Tag: Fox News

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

My Sad Secret Society Meeting

CREDIT: Reuters | Lucy Nicholson

I’ve got a confession to make. I’m in the Secret Society. You know the one I’m talking about. Fox News and Congressman Devin Nunes have outed us now, so there’s no use in denying it. They’ve uncovered how the nefarious “deep state” — the FBI, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the liberal mass media — is secretly working to take down our peerless leader, President Donald J. Trump.

Fox and Nunes have had help, of course — from patriotic Russian bots, Julian Assange, and from the president himself, who was the first to point out that the institutions we once trusted — to keep us safe from enemies foreign and domestic, to insure justice is served, and to inform the public — are all now in cahoots with one goal: to destroy the president’s plan to Make America Great Again.

At our Secret Society meeting last week (I could tell you where it was, but I’d have to have you killed by an FBI agent), there was much concern about this. Several of our leaders actually said they thought the jig might be up.

First to speak was Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, who, let’s be honest, is one of our ringleaders. He told us the bad news — that the president and his minions were onto us. “They’ve figured out that Jim Comey, Andrew McCabe, Rod Rosenstein, and I are lifelong Republicans in name only,” he said. “As you know, all of us really work for Barack Obama, the One True Kenyan …”

Chants arose in the hall — “THE ONE TRUE KENYAN! THE ONE TRUE KENYAN!” — but Mueller raised his hand, asking for silence.

“Yes, Obama is our leader, and he gave us a single instruction when he left office …”

“Take Down Trump!” we chanted. “Take Down Trump!”

“Yes, but I have to be honest with you,” Mueller continued. “That task is getting more and more difficult. Trump is getting rid of us, one by one. If he can take me out, all is lost.”

Then CNN’s Wolf Blitzer took the podium. “My secret friends,” he began, “those of us manning The Situation Room are doing our best to get out damning information about this White House, but it’s getting tougher. Sean Hannity is on to us. Jeanine Pirro is chewing my butt like a pitbull. Tucker Carlson is one sharp cookie, despite that stupid bow tie. And don’t even get me started on Ann Coulter. He, er, she is a force to be reckoned with! Our measly ‘facts’ and ‘breaking news stories’ about Trump’s Russian connections don’t seem to faze these people. We’re calling in fresh pundits every day, but it doesn’t seem to matter.”

Gloom descended upon the room.

Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein then stepped forward, concern clearly etched on his face. “As we planned,” he said, “I’ve tried from the start to skew this investigation to bring down President Trump. First by appointing my friend, Robert, who despite his heroics in Vietnam and decades of service to presidents of both parties, is, as we all know, secretly a crook and a liberal — and one of our best, at that. But we are facing obstacles that we never dreamed of. This patriotic coalition of white supremacists, Russian bots, right-wing media, corporate billionaires, the NRA, and amoral Republican Congressmen may simply prove too much for us.

“Nothing seems to matter, any more,” he continued. “Trump can do anything. Yesterday, he decided to just flat refuse to enforce a Russian sanctions bill passed by Congress by a combined vote of 517-5! How does any president get away with that? It’s crazy. He just ignores legislation passed by Congress, destroys environmental regulations, tweets insane and verifiable lies, raves about an impossible-to-build wall, and still, we can’t stop him. He can have an affair with a porn star — A PORN STAR! — and the evangelicals just love him more. It. Just. Doesn’t. Matter. I’m starting to believe that there is nothing we can do to stop this guy. … I’m sorry.”

The room fell silent as the perfectly diverse crowd stared into their cups of Peruvian chai latte. After a few moments, we all began to head for the doors, exchanging hugs and the Secret Society handshake. For me, it was a somber flight back to Memphis. It seemed an inescapable dark age was descending. I couldn’t even get through my Vanity Fair. Norway, I thought. Maybe Norway.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Trump and the Liar’s Paradox

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Until recently, the famous liar’s paradox was a liar saying, “I am lying.” Now, though, it has to be when any of Donald Trump’s friends or associates claims not to have called the president an ignoramus, a liar, an egomaniac, or heroically unsuited for the presidency. Their choice is either to confirm the obvious or to appear a liar.

Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury, has put them all on the spot. Wolff is a controversial figure whose journalistic reputation falls somewhat short of impeccable. What matters at the moment, though, is that most everything he has written in the excerpts I’ve read of Fire and Fury strikes me as true and, moreover, has already been said by others.

As every journalist knows, news is not that a dog bit a man but that a man bit a dog. In the same vein, it would be news if someone confided to an author or journalist that Trump was a reasonable man, self-effacing, considerate of others, cautious in his approach to major decisions, knowledgeable about the grand issues of national security, or, even, aware that his hero, Andrew Jackson, did not live to see the Civil War. This would be startling stuff. It would be similar in a way to the revisionist assessment of Dwight D. Eisenhower, considered a mumbler in his time, but understood now as a president who cleverly shielded his intentions by being purposely inarticulate. Maybe so.

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Donald Trump

From the White House and in the House of Lies known as the Republican National Committee have come denials aplenty. Who believes them? The president himself has gone into his Rumpelstiltskin act, stomping his foot and tweeting his innocence, but who believes him, either? Trump has effectively lent credence to Wolff’s reporting by having his lawyer threaten to sue Wolff for, of all things, “outright defamatory statements … about Mr. Trump, his family members, and the Company.” So huffed lawyer Charles Harder.

How is it possible to defame Trump? When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called the president a “moron,” was that defamatory or merely the prosaic truth? When others in the White House said something similar, was that defamatory, or was it a statement of fact? Actually, these statements would constitute matters of opinion so clearly protected by the First Amendment that only a Supreme Court packed by Trump with caddies from his golf courses could rule in his favor. That same holds for the effort to restrain Wolff’s publisher from publishing the book. Ain’t going to happen.

As the eminent First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams reminded me, the issue of prior restraint was settled by the Supreme Court in the famous Pentagon Papers case. If Trump and his legal team want, I will arrange for them to see The Post, the Steven Spielberg movie about how The Washington Post came to publish the Pentagon Papers. The question there revolved around national security — not a president’s hurt feelings — and still the court supported the Post and The New York Times.

Trump’s anger has clouded his PR sense. In essence, he’s promoting the Wolff book. The president and the presidency are unraveling. Trump is unloved in his own house. A figure of ridicule, a theatrical creation, he is almost sympathetic. He was told by the greedy and the outright stupid that he would make a swell president. The Liar’s Paradox has spun out of control, with liars lying to a liar who believed the lie. What would that be called? Fox News, I think.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

War is Peace

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There’s been much discussion over the past few days about “banned words” in the wake of reports by the Washington Post and other media outlets that multiple agencies in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), have been told by Trump administration officials that they cannot use certain words and phrases in agency documents.

The words purportedly banned for used in official agency reports being prepared for the 2019 budget were: entitlement, diversity, vulnerable, transgender, fetus, evidence-based, and science-based. Several sources at HHS also told the Post that they’d been told to use “ObamaCare” as opposed to the “Affordable Care Act” and to refer to “marketplaces” where people purchase health insurance as “exchanges.”

“The assertion that HHS has ‘banned words’ is a complete mischaracterization of discussions regarding the budget formulation process,” said HHS spokesman Matt Lloyd to The Hill.

So, in conclusion, we have reports arising from multiple sources in several federal agencies to multiple media outlets saying they’d been given instruction as to what words they could and couldn’t use in government documents, followed by a denial from an official spokesperson that any of it ever happened.

Your call.

This semantic kerfluffle should serve to remind us that whoever controls language controls the message. George Orwell famously illustrated this in his novel 1984, set in a dystopian then-future world, wherein citizens of Oceania were constantly exposed by their government to such slogans as “War is Peace,” “Freedom is Slavery,” and “Ignorance is Strength.” Thirty-three years after Orwell’s future tome, there is little doubt that a battle is raging in this country to control the message.

