea that everyone gets urgent care when needed from emergency rooms is false. Yes, hospitals are required by law to treat people in dire need, whether or not they can pay. But that care isn’t free — on the contrary, if you go to an emergency room you will be billed, and the size of that bill can be shockingly high. Some people can’t or won’t pay, but fear of huge bills can deter the uninsured from visiting the emergency room even when they should. And sometimes they die as a result.

“More important, going to the emergency room when you’re very sick is no substitute for regular care, especially if you have chronic health problems. When such problems are left untreated — as they often are among uninsured Americans — a trip to the emergency room can all too easily come too late to save a life”

This is just common sense to everyone except Romney. But the part of Krugman’s article that is causing controversy came at the end:

Fox Nation - Krugman

“So let’s be brutally honest here. The Romney-Ryan position on health care is that many millions of Americans must be denied health insurance, and millions more deprived of the security Medicare now provides, in order to save money. At the same time, of course, Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan are proposing trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy. So a literal description of their plan is that they want to expose many Americans to financial insecurity, and let some of them die, so that a handful of already wealthy people can have a higher after-tax income.”

The outrage generated by this was expressed in a column by Daily Caller contributor, Jim Huffman. However, there is nothing in Huffman’s retort that attempts to rebut the substantive assertions by Krugman. He never bothers to counter the argument that thousands of Americans are at risk due to deficient or non-existent coverage. The entirety of his pique is aimed at a single sentence that Huffman interprets as Krugman alleging that Romney wants people to die.

First of all, Krugman’s statement actually refers to Romney’s “plan” that would have the effect of producing unnecessary deaths, not Romney’s personal bloodlust. But the more interesting part of Huffman’s article comes at the beginning where he writes…

“We all have heard, or read on the Internet, claims that President Obama is a Marxist and/or a Muslim extremist who wants nothing more than the downfall of America, and that he is willing to sacrifice American lives and prosperity to these ambitions. Maybe the few folks making those claims actually believe them, but there is not a shred of evidence they are true. In fact they are so preposterous no legitimate news outlets would report them as anything but the unsubstantiated nonsense they are.”

Apparently Mr. Huffman has never watched Fox News, or even read the web site his column appears on. Either that or he is admitting that Fox News and the Daily Caller are not “legitimate news outlets,” which would make more sense. Fox personalities from Glenn Beck to Eric Bolling to Sean Hannity, and more, have made overt references to President Obama as a Muslim, a Marxist, a socialist, a communist, a Kenyan, a racist, etc. And the Daily Caller, a web site run by Fox contributor Tucker Carlson, is every bit as bad. Huffman’s attempt to portray those ludicrous sentiments as the product of insignificant blogs backfires in the face of the truth: That the most prodigious disseminater of those vile lies is the heart of the right-wing media and the highest rated cable news network, Fox News.

The clincher is that Huffman’s article now appears st the top of the Fox News community web site, Fox Nation. So we have the unique circumstance of Fox News featuring an article that exposes Fox News as an illegitimate news source. That may be the first thing that Fox News has gotten right in sixteen years.

UNHINGED: The Crackpot Conspiracy Theories Of Clueless Conservatives

Posted by Mark NC on October 9, 2012 at 4:01 am. 3 Comments :

This article was also published on Alternet.

Conservatives and professional Obama haters have been nurturing an animosity for Obama that far exceeds anything directed at previous presidents. The lengths that they will go to bury Obama in mud often resemble D-Movie spy plots that set new standards for implausibility. The all too familiar birther conspiracies that allege that President Obama is a Manchurian socialist bent on transforming America into an Islamic Caliphate are mere fairy tales when compared to some of the horror stories that shiver the spines of the delusional right.

The frequency and outlandishness of their conspiratorial imaginations grows in sync with their desperation. With Obama leading in most polls and the election season drawing to a close, it seems like a good time to recap some of the more ludicrous conspiracies hatched by our conservative fear mongers. So with our tin-foil hats securely strapped on, let’s venture down the primrose path of hair-raising hypothesis.

