Geraldo Rivera's Greatest Hits

by FUQUAMANUEL

As far as Fox News "personalities" go, Geraldo Rivera has always been the most palatable to me. Sean Hannity exudes a smugness unbefitting his accomplishments and intellectual abilities and bleats about "liberal double standards" and "media bias." When he furrows his brow just so and flashes that little smirk, it provokes a Pavlovian fist-through-TV response. Meanwhile, Bill O'Reilly is a bully, constitutionally incapable of recognizing the existence of arguments and perspectives that have not emerged from within his own prodigious skull.

Geraldo, on the other hand, possesses an earnestness and childlike exuberance which at least doesn't make him instantly repulsive. Of course, in his case the line between "earnestness and childlike exuberance" and "buffoonery" is rather blurry, but he seems like the FOX News personality I'd be least likely to get into a bar fight with if we were to one day sit down for drinks.

This is not to say that Geraldo's politics aren't repulsive, nor is it to excuse his desperate attempt to use the Trayvon Martin tragedy to catapult himself back to relevance when he blamed the young man's murder on something other than his murderer. "I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was," he said on Fox and Friends last Friday. He continued:

Dispatches from Libertopia: College Edition

College is a wonderful place. A community of people engaged in the same pursuits provides a welcoming environment that fosters speculation, intellectual adventure and novel risks. Perhaps credit for this falls on a positive context for self esteem or just on the suspicion that everyone else is equally frightened and prone to "fake it until they make it," but for many of us it's a rare chance to truly take conceptual leaps. Some of us shouldn't.

Sadly, for every kid who builds an airboat that runs off old McDonald's fryer oil, there are two pre-law Randroids who will militantly argue the affirmative case in, "Resolved: The United States should legalize indentured servitude for the benefit of poor people at or above the age of majority." Or there's a girl like Stephanie Grace, who employs that intellectual freedom to address whether black people possess subhuman intelligence, provided that one defines "human intelligence" as "white-people smart."

In fact, the abundance of bongs and the consequence-free collegiate bubble that repels the practical and harsh elements of reality often form the genesis of Libertarian sociopathy. Reality is a thought experiment; people and products are all numbers, and death, suffering, pain, neglect and contempt are just remainders that someone at George Mason or the University of Chicago with enough math degrees will eventually square away for good at no cost to the Libertarian explaining this.

Where Have You Gone, Glendolyn Beck? Joe Farah Turns His Lonely Eyes to You

Right-wing publisher Joseph Farah made headlines again for making things up. It's not much of a surprise, falling on the predictability axis somewhere around finding out that Lindsay Lohan was arrested behind a Tony Montana-sized pyramid of blow, or that Ben Roethlisberger forced entry to her house and then her pants. Friends of the site might remember Farah as the man behind both the ultra-conservative website World Net Daily and the idea that the birther rappers Wolverines weren't a total embarrassment.

What makes the current revelation about Farah's willingness to make shit up singular is that he boasted about it to a mainstream blogger who was in the process of trying to establish the parameters of World Net Daily's dishonesty in a published piece. Salon reporter Justin Elliott had already written about how Donald Trump's claims that Barack Obama had spent over $2 million to fight lawsuits from birthers weren't true, then turned his attention to the source of those claims, to further debunk Trump and whomever was spreading them.

Trump's claim was based on a series of stories on the right-wing and Birther news outlet, WorldNetDaily. I emailed WND editor and CEO Joseph Farah 90 minutes before my story was published to ask if he thought Trump's comments were accurate, and whether WND had evidence to back it up. After my piece came out, Farah angrily emailed me to take issue with my characterization of WND as "a discredited birther website." Our subsequent email exchange — in which Farah acknowledged that WND publishes "some misinformation by columnists," which he claimed all opinion journals do — is telling for what it says about the standards of one of the most influential news websites on the right.

I really recommend you go read the article, if only for the ample sources of previous made-up-hilarity from WND (including links to a Photoshopped picture that allegedly proves Obama wasn't somewhere, despite the fact that the person manipulating it forgot to matte out Obama's knee).

