The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

In The Mailbox: 01.06.17

Posted on | January 6, 2017 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: New Sport Team Mascot Battle – The Name “Stallions” Is Too Sexist
Twitchy: Yahoo Finance Deletes This Doozy Of A Tweet, Blames “Spelling Error”, Twitter Blows Up
Louder With Crowder: Montel Williams Throws Down – No Mercy For #BLMKidnappers
According To Hoyt: Men And Women
Monster Hunter Nation: What’s Happening In 2017 On The Writing Front
Vox Popoli: Incoherencies And The Alt-Right


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: All The Links Of The Week That A Hawt Chick Can Read
American Power: Talcum X (a/k/a Sahun King) Blames White Kid For His Own Beating And Torture On Facebook Live
American Thinker: Obama Still Doesn’t Get America
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Blind Hogs And Acorns Friday
Da Tech Guy: JD Rucker – Chicago Hate Crime Exposes What The Media Has Become (And How Conservatives Should Respond)
Don Surber: How Trump Gamed CNN On The Wall
Dustbury: Rack Adjustment
Jammie Wearing Fools: Failed President Expresses “Deep Concern” Over Nonstop Violence In Community He Organized
Joe For America: The Pussification Continues – College Students Demand Counseling After Seeing Flag
Power Line: Trump Is Right – Intelligence Agencies Leak Like A Sieve
Shark Tank: DeSantis Files Bill To End Congressional Pensions
Shot In The Dark: Heather Martens, Whitesplainer
STUMP: Setting The Stage For 2017 – The Liability Side Of Pensions
The Geller Report: Army To Alter Uniform To Accommodate Muslim Soldiers
The Jawa Report: And Now A Message From Darth Spitz
The Political Hat: Meanwhile, In High School Health Class
This Ain’t Hell: Make America Sick Again
Weasel Zippers: No Men Allowed – Feminists Push For Female-Only Work Spaces, also, Yahoo Says Trump Wants What Kind Of Navy?
Megan McArdle: Some Blue-Collar Workers Probably Shouldn’t Do Pink Jobs
Mark Steyn: O Paulie Mio


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Category: Linkagery

FORT LAUDERDALE MASSACRE; UPDATE: 5 Dead, 8 Injured — Police

Posted on | January 6, 2017 | Comments Off on FORT LAUDERDALE MASSACRE; UPDATE: 5 Dead, 8 Injured — Police

 

UPDATE 6:30 p.m. ET: More details on the Fort Lauderdale shooter:

The gunman — wearing a Star Wars T-shirt — was taken into custody and has since been identified as 26-year-old Esteban Santiago.
Santiago flew into the airport from Anchorage, Alaska (with a layover in Minneapolis, St. Paul) on Delta flight 2182, and checked a gun for the flight. . . .
NBC News reports that Santiago had a history of mental problems, but had reportedly been getting treatment.
His most recent address was in Naples, but he lived in Anchorage from 2014 to 2016, where his girlfriend and child continue to live. He is also from New Jersey.
Santiago was a combat engineer in the Army National Guard, and served one year in Iraq before being honorably discharged last year, the Army Criminal Investigation Division confirmed. . . .
Sources also told ABC News that Santiago was contacted by the FBI after an employer back in Alaska raised concerns about certain things he had said. After that meeting, Santiago started getting treatment for his mental health issues. . . .
Court records in that state show he had a minor criminal record for traffic violations. He was also evicted by his landlord for failing to pay rent in February 2015.
Santiago was charged with fourth-degree assault and damage of property in January 2016, stemming from a domestic violence incident.

This is a mentally ill man with a history of petty crime and social problems — a kook, a misfit. There appears to be no political motive, which would mean that everyone who speculated otherwise was wrong.

UPDATE 7:30 p.m.: Did I speak too soon? CBS News:

According to the Associated Press, the Pentagon said he went AWOL several times as a specialist during a stint with the Alaska National Guard and was demoted to private first class. He was given a general discharge, which is different from an honorable discharge.
In November 2016, he walked into an FBI office in Anchorage claiming that he was being forced to fight for ISIS and was sent to a psychiatric hospital, officials revealed.
In 2011 or 2012, he was investigated by Homeland Security Investigations for child porn. Three weapons and a computer were seized, but there was not enough evidence to prosecute, according to law enforcement sources.

