Bill O’Reilly and Fox News now have an ally in the White House sympathetic to their obsession with black-on-black crime. And, after watching one of O’Reilly’s discussions about it, Donald Trump has threatened to send "the feds" into Chicago. It remains to be seen under what conditions he'd send them and what they'd do there.
O’Reilly began his discussion tonight by announcing that “the violence in Chicago getting worse, if you can believe it.” These stories are a great way for O’Reilly and his Fox pals to pretend to care about black lives at the same time that they get to portray blacks as criminal savages. Don’t believe me? When was the last time you saw a Fox story about efforts to combat crime there, such as President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative? No, me neither. In fact, when a guest offered O’Reilly an opportunity to visit some poor neighborhoods and find out what steps are being taken to improve lives, he refused.
You have to wonder whether O’Reilly wasn’t deliberately sending a message to his BFF because he played a clip of Trump promising on the campaign trail that “the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon – and I mean very soon - come to an end.” We already know that Trump shares the O'Reilly/Fox view of black neighborhoods.
O’Reilly challenged Trump by saying, “The question is, can President Trump override local Illinois and Chicago authorities and stop the murder?”
Guest Horace Cooper said that “absolutely” Trump can do that. He even echoed Trump’s “American carnage” inaugural speech by saying, “I don’t know another word besides ‘carnage’ to describe the devastation that’s been taking place.
However, Cooper’s federal override seemed to consist of having federal prosecutors take over some criminal cases in Chicago.
But O’Reilly had another idea. “You know what else President Trump could do? He could call in the national guard … The governor won’t. The governor is afraid. The governor’s a coward, alright? So if I were president of the United States: ‘You know what? For the next month we’re going to have the guard in these neighborhoods to stop this. Because you’re right. It’s carnage and it’s racism. It’s black people getting killed. Innocent black people.' And if it were happening in a white neighborhood, believe me, it would stop.”
A few minutes later, Trump suddenly tweeted, “If Chicago doesn’t fix the horrible ‘carnage’ going on,” he will “send in the feds!” Along with a shout out to Fox.
If Chicago doesn't fix the horrible "carnage" going on, 228 shootings in 2017 with 42 killings (up 24% from 2016), I will send in the Feds!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2017
Congratulations to @FoxNews for being number one in inauguration ratings. They were many times higher than FAKE NEWS @CNN - public is smart!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2017
BuzzFeed’s Claudia Koerner summed it up perfectly:
Cable news is officially setting our national agenda, make it count guys https://t.co/Aq24mC1ymJ
— Claudia Koerner (@ClaudiaKoerner) January 25, 2017
Watch Donald Trump’s unofficial adviser on black crime below, from the January 24, 2017 The O’Reilly Factor.
Marge, you aren’t the only one making the connection between neo-fascist #OrangeHitler and the fictional Senator Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/26/theater/a-play-timed-to-trumps-candidacy-asks-what-if.html?_r=0
Recent events point to a need to update it with two additional words … “ignorance” and “wealth”. As in rank stupidity and greed.
The civil conflict resulting from this will stem from the fact that bullies never seem to understand that you can’t push other people like this without an equal and opposite response. I again refer the Right to A Christmas Story. Didn’t work out so good for Scut Farkus, did it? 2018 should be interesting for the Right, provided that liberal Dems learned their lesson from not showing up at the polls in 2016. I believe the Right knows this, and it’s why they are frantically trying to do as much damage as they can, as quickly as possible.
Of course, it may surprise the Pence White House that most of what the Tweeter-in-Chief discusses in his “executive communications” are simply a cleanup of administrative deadwood. Referring to people who still have a registration in their prior state after moving, or to people who have passed away but haven’t been noted as such by the Registrar is not a reference to fraud. It is simply a matter of making sure the books are completely accurate – something that would take a considerable amount of time and will satisfy bureaucrats and neat-freaks but will not really change anything in voting patterns. The other area – making sure undocumented immigrants don’t vote – is a nonsensical sidestep that assumes that an undocumented immigrant would then choose to expose themselves to deportation and more by volunteering their signature and presenting themselves at a polling place or trying to get an absentee ballot. Analysts who have gone over this have never been able to find that kind of thing, and they’ve been looking. But Trump and Pence can knock themselves out if they want – it’s a massive waste of taxpayer money just to assuage his ego for having spectacularly lost the popular vote. And what will this man say after his own “recount” shows that in fact he really did lose the popular vote fair and square. Will he be able to accept it? The indications from his long-standing behavior are “Not likely”.
