No Stopping Herr Trumpf Now-- Who's To Blame?

Remember the bright red "Keep Calm It Won't Be Trump" memes floating around the internet as recently as two weeks ago? No more. Geoff Garin, head of Hart Research polled 160 political insiders about who they expected to see win the Republican nomination. Way back in October, 8% had chosen Herr Trumpf. Now 59% say the GOP nominee will be Herr. 18% say Rubio-- who has fallen to slipping under the waves in all the new polls of New Hampshire Republicans-- and 16% say Cruz.

Our own informal poll of DWT readers show the majority are hoping for a deadlocked-- brokered-- GOP convention in Cleveland in July, in which no candidate has the 1,237 delegates to win on the first ballot. It isn't so much that they want to see Paul Ryan emerge as the nominee-- a likely outcome, and one GOP billionaires are financing right now-- as it is the expectation of a gun battle inside the convention hall when the Trumpf fans figure out the establishment is stealing the nomination from the only man who can make America great again. (Yes, Ohio has a concealed carry law and guns will be allowed into the Republican convention.)

This week, Reid Epstein, writing for the Wall Street Journal outlined the scenario that will lead to the gun battle likely to wipe out the Republican Party once and for all. Epstein sees several dynamics at play:

• the crowded field, formerly known as the "deep bench"
• Herr Trumpf's ability to energize unaffiliated fascist voters looking for a fuehrer
• the take over of the GOP by the Old Confederacy and the redrawn primary map that gives more sway to Southern states that back nominees who aren’t acceptable to normal people
• the GOP's new way of counting delegates in early contests that will spread them out among the competitors, preventing anyone from separating from the pack

Remember of the 1,237 delegates needed to win, only 133 are being chosen in the 4 early states the media (and the candidates) are obsessing over. The March 1 Confederate Super Tuesday counts for around 600 delegates, "awarded proportinally based on the percentage of the votes the candidates receive, making it likely that one candidate won’t be able to build an insurmountable lead over a crowded field in which several contestants are accruing delegates."

Even if one candidate wins 40% of the delegates awarded by March 15, he or she would have less than one-half of the necessary delegates to win the nomination.

If the leader at that point is a social conservative like Mr. Cruz, the road to Cleveland will be difficult: No Southern states vote after March 15, making a comeback possible in the Midwest and Northeast for an establishment candidate, should one survive. March 15 also brings the first winner-take-all states: Florida (99 delegates) and Ohio (66).

The last real chance for candidates to become the presumptive nominee comes in late April, when New York and five other Northeastern states hold primaries. There are few chances after that to run up large delegate numbers. The biggest prize on the calendar comes at the end, when California votes June 7. But that state, like New York earlier, will award its 172 delegates proportionally by congressional district, forcing candidates competing there to plan strategy based on how many votes they can win in areas like Los Angeles, with comparatively few Republican voters but many delegates, that haven’t seen a contested presidential primary contest in generations.

Delegates won during the primary season are obligated to vote for their candidate only on the party’s first ballot at the July convention. If no candidate wins a majority in that tally, the delegates would be free to vote for whomever they like, creating the possibility of a free-for-all when GOP delegates gather at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland starting on July 18.

They stole the GOP away from the establishment

And that's where the guns start blazing. Except the scenario is all wrong. Despite the best efforts of the GOP establishment, Herr Trumpf is going to walk into the Quicken Loans Arena with the 1,237 delegates he needs because he will be unstoppable-- as Ted Cruz predicted glumly-- after he sweeps Iowa (once Cruz country), New Hampshire (once Jeb or Rubio or Christie or Kasich country), South Carolina (once Cruz or Bush country) and Nevada (once Rubio or Bush country).

At Politico Alex Isenstadt looked at the finger-pointing inside the Republican establishment as they all blame the rise of Herr Trumpf on each other and as they see control of their little racket-- the Republican Party-- slip through their fingers. "The chiding," he wrote, "once limited to private conversations, is now erupting in public view-- with campaigns, operatives, donors, party officials and conservative intellectuals arguing over why something hasn’t been done to stop the man who has been leading nearly every state and national poll since August. Trump, many in the GOP’s upper ranks are convinced, would lead the Republican Party to an epic defeat in November, with consequences all the way down the ballot." They all agree on one thing: "This whole thing is a disaster." Many people blame Jeb whose SuperPAC hasn't deployed effectively against Trumpf but used millions of dollars attacking the hapless Rubio and the other hopeless also-rans. There's a lot of insider hate being directed towards Jeb's selfish, greed-obsessed, incompetent hatchet man, Mike Murphy.

Yet others say it’s unfair to solely blame Bush-- and that Rubio is just as culpable. Despite winning the support of an array of deep-pocketed donors, including hedge fund manager Paul Singer and tech titan Larry Ellison, Rubio has and his allies have done little to attack Trump. Of the $33 million that Rubio and the super PACs supporting him have spent on television ads, none of it has been against Trump. He rarely tweets about Trump, and when asked about him in interviews, Rubio tends to dodge the question.

“He has been afraid to criticize Trump for fear of being attacked unless directly put on the spot by a reporter,” said Tim Miller, a Bush spokesman.

Still others fault Ted Cruz, who spent months cuddling up to Trump in hopes of scooping up his supporters. Only this week, as he saw his lead slipping away in Iowa, did Cruz and several of his super PACs launch hard-hitting TV ads castigating the Manhattan billionaire as a New York liberal who couldn’t be trusted on hot-button social issues like abortion.

The anti-Trump barrage may be too little, too late, many Republicans fear.

“Cruz's crew should’ve done it. It was incredibly shortsighted. The longer [Trump] goes, the harder he is to kill,” said Brad Todd, a veteran Republican strategist who until recently worked for a super PAC that supported Bobby Jindal’s presidential campaign. “Now they are locked in a death match with a short clock, and their money is worth less than it would be when the air was clear and Trump's fans were just flirting.”

But it’s not just campaigns that are coming under fire-- it’s also donors, many of whom were presented with the opportunity to go after Trump but didn’t pull the trigger. Among those pushing to launch a serious anti-Trump campaign was Alex Castellanos, a veteran GOP strategist who was a top adviser to Mitt Romney. Last year, Castellanos visited a number of top GOP donors, operatives and lobbyists in an attempt to find financial support for a proposed TV ad campaign that was to cost in the eight-figure range.

