FOLLOW US ON:
GET THE NEWSLETTER
CONTACT US
Fox News makes you DUMB: Evil conspiracy or giving thick people what they want?

image
 
Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind Poll found that some news sources actually make us less likely to have a full picture of the world we live in. Did I write some? I meant Fox News. Yep, according to the poll (which was conducted entirely in New Jersey, and so to my mind could skew the IQ results a tad higher than the overall US) Fox News viewers are more ignorant of current and international events than people who pay no attention to the news!

If Fox News was an evil Russian conspiracy to consciously try to dumb down the conservative population of the US, then they’ve done a job that the fictional SMERSH would envy! Facts? Who needs facts when there are smelly Marxists who need to get a job, Ground Zero mosques that need to be protested, whatever word salad Sarah Palin feels like puking up via satellite that day and you know, shit like that?

Intelligence is so overrated! Look at Sean Hannity. Guy’s making millions and he’s only got half a brain! See what hard work aggressively inflicting ignorance on senior citizens and thick people can get you in this country, dirty hippies? Get with the Ronald Reagan free market, Occupy weirdos! And get off my lawn!

Among other topics, New Jerseyans were asked about the outcome of the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East this past year. While 53% of New Jerseyans know that Egyptians were successful in overthrowing the government of Hosni Mubarak, 21% say that the uprisings were unsuccessful, and 26% admit they don’t know.  Also, 48% know that the Syrian uprising has thus far been unsuccessful, while 36% say they don’t know, and 16% say the Syrians have already toppled their government.
 
But the real finding is that the results depend on what media sources people turn to for  their news. For example, people who watch Fox News, the most popular of the 24-hour cable news networks, are 18-points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government than those who watch no news at all (after controlling for other news sources, partisanship, education and other demographic factors).  Fox News watchers  are also 6-points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government than those who watch no news. 

I’ll repeat that: People who get their news “by osmosis,” walking past a newsstand, or via “the drum” know more about what’s going on in the world around them than people who watch Fox fucking News!

“Because of the controls for partisanship, we know these results are not just driven by Republicans or other groups being more likely to watch Fox News,” said Dan Cassino, a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson and an analyst for the PublicMind Poll. “Rather, the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at
all.”

Of course this is one study Fox New viewers will never, ever hear about…

Read more at Public Minds

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
11.21.2011
05:34 pm
|
Occupy THESE idiots: Fox News is the 1%

image
 
Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films was on MSNBC’s The Ed Show last night to discuss the completely idiotic way Fox has bashed Occupy Wall Street.  (My former company released several of his documentaries on DVD including OutFoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, a project I was proud to have put some money behind).

Watch the opening montage: How could anyone save for a totally uninformed pisshead take Fox News and what these people have to say seriously? It’s simply dishonest reporting yet the Geritol set and thick people all over the country take this shite as the gospel truth. Who benefits from keeping the common man ignorant and infuriated? (The 1%?)

It’s just bizarre to watch this, having visited Zuccotti Park several times personally. What they describe bears little to no resemblance to what I saw with my own two eyes on several occasions. They are flat out liars and fabricators.

Why NOT occupy Fox News? It would give them something legitimate to complain about and man, would that be a whole lot of fun.
 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
11.18.2011
03:17 pm
|
Occupy Fox News


 
This commercial ran three times during Wednesday night’s episode of The O’Reilly Factor. It’s also aired on Bloomberg, ESPN, the History Channel and elsewhere

If you’d like to chip in to buy more national media time for this Occupy Wall Street ad and others, you can do so via Loudsauce.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
11.09.2011
09:15 pm
|
Slavoj Žižek speaks about Occupy Wall Street on Fox News?


 
Yeah, you wish… Me too! Sorry for the bait and switch, folks, but I’ll try to make it up to you with a new half-hour video of Žižek, below, as seen on Al Jazeera last week.

