Did you hear that Obama is traveling to India this week? Did you hear that it’s going to cost the U.S. taxpayers over $2 billion, and require the deployment of 34 war ships? Yup. It’s going to cost the U.S. taxpayers more per day than it does to fight the entire war in Afghanistan! It’s an outrage…. And, of course, it’s not even remotely true… But that hasn’t stopped the frenzied attack by the likes of Michele Bachman, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage and Glenn Beck these past several days. Here’s Gloria Vanderbilt’s tight-shirt-wearing son with the details:
Sure, it’s not true, but it fits the Republican narrative of big government waste under the Obama administration, so it’s what we’re hearing about today. And it makes the life of Republican officials that much easier, as they no longer have to go to all the hard work of finding real things in the budget to cut. Now, they can just make offhand comments about Obama’s astronomically expensive folly in India, thereby implying that there’s plenty of fat to be trimmed, ignoring the fact that it’s purely fictional fat in this case. And, remember, according to Mitch McConnell, it’s not their top priority to actually reign in spending, or balance the budget, but to weaken Obama’s position in 2012, so that he’ll be easier to beat. It’s all about power… and lies, such as these, don’t matter. The talking heads at Fox may concede at some point that they were wrong on this, but it won’t make any difference. The damage has been done. They’ve already established in the minds of their millions of viewers that this is a wasteful, corrupt and disconnected regime that is spending us into the grave. This is how things work in the era of Fox News. You force-feed the American people shit you know to be fictitious for 48-hours straight, until it permeates the collective subconscious, and then, once you can’t beat it any more, you issue a 1-minute correction, and then you move on to the next item on the misinformation campaign.
Oh, and by the way, I have it on good authority that Michele Bachman spends over $50 million dollars a day of taxpayer money on makeup.
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And, here, if you don’t like Anderson Cooper, is Rachel Maddow on the same thing.
Isn’t there someone, like the FCC, charged with overlooking things such as these? When someone says “fuck” on TV, there’s a charge. Why not in the case of lying?
Michele Bachman, girl, you need to spend a little more. (Oh no I dinnit just make a disparaging comment about a female’s looks. Oh yes I did!)
Kim, you are correct. Remember when Slash from Guns’n’Roses got in all sorts of trouble? And all my man said was, “We’d luck to fuckin’ thank….” These assholes should have some sort of consequences, but I doubt they will….
Maybe, at the very least, we could publish the home addresses for Fox execs, so that their neighbors now what it is that they do for a living. Propaganda has no place in modern society.
You can start by joining Turn Off Fox.
http://www.turnofffox.org/
When consistency is obtained the hypothesis becomes a theory and provides a coherent set of propositions which explain a class of phenomena. A theory is then a framework within which observations are explained and predictions are made.
Here are Fox’s sponsors:
http://foxnewsboycott.com/fox-news-sponsors/fox-sponsors-a-l/
While we’re talking about Fox, I thought that this article on Olbermann’s recent issue at MSNBC might be of interest.
From ThinkProgress.
What is it costing the U.S. taxpayers for the big O’s trip? You sound as if you might know the answer.
I hear through my sources that Michelle Obama eats $70 million dollars in ribs each week. As for how much this pilgrimage back to the Holy Land for our Muslim President, I think it’s costing more than the moon launch.
Of course it costs more than the “moon launch”; Hollywood wasn’t that expensive in the late-1960s.
I can’t believe you think the moon is real, cmadler.
NY Magazine has a great piece on Beck, Roger Ailes, and the situation at Fox News. I highly recommend it.
http://nymag.com/print/?/news/media/roger-ailes-fox-news-2011-5/