As part of his pre-emptive strike at a forthcoming, unauthorized biography interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Roger Ailes defended Megyn Kelly's claim that Santa is white the same way she did: by pretending she was joking and that the outcry was little more than an attempt to "bring down or hurt Fox News." Oh, and he also said he re-hired Sarah Palin to tick off her political foes.

You may recall that Kelly paused a discussion about whether Santa should be portrayed as white to assure her viewers that he really is white:

And by the way, for all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white but this person just arguing that maybe we should also have a black Santa but Santa is what he is.

After her remarks went viral, Kelly played the racial victim and - despite all evidence to the contrary - claimed she had been joking.

I offered a tongue-in-cheek message for any kids watching, saying that Santa, who I joked is a real person whose race is identifiable, is white. 

I'll post the original video below so you can see for yourself how un-joking she seemed. 

But when asked about the controversy by The Hollywood Reporter, Ailes said: "She was joking. She's talking about Santa Claus, for Christ's sake. But the people who are jealous of her, who want to bring down or hurt Fox News, see an opportunity. If they have to beat up somebody as talented as Megyn Kelly on Santa Claus, they're pathetic."

Later in the interview, Ailes was asked why he had re-hired Palin. His answer wasn't exactly a ringing endorsement of her punditry:

The only two people I knew who got worse press than her were Richard Nixon and George W. Bush -- some of it unfairly, much of it unfair to her family. She's recognizable, she's attractive, and she still has the message of stop raising taxes. The Tea Party started as a group that [the government] could make go home to bake meatloaf at any point in the last three years by simply doing two things: Stop raising taxes and stop stealing their money. Congress can't stop spending money. I'm not a defender of everything she says. I don't hear everything she says. But I know she represents a certain group of people who rose up against their own party, which you rarely see. I probably hired her back, if you really want to get to the bottom of it, to give her a chance to say her piece and piss off the people that wanted her dead.

He "probably" hired her to piss off her enemies? "Some" of her bad press is unfair? What Ailes is admitting here is that he hired Palin for mostly political, not journalistic reasons.

There could be no further proof that Ailes uses the Fox News Channel as a political tool, not an objective news outfit.