The Kruginator on the owner of the Republican Party

Krugman on how News Corp. wants to have complete dominion over the executive branch by hiring as many 2012 hopefuls as possible onto the Fox News payroll:

I mean that literally. As Politico recently pointed out, every major contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination who isn’t currently holding office and isn’t named Mitt Romney is now a paid contributor to Fox News. Now, media moguls have often promoted the careers and campaigns of politicians they believe will serve their interests. But directly cutting checks to political favorites takes it to a whole new level of blatancy.

Arguably, this shouldn’t be surprising. Modern American conservatism is, in large part, a movement shaped by billionaires and their bank accounts, and assured paychecks for the ideologically loyal are an important part of the system. Scientists willing to deny the existence of man-made climate change, economists willing to declare that tax cuts for the rich are essential to growth, strategic thinkers willing to provide rationales for wars of choice, lawyers willing to provide defenses of torture, all can count on support from a network of organizations that may seem independent on the surface but are largely financed by a handful of ultrawealthy families.

And these organizations have long provided havens for conservative political figures not currently in office. Thus when Senator Rick Santorum was defeated in 2006, he got a new job as head of the America’s Enemies program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank that has received funding from the usual sources: the Koch brothers, the Coors family, and so on.

Now Mr. Santorum is one of those paid Fox contributors contemplating a presidential run. What’s the difference?

Well, for one thing, Fox News seems to have decided that it no longer needs to maintain even the pretense of being nonpartisan.

Nobody who was paying attention has ever doubted that Fox is, in reality, a part of the Republican political machine; but the network — with its Orwellian slogan, “fair and balanced” — has always denied the obvious. Officially, it still does. But by hiring those G.O.P. candidates, while at the same time making million-dollar contributions to the Republican Governors Association and the rabidly anti-Obama United States Chamber of Commerce, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns Fox, is signaling that it no longer feels the need to make any effort to keep up appearances.

Something else has changed, too: increasingly, Fox News has gone from merely supporting Republican candidates to anointing them. Christine O’Donnell, the upset winner of the G.O.P. Senate primary in Delaware, is often described as the Tea Party candidate, but given the publicity the network gave her, she could equally well be described as the Fox News candidate. Anyway, there’s not much difference: the Tea Party movement owes much of its rise to enthusiastic Fox coverage.

As the Republican political analyst David Frum put it, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox” — literally, in the case of all those non-Mitt-Romney presidential hopefuls. It was days later, by the way, that Mr. Frum was fired by the American Enterprise Institute. Conservatives criticize Fox at their peril.

So the Ministry of Propaganda has, in effect, seized control of the Politburo. What are the implications?

Read on to find out.

Fox News viewers like to fancy themselves as independent thinkers, intellectual giants who look at Glenn Beck’s blackboard and his references to philosophers and the Founding Fathers that make absolutely no sense, historical or otherwise. Fox News’ demographic skews older, which means many people who rely on Social Security (which Republicans want to get rid of), Medicare (which Republicans want to get rid of), traditional pensions (which Republicans and businesses have already gotten rid of), and other accommodations. How any American who claims to value “freedom” and “liberty” can advocate a government that is 100% bought and paid for by a corporation, well, I’d love to hear the arguments for that.

Can we please stop this idea that MSNBC is "the left’s Fox News"?

Who is the morning liberal show host on Fox, the way Joe Scarborough is on MSNBC?

Show me ONE time when Fox News EVER parted ranks with George W. Bush on anything. Dylan Ratigan, Keith Olbermann, and Rachel Maddow part ranks with Barack Obama frequently.

And show me where General Electric or Universal was EVER the biggest donor to the Democratic Governors’ Association the way Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. is the biggest donor to the Republican Governors’ Association this year.

If this is the false packaging they use now, imagine if they actually get her elected

The need to fabricate the public image of Sarah Palin is so strong that Fox News tried to resort to using old interview footage of L.L. Cool J and passing it off as hers to show that the Republican Party and the teabaggers aren’t racist:

Here’s a chapter in the culture wars that no one saw coming: Sarah Palin and Fox News facing off against ’80s rap star and actor LL Cool J.

Popular conservative blogger Allahpundit tweaked liberals who accuse Tea Party supporters of racist sympathies, saying they’ll be “shocked to find the alleged Grand Dragon of the tea-party movement making chitchat with a hip-hop legend.”