I do have a point, though, for leading you here under false pretenses: The fact that you are interested to see what Slavoj Žižek (or someone like him) would say about Occupy Wall Street, and especially hearing it said on Fox News, is why Roger Ailes needs to do a very quick revamp of his product if he doesn’t want Fox to seem like it’s yesterday’s news…

It’s been interesting to watch how Fox News keeps calling on the very same lame-brained group of talking heads they always call on, to discuss Occupy Wall Street. Like they can’t rotate in ANYONE new to shake things up even a little bit? OWS has upset the Fox News apple cart in a big way. They have no idea how to deal with it, understand it, or even process it intellectually, let alone report on it, and that is becoming more and more obvious every day.

How many variations on the themes of “dirty hippies,” “they don’t know what they want,” “they’re a bunch of violent socialists who are just jealous of rich people (like us and our masters)” and of course, “ACORN!” are there?

I’ve just counted four.

Predictable but hilarious. In less than two months Fox has nearly totally lost its once secure place in the national conversation. They’re floundering very, very badly. They’ve fumbled the ball.

Here’s how I see it: Fox News post-Occupy Wall Street is like The Spice Girls the day after Geri Haliwell left the group. Their entire shtick became anachronistic in a single day.

This is what Occupy Wall Street has done to Fox News, not to mention the rest of the far Reichwing opinion outlets. From talk radio to the various editorials written byTea party twits on WorldNetDaily, what’s been on evidence for the past few weeks is that there is almost zero capability on the part of people who think that way to absorb what is happening because it is happening so incredibly quickly. It’s taken them completely by surprise.

Indeed, the scales have rapidly tipped in the past few weeks and there are shifting sands beneath our feet as I type this. My feet and yours, not just Bill O’Reilly’s or Rupert Murdoch’s. I don’t think anyone, right of left, has a full picture of what’s going on, or exactly where it’s headed, but what should be crystal clear to every person in the world capable of critical thinking is that something big, something very major and something potentially fantastic has happened and it is going to continue to happen for some time to come. Like it or not, this is not a prediction, it is a statement of fact.

The genie is way out of the bottle, but you won’t hear about this from entities (like Fox News) who are threatened by what’s happening. Some of the most objective reporting on what’s occurring in America—and when I say “objective” I mean to impart, in this instance, not an anti-American bias but a NON-American point of view, there is huge difference—is coming from Russia Today and Al Jazeera. You want interesting news, considered opinions, intelligent reporting and something beyond the empty calories of the shrieking taking heads, then check both networks out.

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek was recently given nearly 30 minutes on Al Jazeera to speak about global revolutionary movements and what’s coming next. Can you imagine the sparks that would fly if Žižek was invited on to The O’Reilly Factor or Sean Hannity’s program?

Why not? If it’s good for ratings, it’s good for ratings. Isn’t that all Ailes really cares about? Well, if so, Fox News will need to update their modus operandi—and pronto, too—to keep up with such rapidly changing events. The thing is, I don’t think they can go on as they have in the past. Not because I think their audience has, or is going to, “wise up” all of a sudden because of what they see happening with OWS (although some of them will). No, my contention is very simply that Fox News is becoming too predictable, even for their admittedly not very intellectually demanding viewers. That’s saying a lot.

Ann Coulter? Hmmm, I mean, I wonder what her take is on Occupy Wall Street, don’t you?

Actually, no I fucking don’t and I never have. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass what Ann Coulter thinks about anything, but beyond that, she’s boring, and predictable, and so is Fox News. The past two months have seen the network foundering badly. Fox has become too rote, too boring. Ann Coulter? She’s not even any fun to mock anymore. Roger Ailes needs to euthanize Ann Coulter and push her off the gangplank just like he did with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. She’s the poster child for everything that’s wrong with Fox News right now. Put her and the rest of them out to pasture soon or Fox News will be just like the post-Geri Haliwell Spice Girls in 1998, becoming a glaring anachronism almost overnight.