Often a carrying a personal laptop into meetings, Castellanos laid out a detailed plan for a negative ad blitz against Trump, casting him as a flawed strongman. Yet those familiar with the effort say Castellanos, who spent hours venturing into New York and Washington offices, was met with disinterest from donors, who gave a variety of reasons for not wanting to open their checkbooks. Some predicted that Trump would collapse by the sheer weight of political gravity. Others said they had business interests with the front-runner, or expressed fear of retribution.

“Some donors are wonderful, but others have been saps during this entire process,” said Anderson. “If you want to know how to lose elections, the first people who you should talk to are the Republican Party’s major donors.”

Much frustration has been directed at the RNC, which some believe has been pushed around by the party’s surprise poll-leader. Last year, many cringed when RNC Chairman Reince Priebus traveled to New York City to meet with Trump when he signed a pledge to support the eventual GOP nominee. And when the RNC dropped National Review last week as a sponsor for a forthcoming debate, fans of the magazine’s anti-Trump special issue saw fear at work.

“My sense is that most rational RNC members hope Trump is not our nominee but do not want to upset him in case he is the GOP nominee,” said Al Cardenas, a former Florida Republican Party and American Conservative Union chairman who supports Bush. “The challenge is that while the RNC and others play this strategy out, the odds improve that Trump will be the nominee without an organized opposition to his candidacy beyond his rivals in the primary.”

...Sally Bradshaw, a longtime top Bush adviser who helped write the report, blamed a "lack of courage in our party" for the failure to take on Trump, as Bush has. She called Trump a “bigot” and said he “couldn’t unite our party and bring women, Hispanics and independent voters into the fold.”

“We won’t beat Hillary Clinton with Donald Trump as the nominee,” she added. “It doesn’t take a whiz-bang political data scientist to figure that out."

They're still sitting around with their fingers up their asses as their party has been hijacked. Jeb's newest theme is that Trumpf isn't a true Christian, the same ugly accusation Huckabee's SuperPAC (funded by Ronald Cameron, a rich chicken processor from Little Rock and Sharon Herschend owner/operator of Dollywood, Silver Dollar City in Branson, Wild Adventures in Valdosta, Georgia, the Harlem Globetrotters brand, Ride the Ducks, and Stone Mountain, the Confederate Mount Rushmore and a birthplace of the KKK) is making about Ted Cruz. Watch this hideous ad running in Iowa and you'll understand why it was so easy for a hustler from New York to take the Republican Party right out of their hands without breaking a sweat:



Right-wing nut Jonah Goldberg, writing in the L.A. Times was weeping bitterly over the conservative crackup-- the loss of the right's philosophical coherence and its s imminent demise-- he sees roiling his dark horrible world. He blames Herr Trumpf-- and the "fierce internecine battle over whether to oppose Trump's run, passively accept his popularity, or zealously support his bid."

The level of distrust among many of the different factions of the conservative coalition has never been higher, at least not in my experience. Arguments don't seem to matter, only motives do... [T]he GOP establishment has become so corrupted, its members would knowingly reject a savior just to protect their comfortable way of life... There's no shortage of reasons for why the right is at war over whether or not to take a flier on Trump. All of the various establishments and the counter-establishments over-promised and under-delivered in recent years. Cruz and his supporters accused his fellow politicians of being corrupt sell-outs and so many people believed him, they'd now rather take a gamble on Trump than back Cruz, a mere politician.

Eric Boehlert has been more than happy to explain how the Republican Party is getting burned by the implosion of the right-wing noise machine. "What's inescapable about the mounting GOP hand wringing," he wrote, "is that Trump is a right-wing media creation. He's flourishing on the fertile playing field of bigotry and resentment that National Review, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and a litany of others, have helped seed for many years. There's little doubt that during President Obama's two terms they cultivated an anti-intellectual movement that now appears poised to seize control of the Republican Party." And their civil war is getting bloodier by the way.

On one side, Trump's denounced as a "vicious demagogue," a "con man," a "glib egomaniac," and "the very epitome of vulgarity." On the other side, Trump's army has derided National Review as out of touch, and accused the magazine of cozying up to "open border zealots," a cardinal sin on the right.

None of that disguises the fact that Trump is the monster the Noise Machine created by encouraging bigoted and dishonest forces within the conservative movement; by giving credence to the three year Benghazi cover-up charade, the two year IRS witch hunt, by fueling ugly passions about Obama wanting to take away everyone's guns, and by arguing he's uninterested in defending America's national security.

For years, lots of conservative pundits and talkers cashed large, and in some cases very large, paychecks feeding this ugly beast. Now the beast is beyond their control and they're going to whine all the way to New Hampshire?

Call it the perils of Obama Derangement Syndrome.

Conservative John Ziegler saw this media-enable crack-up coming months ago:

Thanks to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Matt Drudge, Sarah Palin, a website named "Breitbart," and certain elements of Fox News (all of whom have both pushed and ridden the Trump bandwagon for selfish commercial purposes), the conservative base is living under several important delusions which has allowed for "Trumpsanity" to foster and grow.

The Right Wing Noise Machine was revved up to 11 during the Obama years in an effort to destroy his presidency. In the end, the Noise Machine's lasting contribution, in the form of a Trump nominee, may be assuring that Obama hands the White House over to another Democrat.

Will Paul Ryan Save The GOP? Are You Kidding?

Inside the Republican conference, when the GOP had their secret vote to see who the party nominee would nominate for Speaker, 45 Republicans couldn't bring themselves to vote for Ryan, many of them crackpots he had cultivated for years by giving them fat checks from his personal ProsperityAction PAC, funded by the Wall Street interests who have nurtured him for many, many years. He got 200 votes, not enough to win the Speakership the next day. But it was clear that most of the opponents would switch their votes on the floor and help elect Ryan Speaker. And they did; 236 Republicans voted for Ryan and only 9 crackpot extremists went for Daniel "Taliban Dan" Webster:

• David Brat (R-VA)
• Curt Clawson (R-FL)
• Louie Gohmert (R-TX)
• Paul Gosar (R-AZ)
• Walter Jones (R-NC)
• Thomas Massie (R-KY)
• Bill Posey (R-FL)
• Randy Weber (R-TX)
• Ted Yoho (R-FL)

I'll mention that Pelosi got 184 votes, only three very right-wing Blue Dogs-- Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), Gwen Graham (FL) and Jim Cooper (TN)-- voting against her. The vote for Ryan puts a far right extremist in the 3rd most powerful political position in America, one who is completely beholden to what Bernie refers to as "the billionaire class," which has nurtured his career ever since he was a trainer in a gym. The video up top gives a hint of what's scary about Speaker Ryan, who has been the loudest-- albeit craftiest-- advocate for eviscerating Medicare of anyone in Congress. The Beltway media has very much bought into his carefully designed persona as a somewhat mainstream, non-ideological intellectual. Nothing could be further from the truth... unless being obsessed with Ayn Rand's adolescent inanities make you an intellectual and unless smiling sweetly while presenting a budget plan to turn Medicare into an inadequate and deadly voucher system in order to lower taxes on the rich is "non-ideological."



