“Playing The Fools Against The Marks”: Why Fox News Finally Dumped Dick Morris
I suppose I should have weighed in on this already, given that it’s been an entire day, but in case you were wondering, here’s what I think about Fox News’ decision to finally give Dick Morris the boot. Erik Wemple probably spoke for many people when he said, “this is a time to celebrate Fox News. It has seen the lunacy of Dick Morris, and it’s taking the appropriate step to inoculate itself against the ravages.” This comes fast on the heels of Sarah Palin being shown the door, some post-election house-cleaning that thankfully has left sage contributors like Karl Rove standing.
So what does this show? It doesn’t, alas, indicate that real accountability is coming to the pundit industry. I’ve always thought it’s too simplistic to view Fox News as nothing more than a partisan organization, as many people on the left do. Since he started the network in 1996, Roger Ailes’ genius has lied in a careful melding of business and ideology, in which neither one ever moves too far ahead of the other and each serves the other’s needs. Fox is extremely valuable to the Republican party and the conservative movement, and it’s also a huge money-maker for Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp. Anyone who appears on the channel has to satisfy both strands of that ideological/financial double helix.
And as Morris shows, satisfying the ideological needs of Fox’s viewers is more complicated than just telling them what you think they want to hear. Morris was so laughably wrong in almost everything he said that even many die-hard conservatives no doubt found him to be a buffoon. When he tells you over and over again that there’s no way your side can lose, and then they do, his credibility suffers even with people who want to believe him. But what really did him in, I think, was when it came out in December that he was, in all probability, running a scam on the Fox News viewers whom he implored to contribute to his super PAC to defeat Barack Obama. None of the money went to that cause, instead probably finding its way back into Morris’s pocket. It’s one thing to treat Fox viewers like fools—most of the network’s personalities do that every day. But it’s quite another to treat them like marks. If you do it as blatantly as Morris did, the entire brand is threatened.
In the end, it became too obvious that Dick Morris wasn’t working for the betterment of the conservative movement, or the Republican party, or Fox News. He was working for the betterment of Dick Morris. Once that became all too obvious, I’m sure Ailes had no qualms about showing him the door. After all, there’s plenty more where he came from.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 6, 2013
“A Programming And Political Failure”: Sarah Palin, Fox News And The End Of An Era
Wasn’t it fitting that Sarah Palin’s exit from Fox News was made official the same week President Obama celebrated his second inauguration? Didn’t it just seem apt that the once-future star of Fox News and the Tea Party movement lost her national media platform just days after the president she tried to demonize for four years basked in the glow of his easy reelection victory?
Palin’s breakup with Fox was expected, but it’s still significant. A “milestone,” is how former Bush speechwriter David Frum put it.
The move represents the end of a brief, ill-conceived era within the conservative media movement, and specifically at Fox, where in the wake of Obama’s first White House win Palin, along with preposterous cohort Glenn Beck, was irresponsibly tapped to become a high-priced pundit who trafficked in hate.
At Fox, Palin represented a particularly angry and juvenile wing of the conservative movement. It’s the part that appears deeply obsessed with Obama as a person; an unhealthy obsession that seemed to surpass any interest in his policies. With lazy name-calling as her weapon of choice, Palin served as Fox News’ point person for misguided snark and sophomoric put-downs. Palin also epitomized the uber-aggressive anti-intellectual push that coincided with Obama’s swearing in four years ago.
And for a while, it looked like the push might work. In 2010, it seemed like Palin and Beck might just succeed in helping Fox change the face of American politics with their signature calling cards of continuous conspiracies (Beck) and perpetual victimization (Palin).
But it never happened.
In the wake of Beck’s cable TV departure in 2011, Obama’s reelection win in 2012, and now Palin’s farewell from Fox last week, it’s obvious the blueprint drawn up by Fox chief Roger Ailes was a programming and political failure. Yes, the name-calling and conspiratorial chatter remains at Fox, but it’s no longer delivered by Palin who was going to be the star some loyalist thought the channel could ride all the way to the White House.
Let’s also note that Fox’s Palin era was marked by how the Beltway press often did everything in its power to prop her up as a “star” reaching new heights, when with each passing month Palin’s standing with the public seemed to register new lows.
Belying claims of liberal bias, the political press seemed desperate for Palin to succeed and to become a lasting presence in American politics; a permanent TV foil during the Obama era. Can you think of another time when the press so enthusiastically heralded the losing vice presidential candidate as a political and media “phenomena”?
— ABC’s The Note: “There is precisely one superstar in the Republican Party.”
—Time’s Mark Halperin: Palin’s “operating on a different plane, hovering higher than a mere celebrity, more buoyant than an average politician.”
