Seems like the War on Christmas comes earlier and earlier every year. So with less than three weeks of War on Christmas shopping left, all God-loving Christians must be sure to remember what this season is truly about: intolerance for those different from you, paranoia, a perpetual sense of victimhood, narrow-mindedness, and religiously-correct commercialism.
Merry War on Christmas, everybody! And yes, Virginia, there really is a Bill O’Reilly. Sorry about that.
Last week, Bill O’Reilly was trying to make some point about how the feared “secular progressives” have turned San Francisco into a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah. To “prove” this point, he sent his personal douche/stalker/producer Jesse Watters to explore the city to give a “fair & balanced” appraisal of why San Francisco could not be anything but a sin geyser splattering its moral depravity over the glistening purity of “traditional” (meaning white, Christian, racist, homophobic, xenophobic, terrified, ignorant) America.
I figured I’d write about this to provide a little local favor. Because, you see, I’m actually from the San Francisco Bay Area. I lived in a suburb of the Berkley/Oakland area since the age of three and went to high school in Oakland. During that time, I visited SF frequently, usually to go to concerts and sometimes for shopping, restaurants, or theater with my family. After graduating from college, I moved back to the bay area, where I lived in SF and worked there for about two years.
That’s why I feel I can say with authority that O’Reilly and Watters are either complete idiots and/or are shamelessly lying to their viewers in this ridiculous “story” about SF. And they are lying to their viewers because they believe with all their rotten hearts that FOX viewers are ignorant imbeciles.
No, I’m not making that up. No, it’s not out of context — you can listen to it yourself. From the audio (for some unimaginable reason, this quote didn't make the print edition — more on that soon) from a new interview in TIME magazine with John McCain :
Q: Some members of the [Iraqi] government have made it clear in the last month or two that they might want to withdraw before complete stability, before totally secure borders, before some of the completeness of victory as you described. Is there any change, do you think there is some wiggle room there because what you described with Petraeus was an end point that was rather complete — a peaceful, stable country.
MCCAIN: It’s a peaceful and stable country now.
When do you go from simply being “out-of-touch” to being insane, delusional, or a pathological liar? “Out-of-touch” is simply too kind of a description for someone who would describe Iraq as either peaceful or stable. And what about all those warnings the Repubs keep spouting that Iraq is on the edge where one false move could send the country spiraling into further chaos? And if Iraq is "peaceful and stable," why the hell are we still there? And why didn't the idiots at TIME put this in the printed article?
Hey Obama: Check your calendar — Christmas just came early. I’m sure you can find some space in tonight’s speech for this doozy. Please digg it so it gets the attention it deserves!
ThinkProgress has some info on how Iraq is neither peaceful nor stable.
A sprinkler system partially flooded part of the Pepsi Center Monday morning.
The Denver Fire Department, which has a crew stationed at the center all week, was able to respond quickly before 5 a.m. when the sprinkler went off.
The sprinkler was located on the club level in a skybox which had recently been renovated to host a news crew. It appears the skybox belongs to Fox.
If that skybox actually is FOX’s, it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving channel. If it was an accident, karma rules. If it was deliberate sabotage of the republicans’ unrepentant propaganda mouthpiece, I applaud the perpetrator. May you continue to run free!
FOX and the Republicans have gone into overdrive trying to defend John McCain for not knowing how many homes he owns. As you’ve seen on this blog, they’ve attempted to explain it away with made up excuses, deflect it by claiming that calling out McCain’s cluelessness is somehow attacking Cindy McCain, and there’s the ever-popular, way-overused, “But he was a POW!” card that supposedly excuses you for every unethical, stupid thing you’ve ever done, said, or will do or say in the future.
Predictably, the right is attempting to reframe McCain’s cluelessness by saying that Barack Obama is actually attacking people for doing well and owning multiple homes, not people like McCain who are so clueless/obscenely wealthy that they don’t know or care how many homes they own. On Your World, Neil Cavuto claimed that by attacking McCain for having multiple homes, Obama was really “bashing the American Dream.”
