Oliver North? Really? The Unmitigated Gall Of Fox News

So Oliver North was on Fox News giving analysis on the negotiations with Iran about nuclear weapons. Yeah, that Oliver North. the one who sold arms to Iran for Ronald Reagan, which was against international law. The one who took the illegal profits and sent them to terrorists in Nicaragua, which was against federal law. And if that weren’t enough, he lied under oath to Congress about it in his Marine uniform.

You have to hand it to Fox News for selecting this felonious cretin to pontificate about contemporary arms negotiations with the same country that he supplied. And his view that President Obama’s efforts to prevent Iran from having the deadliest weapons are “an unmitigated disaster,” makes you wonder what he thought of his role in arming Iran while they were holding Americans hostage.

It also makes you wonder how stupid Fox News viewers are.

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Oliver North

Benghazi A Mini Iran/Contra? Fox News Should Ask Their Own In-House Felon

Earlier this week Fox News helped to promote a shoddily constructed story by a discredited reporter about an alleged effort by the State Department to dispose of documents that might be harmful to then-Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. The story, that they laughably called a “bombshell,” did not provide a single bit of evidence and relied entirely on allegations by a former State Department official who had been reprimanded for being “grossly inadequate” and who clearly had an ax to grind.

Fox News Oliver North

Today Fox News upped the ante by adding new scenarios with even less connection to reality. On Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade introduced a segment with retired Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer saying that…

“Anything that could have got them into trouble, Colonel, was grinded up, was shredded, and the review board never got all the documents.”

Of course, none of that was ever verified, and the allegations were merely speculation by someone who the reporter admits never witnessed any such thing. So in order to take the focus off of how thin this whole fictional account is, Kilmeade allowed his guest to offer up a complete fantasy that neither of them bothered to support with any facts.

Shaffer: Some of these documents we’re talking about were probably the direct link to some of the bad incidents, to include the holy grail here that nobody wants to talk about, is the obtaining of weapons from the Libyan rebels, moving them out of the country, to the Turks, through Turkey to the Syrian rebels. Some of those rebels ended up being the ISIS threat we’re now facing.

Kilmeade: So you mean this is almost like a mini Iran/Contra thing?

Shaffer responded “Absolutely,” to this question, apparently ignorant of what the Iran/Contra scandal was all about. Shaffer’s invention of a plot to transfer weapons that were lawfully provided to Qaddafi foes in Libya, to dubious characters in Syria, is nothing like Iran/Contra, and there is no evidence that it even happened. In the Reagan era scandal weapons were illegally sold to Iran while the nation was under an international arms embargo. The proceeds were then used to illegally fund the Nicaraguan Contras, which was explicitly prohibited by federal law.

The funny thing about this is that Fox News could have gotten all of this straight if they had instead interviewed their own employee, Oliver North. It was North who ran the Iran/Contra affair and was convicted by a jury for his felonious behavior. However, he is now a Fox News anchor and military commentator for the network. You have to wonder whether it was his violations of federal and international arms trading laws, or his perjury conviction for lying under oath to Congress, that made him such an attractive candidate for employment at Fox.

Actually, it may be overly optimistic to suggest that North would have straightened anybody out, since he has been lying about the scandal for more than two decades. But it’s interesting that Fox is now using Iran/Contra as an example of grossly unlawful practices with their comparison to the fiction they are hyping about the Clinton State Department purging documents. If this “holy grail” that they are now trying to smear Clinton with is so bad that they are calling it a “mini Iran/Contra,” then how can they ethically employ the leader of the actual, full-sized Iran/Contra?

Of course, the answer to that question is that Fox News has never considered it within their charter to act ethically. That makes their job of lying and distorting the news a lot easier.

Fox News Lies: Obama Did Not Praise Ho Chi Minh

One of the propaganda tactics most favored by Fox News is the snipping of a comment by President Obama and regurgitating it in a negative, and wholly dishonest, light. They did it last year on behalf of the Romney campaign numerous times with silliness like “You didn’t build that,” and other blatant misrepresentations.

Fox News

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Today Fox News is premiering their latest rhetorical deception by fixating on remarks the President made in a press availability with Vietnam President Truong Tan Sang. While describing the discussion Obama had with Sang, he noted that

“At the conclusion of the meeting, President Sang shared with me a copy of a letter sent by Ho Chi Minh to Harry Truman. And we discussed the fact that Ho Chi Minh was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson.”

That’s it. Nothing praising Ho Chi Minh at all. Just a simple recitation of unarguable facts. No one on Fox or the right-wing fruitcake brigade disputes that Ho Chi Minh revered the people and ideas that inspired the birth of the United States. He used the Declaration of Independence as the model for Vietnam’s quest for its own independence from France.

Nevertheless, Fox News is now attempting to twist Obama’s words into something that he never said or even implied. And the “fair and balanced” network brought on two revolting characters with sordid pasts to advance the distortions. Oliver North is the convicted Reaganite who illegally sold arms to Iran in order to secure funding to support fascist rebels in Nicaragua, which was prohibited by congress. Ralph Peters is the Fox strategic analyst who called on the Taliban to “save us a lot of legal hassles” by executing an American soldier. He also advocated military attacks on the media. These two traitorous miscreants spent several unopposed minutes on Fox lambasting Obama as “stupid” and “evil” as they lied about what he said.

Anyone who seriously regards Fox as a credible news source should seek professional help. The unadulterated lie that Obama praised Ho Chi Minh can also be juxtaposed with the documented fact that Fox did indeed praise the Unabomber. This is the level of cognitive disconnect that exists at Fox, and it is the reason that their audience is so pathetically ignorant. It’s a good thing that their viewers are so small in number (less than 1% of the population) and so close to their judgment day (the oldest skewing audience in television).