I wonder how Fox News would have reacted if left wing journalists had said the same thing about Condoleeza Rice or Colin Powell during W’s terms.

I do remember criticism of their priorities, particularly of Rice being in the pocket of Big Oil, but not in terms of her basic intelligence.

This is simply another cheap shot from Tantaros and Fox News, and should be recognized as such.

I have to thank Ellen for posting this. It gave me and several people at work today a really good laugh.

If right wing GOP people don’t want to be called out for racism, then perhaps they shouldn’t do or say racist things. It’s not that hard. Just don’t be a racist and people won’t think you to be one. I agree with Ellen – what “truth” is it that these people feel they can’t speak out loud? That they don’t like Muslims? That they don’t like immigrants? That they don’t like black people? That they hate this President and are willing to believe any and every lie they are told about him?

Back in the 1990s, there was a silly right wing meme that got floated, saying that America was suffering from “compassion fatigue” – that privileged white Americans felt that they shouldn’t have to address the country’s long history of racism and discrimination. Members of FAIR had a great response at the time – they answered that this was an interesting question but millions of Americans were continuing to suffer from “racism fatigue”.

In his Fox show tonight, there were some truly stunning moments, even for Hannity. He felt a need to monologue about how much he hates this President, which he presented as his own “rebuttal” to the SOTU address.

Things got much stranger during a discussion with Laura Ingraham and Geraldo Rivera. Rivera actually made one good point in there – Hannity didn’t do a “rebuttal” to a George W. Bush SOTU ever. It was only when President Obama was delivering them that Hannity found it appropriate to tear them apart. Had anyone done that to W. Bush, Hannity would have accused them of treason.

Of course, Hannity does now seize on an economic number that really does mean something. He’s correct when he notes that the unemployment figures don’t include the many people who have been out of work too long to be counted within that statistic and/or have given up looking for a new job. Hannity is right to note that if you counted these people in the full unemployment number, the figure would rise sharply. But he’s forgetting that people on the left cited this number throughout the W. Bush presidency, when Hannity was trying to talk UP the economy rather than talk it down. Hannity wouldn’t hear of such discussion until Barack Obama became President. At that point, this number became very important to him.

Rivera asked when Hannity gave one of these kinds of rebuttals to George W. Bush, and Hannity tried to bully away the question. Ingraham then jumped in on Hannity’s side and tried to dismiss Rivera’s objection. And she made a statement that Hannity had roundly criticized Bush’s handling of the economy when things weren’t going so well. The only problem with her statement is that IT’S A LIE. As thankfully documented here, Sean Hannity actually went way overboard trying to deny there were any economic problems, all the way through the 2008 electoral cycle – even to the point of trying to bully Robert Kuttner off the air.

The reason Kelly didn’t go full-nasty on Bundy is pretty obvious. Too many of Fox News’ viewers like the Bundy family and agree with their extreme ideas. If Kelly goes after Bundy, she alienates the GOP base and many of Roger Ailes’ coveted demographic.

On the other hand, Ailes doesn’t like that these yahoos are acting out during an election year, and I doubt he thinks they have a chance at anything other than jail terms. But he knows he can’t just attack them without consequences. (His likely position is that their behavior is inevitable given the current President, but that these guys are just making a mess.)

So he has Kelly try to go down the middle of the road. She doesn’t exactly agree with Bundy’s comments, but she doesn’t shout him off the air either. So the GOP fans of Bundy can say that he got his points in, and the GOP critics of Bundy can point to her correcting him here and there.

And yes, if this was a left-wing sit-in at a congressman’s office where the protestors were refusing to leave until, say, the congressman changed their vote on something like the Iraq invasion, Kelly would spare no ammunition in ridiculing and blasting at the protestor.

Thank you for confirming that I wasn’t hearing things this morning. Truly unbelievable.

It sounds like Mike James has not actually watched this segment or even read what the protestor was actually saying.

Frankly, it’s strange to hear someone thinking that anyone would say that violent crime is caused by people being afraid of calling the police. That’s a nonsensical statement, and it would seem to line up with the same strange worldview that would start ideas like “Black Lives Don’t Matter”.

Obviously, the protestor’s view is that there’s a problem when communities don’t feel safe calling the police. Meaning that they not only are victimized by crime but by the police as well. This really isn’t that hard to understand. But most likely Mike James already knows this.

