FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2026
On Fox, the friends made it nine: Yesterday afternoon, then again this morning, the Fox News Channel continued to focus heavily on the search for Nancy Guthrie.
In all honesty, there hasn't a huge amount of news to convey about this deeply unfortunate matter. On Fox, by way of contrast, there seems to be plenty of time to kill.
Has this helped erase the sitting president from the news stream at a time when his numbers seemed to be sinking? We don't know if that has been some part of the channel's motives.
But as of yesterday afternoon, CNN and Fox had spent the past week staging virtual filibusters on this unfortunate topic. Consider the Fox News Channel's Will Cain Show, which airs each weekday at 4 p.m. Eastern.
Yesterday afternoon, Cain discussed nothing but the Guthrie case from 4 o'clock down to 4:27 p.m. After a commercial break, he devoted three (3) minutes to yesterday's Senate hearing in which, in Cain's basically accurate rendering, "GOP lawmakers were tearing into Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, grilling him on alleged fraud, anti-ICE rhetoric and everything in between."
Cain spent three (3) minutes on that topic, then returned to fruitless, repetitive discussions about the search for Guthrie. The last five minutes of the show were devoted to a conversation with the actress Candace Cameron Bure about her Christian faith.
As for this morning, the Fox & Friends program devoted at least half its airtime every hour to the Guthrie matter. Finally, during the third and final 8 o'clock hour, Karoline Leavitt showed up.
As we noted yesterday, performers on Fox News Channel shows don't really need help from "human interest" events when they want to tilt the news in the sitting president's favor. Quite routinely, they disappear the topics they don't like and they reinvent the facts about the topics they prefer.
Leavitt was at her best today. After discussing the Guthrie matter, she was asked about the forthcoming monthly inflation report. Inevitably, Leavitt said this:
LEAVITT (2/13/26): Well look, the report will be released in a few minutes, and I can't get ahead of it. But what we do know are the facts. President Trump inherited an economic mess from the Biden administration. Inflation was at a record high—nine percent...
"What we do know are the facts," she said. She then proceeded to change them.
Leavitt continued from there, picking and choosing her measure of current inflation. But no—as Leavitt surely knows, inflation wasn't running at nine percent when President Biden handed off to President Trump.
As Leavitt presumably knows, inflation was running at three percent on that fateful occasion.
Inflation was running at three percent. On Fox, that number is always nine. Jones, Earhardt and Kilmeade, good friends all, politely listened to Leavitt's misstatement without attempting to offer correction. Presumably, they all knew that her statement was bogus, but they also knew that it was bogus in the standard Fox News Channel way.
What has happened to Nancy Guthrie? At this point, nobody knows.
Fox hardly needs to stage filibusters concerning the search for Nancy Guthrie to make the news work out better for Trump. We don't know why they've focused so heavily on this matter since at least last Saturday morning, but has anyone on Fox & Friends ever mentioned that sad visual rendering of the Obamas the president reposted last week?
We haven't had time to check that out. Based on experience, we can guess what that search would most likely find.
ReplyDelete"Yesterday afternoon, Cain discussed nothing but the Guthrie case"
I don't care about the Guthrie case, so I don't watch any Guthrie case shit. And who forces you, Bob, to watch any Guthrie shit? You're acting crazy, man.
"But no—as Leavitt surely knows, inflation wasn't running at nine percent when President Biden handed off to President Trump. "
But he didn't say "when President Biden handed off". He said that the Autopen administration created economic mess, and President Trump inherited it. And indeed there was annualized 9.1% inflation rate in June 2022, during the Autopen administration.
The Leavitt's quote you posted is perfectly fine, Bob, but you need to take care of your unfortunate Democrat-cult zealotry.
The problem is not whether one watches Fox willingly. The problem is that Fox organizes what is visible ("real") in the first place. The inflation figure is also a mere image, 9%, circulating independently of time and conditions. The debate over it does not concern economic reality, but the management of appearances, a struggle over the representation of it in the hierarchy of attention. It’s a contest over which numerical image will dominate the narrative field.
DeleteThe same holds true for the meta debate about motives (“Democrat-cult zealotry”). It's am illusory representation as opposed to real social relations that are directly experienced and consciously understood. It remains within the illusion, and in doing so, deepens it. What appears as spontaneous disagreement is in fact the reproduction of the same mediated logic that structured the original broadcast.
Both function to serve a mediated distortion where allegiance is displayed, identities are performed, and representations continue to be circulated without ever returning to lived, materially grounded analysis.
Here's a quote that manages to succinctly capture both Trump's dishonesty and his incoherence, as well as undermining the trumptardian twaddle stated above:
Delete'Trump: “I inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country. It was through the roof. Now, you will say it wasn’t in history, it was 48 years. You know there’s a theory. There was – I say it was the worst. But whether it’s 48 years or what, I inherited the worst inflation in the history of our country.”'
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/05/politics/fact-check-trump-nbc-interview
At which point the MAGAts begin nodding their heads up and down in unity.
Delete
DeleteYes, Soros-monkey, the Autopen administration is responsible for huge inflation in the US of A.
Yes, huge inflation over 4 years of Autopen's reign. Regardless of any particular monthly number, which is Bob's silly nitpicking.
And yes, Soros-monkey, the second Donald Trump administration did inherit it.
What's your point, Soros-monkey?
What are you going to do about it, Mao?
DeleteStop raping children?
LOL.
I'll take my chances.
Show of hands. Is Mao/trumptard that stupid or just pretending to be that stupid?
Delete
DeleteGood, good. I'll mark this as "Soros-monkeys got nothing to say and resort to explicit word-salads."
