WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 16, 2024
A rarely discussed distant land: Sometime in 2023, we began watching the Fox News Channel on a much more regular basis.
We did so because we'd come to feel, rightly or wrongly, that MSNBC's major programs had become unwatchably bad. Our incomparable complaints:
Total agreement on all points among all panel members. Unbelievably trivial legal minutia pretty much all the way down.
Near total focus on seeking ways to "lock him up." Refusal to pay attention to the types of actual issues and actual topics which affect the lives—and affect the votes—of people who aren't solidly inside Blue America's political camp.
At any rate, we began to watch Fox News. It had been a while since we'd spent a lot of time doing that.
We were surprised by what we saw. Indeed, we remain astonished by what we now see, on a daily and nightly basis, within that distant land.
Does Blue America really know what happens inside that land? It's right there on cable for all to see. But is anyone in Blue America actually watching this channel's programs—and if so, are Blue America's major news orgs willing to report what is taking place?
With those questions as background, we strongly recommend a new post by Kevin Drum. The post starts as a report about Candidate Trump—but it ends with a note about Fox.
The headline pretty much speaks for itself. Here's how Drum begins:
Notes on Trump’s Bloomberg interview
Here are a few miscellaneous thoughts about Donald Trump's sit down at the Economic Club of Chicago with Bloomberg editor John Micklethwait. The full thing is on YouTube,,,
In that passage, Drum is vastly understating the force of the content which follows.
Other observers have focused on the candidate's many evasions during yesterday's interview session, or on the various political topics on which Trump was questioned.
Instead, Drum offered a laundry list of alleged groaners by Candidate Trump concerning economic issues. Here are two examples:
[At one point] Micklethwait made the mistake of asking Trump precisely what he'd do to cut waste in the government. It probably seemed like a nice, concrete question, but Trump wouldn't answer. Instead he took the opportunity to yet again brag about how he saved $1.7 billion dollars almost overnight on a new pair of Air Force Ones. All he had to was call the CEO of Boeing and ask, something that no one before him had ever thought to do.
This is yet another Trump fantasy. He played no role in negotiating the Boeing contract, which ended up where everyone always thought it would. But no one ever challenges him, so he keeps repeating this tall tale every chance he gets.
On the subject of fantasies, Trump also insisted that he gave Apple a break on tariffs but only if they started manufacturing in the US. And they did! They opened a factory in Austin to make Mac Pros.
Except for one little detail: that factory opened in 2013, long before Trump was around. But he's been taking credit for it anyway since 2019.
Concerning the opening of that Apple plant, Drum provides a link to a New York Times "news analysis" piece from November 2019.
(From that 2019 report: "The moment was part of a bizarre afternoon in Texas, where the president played up a six-year-old factory as evidence of his three-year-old presidency’s success in bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States.")
Concerning Trump's claims about Air Force 1, Drum provides a link to his own report for Mother Jones back in 2018. (Headline: "Here’s the Unremarkable Story of America’s New Presidential Jet.")
All across Blue America's landscape, the candidate has been mocked for his rambling evasions during yesterday's session, but also for his trademark groaners and howlers. But at the end of Drum's post, he offers this additional account—a brief account of what was being said in a far distant land
After it was all over and Trump had done nothing but repeat his usual lies and demonstrate that he knows nothing about the economy, his fans at Fox News immediately began marveling at Trump's masterful performance in schooling Micklethwait. Why, Trump's command of economics was so overwhelming the poor guy never stood a chance. Seriously, they said that. It's a case study in toadying unrivaled in recent history.
Kevin left it there. For examples of the buckets of praise being dumped on the candidate's head, we recommend David Gilmour's report at Mediaite.
Headline included, Gilmour starts like this:
Sean Hannity Gushes Over Trump After Chaotic Interview With Bloomberg Editor
Fox News host Sean Hannity delivered effusive praise for former President Donald Trump following a chaotic interview with Bloomberg News editor-in-chief John Micklethwait, lauding Trump’s performance as his “all-time greatest moments on the campaign trail.”
Despite the former president’s meandering responses and frequent tangents during his interview on Tuesday at the Economic Club of Chicago, at one point answering a completely different question to the one asked by Micklethwait.
