The Stepford Anchors & Trump Gets Bloodied

Fox GOP debate hosts loosen up before starting last week.

As much as I call out Fox News for it's elevation of rigid conservative ideology and fringe op-ed over actual facts, reality and truth, overall the channel had a pretty good week.

Their live coverage of the 1st debate between the Republican presidential candidates from Cleveland last Thursday night scored high ratings and debate anchors Megyn Kelly, Chris Wallace and Brett Baier (pictured left) surprised many liberals and progressives with a relentless series of well-researched and hard-hitting questions that kept the candidates on edge.

Personally I was expecting slow-pitch softball but they delivered fast balls over the plate all night; to me only Ohio Governor John Kasich really hit it back out of the park with his comments on same-sex marriage and defying his party to accept the expansion of Medicare which is a major component of the Affordable Care Act.

Trump shrugs off his ignorance during Thursday's debate

Remarkably, when confronted with evidence of his own misogynist comments against women by Megyn Kelly, Donald Trump reverted to a bizarre subtle "threat" against her that he'd have to re-think his relationship with her simply because she was asking him the questions millions of Americans want to know.

Seriously, what is it that has to come out of this buffoon's mouth before the RNC realizes what a liability he is for Republicans in the 2016 general election and finally cuts him loose?

If his report card from fact-checkers monitoring the debate was any gauge the GOP needs to cut that rope pronto.

After the debate, Trump had the gall to try and brush off the fact that Kelly kicked his ass on national television by suggesting she was tough on him because she was menstruating; and his asinine "blood comment" has drawn outrage even from his fellow GOP presidential candidates. 

It also got Trump uninvited from the Red State Gathering event coming up this weekend in Atlanta as conservatives move to distance themselves from his ignorance, blustering toxicity and anger.

Trump even made a lame attempt to explain away his "blood comment", but that ship has already sailed; and Trump seems genuinely confused at the backlash against him.

After all he's only saying what he thinks conservative white Americans want to hear; and let's not pretend a guy who refers to African-Americans collectively as "the blacks" is speaking to any other demographic.

Trump is speaking to the Fox News audience.

"Fair & balanced"? Female Fox News hosts

On Saturday afternoon, a post on DailyKos.com by Injolt posed an interesting question that's puzzled many people; "Why Are All the Female News Anchors At Fox News Blonde?" 

Accompany the article was the image to the left showing the photos of all the female Fox News anchors cropped next to one another.

Now even though I may have philosophical differences with the generally slanted content produced by said female Fox anchors, I'm not demeaning their professional ability or anything.

But there's clearly a creepy "Stepford Wives" aspect to their all having pretty much the same shade of blond hair like it's part of a uniform or something.

An August 3rd op-ed / blog post penned by essayist and cultural critic Chauncey DeVega entitled "Dear White America: Your Toxic Masculinity Is Killing You", written as an open letter to white people on his Indomitable blog about the dangers of what he calls "Toxic White Masculinity", offers some insight into Injolt's question about why all the female Fox News are blond. 

In the article (which I first read about on The Field-Negro's blog the other day) DeVega discusses, in part, the dangers of the distorted media perspective perpetuated by Fox News on a daily basis. 

DeVega shrewdly observes that Fox has "created an alternate reality for many white Americans where down is up and up is down so to speak." in which the Fox News viewing audience which is 92% white during prime time, exists.

The Fox News bubble doesn't reflect the America that actually exists, it reflects a culturally isolated walled-off suburban America the Fox News audience wants to see; one that is continually reinforced by the ideas of political extremists and "mainstream" white supremacists like Ann Coulter, Laura Graham, Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan. 

The blond news anchor pictured above is a psychological reflection of what the Fox News audience sees; there are no Hispanic, Asian or women of color of African descent who host on Fox, though there are certainly very conservative women journalists from each of those demographics in this country.

