Okay, after reading that, maybe the phrase “intelligent conservative” isn’t as oxymoronic as it seemed at first glance. Perhaps it is something like “advanced remedial training” or “semi-special education.”
Sure, in absolute terms it doesn’t make sense, but as a modifier describing the relative ranking of the person within the condition of “conservative,” it’s meaning might be clear to me now.
I guess Scylla deserves a pat on the head or a cookie or gold star.
Thannks, I’d been wondering where kanicbird had run off to.
I have to call falsehood on this analogy. You are presuming that Shodan has a friend. 
I think I must refrain from needling you from now on, Shodan. Not that it hasn’t been fun, but— now I’m just embarrassed for you. I wish you a speedy recovery.
TANSTAAFPizza
My, God, that place is so hilariously, openly partisan it looks like self-parody. “Obama’s Terrifying Doctrine” Snerk.
How much practice does it take for the on air personalities at that network to be able to say “fair and balanced…we report, you decide” with a straight face?
The comments are uniformly moronic as well. Who is this horrifying monster they talk about when they talk about Obama? There is no connection to the real person there. Their perceptions have gone beyond merely distorted reality to full on hallucinations.
We don’t.
Oh? The appropriate place to cut a clip to soundbite status is the President rephrasing a question, in order to answer it with a clear distinction?
Let me give you a hypothetical: One year ago, Mr. Bush is conftonted by a contentious reporter at a press conference, who asks, “Don’t you think the war in Iraq is a total fzilure? Shouldn’t we cut our losses and get out of there now?” His response is, “I’ve been asked, ‘Don’t you think the war in Iraq is a total fzilure? Shouldn’t we cut our losses and get out of there now?’ And my answer is, No! We are slowly but surely making Iraq a safe democratic place, and it is our duty to stay the course.” So hypothetical news media clips it to Mr. Bush saying, “Don’t you think the war in Iraq is a total fzilure? Shouldn’t we cut our losses and get out of there now?” as though that’s what he now believes. Wouldn’t this be misrepresenting him?
I’m not familiar with the President’s plan, but evidently he intends there to be a large private-sector presence, supplemented for those who need care and do not have coverage for it. (I welcome correction on this.) In what way is that “government paying for it” where “it” is all health care?
As Lib was quick to point out to me several years back, there may be something we individually regard as a moral duty on ourselves which nonetheless is a moral wrong to require our fellow man to join us in corporately ensuring is done. There are obvious examples in the religious sphere, but his point was that exacting funding by taxation for something you feel is right but others may not is precisely the same sort of thing – and I can see his point. On the other hand, national defense is something that some may be philosophically opposed to, but that we have no issue in taxing to support, and having the government run the Army rather than private armies underwritten by the rich and by corporations.
Decide where you draw the line. I think a child in pain justifies taxing your ass and mine as well to get someone to alleviate his pain and cure what’s causing it. YMMV – in one meaning or another.
The broader question is, “On the presumption that this and other examples demonstrate that Fox News regularly misrepresents anyone to the left of John McCain, is there any thoughtful person, liberal or conservative, who would take them seriously as a source of news?”
Why do you believe that Obama’s plan has the state paying for insurance? Because it doesn’t.
Obama thinks you do. That’s why he said "I actually want a universal health care system; that is our goal. I think we should be able to provide health insurance to every American that they can afford and that provides them high quality.
So I think we can accomplish it. Now, whether we do it exactly the way European countries do or Canada does is a different question, because there are a variety of ways to get to universal health care coverage."
I don’t see any way to parse that other than the notion that European countries have universal health care systems.
Obama goes on to reject single-payer, but there he says that Canada is the classic example. But Canada wasn’t in Europe the last time I checked.
Maybe it has become one of the 57 states.
Regards,
Shodan
Obama thinks Ireland has universal health care? Cite?
Do any of the Fox anchors actually do investigative journalism? For that matter, can any of them do investigative journalism? How many have the background to do so?