It seems quaint to think that until as recently as 1987, licensed broadcasters in the U.S. were required to observe something called the Fairness Doctrine, a policy of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that required broadcast license holders to present controversial issues of public importance in a manner that was — in the FCC’s view — honest and equitable. It was imperfect in its execution, but its intention was to guarantee that U.S. citizens would be able to rely on their broadcast media to present a fair and balanced picture of the news of the day. (“Fair and balanced”? I’ve heard that somewhere.)

National news networks, and even local news and affairs programs, were constrained from the kind of partisan cheerleading that passes for news and analysis these days. Broadcasters were required by law to grant equal time to opposing views. Crazy, right?

Nowadays, if you want both sides of an issue, you have to watch and listen to several news outlets. MSNBC is reliably left of center; CNN is slightly left, but usually makes an attempt to present both sides; Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News has basically disintegrated into state media, wholly in service to the Trump/GOP agenda — even going so far as to suggest this week that the FBI was staging a “coup” by pursuing its investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible Russian connections.

What’s next? Alex Jones as Sean Hannity’s new sidekick? I’m still trying to figure out how being “conservative” has come to mean siding with our arch-enemy, Russia, against our own U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. This is weird and dangerous turf.

The late, great comedian George Carlin had a blistering routine about the “seven words you can’t say on television.” I urge you to dial it up on your local YouTube and watch it. It’s hilarious and scary good. But again, “forbidden words.” How quaint. One night’s channel surfing will make it clear that there are no words that can’t be spoken on your television.

Oh, sure, Wolf Blitzer still can’t just pop off and rhetorically ask, “How the f**k can Kellyanne Conway say that with a straight face?” (Though that would be refreshing.) According to the FCC, there are still “forbidden words” for licensed broadcasters. But there are no forbidden ideas; no forbidden lies; no FCC policy to monitor fairness or equity or balance. It’s the wild west; every viewer for themselves.

Choose what’s fake. Choose what’s real. Choose your truth. Ignorance is not strength.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Murdoch’s Legacy

Back in 1983, then-Representative Pat Schroeder (D-Colo.) was fixing eggs for her kids when she looked down and got an idea about President Ronald Reagan. She called him “Teflon-coated” because nothing bad stuck to him. The same could be said about Rupert Murdoch. He’s the Teflon mogul.

Richard Cohen

This year, Fox News, which Murdoch controls, signed Bill O’Reilly to a $25 million-a-year contract, even though the company knew that O’Reilly had recently settled a sexual harassment claim for $32 million. That tidy sum was just the latest of O’Reilly’s sexual harassment settlements, the grand total being about $45 million.

Not only was 21st Century Fox aware of the settlements, it even helped O’Reilly come up with some of the money and included, in the new contract, that he would be fired if new allegations arose.

Not too long before, Fox News forced out its president, Roger Ailes, who also, it turned out, was a serial sexual harasser. In sum, Murdoch presided over a smarmy frat house where sexual harassment was rampant, and, for the longest time and through Herculean effort, the network managed to look away.

Somewhat in the same vein, Murdoch did not know that reporters at one of his British newspapers, the News of the World, were hacking into the phones of newsworthy people. Murdoch, a newspaperman to his bones, apparently never wondered where the scoops came from. One of the hacked phones belonged to a murdered school girl. This was too much even for Fleet Street, but Murdoch, three monkeys in one, apparently never saw, heard, or said anything.

Murdoch’s lifelong passion has been newspapers, but his real power base is Fox News. The network is to Republicans what the Daily Worker was to American communists — the only trusted news source. With the possible exception of the way the once isolationist Chicago Tribune dominated the Midwest, there has never been anything like it.

In the most recent presidential campaign, fully 40 percent of Trump voters said their main source of news was Fox News. Just 8 percent of them relied primarily on CNN — enough, nevertheless, to send Donald Trump baying at the moon about fake news. These figures are not only bad news for Fox News’ competitor, but they are also bad news for the Republican Party.

