Faux "News" 2: U.S. State TV?

[Cartmann99]

7 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Every time I think Tucker couldn't be a bigger asshole, he finds a way to prove me wrong: "Tucker Carlson suggests Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who lost her legs in Iraq, hates America"

  Reveal hidden contents

Before launching a broadside against Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Fox News host Tucker Carlson acknowledged that it’s not easy to go after a Purple Heart recipient who lost both her legs while serving her country in Iraq.

“You’re not supposed to criticize Tammy Duckworth in any way because she once served in the military,” Carlson said Monday night.

That didn’t stop him from calling Duckworth, a contender to be presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s running mate, “a deeply silly and unimpressive person” and suggesting that she and other Democratic leaders “actually hate America.”

Duckworth quickly jabbed back on Twitter, writing, “Does @TuckerCarlson want to walk a mile in my legs and then tell me whether or not I love America?”

With Duckworth’s profile rising as a potential Biden running mate, Carlson’s attack offers a preview of what could come as Republicans gear up to go after whomever the former vice president chooses to join his ticket, as The Washington Post’s Sean Sullivan reported.

Duckworth’s combat experience has helped her ascend a list of Biden’s potential running mates, The Post reported. In 2004, she lost her legs when insurgents shot down the Black Hawk helicopter she was co-piloting with a rocket-propelled grenade.

After her election to the Senate in 2016, she’s used her military record to rebuke Republicans who have questioned Democrats’ patriotism. When Rep. Douglas A. Collins (R-Ga.) in January accused Democrats of being “in love with terrorists,” Duckworth retorted that “I left parts of my body in Iraq fighting terrorists.”

On Monday, Carlson went after Duckworth for an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash over the weekend, when the senator suggested a “national dialogue” over whether monuments honoring George Washington should be removed because he owned slaves.

“When Duckworth does speak in public, you’re reminded what a deeply silly and unimpressive person she is,” Carlson said before playing the clip.

The Fox News host then suggested that he is loath to question anyone’s patriotism, saying, “It’s a very strong charge, and we try not ever to make it.”

“But in the face of all of this, the conclusion can’t be avoided. These people actually hate America,” Carlson said. “There’s no longer a question about that.”

Later in the segment, Carlson argued that “the leaders of today’s Democratic Party … despise this country.”

Carlson, who has endured numerous calls for advertisers to boycott his show over his statements on race and the protests that followed George Floyd’s death in late May, faced quick criticism for questioning Duckworth’s patriotism.

 

 

Rufus bless, I just had a flashback to the 2002 Georgia Senate race between Saxby Chambliss and Max Cleland:

Cleland ad causes trouble for Chambliss    (Article is from 2008)

Quote

With Sen. John McCain returning to the campaign trail on Thursday on stump for Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss in his runoff race in Georgia, Democrats are reminding voters and donors of a controversial ad aired by Chambliss in the heated final weeks of the 2002 campaign that shows pictures of Democratic Sen. Max Cleland, a triple-amputee from wounds suffered during his service in Vietnam, just after shots of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

The ad — which has a voice-over warning that, "As Americans face terrorists and extremist dictators, Max Cleland runs television ads saying he has the courage to lead," then lists votes where the Democrat opposed President Bush before concluding that "the record proves Max Cleland is just misleading" — helped propel Chambliss to an unexpected victory.

"I'd never seen anything like that ad," McCain said at the time of the spot, which was widely condemned by Democrats. Putting pictures of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden next to the picture of a man who left three limbs on the battlefield is "worse than disgraceful," said McCain. "It's reprehensible.”

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee released a Web ad ahead of the Arizona senator’s visit titled “Disgraceful,” reminding voters of McCain’s 2002 response, and also issued a fundraising letter from Cleland where he writes, “In 2002, Saxby Chambliss won his Senate seat in the final days by putting my picture next to Osama bin Laden and lying about me,” Cleland wrote. “It was despicable, but it worked. This year, we can’t let Chambliss use the same vile tactics to defeat Democratic challenger Jim Martin.

“Sen. Chambliss has his good pal, John McCain, to stand by his side and speak truth about his character,” the text of the ad reads before highlighting McCain’s comment. “It looks like even Sen. Chambliss’ buddy, John McCain, agrees. Georgians deserve better,” the ad concludes. A call to McCain's Senate office asking for comment on the 2002 ad was not returned by the time this article was posted.