Farah's crowing about the standards of his own online newspaper damn himself and it for three reasons: contempt, his essential admission that even he acknowledges his own paper's regular illegitimacy, and bad, bad timing. The last is harder to explain, but the first two are fairly easy. In fact, the contempt part is glaring.

'Raise your hand if you love freedom. Notice your dead mom didn't move a muscle, kid.'

Here's the story so far: Marcelas Owens is 11 years old and doesn't have a mom. She developed pulmonary hypertension, a potentially fatal but very treatable disease. Because she got sick, she lost her job. Because she lost her job, she lost her healthcare. Because she lost her healthcare, she lost her (potential) access to treatment. Because she lost her access to treatment, she lost her life.

A month ago, Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash) told Marcelas and his mother Tifanny's story to President Obama as an illustrative tale of how fragile people's lives and economies are without healthcare. This week, conservatives responded by telling an 11-year-old that his mom should have pulled herself up by her healthstraps and got undead, like, doublequick. She's just lazy. She lies around on her back all day.

Their response combines the best of ignorance, self-serving fabricated victimization and imperial unconcern with the little things, like whether someone lives or dies. Let's go to the McClatchy article on the subject, which describes their behavior as "ridicule":

FOX News Poll: Gauging What We Told You Your Opinion Was

There's a poll up at FOX News right now about the healthcare vote. I don't usually read their site very much, but a friend who was trying to induce an Eastern European art-film level of despair in himself visited it today just to look at the paranoid ignorance of the comments section. While there, he spotted this awesome poll (a picture of it is posted below right, in case FOX decides to take it down):

YOU DECIDE
Health Care on Track for a Vote: Will It Pass?

• Yes -- Obama and Pelosi are doing whatever it takes to make this law.
• No -- In the words of Tip O'Neill: 'All politics is local' -- and us 'locals' are ready to toss the 'yes' voters.
• Not sure -- Either way the system needs reform.
• I don't care -- We no longer have a say in what our 'representatives' do.
• Other (post a comment)

Now, obviously this poll has substantial problems. The data it gathers is of no use to anybody. Asking the American people whether a bill will pass is a pretty stupid way of predicting a vote's outcome. There are only about 500+ people whose replies are going to be helpful at all, so really it's sort of like polling people today about who's going to win the 2009 World Series.

Maybe that's what they mean by the line at the bottom that, "This is not a scientific poll." Science is untrustworthy; poll the controversy.

What's fascinating here is that FOX News evidently isn't interested in its viewers' opinions even when it asks for them. The process of taking this poll doesn't mean selecting one action or another or advocating an outcome: it means selecting something because this must be what you already believe about it. It's quite impressive, actually. They've managed to transform the process of asking someone what they think into one of telling them whatever that might be. You have to admire a level of framing that manages to convert interrogatives to a list of imperative talking points.

The Swiss Are Assholes

Poor Muammar Qaddafi. First, no one can spell his name the same way from year to year. In fact, I'm pretty sure I had to switch spellings during semesters in college once. Also, "Khadafy" looked way cooler, kind of like a split between Wrath of Khan and a blaxsploitation film. Second, he spent a good chunk of the 2000s being a poster boy for the efficacy of the Bush Doctrine after he renounced terrorism. But then he made one nutty UN speech, got a new president who didn't need him to prop up the notion that "the bombs-away system works!" and suddenly he's no longer that necessary.

Third, he can't even beat his servants in a Swiss hotel. What a bunch of bullshit. Look, you don't keep running a shithole like Libya for the money. If you want to run a country with shaky economic development, tribal conflict, violent crime and an arid climate just for the money, eventually you pull a Carlos Salinas de Gortari, rob the company store and set yourself up in a bigass house in Ireland, where there's water, beer and redheads who are reliably crazy in the right room of the house.