Below, Slavoj Žižek on Al Jazeera last week:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
11.03.2011
02:40 pm
|
Tea Party Zombies Must Die!
09.07.2011
02:53 pm
Topics:
Tags:


 
Tea Party Zombies Must Die” is a new first-person shooter game from StarvingEyes Advergaming, a company set up to make viral Internet games. Looks like they’ve got a winner in that department with this in-house produced game:

DON’T GET TEA-BAGGED! The Tea Party zombies are walking the streets of America. Grab your weapons and bash their rotten brains to bits! Destroy zombie Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, the Koch Brothers, and many more!

Apparently the way this works is that the shooter, er, player, blasts their way into the Fox News studio encountering “Factory-made Blonde Fox News Barbie Who Has Never Had a Problem in Her Life Zombie” and then moves through the levels encountering the “Koch industries Koch Whore lobbyist pig zombie,” “Generic Pissed Off Old White Guy Zombie,” the “Pissed Off Stupid White Trash Redneck Birther Zombie” and the “Climate Change Denying Zombie.”

Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich, Brit Hume, Mike Huckabee and the ever hapless Rick Santorum also provide “undead” fodder for the game.

Cue Fox News making a huge controversy over this, and blaming Obama for it somehow…
 

 

 
Via The National Review

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
09.07.2011
02:53 pm
|
Roger Ailes: The Evil (Paranoid) Overlord of Fox News
05.27.2011
12:04 pm
Topics:
Tags:


 
If you haven’t read Tim Dickinson’s terrific article on the genius/lunacy of Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, in the new issue of Rolling Stone, it’s a must-read, tour-de-force bit-o-journalism. Dickinson manages to make sense of the entire wacko-conservative gestalt of Fox News: It’s a top down organization of far-right toadies—no liberals need bothering applying—each vying for attention, approval and career advancement—natch—from the power-mad, brilliant yet crazy-seeming paranoiac who runs that bughouse.

Here are three key “takeaway” paragraphs from the article:

Ailes begins each workday buffered by the elaborate private security detail that News Corp. pays to usher him from his $1.6 million home in New Jersey to his office in Manhattan. (His country home – in the aptly named village of Garrison – is phalanxed by empty homes that Ailes bought up to create a wider security perimeter.) Traveling with the Chairman is like a scene straight out of 24. A friend recalls hitching a ride with Ailes after a power lunch: “We come out of the building and there’s an SUV filled with big guys, who jump out of the car when they see him. A cordon is formed around us. We’re ushered into the SUV, and we drive the few blocks to Fox’s offices, where another set of guys come out of the building to receive ‘the package.’ The package is taken in, and I’m taken on to my destination.”Ailes is certain that he’s a top target of Al Qaeda terrorists. “You know, they’re coming to get me,” he tells friends. “I’m fully prepared. I’ve taken care of it.” (Ailes, who was once arrested for carrying an illegal handgun in Central Park, now carries a licensed weapon.) Inside his blast-resistant office at Fox News headquarters, Ailes keeps a monitor on his desk that allows him to view any activity outside his closed door. Once, after observing a dark-skinned man in what Ailes perceived to be Muslim garb, he put Fox News on lockdown. “What the hell!” Ailes shouted. “This guy could be bombing me!” The suspected terrorist turned out to be a janitor. “Roger tore up the whole floor,” recalls a source close to Ailes. “He has a personal paranoia about people who are Muslim – which is consistent with the ideology of his network.”

**********

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. Looking down on the street below, he expressed his fears to Cooper, the editor he had tasked with up-armoring his office. “They’ll be down there protesting,” Ailes said. “Those gays.”