Fox News has been a force in converting the party of Lincoln into the party of Trump. The network’s allegiance to Trump approaches mindless adoration. It once had the occasional nighttime skeptic, notably Megyn Kelly, but she is gone. In her stead has come Laura Ingraham, who spoke for Trump at the convention, and an even-more abrasive Tucker Carlson. As for the dominant Sean Hannity, he apparently so fears Breitbart News that he went soft on Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, who is accused of sexual misconduct with a 14-year-old girl when he was 32. (Even Trump withheld judgment.)

Moore has become the GOP’s litmus test. The refusal or hesitancy to denounce him is a consequence of where Murdoch’s Fox News has led the party. The GOP has gone so far to the right that it is about to veer off a cliff. The Fox News audience is old, white, and in a cane-stomping rage at the way America is going. It believes in the media mendacity that Trump proclaims and Fox News incessantly echoes. Aside from Fox News, it will trust only similar sources.

But look. Look, in fact, at Virginia. In that state’s recent election, the repudiation of Trump was beyond argument. Non-whites went Democratic in a big way. So did the more affluent suburbs, young people, and women. What’s left for the GOP is rural, less educated, less affluent, and, to be charitable, less young. On the back of any envelope, it’s a bad business plan.

Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump have long been friends. Murdoch has occasional access to the Oval Office, where he advises Trump — the amoral leading the immoral. Trump is 71; Murdoch is 86, and the median age of a prime-time Fox News viewer is 68. Anyone can see where this is going. The grim reaper has become a Democratic poll watcher.

Murdoch came to the United States from Australia to fulfill his gargantuan ambitions. He bought New York magazine by deceiving his friend Clay Felker. He buckled to China and booted the BBC from his Asian TV network. He has undoubtedly realized his ambitions but will be remembered not for what he built, but for what he destroyed — American political comity and a sensible Republican Party. No amount of Teflon can change that.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

All The News That Flits

Do you double-screen? By that, I mean do you watch television with your laptop open or your phone in your hand? According to a report this week from Accenture Consulting, 87 percent of Americans watch TV with another screen in use. We’re Tweeting, posting on Facebook, texting, and reading online articles while catching the latest episode of The Bachelorette, or whatever. We’ve become multi-taskers, even as we goof off. Multi-goofers?

And not only are Americans double-screening, they’re continuing to turn away from traditional television viewing — watching a show as it’s broadcast in its original timeslot — at prodigious rates. According to the Nielson ratings, traditional TV viewing in 2016 is down 11 percent from 2015.

The trend is being driven by young people (I refuse to use the “M” word), who are turning from traditional television in droves, eschewing cable and satellite packages for streaming subscriptions of various kinds and free internet options. The Nielson Report for the first quarter of 2016 showed that Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 watched an average of 15 hours of traditional television a week. Compare that to the 50-to-64 age bracket, which watched an average of 50 hours of traditional television a week.

It’s easy to see that a generational watershed moment is coming for television and cable networks that will be similar in impact to the sea change that has deconstructed the daily newspaper business in the past decade or so. Our consumption of media will continue to “silo” for the foreseeable future.

The trend has been somewhat masked this year because of the presidential race — and Donald Trump — which has brought record increases in viewership and revenues for cable news outfits such Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. Fox News, in fact, is having its best year ever, averaging over 2.37 million viewers in primetime, which surpassed former cable viewing leader, ESPN.

Of course, compared to network news ratings in the years before cable and the internet fragmented the American viewing audience, that number is a pittance. CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, for example, once averaged 30 million viewers a night. Television news then was a family banquet, one where we all shared the same meal. It’s now a takeout pu-pu platter.

And those seemingly healthy Fox News numbers mask another issue that the fair-and-balanced folks will have to deal with very soon: The median age of their viewers is 68 — mostly male, mostly white, mostly conservative. That means more than half of Fox News viewers are over 68. To say that the network is facing a demographic challenge in the next few years is an understatement.

To the extent that they watch cable news, CNN is the choice of most younger viewers. But at 1.4 million total viewers a night, it’s a bite of leftover dim sum.

