“You Can Always Count On Fox”: Fox Captures The Culprit For The Paris Attacks; Bill de Blasio, With An Assist From Obama
My first thought on hearing about the killing of at least a dozen Parisians at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo—including editors, cartoonists, and one cop shot on the sidewalk, execution-style, in front of cell-phone cameras—was that Bill Maher will feel even more justified in denouncing Islam as a “violent religion,” all the eloquent arguments by Reza Aslan and others notwithstanding. The murders were an attack not just on journalism, but on comedy itself, not unlike the hacking of Sony over the cartoony Seth Rogen movie The Interview.
My second thought was, “Will journos and comedians now need bodyguards?” Unfortunately, they already do—one of the cops killed Wednesday had been assigned to protect editor Stéphane Charbonnier because of Charlie‘s previous cartoons lampooning the prophet Muhammed and jihadist terror groups. The offices were firebombed in 2011 because of Charbonnier’s fearlessness.
Third thought: “How will Fox cover this?” Will they be torn between hating the terrorists and defending the “surrender monkey” French? Will they somehow connect this to the two cops killed in New York and blame Mayor de Blasio and protesters around the country marching against police violence? Nah, they can’t manage that, can they?
But you can always count on Fox. Within hours of the breaking news this morning, host Martha MacCallum and New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin were throwing the Paris attack and the NYC story into the same blender. After the Ferguson and New York protests, Goodwin said, “Police started to second guess themselves” for fear of being unjustly blamed or worse, killed, for acting too aggressively. The cops, he said, were like journalists who “censor themselves” for fear of being attacked.
Martha nodded. Whether it’s journalists holding their tongues for the sake of political correctness or cops holding back on choke-holds and shooting unarmed black men, “that makes things a lot softer,” she said.
Fox’s Eric Bolling raised the stakes on Outnumbered, saying, “This should be a test case for New York City and cities everywhere. Here’s the point: there’s a very serious push from the left that the police should not be militarized. We should over-militarize.”
An hour earlier, Fox & Friends had been jumping back and forth between the Paris attack and Obama’s threat to veto the first two bills coming out of the new Republican Congress, with Elisabeth Hasselbeck teasing before two commercial breaks: “Coming up: Hypocrisy brewing over president’s veto threats?” The idea is to link two unrelated things—terrorism and Obama’s promised veto of the Keystone pipeline—by weaving them into the same time and space. Weave and repeat: It’s simple and effective propagandistic association.
Ultimately, Fox connects everything under a still-larger narrative: YOU are under attack. Different Fox hosts Wednesday morning went on to tie the Paris attack to the release of Guantanamo prisoners, the Benghazi terrorists who haven’t been apprehended, and the likelihood that enhanced interrogation techniques—i.e., torture—won’t be used on any perpetrators because Obama is just too soft on Islamic terrorists.
On cable news this morning, you did hear the caveat to not blame all Muslims—Bobby Ghozi warned against that impulse on CNN; on MSNBC, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Islam was “a “peaceful religion.” And even on Fox, a counterterrorism expert said, “Islam is not the definition of terrorism. Far from it.” But he added that unless we start calling it “what it is—radical Islamic terrorism,” we can’t beat them.
In other words, while much of the liberal media are still trying to sort out just what happened and who did it, Fox is already out of the gate incorporating the attack into its ongoing agenda. And no matter whether or not this terrorist assault helps the authoritarian right over here like 9/11 did, in France it will almost certainly boost the Islamophobic Marine le Pen and the right in France 2017 elections.
As political commentator and Huff Post French editor Philippe Moreau Chevrolet said on Al Jazeera, “The far right doesn’t need to campaign anymore. [The attack] is doing the campaigning for them.”
By: Leslie Savan, The Nation, January 7, 2015
“Will We Walk The Satirical Walk?”: Now Is The Time To Stop And Think About What Satire Really Means
“Satire is what closes on Saturday,” satirist George S. Kaufman wrote, satirically. It is worth unpacking what this quote really means. Ostensibly, it means that when you choose the rapier of satire rather than the comforting swaddle of mass entertainment, you are limiting your audience in a self-sabotaging matter: While you’re busy finding yourself clever, the crowd has moved on to giggle along with cute kittens singing catchy songs. Satire is satisfying, but generally speaking, the only people listening are the person doing the satirizing and those who already care enough to agree with him. Most people ignore him, or, if they do anything at all, call him a jerk.