The problem is that no such chitchat was produced for the Palin show. LL Cool J, star of “NCIS: Los Angeles,” tweeted Tuesday night: “Fox lifted an old interview I gave in 2008 to someone else & are misrepresenting to the public in order to promote Sarah Palins Show. WOW.”

When contacted by Yahoo! News for comment, a Fox News spokesperson explained that LL Cool J had been informed in 2008 that the interview was planned as a segment for “Real American Stories”–though of course the network couldn’t have known at the time that Palin would be hosting.

And it took them two years to get the show to the air? Hardly likely.

Update: Looks like the confusion isn’t limited to the hip hop genre. Toby Keith’s publicist tells the New York Times that Keith has never done an interview with Palin and she had no idea he was being used in the Palin special. She believes that Fox will be recycling an interview Keith gave Fox in 2009.

Fox News is no longer even the media arm of the Republican Party; it’s the media arm of a movement that’s about bullying, willful ignorance, bigotry, stupidity, and false packaging.

Fox News at the gym

So the Grand Opening of the company gym at the Major Corporation™ that employs me is this Tuesday, and there are these bigass outlets high up on the wall that I’m told are going to hold flatscreen TVs. This is usually an ominous sign, because these days, most public places where you see flatscreen TVs means that said TVs are going to be constantly tuned to Faux Noise.

It’s going to be hard enough to get me to take the plunge to go to the gym and become the hamster-on-a-treadmill (or elliptical, or whatever) that I never wanted to be, without listening to idiotic wingnut-bots piping propaganda into my ear all day. I’m only hoping that the “TV sound through your earbuds wirelessly” they’re talking about becomes a reality, because there’s only so loudly you can play WTF podcasts to drown it out.

As annoying as it is, I don’t make a fuss about Faux Noise in doctors’ offices. My experience has been that you usually find it in the offices of urologists and in imaging centers, where a sizable portion of the clientele is exactly the kind of Angry Aging Man that is the Faux Noise audience. My local bagel shop has it because it caters to the Town Geezers, who gather every morning to rant about our local government but then the one chance they had to actually change things, they voted in the same cronies who have been in power for thirty years yet again. The day I find it in, say, a gynecological office is the day I find another doctor. It’s bad enough that Dr. Crazy Unhealthy Diet (of whom I was very fond until she went off the Diet Deep End) publicly crowed with joy in December 2000 about the selection of George W Bush and when someone has a long-stemmed Q-tip in your nether parts, you just smile benignly and say “Uh-huh”. That should have told me something right there.

So how do YOU deal with Fox News in public places? Drown it out? Ask for a change? Find someplace else that delivers the same service?

I may just keep Newsweek after all

I’ve been reading Newsweek since I was a child. Back in those days, Republicans were Time and Democrats were Newsweek. In more recent years, I’ve threatened to cancel my subscription any number of times, not least of which was when Michael Isikoff hopped on board the Whitewater bus and drove it right into the brick wall where it should have died….then he proceeded to beat the brick wall for a while.

Recently, the suits at Newsweek realized that reporting on week-old news was anachronistic in these days when you can get updated news online on a 24 x 7 basis, and so it has been retooled into a magazine of commentary or analysis. The skimpy advertising, dominated by ads for faux “masterpiece” jewelry and those Amish heaters, leaves doubt as to whether the new concept can make Newsweek survive, but with columns like this one from Jacob Weisberg about how Fox News flies in the face of what American journalism is supposed to be, I sure hope it does:

What’s most distinctive about the American press is not its freedom but its century-old tradition of independence—that it serves the public interest rather than those of parties, persuasions, or pressure groups. Media independence is a 20th-century innovation that has never fully taken root in many other countries that do have a free press. The Australian-British-continental model of politicized media that Murdoch has applied at Fox is un-American, so much so that he has little choice but go on denying what he’s doing as he does it. For Murdoch, Ailes, and company, “fair and balanced” is a necessary lie. To admit that their coverage is slanted by design would violate the American understanding of the media’s role in democracy and our idea of what constitutes fair play. But it’s a demonstrable deceit that no longer deserves equal time.

Whether the White House engages with Fox is a tactical political question. Whether we journalists continue to do so is an ethical one. By appearing on Fox, reporters validate its propaganda values and help to undermine the role of legitimate news organizations. Respectable journalists—I’m talking to you, Mara Liasson—should stop appearing on its programs. A boycott would make Ailes too happy, so let’s try just ignoring Fox, shall we?

Amen.