It’s gotten so that we only come out of our silos when events force us to do so. A major disaster, a mass shooting, a terrorist attack, a Super Bowl — or possibly a presidential debate — can lure us away from the mind candy we feed ourselves all day long. Not much else.

I guess the silver lining is that the devices we use to cocoon ourselves are also the very things that bring us together instantly — that alert us to events and update us on breaking news faster than Walter Cronkite ever thought about doing. When Gene Wilder died this week, I knew the details of his passing within minutes. Within a half-hour, I’d seen links to his best scenes and to tributes from dozens of people. I could pick and choose what — if anything — I wanted to see or read. I never thought about turning on the TV. It all just popped up in my social media feeds.

And maybe that’s the “news” of the future — instant and self-selected. Maybe we should all start thinking of ourselves as little cable networks.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Paul Ryan and Bernie Sanders

In keeping with the polarized politics on Capitol Hill, I have one winner for Republicans and a very different winner for Democrats. Speaker Paul Ryan and Senator Bernie Sanders perfectly embody the polarization that prevents Congress from getting anything done on the nation’s most pressing issues, from immigration to stopping gun massacres to fighting the Islamic State. 

This dysfunctional Congress deserves its dismal 13 percent approval rating from the American people. The Republican majorities in the House and Senate reached a new nadir in broken politics by inviting a foreign leader, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to use the Congress as a setting to disrespect the American president back in March. They acted without first consulting with the White House. And then there was the refusal to hold confirmation hearings on the president’s nominees for judicial posts or to the Foreign Service.

Congressional Republicans have made it their everyday practice to obstruct initiatives from the twice-elected leader of the nation.

The GOP antipathy toward President Obama is not new. The bigger change is the out-of-control elbowing inside the Republican tent that came to define the year on Capitol Hill. Republicans in the House successfully launched a coup earlier this year against then-Speaker John Boehner, forcing out a man who is by any measure a strong conservative but still not conservative enough for the party’s far right. The eventual winner after several weeks of embarrassing party infighting was the 2012 GOP vice presidential candidate Ryan. But Ryan won without winning the official endorsement of the rebellious Freedom Caucus, who dictated Boehner’s departure. All this led the new speaker, in his very first speech as the top Republican in the House, to stare failure in the face. 

“Let’s be frank: The House is broken,” he said. “We are not solving problems. We are adding to them.”

The real story is that he is the most conservative speaker in recent times. Ryan rose to prominence as the defiant right-winger who proposed, as top Republican on the budget committee, to change Medicare from a guaranteed health-care program for the elderly to a limited, untested voucher plan. He also backed massive tax breaks for the wealthy and large corporations. He has been a reliable opponent of abortion rights and gay rights, and he supported President George W. Bush’s push to privatize Social Security.

Despite that very conservative record, the new speaker had to deflect charges from the Freedom Caucus, conservative talk radio, websites, and bloggers that he is just one more establishment Republican. That outrageous indictment fits with a Pew Research poll from May that found 75 percent of Republican voters want congressional Republicans to obstruct, defy, and challenge President Obama more frequently.

The GOP’s deference to the far right has resulted in a backlash from liberal Democrats around the nation and on Capitol Hill, and that finds expression in the presidential bid of Sanders.

Democratic voters still strongly back former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the party’s 2016 nomination, but the defiant roar of the party in 2015 can be heard at Sanders’ political rallies.

He has been a political sensation all year long, in every corner of the nation. He attracts energized, loud crowds by identifying the Republican majority in Congress as the tool of big business and extremely wealthy Americans, including Charles and David Koch and other plutocrats. Sanders’ anger at the power of big money is resonating among left-wingers looking to identify those responsible for rigging the economic and political system against workers, unions, students, immigrants, and minorities.

Sanders succeeded in forcing Clinton to do a flip-flop and become an opponent of Obama’s Asia trade deal. He lashed out at her for being slow to oppose the Keystone XL Pipeline. He critiqued her 2002 vote to authorize the war in Iraq.

