“Competing Voices”: Did Rupert Murdoch Throw Fox News Under the Bus?
Rupert Murdoch veered off script this week with some tweets that ran completely counter to the Fox News spin this campaign season. In fact, they undercut the entire political premise at Fox, which is to attack Democrats without question, and to force Republican politicians to champion a truly right-wing agenda. Is there a rift brewing?
It’s true Murdoch has a history of taking stances on issues such as global warming and immigration that are diametrically opposed to the propaganda programming Fox airs. So perhaps this is another example of that.
And some observers might say Murdoch’s candid comments suggest competing voices are welcome within News Corp. I think that’s unlikely though, at least within Roger Ailes’ Fox world where you’re either on the team or off. Remember that in 2008, angry that Murdoch might use his New York Post to endorse Obama after Fox had tagged him a terrorist sympathizer, Ailes reportedly “threw a fit” and threatened to quit. (Murdoch’s Post endorsed McCain instead.)
Did Murdoch’s curious tweets cause similar consternation?
Note this one:
Election: To win Romney must open big tent to sympathetic families. Stop fearing far right which has nowhere else to go. Otherwise no hope.
Murdoch stresses Romney has “no hope” of winning in November if he keeps kowtowing (my word) to the “far right.” Instead, he has to embrace the “big tent.”
Where to begin in describing the lack of self-awareness in that statement? Or is it just shocking hypocrisy in play?
Murdoch owns Fox News, the epicenter of the “far right” in America, and Fox News has been relentlessly urging Republican candidates to wage right-wing battles against Obama. But seven weeks before Election Day, Murdoch now thinks Romney should stop trying to impress the “far right”? He should stop trying to appeal to the Fox News audience?
Urging a “big tent” appeal, Murdoch actually sounds like the Republican strategists who try to win elections for a living (instead of winning cable ratings races) who fretted that the vice presidential selection of Paul Ryan would doom the Romney campaign because of the “extremely unpopular” policies Ryan advocates.
The irony is Murdoch (and Fox News) was among those who all but demanded Ryan be the VP pick, and who then loudly cheered his selection. The pivotal Ryan pick was a perfect example of Romney catering to the “far right” in a way that Murdoch now says is counter productive to the candidate.
Also, it’s a bit baffling the way Murdoch dismissively refers to the “far right,” as if he’s not the most important broadcaster within the “far right,” and as if Fox isn’t the “far right” sun around which the conservative movement orbits every day. There’s a reason New York magazine labeled Ailes “the head of the Republican Party.” And there’s a reason a GOP source told the magazine “You can’t run for the Republican nomination without talking to Roger. Every single candidate has consulted with Roger.”
And note to Rupert: The Republican Party, at the urging of Fox News, eagerly folded its “big tent” years ago.
Here’s another Murdoch tweet from this week that likely produced bewildered looks inside the Fox News green room:
Retrospect; Conventions mixed but net big win for democrats. Michelle O and Clinton the big stars. Bill brilliant, Hillary away until 016.
The proclamation from the Fox News owner that the DNC was a hit last week, and that “big star” Bill Clinton was “brilliant,” must have come as a surprise to Fox talkers who spent last week denigrating the convention and bemoaning Clinton’s flat, “self-indulgent” speech.
In fact, Fox tried for days to deflate the convention by lying about its television ratings, misleading about what Obama said in his acceptance speech, and in general just endlessly bemoaning its very existence. (Fox was simply part of the larger right-wing media crackup over the convention.)
Turns out though, Murdoch thought the whole thing was a “big win for Democrats.”
I don’t know what Murdoch’s long-view strategy is, but in the short-term, by touting the success of the Democratic convention and downplaying the political importance of the “far right,” it sure looks like he’s throwing Fox News under the bus.
By: Eric Boehlert, Media Matters, September 13, 2012
“He Who Has No Name”: At News Conference, Republicans Made No Reference To Party Standard-Bearer Mitt Romney
Republican leaders had all kinds of things to talk about in their first day back on Capitol Hill from their month-long recess.
They spoke about jobs and the economy, about military spending and automatic budget cuts, about the national debt and the need for energy legislation.
But there was one thing House Republican leaders did not mention in their statements to the cameras after Tuesday morning’s caucus: Mitt Romney.