Except that Olbermann doesn’t just pull stuff out of his ass and advocate murder

I couldn’t believe this front-page article I read in the New York Times this morning, about how the corporate masters at Faux Noise and MSNBC told their warring on-air personalities, Billo the Clown (I can still call him that because I don’t work for MSNBC) and Keith Olbermann to knock it off:

For years Keith Olbermann of MSNBC had savaged his prime-time nemesis Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel and accused Fox of journalistic malpractice almost nightly. Mr. O’Reilly in turn criticized Mr. Olbermann’s bosses and led an exceptional campaign against General Electric, the parent company of MSNBC.

It was perhaps the fiercest media feud of the decade and by this year, their bosses had had enough. But it took a fellow television personality with a neutral perspective to help bring it to at least a temporary end.

At an off-the-record summit meeting for chief executives sponsored by Microsoft in mid-May, the PBS interviewer Charlie Rose asked Jeffrey Immelt, chairman of G.E., and his counterpart at the News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, about the feud.

Both moguls expressed regret over the venomous culture between the networks and the increasingly personal nature of the barbs. Days later, even though the feud had increased the audience of both programs, their lieutenants arranged a cease-fire, according to four people who work at the companies and have direct knowledge of the deal.

In early June, the combat stopped, and MSNBC and Fox, for the most part, found other targets for their verbal missiles (Hello, CNN).

“It was time to grow up,” a senior employee of one of the companies said.

The reconciliation — not acknowledged by the parties until now — showcased how a personal and commercial battle between two men could create real consequences for their parent corporations. A G.E. shareholders’ meeting, for instance, was overrun by critics of MSNBC (and one of Mr. O’Reilly’s producers) last April.

“We all recognize that a certain level of civility needed to be introduced into the public discussion,” Gary Sheffer, a spokesman for G.E., said this week. “We’re happy that has happened.”

The only part of this feud that’s regrettable is that it has resulted in lazy so-called “journalists” like Brian Stelter insisting that the two men are identical except that they come from different sides of the aisle.

Keith Olbermann is opinionated, he can be bombastic and pompous, and his intermittent Special Comments, for all that they are passionate and by their very nature as commentary, sometimes go over-the-top, he knows the difference between his opinion and facts; something Bill O’Reilly does not. In this video, O’Reilly tries to distance himself from his own responsibility in incitement to violence in the murder of Dr. George Tiller:

Olbermann has a huge ego. So does O’Reilly. That happens with guys who are on TV and are good at what they do. The issue is not who’s more bombastic. The question is who does reporting and commentary on actual facts, and who just pulls stuff out of his ass. And O’Reilly pulls stuff out of his ass.

But the issue isn’t about keeping discourse civil, or which of these men is a putz and which is a saint. I probably wouldn’t want to know either one of them. The issue is the extent to which corporate ownership controls the media message, and when we are now seeing signs of that same corporate media deciding that the presidency of Barack Obama must be destroyed barely six months into his term because corporate management prefers Republicans, then there is no meaning to democracy in this country.

Glenn Greenwald points out what we’ve already seen from corporate media, and also notes that Richard Wolffe, who did a reasonably credible job of reading from a teleprompter while subbing for Olbermann last week, is a corporate lobbyist at a company run by former Bush Administration spokesman Dan Bartlett:

So now GE is using its control of NBC and MSNBC to ensure that there is no more reporting by Fox of its business activities in Iran or other embarrassing corporate activities, while News Corp. is ensuring that the lies spewed regularly by its top-rated commodity on Fox News are no longer reported by MSNBC.  You don’t have to agree with the reader’s view of the value of this reporting to be highly disturbed that it is being censored.

This is hardly the first time evidence of corporate control over the content of NBC and MSNBC has surfaced.  Last May, CNN’s Jessica Yellin said that when she was at MSNBC, ”the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this [the Iraq War] was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation”; “the higher the president’s approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives … to put on positive stories about the president”; and “they would turn down stories that were more critical and try to put on pieces that were more positive.”  Katie Couric said that when she was at NBC, “there was a lot of undercurrent of pressure not to rock the boat for a variety of reasons, where it was corporate reasons or other considerations” not to be too critical of the Bush administration.  MSNBC’s rising star, Ashleigh Banfield, was demoted and then fired after she criticized news media organizations generally, and Fox News specifically, for distorting their war coverage to appear more pro-government.  And, of course, when MSNBC canceled Phil Donahue’s show in the run-up to the Iraq war despite its being that network’s highest-rated program, a corporate memo surfaced indicating that the company had fears of being associated with an anti-war and anti-government message.