But in their relentless and spectacularly successful crusade to move the political center further right, the Republican media has ostensibly abandoned Ryan as a squish. Eric Boehlert saw through the ruse immediately:

When newly-elected Speaker of the House Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) was picked by Mitt Romney to be his running mate in 2012, right-wing media were ecstatic. Cheered by Ryan's sterling conservative credentials, far right commentators celebrated that one of their own has been added to the ticket.

Rush Limbaugh: "I don't remember a vice presidential pick that has so energized a campaign as this choice of Paul Ryan."

Glenn Beck: "Mitt Romney has picked a solid, smart conservative for his vice-presidential running mate."

Laura Ingraham: "More than anything today, we need a man with courage and clear-thinking. Ryan has both."

Mark Levin: "Paul Ryan is an excellent VP choice."

Fast forward just three years and those same commentators are now raising doubts about Ryan, when not outright trashing him in public. Ryan's sudden sin?  Not being sufficiently conservative; not passing the purity test.

Limbaugh: "This whole Ryan thing hasn't made any sense to me from the first moment I heard about it."

Beck: "The 'fix' the republic needs is Paul Ryan? The man who never met a bailout he didn't like? A man who asked to be made king? 100% support and you can't vote him out? Your solution is MORE POWER FOR THE SPEAKER?!?!?!?"

Levin: "NOT SO FAST! Paul Ryan an amnesty advocate"

Ingraham: "From misrepresenting the outrageous Fast Track &TPP to amnesty & foreign workers, list of demands, Ryan's possibly the worst Spkr choice."

Ryan's amazing free-fall from grace seems to be part of a larger race to the radical right, not only among powerful forces with the Republican Party, which now seem to be fundamentally opposed to governing and legislating, but also within key portions of the right-wing media. There seems to be a mini-stampede underway towards an extremist destination rarely seen in mainstream American politics. And for parts of the conservative media that means now demonizing former heroes like Paul Ryan.

"Conservative talk show hosts, including Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, have already denounced him as a dangerous moderate," according to Doyle McManus at the Los Angeles Times. "Tea party organizations are already raising money from supporters with appeals to stop any more Ryanesque budget deals."

...• "He is the wrong man at the wrong time."  [American Thinker]
• "Paul Ryan represents one of the absolute worst outcomes for conservatives. " [Conservative Review]
• "Despite his portrayal by the media as being conservative, most actual conservatives in the House know that Ryan isn't a conservative." [Breitbart]

And, yet, policy-wise, nothing has changed. The right-wing purity test is more toxic than it has ever been in American history. Even their greatest hero, Reagan, would be on his way back to the Democratic Party if this crew of grifters, profiteers and lunatic fringe sociopaths ever got their hands on him. Ryan wants to privatize Social Security and phase out Medicare. He wants their super-rich donors to pay laughable tax rates and he's all for shrinking the size of government so that it can be drown in a bathtub. That isn't enough for them? Nope, not as crazy and self-referential as they've become today.

It's going to take a Goldwater-sized thrashing to wake up the GOP-- and that's probably coming courtesy of Ted Cruz. I wasn't that interested in the horse-race aspects of the new Reuters-Ipsos poll released yesterday but I found the chart just above interesting. Depending on what priorities issies-voters put on various issues, it looks like there could be a giant Democratic Party tsunami headed this way next year. Among voters whose top issues are Israel, Iran, Syria, the war on terror, the deficit and foreign policy, the GOP has a slight advantage. Like, of the several hundred voters who will turn out at the polls in 2016, 53% of them will vote for the GOP and 47% for the Democrats (all things being equal). On the other hand, if a voter is motivated by women's rights, marriage equality, the environment, education, Medicare, healthcare, Social Security, energy policy, small business, and jobs... advantage Democrats. How much advantage? Well voters for whom women's issues are the top priority-- probably a few more than for whom Syria is-- will give the Democrats 75% of their vote and... let's see... what's left over for the GOP? Oh yeah, 25%. Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, any Bushs, Romneys, Kochs... YES!

How Vain Is Trey Gowdy-- And Don't Call It Plastic Surgery

The congressman who represents the two most backward counties in South Carolina, Greenville and Spartanburg, is 51 year old fashion-plate Trey Gowdy. Gowdy first came to Congress as a page sponsored by vicious racist Strom Thurmond. It's not clear if he's one of the pages who laid with Mark Foley or not, but Gowdy had fun as a page and decided he wanted to grow up to be a real congressman. He got his chance in 2010 when mainstream conservative Bob Inglis hinted that Climate Change might be real. One of the stupidest people ever elected to Congress, Gowdy painted Inglis as a tree-hugging communist and defeated the 6-term congressman 71-29% in the GOP runoff primary. No one has ever accused Gowdy of being mainstream-- or even having a functioning brain. But, less known, is his addiction to cosmetic dermatology. Look at the picture up top. That's what he looked like before all the injections of filler, Botox, laser resurfacing, etc. The work he's had done is pretty good except for the translucent facial skin and the overdone forehead which doesn't move and prevents him from making expressions, probably because he harassed his doctor for more Botox than he needed.

One of the most prominent cosmetic dermatologists in Florida told us that "Gowdy's had multiple laser resurfacing procedures and cosmetic injectable fillers in his laugh lines. He has had cosmetic filler in his cheeks and his cheekbones were definitely filled-in and shaped. As you can see, he started with Botox and laser and turned to cosmetic filler. You can clearly see he bad laugh lines and crows feet around his eyes. As time went by, his forehead became very smooth. He has a good cosmetic dermatologist, I'll give him that. He is clearly obsessed with how he looks. What other male politician radically changed their hair and facial hair like that?"

