On Fox News, a United States senator might be branded as anti-American for working on behalf of constituents instead of on behalf of Donald Trump.
As the Fox & Friends show mulled over last night’s stunning defeat of Dear Leader’s Trumpcare, it was to be expected that they’d search for a scapegoat. The effort was obviously complicated by the fact that this latest iteration of Trumpcare was taken down by Republicans.
So, without an excuse to blame Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama (yet), cohost Brian Kilmeade came up with this, as caught by Media Matters:
KILMEADE: You have [Sen.] Rand Paul [(R-KY)], extreme conservative/libertarian, [Sen.] Ted Cruz [(R-TX)], OK I’m going to make my hands dirty and make it work somehow. And then you got moderates, like Senator [Rob] Portman [(R-OH)] listened to his governor. And you have Senator [Susan] Collins [(R-ME)], who said, “I got some huge blowback when I went back.” So these people are being true to their school, just not true to their party, and maybe not true to their country. The president said before this didn’t—before he knew that these two—he had these two defectors, reported, according to Politico, he goes, “If the Senate Republicans don’t get this thing done, they’ll look like dopes.” Do they look like dopes?
Fox News contributor Ari Fleischer didn’t want to go all the way to calling Republicans traitors; he "only" painted the opposing senators as lying dopes.
ARI FLEISCHER: He’s right. It’s not a question of being true to your party or true to your country. It’s a question of being true to your word. They should not have elevated the issue for eight years among Republicans, saying, “First thing we’ll do is repeal and replace,” if they weren’t capable of doing it.
It’s worth pointing out that elsewhere in this segment, which was not made a part of the video below, the Fox & Friends cohosts expressed reservations about the Senate Trumpcare bill and suggested that maybe voting against it was righteously high-minded. But nobody mentioned Trump’s role in Trumpcare’s failure. On Fox & Friends, polishing the image of Dear Leader is Job #1!
Watch Kilmeade demonize U.S. senators for standing on their principles below, from the July 18, 2017 Fox & Friends, via Media Matters.
I’m hoping that all this whiplash-inducing confusion is starting to sink in. The mindless faithful will never abandon their Dear Leader but they’re not the majority. What the Dems have to do, however, is to focus on substance. Opposition without proposition (got that off someone on CNN) didn’t work against Berlusconi and it won’t work against Trump. We’ve got to focus on his incompetence, irrationality and lack of anything even remotely ressembling a POTUS. He is that in name only.
While I’m not especially against a deal with Russia, methinks Putin has Trump exactly where he wants him. Hillary also tried to improve USA-Russia relations, but she wouldn’t play ball with him and he clearly had nothing he could use to blackmail her. Not that I’m insinuating that he’s got much on Trump, but I can’t but wonder.