In the morning, he’ll be talking in word salads and punching the unemployed.
That’s really what this comes down to.
According to Gawker, Fox News doesn’t feel it needs to defend Bill O’Reilly anymore:
Update, 5:40 p.m.: Two hours after this post was published, Fox provided the following statement to Mediaite (without addressing the substance of the Media Matters report):
Bill O’Reilly has already addressed several claims leveled against him. This is nothing more than an orchestrated campaign by far left advocates Mother Jones and Media Matters. Responding to the unproven accusation du jour has become an exercise in futility. FOX News maintains its staunch support of O’Reilly, who is no stranger to calculated onslaughts.
Bill has addressed the lies about the Falklands, although there are new lies now about his involvement in the JFK assassination conspiracy. Plus, he claims he witnessed nuns being executed in El Salvador when records show he wasn’t even in the country at the time the events happened.
It’s more important to fling poo at those institutions that are trying to keep Bill O’Reilly honest than to force Bill O’Reilly to actually be honest.
But no matter. I never expected Fox would censure O’Reilly in the same way that NBC disciplined Brian Williams. Part of this is because NBC still clings tenaciously to the concept of being a news organization while Fox News does not.
Come to think of it, wasn’t it Fox News that won a Supreme Court victory several years back that made it Ok for it to lie? Yeah, it was something like, it doesn’t have to tell the truth. There’s nothing in the constitution that says that a media outlet that purports to report the news has to do so honestly or something to that effect. They all might lie but Fox News takes pride in being audaciously dishonest and getting away with it. It’s that audacity to flout the rules, while demanding everyone else adhere to some purity test, that I suspect is the real attraction for the Fox News viewer. It’s the thrill of making everyone else march to Fox’s drummer.
So, it doesn’t really matter what you throw at Bill O’Reilly, Fox is going to stand by him and they’ll pretend that they have addressed all of the accusations adequately and it’s only the left wing media and enemies that are going for Bill.
But it would be wrong to assume that it’s only MMFA or some radical Decembrist faction of a commie left that wants to bring down Bill O’Reilly and Fox News. Hey, I didn’t vote for Obama-twice! I have been called a racist for not sticking with my tribe when what *I* saw in 2008 was an inexperienced but ruthlessly ambitious opportunist hired to carry out the wishes of the financial services industry that was about to lose its shirt in the worst financial crisis since the 1930’s. My objection to Obama is he is really a country club moderately conservative Republican and he’s governed like one. So, how does the Fox News conditioned viewer handle people like me? I’ve seen the confusion in their eyes when they try to reconcile what they’ve been told with the fact that I am standing there saying I am a liberal who loathes Obama for purely non-racial reasons. It’s like watching Fembots about to explode. They can’t quite grasp it.
(Now that I think of it, I’ve seen some lefties have the same reaction. There’s a nugget of a problem there that the left has not accepted about its own side.)
No, the fighters against Fox extend beyond the usual suspects. It includes anyone who has to sit with brain dead relatives at dinner who have become mean spirited, crotchety, vile, bigots robotically spitting ultra-conservative nonsense in a garbled illogical word salad. Those people go out and vote, because they’re angry, and they don’t sound like they know what they’re supposed to be angry about. Nothing they say makes any damn sense. And it’s very difficult to want to be around them because they behave as if they’ve had a lobotomy. You can’t construct a logical argument with people who have had conditioned responses and thought-stopping reactions to anything you say. Seriously, they can contradict themselves several times in the same sentence and never even realize it. They are operating in pure fearful, emotional, enraged mode, thinking there is a child molester behind the potted plants and that the Muslims are going to kill them in their beds while they unknowingly support the most regressive economic theories the conservative right has to offer because God, or something.
The John Birch Society ain’t got nothing on Bill O’Reilly and Fox News. John Birch was fringe until Fox came along. And Bill has a single talent. He is extremely effective at turning perfectly ordinary people into obnoxious right wing Archie Bunker types who actively celebrate their willful ignorance and call themselves holy. That is a gift to the ultra wealthy. The rich and powerful will fight tooth and nail to protect Bill O’Reilly. He is their golden goose. His distortions and ability to provoke irrational anger keeps his audience in a state of poised suspension, ready to hurl themselves like zombies at the first fresh brains O’Reilly shakes in front of them. As informed citizens, they’re useless to the rest of us and, in most cases, actively harm their families and friends by their inability to see when they’ve been flimflammed. It’s pure gold to the small evil group that runs the world and to whom no one we know belongs.
The true Fox News watcher will joyfully accept their role as a minion to the corrupt. They will tell you that there is nothing you can do to change a corrupt system except pray for the second coming. How this justifies joining the army of corruption, I’ll never understand, unless it is to bask in the glory of being on the side of the powerful, especially those corrupt powerful who masquerade as godly. It sort of reminds me of the people who are flocking to the middle east to join ISIS. We all know ISIS is brutal, totalitarian and mindless but some people are attracted to that. Fox News only beheads people metaphorically. Its enemies still suffer the same fate, and the meanness, misogyny and cruelty is still there, but there’s less blood.
