Tag Archives: Fox News

media news

Williams, O'Reilly: double standard?

The thought occurs to me on this rainy day on the Texas Tundra: Brian Williams is likely out of a job, while Bill O’Reilly is still going strong for doing essentially the same thing that got Williams into trouble.

How come?

Williams once was the much-admired anchor for NBC’s Nightly News broadcast. Then it came out that Williams fibbed about a story he had told over a decade that a helicopter he’d been riding in had been shot down during the Iraq War. His chopper wasn’t shot down, but he was riding in the same group of air ships that included the one hit by the rocket-propelled grenade. NBC investigated the matter and suspended Williams for six months — without pay. He has become the butt of jokes and the network is highly unlikely ever to return him to his former job.

O’Reilly, meanwhile, was revealed to have embellished his own record, talking about how he “covered” the Falklands War in 1982 while never setting foot in the war zone while Argentine troops were fighting British troops that had landed on the islands to take back Britain’s territorial possession. O’Reilly who “covered” the war for CBS News, has since become Fox News’s No. 1 commentator. He reported how he had been put in harm’s way in the Falklands. Except that he wasn’t ever exposed to hostile fire. It was revealed the potential harm came from rioters in Buenos Aires, from where O’Reilly was “covering” the war.

Fox stands by its man. O’Reilly called the reporting of his embellishment the work of “guttersnipes.”

One man gets kicked off the air. The other is still goin’ and blowin’.

O’Reilly often laments what he calls “double standards” in media reporting.

He’s right. There well might be a double standard at work here.

 

national news, political news

Bush bungles an obvious question

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It turns out some of Jeb Bush’s allies in Washington are “flabbergasted” by his botched response to a question about the Iraq War.

The former Florida governor is likely to run for the Republican presidential nomination next year.

I believe I know the answer to why Bush’s confusing responses triggered by a single question has baffled his GOP allies.

It’s because of all the questions he should have expected from the media, this was at the top of the list. He should have been uber-prepared to answer it cleanly, crisply and without hesitation.

GOP lawmakers flabbergasted by Bush stumbles on Iraq

The question came from Fox News’s Megyn Kelly. Knowing what we now know, governor, would you have gone to war in Iraq? That’s more or less how Kelly pitched the question to Bush. His first answer? Yes, I would. Then he said he “misheard” the question. Then he said he “misinterpreted” it. Then he said, “No.”

Is he ready to become president of the United States? Some of his friends are worried. Others say he’s just “rusty,” having been out of elective office for a decade.

Whichever the cause of his early stumble, Jeb Bush had better get rid of cobwebs. In a hurry.

national news, political news

Well, that clears it up: Jeb wouldn't go to war

Jeb Bush has set the record straight … I think.

He now says he wouldn’t have gone to war in Iraq if he and the rest of the world knew then what we know now — which is that Saddam Hussein didn’t possess weapons of mass destruction.

Does that clear it up for you? The former Republican Florida governor — and likely GOP presidential candidate — surely hopes so.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/05/14/jeb-bush-clears-air-on-iraq-war-stance-says-would-not-have-authorized-invasion/?intcmp=latestnews

He went from “yes I would” go to war, to “mishearing” the question from Megyn Kelly of Fox News, to “misinterpreting” the question to now reversing himself completely.

MSBNC’s Rachel Maddow — and I’m acutely aware that she is no fan of any of the Republicans running, or thinking of running, for president — pointed out an important element of the botched answer to a simple question. She said Thursday night that Jeb Bush, whose brother George W. Bush, invaded Iraq in 2003, should have been aware that the question would come and he should have had his answer down pat.

He didn’t. He either hasn’t done his homework on the nuts and bolts of running for president, or doesn’t quite understand how the media work. Reporters are going to ask him repeatedly about the Iraq War and whether it was a good or bad idea for the United States to invade another country.

Jeb Bush remains one of the frontrunners for the GOP nomination, whenever he declares his candidacy.

I actually want him to do well as the nomination campaign ramps up.

But, oh man, he must stop fumbling the questions everyone in America knows he’s going to get.

national news, political news

'Mistakes were made' in Iraq … do you think?

There goes Jeb Bush, using that maddening passive-voice cliché that declares “mistakes were made.”

The mistakes occurred in Iraq after his brother, former President George W. Bush, invaded that country on a bogus premise that the Iraqis possessed weapons of mass destruction.

He told Fox News’s Megyn Kelly that he’d invade Iraq also, even he knew there were no WMD.