During the debate, we didn't see that side from the Fox hosts, who seemed particularly intent on reaching out to the much more centrist view point that represents where mainstream America actually exists - and the ideological center from where the next president will elected in 2016.

In short, last Thursday night in Cleveland Megyn Kelly, Chris Wallace and Brett Baier temporarily stepped out of the Fox bubble to connect to reality.

The hard-hitting questions crafted by the hosts and their producers at Fox strike me as a calculated two-prong effort to begin to separate Donald Trump from the field of legitimate Republican candidates, and specifically silence the backlash from progressive and more liberal and centrist-leaning media organizations who've become adept at calling Fox out for it's BS.

What we saw last Thursday was a complete 180 from the 2008 election when Fox essentially created the Tea Party by lending non-stop coverage to what was then and still is, essentially a fringe extremist political movement that reflects the politics of a very small fraction of the total American electorate.

The Tea Party was barely (if at all) mentioned at last Thursday's event cleverly designed to reach towards the center, but if you click over to Fox you won't have to wait long to hear the vestiges of the Tea Bagger ideology where they butter their bread.

Fox was on it's best behavior for the debate, and the anchors came off like real journalists for a change.

But they're still Fox and they still pitch their tent far outside the boundaries of the mainstream American mindset.

Dinesh D'Souza Gets "Ghetto" On President Obama

Conservative commentator Dinesh DSouza

Author Dinesh D'Souza is once again making media headlines for yet another in a long string of dimwitted, racially-tinged comments about President Obama.

As Olivia Kittel of Media Matters reported earlier today, in response to Obama being interviewed on BuzzFeed recently to promote the upcoming deadline to sign up for health care, D'Souza took to Twitter to post a photo of the media savvy President taking a selfie with the following comment: 
"YOU CAN TAKE THE BOY OUT OF THE GHETTO...Watch this vulgar man show his stuff, while America cowers in embarrassment." (Those are his CAPS not mine by the way)

So what does any of that have to do with the Affordable Care Act? Not much, but D'Souza has never been one to let little things like logic, sense, readability or truth get in the way of his fiery conservative prose.

His latest 93-word Tweet is vintage D'Souza (see example below) and pretty much manages to sum up the kind of intellectually void claptrap he writes that makes him such a revered intellectual demi-god among conservative Republicans.

The conservative Indian-American author, commentator and Fox News darling has been peddling his delusional mix of unhinged political opinion, bigotry and right-wing propaganda since his days at Dartmouth College, where he took pleasure using his position as an editor for the monthly student publication The Prospect and as a writer on the Dartmouth Review as a platform for his homophobia, racism and intolerance for virtually anything that falls outside of the spectrum of Anglo-Christian, politically conservative and heterosexual.

D'Souzas's entrenched cultural elitism likely stems from his relatively privileged upbringing in Mumbai, India where he was born to parents who were Catholics; his father was an executive for Johnson & Johnson and his mother was a housewife.

His K-12 education in Mumbai's elite Catholic schools (and his father's influence) served as a springboard for him to study abroad in America; in of all places - Arizona, the land of Barry Goldwater and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio; same guy who harasses immigrants on the taxpayer dime, sued the president and sentences inmates to restricted diets of bread and water for relatively minor infractions.  

So if you consider where he comes from and how he was educated, his Ann Coulter-ish brand of predictable conservatism based on demeaning others actually makes sense.

Sad and pathetic yes, but it makes sense.

D'Souza's November 26, 2013 Tweet

D'Souza seemed to discover his purpose in the wake of the election of President Obama in 2008 as the Republican Party morphed into a breeding ground for right-wing conservative extremism.

The anger-filled Tea Party movement bankrolled by Charles and David Koch became an all-inclusive cesspool of bigoted, misogynist, obstructionist, fear-pandering reactionary philosophy - and D'Souza leaped right in.

He's been there ever since, gleefully yanking the chains of right-wing Obama haters by creating content that demeans the President because of his race; like the Thanksgiving Tweet D'Souza released on November 26, 2013 as millions around the globe struggled to make sense of the death of an innocent black teenager.