Chambliss told MSNBC on Monday that "we're just very pleased to have [McCain] coming in on Thursday of this week.”

"If Cleland had won, you’d never have heard a thing about it," Chambliss told Politico in response to a question about the 2002 spot. "That ad is so mild compared to the ads I’ve seen in campaign after campaign since 2002. Plus, the ad was truthful.”

“They lost," he added. "They're always going to be bitter about it."

DSCC spokesman Matthew Miller said that while the 2002 ad "is not what [this year's] race is about, there is still certainly some resentment” among Democrats over it.

“There is still a lot of animosity from Democrats directed at Saxby for that, and deservedly so,” Georgia Democratic Party spokesman Martin Mathen said. “It was a low blow.”

Both ActBlue and Daily Kos have spotlighted the ad in fundraising drives for Jim Martin, Chambliss’ Democratic opponent this year.

“I encourage you to give to Jim Martin’s campaign,” reads one fundraising e-mail to ActBlue donors. “Jim is running for the Georgia Senate seat against Saxby Chambliss. Perhaps you remember Saxby for his cynical, dishonest campaign against Max Cleland six years ago.”

National Republican Senatorial Committee spokeswoman Rebecca Fisher chastised Democrats for dwelling on 2002.

"The Chambliss campaign is focused on the future of Georgia and this nation. If Jim Martin and national Democrats want to focus on the past, that's his choice. Georgians have real problems that Sen. Chambliss working to solve," she said.

The NRSC hit Martin in the final week of this year's general election with an ad accusing the Democrat of voting against tougher penalties for those caught soliciting child prostitutes.

Despite lingering resentment among Georgia Democrats, Martin’s campaign has not frequently mentioned the 2002 ad.

It's not talked about at all in the local media,” said Charles Bullock, a political science professor at the University of Georgia. He added that, despite the national scorn for the ad, “it worked in Georgia.”

“This is a new election. We’re focused on the concerns of Georgia voters and not some ad Saxby ran in 2002,” Martin told Politico, adding, “Still, the fact remains that this was an extremely negative campaign that he ran against a war hero.”

While Martin has criticized Chambliss for using “inappropriate” tactics in the 2002 race, he's mostly tried to stick to his economy-focused message.

Polls throughout the summer showed the Democrat trailing by over 20 percent. It wasn’t until the markets crashed in September and Chambliss made a very unpopular vote in favor of the $700 billion bailout that the Democrat began to close.

On the trail, Martin frequently links Chambliss to Bush on the economy and blasts the Republican’s record on veterans’ issues. The Democrat has not retooled his message for the Dec. 2 runoff and is not planning to make a push over the infamous ad.

Still, Martin has not forgotten the fate of his fellow Democrat Cleland.

“Personal attacks are how Saxby has always operated,” he said. “McCain was right when he gave him a hard time about that ad. I think he was right in 2002 and I think the facts are the same now.”

 

[onekidanddone]

2 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

Rufus bless, I just had a flashback to the 2002 Georgia Senate race between Saxby Chambliss and Max Cleland:

Cleland ad causes trouble for Chambliss    (Article is from 2008)

 

My father worked with Max Cleland at the VA. Dad thought Cleland was a wonderful person. 

[JMarie]

On 7/6/2020 at 11:11 AM, Cartmann99 said:

 

 

I'm shocked Mr. Mojo could spell pneumothorax. He probably copied it from a tweet or blog post.

[Cartmann99]

6 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

My father worked with Max Cleland at the VA. Dad thought Cleland was a wonderful person. 

I lived in Georgia during the 2002 Senate race, and I will loathe Saxby Chambliss for the rest of my days.

 

Next up, we have a message from Fucker Carlson:

 

[JMarie]

9 hours ago, Cartmann99 said:

I lived in Georgia during the 2002 Senate race, and I will loathe Saxby Chambliss for the rest of my days.

 

Next up, we have a message from Fucker Carlson:

 

I happened to catch that snippet from last night"s show. He then went on to say kids don"t learn by being in front of a computer all day. He"s obviously never heard of cyber schools, or online learning in general.

[GreyhoundFan]

I guess Tucker will need to stock up on suits...

 

[Xan]

8 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I guess Tucker will need to stock up on suits...

 

When I think of Tucker Carlson, the one thing that makes me laugh is how he came in 11th on Dancing with the Stars.  I do hope people on Twitter remind him of it.  He looked unimpressive and deeply silly.

