SATURDAY: The eternal sunshine of the Fox & Friends mind!

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2024

All Misstatements by Trump Left Behind: Will Candidate Harris win this election? We'd bet against her at this point, but we have no real idea.

In fairness, let's be fair:

Vice President Harris was thrown into the race at a very late point in the game. By now, it seems fair to say that she has proven to be a challenged candidate in various ways, as was the case in 2019, when she sought the Democratic Party nomination in the normal manner. 

Full disclosure! Off the cuff, in extemporaneous speech, she continues to be surprisingly inarticulate; this is surely costing her votes. That said, this site exists to examine the discourse, not to evaluate the pols—and it's the spectacular dumbness of our current discourse which defines the astonishingly horrible shape we Americans, Red and Blue, are now inescapably in.

Dear readers! Even with the Internet Archive down, consider the sheer stupidity of a presentation which took place on yesterday morning's Fox & Friends. 

It started at 8:27 a.m. To watch the presentation we'll now discuss, you can just click here.

Sad! At the start of a "Fox News Democracy 24" report, co-host Ainsley Earhardt kicked things off like this:

EARHART (10/11/24): Moments ago, Tim Walz was pressed by Good Morning America about why Kamala Harris hasn't made good on her campaign promises while she's been in the White House. Here is that exchange...

Sad! Before we show you the way "that exchange" on GMA got started, let this obvious point go forth to the nations:

According to Earhardt, the question posed to Candidate Walz was this:

Why hasn't Harris made good on her promises while she's been in the White House?

Sad! In one blindingly obvious sense, the question starts to disqualify itself if one obvious point is added:

Why hasn't Harris made good on her promises while she's been in the White House as vice president?

How dumb does a journalist have to be to skip past that obvious point? Candidate Harris has "been in the White House" for almost four years, but she's been there as vice president. 

She herself hasn't been in charge! As almost everyone has heard by now, the president has been Joe Biden!

This must be the world's most obvious point. But as you can see in the videotape which Earhardt now proceeded to play, major players in our mainstream press corps skip past this obvious point in much the same reflexive way the rest of us humans breathe.

Below, you see where the Fox & Friends segment went as Earhardt played a brief chunk of videotape from the GMA interview. Sad! This is the question posed to Walz by GMA's Michael Strahan:

EARHART (10/11/24): Moments ago, Tim Walz was pressed by Good Morning America about why Kamala Harris hasn't made good on her campaign promises while she's been in the White House. Here is that exchange:

STRAHAN (videotape): Something that former president Trump said—something that, within your debate with— They were saying that, "Hey, these are policies that Kamala Harris could have done three years ago, when she was in the White House with President Biden—and she never did."

What do you say to people who bring that up, who say that?

Sad! In that passage, you see a multimillionaire mainstream news star endorsing what may be the world's dumbest possible question.

That question might (or might not) make sense if asked of a sitting president. In all honesty, this familiar question is strikingly dumb in the circumstance at hand.

You can see the start of what Walz said by watching the Fox & Friends tape—tape which comes from what may be the dumbest and most propagandistic program in all of TV "news."

For the record, we can find no tape of Strahan's interview with Candidate Walz at Good Morning America's site. At that sadly instructive site, we find no sign that the interview with Walz ever took place at all.

Sad! As you can see, the GMA site is mainly devoted to thumb-sucker "human interest" reports, followed quickly by information about the various ways a person can "Shop GMA." 

That site is stupidity all the way down. With few exceptions, so is the little which is left of our ersatz "national discourse." 

Sad! We all live within an extremely dumb political / journalistic culture. In fairness, it isn't just Fox & Friends, though that gruesome morning show frequently takes the cake. 

In the 7 o'clock hour this morning, co-host Pete Hegseth was happily informing Fox & Friends Weekend viewers that Candidate Harris is "staggeringly bad"—that she "can't articulate" her views on various issues at all.

In our view, that has turned out to be a weakness for Candidate Harris. That said, she's running against a second candidate whose presentations are crazily inaccurate on a regular basis. Other aspects of his presentations make things exponentially worse.

That said, of one thing you can feel certain—viewers of Fox & Friends and Fox & Friends Weekend will never be asked to think about the crazy things that other candidate constantly says in his speeches and during his interviews. 

They will never be asked to look at footage of any of his crazy remarks. One thinks of an Oscar-winning film from not that long ago:

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a 2004 American science fiction romantic comedy-drama film directed by Michel Gondry, based on Charlie Kaufman's screenplay developed from a story by Gondry, Kaufman and Pierre Bismuth. Starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, with supporting roles from Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood and Tom Wilkinson, it follows two individuals who undergo a memory erasure procedure to forget each other after the dissolution of their romantic relationship.

[...]

The film was a box office success, grossing $74 million on a $20 million budget, and was named by the American Film Institute one of the Top 10 Films of 2004. At the 77th Academy Awards, Bismuth, Gondry and Kaufman won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and Winslet received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.

In the years since its release, the film has become a cult classic; it is considered by many publications as one of the best films of the 21st century.

In this well-known film, a pair of ex-lovers are allowed to enjoy an "eternal sunshine" after having their painful memories erased. At Fox, viewers are allowed to enjoy an eternal sunshine in a slightly different manner:

Sad! Fox viewers are never shown the crazy statements and crazy behaviors of the candidate the Fox News Channel supports and propagandizes for. To a substantially lesser but real extent, a similar process has been underway for years at many of Blue America's favorite news orgs.

No program is dumber than Fox & Friends, though several Fox News programs try. In fairness, the dumbness extends into Blue regions too. All of us are currently living inside a deeply stupid political culture.

Can a large modern nation survive in this way? The question seems to be in the process of aggressively answering itself.

Who is going to win in November? We can't answer that pressing question, but we're guessing the other guy might!

Fuller disclosure: As we noted once again in yesterday afternoon's report, the culture at Fox also becomes amazingly coarse and profane during the 10 p.m. hour.

During that remarkable hour, Candidate Harris is known as "Cackles McKneepads." It's also known that she's "a wine drunk."

On at least three occasions, viewers have been asked whether Hunter Biden has started "banging" or "BLEEPing" first lady Jill Biden yet. This is the business the moguls at Fox have chosen.

This occurs on a nightly basis. As this garbage can is opened each night, the New York Times looks away.

This is the culture into which we've been thrown. It's hard to believe that a large modern nation can expect to function this way.