Now he’s backing away from the statement, telling conservative talk-show host Sean Hannity that predicting what he’d do is a “hypothetical” situation.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/jeb-bush-backs-off-support-of-iraq-invasion/ar-BBjH0wT

The former Florida governor is considering a run for the Republican presidential nomination next year. He’s almost certain to join a growing GOP field.

He’d better get his Iraq War spiel lined out.

He told Hannity that President Bush learned from the “faulty intelligence” on which he relied to launch the March 2003 invasion. I guess that’s his view. As for the former president, he hasn’t yet revealed what precisely he “learned” from the mistaken intelligence-gathering.

I’m actually hoping Bush gets his act together. His party needs someone with a reputation for moderation running for president. The TEA party wing of the GOP has a lot of champions in the hunt already for the White House — and I expect fully that Gov. Bush will try to sound like one of them as he launches his own presidential bid.

His record, though, tells a different story.

Jeb Bush’s first major obstacle, though, is to persuade the country he is no carbon copy of his brother.

 

national news, political news

Welcome to politics, Dr. Carson

Ben Carson is a famed neurosurgeon.

He gave up that profession and now he’s taking on another one: politician.

He’s going to learn that politicians have to be as careful with their words as surgeons have to be with their scalpels. You say the wrong thing, you’re potentially finished as a candidate.

Carson is running for the Republican presidential nomination. This morning he showed up on “Fox News Sunday” and got grilled by host Chris Wallace for some things he said about the Obama administration.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/10/chris-wallace-ben-carson-fox-news-sunday_n_7252994.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000013

When a GOP candidate gets hammered by a Fox News host, well, the planet might be on the verge of spinning off its axis.

Wallace challenged Dr. Carson’s comparison of the Obama administration with the Nazi Third Reich.

Does he really mean that? Wallace asked.

Carson said during Adolf Hitler’s reign of terror, people didn’t challenge him. Wallace asserted immediately that people are challenging President Obama all the time.

How about ending any Hitler references? It is ridiculous and insulting in the extreme to equate modern political activity with anything that was done during the Third Reich’s dozen years of existence.

I happen to admire Dr. Carson’s work and the brilliance he exudes when talking about medical procedures and his hopes for cures to deadly brain diseases and disorders. That work is a long, long way from the political rough-and-tumble he’s entering.

Careless and overblown statements do have a way of lingering and biting the speaker of those words where he doesn’t want to be bitten.

national news, political news

'91 percent chance' Graham will run

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told Fox News Sunday today there’s a “91 percent chance” he’s going to run for the Republican presidential nomination next year.

Ninety-one percent chance. Not 90. Not 95. The odds are now at 91 percent.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/19/lindsey-graham-president-2016_n_7095360.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000063

Surely I’m not the only American wondering where the senator came up with 91 percent.

It’s usual for politicians to round these numbers off to the nearest zero or to the nearest 5. Isn’t that how it goes?

Sen. Graham, an Air Force reservist and lawyer when he’s not legislating in the U.S. Senate, must be from some school that suggests you should be as precise as possible when using numbers of any stripe.

I guess that includes numbers that set hypothetical odds on whether you’re running for president.

There’s also a 91 percent chance, therefore, that he’ll have to answer to critics within his own party that he’s too, um, “moderate” to suit their taste. He’s declared climate change to be the real thing and actually favors comprehensive immigration reform, according to the Huffington Post.

This might be the deal breaker among the hard-core GOP base: He’s actually endorsing some of President Obama’s Cabinet nominees and judicial appointees.

The chances of the hard right wing of his party forgiving him for those views? Zero.

 

religious news

Right-wing media find a 'war on Easter'

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The right-wing mainstream media cannot get enough of these trumped-up “wars.”

Fox News annually declares there to be a secular “war on Christmas.” The only people waging war on Christmas are the retailers who keep pushing out the notion that it’s all right to camp out overnight waiting for the stores to open on Black Friday. Get in ahead of the rush … but please don’t punch out the shopper who cuts in ahead of you to get the toy you had targeted.

Now it’s a “war on Easter.”

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/03/29/foxs-week-long-war-on-easter/193352

Please. Stop.

There is no war on Christians’ holiest holiday. It’s a figment of the right-wing mainstream media marketing geniuses who look for ways to boost their ratings, allowing their on-air personalities to brag about how they’re kicking the stuffing out of the rest of the “mainstream media.”

Churches are still informing congregants about what Scripture says about Easter, about how Jesus rose from the dead after being crucified. Believers all over the world celebrate this holiday with all due reverence. My family and I do.