A friend of his from Spartanburg High School in the early '80s told us that Gowdy was kind of known as a dumbbell in school but was a snazzy dresser and that people thought "he'd be gay if he wasn't such a Baptist fanatic." Right now he's facing ethics charges-- brought against him by Alan Grayson after Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy accidentally admitted on tape that Gowdy's Benghazi Committee is just a partisan witch hunt against Hillary Clinton and unrelated to Benghazi-- and spends his time whining about how the world is misjudging him. The hyper-partisanship has been confirmed by Republican Congressman Richard Hanna and by a GOP investigator who was fired when he refused to "get" Hillary. He may not be as brazen as Carly Fiorina but Gowdy is never shy to lie his ass off when he's protecting his absurd positions. And he's pretty pissed off right now that even some of his Republican colleagues are saying he's spending millions of tax-payer dollars on a partisan witch hunt that should be paid for by the Republican Party, not by hardworking Americans. He flipped out on Face the Nation last Sunday: "I have told my own Republican colleagues and friends, shut up talking about things that you don’t know anything about. And unless you’re on the committee, you have no idea what we have done, why we have done it and what new facts we have found."

Except that everyone seems to know that he accidentally outed a CIA source because... he's a bungling idiot. Eric Boehlert understands what to do with someone as vain as what he calls "the GOP's new Ken Starr"-- the media should stop giving him oxygen.

By any commonsense standard Gowdy’s inquiry has been a Congressional bust. ($4.6 million spent to hold just a handful of public hearings?) If that’s effectively highlighted during Clinton’s nationally televised testimony, and if Democrats continue to press forward with their procedural attempts to dismantle the costly committee, Gowdy’s time in the spotlight might be quickly ending.

And that’s where the messy break-up looms. The Benghazi committee has been very good to a Beltway press corps anxious to pursue storylines about Clinton’s supposed incompetence and crooked ways. This year, the Benghazi committee has helped pundits produce months’ worth of baseless speculation about looming email indictments and the potential for a Clinton campaign “collapse.” The Benghazi committee has provided institutional cover for the press to game out wild, what-if scenarios in which Clinton inevitably plays the villain, or a bumbling bureaucrat in over her head.

In other words, Gowdy provided the contours for the media’s beloved “scandal” narrative. And Gowdy’s committee has been generous with leaks that always make Clinton and her team look bad, even when upon closer examination the leaks don’t hold up to scrutiny.

So think of Trey Gowdy as this decade’s Ken Starr. He’s an obsessive Clinton chaser who teamed up with a grateful press corps to produced endless “scandal” coverage. But like Starr, the facts are finally running out on Gowdy.

..."Unravel[ing]" "Thoroughly discredited." A "charade." A "laughable crusade."

Describe it however you want, but Gowdy’s Select Committee, which has been in session longer than Congress’ Watergate investigation, is done. And it’s done because its cover has been blown and because the scandal plots won’t line up the way he wants. And the sooner the press admits that and moves on, the better because journalists have allowed themselves to be played for too long.

“The reality is that the Republican staff and majority of the committee have made it function as an oppo-research arm of the Republican National Committee, far more interested in whatever it might dig up about or against Hillary Clinton than any remaining mysteries on the four Americans killed in Benghazi,” wrote James Fallows at The Atlantic.

Yes, Gowdy’s sudden laundry list of bad news is long, but as the New York Times’ Paul Krugman noted, “We shouldn’t have needed McCarthy blurting out the obvious for the press to acknowledge that the Benghazi investigations have utterly failed to find any wrongdoing.”

And we shouldn’t have needed Bernie Sanders declaring, “the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!” at the Democratic debate this week for the press to acknowledge that its never-ending flood of coverage has been wildly out of proportion for the plodding process story.

Gowdy’s blind, partisan pursuit has been hiding in plain sight for years. Just like Ken Starr’s blind, partisan pursuit of the Clintons was easily detectable. Yet the press played along because the Clinton gotcha game generates buzz and it’s good for journalists’ careers.

And since there’s a collective Beltway mindset, being wrong when chasing Clinton inquisitions means rarely being held accountable, or being forced to defend wildly erroneous charges.

So most often, the fling is win-win for Republicans and press. And it has been for years. But there comes a time when the Republican pursuer loses all creditably and threatens to tarnish journalists who don’t break things off.

For Gowdy and the press, that time is now.

Lying Doesn't Matter In A Republican Primary... In Fact An Ability To Make Things Up And Get Away With It, Is A Plus For These People

David Brock may be discredited for his Republican-like sliming of Bernie Sanders on behalf of the Clinton machine that has helped finance his career, but the watchdog organization he founded in 2004, Media Matters for America, is as vibrant and essential as it ever was. In the video above, Media Matters' Eric Boehlert was on TV patiently exposing the cascade of ugly lies that fell from Carly Fiorina's lips during the Republican debate Wednesday night.

Boehlert repeated the point that Republican politicians and their base are now "immune from facts, living in their own bubble."

This is a classic example. Carly Fiorina has a problem telling the truth. Now she either didn't watch these videos, which is amazing because she wants-- she wants to shut down the entire federal government to defund Planned Parenthood. Or she did watch the videos and she just made this stuff up, because what she described, as you said, does not exist. I mean, how are you going to run for president and you're going to say this is what she saw on the video, when everyone can look at it in the video and say it doesn't exist? That's a problem. And, you know, if you want to go back for some context, when Al Gore ran for president, the D.C. press said he cannot be president because he has the tendency to exaggerate. Is the press going to hold Carly Fiorina to the same standard? She's just making stuff up about shutting down the federal government. This is kind of weird.

The bottom line is that even in the doctored tapes manufactured by anti-Choice fanatics, there aren't any images that Fiorina claims to have seen and there is no mention of instructions to "keep it alive so we can harvest its brain." Fiorina made that up to score points at the debate. Can anyone again ever take anything she says seriously?

But Fiorina wasn't the only compulsive liar spouting nonsense on that Reagan Library stage last week. To prepare for his NYTimes column Friday, Paul Krugman went over the transcript of CNN's debate and reported that he was "terrified."

Why is that scary? I would argue that all of the G.O.P. candidates are calling for policies that would be deeply destructive at home, abroad, or both. But even if you like the broad thrust of modern Republican policies, it should worry you that the men and woman on that stage are clearly living in a world of fantasies and fictions. And some seem willing to advance their ambitions with outright lies.

Let’s start at the shallow end, with the fantasy economics of the establishment candidates.

You’re probably tired of hearing this, but modern G.O.P. economic discourse is completely dominated by an economic doctrine-- the sovereign importance of low taxes on the rich-- that has failed completely and utterly in practice over the past generation.