And now we have an example of GE’s forcibly silencing the top-rated commentator on MSNBC — ordering him not to hold Fox News accountable any longer — because, in return, News Corp. has agreed to silence its own commentators from criticizing GE.  The corporations that own our largest news organizations have extensive relationships with the federal government.  Anyone (like Charlie Rose) who denies that those relationships influence how these news organizations “report” on the government — driven by the desire which corporate executives have to avoid alienating the government officials on whom their corporate interests depend, or avoid alienating potential customer bases for their products — is completely delusional.  GE’s forcing Keith Olbermann to cease his criticism of Fox News and Bill O’Reilly is a clear and vivid example of how that works.

* * * * * 

On a very related note:  this week, former Newsweek reporter Richard Wolffe was a guest-host on MSNBC’s Countdown while Keith Olbermann is on vacation.  When Olbermann is there, Wolffe is a very frequent guest on Countdown, where he is called an “MSNBC political analyst” and comments on political news.  All of this, despite the fact that Wolffe left Newsweek last March in order to join “Public Strategies, Inc.,” the corporate communications firm run by former Bush White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett, its President and CEO.  According to the Press Release they issued to announce Wolffe’s joining the company:

Don’t let their allowing Rachel Maddow on the air fool you into thinking MSNBC is on our side. As much as I worship the ground she walks on, Maddow is for better or worse playing the same role in the Corporate States of America that the Democrats play in our political system: to give you the illusion that someone other than rich white guys in executive suites have any say whatsoever in American policy.

Watching the lying liars twitch and writhe is the most fun I’ve ever had fully clothed!

I am quite enjoying the apoplexy on the right, now that Senator Franken has been declared the winner of Minnesota’s protracted Senate election. The diatribes have been endless and the rhetoric has escalated to the point that the hyperbole has crossed over into absurdist comedy gold.

Their real problem is that they can’t stand that they have been bested. That the Harvard Cum Laude Math major they dismiss as a clown has bested them. The one man who will call Rush Limbaugh a big, fat idiot and do the research to back up his assertion with empirical data and never dream of apologizing for it – the man who wrote a best seller about the right wing titled Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them – now has the bully pulpit of a Senate seat. And that is an achievement that not one of those braying jackasses could ever hope to achieve. And the bile it causes them to choke on makes my heart sing. I wonder of it is possible to overdose on schaddenfreud, cuz I think I am about to lose consciousness…

Joe Conason spent some time in the fever swamps documenting the deranged attacks of the right-wing noise machine against his friend. I thank him for doing so because it means I didn’t have to.

Sadly, the most notorious Franken antagonist, Bill O’Reilly, was absent from the airwaves on the evening of Franken’s victory. Demure guest host Monica Crowley seemed bemused by the Minnesota outcome. But Glenn Beck, in his semiliterate way, heaped on enough abuse to keep Billo’s fans satisfied for the moment. “It shows how crazy our country has gone,” he began. “It shows that we’ve lost our minds. It’s like we’ve slipped through a wormhole. It’s like, this look likes the country I grew up in, but no — Al Franken would never be a senator … We have entered a place to where there isn’t statesmanship anymore.”

The tenor of the Fox attacks grew more feverish with the ranting of Brian Kilmeade, who judged Franken “barely sane if you read his books, and quite angry in every facet of his life.” Kilmeade went on to describe the new senator as “hateful,” “evil,” bitter,” and “maniacal,” and again as “angry.” Sean Hannity echoed Fox’s other amateur shrinks, saying, “This guy, Franken, he’s not all there.”

So did R. Emmett Tyrell, the Human Events columnist and former editor of the American Spectator, who appeared to confuse Franken’s portrayal of a fictional character with the former comedian’s own personality, and went on to predict that he will need “anger management counseling” during his Senate term. “He was weird on ‘Saturday Night Live’ in the 1970s, on which he popularized a goofball character named Stuart Smalley, a self-help guru who repeated over and again, ‘I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!’ … My guess is that the Stuart Smalley character is the essential Al Franken, a weirdo.”

Speaking for Pajamas Media, Rick Moran called Franken “a bat guano crazy liberal” and gloated over the “rabid, unbridled, hateful partisanship” that will bring both the senator and his party to grief. “It is a pathological, almost clinical condition that will explode from time to time in bitter denunciation of the opposition, supplying bloggers and commentators with a cornucopia of material,” wrote Moran with grim satisfaction, adding that “Franken’s psychosis” includes a pathological hatred of Christians and particularly Catholics (which may come as a shock to his Catholic wife, Franni).