Bill O’Reilly is actually well educated with graduate degrees in broadcast journalism from a very respected college (Boston U.), not that he does more than opine. Shepard Smith**-** attended the U. of Mississippi School of Communications but never graduated. Glenn Beck- never attended college, background was as a disk jockey turned shock jock. Sean Hannity- flunked out of college (big shock there). Michelle Malkin- B.A. in English. Geraldo Rivera is Geraldo Rivera.
That’s what irks me about the claim to news networks. The news comes from wire services and the rest is just spin and smirking.
CNN isn’t a lot better- Helen Keller would have made a better interviewer than Larry King and Lou Dobbs, regardless of what his degree is in, is just a cranky old fart gumming Jell-O and yelling about “these drugged up hippie kids” in the neighborhood, but at least Anderson Cooper really is qualified and actually does do investigative pieces and so do some of the others. (I’ve often wondered if Shepard Smith and Anderson Cooper have ever had a fling, but that’s another subject.)
I once saw this great video on America’s Funniest Home Videos of a guy going after some bees with a trash can lid and a badminton racket. Of course he ends up flailing about wildly and running away.
That’s the image that Shodan’s last post brought to my mind.
Not always. Back when he was still trying to break into the biz, he was Jerry Rivers.
Can an anchor from a rightwing news network and an anchor from a left wing news network live together without driving each other crazy?
I smell a sitcom. “Coop and Shepherd?” “Andy loves Shep?” “Newsies?” maybe something about a Fox in the Coop? Too much?
:shrug: James Carville and Mary Matalin.
FWIW, Geraldo at the beginning of his career was a legit investigative reporter. He won an Emmy in '72 for a report on abuse and neglect of mentally retarded patients at New York’s Willowbrook State School.
Whether or not he could return to investigative journalism after a couple of decades in which Al Capone’s vault was relative highlight is debatable.
Geraldo was a lawyer before he was a TV reporter, so he does have a graduate degree. He also did some post graduate work at Columbia School of Journalism. I don’t think he ended up with a degree from there, but he’s still decently educated, he’s not just a subliterate lout like Hannity or Beck.
That “Jerry Rivers” thing is a myth, by the way.
IIRC, Billo has a Harvard graduate degree.
I never could fault Rivera for Al Capone’s vault. It was tabloid TV but was represented as such, it was a fun enough show, no harm done, and IIRC the documentaries on Capone and interviews with people who knew him and Elliot Ness (this was the 80s when there were a few very old men alive who remembered them both) were actually quite good.
Much of my hatred for Geraldo Rivera is that I blame him for a large part of the Satanic Panic (the latter day witch hunts in the late 1980s/early 1990s that ruined many lives). He hosted a 2 hour primetime special on the satanic cults that were killing children coast to coast. Actual quote by Rivera from that show:
This was total bullshit of course. Yeah, there are practicing Satanists- and some of them really are the evil (i.e. non LaVeyan ‘provocateur hedonist’) variety, just as there are Voodoo practitioners and Zoroastrians and Ishtar worshippers out there. Yea there were certainly some murders involving the occult- I’d be surprised if they were 1% of 1% of the homicides in any given year (fewer than the abortionists killed by crackpot idealogues), but Rivera made it seem like murder by Satanic Cults was rivalling cancer and heart disease and involved teachers and Congressmen and Ol’ Scratch himself.
People’s lives were ruined due to this. (The arrests in Wenatchee WA and the West Memphis Three are two of the more famous cases that involved people who admitted being stirred up by the media exposure of [non-existent] widespread ritual satanic abuse but there were others as well.) To date to my knowledge Rivera has never apologized for his role in this with even so much as an “oops… probably not so much a million as ‘some’” acknowledgement.
It’s unthinkable to me that anybody would take him seriously as a news man or let him have a platform after such unbelievable whoppers as the above. Add to this his tabloid journalism show that lowered the bar for all talk shows, his “Women I Have Fucked, Been Blown By, or Rubbed Up Against on the Subway” memoir, his far more recent being expelled from Iraq due to grandstanding that compromised security (can you even imagine the coverage Fox would STILL be giving that if it’d been Anderson Cooper?), and I just can’t take any network seriously that would let him on the lot.