No, you run Libya for the perks: getting to use swords, firing guns in the air, buying really old missiles and whaling on dudes. I can't even comprehend how the Swiss don't get that last part. They spent 1300-1550 kicking the shit out of everyone in Europe for the money, mainly jabbing them with sticks. Then they got so bored they spent the next 450 years basically daring anyone to fuck with Popes just for another excuse to do something. The Swiss are assholes.

9/12 Postscript: FOX News Has a Pep Rally

From the Completely Unsurprising Files:

FOX News spent a large portion of this past week disingenuously castigating other networks for "not covering" the 9/12 protests. This despite ample evidence that pretty much all outlets either broadcast or printed a thrice-told story about a group of people that comprised no more than 0.057% of the total votes in the 2008 election whining about how they represent the real will of America. Perhaps what FOX meant was that other networks didn't cover the 9/12 protests with anything like the enthusiasm FOX exhibits. For instance, at the April 15 protests, FOX set up stages and gave away $500,000 in free advertising, to say nothing of fawning coverage of this new "movement" in the days preceding and following the protest.

White America's Inconvenience Tantrum, Part IV: The 9/12 Project—Building a Bridge to Nowhere with Fractions of Sense

Forgive my not watching Glenn Beck on Saturday, when he and his Freep-mustachioed army crossed the Potomac, entered the city, cast the congressmen out of the Temple of America and ratified the new Bible of Rights with blood taken from the incorruptible corpse of Ayn Rand, all to finally defeat 9/11. His 9/12 Project came off exactly as expected. By that, I mean nothing happened, but it was really loud, obnoxious and ignorant in the service of nothing.

I can barely handle the man in the best circumstances, and I wasn't going to try while hungover. I needn't have bothered anyway. Beck repeats himself ad nauseam, and there's really no reason to devote new effort to record his mass-distributed hysteria. The purpose of Beck's 9/12 Project is to bring America back to the way we all felt on the day after 9/11, but Beck is mistaken about almost every detail.

At the time, the United States reeled from violent dislocation, banded together to save even the least of our own from the direst straits and in the process cast off political labels for a temporary unity of purpose. Beck's crusade, however, demonizes taxes as slavery, lawful representation as criminal usurpation, Democrats as complicit with terrorists, the president as alternately Stalin or Hitler and pretty much everything he doesn't approve of as apocalyptically dire.

Because I've written about the teaparties of April 15, Beck's live broadcast on the same day and the July 4 teaparties, it's a waste of my time and yours to go into their particular ills with the same level of detail again. What you need to know about what happened on 9/12 are the following three things:

Nobody Puts Becky in a Corner

On July 28, Glenn Beck said on FOX News morning show Fox and Friends that he thinks Barack Obama is a racist and hates white people. This brings the grand total of closet racist minorities outed by FOX and other pundits to two, including Sonya Sotomayor, who viciously and unconscionably suggested that minorities might be more attuned to minority issues than white men. This comment further reinforced suspicions of Obama's racism. How could he be planning to name such a racist to the court instead of choosing amongst underprivileged white males, who had previously accounted for a mere 106 out of 111 justices in history?

You'd hope that cooler heads would prevail, but in ensuing weeks, radical left-wing splinter groups like GMAC Financial Services, ConAgra Foods, Geico Insurance, P&G, Progressive Insurance, Roche, Sanofi Aventis, RadioShack, Men's Wearhouse, Lawyers.com and Sargento Cheese have pulled their ad spots from Beck's show, no doubt cribbing from some Guerrilla Corporate Sponsorship checklist in Mao's Little Red Book. Beck is embattled, or so it would seem.

America's Going Down the Tubes from All This Inter-Species WOP-Mick Miscegenation

Poor Brian Kilmeade. It's bad enough to be a pube-headed witless douchebag with the sort of pale fleshy lips you usually only see on fat animated Germans screaming for hasenpfeffer or on fat uniformed Germans sulking in the dock at Nuremberg. It's worse to be such an obvious closet case on the official cable network of GOD HATES FAGS. But worst of all now he apparently thinks ethnic groups are different species and that we endanger our health via race-mixing.