**********

Ailes knows exactly who is watching Fox News each day, and he is adept at playing to their darkest fears in the age of Obama. The network’s viewers are old, with a median age of 65: Ads cater to the immobile, the infirm and the incontinent, with appeals to join class action hip-replacement lawsuits, spots for products like Colon Flow and testimonials for the services of Liberator Medical (“Liberator gave me back the freedom I haven’t had since I started using catheters”). The audience is also almost exclusively white – only 1.38 percent of viewers are African-American. “Roger understands audiences,” says Rollins, the former Reagan consultant. “He knew how to target, which is what Fox News is all about.” The typical viewer of Hannity, to take the most stark example, is a pro-business (86 percent), Christian conservative (78 percent), Tea Party-backer (75 percent) with no college degree (66 percent), who is over age 50 (65 percent), supports the NRA (73 percent), doesn’t back gay rights (78 percent) and thinks government “does too much” (84 percent). “He’s got a niche audience and he’s programmed to it beautifully,” says a former News Corp. colleague. “He feeds them exactly what they want to hear.”

Fox News will make a lot more sense after you’ve read this article. You’ll be simultaneously impressed and sickened by the evil genius of Roger Ailes. Love ‘em or loathe him—I’m firmly in the latter category I can assure you—it cannot be denied what a media-manipulating genius he truly is.

How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory: The onetime Nixon operative has created the most profitable propaganda machine in history. Inside America’s Unfair and Imbalanced Network (Rolling Stone)
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
05.27.2011
12:04 pm
|
Historic Black church receives threats after comments from Sean Hannity
04.28.2011
07:23 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
The Shiloh Baptist Church, the historic African-American house of worship attended by the Obama family on Easter Sunday (and that has been visited in the past by Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush) has received more than 100 threatening phone calls and messages since Sean Hannity’s Monday night broadcast on Fox News:

The Rev. Wallace Charles Smith said the church has received more than 100 threats since Fox News channel’s Sean Hannity aired a tape Monday of a speech Smith gave in January 2010 at Eastern University in Saint Davids, Pa.

“We received a fax that had the image of a monkey with a target across his face,” Smith said. “My secretary has received telephone calls that have been so vulgar until she has had to hang up.” …

On Sunday, Obama and the first family visited the church, founded in the 1860s by former slaves. On Monday, Hannity aired a clip of a speech Smith gave when he served as president of Palmer Theological Seminary in Philadelphia.

“It may not be Jim Crow anymore,” Smith says in the videotape. “Now, Jim Crow wears blue pinstripes, goes to law school and carries fancy briefs in cases. And now, Jim Crow has become James Crow, esquire. And he doesn’t have to wear white robes anymore because now he can wear the protective cover of talk radio or can get a regular news program on Fox.”

Sean Hannity’s Neanderthal audience sorta made the good Rev. Smith’s point for him, don’t you think?

Then, being the crass, small-minded scumbag asshole that he is, Hannity e-mailed the Washington Post on Wednesday, writing that he’d requested comment from Rev. Smith and had offered him “an open invitation to explain his comments on our show and he refused. We played his own words in full context but now it’s time for him to explain.”

So he can get a thousand threats and pictures of monkeys in cross-hairs sent to his office next time? I’m sure Rev. Smith will get right on that, you racist frat-boy bully…

Personally, I think it’s time for the SEAN HANNITY to “explain” his ratings-driven race-baiting but I won’t hold my breath for that. This motherfucker claims to be a patriot and love his country. Sean, where is the love?

Shiloh Baptist Church receives threats after comments from Sean Hannity (Washington Post)

Via Little Green Footballs

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
04.28.2011
07:23 pm
|
If Fox News existed throughout history

image
 
*Shudders*

(via Banned in Hollywood)

Posted by Tara McGinley
|
04.14.2011
06:11 pm
|
Top Fox exec admits to lying on-air about Obama being a ‘socialist’
03.31.2011
01:00 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon was caught bragging on tape during a conservative cruise ship retreat that he flat-out lied when he speculated on-air “about whether Barack Obama really advocated socialism.” Sammon goes on to add that this allegation he personally—and *ahem* privately—found “rather far-fetched.” He calls it “mischievious” but wouldn’t an honest person call it what it is: LYING? He’s the VP of the top TV news outlet in America and he publicly admits to lying on-camera??? Where the fuck is James O’Keefe?