OK, (a) even if this guy was just a delusional kook, his delusion involved an Islamic terrorist organization, (b) that this guy had been on the FBI radar for two months, yet was still able to board a flight to Florida, is disturbing, and (c) the child pornography investigation five years ago suggests this guy had red flags all over him. How does someone’s problems bring them to the attention of three separate federal departments — Defense, Justice and Homeland Security — yet they’re still boarding a flight with firearms in their luggage? (Hat-tip: Pamela Geller.)

* * * * *

* * * PREVIOUSLY (1:46 p.m. ET) * * *

At least nine people are reported dead after a gunman went on a rampage:

A gunman is in custody after a deadly shooting at the Ft. Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport.
Sources tell NBC Miami that nine people have been shot and three people have died. . . .
An airport spokesman said that the center of the incident was in the baggage claim area of Terminal 2.
Former White House press secretary to President George W. Bush, Ari Fleischer, was at the airport at the time and tweeted about the chaos Friday afternoon.
Just after 1pm, he wrote that ‘shots have been fired. Everyone is running’.

UPDATE 3 p.m. ET: According to Fox News, Florida Sen. Bill Nelson says the shooter’s name is Esteban Santiago, whose name was reportedly found on his military ID. No motive is yet known. The official death toll is five. There are now reports of a possible second gunman.

UPDATE 3:20 p.m. ET: NBC Miami affiliate WTVJ-TV reports:

A gunman opened fire at Fort Lauderdale / Hollywood International Airport Friday afternoon, killing at least five people and injuring eight others before being taken into custody, authorities said. More than an hour later, people were seen running across the tarmac and sheltering behind cars while police had their guns drawn.
Law enforcement sources identified the shooter as Esteban Santiago, a 26-year-old man born in New Jersey. Multiple sources told NBC News that he had a military ID on him. . . .
The Broward Sheriff’s Office said they received a call about the shooting around 12:55 p.m. Live video more than an hour after the attack showed people running across the tarmac between terminals while others took cover behind cars – while officials search for another possible shooter. Police were also seen running into a parking garage with guns drawn.
Police officers responded less than a minute after the shooting began, [witness Mark] Lea said. Once the shooter was out of bullets, “he was gunned down by police,” he said. . . .

It is important not to jump to conclusions about the motive for such incidents before we have actual facts we can rely on. When news is breaking, a “wait-and-see” posture is always best, no matter what our suspicions may be. One obvious element of suspicion in this shooting is that we know President-elect Donald Trump has a home in South Florida, and it is therefore possible that this gunman’s act had some political motive. However, we do not have any facts yet to support that speculation, and I mention this one possible theory simply to illustrate how easy it is to make such speculations. If the gunman had been named “Mohamad” or “Abdul,” obviously other theories would be a fair subject of speculation, whereas if his name was “Bubba Wayne” or “Billy Joe,” our guesses might lean another way. Yet we must wait for the facts before we can start claiming to know the why of this incident.

UPDATE 3:48 p.m. ET: Multiple news outlets are quoting a Facebook post by Broward County Commissioner Chip La Marca about the incident:

The shooter was a passenger on a Canadian flight with a checked gun. He claimed his bag and took the gun from baggage and went into the bathroom to load it. Came out shooting people in baggage claim. There were 13 total shot, 5 dead, 8 transported to hospital.

If this account is accurate, then it would appear that the gunman’s attack was premeditated, although evidence that the shooting was planned does not tell us anything about the shooter’s motive.

