Justin's Political Corner
At least most of them aren’t snickering about the blood clot.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was recently hospitalized after doctors found a blood clot in her head, a condition that ABC News reported was “potentially ‘life-threatening.’” The hospitalization came in the wake of the news in December that Clinton had suffered a concussion after catching a virus, becoming dehydrated, and feinting.
The unhinged concussion response seemed to mark the unofficial return of the Clinton Crazies, that marauding mindset among conservatives who spent the 90’s launching endless attacks against the Clintons; vicious and wildly personal attacks that went far beyond partisan debate. (i.e. Accusations of killings and mass murder.)
What else explains the conservative media’s decision to treat Clinton’s head trauma as being side-splittingly funny? There’s something very disturbing about how it coalesced around its strategy to make fun of her health. I’d suggest there’s also very distasteful about gleefully mocking the health of a woman in her mid-sixties.
But boy, Fox News’ Laura Ingraham thought the story was a hoot:
Ingraham loved the tasteless “Immaculate Concussion” quip so much she went on The O’Reilly Factor that same night and shared it with a national television audience, delighting in the phrase. Host Bill O’Reilly couldn’t contain his laughter. “I haven’t heard that! That’s good!” roared O’Reilly.
Still laughing, Ingraham responded, “Did she really have a concussion? Maybe she did. I mean, who knows.”
In truth, it might be easier to list the Fox talkers who didn’t laugh out loud while discussing Clinton’s faltering health last month. On The Five, Dana Perino chortled when co-host Greg Gutfeld joked Clinton couldn’t have a concussion since she’d been “ducking everything” regarding Benghazi. Later that same night, Sean Hannity’sshared a chuckle with Fox’s Charles Krauthammer for mocking Clinton’s “acute Benghazi allergy.” (A “good line,” Hannity assured his guest.) It was noteworthy that Fox host Greta Van Susteren went out of her way, via her blog, to distance herself from the “sarcastic” and “snarky” Fox News comments about Clinton’s health.
The topic of Clinton’s faltering condition became a running joke for weeks. Right up until the day the troubling blood clot news was revealed, National Review Online editor Jonah Goldberg was still making light of her condition:
In the December 31 issue of The Weekly Standard, readers were encouraged to laugh at the news of Clinton’s head trauma.
Blogger and USA Today columnist Glenn Reynolds recently made sure to share with readers a photoshopped picture of Clinton (with her head attached to a burly man’s body) that suggested she was “drunk as skunk” when she fell and suffered a concussion:
Reynolds also hyped the blatant lie that that Clinton had flown to a “Caribbean resort” for New Year’s Eve.
Reynolds’ baseless behavior was not unexpected. Two weeks earlier he had treated the concussion revelation as one big joke, writing, “HELP, I’VE FALLEN AND I CAN’T TESTIFY ABOUT BENGHAZI”
When Clinton’s doctor recently announced a blood clot had been found during an examine, Reynolds quickly linked to right-wing conspiracist Ann Althouse, who in a pair of blog posts wondered if the “oddities” surrounding Clinton’s health reports stemmed from “fakery.” When critics lampooned her rumor mongering, Althouse insisted she’d been sponsoring “political debate” by raising baseless doubts about the Clinton story.
In the New York Times report about Clinton’s blood clot, the newspaper quoted David Rothkopf, an acting Commerce Department under secretary in the Bill Clinton, who noted the heated politicization of the Hillary Clinton’s health. Beseeching common decency, Rothkopf urged partisan to stop the unseemly behavior and to just act like “human beings.”
For the Clinton Crazies, that’s not always an option.
Some of their stupidest excuses:
9. Skewed Polls Depressed Republican Turnout
Many conservatives are complaining that most national polls are “oversampling” Democrats, even though most pollsters don’t weigh their data based on party identification since partisan makeup of the electorate can fluctuate.