The funny sad thing is, I’m one of those people who desperately wanted Obama to be a socialist! Talk about your delusional and dashed hopes… Anyone who says Obama is a socialist, is either an idiot or like Bill Sammon, a lying liar. (And dig the subtext: Sammon is basically saying “Hey, I’m not dumb enough to actually believe the shit I say on TV”! Hilarious).

If an NPR executive or a CNN VP said something like this against a conservative politician, or even made a generic comment disparaging the right, they’d be forced out of their job within a matter of days. Sammon—AN ADMITTED LIAR, WHO LIED ON FOX NEWS, WHERE HE IS EMPLOYED—should be repudiated and fired by Fox immediately. There is no nuance to what he said. He admitted to lying. That is what he did. The man has no credibility professionally—as an admitted liar, as a supposed newsman—moving forward.

You can help put some heat on Sammon and Fox News by sharing this video on FB and Twitter.

PS: It’s amusing to read some of the comments about this video on YouTube and elsewhere. One teabagger wrote “You Media Matters-types should all be in jail!” What does someone think they mean when they make a statement like that in this kind of context, you know? Exposing liars is a bad thing, I guess, when someone happens to agree with the lies?
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
03.31.2011
01:00 pm
|
“Fox News Lies!”: Correcting the record

 
Not that they have any credibility to begin with, but the Fox News coverage of Wisconsin has been particularly dishonest.

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
03.10.2011
01:32 pm
|
Shep Smith & Juan Williams DELIBERATELY tell the truth about Wisconsin and Koch Bros on Fox News!
02.24.2011
12:44 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Fox News’ Shep Smith, who from time to time proves that he’s actually a sensitive, thinking human being with empathy for others (unlike the vast majority of the ideologues he works with), and Juan Williams, speak the unvarnished truth about what’s going on in Wisconsin. They actially stick up for the little guy! On Fox fucking News! For reals. You won’t believe it!

Watch this. No really, watch this. It’s not often that you’re going to hear something like this on Fox News, so savor it while you can.

“They were promised this. They worked all their lives for this.” [<--Can you imagine the hate mail Smith will get for that alone???]

“I’m not taking a side on this, I’m just telling you what’s going on…to pretend this is about a fiscal crisis in the state of Wisconsin is malarkey.” [<--Think he'll have an uncomfortable moment around the water cooler with Sean Hannity over letting that one slip out???]

Maybe my TV is broken or something?
 

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
02.24.2011
12:44 pm
|
Iowa Republican focus group agrees: Obama a Muslim

 
Now this is good TV! Ever since I stopped giving a fuck that I live in a land of lard-encrusted intellectual midgets and learned to sit back, relax and grab a good seat for the end times reality teevee show, my life’s been so much less stressful.

Why just a few short weeks ago, I’d have been apoplectic at the sight of these moronic Iowa Republicans passing judgement on Obama’s Middle East foreign policy as if even one of these ignoramuses could find Egypt on a map. The punch line happens just before the one minute mark, when all is revealed….

Here’s an astute comment from YouTube:

This is what happens when when you fail to learn how to think critically and judge the validity of your sources of information. These people feel confident in their beliefs because they never put any real thought into them.

Arguing with such people is often fruitless, because directly confronting them usually causes them to retreat further in their beliefs. To get them to question their beliefs you would first need to improve their methods of thinking, which is not an easy thing to do.

He’s right, you can’t just snap your fingers in front of an idiot’s face and say “Wise up, dumbshit!” and expect that it will happen. Even Fox New’s Frank Luntz seems embarrassed for these people, which is saying a lot.