One wonders why Kevin Pearson is so angry that he feels he must throw profanity around. It sounds like desperation as he watches a pundit he clearly admires, Limbaugh, sinking into irrelevancy.

Pearson seems unaware of the facts. Limbaugh has in fact been losing radio stations. Here in Los Angeles, he was moved off the Clear Channel flagship, KFI and put on their secondary tier station, now renamed KEIB at the lower powered 1150AM broadcast. (This station only covers part of Los Angeles as opposed to KFI which can cover everywhere from Valencia down to Orange County) Limbaugh has also lost key stations in other cities. Only recently he was throwing a tantrum about not caring about having lost his WABC perch in New York, and that’s without noting that he’s been pulled off the air in other markets like Boston.

The market manager covering WIBC in Indianapolis publicly stated that they pulled Limbaugh off the air because several national sponsors will not consent to have their ads on during his program. (This is also most likely the reason why Clear Channel bumped Limbaugh to the lesser station in Los Angeles.)

There is no evidence that all the sponsors “begged” to be taken back by Limbaugh – other than Limbaugh’s people insisting that it happened. David Friend at Carbonite certainly didn’t. He was unapologetic about it months after the fact, even though right wingers tried to spin the situation the other way around. (Carbonite lost some revenue due to their principled choice to walk away from Limbaugh – that revenue drop, as Friend noted at the time, was due to their needing to find other national programming to replace Limbaugh, not due to Limbaugh being the key to their future.)

And let’s look at who’s been advertising on his shows since he attacked Fluke – Hillsdale College? Tax Defense Partners? Time Share Exit Team? Really? These guys outbid all the other legitimate advertisers that could have come on board? Time Share Exit Team has more funding than Sleep Number? Does Kevin Pearson believe that people don’t notice this stuff? (It’s almost funnier to listen to who advertises on Glenn Beck’s shows – Goldline??? And we should note that the station Limbaugh was demoted to in Los Angeles is the one that carries Beck.)

The reality for Limbaugh is that he’s a long way from his heyday of attacking Bill Clinton every day. His response to that fall has been an increasing stream of nasty personal attacks, each of which has damaged his reputation and made advertisers less interested in dealing with him. In the last ten years alone, he has been caught mocking Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s, insulting Iraq war veterans with whom he disagreed (by calling them “phony soldiers”), repeatedly attacking President Obama with comments like “I Hope He Fails!!!” and of course, trying to slime Sandra Fluke. These aren’t the actions of someone who believes they’re on top of the world – these are clearly desperate plays for attention.

Limbaugh has good reason to be concerned about the impending expiration of his current deal next year. It is unlikely he will be getting anything like that with the new deal.

Eyes, you’re absolutely right about the turnout. Under any candidate scenario, it is crucial for voters to show up and participate. If anything, that was a major lesson from Ross Perot’s campaign in 1992 and Ralph Nader’s campaign in 2000.

And we should note that during midterm elections, it’s been shown that white GOP voters tend to turn up with much more regularity. Occasionally, this can go another way – such as 2006, when Dems finally showed up for midterms and the GOP got a surprise.

You’re also correct that part of the purpose of all the “outrage” stories aired on Fox News and right wing radio has been to keep the base as lathered up as possible. (The other part of the purpose has had to do with establishing a counter-narrative of history, one where the right wing can point to their own signposts. And this website has served a valuable function in calling out Fox News for these attempts, preserving the behavior for the historical record, and showing what was missing from the right wing version of the story.)

In general elections, more people tend to show up, and again, it’s critical that Dems get voters to actually participate. In both 2008 and 2012, the GOP had a chance at winning, had the Dems not mobilized and turned out – and that’s despite the attempted hurdles the GOP tried to put in front of them. Voter ID being one of the most despicable scams we’ve heard, clearly designed to intimidate non-white Dem voters from voting.

In the situation where Dems are actually voting, like 2008 and 2012, the GOP is faced with a serious demographic problem. It’s one that has snuck up on them over the past 20 years. Back in 1980, Ronald Reagan could win the Presidency, primarily on the votes of white men – he didn’t need to count on female, black or Chicano votes. In 2016, we’re facing a very different voting group. There’s still a large bloc of white male votes – the older wedge of which tilts to the right. But there are also significant blocs of votes from women and other ethnicities. This was a big part of the reason everyone but Karl Rove knew to call Ohio for Obama when they did in 2012 – the areas that hadn’t been fully reported in were primarily non-white and it was known that those voters weren’t going to suddenly vote for Romney.