—Washington Post’s David Broder: “A public figure at the top of her game.”
Wrong, wrong and wrong.
Whatever success and momentum Palin enjoyed on Fox in terms of influencing the national conversation (i.e. “death panels”), it slowed in January 2011. That’s when, responding to an Arizona shopping center shooting spree that nearly claimed the life of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Palin cast herself as a victim, and condemned the press for manufacturing a “blood libel.” (Palin appeared to not understand that historically, “blood libel” relates to the anti-Semitic charge that Jews murder children and use their blood for religious rituals.)
The Beltway press seemed truly aghast by Palin’s performance. And so did Roger Ailes. When Palin bowed out of the 2012 presidential race and did so on a right-wing talk show instead of on Fox, thereby robbing the channel of the spotlight, her star seemed to fade precipitously, to the point where her views and commentary were irrelevant to last year’s presidential campaign.
Meanwhile, Palin’s departure is also significant because it comes at a time when Fox is still reeling from Obama’s reelection. (A reelection Palin was supposed to help derail.) Where the channel spent the previous four years with a laser-like focus rallying right-wing believers in an effort to drive Obama from the White House, while simultaneously, we were told, saving liberty and countless freedoms, Fox today seems utterly lost knowing it won’t ever defeat Obama at the polls.
Clinging ever tighter to the gears on its phony outrage machine, Fox talkers take turns taking umbrage. Last week’s relentless sobbing over Obama’s inauguration speech (too partisan!) was a perfect example of how the channel can’t stop lashing out at imaginary slights.
Writing for Esquire‘s website, Tom Junod noticed the same pervasive sense of bewilderment. A student of Fox who wrote a lengthy profile of Ailes two years ago, Junod labeled the Fox incarnation on display early in Obama’s second term to be a “freak show” wallowing in defeat and an over-sized “sense of injury”:
The question, of course, is whether [Ailes] knows what anyone else in the United States might like, or whether his network, even as it holds its captive audience, will descend further into political irrelevance. For all his instinctive showmanship, and for all his purported populist genius, Ailes saw Obama cobble together his new majority right under his nose, and knew neither what to call it or how to stop it.
In other words, Fox News got steamrolled by Obama’s reelection. Palin’s departure from the Fox payroll serves as a useful exclamation point to that fact.
By: Eric Boehlert, The Huffington Post, January 28, 2013
“Makers, Takers, Fakers”: A Major Rhetorial Shift For The Party Of Sneering Plutocrats
Republicans have a problem. For years they could shout down any attempt to point out the extent to which their policies favored the elite over the poor and the middle class; all they had to do was yell “Class warfare!” and Democrats scurried away. In the 2012 election, however, that didn’t work: the picture of the G.O.P. as the party of sneering plutocrats stuck, even as Democrats became more openly populist than they have been in decades.
As a result, prominent Republicans have begun acknowledging that their party needs to improve its image. But here’s the thing: Their proposals for a makeover all involve changing the sales pitch rather than the product. When it comes to substance, the G.O.P. is more committed than ever to policies that take from most Americans and give to a wealthy handful.
Consider, as a case in point, how a widely reported recent speech by Bobby Jindal the governor of Louisiana, compares with his actual policies.
Mr. Jindal posed the problem in a way that would, I believe, have been unthinkable for a leading Republican even a year ago. “We must not,” he declared, “be the party that simply protects the well off so they can keep their toys. We have to be the party that shows all Americans how they can thrive.” After a campaign in which Mitt Romney denounced any attempt to talk about class divisions as an “attack on success,” this represents a major rhetorical shift.
But Mr. Jindal didn’t offer any suggestions about how Republicans might demonstrate that they aren’t just about letting the rich keep their toys, other than claiming even more loudly that their policies are good for everyone.
Meanwhile, back in Louisiana Mr. Jindal is pushing a plan to eliminate the state’s income tax, which falls most heavily on the affluent, and make up for the lost revenue by raising sales taxes, which fall much more heavily on the poor and the middle class. The result would be big gains for the top 1 percent, substantial losses for the bottom 60 percent. Similar plans are being pushed by a number of other Republican governors as well.
Like the new acknowledgment that the perception of being the party of the rich is a problem, this represents a departure for the G.O.P. — but in the opposite direction. In the past, Republicans would justify tax cuts for the rich either by claiming that they would pay for themselves or by claiming that they could make up for lost revenue by cutting wasteful spending. But what we’re seeing now is open, explicit reverse Robin Hoodism: taking from ordinary families and giving to the rich. That is, even as Republicans look for a way to sound more sympathetic and less extreme, their actual policies are taking another sharp right turn.