Cooking the Unemployment Rate
The most recent crackpottery of the right was revealed last week as new unemployment numbers were released. The new data put the unemployment rate at 7.8%, the lowest it has been since the Bush administration cratered the economy on their way out of town. Almost immediately, right-wingers declared that the numbers were manufactured by Obama’s henchmen in the Labor Department. Never mind the fact that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is an independent body that currently has no Obama appointees serving. That didn’t stop conspiracists like Jack Welch from alleging that they are “Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers.” That unsubstantiated charge was adopted by Rep. Allen West, Fox News’ Stuart Varney, and much of the rest of the right-wing media circus.

The Media is Skewing the Polls
For several weeks now, Obama has maintained a steady lead in election polling. That fact has been difficult for conservatives to square with their conviction that Obama is the most hated man in America. Consequently, they must conclude that all of the polls have been tampered with by scheming liberals. However, for their conspiracy to be credible, they would have to include Fox News and Rasmussen amongst the conniving lefties because their polling also puts Obama in the lead. One way they have found to workaround that inconvenient fact is to ignore the polls that challenge their thesis. Therefore, Fox News simply neglects to report on polls that show the President leading – even their own Fox News polls.

Politicizing the Stock Market
In a year when the economy is such an integral part of the news cycle, conservatives have found it necessary to glom onto any factoid that they can use to bash the President. That manifests into a frenzy of spin that casts any decline in the stock market as the fault of Obama, and any increase as investor speculation that Obama is on the way out. Last week, many of the right-dominated business networks feebly described a positive day for the Dow as a Romney rally, simply because it occurred on the day after the presidential debate. There is a long history of the right making idiotic assessments of the stock market. In May of 2009, Fox News anchor Brenda Buttner gushed, “Call it a tea party rally. Wall Street’s sure partying, up six weeks in a row.” In September of 2011, Fox Nation reported “Stocks Tumble Worldwide After Obama Speech.” Then in June of 2012, they fantasized that “Stock Market Drops After Obamacare Upheld.” Fox’s Neil Cavuto hosted a discussion of what he called the “Bush recovery” nine months into Obama’s term. What they commonly miss is that markets traditionally perform better under Democratic administrations than Republicans.

Obama is Coming for Your Guns
This conspiracy theory takes a considerable measure of willful suspension of disbelief. The National Rifle Association has alerted its members that a second Obama term will result in the repeal of the second amendment and a wholesale confiscation of guns. Their evidence of this is that Obama has done nothing at all to roll back gun rights during his first term. That, they surmise, is a devious trick to lull gun rights advocates into a false sense of security. Then, when Obama is no longer facing a reelection campaign, he will be free to curtail all of our precious liberties.

The Social Security Administration’s Arms Cache
When it was discovered that the Social Security Administration had purchased 174,000 bullets, the right-wing sirens went off and presumed that they were preparing for massive civil unrest and intended to use the ammo on Americans. “‘Why would the U.S. government want the SSA to kill 174,000 of our citizens, even during a time of civil unrest?’ Maj. Gen. Jerry Curry wrote on the conservative website The Daily Caller.” That would be a good question if it weren’t rooted in utter dementia. In fact, the actual reason for the purchase was a routine acquisition to arm conventional security personnel at the agency’s offices across the country.

The Muslim Mole in the Secretary of State’s Office
A longtime aide to Hillary Rodham Clinton was accused by conservatives of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Huma Abedin has worked with Clinton for many years as a trusted and effective public servant. No evidence was given for the repugnant allegations that cast her as a traitorous double agent. She is also married to former Rep. Anthony Weiner, who is Jewish and unlikely to be affiliated with Muslim extremists. But that didn’t stop Rep. Michele Bachmann who said, “it appears that there are individuals who are associated with the Muslim Brotherhood who have positions, very sensitive positions” in our government. She was joined by other prominent conservatives like Newt Gingrich and Frank Gaffney. This conspiracy dove-tails nicely with those alleging that Obama is a Muslim plant as well.