In this demographic situation, a GOP candidate must be able to mobilize ALL of his base voters and pretty much every other voter he can get. He needs to get all the usual GOP voters out, plus all the Fundamentalists, the hard right, the libertarians, and then even whatever is left of the independent votes. If he can pull that together, then yes, the GOP candidate can win. The problem these days is that Fox News and right wing radio have made it almost impossible to please the hard right and the Fundamentalists. In order to get that group to follow you, like Ted Cruz, you have to sacrifice everyone with common sense. Again, Reagan could get those votes, partly from being a generally appealing guy and partly from the demographic being more solidly white and male in 1980. And various scholars have noted the Reagan of the 1980 campaign probably couldn’t please the hard right today – he’s just not right wing enough for them. (We also have to keep in mind that right wing radio and Fox News have helped push the GOP farther over to the right than we’ve been since the 1950s.)

When the nonsense is finished from the GOP campaigns, we’ll have the usual middle-of-the-road candidate. The GOP base will once again need to decide if they wish to vote for a man who doesn’t stand with their harshest views of history and politics. And recent presidential elections have shown us that a chunk of that base will not vote for someone who doesn’t completely stay with them. The Romney campaign line about the “Etch-a-Sketch” moment was a true statement, but the right wing could not tolerate it. Hence, they didn’t show up. (The right wing has tried to spin this as the Fundamentalists not showing up due to Romney being a Mormon – but that doesn’t explain why the same hard right wing base didn’t turn out for McCain. The answer is that they want someone like a Ted Cruz or a Sean Hannity, and they won’t settle for anything but that.) Given that issue, the GOP candidate has to deal with not only not getting their own base, but also not getting much of the general vote that is not white, male and older.

On the other hand, if the GOP is foolish enough to actually nominate someone like Trump or Cruz to be their candidate, we’re looking at a landslide. Mainstream GOP voters will either vote against those candidates or stay home.

This really wasn’t a surprise, to be honest. Carson was never a real contender for President, and he’d always been a lock to crumble before more than a handful of primaries, if he even were to make it to Iowa. And if anything, this latest gaffe just gives the RNC what it’s been waiting for – a way to seem like they’re supporting Carson while actually tossing him to the sidelines.

The hard right will of course cry foul here, since they’re enjoying tweaking the GOP establishment. But it doesn’t change the fact that Carson willfully puffed up his resume. Had Barack Obama or Bill Clinton been caught in a lie like this, Fox News would have covered nothing but that for YEARS. Even today, we’d be seeing coverage of that any time Bill Clinton’s name came up. But if it’s Ben Carson, Fox News would have us think of it as just another campaign moment to move along from. (On the surface, of course.)

The actual facts around Carson’s situation with both Westmoreland and West Point are different from what he has repeatedly stated, even recently. It seems that Westmoreland did attend a dinner honoring a Medal of Honor recipient that Carson likely also attended as a 2nd Lt in the local ROTC. But that was earlier in the year, not on Memorial Day. We also have no idea whether Carson even met Westmoreland, other than being able to attend the same event. And we do know that the “full scholarship to West Point” line was false. It’s possible someone in his ROTC told him he could potentially be appointed there, but Carson’s narrative about it bears no relationship to what would have happened had he actually been in a position to choose whether or not to attend West Point. The academy would have a record of this, and they do not.

Carson’s new insistence that he never actually applied is still a ways off from the facts. You can’t just apply to attend this academy. They’re extremely exclusive. You have to be appointed, and it’s a big deal for it to happen. Had he actually been appointed and given this opportunity, and then turned it down as he says he did, it’s the sort of thing a lot of people would remember. In reality, it sounds like someone may have suggested it to him as a possibility that he never pursued. But that’s not as noble a story as the one he’s been peddling, is it?

Again, if this were a Democrat candidate, Fox News would have eviscerated him, and would continue to do so every single time his name came up.

What’s more interesting to me is that the Fox News group has adjusted the debate army. As expected, they’re dumping Graham and Pataki. But in a fun development, they’ve banished both Huckabee and Christie to the kids’ table. In the case of Huckabee, I believe it to be a matter of his campaign not having much staying power.