The sense that the interview was not going well seemed underlined as pro-Trump talking heads rounded the wagons to heap excessive praise on the former president. Fox News host Mark Levin, watching live, wrote on TruthSocial that the appearance was “extremely impressive” and the interviewer “screamingly hostile.”
Trump senior advisor Stephen Miller also went all out: “President Trump’s Bloomberg interview at the Economic Club of Chicago was the greatest live interview any political leader or politician has done on the economy in our lifetimes. Period.”
Videotape is provided. In that one statement, Miller comes close to having the candidate replace Raymond Shaw as "the kindest, bravest, warmest, most [intelligent] human being I’ve ever known in my life."
Can such a nation long endure—a nation half-Red and half-Blue? More to the point, can our nation long endure when major orgs in Blue America refuse to report the foolishness being trafficked to millions of people, around the clock, within that distant land?
(Also, when such orgs ignore the undisguised ugliness which passes without comment each night on the astonishing Gutfeld! show?)
Blue orgs don't seem to want to tangle with Fox. Can a nation locked inside Red and Blue silos expect to long endure?
For extra credit only: Opening joke on Monday evening's Gutfeld!:
GUTFELD (10/14/24) Happy Monday, everybody.
So in a viral clip, a McDonald's worker accidentally mistook Bill Clinton for Joe Biden.
At first, Bill was disappointed. Until he realized this means he might be able to bang Dr. Jill.
[AUDIENCE GROANS]
Yeah, too old for him.
On Gutfeld!, someone is always trying to "bang" or [BLEEP] Jill Biden. This garbage can gets opened each night. It goes downhill from there.
There's never an ending to Paris, Hemingway said. So too with Greg Gutfeld's anger and moral disorder, or with his flyweight panels.
Somerby doesn't have to watch Fox News himself. There are newsletters that summarize their content. One is called Decoding Fox News (on substack, also in podcast format). There is another called Deconstructing the Religious Right. In fact, most of the action has moved away from cable, which is now watched by a small proportion of voters. That's why campaigning by Harris (if not Trump) has moved away from traditional news sources.
ReplyDeleteAnother important source is Ground News. They have classified media by its political leaning and gives statistics about where which stories have appeared, including the blind spots of both the left and right (stories only reported in biased media).
Drum is reacting the way a serious person with some financial background would react to Trump's interview. Fox is being partisan. Somerby should recognize and more importantly, acknowledge that.
Our nation has always been full of educated people and uneducated people. There are also fools and sages in terms of wisdom and common sense. What makes no sense is that Somerby excoriates the educated (as if going to college were a sin) and wastes credulity on the medacious and doesn't seem to know how to figure out where to place trust. That is his problem. Most people are better at it than he is.
There are liars and cheats and thieves in this world too. Along with honest, hard-working, straight-forward people who are trying their best to treat others fairly. Somerby regularly confuses these groups here too.
When our country decided to let everyone vote, it opened the door to deserving and thoughtful voters and all the underqualified voters. Our faith has been that there are more reasonable voters than wasted votes and that the majority would produce a better decision than all of the other interest groups holding power in their own self-interest (rich people, land/slave/property-owners, robber barons, male chauvinists, racists and bigots, church bigwigs and charlatans. Our Constitution express forbade foreign interference, but a billionaire joined forces with one of our nation's foreign enemies to put himself into power. That was an attack on our system, not part of it and we have been working to prevent that from happening again. Today, that same billionaire is trying to mobilize the miscreants (both allowed to vote and not allowed) to work the system and gain power again. Fortunately, all the deplorables in Trump's basket are not enough to outweigh the reasonable majority.
Somerby doesn't see things the way I do. It is his right to disagree. I wish he would clearly state his own views instead of hinting about sacred Troy falling and Others who need to be understood (which seems to mean coddled). My faith is that during this election, reasonable people will recognize that the fate of our country demands that they take their voting privilege seriously and cast their vote wisely (for Harris) instead of for an obvious crook, because he pisses off someone you hate.
