“About Those Real Problems”:The Odd Republican Preoccupation With White House Tours
Someone’s going to have to explain this one to me.
Fox News Host Eric Bolling on Thursday offered to pay for one week’s worth of White House tours after the administration temporarily suspended them due to cutbacks under sequestration. “If I can get the White House doors open, I will pick up the tab,” Bolling said on the Fox show “The Five.”
Soon after, Fox News’ Sean Hannity offered to also “pay for a week” of White House tours out of his own pocket.
If this seems familiar, it’s because the offers come on the heels of Republican outrage over the decision to scrap White House tours as a consequence of sequestration budget cuts. Apparently, the president and his team had a choice: cancel the tours or start Secret Service furloughs. They chose the former.
And the right apparently can’t stop talking about it, to the point that Fox personalities want to open their wallets to keep the tours going. By some accounts, Fox News has been more than a little preoccupied with the issue.
There may be some deeper symbolic meeting that eludes me — if there is, I’m all ears — or perhaps conservatives are vastly more attached to White House tours than I ever realized. Either way, I can’t help but wonder about the right’s priorities.
Jed Lewison noted today, for example, that the Army was forced to suspend a tuition-assistance program as a result of the sequester, but Bolling and Hannity aren’t offering to pick up the tab on this one.
Of all things for Republicans to be going nuts about, losing the White House tours is the last one. Sequestration is causing real harm to real people, whether it’s unemployed workers, children and mothers who need Head Start, or soldiers looking to enroll in the Army’s tuition assistance program.
They could make all these problems go away — including the loss of their precious tours — with the blink of an eye. All they have to do is repeal sequestration. If they just repealed the damn thing, they wouldn’t even have to raise taxes.
And if they want an equivalent amount of deficit reduction, they can get that too by replacing sequester with a combination of revenue and spending cuts. As President Obama has said more times than anybody cares to remember, his offer is still on the table. Republicans are the ones saying no, and even if White House tours are the only thing that pisses them off, they still have the option of doing something about it.
I have to admit, watching news events unfold, it’s sometimes easy to find myself saying, “Well, I bet Fox will have a field day with this one.”
But White House tours? When sequestration is causing real hardship on real people? I’m at a bit of a loss on this one.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 8, 2013
“Mike Huckabee Just Keeps Digging”: Pushing A Bogus Culture War In The Wake Of A National Tragedy
On Friday afternoon, while details of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School were still coming to light, Mike Huckabee appeared on Fox News to complain about school prayer. “We ask why there is violence in our schools but we have systematically removed God from our schools,” he said.
Upon further inspection, Huckabee’s unfortunate comments didn’t make any sense. But instead of backing off, the former Arkansas governor and failed presidential candidate managed to make matters slightly worse over the weekend.
Reflecting on Friday’s murders, the Fox News personality argued:
“Christian-owned businesses are told to surrender their values under the edict of government orders to provide tax-funded abortion pills. We carefully and intentionally stop saying things are sinful and we call them disorders. Sometimes, we even say they’re normal.
“And to get to where that we have to abandon bedrock moral truths, then we ask, ‘Well, where was God?’ And I respond that, as I see it, we’ve escorted Him right out of our culture and we’ve marched Him off the public square and then we express our surprise that a culture without Him actually reflects what it’s become.”
So long as Huckabee is going to keep spewing rhetoric like this, we might as well take the time to explain how foolish it is.
First, the government is not forcing businesses to provide “tax-funded abortion pills.” As Zack Beauchamp explained, “The Obamacare contraception mandate, which is what Huckabee is likely referring to, does not provide coverage for any abortifacients — and will actually help reduce abortion rates.”
Second, the notion that the United States has a godless culture and a public square devoid of religiosity makes me wonder what country Mike Huckabee lives in. As best as I can tell, in America’s public square, we have religious television stations, religious radio stations, religious athletes who pray on the field, religious entertainers who thank God at award ceremonies, religious public officials who emphasize their faith when seeking public office, religious book stores, religious holidays, religious movements, religious references on our currency, and pastors who get their own television shows on cable news networks.
And third, to reiterate a point from the weekend, the fact that Huckabee continues to want to push a bogus culture war in the wake of a national tragedy suggests he just isn’t an especially nice guy.
For a guy with a jovial reputation, there’s something rather disturbing about Mike Huckabee’s worldview. Remember, it was earlier this year when he said he wanted to see President Obama’s college transcripts “to show whether he got any loans as a foreign student.”
Last year, Huckabee falsely claimed President Obama “grew up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather.” Soon after, he endorsed “death panel” garbage. By the early summer, Huckabee was equating the national debt with the Nazi Holocaust.
In August 2009, Huckabee argued on his own radio show that Obama’s health care reform plan would have forced Ted Kennedy to commit suicide. Ed Kilgore argued at the time, “This despicable rant should disqualify Mike Huckabee from any further liberal sympathy, no matter how much he tries to joke or rock-n-roll his way back into mainstream acceptability.”
That’s as true now as it was then.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, December 17, 2012
“Unbridled Hypocisy”: Laura Ingraham Has the World’s Worst Imagination
Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham is outraged — outraaaged! — that President Obama met with some MSNBC anchors at the White House on Tuesday, according to her daily newsletter:
“Rachel Maddow, Al Sharpton, Lawrence O’Donnell, and Ed Schultz all stopped by the White House to discuss the President’s fiscal cliff proposal. Can anyone even imagine how the press would have reacted if Fox News hosts and conservative personalities had stopped by the Bush White House to discuss policy? They would have been rightly outraged.”