“He [Sanders] is where the economic heart and soul of the party is right now And he’s got the outsider thing, which is so big this year,” New York Times columnist David Brooks said recently.

Sanders and Ryan are the year’s political leaders in Congress because they captured that “outsider thing” for the left and the right. 

As the year ends, both parties and their leading men are in a critical struggle over whether the outsiders are now in charge.

Juan Williams serves as a Fox News political analyst and is the author of the bestseller, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965.

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Opinion The Last Word

Trump’s Bully Pulpit

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It has become a given among professional journalists that Nazi or Hitler references have no place in the discourse of American politics. That being said, doesn’t Donald Trump remind you of Mussolini — the same arrogant swagger, the fiery rhetoric, the frenetic arm movements, the pout? Pardon me, Benito Mussolini was the fascist dictator of Italy who was allied with Germany and Japan against the United States during WWII. I wasn’t there. I just like to read about this stuff. Or maybe I saw it on the History Channel. Anyway, lately Trump has been making Mussolini look absolutely timid. What with the defiant stance, the funny hats, and the adorable wife. Well, at least Benito thought his wife was adorable. And he likes pushing people around, see?

Trump has dominated the news coverage for weeks. In fact, you can’t turn on the TV without seeing the Donald. He’s the main attraction on all the cable news networks as well as the entertainment news channels because, let’s admit it, he’s one helluva entertainer. But if I hear one more pundit say, “He’s sucking all the oxygen out of the room,” I’m going to suffocate. After several outrageous news conferences and incoherent speeches, Trump is running away with the GOP leading-contender status like a contestant on The Apprentice. The Tea Party contingency loves him, and the evangelical congregation believe he’s a godsend. Literally. There’s no use telling Trump devotees that his xenophobic, misogynistic, paternalistic, and extremist ravings might be dangerous, because they don’t understand what those words mean anyway. That’s why they call it “the base.” For the rational among us, Trump’s ole-time racist rhetoric won’t be so fascinatingly galling for much longer. The novelty will wear off, his shelf-life will expire, and it will be time to change the channel. The problem is, to what channel?

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No sooner had Trump made nice with the Fox Republican Propaganda Network over his ugly remarks about favorite daughter Megyn Kelly, than he unilaterally restarted the war. Trump went into Twitter overdrive saying, “I liked the Kelly File much better without Megyn Kelly,” and retweeting some clever backwoods poet’s comment that, “The bimbo’s back in town,” with Trump adding, “I hope not for long.” Trump says, “I cherish women,” in his domineering way. Maybe Ivanka can tell Dad that calling them “bimbos” is no way to win the women’s vote. Personally, I’d love to see a war between Trump and Fox News. Trump and Roger Ailes could have a loser-leaves-town match, or better still, a hair match, only Ailes has none to lose. Perhaps he could get Hannity as a proxy. The next week, Trump tossed respected journalist Jorge Ramos out of a press conference for being too insistent, saying, “Go back to Univision.” That sucking sound you hear is the last potential Latino Trump vote heading south. During his next media scrum, Trump claimed that, “CNN is terrible,” and “Fox News doesn’t cover me fairly.” Since NBC dismissed him from his reality show, Donald is about to run out of media outlets to cover his every burp on live TV.

The Dick Armey-organized, Koch brothers-funded Tea Party was once a fringe group of the Republican Party. Now, they run the show. The GOP created this beast on inauguration day when they plotted to destroy the Obama presidency — country be damned. So now they must feed the beast. Trump claims that his favorite book is the Bible, yet he can’t remember a favorite passage. Here’s one from Hosea 8:7, “They that sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind.” Trump’s stump speeches contain phrases like, “the Mexican people love me,” “I have a great relationship with the blacks,” and “we love the Ukrainians.” I don’t know if I’m listening to Donald Trump or Don Rickles. Political insiders scoff at the possibility of Trump winning the nomination, but this is the party that elected the twin disasters of Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger. If Trump is somehow elected president, he’ll have to build a wall at the southern border to keep people in. “People are shocked at how smart I am,” Trump says, as he carries on a Twitter war that makes him look more like a Real Housewife than a presidential candidate. He’s sewn up the Duck Dynasty vote without putting forward a single intelligible program. When challenged on his plan to expel 11 million undocumented workers, Trump proclaimed, “We’re going to deport them in a very humane fashion.” I’m sorry, but isn’t that what Hitler said?

