On this week’s Fox News Sunday, liberal panelist Dennis Kucinich tried to cite the Bush administration – and its false pretenses for starting a war in Iraq – as at least equally responsible for Americans’ distrust in government as the so-called IRS scandal under the Obama administration. But when co-panelist Karl Rove objected and told Kucinich to “move on,” host Chris Wallace backed up Rove with the same instruction. Which Kucinich followed by attacking President Obama.
On the subject of “arrogance of power,” Wallace turned to Kucinich with a leading question, “As a self-professed, unapologetic liberal, after a week like this, particularly with the Justice Department subpoenaing all these records, with the IRS targeting people, won’t more Americans see government as the problem, not the solution?”
That prompted the following exchange:
KUCINICH: Well, the first problem you have here, is that there are some who can only see the wrongs of the president in the other party. I mean, we still haven’t had President Bush, for example, account for why he took us into war in Iraq, and all the dead soldiers as a result, and the dead Iraqis.
ROVE: Oh, please. Silverman-Robb commission have looked into that from top to bottom, a bipartisan commission.
KUCINICH (starting to argue): We went to war. Where were the weapons of mass destruction?”
ROVE (in a commanding tone): Stop defending Obama by blaming Bush. That’s gotten really, really, really tiresome.
Kucinich tried to say that he holds both President Obama and President Bush “accountable.” He said, “You can’t just attack President Obama and not look at what President Bush did.” Apparently, Kucinich hasn’t figured out yet that on Fox News, only Democrats are “held accountable.”
ROVE replied, "Again, Silverman-Robb commission looked into it from top to bottom. Move on."
Kucinich tried to keep arguing but Wallace broke in to back up Rove. Wallace said, “All right. Move on in any case. So what’s your point, though, about government?”
Kucinich backed off and moved on to attacking President Obama:
My point is, look, President Obama hasn’t done anything about the unemployment problem. We have massive amounts of people who are out of work. And the oxygen that’s being sucked out by some of these scandals may limit the White House, but he still has to be held accountable for not creating the jobs. We have about 8 million people out of work, about another 8 million people working part time and shouldn’t be. We need an economic agenda. We don’t have it. And as far as government being too big, national security state, too big. Military, which goes abroad and creates wars, too big.
We’ve written before about Kucinich carrying Fox’s anti-Obama water. We hope he’ll wake up and smell the Republican coffee that he keeps helping to serve. But on that day, he continued his Obama attacks in the Panel Plus segment that gets posted online.
As for Kucinich’s leanings, I realize his public presentation is as one who wants everyone to reason together. As such, he’s a dependable liberal voice who can be counted on to back down when he’s discussing issues with angry right wing voices that are more sure of themselves. Kucinich certainly got a fair shake from the media throughout his career. It was known that his run for President had no chance, and that he was trying in vain to take the Ralph Nader mantle in 2004. I don’t know that Fox News treated him fairer than CNN – it’s more accurate to say that Fox enjoyed the spectacle of his demise more than other channels, which focused on the front runners of that race. Fox News’ intent in 2004 was to make it look like all the Dem candidates were as liberal as Kucinich, thus painting them all with a single brush. So it was a propaganda consideration rather than a journalistic one that motivated Fox News to cover him at all. And it was yet another example of how biased the situation is at this channel.
Finally, Kucinich didn’t agree to appear as a regular paid commentator on Fox News because he wanted to “try to reason with all.” He’s doing it for the check he gets each week. He’s not paid to win the debates he has on the various Fox News shows. He’s paid to lose them.
I agree that Kucinich sold out, although I’d disagree on the timetable. I agree that President Obama is a corporate-friendly president, much like every other president we’ve had over my entire lifetime. I agree that Dems and GOP candidates tend to be similar when we’re not dealing with extreme cases like Christine O’Donnell or Rick Santorum.
I don’t agree that President Obama hasn’t accomplished much or that he hasn’t used the Bully Pulpit to his advantage. If anything, the criticism from the right wing has been to try to attack him FOR using the Bullly Pulpit to advance the issues he’s backed. And he’s actually gotten a fair amount accomplished, despite almost universal opposition and obstruction from the GOP. The notion that he “doesn’t seem to have any ideas” and all that is a right wing meme along the lines of what we heard after Rush Limbaugh angrily shouted “I hope he fails!” The right wing approach has been to announce that Obama doesn’t have any ideas or has already failed and then proceed from that assumption as thought it was true. I wouldn’t recommend following that approach in any case.
As for Dennis Kucinich, I still remember when he was running for President in 2004. I remember that he originally had an anti-choice position but flipped it when he was running for higher office. I remember that he did a great job of trying to provide a Democrat alternative to Ralph Nader’s insurgent campaign. Except that Nader actually campaigned all the way to the finish line and Kucinich bowed out before the convention, where he was given a few minutes to speak and some useless platform language. Kucinich was, in the sum of his Congressional career, a dependable liberal and moderate. He was never a Barbara Lee or a Ron Dellums, and he shouldn’t be confused with those people. The fact that he had no problem signing a contract to appear on Fox News and act in this unfortunate manner should be a strong indication of his true leanings.
What a schmuck. I can’t believe you are this dense. Taking a pay check from those low life turds puts you in the same company. Shame on you. You beautiful wife must be very proud. Nobody else is.
Except for him and James Rosen.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/20/karl-rove-prosecute-people-who-break-their-oath-by-leaking-secrets/
Kelly even put aside her own double standards to try taking him to task on that he was employing multiple Hypocrisies, and Rove replied with a no saying it while saying it version of “It’s not bias- I’d help them pick out Rosen’s cell if I didn’t have plans for him!”
Sorry about the hijack into that- I just wanted to contribute that as an add-on to Rove being such a piece of dicklick.
As for Turd Blossom, Dennis should just look at Rove and say, "I imagine its hard for you hearing people bring up mistakes that you either orchestrated or had a hand in ":
If you had a real left wing commentator like, say, Amy Goodman, they wouldn’t tolerate that kind of thing for a second. If Karl Rove said something that offensive and then said “Move on!”, you’d hear an answer of “Excuse me? Are you telling the thousands of people who died for your war to move on? Are you telling the families of those people to move on? How dare you dismiss their concerns like this.” And then you let Karl Rove try to talk his way out of that abyss.
Again, this is a useful example of Fox News being a helpful organ for the GOP and not by any means a “fair and balanced” news organization. Chris Wallace is reliable as a GOP litmus on most issues. Sometimes he can be tough on GOP candidates, particularly if they are out of favor with the elite of the party (witness his broadsides on Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum last year when the GOP power structure wanted them to get out of the way of Mitt Romney as fast as possible). But I don’t know that I’ve ever seen him do anything but attack Democrat candidates and politicians. Of course, his lowest point came with his attempted gotcha on Bill Clinton and we all saw how badly that went for Wallace. I actually felt some sympathy for Wallace at that moment. It’s true that he deliberately provoked Clinton, but it’s never pleasant to watch someone get humiliated like that on the air, even when it’s Wallace.
Hey Karl, let’s not forget that throughout the entire 80’s everything that was negative was blamed on President Carter by the R’s. In fact I still hear him being blamed occasionally when it fits your agenda.