If I didn’t know better, I’d say that Roger Ailes is encouraging Huckabee to come back to the network in time to comment on the primaries, etc. The smart move for Huckabee would be to grab the opportunity – since it would freeze out Ted Cruz, who is clearly campaigning for Huckabee’s slot on the network. It doesn’t allow Huckabee to come back with the huge raise I think he thought he’d get from a new presidential campaign, but it at least allows him to block Cruz and continue to make a very comfortable living while opining at will. When the primaries really get going and Cruz winds up on the sidelines, it will be interesting to see where Cruz goes. If Huckabee blocks him from Fox News, I suppose he could wind up with NewsMax or with Glenn Beck. I frankly always expected both Cruz and Carson to have radio shows by January 2017, from which they’d predictably throw rocks at Hillary Clinton or whichever person gets sworn into the White House next.

With Christie, I think Ailes may actually be giving him a chance to get MORE attention, since he’s getting lost in a sea of lecterns on the stage. In the smaller debate, it’s a better chance for Christie, like Fiorina, to jump out to center stage and take over the evening. And once a few more contenders fall out (Carson, Paul, Rubio), maybe Christie gets to come back to the mainstage…

This may be one of the most spectacular O’Reilly interviews I’ve ever seen. He’s clearly enraged by George Will. And Will clearly sees him for what he is. (When you think about it, George Will and Bob Schieffer have more in common on this score than either would like to admit.)

What’s also interesting here is that O’Reilly is actually touching on something very real about the Reagan years that most right wingers don’t want to admit. Reagan was in fact addled and confused for much of his presidency. He was in fact easily manipulated by his cabinet and his advisors, perhaps more so than George W. Bush. He was in fact out of touch with what was happening to average people around the country. There are multiple accounts of his briefings needing to be simplified to an absurd level, to his ideas about politics and the world being strangely askew from reality. So O’Reilly has unwittingly stumbled into something very substantial about the Reagan Administration – but it’s something that the hardline right wing absolutely cannot tolerate being discussed.

Will’s condemnation of the book is based on two core principles. The first is that he will not countenance Reagan being presented in this fashion – it doesn’t jibe with the mythology Will has built for the past 35+ years of his career. The depiction of a confused, out-of-it Reagan would expose Will for what he was back in the day – a hard right apologist for the worst excesses of the Reagan Administration, and a constructor of tall tales to justify those apologies. Tall tales about a strong President who faced down the world and the Democrats at the same time. A strong president who sadly didn’t really exist. (Not to say that Reagan didn’t hold passionate views at times – but he was never able to articulate them without a strong speechwriter. George Schultz had this best in his own notes and testimony about an infamous exchange between Reagan and Weinberger, in which they apparently said:

Weinberger: Mr. President, selling these TOW missiles to Iran is a violation of the Arms Export Control Act. It is illegal. And trying to wash the sale through another country will not make it legal.

Reagan: I can handle the illegality, Cap. But I can’t handle that big, strong Ronald Reagan didn’t do anything to get the hostages out!

Weinberger: Mr. President, visiting hours are on Thursdays…

c.f. Peter Kornbluh and the National Security Archive

Will’s second core principle is more basic to this confrontation. He finds O’Reilly to be an unworthy person trying to present himself as an intellectual. This isn’t a political issue so much as it is a class issue. Will sees right through O’Reilly’s attempts to re-establish himself as a learned historian. And again, there are people on the right and the left who will agree with Will on this point. The fact is, O’Reilly is not a historian by trade or by experience. He’s a well-paid blowhard. For all the wealth and the attention, he’s still the same tantrum thrower who infamously screamed “We’ll DO IT LIVE!!!!” It’s no surprise that Will detests O’Reilly. And in this case, Will is understandably upset that O’Reilly is inadvertently playing up a narrative that would challenge Will’s entire career. O’Reilly, of course, seems totally oblivious to the consequences of his behavior here. Which is again, no surprise.

Kelly also went way over the top at the end of her show, as she sorrowfully intoned that the victims’ families “DESERVE TO KNOW”. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Kelly was doing a bit of grandstanding.

The funny thing about the hearing is that you can see right away how badly it backfired on the GOP. Because the clips brought up on the various Fox News shows afterward wound up just being recaps of this or that GOP congressperson trying to Bogart the microphone and get their 15 minutes. Nothing of the supposed “gotcha” moments or “smoking guns” that the Fox News audience was eagerly hoping to see. Instead, they were treated to a spectacle of GOP congresspeople looking fairly incompetent while Clinton calmly stared them down, hour after hour.

