"Munich" 2023

This has been a blue-ribbon week in exposing the hypocrisy mill known formally as Fox News. E-mails released prior to the soon-to-be-tried Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News Networks and its parent company, Fox Corp, reveal that in private Fox on-air personalities disparaged the false voting fraud claims that they pushed on their shows. Perhaps the most outrageous dichotomy between private and public proclamations about the election was evidenced by the network’s biggest star, Tucker Carlson. As the New York Times pointed out, 

Mr. Carlson — who ridiculed claims about a plot to steal the election as “shockingly reckless” and “absurd” in his November 2020 text messages — also continued to give credence to lies about widespread voter fraud this week.(1)

In fact, Carlson in an e-mail has stated, “I hate [Trump] passionately.”

But that was in private. In public, the following picture seems to be more in character.

Why did Fox News, despite acknowledging behind the scenes the falsity of its claims, pivot to support of Trump’s stolen election fantasies on its shows? As News Corp owner Rupert Murdoch said about allowing Mike Lindell, an avid conspiracy theorist, to run MyPillow ads on the network, it was purely a purely financial decision. “It is not red or blue, it is green.”(2) 

After the network correctly called Joe Biden the victor in the voting in the state of Arizona, thereby putting up enough electoral votes for the Democrat’s victory, hordes of rabid MAGAs defected to (fake) news outlets even crazier than Fox, leaving the latter to worry about falling profits.

Sean Hannity, in an exchange with fellow hosts Carlson and Laura Ingraham, fretted about the “incalculable” damage the Arizona projection did to the Fox News brand and worried about a competitor emerging: “Serious $$ with serious distribution could be a real problem.”(3)

Thus the decision to appease the MAGA faithful—to promote false narratives that would keep the pointy-headed rabble tuned to Fox and their $$ on the company’s balance sheet.

*

Trump, himself, the other day paused long enough from crying into his Diet Coke about the “stolen election” to claim that he could end the Russian-Ukraine war by practically snapping his fingers. According to the UK’s Daily Telegraph, “Donald Trump indicated that he may have ‘made a deal’” with Vladimir Putin “if he were president at the time of the invasion.”(4)

The great master of “The Art of the Deal” claimed, admittedly in his usual inarticulate manner:

I could have negotiated. At worst, I could have made a deal to take over something, you know, there are certain areas that are Russian speaking areas, right, like, but you could have worked a deal.”

Now that “deal” sounds just like Trump, a man who gives nothing of his own to charity; he asserts the right to steal from others (the Ukrainians, who obviously would have no voice in this) and hand their land over to a beady-eyed tyrant. 

Does this remind you of anything? Hint: I used the verb form above. That’s right: Appeasement —The Munich Agreement, (September 30, 1938), the settlement reached by Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy that permitted German annexation of the Sudetenland, in western Czechoslovakia.(5)

Of course, we all know how that deal worked out. 

***

(1)  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/business/media/fox-dominion-2020-election.html?searchResultPosition=4

(2)  https://www.theguardian.com/media/2023/feb/28/rupert-murdoch-deposition-fox-news-dominion-voting-systems

(3)  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/17/opinion/fox-news-dominion.html?searchResultPosition=1

(4)  https://news.yahoo.com/donald-trump-d-let-putin-194231988.html

(5)  https://www.britannica.com/event/Munich-Agreement

  

Benito never kicked my cat

Tucker Carlson:

Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs?

These are fair questions, and the answer to all of them is "no." Vladimir Putin didn't do any of that. So, why does permanent Washington hate him so much?

https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlson-gives-passionate-defense-vladimir-putin-person

*

Benito never kicked my cat,

Ate my porridge, crushed my hat.

Stalin remembered to return

My samovar, my coffee urn.

Hitler and the Nazi SS

Never made my carpet a mess.

I confess that Pol Pot

Never took my parking spot.

Pinochet and Vlad the Impaler

Never squatted in my house trailer.

The Tonton Macoute and Papa Doc

Never re-set my electric clock.

And surely Chairman Mao

Never tried to milk my cow.

Franco warned the Falange:

“Hands off Tucker’s blancmange.”

Thus I am so very glad 

To deny that they were bad.

 

Hammer and Tongues

As the saying goes: “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” 

Republican and fellow rightwing hammerheads have been busily banging away at imaginary nails. Take Ronny Jackson, for example. An MD who once claimed that Trump was the paragon of physical fitness, Johnson is now a Member of Congress representing (where else?) Texas. Seeing the Democratic party as a nail head, Johnson brought his tool down mightily: 

Here comes the MEV - the Midterm Election Variant! They NEED a reason to push unsolicited nationwide mail-in ballots. Democrats will do anything to CHEAT during an election . . . ,

he tweeted.*

Somehow this alleged man of science (aren’t doctors supposed to be men of science?) didn’t give a logical explanation of why his claimed bogus COVID variant needed to take a route from South Africa to Europe before being sprung on gullible US voters. Or why it is that non-bogus people are dying from a bogus disease. I wonder in what medical school class one learns to finesse such questions.

¶

This is what people say to me: he doesn’t represent science, he represents Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews during the Second World War and in the concentration camps.

Thus, Fox Nation host Lara Logan offering a comparison between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.**

Logan’s playing of Whack-a-mole, using her hammer on the pate of the distinguished director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is a very advanced example of weaseldom. Note that she doesn’t say that she herself  is making the comparison; she is allegedly only repeating “what people say to me.” She claims, “People all across the world are saying this.” I haven’t heard that in my part of the world, but, then again, I don’t have much to do with crazies. Apparently, Logan does, but don’t blame her for what she hears and repeats—because, weaselly, she doesn’t dare say it directly.

¶

Tucker Carlson is not a man who is going to be outflanked by the likes of a Lara Logan. He gets out his hammer for Fauci’s noggin and disdains any weaseling. He will own up to his whacking. 

If you haven’t checked in on Tony Fauci lately, you may be a little surprised to discover what he’s become . . . . After two years of being nonstop media adulation, Tony Fauci has morphed into an even shorter version of Benito Mussolini.***

(Whether it is worse to be banged on the head for being a Mengele or a Mussolini, I leave up to you.)

Carlson subtly engages in a cute bit of anti-Italian bigotry here (and, considering his record on immigration, perhaps something of a warning against southern Europeans in general). 

¶

Time, I think, to take away the toolbox from the wingnuts. Though I think someone should first take a monkey wrench and tighten the screws that are loose. 

***

*  https://news.yahoo.com/white-house-doctor-raved-trumps-024430725.html

**  https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/fox-news-lara-logan-compares-015448939.html

***  https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tucker-carlson-makes-unhinged-comparison-123650608.html