They uttered 1,350 words in their opening remarks at the news conference but made no reference to the party standard-bearer who would be at the top of their ticket in just 56 days.
NBC’s Luke Russert tried to help the lawmakers address this omission. “Governor Romney said that it was a bad decision for Republicans to agree to the bipartisan debt deal,” he pointed out. “What’s your response to him?”
House Speaker John Boehner, who negotiated the deal, looked unwell.
“I don’t think there’s anybody that worked harder than Eric and I to try to work with the president to come to an agreement,” he said, with Majority Leader Eric Cantor standing just behind him. Boehner tried to pin the agreement’s automatic cuts in defense spending on President Obama, but he ultimately defended the package: “Somehow, we have to deal with our spending problem.”
That Romney would go on “Meet the Press” and say that last year’s bipartisan spending deal was a “mistake”— never mind thatRomney had applauded Boehner for negotiating the deal at the time — made clear that the GOP nominee does not wish to run on the record of congressional Republicans.
That House Republicans would not so much as breathe Romney’s name makes clear the sentiment is mutual.
The seven leaders at the microphone didn’t mention Romney even when asked about him — as though he is some sort of political Voldemort. Instead, they kept contrasting House Republicans’ record on jobs bills with those of Senate Democrats and the White House while leaving Romney out of it.
For good measure, the Republican lawmakers also praised a bill that would remove trade restrictions on Russia, a country Romney has called “our number one geopolitical foe”; Romney opposes the trade measure unless Russia is also punished over human rights.
The estrangement seen in the past few days is part of a broader dynamic in which the Republican Party seems to be readying itself to cut and run from its nominee. At the convention in Tampa, a gaggle of younger Republicans — Chris Christie, Scott Walker, Nikki Haley, Rand Paul — delivered speeches light on mentions of Romney and heavy on self-promotion. Overall, Romney was mentioned far less at his convention than Obama was at the Democratic convention.
This tepidity furthers the impression that Romney is a placeholder for the next generation of Republicans, tempered by partisan squabbles and disciplined by conservative activists, and unwilling to negotiate or compromise. Romney himself, though a businessman by temperament, had to affect the younger Republicans’ mannerisms to win the nomination. He further ingratiated himself with the young conservatives by tapping as his running mate Rep. Paul Ryan — one of a trio of self-styled “young guns” in the House, with Cantor and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy.
In the House GOP caucus meeting Tuesday, Boehner told his members privately that the choice of Ryan “validated all the work House Republicans have done over the past 19 months.” Boehner is correct about that. The Ryan choice was a bow to where the power is in the party, where it’s going and who its future leaders are. If Romney wins, congressional conservatives would drive his agenda from Capitol Hill. If Romney loses, congressional conservatives would immediately inherit the party in preparation for 2014 and 2016.
Either way, it promises to be a cacophony. At the news conference that followed the caucus gathering, a campaign-style backdrop proclaimed “Focused on American Jobs” and repeated the phrase “American Jobs” 30 times. But it was also Sept. 11, and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.) argued that the hijackers “didn’t attack us as a Republican or a Democrat; they attacked us as Americans, and we would do well to remember that.”
The leaders had difficulty sticking to either theme in their zeal to campaign against the president: “There’s a lack of leadership in this administration. . . . Can’t find a job in the Obama economy. . . . The president has done nothing.” Boehner said he was “not confident at all” about avoiding downgrades of U.S. debt, accusing Obama of being “absent without leave.”
Actually, Obama has been present; Republicans just find his presence objectionable. The notable absence from congressional Republicans’ calculations is Romney.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 11, 2012
“Arithmetic For Billionaires”: Romney Is Rich, But Can He Add?
Mitt Romney is a very wealthy man with a proven capacity for avoiding taxes – but can he do simple arithmetic?
In the wake of the Democratic convention, the Republican candidate again promised to “cut the deficit and get us back on track to a balanced budget.” He even hinted that his own party bears some responsibility for ballooning federal deficits and debt. “We’re going to finally have to do something that Republicans have spoken about for a long time and for a while we didn’t do it. When we had the lead, we let people down,” he said the other day, presumably referring to the last Republican president, whose name must never be mentioned, and the Congressional leadership during that administration.
And “for a while” presumably refers to the past 30 years or so.