Glenn Beck’s “news” site “The Blaze” amplified a blog post touting the conservative theory behind the poll numbers: ”These over-samplings serve a few purposes but mainly drive down enthusiasm for Republicans while assisting the Obama campaign with ‘bandwagon’ supporters who simply like being on the winning team…”
8. The Government Suppressed The Military Vote
On Fox & Friends, guest co-host Eric Bolling asserted that “it’s becoming more difficult, relatively more difficult, for military personnel to get an absentee ballot, yet we’re supposed to believe that getting a photo ID just makes it way too difficult for an American citizen to vote.”
As Media Matters noted, the head of the Military Voter Protection Project, which provided the data that Fox & Friends based its discussion on, said, “The military voting issue has existed long before the current administration. I simply don’t see any politics at play.”
7. The Government Allowed People To Vote Early
Having more people be able to vote, by states allowing ballots to be cast before Nov. 6, is a “recipe for fraud,” according to Rush Limbaugh.
6. ACORN. Again.
From Dean Chambers of UnskewedPolls.com fame:
While the media is creating the perception that Obama can and is winning, the campaign and it’s supporters are working with their allies and former members and leaders in groups like ACORN and others to change the actual vote outcomes as much as they can. … By creating the perception that Obama is winning, the media is giving the campaign a margin in which to be able to engage in voter fraud and make it believable … this is precisely why Obama’s Justice Department under Attorney General Eric Holder is fighting voter identification laws so strongly. They know they are far less likely to win the if the election if honest and fair.
The national ACORN organization no longer exists.
5. Obama Was Never Vetted
In March, Breitbart.com launched “The Vetting” because “Andrew [Breitbart] wanted to do what the mainstream media would not. First and foremost: Andrew pledged to vet President Barack H. Obama … he wanted to show that the media had failed in its most basic duty: to uncover the truth, and hold those in power accountable, regardless of party. From today through Election Day, November 6, 2012, we will vet this president…”
Breibart.com has been “vetting” ever since. Daily Caller too.
And yet, it is never enough. Red State’s Erick Erickson wrote recently: ”Honestly, he hasn’t really been vetted. We do not know a lot about Barack Obama from his time before the United States Senate. Much of what we could learn has conveniently disappeared. The few things we do know — like his connections to terrorist Bill Ayers — are dismissed by the media.”
3. Romney Wasn’t Conservative Enough
Laura Ingraham declared “conservatism wins” always, therefore Romney losing must mean he’s not being conservative enough.
Rush Limbuagh similarly concluded that if Romney “would just go full-bore conservative [he would] wrap it up.”
Fox’s Ingraham: Waiver Rule Change Is “A Push For Election Turnout” By The Obama Administration.On the July 24 edition of Fox & Friends, Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham reacted to reports that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will issue waivers to states to relax some of the work requirements in Temporary Assistance For Needy Families (TANF) by claiming the change was “a push for election turnout” by giving “more free stuff to people.” From Fox & Friends:
INGRAHAM: This is so tailor made for the Romney campaign, right? But let me tell you, what I think is going on in part is what we saw with the numbers coming out of Virginia over the last couple of weeks. Romney is doing better in Virginia. It’s a critical state for this election and the Washington Examiner yesterday wrote a piece about how the Obama campaign has to up the turnout in Virginia among certain demographic groups, including African-Americans. I think a lot of this ends up being a push for election turnout. Same thing. Give more free stuff to people and hope that they come to the polls. I think you’re seeing it with immigration, you’re seeing it with this. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 7/24/12]
But The Rule Change Was Reportedly Requested By GOP Governors
WSJ: 1996 Law Required States To Document Work By TANF Recipients. The Wall Street Journalreported that “[u]nder the 1996 law, states are required to document the number of hours that welfare recipients spend in paid jobs, voluntary work or other activities directly related to finding employment”:
Under the 1996 law, states are required to document the number of hours that welfare recipients spend in paid jobs, voluntary work or other activities directly related to finding employment. States can lose federal funding for their welfare programs if they don’t meet targets for recipients’ participation in these activities. [The Wall Street Journal, 7/13/12]
WSJ: Utah And Nevada — Both Led By Republican Governors — Requested Waivers From Documentation Requirements. The Wall Street Journal further reported that Utah and Nevada, both of which have Republican governors, asked for waivers from documentation requirements:
States have said that such rules are preventing them from running more-effective welfare programs, and the Obama administration said that two states, Utah and Nevada, had specifically asked for waivers from the requirements. Both states have Republican governors.
On Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services sent states a letter saying they could get a federal waiver to those rules if they proposed better ways to help recipients find permanent, well-paid jobs. [The Wall Street Journal, 7/13/12]
Republican-Led Utah: States Need The Flexibility To Report Employment Outcomes, Rather Than Process.
Wash. Post: “A Group Of 29 Republican Governors” Argued “For State Welfare Waivers More Expansive” Than The Ones From HHS. In a July 19 Washington Post Wonkblog post, Dylan Matthews noted that, in 2005, 29 GOP governors requested TANF waivers “more expansive than those being issued by the Obama administration.”
According to Fox News host Laura Ingraham, Ted Nugent was “winning” when he started yelling at a CBS News reporter and made sexually explicit threats during an interview that aired on May 4. The National Rifle Association board member and Washington Times columnist blew up at CBS’ Jeff Glor when he raised the suggestion that Nugent will have a hard time attracting moderate voters for presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Nugent responded by citing his charity work with children, then exploded:
NUGENT: Call me, when you meet someone who does that more than I do. Because that’s really moderate. In fact, you know what that is? That’s extreme. I’m an extremely loving, passionate man, and people who investigate me honestly, without the baggage of political correctness, ascertain the conclusion that I’m a damned nice guy. And if you can find a screening process more powerful than that, I’ll suck your d—k.
Turning to a female producer off-camera, he shouted: “Or I’ll f—k you. How’s that sound?”
Ingraham highlighted Nugent’s comments while guest-hosting for Bill O’Reilly’s show, which includes the nightly “Pinheads & Patriots” segment.
From the 05.04.2012 edition of FNC’s The O’Reilly Factor:
Ingraham went on to say: “Well, Nugent apologized off camera and he said after the interview that he was rushed to the emergency room and had a kidney stone removed.” She added: “You can decide if the rocker’s a pinhead or a patriot for those remarks.”
On April 26, O’Reilly designated Doonesbury comic strip creator Gary Trudeau a “pinhead” for a strip critical of Fox News’ coverage of the news. On April 17, according to Nexis, Fox News host Bob Beckel was labeled a “pinhead” for cursing (saying the F-word) on the air on Sean Hannity’s Fox show while defending the Head Start program, then refusing to apologize for it. O’Reilly stated: “Obviously, Beckel was a pinhead last night. I think he knows it. But he — he’s not a professional broadcaster so sometimes that happens.”
Ingraham has refused to weigh in on similarly controversial comments by conservatives in the past. On the November 10, 2011, edition of The O’Reilly Factor, Ingraham highlighted Herman Cain’s disparaging remark about House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and asked: “So, is Cain a pinhead or a patriot for calling former Speaker Pelosi ‘Princess Nancy’? You make the call.”
h/t: MMFA
(via Nikki Haley: ‘There Is No War On Women, Women Are Doing Well’)
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) defended her party against charges of a “war on women,” saying on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor last night that women are “doing well”:
HALEY: This is a president that is trying to create distractions. There is no war on women. Women are doing well.
One has to wonder about Haley’s definition of “well.” Women accounted for the entire drop in labor force participation during the recession, and 88 percent of jobs created since the end of the recession went to men. In Haley’s state of South Carolina, women are paid just 76 cents for every dollar a man makes, and own just 28 percent of businesses, despite making up slightly more than half of the state’s population.
Haley, a key Mitt Romney surrogate, has become her party’s face in responding to charges of the war on women. But she’ll likely need a better counter-narrative than woman are doing just fine, as Romney appears to be hemorrhaging female support. A new Washington Post/ABC News poll out this morning shows him trailing Obama by 19 points among women.
Remember Laura Ingraham? She’s the back-up O’Reilly Factor guest-host who wrote a deliberately (it seemed) unfunny Barack Obama “diary” last year in which she described Michelle Obama as eating baby-back ribs at every meal.
Her grasp of race and politics has only grown stronger since then, and today on her radio show she wondered aloud if Herman Cain “would be the first black president, when you measure it by — because he doesn’t — does he have a white mother, white father, grandparents, no, right?”