“War on Easter”? It ain’t happening.

Let’s knock it off, shall we?

 

national news, political news

Morris 'thinks' a lot of things

Dick Morris has been “thinking” a lot lately.

He thinks Barack Obama wants Elizabeth Warren, not Hillary Clinton, to succeed him in the White House.

He thinks the White House leaked the Clinton email story to the press to torpedo the former secretary of state’s presidential ambitions.

He thinks the email controversy will linger the way the Watergate scandal did in 1973-74.

Obama wants Warren over Clinton, Dick Morris says

How does The Hill columnist, former Bill Clinton pollster and one-time Fox News contributor know all of this? Hard to say. He just thinks it.

This kind of peanut-gallery analysis slays me.

Dick Morris hardly is an insider in the Obama White House. He’s become a fierce critic of the president and, for that matter, of Hillary Clinton. Does he have some inside knowledge? He might be moonlighting these days as a mind reader, for all I know.

Warren says she will not run for president. The president isn’t likely to endorse a party nominee prior to the convention next year. As for the email matter, the only reason is will remain in the public eye is because critics, such as Morris, will ensure that people like me keep commenting on it.

How credible is Morris’s thought process on these political matters?

In the days prior to the 2012 presidential election, he thought Mitt Romney would win in a landslide.

It didn’t work out that way.

 

International news

What if the bin Laden mission had failed?

You hear this on occasion from conservative critics of President Obama.

The president “had nothing to do” with the killing of 9/11 terror attack mastermind Osama bin Laden.

Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly repeated the preposterous notion this week on an edition of his “O’Reilly Factor” talk show.

http://mediamatters.org/video/2015/03/18/oreilly-obama-had-nothing-to-do-with-the-killin/202957

I’ve heard it from others on the right, many of them right here in the Texas Panhandle, where the president is about as popular as … oh, let’s see, bin Laden.

O’Reilly said the Navy SEALs had everything to do with killing bin Laden in May 2011. Well, yes they did. The brave men risked everything by flying into Pakistan on a moonless night, landing their helicopters in bin Laden’s compound, looking for bin Laden, finding him, killing him and then hauling his corpse out of there.

However, to say that a commander in chief who issues the order “had nothing to do” with its success ignores the truth of what would have happened had the mission failed.

Did President Carter have “nothing to do” with the mission to rescue the Iran hostages in April 1980, the one that failed, costing eight American lives in the middle of the desert? He wasn’t at the controls of any of the helicopters that crashed. But he certainly got the blame — chiefly from those on the right — for the mission’s failure.

Did President Truman have “nothing to do” with ending World War II when he issued the order to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? What if the Enola Gay B-29 bomber had crashed on its flight over Japan? Give ‘Em Hell Harry would have caught plenty of hell himself.

This ridiculous notion that presidents don’t risk enormous political capital when they make these difficult decisions is the stuff of nonsense.

Barack Obama had to weigh the risks of sending in the commandoes when he ordered the hit on bin Laden. He could have ordered air strikes that could have killed innocent civilians. He didn’t. He could have passed, deciding the risk was too great. He didn’t do that, either.

The president did what presidents get paid to do. He made the difficult call.

Thus, he, too, had everything to do with the success of the raid to kill Osama bin Laden.

 

national news, political news

HRC's email tempest is going to build

Oh, how I was hoping Hillary Rodham Clinton would quell the unrest over her use of private email accounts while she was secretary of state.

Silly me. I knew it likely wouldn’t, but I was hanging on to a glimmer of hope.

Her press conference today likely guaranteed this tempest is going to follow her onto the 2016 presidential campaign trail, assuming that she makes the race — which everyone in the know seems to think will happen.

Clinton fails to calm email storm

She said something today about deleting tens of thousands of private emails from her server at home. She said she never breached national security with private communications. Clinton said she used the private account for “convenience” sake and said if she could do it over, she would have used the State Department account to communicate about State Department matters.

Her critics on the right — led by Fox News and other conservative mainstream media — will ensure that this matter keeps bubbling up.

Now, though, her critics on the left are likely to start beating the bushes for an alternative candidate to seek the Democratic presidential nomination next year. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts says she won’t seek the presidency.

Hmmm. Can she be talked into running? I’m betting some operatives are going to try.

This email matter hasn’t risen to the level of “scandal,” as some on the right have called it. But it does raise some questions — in my mind, at least — about whether Clinton kept public information away from public scrutiny.

This mess is far from being cleaned up.