Randy Haspel writes the “Recycled Hippies” blog, where a version of this column first appeared.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Master Debaters, Near and Far

Boring, boring, boring, boring, TRUMP!, boring, boring, boring, TRUMP!, boring, boring, boring, boring, TRUMP!, boring, boring, TRUMP!

That was the most concise analysis of last week’s GOP presidential candidate debate that I read. And that was on Twitter. It was a lot like the final episode of True Detective, except you’d replace “TRUMP!” with “KA-BLAM!”

The candidates spent most of the debate trying to convince viewers that they would be the best man to control American women’s uteruses, and denying any possibly sensible positions they’d held in the past. I fully expected Chris Wallace to end the debate by saying, “Final question: Which of you is the absolute batshit craziest, and why?”

The aftermath of the GOP debate was almost as much fun as the debate itself, as The Donald seemingly shot himself in the foot with misogynist comments about Fox moderator Megyn Kelly, who had the audacity to ask Trump about his many past mysogynist comments. Pundits immediately proclaimed that Trump had jumped the shark and that his campaign was over, unless he apologized.

Trump, as anyone who has observed his career could predict, didn’t apologize, and instead ramped up his rhetoric another notch. Naturally, his lead in the polls grew and Fox groveled, withering under Trump’s verbal assaults on the network.

I fully expect Trump to pull out a bunch of bills at the next debate and “make it rain” on the other candidates. What could it hurt at this point? He’s the Teflon Man.

It was a big week for debates, with Monday night’s Memphis mayoral forum coming just on the heels of the GOP’s extravaganza. Five candidates — Mayor A C Wharton, Jim Strickland, Harold Collins, Mike Williams, and Sharon Webb — vied to impress Memphis voters with their rhetoric and political acumen.

Well, except for Webb, who appeared to have wandered onstage by accident. As one person tweeted: “I’m sure Dr. Sharon is a sweet woman with a great heart, but this is not her element.” That would be correct, if by “her element,” you mean Earth. Prediction: You will not read or hear the term “Webb-mentum” in the next few weeks.

Each of the other four candidates made some points and took some shots at their opponents. Wharton gave as good as he got (and he got fired upon more than Detective Ray Velcoro in that True Detective finale).

I still think the race is going to come down to Wharton and Strickland, based primarily on the fact that they are by far the best-financed, and that beating an incumbent in a field split four ways is tough without serious cash. I don’t think race-based voting will be much of a factor. Memphis voters have shown time and time again that when it comes to city-wide races, crossover voting is the rule rather than the exception, especially when party affiliation is not a factor.

One thing is certain: This fall in Memphis will not be boring.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Death by a Thousand Cuts

Hey, remember Ebola? The disease that was going to kill us all in the weeks leading up to the November elections? Remember that guy who died in Houston? And that nurse who rode on an airplane, endangering the entire traveling American public? And that other nurse who rode her bike around New York state, infecting millions? Remember Senator Lindsey Graham’s adorable hysterics? Remember how the national media, particularly Fox News, tried to scare the crap out of us, day after day after day? Pay no attention to the experts! Block all air traffic from Africa! Quarantine everybody for 40 days! Thanks to Obama and Harry Reid, we’re all going to die!

Yeah.

Then, like magic, the day after the mid-term elections, the crisis ended. Being something of a cynic, I predicted what would happen in an October 30th column titled, “The Ebola ‘Crisis’ Isn’t.” The usual right-wing commenters took their shots: “When a community organizer president, a lawyer Ebola czar, and the ultra liberal editor of an entertainment weekly tell you there’s nothing to worry about, you can rest assured there’s not.” And, “The Flyer editor’s a doctor now … smart dude!”