Fact-Checkers Are A Liberal Plot
Creative and shameless conservatives are establishing a new and unique front in the political war zone. Not satisfied with bashing everything about the media (despite the fact that talk radio and their own Fox News are a huge part of it), the wackoids on the right have declared war against – get this – Fact-checkers! This may seem wildly deranged, but upon reflection it makes perfect sense. If your entire movement is built on a foundation of lies, then fact-checkers are your mortal enemy. This became clear a few weeks ago when Neil Newhouse, a Mitt Romney adviser, publicly declared that “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” Since then they have disputed or ignored every challenge of their truthfulness. The result is a record setting collection of dishonorable mentions from PolitiFact and other media lie detectors.

The Secret Behind The Gulf Oil Spill
When millions of barrels of oil were pouring into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, most Americans were disturbed by the devastating environmental damage and the negligence of the company operating the drilling platform. But conservatives led by Rush Limbaugh saw through the scheme and revealed that the massive malfunction was actually a deliberate act of sabotage devised to create a justification for eliminating all off-shore drilling. Limbaugh told his audience that “I want to get back to the timing of the blowing up, the explosion out there in the Gulf of Mexico of this oil rig … What better way to head off more oil drilling, nuclear plants, than by blowing up a rig?” You can’t argue with logic like that, because it’s the logic of a mad man who thinks the President would murder twelve workers and foul an environmentally sensitive region in order to achieve a political goal.

Obamacare’s Death Panels
No list of conspiracy theories would be complete without a mention of Sarah Palin’s “death panels.” These nefarious groups were said to have the power to decide whether your grandmother would live or die based on her level of productivity to society as determined by a team of government bureaucrats. In reality the section of the Affordable Care Act to which Palin referred actually provided for coverage to pay for end-of-life counseling. These were voluntary sessions to help patients determine and document what sort of life-saving measures they preferred in the event that they were incapacitated and unable to communicate their wishes to their doctors. When that proved to be an embarrassing misinterpretation of the law, conservatives switched to another section of the bill, the Independent Payment Advisory Board, and called that the death panel. However, the IPAB was simply a board that assessed the best practices in medicine and made non-binding recommendations in order to prevent excessive billing and unnecessary procedures. Palin was awarded the “Lie of the Year” award from PolitiFact for her imaginary panel.

The Green Plot to Enslave the World
Conservatives have never taken to science. So it should come as no surprise that many of them regard global warming as a hoax whose purpose is to enrich Al Gore and a few socialist wind farmers. But there is another faction of the anti-environment movement that has uncovered something even more dastardly lurking behind the effort to maintain a clean, sustainable planet. Agenda 21, a little known and non-binding resolution adopted by the United Nations is viewed by some on the right as an attempt to control the lives of people throughout the world by regulating everything they do. Amongst their paranoid fears is that Agenda 21 will cede U.S. sovereignty to the U.N. and a one-world government. The truth is that Agenda 21 is a set of principles to guide the development of practices to preserve a sustainable environment for future generations. It is entirely voluntary and was agreed to by the U.N. in 1992 and signed by President George H.W. Bush. But to hear doomsayers like Glenn Beck put it, it will “suck all the blood out of [our communities], and we will not be able to survive.”

These are but a few of the tales woven by angst-ridden right-wingers in the dark moments when their thoughts wander from rational reality. However, the science that they scorn may have an explanation for their fantastical imaginings. Ryota Kanai, at the University College London Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, examined how liberals and conservatives brains differ. Among the findings were that the brains of liberals have a larger anterior cingulate cortex which has been shown to produce thought proceses that are more flexible and reliant on data, proof, and analytic reasoning. Conservatives are more likely to have an enlarged amygdala which is associated with greater inflexibility, emotion, and fear response.