And it’s a marked improvement over one of my all-time favorite moments from campaign 2008, when Monica Crowley (guest hosting for Ingraham!) accused Obama of lying about being black: “According to this guy Kenneth Lamb, Barack Obama is not black African, he is Arab African. And yet, this guy is campaigning as black and painting anybody who dares to criticize him as a racist. I mean, that is — it is the biggest con I think I’ve ever seen.”
I should point out that Crowley’s source on this was an amateur Obama family genealogy put together by a very strange right-wing blogger who encouraged his readers to steal Obama’s used handkerchiefs so he could test the DNA.
Transcript after the jump.
INGRAHAM: When the president told the Black Caucus to stop whining, I was thinking about this, he was really telling all of us to stop whining. Oh, things aren’t so great, stop whining. So you’ve been out of work for two years, stop whining. So we haven’t done that whole jobs-saved-or-created, shovel-ready-projects, that hasn’t really sort of come — stop whining.
Arrogance. The audacity of arrogance. We’ve spoken about that on The Laura Ingraham Show. What happens when individuals get pushed into positions, or elevated to positions for which they’re not qualified? We’ve talked about this a lot. This is a problem with affirmative action, is that people get pushed, pushed, pushed farther than their abilities can match the position, and then they just keep failing, then they feel terrible about themselves, then everyone’s annoyed. Right?
And what happened with Obama is that he gets this job that he’s not qualified for. He’s Constitutionally qualified for. OK, the birth-certificate people are all going “Oh no no.” Oh please. OK, so he’s Constitutionally qualified for but he’s not really qualified for. And guess who pays the price? All of us. Because we had such a yearning for history.
Well I have a question. Herman Cain, if he became president, he would be the first black president, when you measure it by — because he doesn’t — does he have a white mother, white father, grandparents, no, right? So Herman Cain, he could say that he’s — he’s — he’s the first, uh — he could make the claim to be the first — yeah, the first Main Street black Republican to be the president of the United States. Right? He’s historic too.
But, you know, he’s not running on that. He’s running on 9-9-9. The Wall Street Journal slammed 9-9-9 today, saying you should never agree to a national sales tax, that’s idiotic because the income tax will always be raised. People always try to raise that, so then you’ll have an income tax and a sales tax, which is not a bad argument against the national sales tax.
But they basically say, look, the GOP field is shaking out, and Herman Cain is confident, as he showed in his 1994 exchange with Clinton on health care. He shows he can carry his own in a debate. But the most serious political mistake he makes, according to the Journal, is this national sales tax that the Journal believes is just going to add more burdens to an already overburdened taxpaying public. So that’s all out there.
Rep. Allen West (R-FL) fomented a racial controversy with comments describing African-American voters’ tendency to support the Democratic Party as a “21st-Century plantation.” Wednesday, he carried his meme even further, telling Fox News guest host Laura Ingraham that, “I’m here as the modern-day Harriet Tubman, to kind of lead people on the Underground Railroad, away from that plantation into a sense of sensibility.” To top it off, West went on to claim that leaders such as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Barbara Lee or Maxine Waters were the “overseers of this 21st-Century plantation,” meant to “pacify and keep the black community firmly behind [white liberals], regardless of the failures of [their] social welfare policies.”
So, naturally, Hardball host Chris Matthews brought Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) herself on his show to respond. Waters revealed that West had advised his own brother to contact Waters in his search to find a job:
WATERS: Did I tell you his brother was here today?
MATTHEWS: Tell me.
WATERS: He has a brother that’s out of work. Well his brother came up to me, introduced himself, and told me that he’d lost his job — he’d been laid off. And I asked him if he’d called his brother [Rep. West] and he said he had. And I said, “And what did he say?”
He said, “He told me to come to the job fair. He told me to come and see you.” And so we’re hopeful that we can help his brother.
MATTHEWS: So he sent him to the plantation, as he put it?
WATERS: Well, you know, that’s a reasonable conclusion.
Allen West is a clown and a moron. Maxine Waters has integrity.
h/t: ThinkProgress
