FOX & 'friends'
By Kevin Uhrich 03/06/2008
Is it just us, or is FOX News backhandedly promoting Barack Obama's presidential campaign?
Hey, don't get the wrong idea. We think it's great that not everyone with this arch-conservative "news" network is howling disapproval over the first viable African-American presidential candidate.
Then again, maybe it's good to be a little bit paranoid about what the folks at FOX are putting on the air.
For instance, we know that Obama's been feuding with the network over its recently debunked claim that the candidate attended a Madrassa, a school for radical Muslims, as a child in Indonesia. But other than that, it appears the best thing that FOX can do to discredit Obama is compare him with Hillary Clinton, which former Bill Clinton strategist and current GOP shill Dick Morris, along with Eileen McGann, did in a column for foxnews.com.
"Hillary and her boys realize that all that Obama has to sell is his purity. He's like Evian water. He has no particular taste, he's just the un-cola - the opposite of the vicious, destructive, partisan politics that pervades our country and turns off the voters. Purity is a high standard," McGann and Morris, himself a longtime veteran of divisive partisan politics and embarrassing sexual indiscretions, wrote without a hint of shame or irony, "particularly for a politician, especially for one who is running against a Clinton. And purity is the easiest thing to sully. Just a drop of ink in a bottle of Evian makes it ‘dirty' and undrinkable."
Since when does being called "pure" as water from the French Alps by one of the dirtiest players in American politics amount to a slur?
Knowing that FOX really is different - more of a GOP mouthpiece than a real news agency - what else might this unusual approach to "covering" Obama's campaign be telling us?
Just as the guys running FOX - Rupert Murdoch, members of the Bush Clan and other top GOP operatives, like FOX News President and CEO Roger Ailes - are being largely non-critical of Obama's policy positions at this stage, they remain relentlessly nasty toward candidate Clinton, evidenced by the column co-written by the insipid Morris.
Not that there is anything unlikable about Obama, a generally unknown political quantity prior to this campaign who has won the hearts and imaginations of millions.
But the truth is FOX doesn't just dislike Clinton; they fear her, mainly because 1) Clinton has been fighting and more often than not winning an ongoing ideological war with conservative Republicans like Murdoch and Ailes for the past several decades, and 2) FOX knows what most people are afraid to admit: That America remains more of a racist than sexist country.
Sure, Obama swept 11 primaries and caucuses prior to Tuesday's election. But let's remember that those are voting Democrats mostly living in predominantly Republican states, and when the time comes for the final showdown, those same conservative states will likely go for McCain.
The folks at FOX are confident that McCain could beat Obama in the general election, just as they believe that Clinton would stand a much better chance of winning in November.
How does that old saying go? The enemy of my enemy is really my friend?
Obama may come to learn that lesson the hard way if he wins the nomination, when the time comes for FOX to show its true colors by never mentioning his name without using his middle name, Hussein, and drumming on his ancestral Muslim roots, which FOX will undoubtedly resort to doing in order to transcend any "blackness" Obama might have exuded during the primaries.
Paranoid? Hardly, considering at FOX predicting and then orchestrating the news is apparently just one small step away from creating it for public consumption.
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