 

Category: Crime, Florida

In The Mailbox: 01.05.17

Posted on | January 5, 2017 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 01.05.17

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Network News Whores Downplay Brutal Torture Of Disabled Man
Twitchy: Watch CNN’s Don Lemon Explain Why Chicago Torture Suspects Aren’t Evil
Louder With Crowder: Crowder Nails Media’s Hypocrisy On #BLMKidnapping


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: I Support Total And Complete Discrimination
American Power: Fascism Vs. Right-Wing Populism
American Thinker: Obama’s Disastrous Legacy
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Genetic Diversity News
Da Tech Guy: Christianity Vs. An Elks’ Club That Meets On Sundays
Don Surber: Hedge Fund Bet Against Trump – And Lost $400 Million
Dustbury: The Lowest Form Of Taco
Fred On Everything: Trump To Build Death Camps For Transgendered People Of Color, Will Deport All Women
Jammie Wearing Fools: Feelgood Photo Of The Day – Moving Truck Spotted By White House
Joe For America: General Drops Bombshell About Obama As He Resigns
JustOneMinute: The Press Gets Shy In Chi-Town
Power Line: The Most Epic “Epic Media Fail” Of All Time?
Shark Tank: Miami’s MegaMall Project Modeled On Failing Project In NJ
Shot In The Dark: What The Heck Ya Gonna Do?
STUMP: Setting The Stage For 2017 – Questionable Asset Management Practices
The Geller Report: Canadian Woman Kidnapped, Raped By Five Muslim Men
The Jawa Report: Obama’s More Average America Policy Gets Results
The Political Hat: Bad Food At School, Virtual Safe Spaces At School, The New Scarlet Letter At School
This Ain’t Hell: Obama’s DoD Medal For Distinguished Public Service
Weasel Zippers: Black Suspects In Chicago Torture Case Charged With Hate Crimes, Felony Assault, And Kidnapping Charges
Megan McArdle: Republicans Should Save These Three Unpopular Parts Of Obamacare
Mark Steyn: The “Craziness” Of The Climate Science Echo Chamber


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Video Shows Democrat Hate Crime in Chicago: ‘F–k Trump! F–k White People!’

Posted on | January 5, 2017 | 3 Comments

 

Four young supporters of Barack Obama wanted to show the world what the Democrat Party stands for, so they kidnapped a mentally disabled young white man, bound and gagged him, and tortured him in a West Side Chicago apartment, livestreaming video of their hate crime on Facebook.

Police say they have arrested four 18-year-old suspects — two black males and two black females — in connection with the incident that Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson called “sickening.”

Police document shows suspect in this week’s Chicago torture incident.

One of the suspects, Brittany Herring, a/k/a Brittany Covington, had been arrested for larceny in October. This week’s atrocity occurred in the city where Obama once worked as a “community organizer,” where Hillary Clinton got 84% of the vote on Election Day, and where Obama’s former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has been mayor since 2011. Chicago is also a city where nearly 800 people were murdered in 2016, with more homicides than New York and Los Angeles combined.

 

The video torture of the young white man by black Chicago teens shouting “f–k Trump” and “f–k white people,” came in the wake of nearly two months of incitement by Democrats and their liberal media allies, after the Nov. 8 election in which Clinton lost to Donald Trump. Encouraged by sympathetic coverage from CNN and other liberal TV networks, Democrat protesters using the slogan “Not My President” have staged rallies denouncing white people as “racist” for voting Republican.

 

Chicago Democrats protested against Trump in November.

Since the 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri, the Democrat-funded activist group Black Lives Matter has encouraged violence against police and against white people, inciting riots in Baltimore in April 2015 and in Charlotte, N.C., last September. In July, 11 Dallas police officers were shot by a terrorist named Micah Xavier Johnson who was inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. The Dallas attack “was part of an ongoing wave of violent racial terrorism targeting American law enforcement” that included shootings of police in Tennessee, Missouri and Georgia.

In her recent book The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, Heather Mac Donald described how false narratives promoted by the Black Lives Matter movement were “amplified by the media, college presidents, and the left-wing political class.” Despite clear evidence that the group’s protests were jeopardizing public safety and inciting crimes against police, President Obama, Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats expressed support for the Black Lives Matter movement. In their book The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama, authors Matt Margolis and Mark Noonan describe how the president’s public rhetoric has shown “a tendency to use race as a wedge to divide Americans,” politically exploiting the death of Trayvon Martin and the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson.

Democrats express their hatred of the president-elect.