No, I’m not a doctor, but I’ll take doctors’ and scientists’ opinions over those of Sean Hannity and various anonymous nuts, any day.

And speaking of nuts … what’s really nuts is what’s about to happen to Tennessee’s health-care system. Earlier this year, Governor Bill Haslam issued a directive to all state department heads to cut their budgets by seven percent. Last Friday, TennCare released its proposed new budget, which slices $165 million in spending. That number actually represents around $400 million in lost revenue, due to the subsequent loss in matching federal spending.

From The Tennessean: “The proposed budget eliminates grants to safety net hospitals, ends funding for programs for babies born with health problems, halts coverage of hospice services, and limits in-home assistance for the elderly to those poor enough to qualify for Supplemental Security Income. Doctors and other health providers would get hit with a 4 percent reimbursement reduction. Other cuts include funding for medicines and mental health services.”

Dave Chaney, a spokesman for the Tennessee Medical Association, said, “For more than 20 years, physicians have accepted very low rates to take care of patients, and the rates keep being cut as the cost of providing care goes up and the program continues to add people and covered services. That’s an unsustainable trend.” No doubt.

And of course, it’s all made even worse by the state’s ideology-driven refusal to participate in any variation of the Affordable Care Act. That foolishness is costing the state millions more in lost, no-risk health-care funding. Unfortunately, there’s no known cure for stupid.

Maybe it would help if we could drum up some Ebola cases in Chattanooga.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

The Ebola “Crisis” Isn’t.

“He sounds kinda gay,” I said to my art director.

It was 1985. I was a young magazine editor living in Pittsburgh. I’d just gotten off the phone with a freelance writer who I’d agreed to meet for lunch. I was a liberal-thinking sort of fellow. I had no problem with gay people, though I didn’t know many back then.

“Lewis” and I had agreed to meet at a small restaurant near my office. It was a quiet place, perfect for conversation. I got there first.

Five minutes later, the front door burst open and a tall, thin, animated man came in and surveyed the room. He was wearing a beret and a long black coat. Around his neck was a six-foot-long scarf of many colors. He spotted me across the room and began to work his way through tables of diners, tossing his scarf over his shoulder as he approached. “THERE YOU ARE!” he boomed. “I’m SORRY I’m late! I’ve been running NIPPLES TO THE WIND all day, and I just can’t seem to catch up.” Heads turned, eyes rolled.

It was a hell of an entrance, and it led to a great friendship. I thought about Lewis again this week, as I read the latest fear-mongering news reports about the Ebola “epidemic.” Through my friendship with Lewis, I saw the horrific effects — second-hand, admittedly — of a real epidemic: AIDS. And there is no comparison.

In the 1980s, getting AIDS was a death sentence. And we had a president who didn’t even utter the name of the disease until five years after it had killed tens of thousands of Americans. I watched Lewis undergo the terrifying ritual of getting “the test,” going to the doctor to find out if he would live or die. He was negative, thankfully, but many of his friends were not. Most of them didn’t live more than a year or so. It was a dark and scary time.

Children who were HIV positive were turned away from school. Doctors who treated AIDS patients were shunned. Gay men were treated as pariahs. It took years for Americans to learn to deal with the epidemic in a rational manner. In the U.S. alone, 636,000 people have died from AIDS. World-wide, the death toll is 37 million, and the disease continues to kill. That’s an epidemic.

Ebola is a horrific disease with a 30 percent survival rate. It is ravaging three African countries with sub-standard medical and health facilities. We should be doing all we can to help stop the spread of the disease. But medical experts in the U.S. have assured us repeatedly that we are in no danger of an epidemic here. There have been four cases in the U.S. One person has died. Can we stop with the absurd over-reaction, please?

And can we please stop using the Ebola “crisis” for political gain? (Actually, I suspect much of the furor about Ebola will subside after the November 4th election. Which is a sad commentary, indeed, on the state of our electoral process.)

Yes, Ebola is scary, but we need to get a grip. Those of us of a certain age can remember what a real epidemic looks like. And this ain’t it. Not even close.