Just like the offensive Tweet above, his latest Tweet using words like "ghetto" and "vulgar" to describe the leader of the free world is basically the intellectual equivalent of "Obama has cooties", but again, that's who Dinesh D'souza really is when you get beyond the critically-panned books and paid speaking appearances at conservative think-tanks.

Frankly, a moralizing hypocritical wannabe-Christian theologian who cheated on his wife and is a convicted felon has a lot of gall calling anyone "ghetto" - let alone the President.

      

Right Wing Media Pundits Use Canadian Terror Tragedy To Attack President Obama

Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, killed at the Canadian War Memorial on Wednesday

On some level you have to admire the vacant, uninformed audacity of the modern American conservative movement's efforts to energize their aging and shrinking voter base.

When it comes to their ceaseless quest to find ways to blame virtually any event that takes place on President Obama, there is no level to which they will not sink.
 
While many people in North America and around the globe over the past 48 hours were quietly keeping Canadian soldier Cpl. Nathan Cirillo, a 24 year-old reservist who served with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, in their thoughts and prayers and struggling to understand his tragic death at the hands of a recent Muslim convert with a history of drug abuse, Fox News was busy concocting ways to rewrite the narrative in such a way as to blame Obama for it.

Let's review. A radical Muslim gunman named Michael Zehaf-Bibeau opens fire on Cpl. Cirillo as he stands guard over the Canadian War Memorial at a complex in Ottawa, killing him. The killer then races into the nearby Canadian parliament building but is killed in a violent exchange of gunfire with members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

This incident came just two days after another radicalized Muslim named Martin Couture-Rouleau used a car to run over two Canadian soldiers in Quebec, killing one of them and seriously injuring the other. 

As reported by Emily Arrowood and Lis Power on  MediaMatters.org earlier this afternoon, despite President Obama specifically mentioning the words "terrorist activity" or "terror" no less than three times during a press conference on Wednesday, the talking heads on the Fox News Channel were busy venting their outrage NOT at Michael Zihaf-Bibeau (the Canadian-born man who used a gun to take the life of Cpl. Cirillo), but at a completely FALSE narrative concocted by right-wing media based on the lie that suggests President Obama won't call terrorist incidents terrorist incidents.  

Consider the transcript of this exchange on 'Fox & Friends' between host Steve Doocy and Fox News "legal analyst" Peter Johnson (as posted on MediaMatters.org):

DOOCY: "Should this serve as a wake-up call to Canada and America, and could the president's failure to recognize terror as terror put us at risk? Peter Johnson, Jr. joins us live."

JOHNSON: "We need to take the wake-up call and say 'don't call back in five minutes.' The president, unfortunately Steve, and our friends out there this morning, has not recognized terror as terror -- Benghazi, Fort Hood, the Little Rock 2009 massacre of our American soldiers here on American soil, Alton Nolan and the beheading as you were talking about before. So the first step is recognition of the problem. We need to be strong and powerful enough to say yeah, there is a problem and we're going to contain it here in the United States."

"But the problem is, we haven't recognized it and called it as such. So today, the president needs to recognize this as terrorism. He didn't recognize it yesterday, although the Canadian prime minister did, and the world did, and anyone that could read about it or see it on the FoxNews.com site or on our television could say, what do you think it is? This is a radicalized Islamist terrorist." 
 [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 10/23/14]

To repeat, President Obama used the words "terrorist activity" or "terror" three times during his press conference on the day of the attack, so what the Hell are these people on Fox even talking about?

This lunacy wasn't limited to 'Fox & Friends' by a long-shot. On the day of the actual shooting Fox News host Sean Hannity, Fox White House correspondent Ed Henry and host Andrea Tantaros ALL repeated variations on the same theme, taking care to tie it into the Benghazi incident in Libya - as did everyone's favorite gas bag Rush Limbaugh.