Then there was Limbaugh, the capo di tutti right-wing capi, who warned with pithy brevity that the 60th Democratic vote in the Senate is “a genuine lunatic.”

Calmer but no less nasty was the assessment of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which insisted that the Democrat had somehow hijacked the Senate seat from the rightful Republican victor. “Mr. Franken now goes to the Senate having effectively stolen an election,” said the editorial, without deigning to mention that Republicans in Minnesota, including the governor, had effectively vetted the recount and canvassing from Election Day forward, up to the final Supreme Court decision.

The WSJ is simply spouting bullshit – par for the course for an organ of the Murdoch noise machine. No one in Minnesota thinks the election was stolen. Sara Janacek, a leading conservative voice in Minnesota told the Washington Post that those accusations are false. “The state media — and a majority of the public — do think Franken’s election was legitimate,” she said. “We had an open and very public recount process.”

Let the critics sneer and underestimate him. He will, in the meantime, study issues from every angle and be diligent about the job that has been entrusted to him. He is there in large part to honor his friend Paul Wellstone, whose seat he now occupies. He is not mean, crazy or frivolous and his election was legitimate, and those who want you to think otherwise are neither as stable nor as smart as he is, and I base that on the public behavior of both Franken and those who hate him.

Fox, of course, has a vendetta against the guy. Have you forgotten this?

Aug 23, 2003 | His voice full of amused contempt, U.S. District Judge Denny Chin refused Fox News’ request for an injunction against author and comedian Al Franken’s new book on Friday. “There are hard cases and there are easy cases,” said Chin. “This is an easy case. The case is wholly without merit both factually and legally … It is ironic that a media company that should seek to protect the First Amendment is instead seeking to undermine it.”

The hearing couldn’t have gone better for Franken, who is being sued by Fox because the network claims his new book, “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right,” violates Fox’s trademark of the phrase “Fair and Balanced.” Fox had sought to block Franken’s use of the phrase pending a trial for trademark infringement, in which it hoped to win compensation for damages.

But Chin’s ruling suggested there might not be a trial. Besides rejecting Fox’s petition for an injunction, Chin practically invited Franken’s lawyers to file for dismissal. And he hinted that if it pursues its lawsuit, Fox may lose the very trademark it’s trying to defend — a trademark that, according to the suit, Fox has spent $61 million promoting.

It is always important to consider the source when someone is attacking someone else, and in the case of Senator Franken that admonishment has never been more true or more important.

c/p @ They Gave Us a Republic

Its the Votes, Stupid! BradBlog Breaks Voter Registration Fraud Arrest Story, Live on Fox News!

Our great friend Brad of Brad Blog was able to break this story live on Fox News last night in the midst of an appearance with scary John Fund, punditizing for the left on a segment that was purported to be about voter disenfranchisement/fraud through home foreclosures. These things usually devolve into a tit for tat of “well, no one made the borrowers take the loans” versus “well, no one made the banks loan the money,” with the likes of Fund saying “poor banks were forced by Freddie/Fannie…” and that the unscrupulous borrowers should have known better…whatever; used to be that the lender did a thorough check as to whether a borrower could afford a loan. So, enter our hero, stage left, with a real breaking story about real, immediate, lawbreaking on the GOP side, and gasp!!! …Fox led with the breaking story at the top of the news hour, and Fund is probably still bristling.

This is a great example of real news reporting meeting Faux News and the real stuff winning out…. Because when faced with stark truth, even in the face of the angry Fund types trying to spin it, this kind of thing can’t get a footing even at Fox. They have to leave it with a “well, if this is true we will run it,” statement…and then, they sorta have to run it…

Imagine what would happen if each outlet had to be fair and balanced, and if it was a matter of national regulation rather than corporate interest …imagine what would happen if Americans had the actual information breaking from wherever the news was, without the spin, and were tasked with coming to their own conclusions…it sounds quaint and old fashioned, but here it is; reporting like it used to be….

Thanks, as always, to Brad for working tirelessly to get the truth out about making our votes count and be counted! This is probably the one most important issue leading to this election, and we all need to be aware of what is going on. Visit Brad often for the constantly breaking news and let your representatives know that you are watching this situation and that you expect to be protected and to have your vote counted.

c/p RIP Coco

Off the Rails With the Hate Talk Express…. What the Wingnuts Have Wrought.