Romney also says that he watched none of the speeches at the Democratic convention. He obviously missed the one that might have helped him figure out exactly what his party has been doing wrong. “I hear Bill Clinton spoke for like, 50 minutes?” he snarked at a public appearance on Friday. Yes, the former president spoke for just over 49 minutes – and he articulated a message that could enlighten Romney. Clinton’s lesson might be titled “Arithmetic for Billionaires.” He could start with an accurate assessment of the origins of the national debt level currently carried by the U.S. Treasury. As Clinton noted, the federal debt roughly quadrupled during the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush administration, from just under a trillion dollars to four trillion.
When Clinton became president, that debt was rising rapidly with annual deficits of $400 billion. His first budget raised taxes, almost entirely on the wealthiest taxpayers, by restoring a top bracket of 39.5 percent. Not a single Republican in Congress voted for that 1993 budget, with many of them predicting that raising taxes on the rich would result in economic catastrophe. They were wrong, of course.
The economy boomed, incomes rose at every level, millions began to climb out of poverty, and the rich became richer too (although many of them never forgave Clinton for demanding that they pay up for the festivities of the Reagan era). Clinton booked four balanced budgets and began to pay down the national debt. The debt would have been paid down entirely, preparing the nation far better for the crash that we ultimately faced, had that unnamed Republican not succeeded Clinton with reckless tax cuts and extremely expensive wars.
By the time President Nameless left office, the nation was deeply in debt and on the brink of a catastrophe that wasn’t merely rhetorical. Now along comes Romney, with his sidekick Paul Ryan, telling voters that they will cut the deficit and balance the budget. Yet as Clinton noted, they propose still another round of tax cuts for the wealthiest households – including their own and those of their most generous supporters – that would cost the Treasury at least $5 trillion. And they insist on increasing the defense budget by hundreds of billions, too.
What Clinton asked is how the Republican nominees propose to pay for those lavish favors to themselves and their friends. Doing the arithmetic himself, he came up with three possible answers: They will raise taxes on the middle class by taking away mortgage, charitable and other deductions, so that billionaires can have another tax break. They will cut federal spending so deeply that infrastructure, education, science, technology, and health care will be ruined for the future. Or they will do nothing, and explode the debt, just as their predecessors have done repeatedly over the past three decades.
Whether in their own 40-minute addresses to their party convention or elsewhere, neither Romney nor Ryan has offered a plausible solution to Clinton’s arithmetic problem. They talk about spending cuts and tax reform, but without any specifics. The footnote to their budget claim says only, as Clinton put it: “See me about that after the election.” Clearly the Republicans intend to push off difficult questions about their budgeting, just as Romney intends to push through without releasing his tax returns. But those evasions may prove very difficult to sustain through the four upcoming debates.
Sometime before November 6, someone will ask Romney and Ryan to do the arithmetic.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, September 8, 2012
“Inevitable Desperation”: The Ugliness Of The Republican Death Spiral
Democrats should not be complacent. The 2012 elections are not yet won, and we soon will find out just how much half a billion dollars of Koch and Rove Super PAC money can buy. But things are looking good, particularly for President Obama. But Democrats still need to work as hard as if they were behind, right up through election day. And Democrats need to hold on to the Senate and win back the House. Unlike Republicans, Democrats can’t buy elections. Unlike certain prominent Republicans, Democrats actually know they can’t buy dignity and class.
When the radical judicial activists who comprise the extremist majority on the current Supreme Court went well beyond the questions raised in Citizens United, to legislate from the bench an end to campaign finance reforms, the purpose was obvious. These same justices had either ruled on or come to the Court as a result of the equally radical Bush v. Gore decision, and in both cases the real intention was to undermine democracy, to protect a power elite that needs such cynical and sinister machinations in order to maintain its death grip on political power. Do not be surprised if these extremists make further moves before the election, because laws specifically designed by Republicans to prevent legally registered Democrats from voting have been overturned by lower courts, and these perversions of the very concept of “justices” are running out of means by which they and their allies can prevent democracy from breaking out.