This could account for conservatives having a greater susceptibility to conspiracy models of thinking. Whatever the explanation, it is clear that their senses are working overtime and the results produce some pretty wild visions of nightmarish liberals threatening America’s very existence. They seem to have taken very seriously the warning from the Reagan-era horror film, The Fly: Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Conservative Media Hype Old Obama Video: When All Else Fails, Resort To Racism

Posted by Mark NC on October 3, 2012 at 9:56 am. 10 Comments :

With Mitt Romney’s campaign flailing desperately to avoid a massive blowout next month, the conservative media that is frantically trying to prop him up are running out options. They’ve tried to turn the unrest in Libya into Obama’s Watergate. They’ve tried to transform out-of-context snippets of Obama’s speeches into scandalous gaffes. They’ve tried to dismiss all of the polls showing Obama ahead as products of a liberally biased media. None of that has worked to reverse the decline of Romney’s electoral prospects.

So what is a determined right-wing press to do when all of their best efforts to torpedo President Obama have crashed in flames?

Resort to racism, of course. Led by the Daily Caller and the Drudge Report, and buttressed by Fox News, the right is now hyperventilating over a five year old video of Obama talking about the well-documented failure to adequately respond to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. They think that people have forgotten about George Bush’s deadly neglect and his praise for FEMA crony Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown.

Contrary to claims that this is a shocking new video, Obama’s speech was covered at the time by most of the press, including Fox News. Even the Daily Caller’s publisher, Tucker Carlson, reported on this video when he anchored a program on MSNBC. The feverish presentation of this video is nothing more than a transparent attempt to manufacture controversy where none exists.

However, there is another objective here on the part of these video-hypers. Since the content of the video contains references to race, they see this as an opportunity to portray the President as obsessed with the issue. Much of the discussion in the rightist media is about whether Obama was blaming racism for the poor response to Katrina (as if that would be shocking). They are also focusing on a portion of the tape where Obama acknowledges his former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who was in the audience. Glomming on to Wright is not an accidental brush with the past. Conservatives have been prodding Romney to adopt that as an issue since at least last May when I compiled these quotes:

Fox Anchor Chris Wallace: As far as Rev. Wright is concerned, I think it had a lot of relevance, and I think McCain was crazy not to bring it up.

Radio Talker Mark Levin: Why would you take any issue off the table, particularly issues that give us a look into this man’s character?

Fox Anchor Sean Hannity: I believe that the president’s relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a man that influenced him for over 20 years, inspired him, is a very important campaign issue.

Fox Host Kimberly Guilfoyle: I don’t think [rejecting the Wright issue] is the right thing to do. I think he should try to get after it.

Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft: [Rejecting the Wright issue] is certainly disappointing.

Powerline’s Paul Mirengoff: I think there may be value in talking about the Obama-Wright connection.

National Review’s Michael Walsh: Even by Stupid Party standards, [tabling Wright] was an impressive display of preemptive surrender.

Fox Contributor Charles Krauthammer: [I]n principle, if you want to [bring up Wright], it would be completely legitimate.

Herman Cain: I think it is fair if someone wants to highlight the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and his relationship with Barack Obama because, quite frankly, it wasn’t highlighted enough in 2008 when he was running for president the first time.

So now, via a coordinated effort between Romney’s camp, Drudge, and Fox, this issue is being revived. Is it because the public has been clamoring for more information about it? Unlikely. Is it because it worked so well the first time? McCain lost. Or is it because it injects the theme of race into the campaign and riles up the GOP base and spurs prejudiced wingnuts to show up at the polls? Let’s just say “Fox News Reports, You Decide.”

[Late Breaking] Fox Nation is piling on with yet another “Unearthed Video” that charges Obama with “Slam[ing] ‘Violent’ Rich People.” In fact, in this 10 year old clip Obama was talking about the figurative violence of neglecting the needs of America’s less fortunate citizens. Fox is portraying these comments as literal and implying an escalation of the class war. On that subject, remember the words of Warren Buffet: There is a class war, and we are winning. Here is what Obama actually said:

