"March madness" is over and we have a winner. No, I don't mean the awesome University of Connecticut Huskies (Men and Women) but the winner of the Fox & Friends brackets which started with 64 supposed constitutional violations by the Obama administration and ended up with just one winner. After two weeks of almost daily propaganda and lies (Obamacare covers abortion!) that reiterated the same tire GOP talking points, over and over, Fox America has voted and the winner is - drum roll please - the IRS vs. the Tea Party! Big surprise there...
The "brackets" propaganda was relentless. Yet, unmentioned by the giddy and almost orgasmic Steve Doocy and Peter Johnson Jr. the "targeting" of liberal groups did not result in any denials of tax exempt status for "educational" groups which are repositories for dark, anonymous money. The issue seems to have been an Ohio supervisor who, when swamped with applications for tax exemptions, got a little over zealous in scrutinizing the groups most of which were conservative. An article on Forbes, hardly a liberal website, sums it up in commentary not heard in any Fox & Friends propaganda:
"Too many groups that don’t deserve tax-exempt status have gotten it with very few questions asked. Taxpayers shouldn’t be subsidizing groups that hide their political agenda behind their tax-exempt status or subsidizing any other organizations that don’t truly qualify. "In the recent controversy, all sides seem to agree that the IRS went too far in the demands for information from the Tea Party groups. However, the lesson from the Tea Party applications shouldn’t be to stop asking questions; it should be to establish clear definitions and rules regarding who qualifies for tax-exempt status and to consistently ask the same questions of all applicants."
But hey, who needs facts when your hatred of Obama and love for baseless conspiracies frame your propaganda? Funny, when there were questions about President Bush's constitutional record, I don't recall Fox & Friends attacking him in the form of March Madness brackets.
Madness, indeed!
Note - Media Matters has a good summary of the binge propaganda. They point out something interesting. At the beginning of the anti-Obama tournament, the friends promoted GOP Senate candidate Ben Sasse's website which contained the constitutional violation brackets which Sasse developed. The webpage also included a link for donations. After Media Matters exposed what could have been construed as Fox News fund raising for the GOP, the pals then directed their viewers to the Fox & Friends brackets which, coincidentally, were identical to Sasse's.