The Republican National Convention was such a moiling morass of mendacity that even the usually cautious arbiters of national discourse in the traditional media couldn’t help but notice. Paul Ryan’s speech to the Convention was a catalogue of lies. Clint Eastwood’s bizarre performance included his deluded hallucination of President Obama as a man who tells people to shut up, which clearly is nothing remotely akin to the president’s actual personality or behavior, and in fact was a clear projection of the unprecedented disrespect with which the president has been treated by the Republicans themselves. And then came Mitt Romney, with yet another catalogue of lies.
The Romney-Ryan campaign is built almost entirely of lies. We expect some degree of dishonestry in politics, but it usually takes the form of fudging around the edges. With Romney and Ryan it is the very basis of their campaign. The primary theme of the Republican attacks on President Obama is based on a quote taken deliberately out of context. And perhaps even worse, that theme not only is based on a lie about President Obama, it is based on lies about Romney himself. He did not build Bain by means of honest hard work and enterprising spirit, he built it with government subsidies. He did not rescue the Salt Lake City Olympics by using the principles of free market capitalism, he rescued it by using crony capitalist government subsidies. As governor of Massachusetts, Romney built a health care system he now wants people to forget, and he ranked only 47th in the nation in job growth.
As Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy and Research pointed out, Republican criticism of President Obama for the condition of the economy is akin to criticizing firefighters for the condition of a house right after the firefighters had stopped it from burning down. When President Obama took office, the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month. When President Obama took office, the economy was shrinking at an annual rate of 8.9 percent. The economy was burning down. Then the firefighters arrived. The Obama stimulus created some 3,300,000 jobs. Under President Obama’s stewardship, the economy has recovered all private sector job losses. The only justifiable criticism of the stimulus is that it wasn’t large enough to have sparked a full recovery, but that’s not the Republican criticism.
Republicans continue to oppose stimulus spending. Republicans oppose any potential stimulus by the Federal Reserve. In other words, Dean Baker’s analogy didn’t go far enough. It’s not just that the Republicans are criticizing the firefighters for the condition of the house right after the firefighters saved it from burning down, it’s also that the Republicans lit the firein the first place, tried to stop the firefighters from getting to the house, and now aretrying to stop the construction workers from getting to the work of rebuilding it, while themselves planning to add more fuel and light another match.
Mitt Romney has never built anything on his own. He has used government subsidies and money given to him by his wealthy family— the latter an option he apparently is too oblivious even to realize is not available to everyone. He criticizes President Obama for disparaging private enterprise, even though President Obama did no such thing, and then he claims credit for having made lots and lots of money after having lots and lots of money handed to him for nothing, which he doesn’t acknowledge because he apparently believes he was entitled to it by the mere fact of his existence. But Romney is just one among many failed Republican candidates, his triumph in the Republican primaries but more proof that while money can’t buy class, it can buy a Republican presidential nomination. His opposition was a dystopian carnival of human degradation, and if anyone ever wondered why Republicans refuse to accept the scientific proof of evolution it now is clear that it is because evolution has passed the Republicans by. The Republican National Convention featured many of the supposed rising Republican stars of the future, who only succeeded in collectively demonstrating that any ostensible Republican future is but a fantasy of a mythological past from which most sentient beings long since have awakened to consciousness.
The Republicans have no future. From climate change to national security to the economy to social justice and human rights, the list of issues on which the Democrats and public opinion are moving forward while the Republicans are stagnating if not attempting to move backward is endless. They can’t win on the issues. They can’t win on their freak show personalities. They can’t win using the principles of democracy and republic. The only hope for the Republicans is to lie, cheat and steal, and they are attempting exactly that. And to a party that now is habitually and congenitally opposed to basic scientific realities, lies aren’t incidental to their political strategies, they are in fact the basis of their world view. To a party that is openly bigoted against the diverse demographics that the rest of the nation not only celebrates but has become, voter suppression and the undermining of democracy isn’t but a political means to an ends, it is the inevitable desperation of the soon-to-be extinct. Their last and only hope is that they can buy a last election or two, and encode into law, and legislate from the bench into the Constitution an end to democracy itself.
The Republicans are dying. They may still have means to stave off their final end for a few election cycles, but demographics, evolution and history itself are working against them. Death throes are not pretty. Desperation can breed cruelty. The smaller the souls, the uglier and more destructive will be their final flailing flagellations.