Think about it. Bill Clinton’s tax hike was followed by a huge economic boom, the George W. Bush tax cuts by a weak recovery that ended in financial collapse. The tax increase of 2013 and the coming of Obamacare in 2014 were associated with the best job growth since the 1990s. Jerry Brown’s tax-raising, environmentally conscious California is growing fast; Sam Brownback’s tax- and spending-slashing Kansas isn’t.

Yet the hold of this failed dogma on Republican politics is stronger than ever, with no skeptics allowed. On Wednesday Jeb Bush claimed, once again, that his voodoo economics would double America’s growth rate, while Marco Rubio insisted that a tax on carbon emissions would “destroy the economy.”

The only candidate talking sense about economics was, yes, Donald Trump, who declared that “we’ve had a graduated tax system for many years, so it’s not a socialistic thing.”

If the discussion of economics was alarming, the discussion of foreign policy was practically demented. Almost all the candidates seem to believe that American military strength can shock-and-awe other countries into doing what we want without any need for negotiations, and that we shouldn’t even talk with foreign leaders we don’t like. No dinners for Xi Jinping! And, of course, no deal with Iran, because resorting to force in Iraq went so well.

Indeed, the only candidate who seemed remotely sensible on national security issues was Rand Paul, which is almost as disturbing as the spectacle of Mr. Trump being the only voice of economic reason.

The real revelation on Wednesday, however, was the way some of the candidates went beyond expounding bad analysis and peddling bad history to making outright false assertions, and probably doing so knowingly, which turns those false assertions into what are technically known as “lies.”

For example, Chris Christie asserted, as he did in the first G.O.P. debate, that he was named U.S. attorney the day before 9/11. It’s still not true: His selection for the position wasn’t even announced until December.

Mr. Christie’s mendacity pales, however, in comparison to that of Carly Fiorina, who was widely hailed as the “winner” of the debate.

Some of Mrs. Fiorina’s fibs involved repeating thoroughly debunked claims about her business record. No, she didn’t preside over huge revenue growth. She made Hewlett-Packard bigger by acquiring other companies, mainly Compaq, and that acquisition was a financial disaster. Oh, and if her life is a story of going from “secretary to C.E.O.,” mine is one of going from mailman to columnist and economist. Sorry, working menial jobs while you’re in school doesn’t make your life a Horatio Alger story.

But the truly awesome moment came when she asserted that the videos being used to attack Planned Parenthood show “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.” No, they don’t. Anti-abortion activists have claimed that such things happen, but have produced no evidence, just assertions mingled with stock footage of fetuses.

So is Mrs. Fiorina so deep inside the bubble that she can’t tell the difference between facts and agitprop? Or is she deliberately spreading a lie? And most important, does it matter?

I began writing for The Times during the 2000 election campaign, and what I remember above all from that campaign is the way the conventions of “evenhanded” reporting allowed then-candidate George W. Bush to make clearly false assertions-- about his tax cuts, about Social Security-- without paying any price. As I wrote at the time, if Mr. Bush said the earth was flat, we’d see headlines along the lines of “Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.”

Now we have presidential candidates who make Mr. Bush look like Abe Lincoln. But who will tell the people?

This culture of lying doesn't bother-- or even seem odd-- to a generation of Republicans who have been molded and formed by Hate Talk Radio hosts and Fox News. "What's all the fuss?" they must be thinking now. In November of 2016, though, whichever ticket-- either Trump/Sessions or Cruz/Fiorina most likely-- winds up running in the real world, they will have to face normal people who will be as horrified and disgusted as Krugman is. If the Democrats make the colossal error of running Hillary Clinton, though, what we'll hear is "both sides do it; all politicians lie." But they don't all lie.

Say, Mo Dowd, can you think of anyone in gov't or media who's fibbed publicly more recently than Donald Rumsfeld?

"Rummy's memoir, 'Known and Unknown,' is an unnerving reminder of how the Iraq hawks took crazy conditionals and turned them into urgent imperatives to justify what the defense chief termed 'anticipatory self-defense.' . . . You go to war with the army you have, but the facts you want."

-- Maureen Dowd, making fun of Donald Rumsfeld

"[T]he story here isn't that Fox News leans right. Everyone knows the channel pushes a conservative-friendly version of the news. Everyone who's been paying attention has known that since the channel's inception more than a decade ago. The real story, and the real danger posed by the cable outlet, is that over time Fox News stopped simply leaning to the right and instead became an open and active political player, sort of one-part character assassin and one-part propagandist, depending on which party was in power. And that the operation thrives on fabrications and falsehoods."

-- Media Matters' Eric Boehlert

by Ken

Now I don't necessarily mind that Maureen Dowd is calling Donald Rumsfeld to account for his serial lies. "At Rumsfeld.com," she writes in her column today, "Simply the Worst" (see link above), "the author has put up an archive of records and memos," and she proceeds to tick off a bunch of Rummy-whoppers. I certainly don't want Rummy getting a free pass just 'cause folks have forgotten how he lied us into a war for which he had made sure we were unprepared in every way except the initial fighting, all via lies -- or maybe lies-plus-delusions. (Remember how the war was going to pay for itself with all those oil revenues, which we were presumably going to steal?)

The problem is the usual one with our Mo: She waits to pile on until it's totally safe. The time to be waxing indignant about the Rummy-whoppers was the time when he was dropping them on a little-suspecting American public. Although of course the gullible and craven have hidden behind the eternal "Who could have guessed?," the fact is that lots of people who'd done their homework were anywhere from deeply suspicious to thoroughly persuaded that Rummy and Chimpy and Big Dick and the whole gang were just making it up as they went. By and large, as we've noted frequently, those people were punished for being right, while the media automatons who nodded like bobblehead dolls paid no price or were actually rewarded for being wrong.

That would have been a good time to ridicule Rummy for going to war with the facts he wanted. And now would be a good time to be blowing the whistle on the gaggle of compulsive liars who have more or less taken over our political and media discourse.

I don't kid myself that a piece like Eric Boehlert's latest effort ("'We Were a Stalin-esque Mouthpiece for Bush' -- Fox News Insider"; again, see link above) is going to reach the mass of Americans who swallow down all the sludge dumped on them by the Fox Noisemakers. As I keep pointing out, they believe only partly because they're gullible; more importantly, I think, the Foxies give them the lies they want. Ever since Ronald Reagan made Americans understand that they have no obligation to reality, that what really matters whatever ignorant, delusional nonsense fills their heads, the faithful have known their rights: above all, the right to the lies that make them feel better, more manly, more indignant (when indignation is what they want to feel), more trigger-happy, whatever will provide them with some release for all that stored-up unhappiness. Short of addressing the sources of that unhappiness, of course, which would be unthinkable.

