Fox & Friends sneers and jeers about John McCain’s memorial proved that the network doesn’t just play funeral monitor at African American services.
The three Trump lickspittles tried to walk a fine line between respecting McCain and his grieving family yet still carrying out their job description (written or otherwise) of propagandizing for Dear Leader.
Cohost Rachel Campos-Duffy began the discussion by saying that Meghan McCain’s pointed barbs at Trump were “understandable, given some of the harsh words that were said about her father during the campaign but others tried to take shots as well.”
Meaning, of course, that everyone else was fair game for attack by the Trump Friends.
First target: Sen. Jeff Flake. He tweeted out, “Decency wins,” with a photo of former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton seated together at the McCain funeral. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was also there.
That prompted Hegseth to sneer, “I don’t mean to make light of it but I don’t think - you take a picture with Bill Clinton, usually ‘decency wins’ isn’t the caption. A self-dealing adulterer like Hegseth, who adores a guy who boasted about grabbing women by the p***y, lecturing the rest of us about decency? Now, that is worth a laugh.
Campos-Duffy giggled but probably not because of Hegeth’s hypocrisy.
Hegseth did have the decency to talk about his “reverence” for McCain and his sympathy for “grieving daughter” Meghan McCain. “All of that is legitimate,” Hegseth pronounced. But he went on to claim that “no one changes their political view based on, I think, speeches and eulogies.” As if that was the point of those speeches and eulogies.
“John McCain was a good man who did a lot of great things for our country,” Hegseth continued, before adding, “We can also be in a different chapter.” Perhaps unintentionally, he had summed up what I would argue was the real message from the memorial: that this new chapter is neither decent nor good for our country.
Cohost Ed Henry, tossing aside his hat as “objective correspondent” expanded the attacks to include President Obama. “It just seems odd that Jeff Flake feels like a funeral is a place for winners and losers,” Henry said. He was also “struck by the idea that people like Jeff Flake, Barack Obama want to tell us that the funeral was all about unity but they didn’t invite President Trump, they didn’t invite Sarah Palin and they decided to take some shots.”
Well, obviously, the funeral was not all about unity with everybody. Again, I would argue that it was about decency and how decent people can unite around that.
Henry went on to “ask” whether the funeral “was really the right place for that” and, of course, to opine otherwise. However, Henry thought a discussion about McCain’s funeral was the right place to attack Obama’s eulogy. “I was struck also by Barack Obama spending a lot of time in this eulogy talking about himself.”
After a round of appreciative chuckles from the cohosts, Henry whined that Obama’s speech was too much about “John and I” instead of McCain. “It’s about the man who passed away. It’s about his awesome life and legacy,” Henry insisted.
And yet, Henry never said one word here about the man who passed away or that awesome life and legacy Henry claimed others overlooked.
Finally, though, Campos-Duffy came up with something concrete about McCain to praise: his “service to the country” and his anti-abortion record. But even then, it was wrapped in divisiveness: “I’m sure a lot of the elites that were gleeful at some of the shots taken at President Trump don’t want to remember that record of John McCain.”
I’m surprised there were no jokes about Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Watch it below, from the September 2, 2018 Fox & Friends.
Trump not being invited isn’t evidence of division but McCain rejecting The Donald’s divisive message where he only sucks up to his base and stiff-arms the rest of America. Sarah Palin is a product of that same shallow, closed-minded populism McCain rejected.