Bonus clip, Glennspeed You! Beck Emperor:
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
02.08.2011
07:26 pm
|
What if the Democrats ran Bernardine Dohrn for the Senate?
01.16.2011
02:59 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
The reaction to the post yesterday about Palin, Sharron Angle, Glenn Beck and the radical right’s violent rhetoric coming back to haunt them was an interesting thread to wake up to this morning. Thank you to (almost) everyone who contributed. A few observations:

First of all, my point, in case anyone didn’t get it, was contained in the bold text (”...the genie is all the way out of the bottle for this type of violence, for them, too.”). I’m saying that the potential for a blowback against the folks propagating the majority of this hate talk is rather ripe. If you piss in the wind, don’t be surprised when it comes back to hit you in the face. Then poor Eric Fuller went and proved my point about 3 hours later, to his shame. His story is the very embodiment of my argument in the post. The guy should have been arrested, but it’s sad

I hardly see any evidence there of a “full-throated, hate-filled rant,” either, as I was accused of in the comments by “Metzger’s id,” someone who obviously did not read what I actually wrote. (Steve Doocey IS one of the stupidest people on television. He’s a fucking idiot and I will not back down from this position).

Commenter moflcky scores when he asks “Do you think it’s worse now than it was in the 60s/70s with SDS, the Weather Underground, the SLA, the Black Panthers, the Klan and the race riots?”

This is a very good point and worth thinking about. However, I think contrasting the difference of then vs today is best served by comparing *the media* that exists today vs. what we had at that time. With just three TV networks, I think the center could hold very easily back then. In the realm of “public opinion” it was much easier to achieve a broad general agreement 40-50 years ago and so there was, by and large, a very strong “centrist” majority. The GOP of Nixon’s era has very little to do with the GOP of today, they’ve moved far, far to the right of the positions they held in the 70s. And the Democrats of today are pretty much standing in the same place, ideologically speaking, as most of the Republicans were at that time. Nixon, it can be argued, was to the left of Bill Clinton, in many respects.

The political elites of both parties moved significantly to the right in the past 40 years, even if the general public did not. As the politicians shifted rightwards, the population, or some of the population, anyway, reacted by going in the other direction and eventually—sometime in the 90s—modern progressive politics is born (just as the Great Society and Roe vs. Wade saw an awakening of the religious right/Moral Majority as a political force in the late 70s).

You could say it was “the dialectic” or “zeitgeist” in motion or even just a “generation gap”—I refer you to Spiral Dynamics or the work of William Strauss and Neil Howe. I think both get it right. The generation up and coming looks at the Tea party and largely sees a bunch of ignorant, cranky old white people. As the younger citizens of the United States grow up, the folks who are attending these Tea party rallies will be dying off.  And as they do, something else will happen that no one can anticipate at the present time. That’s just the way it works.

The Weather Underground didn’t get face time to argue their beliefs on MSNBC in 1970, although admittedly they might today, depending on the ratings potential. I don’t think they had ANY influence on the general public. The same cannot be said of the radical right Tea party-types and folks like Tony Perkins, Bryan Fisher, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and the rest of them.

There is a huge chasm between some misguided grad students who most people were appalled by, and few supported, and an obviously doomed Republican Senate candidate telling her supporters that if they don’t win at the ballot box, they’ll win with guns? This isn’t some group of hippies who appear to be freaks to 99% of the population talking, this is a lemon-faced church lady-type who faced off against the Senate Majority leader and raised a record amount of cash (most from from outside of her state).

William Ayers was brought up in the comments. I find bringing up Bill Ayers, specifically, in this context (and nearly all others) to be utterly meaningless and tiresome. How is he relevant in 2011 or is this situation comparable? Can someone please remind me?. I’ll say it again: the biggest difference between the Weather Underground in 1969 and the Tea party in 2011 is that the Weather Underground never had their own cable news outlet (The Weather Channel?) and 15% of the dumbest and least educated portion of the population did NOT follow or sympathize with their ideals.

Imagine the Democrats were running Bernardine Dohrn for the Senate? Wouldn’t THAT would be the flip-side of the GOP running Sharron Angle? WHO is the equivalent to Sharron Angle on the mainstream Left? (There is NO nuance in advocating “Second Amendment remedies! It’s not a statement open to that much wiggle room in the interpretation!)