Despite the racial violence Democrats have incited, and despite evidence that resentment of the Obama administration’s anti-white policies factored into Clinton’s November defeat, the liberal media continue promoting the Democrats’ anti-Trump/anti-white message. John Hinderaker at Powerline observed how the Associated Press attempted to conceal the racial politics of the Chicago atrocity, while Glenn Reynolds commented on the failure of most major media outlets to connect the dots of this racial hate crime: “If the races were reversed, there would be near-unanimous media efforts to blame Trump, and they wouldn’t be waiting until all the facts were in to do it.”



 

 

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Category: Barack Obama, Chicago, Crime, Democrats, Donald Trump, Election, Hillary Clinton, Racism

Dear @HallieLieberman …

Posted on | January 4, 2017 | 1 Comment

 

The headline on your Inside Higher Education column made me laugh.

Teaching Gender Studies to Straight Men

Bwahahhaha!

This involves three things that all academic feminists are against:

  1. Men;
  2. Gender;
    and
  3. Heterosexuality.

What is fascinating to me, after more than two years of in-depth research into modern feminism, is the arrogance of feminists in assuming that men are too stupid to accurately assess the movement’s agenda. Do you think men are so illiterate that they can’t comprehend simple sentences?

Feminism Is Queer — that’s pretty simple, huh? It’s also the title of a Gender Studies textbook by Professor Mimi Marinucci, as well as a concise summary of the anti-male/anti-heterosexual ideology of the feminist movement in the 21st century. Since beginning the Sex Trouble project in July 2014, I’ve stacked up such a massive pile of quotes to document the truth — Feminism Is a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It — that readers have ceased to be surprised when I show them the latest example of anti-male hate propaganda I’ve uncovered, e.g., “Queer Feminism vs. ‘The Fragile Male Ego’” (Dec. 28) or lesbian feminist Jill Gutowitz’s man-hating anti-Trump rage (Dec. 24).

 

This is what feminism means in the 21st century, and if you’re a feminist wondering why Hillary Clinton lost, the answer is: YOU.

Studying feminism calls to mind something I first observed back in the 1980s. If a guy’s wife or girlfriend ever says to him, “We need to talk about our relationship,” he is in big trouble. She’s got a problem, and she has decided that the problem is you. No woman has ever used the “we need to talk about our relationship” line except with the intention of making the guy accept 100% of the blame for her unhappiness.

If a woman is happy, she doesn’t need to talk about your relationship, and no unhappy woman can resist blaming her problems on her boyfriend or her husband or her ex-boyfriend or ex-husband or maybe, if no other male scapegoat is handy, she’ll blame her Daddy for her unhappiness.

Every married man understands this. Whatever the wife is unhappy about is always her husband’s fault, and there is no point trying to argue about it. The secret to avoiding divorce is two words: “Yes, dear.”

This is what feminists mean when they blame “patriarchy” for everything wrong in the world. This is just collective scapegoating, as opposed to the individual scapegoating that every husband must endure when his wife is unhappy. And so, when feminists start ranting about “objectification” or “rape culture,” men are expected to answer, “Yes, dear.”

However, there are certain benefits involved in marriage which make men willing to cope with their wives’ anger, whereas men derive no benefit at all from being lectured by a university Gender Studies professor, or by a man-hating blogger like Jessica Valenti. Being a married man means there is only one woman who is authorized to insult me and, in case you didn’t notice, I never asked any Gender Studies majors to marry me.

 

Yeah, that’s a really subtle message, Dr. Lieberman. It’s about as subtle as your dishonest method of promoting your perverted agenda:

How I got a group of straight male college freshmen to take a course on gender, sex and sexuality is simple: I didn’t tell them the topic before they signed up. . . .
I was teaching the required English composition class, but since the course catalog didn’t permit me to list a topic, none of the students knew the focus of the course until they attended the first day of class. I was worried that all the straight guys would flee the minute they read the syllabus and learned what the topic was.

See how it works? Students at a taxpayer-supported state university sign up for a basic English composition class required for graduation and, instead of being taught what they paid tuition to learn, they get a Gender Studies lecture from Professor Dildo, the feminist sex-toy specialist.