Spoiler

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Hey Tucker, the fact that David Duke adores you should be a clue that you are not in a good place:

 

[Cartmann99]

Donnie, honey, as much as you try, you can't spin bullshit into gold.

Since we're spinning things:

 

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Sadly, I'm sure there's no shortage of nasty people willing to write for carlson:

 

[Xan]

58 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Sadly, I'm sure there's no shortage of nasty people willing to write for carlson:

 

Tucker has been trying to be a big media star for some time.  He'll get mileage out of this and hire more hack writers.  He's had a major chip on his shoulder ever since Jon Stewart went on "Crossfire" and chewed him up.

Spoiler

 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I love Bob's description of the Jeanine voice:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

On an average day, Twitler and Jeanine run neck and neck...

 

[47of74]

Faux News staffers aren’t all down with the on air kluxers 

Quote

Four days after Fox News aired a particularly tone-deaf graphicconnecting the killings of Black men—including George Floyd and Martin Luther King Jr.—to stock market gains, many of the network’s Black staffers took part in a phone call with company brass to confront Fox’s increasingly racist and hostile rhetoric towards the protests against police brutality.  

It was almost immediately rife with tension. One staffer directly asked why Bret Baier—the anchor of the network’s key weekday news broadcast, Special Report, which aired the offensive graphic—was not on the call, nor any other white on-air talent. (Baier had previously apologized for the “major screw-up,” noting that, because the show bears his name, “the buck stops with me.” Fox News also apologized for the “insensitivity” of the infographic, adding that it “should have never aired on television without full context.”) 

Other participants on the call expressed anger and distress about rampant racism at Fox, both on- and off-

One employee was especially angry, saying, “They created a cell—they created a white supremacist cell inside the top cable network in America, the one that directly influences the president… This is rank racism excused by Murdoch.”

 

[fraurosena]

Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Howard Kurtz and Ed Henry accused of sexual harrassment and rape.

The allegations are so bad they come with a trigger warning.  

 

Edited July 21, 2020 by fraurosena

[thoughtful]

8 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Howard Kurtz and Ed Henry accused of sexual harrassment and rape.

Disgusting, and not remotely surprising, of course.

[GreyhoundFan]

Faux is all unhappy about the Lincoln Project.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

You know it's bad when it's too much for Faux:

 

[onekidanddone]

On 7/21/2020 at 9:32 AM, GreyhoundFan said:

Faux is all unhappy about the Lincoln Project.

 

Ben Shapiro is a whiny little wanker. He had a hissy fit over Catlin Jenner being on the cover Sports Illustrated. Waaaa waaa. His parents gave him a subscription for his Bar Mitzvah and now it is ruined by filth and immorality  

Few things Ben. You aren’t 13 anymore so grown the fuck up. You know you enjoyed the swim suit editions so don’t go getting all pious you sniveling little snot. 
Yea I can’t stand him. 
 

[GreyhoundFan]

Jeanine needs to stop with the liquid dinners:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Good gravy:

 

[thoughtful]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Jeanine needs to stop with the liquid dinners:

 

I wonder if she was planning to say "unencumbered" or "unhindered," or just thinks "unenhindered" is a word.

In vino showyerass.

[onekidanddone]

On 7/26/2020 at 1:48 AM, thoughtful said:

I wonder if she was planning to say "unencumbered" or "unhindered," or just thinks "unenhindered" is a word.

In vino showyerass.

I believe she meant unhinged 

[GreyhoundFan]

2 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

I believe she meant unhinged 

She needs to stop looking in the mirror before going on her rants. She's more unhinged than most.

[GreyhoundFan]

I hope they do. It would be poetic justice: "How Fox News may be destroying Trump’s reelection hopes"

Spoiler

It would be a peculiarly apt form of poetic justice if the entity that has done so much to help President Trump run this country into the ground — Fox News — ends up playing an outsize role in helping destroy his chances at reelection.

Yet that may be exactly what’s happening.

This possibility is thrust upon us by two remarkable new reports: one in The Post illuminating Trump’s unsettled mental universe as he grapples with the new coronavirus surge, and one in the New York Times reporting that his law enforcement crackdowns are only accelerating more protests in response.

For Trump, Fox News has two functions: With some exceptions, it largely functions as his “shameless propaganda outlet,” as Margaret Sullivan put it, aggressively inflating his successes and faithfully pushing his messages. When Fox occasionally departs from this role, Trump rages at it as a form of deep betrayal.