I feel like the rest of the world is watching to see how well our democracy can protect itself from the forces that have undermined other vulnerable countries. I feel like their hopes are resting on our shoulders, along with our own fate. I have voted for Harris already (during early voting) because I do not want to let democracy down and because the world needs us at our best, not damaged by the flaws embodied by the right wing at this point in our history.
I urge you to take this election seriously too. Step away from Fox and find out more about the issues and use your vote to the best of your ability. Somerby's approach is not working for him or anyone else. But that isn't the only way to think about election issues.
Thom Hartmann has an interesting essay today about the legacy of Joseph McCarthy, as found in the behavior on the right. Here is the part that struck me most forcefully (excluding the McCarthy history, which I lived through and once was enough).
ReplyDelete"While outrage over the distortion and slander of the name of one of the world’s great political parties and its presidential nominee is justified, a larger issue should concern us all.
When a political party has so departed from normal political dialogue that its senior-most members casually insult, misname, and defame their opposition, that party has lost its claim to political legitimacy.
This is no small matter, and every time a TV host or reporter lets either of these slurs slide it digs the knife deeper into the back of our nation’s body politic.
There was a time when our media would ignore or even quote politicians casually using the N-word to describe Black people, the B-word to describe women, and various racial slang to describe Hispanics, Japanese, Italians, and Poles. That time, thankfully, is now past.
Hopefully this “Democrat Party” slur — and the intentional mispronunciation of Vice President Harris’ name — will soon follow the same path to oblivion, and our media will lead the way in calling Republicans out when they persist."
Here is the rest of his essay:
https://hartmannreport.com/p/weaponizing-words-the-gops-plot-to-61c
Full title: Weaponizing Words: The GOP’s Plot to Undermine Democrats & Democracy
When language becomes a political weapon, democracy becomes the victim…
Gutfeld is a disaster but does that mean we should or should not vote for Trump? Enquiring minds want to know.
ReplyDeleteAnd if we should vote for Harris and not Trump, why does Somerby spend so much time focused on the right here to the neglect of the left, which has been working its hardest to inform voters ahead of an election that has already started?
Does Somerby think that reciting Gutfeld's routines every day is the way to prepare voters to exercise their franchise?
Why would Somerby be concerned about the potential consequences of ignoring the content on Fox News?
ReplyDeleteIs Somerby concerned about those consequences? He does nothing here to rebut what is said on Fox. He hasn't once stated that Jill Biden is NOT sleeping with Hunter.
DeleteHow many people here think that it is funny that Trump cheats at golf? Just curious.
ReplyDeleteIf you think it is not clever or cute or funny, do you think we should elect a president who cheats at golf? Just askin'
If you are voting for Trump, does that mean that you (1) cheat at golf yourself, or (2) allow your boss to win at golf when you play together?
If you don't play golf, please substitute the word "poker" in place of golf. Then ask yourself how Bat Masterson would have felt about your answers.
Anonymouse 4:04pm, you settled for a president who showered with his daughter. So, I think that subject is closed.
DeleteAnother lie. When will the lying stop?
DeleteNot according to Snopes.
DeleteSnopes is splitting hairs over something written in a stolen journal that Ashley Biden has denied means her father and she ever showered together.
DeleteThat you would repeat something like that shows how low a person you are.
The last time Trump went golfing, he made 12 holes-in-one. At least that's what JD says.
DeleteShe didn’t deny it in her letter to a judge. She regretted that her private life had been invaded by the theft of her diary.
DeleteIf she has denied it to Snopes, post it. I haven’t seen it. The last entry from them was that she had not contradicted the diary entry so they ruled it as true.
Cecelia is nailing it this week. I caught myself agreeing with him again. This time, when he said the subject of how people feel about the character of Presidential candidates is a subject that is closed. We already know Republican voters, who nominated a rapist and self-admitted sexual predator to be their President (yet again), care not a whit about the character of Presidential candidates.
DeleteGood job, guy.
"According to Ashley, who really ought to know, the entries regarding ‘the showers’ were alterations made not by her, but by someone else well after the diary was stolen.
DeleteWithout evidence to the contrary, any objective person must take her at her word."
Snopes certified the truth that there were pages saying something about Biden showering with his daughter contained in the stolen diary, but it didn't certify that Ashley Biden wrote those pages. She says she didn't.