So, just to recap, Dr. Hallie Lieberman of the University of Wisconsin (a) wants to mandate health insurance coverage for dildos, (b) advocates providing pornography to minors, (c) is anti-marriage, (d) is pro-butt plug, (e) believes men should be required to own prosthetic vaginas and, in case you didn’t guess (f) hates Republicans. Well, let’s return to see what she was teaching in freshman English class:

By the time I taught about transgender representation in the media, the semester was more than halfway done. I was worried that even though trans issues are having a moment, many of my straight male students would be made uncomfortable by discussions of transgender. So I left this topic for later in the course . . . . Giggling and being visibly uncomfortable is a legitimate response for kids who’ve never met a trans person, whose parents are die-hard Republicans who oppose gay marriage, as many of my students’ parents were. . . .
As the week went on, I realized that there was subversive potential in teaching teenagers about transgender issues with no apologies . . .
As a graduate student, I’d taken multiple courses on gender and sexuality, but I never saw a straight man in my course. . . .

And why do you think that was, Dr. Lieberman? Because (a) Gender Studies programs are run by lesbians who hate heterosexual men, and (b) even if a heterosexual man somehow got a Gender Studies degree, no university in America would hire him, because the institutional purpose of having Gender Studies departments is to help meet “diversity” quotas by providing faculty employment for man-hating lesbians.

You dishonesty — the unethical bait-and-switch by which you defrauded those freshmen who had signed up for a required English course — is typical of the entire fraudulent enterprise of academic feminism.

You should be ashamed of yourself, Dr. Lieberman, but if you had any capacity for shame, you wouldn’t be Professor Dildo, would you?



 

Category: Education, Sex Trouble, Wisconsin

In The Mailbox: 01.04.17

Posted on | January 4, 2017 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


OVER THE TRANSOM
First Street Journal: Hold Them Accountable!
EBL: Ellen Pompeo Gets A Taste Of SJW Outrage
Michelle Malkin: Forensic Nightmare – The Perils Of Touch DNA
Twitchy: Having Solved All Other Problems, Cali Legislature Hires Eric Holder To “Battle Trump Administration”
Louder With Crowder: MORON ALERT – Nancy Pelosi Says Everyone Is Better Off Under Obamacare


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: A Note Of Thanks And A Hawt Chick!
American Power: ICYMI – Heather McDonald’s The War On Cops
American Thinker: They Clapped After Taking Jerusalem Away From The Jews
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Da Tech Guy: Baldilocks – Longtime Blogger Ignores The News
Don Surber: Piers Morgan Tells Obama To Grow Up
Dustbury: Assaulted With Battery Details
Jammie Wearing Fools: Freeloading To The Very End – Obama To Host Goodbye Bash At White House Friday
Joe For America: Josh Earnest Has Major Meltdown Mid-Interview – “People Are Too Mean To Obama!”
JustOneMinute: Let The Games Begin!
Power Line: Freakout In Alabama
Shark Tank: De Santis, Cruz Push Term Limits Constitutional Amendment
Shot In The Dark: To The Extreme
STUMP: Setting The Stage For 2017 – Failing Multi-employer Pension Plans
The Geller Report: Obama Sends Troops To Russian Border
The Jawa Report: Ministry Of Entertaining The Masses – Real Muslimas!
The Political Hat: Un-Queering The Cake
This Ain’t Hell: Pentagon Reconsiders Plan To Recoup Iraq War Bonuses
Weasel Zippers: The 18 Major Scandals Of Obama’s “Scandal-Free” Presidency
Megan McArdle: The 401(k) Problem We Refuse To Solve
Mark Steyn: La La La Can’t Hear You


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America Is Rapidly Becoming Insane

Posted on | January 4, 2017 | 3 Comments

Does murder suspect Jerry Pagan look crazy to you?

Barack Obama kept his promise to fundamentally transform America, and our country is turning into a coast-to-coast lunatic asylum:

A homeless man was indicted Tuesday for killing his Bronx lover, authorities said.
Court papers show that Jerry Pagan, 32, confessed in grisly detail to murdering 68-year-old Richard Reed.
He told detectives that, before authorities intervened, he had planned to eat his victim’s penis and chop his head off.
“I stabbed him with a knife and hit him over the head with a hammer and cut off his penis and put it in the sink,” Pagan said to cops in a videotaped interview, the court papers show.
The accused killer added that he “was going to fry the penis up and eat it, too.”

