It turns out Megyn Kelly’s adoration of “citizen journalism” – even when it involved illegal recording of ACORN employees - completely vanishes when it’s Republican Senator Mitch McConnell on the unflattering end of public scrutiny. In case you missed it, Mother Jones released a secret tape of McConnell aides plotting how to smear Ashley Judd as a potential opponent for McConnell's senate seat. Instead of paying attention to the substance of what was caught – legally – Kelly helped further McConnell’s narrative of baselessly attacking Democrats.
It’s worth reminding people that Kelly was a vision of obtuseness over Team Breitbart’s illegal tactics then just as she was a vision of obtuseness over the substance of the McConnell campaign's remarks. For example, they said about Judd:
She's clearly, this sounds extreme, but she is emotionally unbalanced. I mean it's been documented. Jesse can go in chapter and verse from her autobiography about, you know, she's suffered some suicidal tendencies. She was hospitalized for 42 days when she had a mental breakdown in the '90s.
In fact, in this case, Kelly went the extra mile of suggesting - without evidence - that the Democrats had bugged McConnell's office so as to suggest that illegal tactics were used.
As Media Matters noted:
Megyn Kelly discussed the controversy surrounding the recording on the April 9 edition of America Live and repeatedly asked her guests about illegal bugging and the possibility that Democrats were responsible for illegally recording McConnell’s private conversations. Kelly provided no evidence to support the premise of her discussion.
Under state law in Kentucky, where the recording reportedly was made, it is legal to record a private conversation if at least one party to that conversation knows that it is being recorded. So it is only by portraying this conversation as a “bugged” recording that Fox can perpetuate the notion that the recording was obtained illegally.
And distract from the substance of what McConnell's campaign was caught doing, of course.
Let’s keep in mind that it doesn’t mean that there is actually an ethics investigation. It just means that one has been called for by a nonprofit group.
That’s the same thing as McConnell and his people frantically calling for an FBI investigation to try to distract everyone from the main part of the story – their attempt to smear Ashley Judd. And that pending “FBI Investigation” that Fox wants to trumpet really just means that if an FBI investigator has time, he or she will listen to the tape and ask a few people in the room some questions. This is not a major criminal matter, particularly given the circumstances. It is not Watergate. And the simplest explanation tends to work in these cases – meaning that a person in the room didn’t like where this was all going and recorded it for posterity.
This is similar to the person who recorded Mitt Romney talking about the 47% – was that person charged with a felony? No. And the person who saved these remarks won’t be charged either.
But now, thanks to CREW resetting the emphasis where it should have been all along, we can enjoy the spectacle of Rush Limbaugh and Fox desperately trying to spin things back in their direction. This is even funnier than Wag the Dog.
He would have saved a lot of money and humiliation if he new Mackris was recording his perverted sexual harrassment phone calls!
I guess Bill’s willling to talk about this sort of thing after all!
I know these are generated automatically depending on the words in the thread. Now, who attracted these ladies, I wonder: Mitch or Megyn?
And even that’s starting to not work for them. Like I commented on another thread last night, even the Tea Party’s crying fowl on some of the new double standards, they’re wondering if all the tantrums they got behind were just to waste everyone’s time.
Fox News’ solution? Double down on the IOKIYAR, triple it for the people who are all but assured to lose 2014, but are still too useful to the agenda. McConnell’s definitely still a useful idiot.
All evidence points that this tape was indeed done by someone in the room, particularly after he or she realized how ugly the campaign was shaping up. So they taped it and released it. There’s nothing particularly dirty here – just the campaign people showing their true natures. This is similar to releases the Fox people crowed about last year when Democratic strategists would make comments on group phone calls. But now they want to cry foul?
And the Watergate comparison is hysterical. Watergate was a criminal break-in conducted for political purposes, as part of a greater scheme of criminality by CREEP in 1972. And the Nixon tapes weren’t bugs planted by Democrats – they were recordings that Nixon made in his own paranoia, not realizing until too late that they would be his undoing. (And let’s not forget Rosemary Wood and the deleted section…)
The masses will have a hearty breakfast with the eggs on the faces of these Fox “News” frauds.