Yet for precisely this reason, Fox also functions as a kind of security blanket: It persuades Trump that he’s succeeding, which provides an effective reality distortion field against outside criticism.

The new Post report reveals how toxic this is on the coronavirus. Trump repeatedly failed to act to tame the spread, even though that would have helped him politically, due to a pathological refusal to admit earlier error and “overly rosy assessments and data" from Fox News:

Another self-imposed hurdle for Trump has been his reliance on a positive feedback loop. Rather than sit for briefings by infectious-disease director Anthony S. Fauci and other medical experts, the president consumes much of his information about the virus from Fox News Channel and other conservative media sources, where his on-air boosters put a positive spin on developments.

When the coronavirus death toll approached 100,000, this fact was largely absent from Fox prime-time programming. Now that it’s approaching 150,000, Fox personalities are claiming the original lockdowns were a plot to harm Trump and that things are actually going far better than expected thanks to his towering leadership.

Indeed, studies suggest misinformation from Fox and other right-wing media outlets might be making audiences more prone to believing coronavirus conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, even as too-rapid reopenings are a big reason the coronavirus is surging again, his Fox propagandists continue to push the idea that hesitation to reopen schools is pure politics.

Thus Fox feeds Trump’s preexisting refusal to admit error in a way that makes him less likely to dramatically scale up federal testing now — which several governors demanded over the weekend — and more prone to continuing to push for a rapid reopening.

Yet according to Trump’s own advisers, these failures are now putting his reelection at risk. The Post reports that they presented him data showing that the virus is spiking in red states and will soon surge in key swing states.

Trump is surely sliding in part because majorities prioritize defeating the virus even if it harms the economy. Yet Fox’s programming keeps telling him things are going better than they otherwise would be thanks to his glorious leadership, and that calls for extreme caution on reopening are a hoax.

On Fox, protests show Trump’s glorious strength

Meanwhile, Trump is mainlining from Fox a daily picture of the protests that is highly distorted and narcotically numbing.

The Times reports that the rash of new protests over the weekend in cities such as Seattle and Oakland, Calif., were largely driven by reaction to Trump’s law enforcement invasion of Portland, Ore. The Seattle mayor claims this “escalated” matters across the country, and the Oakland mayor warns it will “incite more unrest.”

This is surely why Trump is sending in law enforcement in the first place — he believes inciting violent civil conflict will help his reelection. As one GOP strategist candidly tells the Times, Republicans are hoping to define Democrats “as being on the side of the anarchists in Portland.”

The crucial point here is that what Trump sees on Fox is surely persuading him that he’s succeeding in doing just that.

Fox personalities are claiming that electing Joe Biden will make civil violence “a staple of American life everywhere.” They are relentlessly doctoring Biden quotes to paint him as anti-police. And they are suggesting that Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech, which conflated protests with “far-left fascism” to justify sending in more law enforcement, represented the greatest oratory since Cicero.

All this surely reinforces Trump’s belief that this messaging is working for him. After all, the imagery of violence, when hyped this way, does make for powerful television. And Trump knows powerful television when he sees it!

But in the Fox narrative of the protests, there is no room for any acknowledgement that Trump is functioning as a primarily inciting and destructive force, or that this fact might be further alienating the educated white suburban voters who are supposed to find Trump’s authoritarian displays reassuring.

Yet a recent Post-ABC News poll found that college-educated whites trust Biden over Trump to handle crime and safety by 52 percent to 40 percent. Among college-educated white women, that’s a stunning 58 percent to 37 percent. Among suburbanites, it’s 48 percent to 44 percent. Trump is even losing on this among seniors.

And a recent Yahoo News-YouGov poll found that a larger percentage of suburban voters say the country will become less safe if Trump wins (48 percent) than say the same about Biden (37 percent). Among women, it’s even worse for Trump (50 percent and 33 percent, respectively).

On the two biggest crises convulsing the country — the deadliest public health emergency in modern times, and the worst civil unrest in half a century — Trump is further alienating the middle of the country with his malign destructiveness and his depraved reveling in the supposed power of his own cultish propaganda.

Books will be written about Fox News’s role in exacerbating the national catastrophe that is this presidency. But, in persuading Trump that he is actually winning our great arguments about both those crises, Fox News may also be hastening its end.