10-31-2019, 08:18 PM
FoX News is a sick joke to others in the news business for bias and for manipulation of the audience. Fill-ins between politics are often "get angry stories" perfectly suited to riling people for hatred of liberal causes. It reeks of authoritarian, Orwellian Newspeak.
FoX News is #1 in viewership because the Right side is not so splintered as is the center (the three main networks) or the ones that go decidedly Left (MSNBC, NPR, and CNN). Viewership is no indication of quality. For years, the best-viewed episode on American television (ruling out live sports) was an episode of the Beverly Hillbillies, a comedy that would not stand up to the polished standards of our times. Twenty minutes of comedy around an implausible plot line? It's not going to work now.
We "Blues" are utterly ineffective at shutting down your side. We are good, in contrast, at mocking the President's mannerisms and exposing the emptiness of most things that President Trump and his acolytes say.
I look at the polls, and I see them ratifying what I see in a chaotic Presidency, pervasive corruption and cronyism, butchery of the English language (so bad that it reminds me almost of the fictional Archie Bunker of All in the Family), failure to get along with the military and the CIA, and contempt for anyone who shows signs of voting against him in 2016. A chaotic Presidency with a liberal President (Carter) proved inadequate to meet stagflation and the Iranian Revolution. I have seen corrupt politicians get exposed in many places and the partisan dynamics of those places are never strong enough to let that corrupt pol get away with it.
Obama's problem as President was that he faced the reality of a social order in which well-funded entities that can accept the idea that government rightly represents economic power at the expense of all else. Such is the old feudal principle that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as it serves the super-rich who own the assets. The Right saw Donald Trump as the vehicle for pushing a right-wing agenda of monopolization, privatization on the cheap, evisceration of labor unions, ending welfare, and basically making 95% of the People responsible to people who see no responsibility except of the masses toward the Master Class. Governments have established themselves on the principle that the sole measure of goodness is that the rich-and-powerful are to get everything possible and that all others are expendable tools. Such has never worked well.
By the way -- you live in a very Blue area, the Twin Cities, which from most statistical measures is one of the most livable areas in America. In view of the harsh winters, your community needs a strong welfare system just to keep people from freezing to death, and your sch9ools must be adequate for making people able to afford heavily-insulated housing, heating fuel, food with more caloric content, and winter housing, that would not be so necessary in rural Mississippi. Note well that much of the HVAC that you service is in government buildings. You probably know enough to keep your opinions to yourself when you install or service an HVAC unit in certain places.
...I can say this about FoX News: people watching it tend to get angrier, which demonstrates that FoX News manipulates the news to fit a right-wing agenda. I have been priced out of cable service (I am -poor now, and I hate being poor because poverty forces unpleasant and even dangerous compromises), but I can say that there is a big difference between Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow from when I had cable TV. I could imagine someone watching Hannity and wanting to pound someone into a pulp... or at least shouting him down in a town hall. Rachel Maddow? She is pulling us away from acceptance of "conservative" myths of the time, but she invites us to check what she says against objective news sources. She fact-checks, or at least insists upon people fact-checking and getting multiple sources on her behalf.
Anger is not healthy behavior in politics. I write as calmly as possible about the egregious misdeeds of the Trump regime. I can get away with such because shaking my fist in the air and using vile words solves nothing.
Donald Trump is not a conservative; he lacks the respect for tradition that marks conservatives. He is a fascist, a revolutionary of the Right.
FoX News is #1 in viewership because the Right side is not so splintered as is the center (the three main networks) or the ones that go decidedly Left (MSNBC, NPR, and CNN). Viewership is no indication of quality. For years, the best-viewed episode on American television (ruling out live sports) was an episode of the Beverly Hillbillies, a comedy that would not stand up to the polished standards of our times. Twenty minutes of comedy around an implausible plot line? It's not going to work now.
We "Blues" are utterly ineffective at shutting down your side. We are good, in contrast, at mocking the President's mannerisms and exposing the emptiness of most things that President Trump and his acolytes say.
I look at the polls, and I see them ratifying what I see in a chaotic Presidency, pervasive corruption and cronyism, butchery of the English language (so bad that it reminds me almost of the fictional Archie Bunker of All in the Family), failure to get along with the military and the CIA, and contempt for anyone who shows signs of voting against him in 2016. A chaotic Presidency with a liberal President (Carter) proved inadequate to meet stagflation and the Iranian Revolution. I have seen corrupt politicians get exposed in many places and the partisan dynamics of those places are never strong enough to let that corrupt pol get away with it.
Obama's problem as President was that he faced the reality of a social order in which well-funded entities that can accept the idea that government rightly represents economic power at the expense of all else. Such is the old feudal principle that no human suffering can ever be in excess so long as it serves the super-rich who own the assets. The Right saw Donald Trump as the vehicle for pushing a right-wing agenda of monopolization, privatization on the cheap, evisceration of labor unions, ending welfare, and basically making 95% of the People responsible to people who see no responsibility except of the masses toward the Master Class. Governments have established themselves on the principle that the sole measure of goodness is that the rich-and-powerful are to get everything possible and that all others are expendable tools. Such has never worked well.
By the way -- you live in a very Blue area, the Twin Cities, which from most statistical measures is one of the most livable areas in America. In view of the harsh winters, your community needs a strong welfare system just to keep people from freezing to death, and your sch9ools must be adequate for making people able to afford heavily-insulated housing, heating fuel, food with more caloric content, and winter housing, that would not be so necessary in rural Mississippi. Note well that much of the HVAC that you service is in government buildings. You probably know enough to keep your opinions to yourself when you install or service an HVAC unit in certain places.
...I can say this about FoX News: people watching it tend to get angrier, which demonstrates that FoX News manipulates the news to fit a right-wing agenda. I have been priced out of cable service (I am -poor now, and I hate being poor because poverty forces unpleasant and even dangerous compromises), but I can say that there is a big difference between Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow from when I had cable TV. I could imagine someone watching Hannity and wanting to pound someone into a pulp... or at least shouting him down in a town hall. Rachel Maddow? She is pulling us away from acceptance of "conservative" myths of the time, but she invites us to check what she says against objective news sources. She fact-checks, or at least insists upon people fact-checking and getting multiple sources on her behalf.
Anger is not healthy behavior in politics. I write as calmly as possible about the egregious misdeeds of the Trump regime. I can get away with such because shaking my fist in the air and using vile words solves nothing.
Donald Trump is not a conservative; he lacks the respect for tradition that marks conservatives. He is a fascist, a revolutionary of the Right.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.