Close encounters with Fox News

I watched some segments of Fox News last night.  I saw a few minutes of Bill O’Reilley interviewing Newt Gingrinch.  Newt was making some completely fatuous comparison of the “war on terror” – which apparently in FoxWorld is synonymous with whatever the Bush administration is doing – with the Union side in the Civil War.

 

They had some weird dialogue going about how there are “anti-American Americans” like Michael Moore who take a “European” view of world affairs and they these people are all very dangerous and bad.  It’s amazing how “European” has become practically another word for “enemy” in Oxycontin land.  Wasn’t it just yesterday that the same crowd was promoting the concept of “European-American” to be a name for good respectable Republican white folks?

 

It’s hard to keep up with the vocabulary in the land of the Patriotically Correct Blowhards.  It was weird.  I wish they could at least stabilize their word-meanings long enough for us regular folks to at least be able to understand what they are talking about.

 

Later I saw Brit Hume, one of Fox’s big stars, interviewing Stephen Hayes explaining why Saddam Hussein was joined at the hip to al-Qaeda and was also heavily involved in the 9/11 attack.  Hume, vaguely mimicking the role of a journalist, nodded and agreed with everything he said.

 

All of it just made up, of course.  Hadley just published a book recycling the same phony stories that Rummy’s and Cheney’s rump intelligence operations made up based on raw intelligence, largely fed back to them by the Iranian agent Ahmed Chalabi who theywere supporting to be the American puppet ruler in post-Saddam Iraq.  None of these claims have panned out.  But there was Hadley, cheerfully repeating them.  And there was Hume, cheerfully pretending to be a reporter, adding a fake veneer of respectability to them for anyone who might actually mistake Fox News for being a news organization.

 

It's kind of amazing to see how the Republican Right has created their own echo chamber.  They make some up.  Then repeat to each other endlessly.  Then sneer at anyone who doesn't believe it.

 

But a bogus claim (i.e., "Bin Laden was Saddam's right-hand man") repeated five hundred times doesn't get any less bogus for the repetition.  A flaky propaganda image ("The Iraq War is like World War II") doesn't become any less flaky because smirky ex-Congressmen repeat it pompous tones.  Sad.