[A] former Fox News employee who recently agreed to talk with Media Matters confirmed what critics have been saying for years about Murdoch's cable channel. Namely, that Fox News is run as apurely partisan operation, virtually every news story is actively spun by the staff, its primary goal is to prop up Republicans and knock down Democrats, and that staffers at Fox News routinely operate without the slightest regard for fairness or fact checking.

"It is their M.O. to undermine the administration and to undermine Democrats," says the source. "They're a propaganda outfit but they call themselves news."

So how, according to Eric's source, does the process work?

"They say one thing and do another. They insist on maintaining this charade, this façade, that they're balanced or that they're not right-wing extreme propagandist," says the source. But it's all a well-orchestrated lie, according this former insider. It's a lie that permeates the entire Fox News culture and one that staffers and producers have to learn quickly in order to survive professionally.

"You have to work there for a while to understand the nods and the winks," says the source. "And God help you if you don't because sooner or later you're going to get burned."

The source explains:

"Like any news channel there's lot of room for non-news content. The content that wasn't 'news,' they didn't care what we did with as long as it was amusing or quirky or entertaining; as along as it brought in eyeballs. But anything -- anything -- that was a news story you had to understand what the spin should be on it. If it was a big enough story it was explained to you in the morning [editorial] meeting. If it wasn't explained, it was up to you to know the conservative take on it. There's a conservative take on every story no matter what it is. So you either get told what it is or you better intuitively know what it is."

What if Fox News staffers aren't instinctively conservative or don't have an intuitive feeling for what the spin on a story should be? "My internal compass was to think like an intolerant meathead," the source explains. "You could never error on the side of not being intolerant enough."

Eric's source talks about the changes he witnessed in his time on the inside.

"When I first got there back in the day, and I don't know how they indoctrinate people now, but back in the day when they were 'training' you, as it were, they would say, 'Here's how we're different.' They'd say if there is an execution of a condemned man at midnight and there are all the live truck outside the prison and all the lives shots. CNN would go, 'Yes, tonight John Jackson, 25 of Mississippi, is going to die by lethal injection for the murder of two girls.' MSNBC would say the same thing.

"We would come out and say, 'Tonight, John Jackson who kidnapped an innocent two year old, raped her, sawed her head off and threw it in the schoolyard, is going to get the punishment that a jury of his peers thought he should get.' And they say that's the way we do it here. And you're going, all right, it's a bit of an extreme example, but it's something to think about. It's not unreasonable."

The Ailesmen know how to play on their people's native sympathies, or rather antipathies.

"When you first get in they tell you we're a bit of a counterpart to the screaming left wing lib media. So automatically you have to buy into the idea that the other media is howling left-wing. Don't even start arguing that or you won't even last your first day.

"For the first few years it was let's take the conservative take on things. And then after a few years it evolved into, well it's not just the conservative take on things, we're going to take the Republican take on things, which is not necessarily in lockstep with the conservative point of view.

"And then two, three, five years into that it was, we're taking the Bush line on things, which was different than the GOP. We were a Stalin-esque mouthpiece. It was just what Bush says goes on our channel. And by that point it was just totally dangerous. Hopefully most people understand how dangerous it is for a media outfit to be a straight, unfiltered mouthpiece for an unchecked president."

>Eric points out how rare it is for Fox Noisers past or present to talk about what they do there, and gives generous credit to the extreme "us vs. them" mentality Fox Noisemaster Roger Ailes has carefully cultivated in the organization. " His source explains, "Ailes is obsessed with presenting a unified Fox News front to the outside world; an obsession that may explain Ailes; refusal to publicly criticize or even critique his own team regardless of how outlandish their on-air behavior." Again, the source stresses that the issue isn't partisanship per se but that, in Eric's words, "Fox News is designed to mislead its viewers and designed to engage in a purely political enterprise."

So, Fox News as a legitimate news outlet? The source laughs at the suggestion, and thinks much of the public, along with the Beltway press corps, has been duped by Murdoch's marketing campaign over the years. "People assume you need a license to call yourself a news channel. You don't. So because they call themselves Fox News, people probably give them a pass on a lot of things," says the source.

The source continues: "I don't think people understand that it's an organization that's built and functions by intimidation and bullying, and its goal is to prop up and support Republicans and the GOP and to knock down Democrats. People tend think that stuff that's on TV is real, especially under the guise of news. You'd think that people would wise up, but they don't."

As for the press, the former Fox News employee gives reporters and pundits low grades for refusing, over the years, to call out Fox News for being the propaganda outlet that it so clearly is. The source suggests there are a variety of reasons for the newsroom timidity.

"They don't have enough staff or enough balls or don't have enough money or don't have enough interest to spend the time it takes to expose Fox News. Or it's not worth the trouble. If you take on Fox, they'll kick you in the ass," says the source. "I'm sure most [journalists] know that. It's not worth being Swift Boated for your effort," a reference to how Fox News traditionally attacks journalists who write, or are perceived to have written, anything negative things about the channel.

The former insider admits to being perplexed in late 2009 when the Obama White House called out Murdoch's operation as not being a legitimate new source, only to have major Beltway media players rush to the aid of Fox News and admonish the White House for daring to criticize the cable channel.

"That blew me away," says the source, who stresses the White House's critique of Fox News "happens to be true."

As I said, I understand that no amount of reporting by Eric Boehlert and other media-watchers on the reality-based side is likely to penetrate the swamp of delusion the Right has worked so hard to perpetuate and exploit. Still, people with media pulpits need to be on the case, constantly. Waiting for the "All clear!" signal to show that it's safe for the pilers-on to pile on merely guarantees that it will be too little, too late.

The lies that need to be called out are the ones being told now -- by all the "lying liars," to coin a phrase.

#

Say, Mo Dowd, can you think of anyone in gov't or media who's fibbed publicly more recently than Donald Rumsfeld?

"Rummy's memoir, 'Known and Unknown,' is an unnerving reminder of how the Iraq hawks took crazy conditionals and turned them into urgent imperatives to justify what the defense chief termed 'anticipatory self-defense.' . . . You go to war with the army you have, but the facts you want."