Fox Nation Violent Rich

“The philosophy of nonviolence only makes sense if the powerful can be made to recognize themselves in the powerless. It only makes sense if the powerless can be made to recognize themselves in the powerful. You know, the principle of empathy gives broader meaning, by the way, to Dr. King’s philosophy of nonviolence. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but rich people are all for nonviolence. Why wouldn’t they be? They’ve got what they want. They want to make sure people don’t take their stuff. But the principle of empathy recognizes that there are more subtle forms of violence to which we are answerable. The spirit of empathy condemns not only the use of firehoses and attack dogs to keep people down but also accountants and tax loopholes to keep people down. I’m not saying that what Enron executives did to their employees is the moral equivalent of what Bull Connor did to black folks, but I’ll tell you what, the employees at Enron feel violated. When a company town sees its plant closing because some distant executives made some decision despite the wage concessions, despite the tax breaks, and they see their entire economy collapsing, they feel violence.“

Once again, there is nothing objectionable in those remarks. But Fox finds a way to mischaracterize them in order to stir racial animus. It’s all they have left.

The Fox Effect: The Book That Terrifies Roger Ailes And Fox News

Posted by Mark NC on February 27, 2012 at 9:55 am. 4 Comments :

A new book from Media Matters was just released that chronicles the history of Fox News and explains how a small group of wealthy, politically connected conservative partisans conspired to build a pseudo-news network with the intent of advancing the right-wing agenda of the Republican Party. And that network, known for its drooling anti-liberalism, is scared spitless.

The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine, was written by David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt (and others) of Media Matters. It begins by looking back at the early career of Fox News CEO Roger Ailes and his role as a media consultant for Republican politicians, including former president Richard Nixon. From the start Ailes was a brash, creative proponent of the power of television to influence a mass audience. He guided the media-challenged Nixon through a treacherous new era of news and political PR, and his experiences formed the basis for what would become his life’s grand achievement: a “news” network devoted to a political party, its candidates, and its platform.

When Ailes partnered with international newspaper mogul Rupert Murdoch to launch a new 24 hour cable news channel, he was given an unprecedented measure of control to shape the network’s business and ideology. The Fox Effect examines the underpinnings of the philosophy that Ailes brought to the venture. His earliest observations exhibit an appreciation for the tabloid-style sensationalism that would become a hallmark of Fox’s reporting. Ailes summed it up in an interview in 1988 as something he called his “orchestra pit theory” of politics:

“If you have two guys on stage and one guy says ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls into the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?”

That’s the sort of thinking that produced Fox’s promotion of hollering town hall protesters during the health care debate and their focus on lurid but phony issues like death panels. It is a flavor of journalism that elevates melodrama over factual discourse.

This article also appears on Alternet.org.

The book exposes how Fox was more of a participant in the news than a reporter of it. Through interviews with Fox insiders and leaked internal communications, The Fox Effect documents the depths to which the network collaborated with political partisans to invent stories with the intent of manipulating public opinion. The authors reveal memos from the Washington managing editor of Fox News, Bill Sammon, directing anchors and reporters on how to present certain subjects. For instance, he ordered them never to use the term “public option” when referring to health insurance reform. Focus group testing by Fox pollster Frank Luntz had found that the phrase “government option” left a more negative impression, and they were instructed to use that instead.

There is a chapter on the Tea Party that describes how integral Fox was to its inception and development. The network literally branded the fledgling movement as FNC Tea Parties and dispatched its top anchors to host live broadcasts from rallies. The Fox Effect also details the extensive coverage devoted to the deceitfully edited videos that brought down ACORN. Fox was instrumental in promoting the story and stirring up a public backlash that resulted in congressional investigations and loss of funding. The book followed the story from Andrew Breitbart’s new and little known BigGovernment blog to Glenn Beck’s conspiracy factory to the wall-to-wall coverage it enjoyed on Fox’s primetime. This chapter is where the authors introduce what they call “The Six Steps” that Fox employs to create national controversies:

STEP 1: Conservative activists introduce the lie.
STEP 2: Fox News devotes massive coverage to the story.
STEP 3: Fox attacks other outlets for ignoring the controversy.
STEP 4: Mainstream outlets begin reporting on the story.
STEP 5: Media critics, pundits praise Fox News’s coverage.
STEP 6: The story falls apart once the damage has been done.