By: Laurence Lewis, Daily Kos, September 9, 2012
“Slippery Fish In The Same Malodorous Kettle”: Mitch McConnell And The Obstructionist GOP Undermine The Economy
In the realm of political strategy, there are two mindsets on the question of attacking the opponent. One frets excessively about how the opponent will respond and how the media will write it up. The other, more aggressive mindset doesn’t worry too much about those things, on the principle that playing offense is almost always better than playing defense. I raise this with respect to the specific question of whether President Obama is going to make attacks on Republican obstructionism part of his arsenal over the next two months. His advisors seem to think that doing so would make Obama look weak. I emphatically disagree, and I think he’ll be dragged into doing it anyway, as he already was. Let’s review the tape.
On Wednesday night, Bill Clinton ripped into the congressional GOP: “[Obama] also tried to work with Congressional Republicans on health care, debt reduction, and jobs, but that didn’t work out so well. Probably because, as the Senate Republican leader, in a remarkable moment of candor, said two years before the election, their No. 1 priority was not to put America back to work, but to put President Obama out of work. Senator, I hate to break it to you, but we’re going to keep President Obama on the job!” It was then that he delivered that line about the GOP’s message in Tampa: we made the mess, he hasn’t cleaned it up fast enough, so put us back in.
I was elated to hear that obstructionism had made it to the convention podium, and from its best and most authoritative speaker no less. I hoped this meant that it would become a theme. Let me pause in the chronology to say why. It’s simple. The vast majority of the people blame the president for the sputtering economy. After all, he’s the president. They elected him to fix things, so dammit, fix things. Most people’s political analysis doesn’t go beyond this. They think the president can just … do stuff.
Sometimes, the president can. It is certainly true that Obama had a little more than a year, from Al Franken’s swearing in in July 2009 (which gave the Democrats the magic 60 Senate seats) until September 2010 (when Congress recessed to hit the campaign trail) when he should have been able to do stuff. He did health care. But he, and they, didn’t do economy. The idea of stimulus had been so soiled by then that they didn’t have the votes even among Democrats—partly, to be sure, their own fault for mishandling the stimulus argument the first time around.
But for most of his term, especially on the economy, the Republicans blocked everything. Most people don’t understand that 41 votes in the Senate equal an effective majority because of their collective power to stop any action in its tracks, and most people never will. But the fact is that those 41, if they link arms and stand firm, have more power than the president. Indeed: That old chestnut “the president proposes, and Congress disposes” was originally appropriated from the age-old apothegm “man proposeth, but God disposeth.” Congress is God. At least on domestic policy. But try to tell an average American that in the age of the imperial presidency.
Back to the chronology. As I said, I expected to hear Biden and Obama pick up on Clinton’s attack. Neither did, at least in any meaningful way. Obama didn’t mention, for example, his 2011 jobs bill. Ezra Klein wrote yesterday that the Obama team appears to have decided “to refrain from reminding voters how bad things are and to resist using the campaign as an opportunity to continue pushing emergency measures that congressional Republicans implacably oppose.”
Well, I disagree, but OK, if that’s your decision, that’s your decision. But then, the day after the convention, after the poor jobs numbers came out, what did Obama talk about in New Hampshire? GOP opposition to his jobs bill! So which strategy is it?
Obama may not want to remind voters how bad things are, but they don’t need reminding. They know. And given that they know, the smart and aggressive thing to do is to call out the people who’ve been blocking attempts at progress. Reality is going to force him to do it anyway.
One of the Democrats’ biggest strategic mistakes of the last two years has been their unwillingness to say plainly and openly that Republicans don’t want to see jobs created as long as Obama is president. Chuck Schumer tried it a couple of summers ago. Other Democrats were just afraid to go there. The White House too. And this was even after Mitch McConnell more or less admitted it in public! It was a classic case of worrying about the how opposition would respond and how the media would cover it instead of just playing offense.
Others say he should just train his sights on Mitt Romney, but I think it’s much stronger to tie them all together. Paul Ryan’s presence on the ticket, and Romney’s endorsement of Ryan’s budget, places these slippery fish in the same malodorous kettle. And finally, there is value in simply being seen as fighting. Imagine if Obama called out Mitch McConnell personally for that infamous comment of his. The base would be in heaven, and voters in the middle would at least see him standing up for himself, not letting himself get kicked around. Yes, it would be incautious. I submit that the time is right for a little incaution.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, September 9, 2012
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