When Barack Obama was president, Fox thought the Tea Party disruption of town halls was just ducky. When Obama was demonized at the protests, Fox described the activity in loving detail. But now, with Donald Trump and Republicans being protested, Fox is denigrating the opposition.
On Monday, Fox host Neil Cavuto hosted Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) after he faced disruption and booing at his town hall over the weekend. But instead of quizzing McClintock about his positions vis-à-vis the protests, Cavuto was only interested in promoting one side. You can probably guess which side that was.
First, Cavuto helped McClintock deflect from Trump’s Russia scandal with bogus Susan Rice accusations. In his introduction, Cavuto played a clip of McClintock getting booed after mentioning Rice. Cavuto said McClintock is “still bringing that message to his constituents that at the very least, it is worth probing and getting an understanding what Susan Rice knew, and when she knew it.”
They didn’t even discuss the facts of the Rice matter, probably because they point to a nothingburger. Even Fox's own Charles Krauthammer agrees there's no there there.
But McClintock ran with the messaging. “What we’re seeing, Neil, is the radical left on full display,” he said. “The appalling lack of civility, the intolerance for any dissenting viewpoints and the abject double standard.”
Double standard? Why, it turns out that in 2009, McClintock praised this kind of activism – when it was the Tea Partiers engaging in it:
We need to write letters to the editor, post blogs on the Internet, make entries on facebook and myspace. We need to twitter and call in to radio shows and stand up at public meetings and be sure that every voter understands that … “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.”
We’re going to agitate and agitate and agitate everywhere we can in every forum we can find – every single one of us. This is a fight that every one of us is in and where every one of us can make a difference…
Cavuto complained that many McClintock protesters “didn’t want to hear anything bad about Susan Rice and what she knew and when she knew it, even though she’s had very inconsistent positions. Some would go so extreme as to say she’s lied repeatedly.”
Trump has lied repeatedly. He's lied about his and his associates’ ties to Russia as well as the lie that he was wiretapped by President Obama. But has any Fox host ever suggested that implies guilt or that we should be skeptical of Trump’s claims as a result?
Not only did Cavuto not mention that now, he went on to acquit Trump of any campaign collusion with Russia (even though the FBI hasn’t) by saying that Trump’s missile strike “might seem to put to bed this issue that Donald Trump might have a very sort of patsy kind of relationship with Vladimir Putin.” Then, like any good Fox host, Cavuto went on to smear Trump opponents, this time by suggesting they were just irrational haters. “Yet it still seemed that the crowd was, you know, itching for a fight,” he added.
McClintock helped pile on. "This is the radical left. They demonized Trump during the campaign, they’re still demonizing him. They have completely lost touch with the American people," he claimed.
Actually, if you go by Trump’s dismal poll numbers, the protesters are the ones in touch with America.
McClintock is not on either the House Intelligence Committee nor the Foreign Affairs Committee. But he nonetheless insisted that our supposed new tension with Russia (over Trump’s Syrian missile strike) “certainly puts the lie to any suggestion that somehow President Trump is Vladimir Putin’s patsy.”
And yet neither McClintock nor Cavuto expressed any curiosity about the rest of the story on Trump’s relationship to Russia.
But at least McClintock was unequivocal in his stance that Trump needs to get authorization from Congress to make military attacks on other countries. “They cannot be done unilaterally by the president,” McClintock said. “That is a principle that James Madison, the father of the Constitution, felt was its most important element.”
Then time was up.
Watch the hypocrisy below, from the March 10, 2017 Your World.