White America's Inconvenience Tantrum, Part III: A Pictorial Roundup of the Obese Shuffle of the Ignorant and Damned

Yesterday, while any reasonable person in America was busy spending time with friends, drinking cold beer and eating large amounts of animal parts, a subset of this great nation apparently began the day with posterboard, magic marker and loyalty oaths. While others entertained themselves, these patriots were busy making sure everyone else would be entertained by them throughout the week. Because it would require the intervention of a bored and capricious greek god to make the July 4th tea party protests any more of a sublimely humorous collision of ironies than they already are.

First of all, you have hundreds of people holding up images of Barack Obama as a leader of a cult of personality, implying that he thinks himself a godhead and that liberals worship him. Meanwhile, they're wearing Sarah Palin t-shirts, other Sarah Palin t-shirts, holding Sarah Palin bumper stickers, holding up Sarah Palin lipstick references, wearing Sarah Palin campaign signs, and waving countless handwritten signs sending her messages like "Run, Sarah, Run!" despite Palin's not being affiliated with the tea parties in any official capacity whatsoever.

And as if that irony weren't enough, there's the fact that her recent resignation from Alaska's governorship so dominated the holiday news cycle that it pushed their largely meaningless demonstration from the News in Brief sections of virtually every mainstream outlet and off their pages entirely. Their hero not only quit on them; she obliterated almost all traces of their relevance to the media. Nevermind the further irony that said heroes' state relies on government pork handouts for its own existence and practices a socialistic redistribution of wealth from energy profits.

Then, just when you think there can't possibly be any more ironies, there's the fact that a group of people who claim to "surround them" (whoever they are) managed to mobilize perhaps a tenth of the 3 million people they commanded on April 15th. Of course, on April 15th, their powerful grassroots movement had been promoted for three consecutive days on FOX news, with over $500,000 of free advertising time on that network, with that network setting up staging areas and on-location shows with live cameras. That, and the whole thing was funded and organized by an astroturf group created by Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey. But once you strip away niggling facts like no longer having millions in organizing and advertising capacity or the inducement of being able to get on live TV with news celebrities, these groups really do speak with the Voice of the People. About 1/1,000th of them, if we're generous.

There is just so much irony to work with, even at a glance. For instance, you have:

Glenn Beck Literally Plays with Dolls

At what point does it start being scary for everyone that a headline like that is immediately believable? It's true, but there are probably still a few scattered millions who would look at it and think, "Naaah, that's gotta be some kind of joke." With each passing week, the few remaining Glenn Beck headlines that would cause me to feel doubt about their veracity get stricken from the list. I think all I've got left are:

Beck Eats Live Frog on TV to Illustrate Lesson About Federal Reserve

Beck Dresses in Waitress Garb Like Sookie Stackhouse,

Reads Founding Fathers' Minds for 1 Hour

Beck's Tear Ducts Secrete Raw Cookie Dough;

'Strains of Job Taking Their Toll House,' Say Doctors

and

Beck Behaves Like Normal Goddamn Human Being for 15 Minutes

The last one — it's the last one that's never coming off my list.

Republicans Literally Reduced to Name-Calling

I actually had to verify this, then re-verify this, then — screw it, just to be sure — go back and look at both sources and rub my eyes with my fists like a Warner Brothers cartoon character stranded in a boat with Foghorn Leghorn as he slowly morphed between being a giant feathered chicken and a Kenny Rogers Roaster.

From Greg Sargent's The Plumline blog:

Over a dozen members of the conservative wing of the RNC have submitted a new resolution, to be eventually voted on by the entire RNC, that would call on the Democratic party to rename itself the “Democrat Socialist Party.” If the RNC adopts this resolution, the RNC’s official view would become that Democrats are socialists. From the resolution:

RESOLVED, that we the members of the Republican National Committee call on the Democratic Party to be truthful and honest with the American people by acknowledging that they have evolved from a party of tax and spend to a party of tax and nationalize and, therefore, should agree to rename themselves the Democrat Socialist Party.

Liveblogging White America's Inconvenience Tantrum, Part I: A Tea Party Overview

Click here to jump to Part II.