The American Dream is not to become so obscenely wealthy that you lose track of how many homes you own and don't know/care how wealthy you are. For the vast majority of Americans, including myself, the American Dream is owning one home, paying it off, raising your family there, and being able to send your kids to college. Having too many homes is the dream of the extremely rich. But McCain thinks the problem with America isn’t that people are losing their homes and their jobs and seeing their wages decrease. No. John McCain thinks America's real problem is that rich people and corporations don’t have enough money.
Karl Rove, still not being identified as a John McCain advisor and donor, has dug deep into his bottomless well of lies to help FOX make up another excuse for why McCain doesn’t know how many houses he owns — stop attacking Cindy McCain! Yes, you read that right.
ROVE: Remember the indignation that Sen. Obama had when he said, “They’re attacking my wife. I’m never going to attack Cindy McCain.” Well the issue is: what does Mrs. McCain own? These homes are not Sen. McCain’s, they’re Sen. McCain and Mrs. McCain’s bought with Mrs. McCain’s money! –snip- Well [Obama] is now attacking John McCain’s wife.
So highlighting the fact that McCain has so many houses he has to have his campaign keep count for him (and even they can’t seem to do it) is an attack on Cindy McCain? Why? Because she doesn’t keep reminding her elderly husband how many homes they live in? This is the best “the Architect” can come up with? Does that make any sense to anyone?
FOX/the Republicans/the McCain campaign (they’re really all the same thing) know that this recent revelation of McCain’s out-of-touch cluelessness could possibly sink his candidacy — it is devastating to the notion that McCain can relate to “regular folks” and actually knows what is going on around him. So they are stuck choosing between the following unappealing options:
A) McCain is so rich he doesn’t know/care how many homes he owns.
B) McCain is so clueless he doesn’t know/care how many homes he owns.
C) McCain’s heiress sugar mama owns so much property that it’s impossible for McCain to even estimate how much property they jointly own after almost 30 years of marriage.
It’s shocking to me how Republicans are allowed repeatedly to spout the most outrageous lies, yet are never held accountable and their reputations remain unscathed. There are big whoppers, like Bush’s tax cuts helping the middle class, the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, Iraq’s WMDs, increasing fuel economy in cars will hurt the auto industry, and offshore drilling will immediately decrease gas prices. Then there are smaller but no less outrageous ones, like this recent idiotic statement from Newt Gingrich as he continues his heroic quest to prevent people from properly inflating their tires to save money on gas:
GINGRICH: Well, I got a very funny e-mail from a retired military officer in Tampa who pointed out that most tire inflation is done at service stations and you pay for it. And it’s actually a higher profit margin than selling gasoline. So Sen. Obama was urging you to go out and enrich Big Oil by inflating your tires instead of buying gas.
Get that? Newt Gingrich, who is supposed to be a “serious” and “knowledgeable” political expert, is claiming that spending 50 cents a month to inflate your tires will “enrich Big Oil” more than spending $60 A WEEK buying gas. As ThinkProgress notes, the reason why there’s a higher profit margin on air than on gas is because, if you haven’t noticed, AIR IS FREE AND PLENTIFUL — you’ll always have high profit margins if the product you’re selling is free.
There’s nothing more fun on FOX than seeing the rare sight of Alan Colmes standing up on his hind legs and exposing Sean Hannity for the idiotic, hypocritical windbag he is. But this latest smackdown over John Edwards’ affair has become one of my all-time favorites.
HANNITY: I’m not getting this. Explain to me and I’m wondering if you can’t keep the promise to your family, can’t keep your promise to your wife, you’re having an affair, you’re lying about the affair repeatedly, why should the American people trust you when you say you’re not going to lie to them? Why should we trust you?
COLMES: And by the way, that’s a great question Sean asks and so Amanda, if that’s true and you can’t trust somebody who had an affair. How can we trust John McCain to be President of the United States—he cheated on by his own admission on his first wife, he didn’t keep his martial vows, he didn’t keep his pledge to his first family…
HANNITY: Thirty years ago after five and a half years of being a POW.
COLMES: Excuse me Sean. You’ve had your chance to speak, I’m up. John McCain cheated on his wife, right. Amanda? So how do we trust John McCain? He cheated on his wife, why do you have a double standard and John McCain’s running for President? John Edwards is not. John McCain’s wife was in a car accident. John McCain’s running for President, what about his affair?