Yelling fire in a movie theater, stirring up the crowd with a frenzied, fundamentalist, fervor meant to incite fear, in the best case, and violence in the worst. This sort of snake oil has been for sale from this traveling circus for years, building strength like a hurricane spun out of control with the inevitable little tornadoes popping up here and there.
Now begins the frantic backpedaling by a befuddled McCain and, Ive got to say, that what is glaringly clear now is that McCain’s supporters, who represent a huge part of America, are either tremendously uneducated, or just terrified and propagandized to the point where the train has left the tracks and not even granddaddyMcInsane, with his lurching shoulders and his mouse in the headlights stare, can redirect it.

Trying to reposition yourself, grandpa? Well, its too fucking late.
The villagers have their torches and pitchforks and they are riding the Hate Talk Express straight to hell. I hope that O’Reilly, Hannity, Scarborough, and all the other media pundits that have thrown fuel on this fire for years are happy too. As much as they try to disengage with this thing, and enjoy the money that its earned them, they are going down in history as a major linchpin of this thing, no matter what they say or do. As I said, its too fucking late!

I learned something this week, and it came from the lips of an avid Fox News watcher who engaged me in a gun store, of all places, as I purchased a .22 rifle. First of all, Obama has a big secret about Nigeria and some election there that he manipulated by helping the campaign of a family member by giving advice…hmmm…and this is coming outsooooooon ….like last week in some nutcase book….? I also learned that liberals like me are not allowed to buy guns; that its unusual for any bleeding heart liberal to own a gun! That Obama is anti-gun in general….and that ITS NOT OVER until they get all the Obama/Osama secrets out there!
I learned all of this in the exact words and phrases of Hannity, and O’Reilly coming from the lips of this older man with a beer gut.

My answer to this guy was that I’m a liberal and I’m a patriot. I love the country and the constitution…and that the neocons have done more to hurt the constitution than the likes of me ever could. The guy said that he was unaware that a liberal could be like this; supposedly we were all anti-gun! I told him to stop watching so muchHannity and O’Reilly. I left out Limbaugh, but I imagine that’s on his dial as well. Do people want to appear ignorant?

Well, the tip off of membership in that lazy Fox News club is the arrogance and lack of knowledge of the other side. Its a tone of voice and a phrasing that comes directly from the talking points ( messages that the speaker often doesn’t fully realize they are delivering,)….and the seeming inability to interact properly in public without an undercurrent of seething anger. Like the priesthood and other authoritarian organizations, this movement seems to attract a certain outcast or disgruntled fringe, and somehow the presentation of that picks upalot of lazy supporters who would prefer to be just told what to think rather than to go and figure it out for themselves.

Its going to be hard to shake hands and make up at the end of this thing. The damage done is not something that can be blithely dismissed because its ongoing and will continue for years to come. So, as thewingnuts, led by grandpa McInsane himself, try to backpedal the level on this thing, I think it would behoove us all to keep strongly in mind what they’ve done. The next step in this is going to be to say something to the effect of “that was in the past and now we have to move forward,” which is how they get us to forget so they can start planning for four and eight years from now. See, we’re bad if we cling to old resentments, but its those old resentments that maybe might protect us from making the same fucking mistakes over and over again. When do we get smart about this? Or are we always looking for the good daddy underneath the seething contempt? Personally, I give up.

h/t Skippy!

c/p RIPCoco

OK, I’ll bite: Why should I pay for John McCain’s melanoma treatment? Or his Viagra, for that matter.

From the August 23 edition of Fox News’ Cavuto on Business (via Media Matters):

CAVUTO: Now, Jonathan, you’re not calming down, right?

HOENIG: Neil, I’m not. In fact, both Joe Biden and Barack Obama have made it very clear that they support socialized health care. In fact, they think that health care is a right. And I think it shows a real ignorance as to what a right actually is. I mean, a right is right to action; it’s not to a freebie from someone else. And I know it sounds kind of curt in this age of political correctness and altruism, but why should I be responsible for paying for Joe Biden’s brain aneurysms?

MARC LAMONT HILL (Fox News contributor): Ouch.

CAVUTO: All righty. I’ll leave that alone.

The only way that either Biden OR Obama has supported “socialized health care” is if you believe that socialized health care consists of anything other than “I got my health care and f— you.”