This is a pattern that has played out with varying degrees of success. Fox used this blueprint to engineer the career-ending slander of presidential adviser Van Jones and Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod. But the strategy was less effective when used against Attorney General Eric Holder and Planned Parenthood, although not for lack of effort.

These, and other examples of deliberate bias, illustrate why most neutral observers regard Fox News as the PR arm of the Republican Party. The Fox Effect makes a convincing case to affirm that view and even offers admissions to that effect by Fox insiders. It is a damning exposé of how a political operative and a right-wing billionaire built a propaganda machine thinly disguised as a news network. The research and documentation are extensive and compelling.

For that reason, Fox News has mounted an unprecedented attack on Media Matters in advance of the book’s release. [Note: Actually it’s not so unprecedented. Fox set the precedent itself last year with a sustained campaign to do tangible harm by tacking an article to the top of the Fox Nation web site with a headline that read “Want to File an IRS Complaint Against Media Matters? Click Here…”] In the week prior to publication of The Fox Effect, Fox News broadcast no fewer than a dozen derogatory segments across all dayparts and on their most popular programs, including The O’Reilly Factor, Hannity, Fox & Friends, etc. It was the sort of blanket coverage usually reserved for a natural disaster, a declaration of war, or a lewd TwitPic of a politician. The attacks never contained any substantive argument or even example of error on the part of Media Matters. However, they are brimming with the most nasty form of personal invective imaginable.

The basis for the Fox News broadcasts was a series of articles by the Daily Caller (TDC), the conservative web site of Tucker Carlson, who just happens to also be on the Fox News payroll. The gist of the story, as described by TDC, is that Media Matters is manipulating news organizations, coordinating messaging with the White House, and struggling to cope with the “volatile and erratic behavior” of Brock, whom TDC alleges is mentally ill. TDC never reveals from where they got their psychiatric credentials, nor when they had an opportunity to examine and diagnose Brock. Likewise, they never reveal where they got any of the other information for the allegations they make against Media Matters as every source is anonymous.

Media analysts have universally condemned TDC’s reporting. Howard Kurtz interviewed author Vince Coglianese on CNN’s Reliable Sources and assailed the absence of any evidence to corroborate the allegations of his anonymous sources. Coglianese could not even confirm that events alleged in the article ever occurred. He laughably argued that the absence of a denial from Brock was evidence of guilt, rather than a simple disinclination to raise the profile of a poorly written article. Jack Shafer wrote for Reuters that “the Daily Caller is attacking Media Matters with bad journalism and lame propaganda.”

Media Matters was created to document conservative media bias and work to implement reforms that would produce more balanced reporting. Yet, Fox is confused by the fact that Media Matters’ research is cited by progressive organizations and publishers. The grunt work of aggregating video and other reporting is appreciated by those who use Media Matters materials. Much of it is provided without any editorializing. The right has always been fearful of any entity that would simply record their disinformation, nonsense, and hostility, and then hold them accountable for it. But they have yet to criticize NewsBusters or their parent organization, the Media Research Center, despite the cozy relationship they have with Fox News. Brit Hume, the former managing editor of Fox News, however, was abundantly grateful:

Hume: I want to say a word, however, of thanks to Brent [Bozell] and the team at the Media Research Center […] for the tremendous amount of material that the Media Research Center provided me for so many years when I was anchoring Special Report, I don’t know what we would’ve done without them. It was a daily buffet of material to work from, and we certainly made tremendous use of it.

Joining in on the assault is the Fox Nation web site that is engaged in a relentless barrage of critical articles with disturbingly insulting and hyperbolic headlines. For instance:

Is Media Matters’ David Brock A ‘Dangerous’ Man?
Were Media Matters Donors Duped?
Inside Media Matters: Founder Believed to be Regularly Using Illegal Drugs, Including Cocaine.

