Mr. Write's Page

Warning: political rant ahead.

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I was watching a video clip from Fox News recently.

To be clear, I was not watching an actual Fox News program. I would never do that. I removed Fox News from my channel line-up years ago because of what it is: a cynical right-wing propaganda machine that pretends to be news. What I was watching was a highlight being rebroadcast on some other channel.

Anyway, the Fox News talking heads on duty at the time were weaving their usual tapestry of caca, this time regarding who is to blame for poisoning the drinking water of the residents of Flint, Michigan.

Specifically, they were trying to absolve Flint’s emergency manager, an appointee of the Republican governor, and instead blame the federal EPA. Because, why not give it a shot?

For the record, the emergency manager and his underlings are, indeed, the culprits here.

Based on an atrocious law passed by the Republican governor and Republican legislature, an emergency manager had assumed full dictatorial power over the City of Flint. That law completely neutered — nullified, wiped out, rescinded — the authority of Flint’s legally elected officials.

This is democracy, you see, when Republicans are in full throat and operate unchecked.

To save money, the emergency manager decreed that the source of Flint’s drinking water would be switched from Lake Huron to the Flint River, which is, like, closer.

Being bureaucrats in positions of uncontested power, these morons acted without understanding the consequences of what they were doing; specifically, the need to protect the water pipes from the radically different chemistry of the new water source.

As a result, the corrosive river water quickly ate into Flint’s system of pipes, causing lead to leach into the drinking water.

Flint is a city of 99,000 residents, 57 percent black, 42 percent living in poverty. For the past year, Flint’s drinking water has been, to varying degrees, poisonous. It remains poisonous today. And the Republicans who run Michigan are in no hurry to do anything about it.

They could, for example, take steps to begin replacing the city’s ruined water pipes. They haven’t. They could deliver bottled water to the residents who now are unable to drink the city water. They haven’t.

But there was Fox News, ignoring all this, trying to blame some handy federal officials for the debacle. As always, their mission was to muddy the water (sorry) and deflect the blame away from the Republican politicians who in this case are directly responsible.

I wasn’t surprised, of course. This is what Fox News does. This is why they exist. This is their mission.

Yes, I know — not all of the programming on Fox News is right-wing propaganda. A smidgen of normal reporting is stirred in for deniability purposes. Which manages to paint the entire operation as even more underhanded and sleazy.

One of the truisms about Fox News is its iron-clad insistence that the only unbiased news outlet in existence is Fox News itself.

To Fox, everyone else in the news-delivery business is liberally biased; thus, anyone who criticizes Fox News does so because of their liberal bias; thus, Fox is able to dismiss all criticism as ideological.

It makes for the perfect bubble in which there is no need to defend the accuracy of any claim you make.

And the bubble has brought forth some doozies. Probably the most cynical and egregious: that old claim about the federal “death panels.”

You remember the death panels. This was the accusation back in 2009 that, under the proposed “Obamacare” program, the feds would assign panels of bureaucrats to judge individual Americans to determine if they were worthy of healthcare.

That claim was trotted out by a series of the usual Republican wingnuts — notable among them activist Betsy McCaughey, a former Lt. Gov. of New York; airhead Representatives Michele Bachmann and Virginia Fox; and airhead Sarah Palin.

Palin wondered whether her parents and “my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care.”

Now, seriously, folks. I realize the lunatic fringe has worked itself into a permanent lather over Obamacare. Dutifully, they line up to profess the white-hot intensity of their hatred of the program, facts and reality be damned.

(The truth: Obamacare is a modest effort by the administration to rein in a few of the worst excesses of the drug companies and the insurance industry. It is a minor, watered-down, milquetoast effort. The program has managed to benefit quite a few people, but on the whole, its success has been limited.)

If you really believe that Obama’s goal was to institute a program of government-sponsored euthanasia, you should seek professional help.

This is the sort of Big Lie that surfaces and festers inside the Fox News bubble and elsewhere in conservative La La Land. There have been so, so many blatant lies. A few off the top of my head:

— Planned Parenthood sells baby parts for profit.

— Obama is plotting to take away your guns.

— Obama was born in Kenya and is not the legitimate president.

— Human-caused climate change is a liberal hoax.

— Voter fraud is a nationwide crisis.

In the real world, these and other claptrap claims are laughable and easy to debunk; inside the Fox News bubble, they persist forever.

While I was watching the above-mentioned Fox News video clip, I couldn’t help noticing the demeanor of the talking heads. They acted… normal.

Normal, even though what they were saying was patently false and misleading, and its content was bordering on the insane.

Which leads to another truism about Fox News and conservative fantasyland: even though the right-wing talking heads and spinmeisters OWN every foul and false claim they made in the past to advance the cause, they blithely ignore it all and move on to fresh falsehoods.

Could they possibly admit, after all this time, that the “death panels” claim was, you know, wrong? Or admit that, well, maybe Obama was born in Hawaii after all? Not a chance.

The tapestry of lies is still out there, floating in the nether reaches of the bubble, befouling the air. The occupants simply ignore the stench.

About a year ago, Bill Maher said this:

The Republican refusal to recognize facts has left them living a parallel universe that is governed by their feelings and beliefs. Republicans can’t share common ground with the rest of us because they invent their own reality.

Until Republicans decide to join the rest of us, they are going to be off on an island watching the rest of the world pass them by.

Oh, please, please, let it be so.