In the wake of today’s tragic terrorist attack in Paris, which killed 12 people including top cartoonists at satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo, the word “satire” has taken on its own power, its very existence a rejoinder to hatred, a founding pillar of Our Way Of Life. It is being cast as noble. But this is not how we usually see satire. Satire is usually a pain in the ass. Satire exists to discomfit the comfortable, to slaughter sacred cows, to puncture the illusion that we all live in a “polite” society. Satire is crude, and rowdy, and often self-aggrandizing: Satire is meant to call attention to itself in any way possible. Charlie Hebdo was particularly skilled at this: One cover, actually supporting the French law banning Muslim women from wearing burqas, featured a woman wearing a burqa … somewhere other than her head. Good satire is a little gross and cares not of taste. You want people to think … and you’re not against using a good dick joke to do it. Satire attempts, by its very nature, to shake people to alert.
But, mostly, people don’t like to be shaken to alert. They just want to go along with their day. They care a lot less about freedom of expression than they do freedom to go about their lives in peace. You’ve seen a lot of solidarity with Charlie Hebdo today, a strong defense of satire as a way of life. But it is worth noting that most publications aren’t showing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. And it is also worth noting that Americans—the people supposedly so proud of their freedom of expression—haven’t always been on the side of the angels here. South Park’s attempts to show a cartoon of Muhammad were famously censored by Comedy Central—in an episode that explicitly stated that the lesson everybody learned was “the best way to get what you want is to threaten other people with violence”—and the Metropolitan Museum of Art quietly removed all images of Muhammad from its halls five years ago. Even when Charlie Hebdo was firebombed four years ago, Time Paris bureau chief Bruce Crumley wrote that it was “hard to have much sympathy” for the magazine and that “insisting on the right to be obnoxious and offensive just because you can is infantile.”
Charlie Hebdo would respond, “of course it is.” If you’re not being obnoxious or offensive, what are you even doing? One image shared in the wake of the attack today was an old cartoon from The Onion that showed, ahem, “an image of the Hebrew prophet Moses high-fiving Jesus Christ as both are having their erect penises vigorously masturbated by Ganesha, all while the Hindu deity anally penetrates Buddha with his fist.” (It’s quite the image!) The joke here, of course, is that those religions don’t attack those who show their gods in cartoon form … but that is also what makes the joke, and the image, ultimately sort of toothless. (While certainly inventive.) After all: You didn’t, actually, see Muhammad in that Onion picture. Obviously not. Who wants that heat?
But: If no one is offended, then what is the point? It’s all self-congratulatory faux enlightenment with no conviction behind it. It’s a back pat for “getting it,” without actually risking anything. The offense is the point. The offense is the defense of the way of life. Charlie Hebdo fought for—and its cartoonists and writers and editors and police protectors ultimately died for—the right to piss people off without regard of taste or civilized society or what you or anyone else thought of them. We all stand with them today. But will we stand with them tomorrow? Did Sony Pictures and those theater chains stand with them two weeks ago? Does Comedy Central, and the Met, stand with them now? We live in an open society—free, among other things, to be timid. It is encouraging to see the world embracing Charlie Hebdo’s principles of satire and aggressive engagement with extremists today. But I can’t help but fear this show’s gonna close by Saturday.
By: Will Leitch, Bloomberg Politics, January 7, 2014
“For NYPD, No Defense For The Indefensible”: Support Good Cops, Oppose Bad Ones
This should not even need saying, but obviously, it does. So, for the record:
To oppose police brutality is not to oppose police. No one with a brain stands against police when they do the dangerous and often dirty job of safeguarding life and property. But no one with a conscience should stand for them when they assault or kill some unarmed, unthreatening somebody under color of authority.
Support good cops, oppose bad ones: You’d think that a self-evident imperative. But it turns out some of us are unwilling to make the distinction. For them, the valor of the good cops renders the bad cops immune to criticism.
As you’ve no doubt heard, an unstable man named Ismaaiyl Brinsley went cop hunting in Brooklyn on Dec. 20. He randomly shot to death two police officers, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, in retaliation for the unpunished police killings of two unarmed African-American men in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York.