Yes, let’s all put on our imagination hats and try as hard as we can to imagine what that meeting would look like. George W. Bush would be seated in an Oval Office chair, doing jazz hands in front of a bust of Winston Churchill. On his left, Fox News host Sean Hannity would be pensively smelling his hand on a couch with conservative personality Michael Medved. On his right, conservative personalities Neil Boortz and Mike Gallagher would be sharing another couch. And, just for imagination’s sake, let’s put conservative personality Laura Ingraham in there, too, right next to the president. Now, obviously, such a scene never actually transpired, but — wait, what? Oh. It did.
After Media Matters revealed Ingraham’s hypocrisy to the world, a producer responded with the classic “Ingraham didn’t actually write the newsletter, and also, the two things are totally different because I said so” defense.
During Laura’s brief radio hiatus, the Daily Fix is written by staff. Although I didn’t know Laura had visited the Bush White House with other conservative radio hosts, the circumstances of her meeting the president were quite different. Laura did not go to the White House to advise the president, but was simply briefed on policy for perhaps an hour.
For what it’s worth, the MSNBC hosts didn’t “advise” Obama. They were, uh, briefed on policy:
“This afternoon at the White House, the President met with influential progressives to talk about the importance of preventing a tax increase on middle class families, strengthening our economy and adopting a balanced approach to deficit reduction,” Earnest said in a statement Tuesday.
As embarrassing as this whole episode is for Team Ingraham, they’re not the only ones who should have done a little research before going into full fauxtrage mode about the MSNBC meeting. Take the hosts of Fox & Friends (please!), for example, who overreacted in typical fashion. “I’m shocked by that,” Brian Kilmeade said. “To invite five talk show hosts in, all from the same channel? That’s outrageous.” Mike Huckabee, who has a show on Fox News, claimed yesterday that the sit-down with Obama destroyed any “illusion whatsoever that there’s objectivity going on at MSNBC.”
By: Dan Amira, Daily Intel, December 6, 2012
“Much Like Sarah Palin”: Why Mitt Romney Only Does Fox News Interviews
The only Sunday morning talk show Mitt Romney has appeared on this election season is Fox News Sunday, and the other networks are annoyed that the Republican presidential candidate is ignoring their invitations. “I know he does Fox,” Bob Schieffer said to senior Romney adviser Ed Gillespie on CBS’s Face the Nation this weekend, “but we’d love to have him some time, as would Meet the Press and the ABC folk, I would guess.” Gillespie replied: “We’re going to take our message to the American people. You saw him talking to schoolchildren last week.” And it’s not just the Sunday shows Romney is avoiding. Aside from two sit-downs alongside his wife, Ann — on CBS and ABC — and appearances on CNBC and CNN, Romney has only talked with Fox News since securing the GOP nod nearly two months ago. Why is Romney sticking with the “fair and balanced” network? Here, five theories:
1. He only wants softball questions
Romney is following the lead of other conservative Republicans, says Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice, “using Fox News as a way to avoid having to answer those pesky, non–public relations, non-softball questions and follow-up questions that he’d get on CBS, NBC, ABC.” Much like Sarah Palin, he has “had a hard time in other interviews beyond Fox,” says Ron Chusid at Liberal Values. Romney doesn’t like to get into specifics on his secret plan for the economy or why his Bain Capital record is an asset, and heaven forbid “clips of his past statements were brought up.”
2. Romney learned his lesson from the primaries
Sticking with Fox is a deliberate strategy by Team Romney “to limit national media exposure this time around,” says Michael Calderone at The Huffington Post. Romney did the Sunday shows and magazine profiles in 2008, and his GOP rivals “made the weekend rounds” this year, and how well did any of that work out? After the contentious primary, Romney has “benefited from learning the importance of hammering home a singular message on safe turf,” says Justin Sink at The Hill.
3. He’s still shoring up his right flank
Team Romney is working hard to strengthen its bridges to the Right, and Fox News is just part of that strategy, says Calderone at The Huffington Post. Along with his two appearances on Fox News Sunday, the former Massachusetts governor recently held an off-the-record meeting with “dozens of conservative columnists, reporters, and bloggers,” followed by interviews last week with two of the sites represented at the meeting, Hot Air and Townhall. One attendee at the private sit-down said Romney’s message to conservatives is “we want you on our side and working with the campaign.”
4. He has no reason not to stick with Fox
Appearing on Fox News gives Romney a lot of advantages, says The Moderate Voice‘s Gandelman. Like other Republican candidates, he is almost guaranteed as much air time as he wants, “where the candidate can regurgitate talking points” in front of huge amounts of right-leaning voters. Plus, if he makes a verbal misstep, “more likely than not his interviewer would gloss over the gaffe, try to discreetly explain it away, and re-ask the question.” It’s smart PR, and today, unlike a decade ago, “Romney can get away with it.”
5. He’s getting bad advice
Can you really “run for the presidency more or less exclusively through Fox News?” says Richard K. Barry at Lippmann’s Ghost. Maybe: After all, the only people who really pay attention to public affairs programs are political junkies and reporters. But “I think it is foolish to try.” Not only is it risky to alienate reporters who help shape the campaign narrative, but I doubt ignoring the press “plays well with the mainstream of the country, the kind of people you need to vote for you outside your conservative base if you hope to win the presidency.”
By: The Week, Best Opinion, May 29, 2012
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