This was not the Benghazi Hearing that the Fox News people were looking for…

Bob’s post is a little odd, assuming that he actually means what he’s saying and isn’t trying for satire. The reality is that conservative right wingers tend to be quite angry and belligerent by nature. This is easily demonstrable by looking at the behavior of various Fox News and right wing radio hosts, like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly in particular is openly stating in his friendly discussions with GOP candidates that he’s “really angry!” So this isn’t something that should be a surprise to anyone seriously discussing the issue.

The fact is that Fox News viewers tend to be angry right wing people who are comforted by the Fox News (and right wing radio) spin that somehow all the voters who disagree with them are all “low information” people who don’t know anything. The almost casual bigotry that goes with this spin seems to go unnoticed as well, for those people inside the bubble. Granted, there are also a lot of more liberal viewers who tend to be drawn to the rants of people like Hannity for sheer entertainment value – along the lines of “Can you believe that so-and-so said that?” The overall ratings numbers for Fox News have usually been higher than the other networks (although they faltered in early 2013 for obvious reasons), but this disregards the important information we can glean from the key demographics. Namely, that Fox News viewers have been shown to primarily be older, whiter and male. It’s a demographic of an aging population that does not understand how someone like Barack Obama was elected president (and likely was not helped to understand by the kind of coverage that Fox News has provided).

Fox News has never internally believed itself to be “fair and balanced”. That’s an advertising slogan, based on the anger of the right wing that they felt they weren’t hearing “their” side of the story. So now angry right wingers have an outlet that repeats the same biased worldview they’ve been hearing from Rush Limbaugh for nearly 30 years now. And as a result, the GOP has been pushed steadily farther to the right, to the point that it can no longer appeal to mainstream Americans and thus cannot win national elections in anything other than gerrymandered districts. And as a side result of that, we now have not only right wing radio, but Extreme right wing radio, fomented by angry and hateful people like Glenn Beck.

Bob apparently does not understand that Fox News has a history of misstatements, misrepresentations and biased coverage that has been exhaustively documented in public by outlets like this website. And there are research papers that have consistently shown over the past 20 years that Fox News viewers are the least informed of news consumers – regularly indicating that they believe the most extreme and inaccurate propaganda to be purveyed on Fox News and right wing radio. (There’s an argument to be made that it’s actually the Fox News viewers who may be the “low information voters” – as we saw in the 2012 election results.)

The issue that really should concern Fox News proponents is what they’ll do in a few years when the older population that was watching the channel begins to sharply recede. It’s the same problem that the GOP faces – what will they do when their base of older white male voters (mostly from the Baby Boom) begins to decline? Fox News has worked very hard to encourage the most extreme views, particularly of angry “Tea Party” groups, but there’s simply not enough of those people to make for a dependable audience base. Further, the really extreme groups no longer think that Fox News is extreme enough for them now – they’re off listening to exploiters like Alex Jones or Glenn Beck, and referring to even hard right GOP congresspeople as RINOs. This is a problem of the right wing’s own making, and it is one that they’ll have to face sooner or later.

Posters like Bob would do better to spend a little more time looking at those real problems and not trying to debate undisputed facts that have been documented on sites like these. And they might want to look a bit more inward to see who’s really posting out of anger.

This is a typical Fox News double standard. And yes, it was interesting to see Hannity get in every cheap shot he could with Dietl, but then suddenly insist that Williams was straying from the topic by answering them with facts.

Similar double-standarding happened with Megyn Kelly, who challenged the Washington Post’s fact checking of Carly Fiorina, saying that they shouldn’t have given her three Pinnochios. Except that Kelly and Hannity have never had any problems citing the Pinnochios when they are used on Democrats. So the message would seem to be that the Pinnochios are extremely reliable – unless they’re used on a Republican, at which point they should be questioned. Got it.

I suppose it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Fox News is so terrified of Hillary Clinton that they’re dredging up Ed Klein again. Given how unreliable his statements are, I have to wonder if the polling numbers that Roger Ailes sees are actually even worse for the GOP than he’s admitting publicly.

There was a significant amount of nonsense in O’Reilly’s material last night.