What followed was tiresomely predictable. Erick Erickson of Fox “News” said President Obama and New York City mayor Bill de Blasio had “all but encouraged retaliation” against police. Rudy Giuliani accused the president and the mayor of putting forth propaganda that “everybody should hate the police.” The National Review Online blamed Obama and de Blasio for creating a “racially charged, rabidly anti-police” atmosphere.
It might be hard to tell from that superheated rhetoric, but the sin they refer to is as follows: Obama and de Blasio called for reform as people vigorously protested the Staten Island and Ferguson killings.
Tempting and easy as it might be to deconstruct all that right-wing drivel, what should truly trouble us is the behavior of the police in the wake of the shooting. Meaning those New York cops who pointedly turned their backs on the mayor as he spoke at Ramos’ and Liu’s funerals. The NYPD has also engaged in a work slowdown — arrests, tickets and summonses down sharply over the last two weeks.
With this temper tantrum, this turning its back on the representative of the people it serves, the NYPD shames itself, shames its profession, and dishonors the memory of its slain men. It also, paradoxically, makes stronger the case for reform.
What other profession behaves this way? Do good lawyers see an attack on bad lawyers as an attack on them all? Are good firefighters threatened by criticism of incompetent ones? Yet this behavior is routine among police — something to keep in mind when we talk reform.
It’s all well and good to say we need body cams, but that’s just a start. As the cases of Rodney King in Los Angeles and Eric Garner in Staten Island make apparent, a visual record is useless if people are unwilling to see what is right in front of them. And yes, there should also be some state-level mechanism for a special prosecutor in cases like these, so we are never again asked to believe impartial justice can be meted out to a given cop by people in the local courthouse who work with him every day.
But the behavior of New York cops, their righteous pique at the idea of being questioned by the people they work for, suggests another needed reform. We must find ways to change police culture so that it becomes easier for cops to police themselves, to name and shame the brutal or trigger-happy incompetents among them.
Yes, that will be much easier said than done: In no other job might your life depend tomorrow on the colleague you stand up against today. But the alternative is this status quo wherein police are effectively above the law they swear to uphold.
Where bad cops cannot be questioned, good cops cannot be trusted — and all cops are undermined.
There’s something else that should not need saying, but does.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, January 7, 2014
“What Donors Want”: They Helped Elect A New Class Of Congress Members; Now What?
When the 114th Congress convenes on Tuesday, lawmakers won’t merely be thinking of the voters who put them in office. They’ll also be mindful of the donors who helped them reach those voters in the first place.
The 2014 midterm elections cost some $3.7 billion, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. That’s a lot of moneyed interests to consider, and sometimes they aren’t pulling lawmakers in the same direction. What’s a senator to do, for example, if the small-government Koch groups see a federal spending plan as too lavish while the U.S. Chamber of Commerce thinks of it as a win for business?
Scott Reed, a top political adviser for the Chamber, had this take on donor expectations: “We don’t expect the candidates we endorsed to line up 100 percent with us, but we’d like to get them in the 80 percent range.”
Here’s a look at what’s on some donor wish lists—and how they intersect and conflict with each other.
The Koch brothers want an authentic spending fight
Billionaire energy executives Charles and David Koch have a network of advocacy groups that sunk at least $150 million into last year’s elections. They want their senators to be soldiers for less government spending.
“What I want these candidates to do is to support a balanced budget,” David Koch told Barbara Walters in an ABC interview in December. “I’m very worried that if the budget is not balanced that inflation could occur and the economy of our country could suffer terribly.”
Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, the most active nonprofit in the Koch alliance, said his group won’t be shy about calling out lawmakers who take their eye off this spending ball. Phillips predicted chafing between deficit hawks like his group and others that might be willing to sacrifice purity if it means getting their preferred projects funded.
The Chamber of Commerce wants the government to invest in infrastructure
That makes the Chamber, which put up $35 million to usher into office more business-minded Republicans, a potential foe to the Kochs’ top objective. The group spent most of its money on primary contests and notched a win rate of 14 out of 15 candidates, Reed said. The goal was to elect Republicans who are “committed to governing,” he said.
“What we did not want,” he said, “are the candidates who say, ‘Let’s get to D.C. so we can shut the damn place down.'”
The Chamber thinks Republicans should be prepared to fund infrastructure, even featuring that message in some of its candidate advertisements last year. “The key ingredients to thriving free enterprise are roads, bridges and tunnels,” Reed said.