Make no mistake about it, this is what MORE THAN HALF of the country is hearing when we have to listen to this Tea party bullshit: These folks want MINORITY RULE.

They will not get it, obviously, without violence.

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
01.16.2011
02:59 pm
|
Who will Beck, Palin and Fox News blame the next time?
01.15.2011
03:21 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Well, we know that Sarah Palin, Sharron Angle, Glenn Beck and their irresponsible, hateful rhetoric had nothing, nothing whatsoever, to do with the shooting in Tucson, because… well, they (and Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Michelle Malkin and the rest of the right-wing punditacracy clown parade) told us so. Right? Right??

But what of the people who were actually shot, but survived, or who were eyewitnesses to the tragedy? What do they think? Who do they blame for the sorry state of the toxic political climate that led a complete lunatic like Jared Loughner to seek to inflict his “Second Amendment remedies,” on them, as per the innocent, blameless Sharron Angle?

Well, can’t say it’s much of a shock to report that at least one of the shooting victims, Eric Fuller, a 63-year-old disabled veteran who had campaigned for Gabrielle Giffords in her reelection campaign last Fall, DOES blame Palin, Beck and Angle. Fuller, who was shot in the knee and wounded in the back, told Democracy Now that “It looks like Palin, Beck, Sharron Angle and the rest got their first target. Their wish for second amendment activism has been fulfilled.” In remarks Fuller prepared in advance for the interview, he added “Their wish for Second Amendment activism has been fulfilled—senseless hatred leading to murder, lunatic-fringe anarchism, subscribed to by John Boehner, mainstream rebels with vengeance for all, even nine-year-old girls.”

In my book, Mr. Fuller’s opinion holds more water than Palin’s, Beck’s, Angle’s, Limbaugh’s and the whole of the Fox News staff’s (especially Steeve Doocey, who is a blithering idiot) combined. He took a bullet, two, in fact, so he’s got a right to his opinion. He earned it with his own blood. Suck on that, Sarah Palin!

What’s pathetically ridiculous about the entire argument from the right that the specific words of these specific people had no effect on this matter because Loughner is so very obviously batshit crazy is that this ISN’T the first incident like this in recent memory. It’s (at least) the second (if not the third: the name Richard Poplawski ring a bell?).

Why are so few people in the media talking about what happened when Glenn Beck decided to make the tiny Tides Foundation into a fearsome component of his “the progressive movement wants to destroy America with their evil Socialism” conspiracy theories last year? It HAS happened already that a mentally unbalanced person has decided to fight the vast-leftwing conspiracy that Beck and others subscribe to and propagate, with violence. Just seven months ago, a bank-robber out on parole, Byron Williams, en route to murder the staff at the Tides Foundation, opened fire on Oakland police with a 9mm handgun, a shotgun and a .308-caliber rifle with armor-piercing bullets. Williams told told authorities that he wanted to foment a revolution by “killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU.” His mother told the San Francisco Chronicle that her son had been watching Fox News and was angered by “the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items.”  Williams thought that the Tides Foundation was part of a conspiracy in which the BP oil spill was a deliberate act of sabotage masterminded by George Soros and progressives.

Sound like a Glenn Beck fan to you?

(Self-described “progressive hunter,” Williams told a reporter that Beck “blew [his] mind.” Who I am to disagree?)

Where will all of this end? Who knows, but what happens when the people who make a living riling up dumb-ass, poorly-educated white people to hate and fear people who are different than they are or who think differently than they do, face a blowback themselves? Sooner or later, a left-wing crazy probably is gonna come after one of them. It wouldn’t stretch the imagination of anyone to figure that somewhere out there in this vast nation of 300 million people, there is a foaming at the mouth far-left nutcase (or a “radical centrist” for that matter) who feels that what’s really destroying America is assholes like Beck, Palin and Sharron Angle and who thinks killing them is the answer to our nation’s problems.