Oh sure, things were different when the typical Fox News view was younger. People were more helpful, there was a real sense of community, labor was stronger and public education was better and well funded. But they seem incapable of figuring out how we got to this place where we have gone back to the economic conditions that lead to the Great Depression. They do not see the role of Fox News in the process.
And that’s just the way Fox likes it. So, no need to draw further attention to itself. Defending Bill is just going to make it look like it needs to defend Bill and that’s not the kind of face Fox wants to present to the world. That shows a sense of vulnerability. The Fox News viewer doesn’t want to feel vulnerable. Fox wants to look impregnable, a mighty fortress against the commie left even if it’s more like a prison for the gullible.
Ok, we all know it. There are things we can not change in this world. So we must continually chant the serenity prayer as we watch Fox, and media like it, tear the fabric of our country apart. There’s nothing we can do about Fox News and it’s ability to lie, distort, mislead and destroy. We can only wait until the vulnerable reduce in numbers and the younger, less religiously motivated internet era demographic matures. Fox News will just become another niche channel for the unhinged. Then we will start the long, hard slog to recovery, reversing all the crap it has flung at us.
Filed under: General | Tagged: bigots, Bill O'Reilly, christian fundamentalists, el salvador, falklands, Fox News, fundamentalists, ISIS, john birch society, lies, Nuns, Supreme Court, word salad |
The Confluence 
I disagree slightly. The minions sincerely believe they are not minions; in their own minds, they are the most intelligent and independent-minded citizens in Amurka. I doubt our old acquaintances at the Freshwater Crustacean Pond imagine themselves to be minions.
I blame Obummer, or perhaps I should say his owners, for some of this. Many people who opposed Obummer for legitimate reasons in 2008 naively started listening to Faux Noise and other right-wing media because the reactionaries also opposed Obummer–if for less legitimate reasons–and the naive ex-liberals got brainwashed. Again, the FCP denizens come to mind.
That almost happened to me, too. I don’t know why I saw [Admiral Ackbar voice]“IT’S A TRAP!” and they did not.
I slightly disagree. In the book, The Authoritarians, the author (whose name escapes me right now) says that the followers of authoritarian leaders are kinda happy in that role. They want a big daddy to watch over them and tell them how to think. They’re extremely fearful people. Maybe that’s a function of genetics. I’m prone to high anxiety too but I think my logical brain makes it hard for me to believe people like O’Reilly or any authoritarian.
BTW, in case anyone is wondering, I don’t spend a lot of time writing essays. This stuff gushes forth from my head pretty fast and I just dash it off as quickly as possible. If I spend more than 30 minutes on the basic thing, that’s pretty generous. It’s a habit I developed back in about 2006 to write an essay a day. Sort of like a diary. I’m a fast reader and a fast writer. It often means I don’t have time to edit or refine or add extra research.
I’m thinking that Samuel Pepys would approve anyway.
Someday, I suppose I need to get around to reading The Authoritarians.
Someday.
Part of the strength of the reactionaries is that they are obsessed with their perceived enemies, and so, perpetually enraged. This gives them a vast energy. That is one of those ironic cases where a mental illness can be a source of strength.
The Oborg proved that authoritarian followers are not confined to the political Right–but then, the Commies proved that long before.
However, the Oborg were nowhere near Communism, despite what our reactionaries believe. Obummer is more or less the opposite of a Commie; he’s a sellout who keeps his eye on the prize of generational wealth, a reward for his faithful service to “the small evil group…”
*Standing ovation for ‘Monster from the Id’ *
u nailed it Madam/Sir. In particular, IIRC 6 yrs into Gee Dubbz Bush Reagan IV ‘s Reign Of Error, even many Faux News & other ReThugs were distancing themselves from Bush43, no longer claiming Bush43 was a good leader or that Bush43 had good policies. It as if at least many ReThugz were embarrassed of Gee Dubbz & wanted to at least rebrand modern ReThugism under a new poli-trick-ian face.
In contrast, 6+ years into Obama Reagan V ‘s corrupt incompetent Reign, although there are some ex-Obots, many Obots are staying might robotic & constantly praising their Cult Dear Leader O. As an example, witness MS-DLC TV “journalist” & Obot Al Sharpton publicaly claiming he will never criticize any policy of his Dear Leader 0bama. I would say these Obots are more authoritarian than the Bush43 supporters.
I could also say that the modern DLC Clinton/Obama right-wing Democratic party is a right-wing party, more towards extreme right-wing Reagan, than center-left aka social-democratic aka Progressive FD Roosevelt/LB Johnson Democratic party. The ReThugz are even more extreme right-wing party than the DLC Clinton/Obama right-wing party. In this sense both the 0bots & the Bush43/Faux News viewer lunatics are just different types of right-wing authoritarians.
I’m so glad that you didn’t fall into the abyss.
I would think that if one thought the Second Coming were coming soon, one would not want to join the “army of corruption”, since the guy who would be coming back was said to disapprove strongly of greed and other forms of corruption.
Ahhh, but if you passively allow the corruption to happen and even kinda encourage it by voting for people who you suspect are greedy and bad with a thin veneer of “christian values” smeared on top, then you actually help the end come sooner. You add to the entropy by doing nothing to stop it. Get it?