Crossroads wants to avoid messy clashes that could ding the GOP image ahead of 2016
The Chamber can probably count on Karl Rove’s powerful Crossroads political groups as an ally. They’re driven far less by ideology than by party politics. That makes sense: Rove was former President George W. Bush’s top strategist, earning the nickname “Bush’s brain.” The Crossroads enterprise spent $100 million on the 2014 races, according to American Crossroads President Steven Law, and wants more than anything to put the party in a good position for the 2016 presidential election.
“Voters expect constructive action, not obstructionism. They want Washington to work and lawmakers to get things done,” Rove wrote in his post-election column in the Wall Street Journal. “Their expectations are low because their distrust of politicians is high. So surprise them. The rewards will be great if the GOP shows it has a governing agenda.”
Translation: Crossroads wants to keep senators from doing politically damaging things that might cost seats or, worse, the presidency in 2016. To that end, Crossroads will spend much of 2015 providing Republican leaders with research to advise them how to broaden the party’s appeal and what kinds of legislation voters would like to see. “There’s an appetite for constructive change, not reflexive opposition,” Law said.
As for any looming fiscal battles, “we strongly support spending restraint,” Law said. “But where we differ with some of the other groups is in tactics.” He said shutting down the government in protest of Obama’s health care law is a prime example of the kind of “colossal failure” he hopes Republican lawmakers will avoid. “You have to think through what you’re going to get for it. We’d be concerned about shutdown gambits that would tarnish the brand.”
Law, like many representatives of the political money groups, will make the rounds on Tuesday, congratulating the new members and attending various parties in their honor. “Everyone we were helpful to has been very kind about letting us know they appreciated our role,” he said.
Sheldon Adelson seeks the death of online gambling
A billionaire casino executive, Adelson wants to stop what he sees as the scourge of online gambling. He argues it’s not about the bottom line for his international gambling empire, but rather it’s an issue of morality because kids can get hooked on betting. Three states have already legalized online gambling, but Congress could step in with a federal ban. That’s what Adelson has pushed for through a Washington advocacy group he started in 2014.
Although some have argued that it’s too late for action, Adelson isn’t just anyone—he’s a megadonor. In addition to pumping more than $90 million into the 2012 presidential election, he spent $5 million last year to elect Republican House members. Politico reports he may have funneled tens of millions more through nonprofit groups that don’t disclose their donors.
Coal Country wants a return to power
The coal industry demonstrated last year that it can still fuel election turnout. Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used a pro-coal message to pad his win in Kentucky. More than one-third of McConnell’s TV ads in his race against Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes invoked his pro-coal stance, and voter turnout showed the message hit home: He improved his vote totals throughout the state’s coal counties.
The pro-coal theme also played well in West Virginia, where Republican Shelley Moore Capito defeated a Democratic opponent. The American Chemistry Council, American Energy Alliance and United Mine Workers of America Power PAC all weighed in with campaign money and election-time advertising. They’ll be after lawmakers to push back on President Barack Obama’s new regulations limiting smog, which were seen as a direct hit on the coal industry.
Black pastors bought themselves an unlikely friend
Weighing in at just $183,340 in contributions, All Citizens for Mississippi certainly wasn’t the election cycle’s biggest super-PAC. But it packed an important punch. The group worked to motivate African Americans to head to the polls in support of Republican Senator Thad Cochran, who was facing a surprisingly tough primary challenge from the right. The super-PAC, led by a black minister, put out radio ads warning that Cochran opponent Chris McDaniel would be bad for race relations.
Bishop Ronnie Crudup of the New Horizon Church International, who started the super-PAC, said its work on behalf of Cochran erased any doubt about the importance of Mississippi’s African American voters. Crudup said he’s had post-election conversations with Cochran. “The senator knows that African Americans stepped up for him, and I can’t put words in his mouth, but he has made good, affirmative statements that he appreciates the support.”
On Crudup’s wish list: better funding for historically black colleges and universities, policies that bring jobs to Mississippi and federal funding for workforce development. And there’s the issue of Obamacare. Crudup said he’d be very disappointed if Cochran tries to obliterate what he sees as a law that has been particularly helpful in getting African Americans health insurance coverage. “I think that our senator understands his constituents, black and white, depend on that service,” Crudup said.