-- Maureen Dowd, making fun of Donald Rumsfeld

"[T]he story here isn't that Fox News leans right. Everyone knows the channel pushes a conservative-friendly version of the news. Everyone who's been paying attention has known that since the channel's inception more than a decade ago. The real story, and the real danger posed by the cable outlet, is that over time Fox News stopped simply leaning to the right and instead became an open and active political player, sort of one-part character assassin and one-part propagandist, depending on which party was in power. And that the operation thrives on fabrications and falsehoods."

-- Media Matters' Eric Boehlert

by Ken

Now I don't necessarily mind that Maureen Dowd is calling Donald Rumsfeld to account for his serial lies. "At Rumsfeld.com," she writes in her column today, "Simply the Worst" (see link above), "the author has put up an archive of records and memos," and she proceeds to tick off a bunch of Rummywhoppers. I certainly don't want Rummy getting a free pass just 'cause folks have forgotten how he lied us into a war for which he had made sure we were unprepared in every way except the initial fighting, all via lies -- or maybe lies-plus-delusions. (Remember how the war was going to pay for itself with all those oil revenues, which we were presumably going to steal?)

The problem is the usual one with our Mo: She waits to pile on until it's totally safe. The time to be waxing indignant about the Rummywhoppers was the time when he was dropping them on a little-suspecting American public. Although of course the gullible and craven have hidden behind the eternal "Who could have guessed?," the fact is that lots of people who'd done their homework were anywhere from deeply suspicious to thoroughly persuaded that Rummy and Chimpy and Big Dick and the whole gang were just making it up as they went. By and large, as we've noted frequently, those people were punished for being right, while the media automatons who nodded like bobblehead dolls paid no price or were actually rewarded for being wrong.

That would have been a good time to ridicule Rummy for going to war with the facts he wanted. And now would be a good time to be blowing the whistle on the gaggle of compulsive liars who have more or less taken over our political and media discourse.

I don't kid myself that a piece like Eric Boehlert's latest effort ("'We Were a Stalin-esque Mouthpiece for Bush' -- Fox News Insider"; again, see link above) is going to reach the mass of Americans who swallow down all the sludge dumped on them by the Fox Noisemakers. As I keep pointing out, they believe only partly because they're gullible; more importantly, I think, the Foxies give them the lies they want. Ever since Ronald Reagan made Americans understand that they have no obligation to reality, that what really matters whatever ignorant, delusional nonsense fills their heads, the faithful have known their rights: above all, the right to the lies that make them feel better, more manly, more indignant (when indignation is what they want to feel), more trigger-happy, whatever will provide them with some release for all that stored-up unhappiness. Short of addressing the sources of that unhappiness, of course, which would be unthinkable.

[A] former Fox News employee who recently agreed to talk with Media Matters confirmed what critics have been saying for years about Murdoch's cable channel. Namely, that Fox News is run as apurely partisan operation, virtually every news story is actively spun by the staff, its primary goal is to prop up Republicans and knock down Democrats, and that staffers at Fox News routinely operate without the slightest regard for fairness or fact checking.

"It is their M.O. to undermine the administration and to undermine Democrats," says the source. "They're a propaganda outfit but they call themselves news."

So how, according to Eric's source, does the process work?

"They say one thing and do another. They insist on maintaining this charade, this façade, that they're balanced or that they're not right-wing extreme propagandist," says the source. But it's all a well-orchestrated lie, according this former insider. It's a lie that permeates the entire Fox News culture and one that staffers and producers have to learn quickly in order to survive professionally.

"You have to work there for a while to understand the nods and the winks," says the source. "And God help you if you don't because sooner or later you're going to get burned."

The source explains:

"Like any news channel there's lot of room for non-news content. The content that wasn't 'news,' they didn't care what we did with as long as it was amusing or quirky or entertaining; as along as it brought in eyeballs. But anything -- anything -- that was a news story you had to understand what the spin should be on it. If it was a big enough story it was explained to you in the morning [editorial] meeting. If it wasn't explained, it was up to you to know the conservative take on it. There's a conservative take on every story no matter what it is. So you either get told what it is or you better intuitively know what it is."

What if Fox News staffers aren't instinctively conservative or don't have an intuitive feeling for what the spin on a story should be? "My internal compass was to think like an intolerant meathead," the source explains. "You could never error on the side of not being intolerant enough."

Eric's source talks about the changes he witnessed in his time on the inside.

"When I first got there back in the day, and I don't know how they indoctrinate people now, but back in the day when they were 'training' you, as it were, they would say, 'Here's how we're different.' They'd say if there is an execution of a condemned man at midnight and there are all the live truck outside the prison and all the lives shots. CNN would go, 'Yes, tonight John Jackson, 25 of Mississippi, is going to die by lethal injection for the murder of two girls.' MSNBC would say the same thing.

"We would come out and say, 'Tonight, John Jackson who kidnapped an innocent two year old, raped her, sawed her head off and threw it in the schoolyard, is going to get the punishment that a jury of his peers thought he should get.' And they say that's the way we do it here. And you're going, all right, it's a bit of an extreme example, but it's something to think about. It's not unreasonable."

The Ailesmen know how to play on their people's native sympathies, or rather antipathies.

"When you first get in they tell you we're a bit of a counterpart to the screaming left wing lib media. So automatically you have to buy into the idea that the other media is howling left-wing. Don't even start arguing that or you won't even last your first day.

"For the first few years it was let's take the conservative take on things. And then after a few years it evolved into, well it's not just the conservative take on things, we're going to take the Republican take on things, which is not necessarily in lockstep with the conservative point of view.

"And then two, three, five years into that it was, we're taking the Bush line on things, which was different than the GOP. We were a Stalin-esque mouthpiece. It was just what Bush says goes on our channel. And by that point it was just totally dangerous. Hopefully most people understand how dangerous it is for a media outfit to be a straight, unfiltered mouthpiece for an unchecked president."

Eric points out how rare it is for Fox Noisers past or present to talk about what they do there, and gives generous credit to the extreme "us vs. them" mentality Fox Noisemaster Roger Ailes has carefully cultivated in the organization. " His source explains, "Ailes is obsessed with presenting a unified Fox News front to the outside world; an obsession that may explain Ailes; refusal to publicly criticize or even critique his own team regardless of how outlandish their on-air behavior." Again, the source stresses that the issue isn't partisanship per se but that, in Eric's words, "Fox News is designed to mislead its viewers and designed to engage in a purely political enterprise."

So, Fox News as a legitimate news outlet? The source laughs at the suggestion, and thinks much of the public, along with the Beltway press corps, has been duped by Murdoch's marketing campaign over the years. "People assume you need a license to call yourself a news channel. You don't. So because they call themselves Fox News, people probably give them a pass on a lot of things," says the source.