DeleteThis is like saying that Hunter Biden's laptap was certified as having belonged to him, but when it passed into other people's hands, then the hard disk was meddled with and things were added to it that were not Hunter's files.
The question is why the right wing thinks it is OK to attack the family of a presidential candidate this way, when families have previously been off limits, and why these fake made-up attempts to hurt Joe Biden should be believed when theft of property is involved and there is no verification of any of the so-called damaging material.
This is such ugly campaigning that it seems to me it adds fuel to the complaint about the lack of morality on the right, without proving that Biden deserved any of these attacks when he was running or serving as president. That includes the endless investigations fabricated by the right wingers in the House.
This is all so wrong!
I wasn’t going to vote but after Cecelia posting garbage like that, I am now motivated to vote for Harris.
DeleteIf Ashley Biden has countered this, then show it.
Deletehttps://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ashley-biden-leaked-diary-accusation/
In the real world, a mailer like this is called fraud:
ReplyDelete"A super PAC supporting former President Donald Trump's campaign is resorting to a new scare tactic to try to win over elderly voters in Arizona, according to Mother Jones: send them fake notices that their Medicare coverage is being canceled.
The mailers, sent out by MAGA, Inc., "had a big red stamp that proclaimed, 'Medicare Cancellation Notice.' Also emblazoned on its front was this: 'Warning: Rates are going up & plans are being cancelled. Details enclosed.' Its return address was the 'Department of Medicare Cancellation, Kamala Harris Administration,'" reported David Corn. The mailers also included the following message in cursive script: “I hope you can afford to lose your insurance! — Kamala Harris XOXO.”
The back of the mailer warned that Harris “has a new plan that would completely liquidate Medicare funds,” and "All the money you’ve paid into Medicare will be gone ... Your care [will be] cancelled.”
Medicare Part B premiums increased slightly this year from $164.90 to $174.70, but Harris has not at any point proposed a plan that would "liquidate Medicare funds." On the contrary, she has proposed expanding Medicare to cover hearing, vision, and long-term, in-home care, to be paid for by expanding the Biden administration's newly-enacted policy letting Medicare negotiate prescription drug prices."
Why would anyone vote for the right wing when they engage in fraud like this? In another swing state, a Republican candidate sent a mailer to black voters telling them the wrong election date. A Republican who did the same thing using robo-dialing was just convicted of fraud for the 2020 election.
This stuff isn't clever or funny, and no, both sides are not doing it. How can any thinking person vote for a party that routinely engages in fraud, whether it is the lies of paying people to wear T-shits claiming they are auto-workers when they are not, or the lies about FEMA that mainly hurt disaster survivors.
You owe it to yourself to stand up for honesty and decency by voting for Harris. You may not support everything she stands for, but at least she tells the truth about her beliefs.
Remember back when Hillary said that "When they go low, we go high." She lost and that made all the Trump supporters feel vindicated, because they won. But is that how we determine what is right and what is wrong? I was never taught that way, that anything goes as long as you get your way.
ReplyDeleteWe are a society of morals and values. If anything went, we would all truly need guns and we would have to live in fortresses. I would worry about whether the stores was selling spoiled meat. We wouldn't necessarily get our paychecks on schedule. Any guy on a date might rape your daughter. In other words, society would fall apart.
So why should we tolerate this in our presidential candidate? I would NEVER vote for Trump, no matter how much his economy might increase my paycheck, because his world is unlivable for anyone except him. The rest of us have to live somewhere, so I am going to vote for Harris because she follows the rules and cares about an orderly, stable society with police, officials and businesses we can trust. For all of us.
Oh, please. You come here in order to go low. You’re paid to go low. You’ve accused Bob of everything except for incest and murder. That insult you’ve reserved for Trump and conservatives.
DeleteLike the right routinely accuses Hillary of murder? Like you just accused Biden of incest? Why don't you just give it a rest.
DeleteAnonymices are getting morose. Somerby frets, reanalyzes, and stews. Anonymices get morose and creepily self-pitying due to the deep injustice of possibly not getting their spotless way.
DeleteShe’s going to pull it out, dingbats. Relax.
Now, three times, I've agreed with Cecelia. This time regarding "going low".