The Media Matters article points out an important and glaring weakness of the Republican party and today's American conservative movement - their current political platform is largely based off two things:

1. A highly-distorted mix of theory and opinion disguised as policy (trickle-down economic theory, right-to-work laws, "voter fraud", repealing the Affordable Care Act).

2. And using an irrational and virulent hatred of the President as a rallying point - an unprecedented and disrespectful hatred largely based on portraying him as an "other"; which has the effect of laying out a welcome mat for intolerance and bigotry within the Republican party.

The GOP has shrunk to using Benghazi like some sort of all-purpose Magic Bullet, invoking it like some kind of mantra or charm that will simultaneously zap the President's popularity and take the shine off Hillary Clinton's star.

Even though the actual FACTS of the Benghazi incident are totally different than how conservatives USE Benghazi, as the transcript above shows, they have the gall to cite Benghazi as if it was in any way relevant to the terrible events that have taken place in two large Canadian cities in the past few days.

Were these attacks in Canada actually linked to ISIS threats of retribution against any nation supporting the US attacks in Iraq and Syria?

Michael Zehaf-Bibeau was born in Canada and, as evidence suggests, was a loner who only recently became involved with radical Islam - yet with barely any facts known and the investigation just starting conservatives want to blame this senseless attack on the President?

There's something distasteful and cowardly in the way Republicans are quick to use the tragic deaths of innocent people who died at the hands of terrorist killers as political red meat to toss to their constituents.

Why didn't Hannity or Limbaugh talk about the fact that Cpl Cirillo was the father of a young son? Or that he loved dogs and frequently posted photos of his beloved pets online?

They're much to busy trying to capitalize on the fear generated by these unprecedented (for Canadians) terrorist attacks as a means to further channel their loathing for the President.

For conservative media pundits there's no room to honor a fallen soldier who was standing guard at a memorial to fallen soldiers; conservatives can't miss the opportunity to use the brutality of this latest terrorist incident to dishonor the leader of the country they claim to love.

Beck is Out - Roger Ailes' GOP Spin Network Cuts Ties With Delusional Television Host Glen Beck

Fact-challenged Fox News host Glen Beck tried to play off his being booted from his daily TV slot, but the reality is that his lies, distortion of truth and fear-mongering have negatively affected the Fox News brand, which is desperate to re-connect with the main-stream American audience that will ultimately decide who will win the White House in 2012.

As the 2012 Presidential race begins to take shape, clear signs are emerging that the GOP is going all-out to distance itself from the extremist radical fringe element that has dominated the party's agenda in the past few years.

A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows Americans are over perpetual- Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's empty, right-wing soundbite politics and ceaseless wavering over whether she'll actually step into the ring as she criss-crosses the nation racking up speaker fees.

Palin is now tied with former President George W. Bush with a 25% approval rating; that's just one point above Richard M. Nixon according to the Politicususa.com Website; a fact that only confirms whisperings in Washington that the GOP was quietly working to move the former vice-president candidate and her baggage out of consideration for the Republican Presidential nominee slot.

Hoping to capitalize on these setbacks for the Tea Party, Donald Trump has stepped forward to flog the dead horse of Obama's citizenship issue with a string of TV appearances apparently aimed at the fraction of Americans who think the President is not an American citizen.

While the short term gains from such a blatant media stunt might temporarily nudge The Donald's approval ratings above Mike Huckabee's, no serious candidate is going to win the White House stoking Birther's bizarre theories - and ultimately, it's just going to drain away support from the more main-stream Republican candidates who actually might have a chance to score with mainstream American voters - the majority of whom view the GOP as obstructionist and disapprove of their attempts to force a shut-down of the entire government over their ideological budget cuts.

The GOP has a ways to go before it get it's own House in order - but pushing Palin back to the fringe where she belongs and severing it's brand with Glen Beck's strange conspiracy theory nonsense is a decent start.