A typical Democrat voter. Meanwhile, in Ohio . . .

Ohio sperm-squirting suspect Timothy Blake.

Washington County Sheriff Larry Mincks reported that Timothy D. Blake, 28, of 4520 Sams Creek Road, Mineral Wells, was arrested Friday evening in connection with several incidents of public masturbation and menacing in the Marietta area for the past two months.
“This has been a joint investigation between the Marietta Police Department and our office,” said Mincks. “An off-duty MPD officer came across his truck today with the specific insignia we had been searching for and called it in to his superiors and our office.”
Blake allegedly admitted to 12 instances in which he had masturbated in public shopping center parking lots, filled syringes with bodily fluid [i.e., semen] and followed women around stores squirting their backsides with the liquid.
“The first report came in two months ago from a woman who had found this on her bottom and after cleaning it off in the bathroom had walked out to find him waiting and staring at her,” said Mincks. “She said he then took off and she followed him until he got in his truck and left.”
Mincks said officials used both the woman’s description of Blake’s face and company truck to locate him. He also said they were able to use Wal-Mart’s security footage to add to the physical description of Blake.

The sheriff told WTAP-TV, “After we arrested Mr. Blake we asked him about it and he said that it was something that he had discovered on the internet and decided to try it.” Gosh, how is it that I’ve been on the Internet more than 20 years and never “discovered” this idea? What kind of freak is Timothy Blake? Is he registered to vote as a Democrat? Did he support Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton in the 2016  primary?

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin . . .

 

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is currently taking applications for its “Men’s Project,” a six-week program that aims to counter the alleged harmful effects of society’s masculinity paradigms and pressures and empower participants to promote “gender equity.”
“Men’s Project creates a space for critical self-reflection and dialogue about what it means to be a man and how masculinity impacts us and those around us,” organizers state in promoting the effort.
“The experience focuses on the examination of societal images, expectations, and messages around masculinity to empower men to better understand themselves, promote the advancement of gender equity, and raise consciousness in their communities,” organizers add.
It’s open only to “men-identified students” at the public university and “operates on a transformative model of social justice allyship,” according to a news release on the university’s website, which adds “by encouraging that kind of dialogue among a men-identified cohort, the goal is to create a sense of security in vulnerability throughout the six-week program.”

Any guy who would sign up for a “transformative model of social justice allyship” is insane.  What’s the difference between a lunatic asylum and the University of Wisconsin? They’re both full of dangerously crazy people, but only one of them has a Big Ten football program.



 

Category: Crime, Education

Good-Bye, @MegynKelly

Posted on | January 4, 2017 | 2 Comments

 

Did you make the smart move? That’s the question that occurs to most Fox News viewers who have watched your meteoric ascent, as they consider your switch to NBC. Surely the network that hired you would not have done so if they thought you were a conservative. NBC News is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat Party. It is the network of Chris Matthews and Chuck Todd and Rachel Maddow. NBC is anti-Christian and pro-Islam, anti-family and pro-abortion, anti-cop and pro-“Black Lives Matter.” The partisan and ideological biases at NBC News are so blatantly obvious that it is impossible to imagine that you, Ms. Kelly, could be permitted to broadcast anything there that would deviate from the network’s Democrat/“progressive” agenda. But anyway . . .

 

“Bill hated her” — I laughed when I read that quote from an unnamed Fox News host in Gabriel Sherman’s article. Yes, and we hate Bill O’Reilly, a guy who’s been the “face” of Fox News for way too long. Why did Roger Ailes invest so heavily in making O’Reilly the tentpole of the network, the signature of the Fox News brand? It never made sense to me. Veteran news guys like Brit Hume and Brett Baier are the best thing on the network, and in terms of opinionated conservatism, Sean Hannity is more watchable. Yet year after year, O’Reilly has remained entrenched in his 8 p.m. time slot as the centerpiece of the Fox News identity, and I could seldom stand to watch more than a few minutes of The O’Reilly Factor.