Why is this happening? In particular, why is it happening now, just after an election in which the G.O.P. paid a price for its anti-populist stand?
Well, I don’t have a full answer, but I think it’s important to understand the extent to which leading Republicans live in an intellectual bubble. They get their news from Fox and other captive media, they get their policy analysis from billionaire-financed right-wing think tanks, and they’re often blissfully unaware both of contrary evidence and of how their positions sound to outsiders.
So when Mr. Romney made his infamous “47 percent” remarks, he wasn’t, in his own mind, saying anything outrageous or even controversial. He was just repeating a view that has become increasingly dominant inside the right-wing bubble, namely that a large and ever-growing proportion of Americans won’t take responsibility for their own lives and are mooching off the hard-working wealthy. Rising unemployment claims demonstrate laziness, not lack of jobs; rising disability claims represent malingering, not the real health problems of an aging work force.
And given that worldview, Republicans see it as entirely appropriate to cut taxes on the rich while making everyone else pay more.
Now, national politicians learned last year that this kind of talk plays badly with the public, so they’re trying to obscure their positions. Paul Ryan, for example, has lately made a transparently dishonest attempt to claim that when he spoke about “takers” living off the efforts of the “makers” — at one point he assigned 60 percent of Americans to the taker category — he wasn’t talking about people receiving Social Security and Medicare. (He was.)
But in deep red states like Louisiana or Kansas, Republicans are much freer to act on their beliefs — which means moving strongly to comfort the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted.
Which brings me back to Mr. Jindal, who declared in his speech that “we are a populist party.” No, you aren’t. You’re a party that holds a large proportion of Americans in contempt. And the public may have figured that out.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 27, 2013
“The Republican Pity Party”: They Gave It Their All And Came Up Empty
Conservative behavior since President Obama’s reelection in November has evoked, at least in me, a keen sense of sadness. Hardly a day goes by without weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth by the likes of Rush Limbaugh on talk radio and Sean Hannity on Fox News over Obama’s return to the White House. Similar whining is heard among Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Simply put, conservatives are in agony over the president’s smashing victory. Their pain is hard to watch. Only small-minded Democrats would gloat.
What we’re seeing is the impact of losing when you believed with all your heart, soul and mind, buttressed by the predictions of pollsters and pundits, that you would win handily.
The reaction is, for me, heart-rending.
Consider the feeble attempt by House Republicans to recover political ground by threatening Obama over the debt limit.
The poor things, crazed by their defeat, didn’t realize that they had no leverage. They had to back down with a face-saving gimmick to suspend through May enforcement of the limit on federal borrowing.
Consider some Republicans’ return to the issue of what happened in Benghazi, Libya. Did they really think that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would traipse up to the Hill this week, prostrate herself before Congress and confess to something that she knew wasn’t true?
They so wanted her to say that there was mendacity and attempts by the administration to cover up malfeasance in the Sept. 11 attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility. Some seemed truly distressed that Clinton wouldn’t give them what they wanted. They were so desperate. It was so sad.
And so it has gone since election night. The lamentations abound:
●Obama’s nominations of Jack Lew as Treasury secretary and Chuck Hagel as defense secretary are confrontational; woe unto us.
●“I would have liked to have seen some outreach” in Obama’s inaugural address, complained Sen. John McCain, who, with his Republican cohorts, did everything they could to kick Barack Obama out of the White House.
●The Obama administration will “attempt to annihilate the Republican Party . . . to just shove us into the dustbin of history,” House Speaker John Boehner wailed this week.
And so it goes: one big conservative pity party.
Imagine how hard it must have been to lose.
For four long years they hit Obama with everything they had, assailing him at every turn. No insult was too offensive to be hurled; no abuse too outrageous to be tried; no name too abusive to call.
From Day One, destruction of the Obama administration and preventing his reelection was top priority; the second item too far down the list to remember.
Four years of blame, blame, blame. Blah, blah, blah.
Conservatives on Capitol Hill and right-wing commentators left nothing on the field.
They gave it their all — and came up empty.
What an emotional letdown. How not to feel at least a little sorry for them?
So where do they go from here?
This should be a time for introspection, for conservatives to examine their thoughts and look inside for answers as to why they lost when, at first blush, they had so much going for them. And why were they so dead set on not just defeating but breaking this president?
Hard-liners, of course, will take exception to my characterization of their behavior. What I might call abusive or mean they would probably describe as passionate: their passionate defense of liberty, the Constitution, smaller government, free enterprise and the individual — all things they see Obama as opposing.
