The Opposition (to Everything) Party

If you know a rightwing blogger, you might want to check in on them occasionally, to make sure they haven't opened a vein. The mood in the wingnut blogosphere -- as it was on rightwing Twitter last night -- is one of comically exaggerated doom. What happened on Fox News, when Karl Rove absolutely refused to believe that the president had won Ohio (and with it, reelection), is surprisingly not the norm this morning. I suppose they're in shock and may begin waving their "unskewed" polls around and shrieking that Obama stole the election once they've recovered a bit. But for now, it's all about depression. Over at Breitbart.com, the faithful are being consoled with tales of the popular vote and Obama's failure to gain it, but that particular solace is unlikely to even survive the day -- CNN already has the President at 50% and climbing as of this writing.

So what things should conservatives have learned from last night that they don't seem to be? There are a lot; don't pick fights with Nate Silver over math, don't pick fights with women over rape, don't assume your little Fox News/talk radio bubble isn't lying to you about your chances and making you way too complacent, etc. But the big one is that "divide and conquer" only works when you're dividing off the bigger portion to yourselves.

Politico:

...“The conservative movement should have particular appeal to people in minority and immigrant communities who are trying to make it, and Republicans need to work harder than ever to communicate our beliefs to them,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who will immediately be looked to as a potential 2016 presidential candidate.

But the GOP’s problem is more fundamental than one bloc of voters. For the second consecutive presidential election, the Republican got thumped among women and young voters in the states that decided the election.

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Fox Covers for Mourdock

On the slim chance that you haven't heard about it, Indiana Republican Senate candidate and Tea Party whackjob Richard Mourdock found himself in hot water after comments Tuesday suggesting that maybe rape wasn't such a bad thing. "I struggled with it myself for a long time, but I came to realize that life is that gift from God," Mourdock said. "And, I think, even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen."

You'd think that after Todd Akin and Sharon Angle got in trouble for statements on the same subject, Republicans would learn to keep their opinions about the wonderful gift of rape pregnancies to themselves. It really doesn't seem to work in their favor.

Of course, when I say there's a "slim chance" that you haven't heard the latest GOP rape idiocy, I'm assuming that you're a serious news consumer and that you don't watch the worst news network in America, Fox News. If you're a Fox viewer, the odds of your complete ignorance of the subject is actually pretty damned good. As the chart above shows, Fox viewers have been exposed to little more than two minutes of not-very in-depth coverage of the controversy. So if you decided to make a sandwich, you probably missed it.

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The Fox News Death Panel of Experts

Today I posted an image called "Fox News killed my mother." Because it did. It was the most widely circulated image I've ever posted. But, after about and hour I could no longer read any of the comments. Still can't. And some of you have messaged me to say you can't see it. So here it is again. This time, my explanation will be in the first comment instead of here. Basically my mother fell and refused to go to the doctor because she was afraid that "Obamacare" would get information about her and use it in their "death panels." Since then several of you shared identical experiences. This is how their fear mongering is killing our nation, one person at a time, one lie at a time.
-Tracy Knauss, Facebook

"FOX News is killing America one lie at a time, one life at a time. I know this personally," Knauss wrote in her comment. "FOX News killed my precious mother, Hallie. She watched FOX religiously. And when she fell ten days before she died, she refused to go to the doctor because, 'I don't want Obamacare to get all of my information!' she declared, recalling the warnings from FOX News 'anchors.' She was emphatic. She was not going to consort with the Muslim enemy. As she made out her will she told her lawyer, 'I don't want any of my money going to the Muslim Brotherhood!' And her last protestation dealt with 'Obama's death panels.' Mother died just days later. I hold FOX News responsible for my mother's death."

It seems the real death panel here is the panel of "experts" (otherwise known as "PR flacks") on any given Fox News program. This is the danger that not only Fox News presents, but the entire rightwing "news" industry and the Republican Party: when you lie to people about healthcare, bad things happen. It's really no different than being a snake-oil salesman -- except, for some reason, you aren't held responsible for the damage you cause.

But I'd go further here. Yes, Fox is the worst of the mainstream media -- followed by talk radio on the second tier and the wingnut blogosphere at the lowest -- but the supposedly "unbiased" media sources share a lot of the blame as well.

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Tucker Carlson v. Journalism

Tucker Carlson has an "exposé" out about Media Matters for America. Or at least that's what the wingnuts are calling it. I'd always thought that "exposé" wasn't a synonym for "stuff everyone already knows." What we learn is that Media Matters is on a crusade to discredit Fox News. This stunning revelation comes after MM's founder David Brock told Politico that his group was waging a "war on Fox" back in March of last year. So big news; Tucker's investigation discovered that Media Matters is waging a war on Fox.

I feel strangely unrocked by this revelation.

This seems to be an ongoing thing for Carlson's Daily Caller and today we learn that Media Matters had considered hiring investigators to look into the personal lives of Fox personalities and executives. The right may see this as shocking, but the rest of us will recognize it as investigative journalism. And, of course, yesterday Tucker reported that David Brock is kind of a weird guy -- which (assuming it's even true) means he investigated Brock's personal life. As always, it's only OK when conservatives do it.

We also learn that Media Matters is often in contact with the Obama administration. This is apparently terrible. Imagine if the Bush administration had hired talent from Fox News. I'm sure Tucker would be shocked -- if he had any memory at all.

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Why Won't Santorum be President?

Shortest post ever: because he's a ridiculous boob.

OK, so maybe not the shortest post ever. That's an accusation that requires a bit of explanation. You see, back in 2006, Rick was in a tough reelection race against Bob Casey. Things weren't going very well -- Santorum would later lose that election in a landslide -- and he needed to pull a rabbit out of his hat. So Santorum teamed up with Rep. Pete Hoekstra to declare that WMD had been found in Iraq.

Fox News:

The United States has found 500 chemical weapons in Iraq since 2003, and more weapons of mass destruction are likely to be uncovered, two Republican lawmakers said Wednesday.

"We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons," Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., said in a quickly called press conference late Wednesday afternoon.

Reading from a declassified portion of a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center, a Defense Department intelligence unit, Santorum said: "Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq's pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist."

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Fox News to GOP Candidates: 'No More Anti-Bailout Talk'

This video of Rick Perry being interviewed by Fox News' Neil Cavuto has been making the rounds, generally as evidence of how unprepared Perry is for anything in the neighborhood of a tough question. In the clip, Perry's regurgitating the typical GOP mumbo-jumbo about certainty and "investor confidence" being the most important thing for economic and job growth, while completely ignoring the indisputable fact that no one's going to invest in a business that has no customers. Supply and demand is set on its head, as always.

But of course the interesting part is when Perry starts ripping on the bailouts -- previously a fairly typical Republican line. And, until just a few weeks ago, a perfectly acceptable and politically correct one. But after the Occupy movement, it's apparently now verboten.



Yes, Perry's tiny little brain was incapable of processing what had just happened, so he just sat there silent, waiting for the interview to move on. I can't help but fill that silence with the sound of imaginary crickets chirping while rusty gears grind to a halt when I watch it.

But check that video again. Cavuto's crew had that clip loaded and ready to fire. It had previously been a matter of teabagger faith that the bailouts were bad, now it's practically the act of a Communist sympathizer to make that same argument. Cavuto's comment and the clip of Occupy Wall Street was a warning shot across Perry's bow. Perry's not likely to criticize the bailouts on Fox News again -- he obviously has no idea how to deal with the consequence.

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