“Personnel is policy,” as the Reaganites said, and the Ailes-era staffing decisions at Fox News seemed to reflect a commitment to a particular style of Republican political messaging, namely the old Al D’Amato Long Island GOP machine and its Art Finklestein-engineered attack strategy. Attracting a large viewership in the outer suburbs of New York City made sense, as a business strategy for Fox News, and the demographics of that audience meant that having an Irish Catholic guy from Long Island as the 8 p.m. anchor also made sense. But once the network had established its national influence, didn’t Fox News limit its audience by having this snide and smarmy egotist as its most famous face?

 

Well, The Kelly Files was a counter-balance to that problem, but the gigantic ego  of Bill O’Reilly — and the network’s investment in his ego — could not be effectively counter-balanced, and so, good-bye, Megyn:

For Kelly, the jump from a primetime perch at Fox to a multifaceted role at NBC carries a high degree of risk. She’ll be giving up the most loyal audience in cable news for new set of platforms that she’ll have to largely build herself. At NBC, Kelly will anchor an Oprah-like daytime show, launch a new Sunday night news magazine, and contribute to the network’s political coverage. The track record for talented anchors launching daytime programs hasn’t been good (see: Katie Couric, Meredith Vieira, Anderson Cooper), and no Fox News star has successfully crossed over to the mainstream before.

My hunch, Ms. Kelly, is that you will simply disappear. The partisan Democrats who run NBC News have no interest in your success. What they have done is to hire you away from Fox News in order to damage their rival, and to neutralize whatever personal influence you may have had in terms of undermining liberalism’s hegemonic control of the news media. You are now another highly-paid puppet whose strings are controlled by the executives at 30 Rock, and if you fail at NBC — if your daytime show is a ratings flop — those executives will have no problem paying out your contract while limiting your airtime to occasional appearances as a Meet the Press panelist.

 

Of course, I’ve been wrong before. A month before Election Day, I declared that the devastation of Trump’s accumulating scandals meant he couldn’t possibly win and, if I was wrong about that, maybe I’m also wrong about your career prospects at NBC News. How could you succeed?

  1. Be pro-life — The pro-abortion bias is arguably the most toxic aspect of the media’s liberal agenda. Obviously, NBC News isn’t going to let you use their airtime to promote the pro-life perspective in any blatant way, but there will be times when your decisions could have a subtle yet important influence. “Therefore choose life.”
  2. Be anti-Hollywood — My old friend Andrew Breitbart and I used to argue about which was more wicked, Hollywood or D.C. Having spent so long dealing with the two-faced backstabbing scoundrels in Washington, I was certain that D.C. was the most evil place on the planet, but Andrew was unconvinced. “No, trust me, Hollywood is worse,” he’d say, before regaling me with tales about the selfish coke-addicted perverts who run the entertainment industry. If you, Ms. Kelly, were to use your NBC daytime show to expose some of the shocking decadence of Hollywood, this would be a tremendous public service and, I suspect, would make you unique among major network news personalities.
  3. Be patriotic — What was the secret of Trump’s victory, really? First, “build a wall,” and second, “Make America great again.” This simple old-fashioned patriotism proved so popular that 63 million American voters were willing to overlook every negative aspect of Trump’s personality and politics. Maybe your NBC audience would find it refreshing to encounter a daytime show where the U.S. military and our nation’s law-enforcement officers are recognized for their heroic service to our country. Flag-waving Mom-and-apple-pie patriotism is a “brand” whose value has been unappreciated by the liberal media establishment, and you might enjoy surprising success at NBC if you make this a core theme of your new show.

Network TV stars don’t ask for my advice, and I offer it unsolicited only because it seems to me there is too much an echo-chamber mentality in the major media. People inside the news industry can never be objective about the industry and its problems. Unable to step outside the echo chamber, and unwilling to listen to anyone who isn’t part of the industry — what do they know, those stupid people who merely watch TV? — the media’s hive-mind generates a sort of impenetrable force-field that prevents insiders from seeing their industry’s problems objectively.

Maybe you, Ms. Kelly, can be an exception to that rule.

 

(Via Memeorandum.)



 

 

Category: Fox News, Media Bias, MSNBC, NBC
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