Yes, the discussion of the bogus additional “Born Alive” material left out the most important information – that the procedure is already illegal. The new GOP hard right wing bills are actually intended to add more penalties and to attack all clinics that provide any abortions, regardless of whether this illegal procedure is involved. The votes here were intended to pull a “gotcha” on the Dems, and they backfired. O’Reilly’s sham outrage at the Dems who refused to vote for even more penalties and additional attacks is laughable.

More laughable is O’Reilly’s attempt to spin the Pope’s statements as “a shot at Obama”, when in fact the Pope was offering mutually supportive and friendly statements. Sadly, O’Reilly was so committed to his feelings on this that he refused to allow Jessica Ehrlich to finish a sentence in correction to his rant. It’s interesting that he allowed Andrea Tantaros to throw some fairly nasty invective, including a shameful cheap shot at the end of that segment – and showed none of the righteous anger he’s displayed at moderate or liberal guests who have behaved similarly in the past. For Ehrlich’s gentle statements, O’Reilly had no patience at all – he cut her off and began lecturing her before she could even make her point. In fact, she was reminding him that he was taking the Pope’s sentences out of context and even trying to speak for the Pope. She tried to note that the very next sentence from the Pope completely disproved what O’Reilly was saying, and that his body language (something O’Reilly has always professed to study) showed his support and friendship toward President Obama. O’Reilly’s response was to have a bit of a tantrum – “You’ll see that I am RIGHT and you are WRONG”, etc.

O’Reilly’s only little allowance to Dems or President Obama was that he acknowledged that the President was a good host and showed good manners. Mike Huckabee, on the other hand, seems to have abandoned his earlier statements along those lines. Maybe three years ago, Huckabee sounded a bit like John McCain at times, noting that he disagreed with the President but didn’t doubt his faith or his sincerity. This week, Huckabee tried something fairly vile – he threw in the notion that the President is only “pretends” to be a Christian, and issued an embarrassing apology to the Pope for what Huckabee somehow thinks is disrespectful behavior by President Obama. Like Huckabee’s frantic rush to the side of Kim Davis, this move was similarly disregarded by most media. It was seen for what it is – a desperate attempt by Huckabee to stir up more of the hard right GOP base and thus allow him to stay in the race a little longer. (It’s becoming obvious that Huckabee and Cruz are each attempting to outlast each other – they’ll wind up as the Santorum/Gingrich couple of the 2016 campaign. This is why Cruz is desperately trying to say he’s raising “so much” money and why Huckabee keeps jumping up and down for every extremist cause. (I confess to enjoying the spectacle of Cruz trying to crash Huckabee’s Davis event and being told no.) When the 2016 election is over, we’ll see if Cruz gets his wish and winds up in Huckabee’s old slot at Fox News, or if Huckabee himself takes it back. I’d guess the latter, with Cruz getting a “commentator” position like that of Sarah Palin. But the bad blood between these guys is palpable, even thousands of miles away. You can see it directly through all the false piety and the desperate clambering for the moral high ground neither man possesses.

While I applaud the sentiments of Ron Reagan, the factual record unfortunately shows that his father approved of and admired Rush Limbaugh, as evidenced in the famous letter he sent to Limbaugh in the early 90s. (This was one of the last public-ish statements made by Reagan before his Alzheimer’s announcement in 1994)

And I agree that it’s become a regular and ridiculous spectacle for current right wing shouters to invoke Reagan for whatever they want. But we must remember the facts of Reagan’s presidency, and the sad legacy of issues his administration left us. His was certainly the most virulent right wing presidency we’d ever seen, with members of his cabinet pushing many ideas not thought prudent or polite before at that level.

This was a President who wanted to appoint Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, who wanted to name Paul Laxalt as his Chief of Staff during the Iran Contra mess, who cultivated an Administration that saw a record number of indictments and convictions – essentially a record amount of demonstrable criminality in the White House. And that’s not even getting into the wild problems he ran into in terms of fomenting untruths about welfare, social policy and foreign policy. The rise of people like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity can directly be traced to the behavior of the Reagan Administration back in the 1980s. Back then, the most direct echo of Reagan’s thinking was the infamous Wally George, who could only get himself on a public television station for his rants and screeds. Nowadays, thanks to Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch, we have a whole passel of Wally Georges – namely, the entire Fox News Channel.