No, it’s not a song by Air Supply, it’s a description of Fox News.
Tonight, brain-dead viper Sean Hannity trotted out a 19-year-old photo of John Kerry shaking hands with former Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega, and used it to conjure up all the old images of Kerry as a commie-lover, a man who’s always going against America’s interests and a general scoundrel.
Hannity alluded to Kerry shaking hands with the “brutal communist dictator.” I have bad news, Sean: Under lots of international pressure, Ortega called national elections, lost and gave up his power to the winner. Brutal dictators, communist or otherwise, do not just step down following an election. If they do, they’re not a dictator. I’m not giving Ortega any praise — he committed plenty of sins. But in a world of truly repressive monsters, Ortega’s profile is very slender.
That aside, what about the photos of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein 20 years ago? What about other high-ranking Republicans selling drugs to the Iranians (then our bitterest foes) to buy arms for the contras? The sheer hypocrisy and hubris is staggering.
There was no Fox News when I left America for Asia, or if there was it was in its nascent stages. Coming home to Fox News has been a major source of culture shock for me. That they have the gall to put such slanderous shit on the air at all is astounding — that they do so under the rubric of being “fair and balanced” is repulsive. I could blog all day just about Fox News and its sins. I’ve never seen anything like it, and if someone told me a few years ago that such garbage would be watched by millions of Americans I wouldn’t have believed it.
1
By hkreportage
You might like this richard:
from drudge report
May 25, 2004 @ 8:25 pm | Comment
2
By boo
“Brutal dictators, communist or otherwise, do not just step down following an election. If they do, they’re not a dictator.”
Really? So you don’t think Pinochet was a dictator?
May 25, 2004 @ 9:12 pm | Comment
3
By richard
Did Pinochet step down because he allowed a free election and lost? Sorry, I don’t know much about Pinochet’s fall, only about his rise. I thought he was a sick old man when he left office.
May 25, 2004 @ 9:24 pm | Comment
4
By boo
Pinochet called a plebiscite for the 1988 presidential election and lost. He respected the vote and stepped down from the presidency in 1990.
While this in itself is good, it doesn’t cancel out the fact that he was a dictator responsible for many human rights violations during the time he was in power.
More to the point of your post, I doubt anybody will change their minds about Kerry one way or another by seeing a picture of him with Ortega. It may solidify opinions of Kerry held by about 1,000,000 Nicaraguan, Venezuelan, Columbian, and Peruvian immigrants in south Florida though.
May 25, 2004 @ 9:59 pm | Comment
5
By rogan
come on! fox is just 1/4 of “free” news in the US. the other 3/4 are the same just liberal instead of conservative. anyone who has a truely open mind can see that. don’t be worried,liberal thinking is still the majority of news in the US.
May 25, 2004 @ 11:17 pm | Comment
6
By adri
You might like this article.. The Republican Noise Machine (The Mighty Windbags), by a formerly rabid right-winger.
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2004/05/11/noise/index.html
May 25, 2004 @ 11:33 pm | Comment
7
By adri
Oh, and we did have Fox News for a while.. right after September 11, Channel News Asia ran Fox News Exclusives daily for some time. Though I don’t think anyone who watches the news at all in Asia, watches Channel News Asia.
May 25, 2004 @ 11:34 pm | Comment
8
By hkreportage
I watch Channel News Asia.
I kind of like it.
May 26, 2004 @ 7:43 am | Comment
9
By adri
Some of the locals (including myself) are put off by how the mostly Asian journalists pronounce certain words as though they were from the CNN.
May 26, 2004 @ 8:42 am | Comment