"It's a one-day protest aimed at nothing Barack Obama has actually done. It is aimed at the tax code imposed on this country by a republican congress and a republican president who was previously the champion of exactly these protestors. And so it is a completely wrongheaded approach to what's going on. They've picked April 15 as Rage Day for taxpayers, and there's not a single taxpayer out there who is paying a new Barack Obama tax rate. That doesn't exist."
— Lawrence O'Donnell, former Democratic Chief of Staff of the United States Senate Committee on Finance from 1993-5, HuffPo Contributor

Despite being surrounded and born free yet taxed to death, I had sort of a great tax day because of the tea party protests. Never has there been such a perfect storm of bad current events, bad history, bad English and bad taste. Then I remembered that it exemplified bad citizenship and even worse humanity and fell, unavoidably, into a bad mood.

I'll get to the liveblogging in Part II, but there are so many things wrong here that the most pressing question is which aspect to talk about first. Besides, of course, wondering whether "Finding the Black Person at the Tea Party" manages to shatter the futility scale for racial-equality parlor games.

Liveblogging White America's Inconvenience Tantrum, Part II: An Hour of Glenn Beck, Plus Pictures!

If you haven't read it, please click here for Part I.

This is the worst part. The actual transcription. I tune in early, so I catch the last half hour of Cavuto's show. I'm not sure what it's called. Body-Bag of Freedom, or All 50 States of the Entire World with Neil Cavuto or something. Sounds right. I don't know. The bit I see is revelatory, for three reasons.

One, Neil asks a pre-teen what he thinks about having his future mortgaged by the democratic party, without noticing that his mom's doing a perfectly good job of that already by yanking him out of school to learn lessons in Things That Bear No Resemblance to American History and, of course, How to Fuck Up A Protest. From where I sit, it looks like the kid would be happier scrolling the Facebook feed of all the girls he's in school with who've hit at least B-cups by now.

'The Daily Show' and Jon Stewart Need to Decide What to Do with Their Cake

I've gone back and forth all day on how I feel about the Jon Stewart/Jim Cramer interview on The Daily Show last night. I question the edits the show made in order to fit it on the air. They made Stewart look better and Cramer look worse. The unedited version is far better but also unbalanced in terms of focus, which does Stewart and The Daily Show no credit.

They seem to single out CNBC as if it exemplifies a unique failure of journalism, which is mistaken, especially given that they turn a blind eye to similar failures elsewhere. More critically, it seems as if Stewart wants to pop his head out to play pundit only long enough to voice an opinion before ducking behind the comedy show format to enable him to keep sniping at punditry itself.

Both attitudes are problematic. But before we get there, watch the unedited interview. Here it is, if you haven't seen it:

Chuck Norris Is Apparently Dangerously Insane

It's the internet's fault that Chuck Norris ever again approached relevancy to anyone. In 2005, SomethingAwful spawned the phenomenon of making up fake facts about Norris' supposed rugged inability to be stopped, riffing off the old Saturday Night Live "Bill Brasky" sketch where a bunch of salesman tell taller and taller tales about a preternaturally strong/sexy/alcoholic colleague. Unfortunately, like a lot of stupid shit at SomethingAwful, while members there abandoned the joke as repetitive and stupid, the rest of the internet cleaved to it and ran it into the ground for a full year. Then it died.

But, in 2007, in accordance with their policy of boldly solving tomorrow's solutions with yesterday's detritus, the republican party rescued Norris from imprisonment in his Total Gym full-body workout system and propped him up on FOX News, where his complete absence of political education and naked contempt for non-Christians and gays made him blend right in — while his actually having fought somebody at sometime in the past forty years gave him orders of magnitude more combat experience than their brigade of loudmouthed chickenhawks. From there, it was a short step to the Huckabee campaign, where somehow a guy who played bass on the campaign trail and heard one of his kids brag, "There's not a Huckabee alive who can eat at Taco Bell for seven dollars," had the remainder of his dignity stolen from him by a pop-cultural punchline.