DeleteThe only thing Donald Trump is more jealous of than Barack Obama's popularity, is Jared Kushner's penis.
(Explainer: Kushner is married to Trump's daughter, who he has been trying to fuck since she was twelve years old).
Cecelia loves the gutter, I quoted a ruling from Snopes. You have anonymices flying monkeys making all sorts of accusations that they’ve pulled from their butts. You don’t belong on a high horse. You’re too dwarfish.
DeleteAnonymouse 5:18pm, you have a weird obsession with Kushner, but thanks for the show to my tell.
DeletePoor Cecelia. Still not happy after 5:18 proved him right.
DeleteCecelia is one of those who the saying "There's no pleasing some people , unless a minority is paying for it with their life" applies.
Anonymouse 5:24pm, not only was I happy over the anonymouse flying monkey’s timing, I thanked him for it.
DeleteRepublicans have a weird obsession with having Presidents and Supreme Court justices, who are rapists.
DeleteAnonymouse flying monkey 5:27pm, you “go higher” and the sun will scorch your whiskers.
DeleteI have mailed in my ballot and I am at peace. It seems to me that the only way many right wingers can live with themselves is by assuring themselves that the left is just as bad (or worse). Somerby is doing that. But what are the sins he is trying to assuage his guilt over? Yes, his writing is obvious, but he is entitled to his opinions. I suspect it is a leftover from growing up Catholic, where God knows your sins and failure to confess is yet another sin. Somerby knows what is right and wrong, and he surely knows that what Trump does is majorly wrong. It may trouble him that he is shilling for a monster when he surely knows better.
DeleteI forgive you, Somerby. God will too. Or maybe you are in an uncomfortable limbo, disbelieving in your childhood religion but not including forgiveness as a tenet of your current beliefs. If so, I will tell you that most self-help gurus would tell you not to be so hard on yourself.
Cecelia, on the other hand, should be much harder on herself. She is intolerable.
Anonymouse 5:34pm, I’m not so intolerable that you’ve accused me of having a peculiar and inappropriate fondness for young girls and Al Gore, but then anonymouse generosity is as phony and calculated as a Biden family photo op.
DeleteLike I said, intolerable.
Delete"anonymouse generosity is as phony and calculated as a Biden family photo op."
DeleteWhy? Because Hunter's banging Jill?
"I forgive you, Somerby. God will too."
DeleteTwo days ago you promised it was your last post. What happened?
Anonymouse 6:24pm, in your dreams.
DeleteCecelia is the way he is because he is a wounded lost soul. He suffers from unresolved trauma, like all right wingers do.
DeleteThis is not going low, this is science.
Cecelia feels shame because his frontal lobe is undersized and his amygdala is oversized (something known from scientific research), but Cecelia is not to blame for these conditions nor the circumstances that led to them.
These conditions are essentially baked in, Cecelia will never change, he will be forever tormented by these demons.
Anonymousec6:58pm, I wouldn’t describe anonymices as being demons and you don’t torment me. You’re more blog humping Shih Tzus.
DeleteA touch triggered, I see.
DeleteWe all knew that Trump was suppressing the Kavanaugh investigation, but there was nothing we could do about it. That is part of the reason for the anger women felt in 2020 (which helped Biden get elected) and the stronger anger we feel now, that will keep Trump out of the White House, if nothing else does. Women both register and vote in higher percentages than men.
ReplyDeleteTrump has operated on the premise that there is never too much lying. Fox too. They may find out that’s not true.
ReplyDeleteWhen asked at that Bloomberg event about the DOJ going after Google, Trump responded weirdly by extolling VA kicking people off the voter rolls. That’s called 4d dementia.
ReplyDeleteTrump is a clown.
But less Bozo and more John Wayne Gacy.
Somerby is also a clown.
Somerby flinches at the thought of having to substantiate his nonsense, but has the gall to link to the evidence Drum uses to bolster his claims (to be fair, Drum generally just rehashes stuff he reads elsewhere, whatever).
Earth to Somerby, this country has always been divided, red vs blue. We’ve even fought wars over it.
Somerby, dumbly, is concerned we are divided, but has little concern about what we are divided over.