Geraldo Rivera joined the Fox & Friends Mother Of All Bombs Cheering Squad this morning. Despite his love for bomb dropping, he was the only one in the group of four to question the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.
Rivera let Fox viewers know right away he was a proud member of the Trump war party as the producers played video of the MOAB bomb dropping in Afghanistan yesterday. (Transcript via Media Matters, with my emphases):
AINSLEY EARHARDT (CO-HOST): Geraldo, that video’s black and white … but that is what freedom looks like. That’s the red, white and blue.
RIVERA: Well one of my favorite things in the 16 years I’ve been here at Fox News is watching bombs drop on bad guys. And I have some experience in that exact part of Afghanistan going back to December 2001, the first of my 11 assignments in that country, where we dropped what was the forerunner, maybe you call it the father of the “mother of all bombs,” the Daisy Cutter, Daisy Cutter 15,000 pounds of explosive. This is 22,000 pounds of explosive. Like then, now, we’ve had a successful hit. Almost two dozen, or more actually, three dozen bad guys killed. It’s not going to win the war, but it certainly sends a message.
Nobody mentioned that Rivera’s Afghanistan coverage was less than stellar. Then, two years later, he was reportedly kicked out of Iraq for even worse coverage. From Snopes:
While covering American military activity in Afghanistan in 2001 he was criticized for taking a gun into a war zone and derided for misplacing the scene of a “friendly fire” incident by 300 miles (he later said he has confused two different incidents, although the other incident didn’t take place until three days after his report), and while covering the war in Iraq in 2003 he was censured by the U.S. military (and reportedly booted out of Iraq) for broadcasting details that revealed tactical information about an upcoming U.S. attack.
Rivera went on to talk about a bully named “Richie” in high school who would sometimes “want to kill you” and sometimes “let you go.” He added, “I’d like that they’d think that Donald Trump is like Richie from my high school. … I think that that has a positive impact.”
However, to his great credit, Rivera also pointed out that the “bad news” is that 15 years after that 2001 huge bomb drop in Afghanistan, “We’re still in the same neighborhood, we’re still fighting the same enemy.” Only now, he pointed out, the enemy has metastasized from Al Qaeda into ISIS. He also noted that no matter how much damage we just incurred on ISIS' tunnels, “They can always dig another tunnel.”
“We can’t win the Afghan war from the air,” Rivera said, to the obvious disappointment of his colleagues. “I’m not sure if we can win the Afghan war over time. Everyone’s tried it from Alexander the Great to the Russians to the British empire and we’re still there, 16 years later.” But he concluded with some more loving of the bomb: “But this is a good, solid message. I think ISIS is wipe-outable.”
Then, as the segment concluded, Rivera added, “Let them know that … Richie’s in the White House.”
The three Trump-sycophantic cohosts loved that.
Watch it below, from the April 14, 2017 Fox & Friends.
And bullets by billions
Presidential clownship
And sarin on townships
These are a few of my favourite things…
G Rivaldo 2017
I certainly hope Trump doesn’t feel jazzed enough to shoot a bullet across the DMZ in Korea. Forget about the rockets and whatever rudimentary pretend nuke they pieced together. N. Korea has one gazillion artillery pieces aimed at the northern part of S. Korea. They are set on hair trigger by those nuts. They could kill a lot of people in about an hours time.