If not, review this video clip from Dominic Crossan who explains in very clear, unambiguous terms what the dangers of fundamentalism actually are:
Fundamentalist extremism is not exclusive to Islam. You gotta remember that this country was founded by people who had lived through the English civil war which was all about religion and the divine rights of kings. Oliver Cromwell was a real Debbie Downer when it came to Christmas, but as long as you weren’t a Catholic, you pretty much could worship as you pleased in England during his reign. Jews especially benefitted from Cromwell’s freedom of conscience stance.
That’s what the early Americans were trying to establish here because they saw how incredibly destructive fundamentalism and religious authoritarianism was.
With the new media era, we’ve changed all that. Americans don’t have any idea what religious wars are all about. Europeans know about them because they lived through wave after wave of them. But Americans? We are totally clueless. That ignorance is very dangerous.
Now, we have a small bunch of very vocal authoritarian fundamentalist “Christians” who have access to a huge megaphone that are driving a new brand of religious conservatism and it is scaring the hell out of other countries.
It’s got to stop. I have nothing against religious people. I have a BIG problem with fundamentalist of any kind and “Christian” fundamentalists are just as dangerous as Islamic Fundamentalists.
Test post. I don’t know if my previous comment entered moderation or just didn’t reach the site.
You chose well. I own a copy of one of Crossan’s books, God and Empire. 🙂
I like Crossan. HIs theories on Jesus make so much sense to me and make him much more interesting than the bible does.
He must drive fundamentalists up a wall.
The Fox News “journalists” and viewers, like religious fundamentalists, believe that any lie is excused if it’s in the service of God’s will.
They, exclusively, are privy to God’s wishes and intentions.
Prince al Waleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia is the second largest owner of MurdoChorp after Rupert Murdoch himself. Why would a Saudi Wahabbi prince happily own so much of Fox News’s mothership when Fox News is so anti-Muslimitic? Because Fox News is also a global no-warming pretender, and Prince bin Talal believes the “no warming” propaganda preserves the value of Prince bin Talal’s Saudi oil holdings.
From the Prince’s strategic point of view, the antimuslimism is just the delivery vehicle, and the drill-baby-drill burn-baby-burn is the payload.
Those “neo liberal” (what does that even mean?} bastards are determined to send us to war with Russia and keep us in the Middle East. Why??
Oh, yeah, oil.
“Liberal” in the European use of the term, which would roughly equal “moderate conservative” in USAmerican usage. What we call “liberal”, Europeans cheerfully call “socialist”, because “socialist” is not considered an obscene word in Europe. Historically, European “liberals” were the cheerleaders for capitalism, and believed in separation of church and state. “Conservatives” wanted to keep some of the old quasi-feudal restraints on moneymaking, and believed a state church and aristocracy were crucial to the social order–“throne and altar” and all that.
Thank you, but why neo-liberal?
I suppose “neo” simply means they are the newest wave of “liberals” in the European sense–which in Europe means “cheerleaders for capitalism”, which would make them “conservatives” by the USAmerican definition.
I understand “neo-liberal” to be a deceptive self-coined word used by pack of anti public-interest/ anti-union/ semi-anarcho-capitalist/ pro upper-class agents and warriors who support as much deregulation as they can convince a DemParty voterbase to tolerate and who support Free Trade Treason against America to export factory jobs in order to undercut wages and working conditions here and in order to weaken and destroy unions.
President Clinton was a perfect specimen of the type with his hyper-aggressively fanatical support of the anti-American trade-treason agreement known as NAFTA, as well as his support for MFN status for China and his support for dragging America into the WTO, all in service to his loyalty to the International Free Trade Conspiracy.
Slick Willy, like Obummer, is a ruthless climber who betrayed the “outsider” group from which he came, for the prize of generational wealth, as a reward for faithful service to the “small evil group”.
Yeah, they’re both not as bad as the Reptilians–in the same way that diabetes isn’t as bad as cancer. 👿
Sometimes Hobson’s choice is the only choice we are given. Diabetes is indeed less terminal and more survivable than many cancers. People can live ( after a fashion) with diabetes for decades after diagnosis. And the cheerful thing is that advances in stem-cell self-cloning may eventually allow for people to re-grow their own pancreases, or even just regrow clumps of Islet Cells which can be kept alive in a bloodflow-supplied Islet Cell colony somewhere inside the body.
In the same way, it is theoretically possible that a bunch of liberadicals and New Deal Reactionaries may conquer the DemParty from within and purge all the DLC NAFTAcrats and Obots out of it with
Stalinist intensity and thoroughness. Just like the Tea People are trying over at the RepParty. I may not approve of what the Tea Party stands for, but I support their methods more and more and more. Maybe we could come together into a Pot Party and conquer and purge and disinfect and decontaminate the DemParty of today.
Free Trade is the New Slavery! Protectionism is the New Abolition!
Put them apples in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. Willarack Jefferssein Clintobama!
“Stalinist?” 😮
*moves away from Banner at maximum warp*
Je suis socialiste.