The source continues: "I don't think people understand that it's an organization that's built and functions by intimidation and bullying, and its goal is to prop up and support Republicans and the GOP and to knock down Democrats. People tend think that stuff that's on TV is real, especially under the guise of news. You'd think that people would wise up, but they don't."

As for the press, the former Fox News employee gives reporters and pundits low grades for refusing, over the years, to call out Fox News for being the propaganda outlet that it so clearly is. The source suggests there are a variety of reasons for the newsroom timidity.

"They don't have enough staff or enough balls or don't have enough money or don't have enough interest to spend the time it takes to expose Fox News. Or it's not worth the trouble. If you take on Fox, they'll kick you in the ass," says the source. "I'm sure most [journalists] know that. It's not worth being Swift Boated for your effort," a reference to how Fox News traditionally attacks journalists who write, or are perceived to have written, anything negative things about the channel.

The former insider admits to being perplexed in late 2009 when the Obama White House called out Murdoch's operation as not being a legitimate new source, only to have major Beltway media players rush to the aid of Fox News and admonish the White House for daring to criticize the cable channel.

"That blew me away," says the source, who stresses the White House's critique of Fox News "happens to be true."

As I said, I understand that no amount of reporting by Eric Boehlert and other media-watchers on the reality-based side is likely to penetrate the swamp of delusion the Right has worked so hard to perpetuate and exploit. Still, people with media pulpits need to be on the case, constantly. Waiting for the "All clear!" signal to show that it's safe for the pilers-on to pile on merely guarantees that it will be too little, too late.

The lies that need to be called out are the ones being told now -- by all the "lying liars," to coin a phrase.

#

Bloggers On The Bus-- Don't Leave Home Without It

Netroots Nation is coming up this week. President Bill Clinton is giving the keynote address. I love Pittsburgh-- especially the Andy Warhol Museum-- but I'm not going, I've never gone. I know I should and I usually want to in like February or March. But then something always happens like a trip to Mali or Bali and... I miss out. All that not withstanding, I just had my dozenth call from a candidate or office holder who is going, looking for advise. "What should I do there? Who should I meet?" They all want to know.

They'd be better off asking me about Timbuktu-- awesome place-- or Ubud, Kathmandu, Kerala, Kabul or... how to get to Bush's rancho in the Gran Chaco region of Paraguay. But here's my advice to candidates who are going. It's real simple: always be genuine and never pander. Don't say anything different to the netroots than what you'd say to your constituents back home. If you do, that message will definitely get back home, and probably before you do. Oh, and before you go, get Eric Boehlert's book Bloggers on The Bus. Reading it I learned so much more about people I thought I really knew-- not just from reading their work for years but by hanging out with them in real life too. In fact, despite starting the part about me by likening me to "a golden retriever suddenly blessed with the gift of speech," I recommend the book to anyone looking to figure of the progressive blogosphere and some of the characters populating it. And you can get it right on the first page of the Down With Tyranny Books & Music Store. And so can all the candidates and incumbents with the slightest bit of interest.

And if you don't like to read books, our friend Doonesbury captured the spirit of the blogosphere real well in this cartoon and you should study it carefully:

Holding Fox Accountable For Their "We Distort, You Absorb" Style

I'm in the middle of reading Eric Boehlert's fantastic new book, Bloggers on the Busand I was thrilled to be reminded of the heroic-- almost revolutionary-- efforts that bloggers made to delegitimize Fox News on behalf of the cowering wimps in the Democratic Party power structure. The blogger victory over Fox was breathtaking and until Boehlert's book, it hasn't been properly analyzed or even recounted.

Complacent Democratic politicians who avoided picking fights had adopted a "go along, get along" strategy with Fox News, hoping that if they were nice and cooperative, then Fox would be nice and cooperative in return. That strategy didn't work. In 2004 a study conducted by the Center for Media and Public Affairs found that during the height of the presidential campaign, just 13 percent of Fox News panelist comments about Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry were positive, compared to 50 percent positive for Bush.

Bloggers went into action to derail the Nevada Democratic presidential debate on Fox. When it started, it seemed like an impossible task. Harry Reid, the epitome of the "complacent Democratic politicians who avoided picking fights," wanted the debate to happen. Back to Boehlert for the aftermath of the bloody-- and successful-- battle to get it canned.

That's when key Fox News players, in front of and behind the cameras went bonkers. Frustrated for weeks that they had no leverage in the unfolding debate within the Democratic Party about whether or not to go forward with the proposed alliance, the channel's executives erupted with rage when they were finally, and unceremoniously, dumped.

On the air, Fox News pundit, Mort Kondracke claimed that the netroots campaign to cancel the debate amounted to "junior-grade Stalinism." The afternoon host John Gibson also invoked Stalin, as well as Trotsky. And Bill O'Reilly claimed that the network's online debate opponents "used propaganda techniques perfected by Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of information. They lie, distort, defame, all the time." [a little hysterical and a lot of blatant projecting?]

This came from [Fox News head honcho Roger] Ailes himself: "The candidates that can't face Fox, can't face Al Qaeda. And that's what's coming." (Did that mean Fox News was the equivalent of Al Qaeda?) Bloggers were thrilled that the CEO of the most successful cable news channel couldn't resist becoming publicly embroiled in the debate over the debates; they knew they'd struck a nerve with Rupert Murdoch's empire,

The Fox News brand had been dented.

Yesterday, in an interview with CNBC, Obama, provoked, dented it a little more.

Brushing off suggestions Tuesday the media is not critical enough of his administration, President Obama couldn't help but take aim at one cable news channel in particular.

"It's very hard for me to swallow that one," Obama told CNBC when asked whether he thinks the media is too easy on him. "First of all, I've got one television station entirely devoted to attacking my administration."
The interviewer quickly assumed Obama was referring to Fox News, a suggestion the president didn't disagree with.

"Well, that's a pretty big megaphone," he said. "And you'd be hard-pressed, if you watched the entire day, to find a positive story about me on that front."

"We welcome people who are asking us some, you know, tough questions," he continued. "And I think that I've been probably as accessible as any president in the first six months-- press conferences, taking questions from reporters, being held accountable, being transparent about what it is that we're trying to do. I think that, actually, the reason that people have been generally positive about what we've tried to do is they feel as if I'm available and willing to answer questions, and we haven't been trying to hide them all."