Hector,
DeleteHe's pretending.
Like the media does when they treat the Republican Party as if it weren't a global pedophile ring.
Jeffrey Epstein's good friend Kathryn Ruemmler loved to explain that she ran Obama's vetting and ethics department and was responsible for vetting all of Obama's cabinet members.
ReplyDeleteRuemmler also said that she was saddened because Trump had "debased" the Presidency.
Ruemmler was so close to Epstein that she called the convicted sex offender "Uncle Jeffrey."
Democrats are neck deep in Epstein filth.
Get a load of that pig, Obama's White House counsel who was just fired from Goldman Sachs for her close association with Jeffrey Epstein, boasted about her ethics and protecting the "sacrosanctness" of the government and she's concerned about decency and dignity.
Delete"I had a team that did vetting and ethics, so our office was responsible for vetting every cabinet member. In our administration we have quite rigorous standards. And it would be a big failure if someone turned out to not file their tax returns appropriately or something like that. A big issue they would come up with would be household help and people not paying taxes on either a nanny, housekeeper, or landscaping.
I'm really disheartened by what I think is the devaluing of the office of president, which is something that I've revered as White House Counsel and really felt a personal responsibility to protect this sacrosanctness. Not in any religious sense but just because it's such an important office with dignity and decency, I would say. So from that perspective, I've become more partisan, at least in my own thinking about it.
Roughly 8,400 documents involved Ruemmler or referenced her. Some correspondence shows that Ruemmler was aware of the extent of the allegations that Epstein had faced involving underage girls in Florida. In some instances, she advised Epstein on how he might go about trying to repair his image and defend himself publicly against new claims of misconduct.
DeleteThe gifts Epstein gave to Ruemmler have been documented in news reports: the spa treatments, the handbags from Hermes, an Apple Watch, a Fendi coat, among many others. But some of the interactions between Epstein and Ruemmler described throughout their correspondence indicates that Epstein and Ruemmler did not simply have a lawyer-client transactional relationship, as Ruemmler previously attested to.
“It makes him happy to see you happy,” Epstein’s assistant wrote to Ruemmler in 2016, after Epstein prepaid for a spa treatment for her.
In October 2018, Epstein directed one of his assistants to send flowers and chicken soup to Ruemmler because she has “not been feeling well.” It would not be the first time that Epstein would send her a small token of appreciation when she was sick. They talked about dating issues, made jokes about both the wealthy and everyday people, and shared laments about their careers and dating lives.
They would message each other about mundane things like their mutual distaste for seeing babies in business class on flights and would repeatedly plan to have dinner or drinks in various places. Epstein even had Ruemmler as a backup executor of his will at one point.
“Well, I adore him. It’s like having another older brother!” she wrote in an email in 2015.
During her time in private practice after she left the White House in 2014, Ruemmler received several expensive gifts from Epstein, including luxury handbags and a fur coat. The gifts were given after Epstein had already been convicted of sex crimes in 2008 and was registered as a sex offender. Ruemmler was also involved in Epstein’s legal defense efforts after he was arrested a second time for sex crimes in 2019 and later killed himself in a Manhattan jail.
“So lovely and thoughtful! Thank you to Uncle Jeffrey!!!” Ruemmler wrote to Epstein in 2018.
Was that 40,000 entries for Trump?
DeleteGlad they will be grilling the First Lady over the Epstein files. Wait? What? We’re not talking about Melania?
DeleteThe possibility that Ruemmler may not have done a good job for Obama is why these peope with close ties to Epstein need to resign their high level positions. Beyond that, I see no suggestion that she engaged in sex trafficking, but she had a relationship with Epstein, clearly, and that compromises her.
DeleteIt doesn't make Obama a sex trafficker or client of Epstein. Nor does it make her other employers complicit, although it damages their reputations and raises that possibility. This will be true for everyone who Epstein associated with.
The problem Trump faces is that there are so many pieces of evidence that Trump joined Epstein in his sex trafficking and exploitation of underage girls. Ruemmler didn't have that.
It seems likely that we can date Melania's guilty knowledge about Epstein back to whenever Melania stopped living with Trump and functioning as a First Lady. That seems like the only form of kompromat that would allow Melania to break the terms of her prenup with Trump.
DeleteThis whole Epstein filth makes it seem likely that the Melania movie was forced upon Trump in order to help restore Melania's reputation in the face of the shit Trump is going to be deluged with when the Files are finally released in a readable form.
DeleteNumber of indictments in the Obama administration, vs Trump’s at 5 years. Get back to us about that.
ReplyDeleteIt would be sad if the 84 year old mother of a cable news celebrity could be snatched off the face of the earth without anyone noticing or caring. Somerby seems to be wanting to say that Fox is using her disappearance to distract from other negative stories for Trump, but can't Somerby just say that? Does he have to make it sound like Guthrie's life is trivial, unimportant, and the concern about her is manufactured, not real to anyone? As Yevtushenko used to say "no lives are uninteresting" and Somerby used to quote him over and over. Is Guthrie's life now unimportant to him -- and can it be because she reminds him of his own mother and his conflicted feelings about her, and not Guthrie's actual worth as a human being? Somerby sounds callous, like a man who doesn't care about anyone but himself and his precious blog. At least Savannah Guthrie cares about her mother. No one would say that she shouldn't be so concerned, since her mother has nothing to do with the inflation rate and Trump's lies about it.
ReplyDeleteSomerby is correct.
ReplyDeleteWe're stuck with Trump, because every Republican voter is a bigot.