The conservative wing regards itself as all that stands between freedom and tyranny, between order and chaos, between values and licentiousness.
And perhaps that self-view explains why they are taking their loss so hard.
It also may help explain why their conduct is so, well, touching.
Conservatives yakking it up in House and Senate chambers and on the airwaves these days are delusional, in much the way that the South deluded itself into thinking it was in the right during the Civil War or that Republicans held fast to the misguided belief that the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was wrong for the country.
American principles endure. But America is changing, just as it evolved during the Lincoln era and just as it emerged from the Great Depression under FDR’s leadership.
What makes this so excruciatingly sad is that some forces on the right are too far gone to see the truth.
By: Colbert I. King, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 25, 2013
“Another Right Wing Freakout”: Sorry Rush, Gun Violence Is A Health Care Issue
How illogical has the right-wing media ‘debate’ about gun control become this week in the wake of President Obama moving forward on a host of violence prevention measures?
So illogical that conservative media voices expressed outrage, while spreading constant misinformation, about the role doctors might play in addressing gun violence in America. The right-wing Noise Machine cranked up the indignation because the Obama administration wants to make sure health care professional are allowed to communicate with their patients about guns and gun safety.
In other words, the right-wing Noise Machine is furious that the White House is treating gun violence, in part, as a health care issue when it so transparently is one.
Fact: The United States’ life expectancy rate is far lower than most other affluent countries, in part because of our rate of gun violence far outpaces those other countries.
Meanwhile, taxpayers here spend billions each year paying health care costs to treat gunshot victims, the strong majority of whom, research indicates, are uninsured. Taxpayers spend even more money covering societal costs, such as long-term psychological problems, disability, and the loss of productivity suffered by approximately 70,000 Americans who suffer non-fatal gun shot wounds annually.
Following the school gun massacre in Newtown, Conn. last month, Bloomberg News reported:
The cost of U.S. gun violence in work lost, medical care, insurance, criminal-justice expenses and pain and suffering amounted to as much as $174 billion in 2010, according to data compiled by the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation in Calverton, Maryland.
That averages out to more than $644 in costs for every gun owned in America. As economist Ted Miller, the Institute’s principal research scientist, told Bloomberg, “Gun ownership is like smoking, an expensive and dangerous habit.”
So yes, gun violence is America represents an epic and costly health care problem, which is why it makes sense to include health care providers in any comprehensive attempt to combat the crisis. (On Wednesday, the White House announced the administration would “issue guidance clarifying that the Affordable Care Act does not ban doctors from asking patients “about firearms in their patients’ homes and safe storage of those firearms.”)
As the Firearm & Injury Center at the University of Pennsylvania has concluded, “Healthcare providers have a vital role in preventing intentional and unintentional firearm injuries and their impact on patients, families and communities.” And that’s why the group Doctors for America applauded Obama’s gun violence imitative this week.
Meanwhile, the far-right allegation that Obama now requires physicians to press patients about gun use represents a complete fabrication. So was Rush Limbaugh’s claim that Obama’s trying to turn doctors into “snitches,” and Lou Dobbs’ fearmongering about the president turning doctors into “an agent of the federal government.”
The right-wing freak-out is built around the fake premise of, how dare Obama recruit doctors to fight his war on gun violence. (Drudge Report headline: “War on Crazy: Obama Deputizes Doctors”) That may be a conservative attempt to keep the gun debate focused on the issue of gun rights and the Second Amendment and away from the catastrophic, real-life costs that gun violence registers each year.
However, the right-wing media’s baseless assertion ignores the obvious fact that the health care industry in this country — doctors, hospitals, emergency rooms, mental health centers -remains inundated with gunshot wounds daily and deals with the life-changing crisis all the time. (Nearly 300 people are shot everyday in America.) Doctors don’t have to go snooping around acting as “snitches” in order to find the problem.
And the financial costs of those gunshots wounds is rising; improved trauma care means hospitals now save more gunshot victims, which in turn adds to larger, long-term health care and rehabilitation costs.
A 2005 study of hospital charges for firearm injuries in Pennsylvania found that the average charge for inpatient hospitalization due to firearm injuries was $30,814. That figure was more than double what gunshot injuries cost hospitals between 1996-1998.
An in-depth investigation on gunshot violence by the Milwaukee Journal in 2006 reported that the average bill for a shooting patient treated at the city’s Froedtert Hospital was $38,000. For gunshot victims who suffered spinal damage, the bill regularly reached six figures.
Truth is, any attempt to reduce gun violence in America must include a health care strategy, no matter how much whining Fox News and Rush Limbaugh do about it.
By: Eric Boehlert, The Huffington Post, January 18, 2013
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