The Big Lie Goes Back a Way
This is an early piece on Hannity — from the beginning of the Obama Years.
FOX, Sean Hannity, Hal Turner: Jaws of Hell on the Right
FOX is not a news channel. It is a propaganda mill. It engages in search and destroy missions. And it is apparently hospitable to influences that are vastly more alarming and noxious than the wall-to-wall soundbites they have been playing of the Rev. Wright. See my note on Sean Hannity and Hal Turner below.
I have no idea whether, by calling its propaganda news, FOX exposes itself to any FCC regulation. Certainly if the requirement were honesty, there would be cause to lift its license.
The foregoing was written as a simple reaction to the following from the Obama Blog. I should mention as a veteran of innumerable forums since before Al Gore invented the Internet, the Obama Blog and its thousands of comment-makers has an almost unbelievable degree of civility.
So Fox News evidently decided to pore through our millions of user-created pages on My.BarackObama.com and put a screenshot of inflammatory content on the front page of FoxNews.com.
You see, more than 700,000 people have created accounts on the system. You can create one right now if you choose, in about a minute — anyone can.
Now, from time to time people get up to no good — creating fake profiles (like one for Sean Hannity created today), or posting profane or inappropriate content. When they do, the community reports the offending content and if it violates our terms of service it is removed (as the Sean Hannity profile was).
My.BarackObama.com has been at the core of our bottom-up organizing strategy. The tools available have been put to work by a community of supporters that is bigger and more powerful than anything presidential politics has ever seen.
Evidently, Fox News didn’t think it was a big deal that hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans are participating in the democratic process creating groups and local events in communities all across the country.
But they did think it was a big deal that one random person on the Internet, without the knowledge of the Obama campaign, posted a profile in the system with the image of the New Black Panther Party on it.
When we were alerted of the existence of this page, we pulled it down. Yet even after we pulled the page, Fox News continues to disingenuously and prominently feature this “story” on their homepage.
If you have feedback for Fox News, you can email foxnewsonline@foxnews.com.
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One of the worst persons on FOX is a person named Sean Hannity whose past associates and mentors include a fellow named Hal Turner. A brief glance at the archive titles of Mr. Turner’s internet radio shows will suggest the scope of his interests and the likely ethos that formed Mr. Hannity’s worldview:
AUDIO ARCHIVES
THE SUBSCRIPTION SYSTEM IS BACK ONLINE. In order to hear the archives, you must be a paid subscriber. The fee is
Four Dollars ($4) per week, billed monthly ($16). You may subscribe with cash, check, money order or credit card. To sign-up as a subscriber, Click HereHT = THe Hal Turner Show
AH = The Adolf Hitler Show
AN = Aryan Nations
BPL = British People’s League
GE = Grandmother Elizabeth
HH = HoloHoax
LH = Logan’s Hunt
NA = National Alliance
PG = Paul Gellar
RR = Resistance Radio (All Music)
SJ = Shouts of Joy
TD = Turner Diaries
WAR = White Aryan Resistance YT = Yahweh’s Truth
SY = Church Of The Sons of YHVH
If you Google the various show titles above, you will find yourself in a cesspool of racist and white supremacist and crazed theoretical stuff. Compared to the depth of hatred and ill-intent emanating from Hannity’s right, the bilious soundbites from Rev. Wright are a drop in the bucket. And, I might add, a miniscule fragment from a 20 year output that was offered up in a congregation whose dominant ethos was love and upbuilding, not the wall of hatred that underlies the consciousness of FOX News. Hannity apparently reduced his active relationship to Turner as his own career began to take off. He is apparently more than reticent now when questioned about the relationship. And he has apparently learned that imputing racism to others is the best way to avoid being tagged a racist. It takes initiation into the world of Roger Ailes to become an emissary of principalities and powers.
A similar blast from the past
The Big Lie At The Heart Of McCain’s Ayers Campaign
Yesterday I ran the following on my blog:
Tom Brokaw and every other journalist I have seen or read has neglected the following qualification from Bill Ayers which I have published at least twice before in this blog. It is a crucial qualification and the MSM has been shameful to ignore it. I know I am not in the loop of those blogs which are typically referenced by the MSM. But any of these high-profile bloggers could have found the same information and seen its importance. SOURCE
I’m often quoted saying that I have “no regrets.” This is not true. For anyone paying attention — and I try to stay wide-awake to the world around me all/ways — life brings misgivings, doubts, uncertainty, loss, regret. I’m sometimes asked if I regret anything I did to oppose the war in Viet Nam, and I say “no, I don’t regret anything I did to try to stop the slaughter of millions of human beings by my own government.” Sometimes I add, “I don’t think I did enough.” This is then elided: he has no regrets for setting bombs and thinks there should be more bombings.
I have since found a MSM reference to the Ayer’s blog and this quote — in an April 17 Washington Post blog piece. SOURCE
So I stand corrected. The truth was out.
Ayers did not say he wished they had bombed more.
We would not expect the McCain Campaign, or its FOX flaks, to care about a crucial and subtle distinction. But heft is what matters in battles over truth. We need pieces now that make the distinction until the likes of MSNBC stop propagating the no regrets about bombing lie.
Ayers has said consistently that he regrets more was not done to end the war. This is a regret all Americans can share. To have this regret is not a sign of being anti-American.
In a deep sense, this election really is about turning the page on the thinking that would divide us by whether we have regrets about Vietnam. Or Iraq. Or war period. When last I looked, there was a right to consciously object and even to refuse to serve.
One can be a conscientious objector and be fully an American and be fully supportive of our veterans and appreciate their sacrifice. Sadly, though, we seem skewed toward an uncritical form of patriotism that would not allow the nuanced statement of William Ayers to rise above the level of a despicable excuse.
Whatever you may think of Ayers’ statement, its distortion by McCain amounts to a big lie. The entire McCain-RNC robocall initiative contributes to a venomous sort of polarization that may warm the cockles of the MSM’s immature heart, but which can lead to lethal harm. The Weathermen were products of such polarization. It is a supreme irony that the source of such polarization is now the McCain campaign.
Some day there will be a movement to end war that goes beyond a marginal, minority status. When that movement succeeds, our Defense Department will be devoted to defense more than to aggression. And we will not uncritically invest the bulk of our dollars in an effort to fight wars that are essentially unwinnable.
Turning the page means opening up the possibility of a better way, one which sees things as a spectrum rather than in terms of good and bad, black and white. And it means looking at the actions of a William Ayers objectively and not rather than through the lens of political opportunism.
The McCain-RNC robocall initiative moves that sorry aggregation ever closer to the end of the spectrum that leads to the very jaws of hell.
