Geraldo Rivera lit into Fox News’ “slanderous” coverage of Benghazi and the Clinton email “scandal” with the kind of no-nonsense feistiness that just about every Democratic “strategist” who goes on Fox could take a lesson from.
Rivera appeared on Fox & Friends this morning with uber-Obama hater Jeanine Pirro. You may recall she once demanded President Obama’s impeachment over Benghazi.
The discussion started out as a critique of the PBS Democratic debate moderators for not asking about Clinton’s emails last night. But it quickly morphed into something else.
A few excerpts:
RIVERA: It is the most overrated scandal we have ever covered, the emails. There is no crime there. There is absolutely no crime there …and by getting your hopes up that there’ll be an indictment, you lose sight of the real issue.
...This administration was slandered by the coverage of the Benghazi event. …We promulgated to the world the false notion that the Obama administration had the military capacity to save those people.
…We promulgated that, broadcasts day after day, day after day, we have never apologized for that.
…We have never apologized for slandering good people that you may politically disagree with by saying they could have saved people …We basically accused them of murdering our own people.
Let’s just say Rivera’s colleagues were not very receptive to his arguments.
Watch it below, from the February 12 Fox & Friends, via Media Matters.
I say this not as a particular fan of hers, but the agenda of Fox News is pretty obvious here.
I was also amused to hear that Fox News is shocked, shocked that Democrat candidates have no intention of appearing on Fox News for a debate. One can only imagine the kind of nastiness they’d encounter. The response is something along the lines of “life’s too short”…
Yeah, I’m a bit of a “Fox & Friends” addict in the morning so I caught this childish and pitiful exchange. When liberals need registered Republican Geraldo to defend Hillary and the Obama administration you know you’re in trouble!
Benghazi/Email-gate. Yeah, you can understand the “Fox & Friends” hysteria over these because they’ve been a Fox News obsession. Right-wingers think they’re slam-dunk means of sinking Hillary. And, hey, they’re right! The rest of the ‘lib’ corporate media has picked up their narrative and her trust numbers have plummeted.
Even liberals are buying this narrative and I’ve seen some interviewed who are fleeing to Bernie because they don’t see her as trustworthy. Polls of Democrats back this up.
All that said, “Fox & Friends” is correct and the PBS moderators should have asked the question. Not for Fox’s partisan reason they’re convinced it will embarrass Hillary publicly. Separately, PBS “News Hour” interviewed Hillary and discussed the entire trust issue and he’s quite prepared and articulate in addressing it. IMHO, the question would cleared the air and helped her.
Speaking fees. Certainly, businesses pay Bill and Hillary lots of money to speak. The same reason they contribute to most of the candidates. Certainly they hope for access and influence plus they support those they suppose will be compatible with their goals.
Those who don’t? Trump is rich and doesn’t need the money. To his credit, Bernie doesn’t. If you’re a single-issue voter, hey, one of the two is for you.
That said, Fox News plays the role of hypocrite because they’ve said if any Republican were getting the same speaking fees they’d be fine with it.
IMHO, Hillary has the best vision for dealing with preventing a future meltdown while keeping our financial institutions competitive internationally. Bernie would destroy their competitiveness. The Republicans want varying degrees of laissez faire so we can relive another meltdown.
I don’t see the proof that Hillary is corrupt and in their pockets. Any politician, including Bernie, is influenced be less than noble things at times.
Sorry for the epistle, folks. ;^)
The obvious major reason is to try to smear Hillary Clinton with the stink of scandal. The reality that there was no illegal activity by her in regards to Benghazi or her email server is irrelevant to the right wing. If they can make average voters THINK that there is something fishy about her, whether or not there is any truth to it, then they might be able to swing some independent votes their way – or at least discourage those people from voting for her. And if these efforts fail, as they are almost certain to fail, then the right wing can try to paint a Hillary Clinton presidency as scandal-plagued even before she can take the oath of office. Where they pre-announced their campaign meme of saying that President Obama was a failure before he even got into the building, this time they’d be pre-announcing their 2018 and 2020 campaigns about how nobody can trust Hillary.
There’s another reason right behind the first – that being to try to muddy the waters of history when it comes to scandals in presidential administrations. Given that three of the last major GOP presidencies (Nixon, Reagan, George W. Bush) were in fact riddled with criminality and prosecutions, it’s understandable that they’d try to find something to point at during the Dem presidencies. With Bill Clinton, they first tried to accuse him of sexual deviancy including rape, then they switched up to real estate fraud and insider dealings, and then had the independent prosecutor on the hunt for ANYTHING – which finally bore fruit when Clinton got caught with Lewinsky. None of this was particularly serious criminal activity, but it was just salacious enough to let the right wing get on their moral high horse. (Even if they were being hypocritical in the extreme by doing so…)
With Barack Obama, it seems that the right wing has been in overdrive from the beginning, frantically looking for something, anything they could use as a legal cudgel. And again, part of this is coming from the fact that Bush’s Attorney General was forced out of office in disgrace and his VP’s Chief of Staff was convicted of felonies while trying to obstruct an investigation into the Joe Wilson situation. So what do we get under Obama? False piety about Operation Wide Receiver/Fast & Furious, where the right wing hides behind the body of a fallen Border Patrol agent to try to smear Eric Holder and the president. False piety about Joe Sestak and a conversation he had with Bill Clinton. False piety about the IRS and its filing methods. False piety about an embassy consulate attack in the middle of a serious moment of instability in Libya, when they never expressed such concern during similar attacks under the W. Bush presidency.
And now false piety about where Hillary Clinton stored her email. Email that was encrypted. Email that was not by any account leaked to anyone. And yet we hear right wing media folks constantly trying to beat a drum of “she’s about to be indicted!” We hear right wing media trying to imply that Clinton’s email server somehow placed intelligence agents’ identities and lives in danger. Which is a hilarious and brazen attempt to ignore the very real leak that happened under W. Bush. I tried to discuss this with a right wing friend just yesterday, when he raised this very issue, and he refused to acknowledge that the two situations have anything in common. In other words, it’s all very good for the right wing to ignore a real leak that endangered people’s lives, while harping on a non-problematic situation that doesn’t appear to have impacted anyone.
It’s interesting that the right wing is continuing to hammer on this, given that they declared Hillary Clinton’s candidacy dead on Tuesday night. I don’t think I’ve seen Hannity as happy as he was when he declared Tuesday night a “total disaster” for Clinton (never mind how many delegates she has, or that she knew well in advance that Sanders was going to win NH). Frankly, that was the same language that the right wing used when Clinton won Iowa the week before, including the phrase “total disaster”. If her campaign is so completely dead, then why is the right wing still harping on these smear attempts? Shouldn’t they be spending their time attacking Bernie Sanders, since they think he’s about to get the nomination?
Or could it be, maybe, that Fox News is just enjoying the activity of throwing mud at Hillary Clinton whenever, wherever and however they can? That they know she’s likely to be the nominee and they’re trying to smear the heck out of her early and often? It couldn’t be that simple, could it?