By: Julie Bykowicz, Thank You Notes, Bloomberg Politics, January 5, 2015
“When A Hobby Verges Upon Obsession”: Veronica Rutledge And America’s Gun Cult
That Idaho mother shot to death by her two-year-old son in a Walmart store? Judging by Veronica Jean Rutledge’s biography, you can be just about certain that she’d driven to the store wearing a seatbelt, with her little boy buckled carefully into his car seat.
By all accounts, Rutledge, age 29, was that kind of mother: loving, diligent and careful — an entirely admirable young woman. In the aftermath of the tragedy, photos of her shining face are almost unbearable to contemplate.
A high-school valedictorian, Rutledge graduated from the University of Idaho with a degree in chemistry. She was a promising research scientist at Batelle’s Idaho National Laboratory, working on reducing the toxicity of nuclear waste.
It would appear to follow that her child’s home environment was carefully childproofed, with household poisons stored safely away and dangerous objects placed out of reach. Rutledge probably would never have dreamed of letting her son play outside unsupervised, nor left him alone in the bathtub.
And yet she carried a loaded semi-automatic handgun in her purse on a post-Christmas shopping trip and left it unattended in a shopping cart, where the child took it out and somehow pulled the trigger.
Rutledge died instantly there in the electronics aisle.
Very likely her son is too young to understand or remember what happened, although it will shadow his life forever.
In the immediate aftermath, Terry Rutledge, Veronica’s father-in-law, gave an ill-advised interview to a Washington Post reporter expressing anger that anybody would use the tragedy “as an excuse to grandstand on gun rights,” as the article put it.
“They are painting Veronica as irresponsible, and that is not the case,” he said. “… I brought my son up around guns, and he has extensive experience shooting it. And Veronica had had handgun classes; they’re both licensed to carry, and this wasn’t just some purse she had thrown her gun into.”
Oh no, it was a designer item produced by an Illinois firm called Gun Tote’n Mamas with a zipped compartment for carrying a concealed handgun — given to her as a Christmas present from her husband.
Nevertheless, Rutledge made an incomprehensible blunder, and it cost her life. The blunder, as I see it, of carrying a loaded handgun — with a chambered round, no less — as a kind of fashion accessory, a totemic item signifying her cultural identity.
Her close friend Sheri Sandow explained that for all her academic accomplishments, Rutledge was “as comfortable at a campground or a gun range as she was in a classroom.”
OK, fine… but why Walmart? Not because she was fearful, Sandow explained.
“In Idaho, we don’t have to worry about a lot of crime and things like that,” she said. “And to see someone with a gun isn’t bizarre. [Veronica] wasn’t carrying a gun because she felt unsafe. She was carrying a gun because she was raised around guns. This was just a horrible accident.”
Indeed, she needn’t have felt unsafe. The most recent homicide in Blackfoot, Idaho, where the family lived, was six years ago.
The scientist in Veronica Rutledge, had she allowed herself to think about it rationally, would have understood that the pistol in her purse was far more dangerous to her and her child than any external threat. As an NRA adept and a big fan of the Guns.com website, however, she evidently become so habituated to carrying a gun around that she quite forgot she had it.
By itself, there’s nothing inherently objectionable about target shooting, a harmless pastime like bowling or golf. I own a target pistol myself, and take it out sometimes to plink aluminum cans. I also own shotguns, although I no longer hunt.
But when a hobby verges upon obsession, you’re talking about cultlike behavior. Spend a few minutes browsing around Guns.com and maybe you’ll see what I mean. Current features include Kid Rock’s gun collection, and the effects of shooting a giant Gummi Bear with a 12 gauge.
Cool!
In a recent New Yorker article, Adam Gopnik explained the political psychology of guns. The great majority of Americans agree that there should be sensible limitations on the possession and use of tools whose function is killing, “while a small minority feels, with a fanatic passion, that there shouldn’t. In a process familiar to any student of society, the majority of people in favor of gun sanity care about a lot of other things, too, and think about them far more often; the gun crazy think about guns all the time, and vote on the issue with fanatic intensity.”
Hence handguns as costume jewelry, totems signifying one’s membership in the NRA tribe. Terry Rutledge, however, can rest easy. If the 2012 Newtown, CT massacre failed to bring reform, his daughter-in-law’s death won’t change anything significant.
Except possibly the behavior of anybody tempted to pack heat around little children.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, January 7, 2014
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