But even those paled in comparison to what Fox News was posting on the screen graphics that accompanied their broadcasts:

MEDIA MATTERS’ MONEY: David Brock is an admitted drug user
THE MONEY BEHIND THE MACHINE: David Brock committed to a quiet room
A LIBERAL INFLUENCE: Brock spent time in a mental ward

Note that the subjects of the broadcasts were financial in nature. Fox was reporting on TDC’s discovery that Media Matters donors were largely progressive individuals and foundations (not exactly what one would call a scoop). However, Fox News appended assertions as to the mental stability of Brock, which had nothing to do with their topic. It was merely an opportunity for them to take swipes at a perceived enemy. And this mud-slinging occurred during what Fox regards as their “news” programming, not the evening hours that they designate as the opinion portion of their schedule.

In order to cement the impression that David Brock is a mental defective, unfit to lead any organization or to be given serious consideration, Fox News brought in their resident psycho analyst, “Dr” Keith Ablow. As a part of the Fox News Medical “A” Team, Ablow appeared on the air in a segment that painted Brock as seriously disturbed and even dangerous:

“If you are filled with self-loathing you will see demons on every street corner because you project that self-hatred. […] He’s a dangerous man because having followers and waging war, as he says, or previously being a right-wing hitman, this isn’t accidental language. It’s about violence, destruction, and he feels destroyed in himself.”

This diagnosis was an invention by Ablow who has never examined Brock, or even met him. That in itself is a violation of the American Psychiatric Association’s Principles of Medical Ethics, something Ablow does not need to concern himself with because last year he was compelled to separate himself from the APA due to ethical “differences.”

This is actually the second time Ablow has appeared on Fox News with his absurd fantasies (or projections) about Brock. And Brock isn’t his only pretend patient. A few weeks ago he published an op-ed on FoxNews.com that praised Newt Gingrich’s serial infidelity as evidence of traits that would help him to make America stronger were he president. Seriously! And who could forget his deranged psycho analysis of President Obama?

If Fox News wants to engage in “remote” psychiatry they ought to at least be fair and balanced about it. However they pointedly make no mention of the reported paranoia of Fox News CEO Roger Ailes. No mention that he was cited as the reason that the NYPD provided police protection for the Fox headquarters at a cost of $500,000 a year to the people of New York. No mention of the obsessive fears described by Tim Dickinson in a Rolling Stone profile:

“Ailes is also deeply paranoid. Convinced that he has personally been targeted by Al Qaeda for assassination, he surrounds himself with an aggressive security detail and is licensed to carry a concealed handgun. […] Murdoch installed Ailes in the corner office on Fox’s second floor at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. The location made Ailes queasy: It was close to the street, and he lived in fear that gay activists would try to attack him in retaliation over his hostility to gay rights. (In 1989, Ailes had broken up a protest of a Rudy Giuliani speech by gay activists, grabbing demonstrator by the throat and shoving him out the door.) Barricading himself behind a massive mahogany desk, Ailes insisted on having ‘bombproof glass’ installed in the windows – even going so far as to personally inspect samples of high-tech plexiglass, as though he were picking out new carpet.”

I really have to wonder if even the Fox News audience is so intellectually comatose that they wouldn’t recognize the feverish anxiety gushing from Fox in advance of the Media Matters book. A tree stump would notice that they are laying it on awfully thick. So the obvious question is what are they so afraid of? And the answer is that Fox News can no longer hide from their reputation as a dishonest purveyor of slanted propaganda and tabloid trash on behalf of a right-wing agenda and the political operatives who advance it and benefit from it.

The Fox Effect is a thoroughly documented investigation into the inner workings of both the organization and its principle managers and backers. It peels away the layers of the conservative cabal that has so effectively poisoned the public discourse on many significant issues. And like the fraudulent Wizard in the city of Oz, Fox wants us all to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain (Roger Ailes), or to the curtain (Fox News), or the corporation that controls it all (News Corp). And to that end Fox has embarked on a massive smear campaign to destroy the credibility of the book, its authors, and the organization that produced it. But Media Matters has already succeeded. As noted in the book’s epilogue:

“Fox News will no longer be able to conduct its campaign under the false pretense that the network is a journalistic institution. There is heightened awareness in the progressive community and in the general public of the damage Fox causes.”

And that is exactly what Fox is afraid of.

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