HANNITY: After five and a half years in a POW camp.
COLMES: That has nothing to do with it. So it’s OK to have an affair on his wife.
Hannity went on to endlessly repeat that McCain was a POW who got beat up all the time and Edwards plays with his hair and has a big house, implying that McCain, therefore, has the moral authority to cheat on his wife who had been disfigured in a terrible car crash and raised their kids for years while he was a POW.
On Sunday, 58-year-old Jim Adkisson entered the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church during a children’s performance of the musical “Annie Jr.” In a guitar case, he carried a shotgun and 76 rounds. Adkisson killed two church members, Greg McKendry (60) and Linda Kraeger (61), and wounded six more before he was wrestled to the ground as he tried to reload. What was Adkisson’s motive? From RawStory:
A report from the local Knoxville news details the findings from Adkisson's home, along with key statements from a document written by Adkisson related to an apparent motive behind the violent attack that rocked the suburban community:
"Adkisson targeted the church, [Investigator Steve] Still wrote in the document obtained by WBIR-TV, Channel 10,'because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country's hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of media outlets.'
"Adkisson told Still that 'he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement that he would then target those that had voted them in to office.'"
If any of that sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve been hearing the exact same claims coming from the right wing's most prominent stars and spokespeople for years. It’s all there: liberals are ruining the country, Democrats are letting the terrorists win, liberals hate America, the liberal media is bamboozling the nation.
Carol Smallwood, a longtime acquaintance of Adkisson’s, said he hates “'blacks, gays and anyone different from him,” which is also consistent with right-wing ideology. In a four-page note Adkisson left in his car, he explicitly noted his hate for the “liberal movement” — the Unitarian Universalist church is well known for its liberal stances on homosexuality, civil rights, opposition to war, women’s rights, and multiculturalism. While another major cause of Adkisson’s rage was his inability to find work and having his foodstamps reduced, Knoxville Police Chief Sterling P. Owen IV noted "[Adkisson] did express frustration that the liberal movement was getting jobs."
And how do we know that Adkisson was a consumer of popular right-wing thinking? Anticipating that he would be shot by police, Adkisson left the door to his house open to make it easier for authorities to enter. He didn’t want his motive and the ideology it sprang from to be a secret. From the Knoxville News Sentinel:
Inside [Adkisson’s] house, officers found "Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder" by radio talk show host Michael Savage, "Let Freedom Ring" by talk show host Sean Hannity, and "The O'Reilly Factor," by television talk show host Bill O'Reilly.
It’s official, straight from the mouth of Bush’s former press secretary, Scott McClellan — FOX is Republican propaganda.
From Chris Matthews’ interview with McClellan last Friday, 7/25/08 (full transcript):
MATTHEWS: Did you see FOX television as a tool when you were in the White House, as a useful avenue for getting your message out?
MCCLELLAN: Well, I make a distinction between the journalists and between the commentators. Certainly, there were commentators and others, pundits, at FOX News that were helpful to the White House. Certainly, we got talking points [to] those people.
MATTHEWS: Did people say, call Sean [Hannity], call Bill [O'Reilly], call whoever? Did you do that as a regular thing?
MCCLELLAN: Certainly. Certainly. It wasn‘t necessarily something I was doing, but it was something that we at the White House, yes, were doing and getting them talking points and making sure they knew where we were coming from. –snip-
MATTHEWS: You were using these commentators as your spokespeople?
MCCLELLAN: Well, certainly. I mean, certainly.
Of course, this shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who frequents this site, though it is nice to have official confirmation. McClellan went on to try to draw a distinction between FOX’s “commentators” and their “journalists,” but FOX has purposefully blurred the line between the two. That’s how “journalist” Brit Hume suddenly becomes a noxious hard right “commentator” when he’s a guest on other FOX shows and how “commentators” like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity can claim to be “journalists” doing “investigations” when they want to give their propaganda an air of legitimacy. And if you think FOX maintains some sort of principled policy delineating the two, well, you probably also believe they’re “Fair & Balanced.”