As for Bemused’s point, it’s a simple issue. Per the treasonous strategy employed by Newt Gingrich and GOP leaders as of January 2009, Barack Obama’s presidency was never respected by anyone on the Right. The approach from Day 1 was to obstruct everything and delay anything they couldn’t obstruct – making it so that they could retroactively declare President Obama a “failed president” and campaign on every issue possible. The intent was to cause total gridlock and to make this the most miserable presidency either the executive branch or the American people had ever endured – to punish Barack Obama for having the temerity to win this office twice and to punish the overwhelming majority of the American people for having the temerity to vote for him.
President Obama sadly had thought that the GOP would constructively work with him if he gave them room to do so, so he kept trying things like removing the public option from the ACA, hoping this would entice them into a reasonable compromise. It took him up to the 2010 midterms to understand they had no intention of doing a single thing other than all angrily folding their arms and yelling “NOPE!” Faced with that intransigence, President Obama was forced to turn to Executive Order to get anything done. The Right then seized on that as a way of accusing Obama of being a dictator, when in fact he issued fewer EO’s than prior presidents and was actually quite sparing about doing so. His choice was to try to get things accomplished rather than doing what the Right wanted him to do – which was to just sit in the Oval Office and think of himself as a failure. (I note that no matter what action he took while in office, the Right and Fox News would attack him. If he took a holiday vacation, the Right would accuse him of wasting taxpayer money on it. If he travelled abroad, the Right would invent nonsensical wild costs of this trip and throw those around the media. If he stayed in the White House, he would be accused of getting nothing done. Anytime he played a round of golf – something the Right regularly enjoys – it would be counted and ridiculed as though he was doing nothing his entire time in office but sitting on the fairway. This was a coldly calculated and vicious strategy of attacking at every single opportunity on every single day. The point was to make sure that when he left office, if they could get someone into the Oval Office themselves, they could immediately undo every single thing he did accomplish and then rub his nose in it. To this end, they even closed ranks about shamefully leaving a Supreme Court vacancy open for a year – just so they could make sure that he would not be able to fill it.
Of course, now that Mike Pence is the acting President, we are now meant to say “Let’s let bygones be bygones” and roll over for the Right to completely attack every single tenet we have held in this country. In other words, when Barack Obama is the President, that means it is a good and principled thing to say “NOPE!” to everything he does and obstruct and delay at all times and all costs. And goodness knows, he better not sign any Executive Orders because that’s dictating. But when Mike Pence takes over the White House, that means that Executive Orders are a WONDERFUL thing, right? Because now we can say that Donald Trump is a “Man of Action” and look at all the wonderful things he’s doing with EO’s. Boy, that’s so much more than Barack Obama accomplished, isn’t it? So EO’s are a great thing if the right president is using them. And now if the Dems have reservations about the extreme hard right tilt that Mike Pence is pretending he has a mandate to inflict on the country, they are to be labeled as obstructionists. Makes perfect sense to me. Whoever thought these people would have any self-awareness of their vicious hypocrisy was deluding themselves.
Good point. As I recall, however, President Obama kept on trying to involve Congress, giving the bloody-minded GOP a long string of opportunities to say “no”, thereby leaving President Obama with only one way to get some things done, namely the Executive Order (when was the latter re-baptised Executive “Action”).
The GOP said no even to things they agreed with. Although Congress has not yet been involved, the new President’s team has aready started complaining bitterly that the dems are not willing to collaborate. As though they, themselves, had given a positive example. Sheeeeesh.
Anyway, the President-King likes to do things “his way” and that does not necessarily mean that he will be listening even to his own side of Congress. I’m afraid that he’s going to do a lot of damage before he is reined in.
Congress has been MIA the last six years.
It only seems more so now, because 1) there’s no need for another “symbolic” vote to overturn Obamacare, since its about to go away soon anyway, and 2) there’s no scary black Kenyan Muslim Socialist Communist Gay Atheist in the White House for them to obstruct . . .
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And doesn’t the President-King represent a party that had bitterly and repeatedly decried the use of executive orders until a couple of days ago?
PS: what was that quotation about the death of America arriving wrapped in the flag?
PPSS: CNN is actually trying to push back with some real journalism. Has the same sort of reaction appeared on the national channels?
Expect many more fun moments like this one. O’Reilly and Hannity must be enjoying their Broadcast News moment for all it’s worth.