I have a sickening, sinking feeling that this isn’t the end of this, for lack of a better term, “partisan violence,” but just the warm-up acts. There is something eerily Weimar Republic-esque about the sad state of present day America and it’s extremely disturbing to attempt to draw this type of behavior to its logical conclusions. Before anyone writes in to say that it’s only the right-wing who is using the violent talk, the “reload” nonsense and the brain-damaged conspiracy theories, I get that. I know that. What I’m trying to point out here is that I think the genie is all the way out of the bottle for this type of violence, for them, too.

Even if the right has always been the spiritual home to the racist and cryptofascist fringe, from the KKK to the John Birch Society to today’s Teabaggers, there are crazy people all across the political spectrum. The next time—and there is going to be a next time—it might be a former member of the American middle class who has lost his home or pension who comes gunning after a Republican. The next shooter might come from the ranks of the 99ers. The next cold blooded killer could be a radical environmentalist. The next political assassin might be someone whose child died because their insurance company didn’t pay for a new medical treatment or ...?

This toxic political climate in America today is a direct or indirect consequence of a small number of politicians and pundits on the far right calling those who they disagree with “evil.”  Does anyone with half a brain, really dispute that? Then something awful happens, like what happened in Tucson. And then there is more blame. Then the momentum of the bad craziness builds in some lone-wolf lefty lunatic and this energy reemerges with someone on the right getting hurt. And then it will start again. Back and forth, back and forth.

When, not if, the next politician, government official or TV news pundit who is killed turns out to be someone on the conservative side, Palin, Beck, Angle, Limbaugh, Michael Savage and the idiots at Fox News will have no one to blame but themselves.

UPDATE: Mr. Fuller was arrested today for disorderly conduct after allegedly making a threat to Tucson Tea party spokesman Trent Humphries during a “town hall” TV show taping for ABC. According to sheriff’s deputies at the scene in Tucson, Fuller took a photo of Humphries and then said, “You’re dead.”

I didn’t think events would prove my point this quickly—and regret that they have—but there it is.

2011 is going to be a doozy.

 

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
01.15.2011
03:21 pm
|
Is Gretchen Carlson really as dumb as she seems?
11.21.2010
12:12 pm
Topics:
Tags:

image
 
Does former Miss America and Fox News personality, Gretchen Carlson play dumb—deliberately—for the money? I have my suspicions. After all, it’s not exactly easy for a Stanford and Oxford-educated person—as Carlson is—to really get down on the level of Steve “The Dumbest Man on TV!” Doocey, one of her co-hosts on “Fox and Friends.” I mean Steve Doocey? That’s pretty fuckin’ stupid. (He’s the Jerry Hubbard of Fox News and that’s really saying something. He even makes Rick Sanchez seem… well, less stupid).

Then again, Rep. Michele Bachmann herself was one of Carlson’s nannies growing up. (It all makes a strange, sad sense now, doesn’t it?)

Here, Carlson talks to a young boy who has had a near death experience (NDE) under anesthesia, and his father. They’ve written a book called Heaven is For Real. The takeaway? God is a very big person and he can fit the whole world in his hands, Jesus has a dazzling smile and there are no old people in Heaven. Gretchen seems to like this quaint notion. It seems to give the 44-year-old former Miss America comfort that she’ll be all raptured up there in the clouds with Jesus and the rest of the Republicans at the peak of her physical beauty. (Note that the kid doesn’t seem to buy a single word of what he’s saying, even though his father does seem to believe it, or badly wants it to be true).

Is pretending to be stupid, when you’re (probably) not that stupid the least dignified thing someone can do, even for a big paycheck? Wearing an El Pollo Loco Chicken costume is at least an honest way to make a living. Porn seems less degrading in many respects…
 

 
Via Joe My God

Posted by Richard Metzger
|
11.21.2010
12:12 pm
|
Page 3 of 4  < 1 2 3 4 >