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The Dominion lawsuit reveals how the network truckles for ratings.
This is an article I should send to my Trumper sister, explaining to her that the woman who wrote it is a card-carrying conservative. She worked and shilled for Ted Cruz and Jim DeMint (can't get much more GQP than those two).
Fox knew the truth but lied every night. The intellectual dishonesty is staggering but it took millions of people like my sister into dark fantasy places.
DropFox
The year 2021 has not been kind to Ted Cruz. We’re only two months in and he’s already attracted all sorts of attention—the wrong kind—for his role in inciting an insurrection and then for fleeing to Mexico to escape the hardships imposed by power outages in Texas.
Nobody likes Ted Cruz. This year, less than eight weeks old, has already given us even more reasons not to like him.
This is what Amanda Carpenter, Cruz’s former communications director says about her old boss and Republicans who are acting more like Cruz these days.
Beto O’Rourke is a private citizen who lost a Senate race to Cruz two years ago. AOC is a member of Congress from the Bronx. O’Rourke organized a massive phone bank to check on Texas seniors, see if they needed help, and direct them to resources. AOC put together a fundraiser for relief services and raised $2 million in two days.
Ted Cruz flew to the Ritz-Carlton in Cancun while Republican Governor Gregg Abbott jumps on to Fox to blame the Green New Deal—which is not an actual law on the books, by the way—for the catastrophe.
That’s the Republican way these days. So what if there is a natural disaster or a pandemic? Blame the libs, dunk on them, and then go to the beach while Democrats handle the clean-up. And let the MAGA media run interference. For the Republican party, the sensationalization, nationalization, and demonization of the political system matter far more than any form of governing.
Republicans don’t really care about actual governing/managing as opposed to being boss and milking the system for all they can get. They screw up the economy or mishandle the pandemic response and then scream that Democrats aren’t cleaning up the GOP mess fast enough.
Beto O’Rourke and AOC were doing things Texas Republican officials should have been doing because those officials are too busy talking to Fox News or basking on a beach in Mexico.
Ted Cruz is a fitting symbol for the hypocritical GOP. He’s a wealthy elitist living in a McMansion who spends a lot of his time shitposting on Twitter to fire up the far right base. If that sounds familiar, it’s no accident.
100 Reasons Trump Is Unfit to Be President A timeline of Trump outrages.
https://thebulwark.com/100-reasons-trump-is-unfit-to-be-president/
Kash Patel has hawked a sketchy supplement to undo the effects of the COVID vaccine, promoted the QAnon cult and promised to go after Trump’
S.V. Dáte at HuffPost:
WASHINGTON — A prolific conspiracy theorist who has embraced the QAnon cult and already has a 60-name enemies list of President Donald Trump’s critics goes before U.S. senators Thursday to determine whether he will take charge of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency. Kash Patel, who has spread Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him and the debunked claim that the FBI instigated the Jan. 6, 2021, violent assault on the Capitol, will soon be running that agency — unless four Republican senators defy Trump and vote him down. “What makes Patel dangerous is his willingness to harness and deploy government resources,” said Amanda Carpenter, a former Republican Senate aide and now a researcher with the Protect Democracy nonprofit. “When the government gets power like this, it rarely is only used for its publicly intended purpose.” Patel, if confirmed, would represent a radical departure from the type of nominee presidents of both parties have sought to put in charge of the FBI since a Senate investigation in the 1970s found rampant abuses by J. Edgar Hoover, who had run the agency and its predecessor entity from 1924 until his death in 1972 as a personal fiefdom by investigating his critics for the purpose of holding leverage.
Trump, who has shown little interest in following good government norms since his election in 2016, has now twice cut short the 10-year term that was established for an FBI director specifically so the agency could not be beholden to a single president. In early 2017, Trump fired then-Director James Comey after he refused to pledge Trump his loyalty.
[...]
Discrediting The Russia Probe
Unlike many Trump acolytes who came up in Republican politics, Patel, 44, began his career as a public defender in state and federal courts in Miami before moving to the Justice Department during Obama’s tenure. His rise in Trump’s circle began when he moved to work under Devin Nunes, a California congressman at the time who was the Republican chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Trump was obsessed with undermining the intelligence community’s assessment, shared by a separate investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee, that Putin had helped Trump win the 2016 election. Patel authored a report trying to discredit special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia, winning great acclaim in pro-Trump media. It became the go-to document for those pushing Trump’s false claim that it was all a “hoax.”
From there, Patel went to work in Trump’s White House as a staffer for the National Security Council until the final months of that first term, when he became chief of staff in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and, ultimately, chief of staff for the acting secretary of defense. Trump tried to install Patel as deputy CIA director as part of his machinations to remain in power despite having lost reelection, but backed down when agency Director Gina Haspel said she would resign in protest. Between the end of the first Trump term and the start of the second, Patel enthusiastically joined in the pro-Trump movement’s grift machine, cashing in on appearances and merchandise exploiting the seemingly limitless demand for all things Trump. He produced a podcast for the conspiracy theory-promoting news site Epoch Times. He traveled the country for revival-style meetings of believers of QAnon, a fringe cult that sees Trump as a messianic figure destined to rid the government of those who secretly murder children to drink their blood.
[...] He helped produce a recording of “The Star-Spangled Banner” made by inmates of the District of Columbia jail accused and, in some cases, already convicted of assaulting police officers on Jan. 6, which Trump then participated in and which was then sold commercially. Trump subsequently played the song at his rallies while he would stand at attention. He even helped market pills that claim — with zero evidence of efficacy — to undo the effects of COVID-19 vaccines. “Spike the Vax, order this homerun kit to rid your body of the harms of the vax,” Patel wrote in a social media post, linking to “Warrior Essentials” website [...]
So Many Enemies
No FBI nominee in history has come to the job with such a comical assortment of statements and money-making schemes. Yet, If Patel’s nomination fails, it could well be because of the adult book he published in 2023, “Government Gangsters: The Deep State, the Truth, and the Battle for Our Democracy.” Hoover famously sought out “subversives” and “communists” to target in his decades in power. Patel, in contrast, has based his dividing line between friend and foe much more simply: how an individual has treated Trump and, relatedly, Patel himself.
“Deep state” is a phrase popularized by Bannon to describe individuals in the federal government who are not personally loyal to Trump, and, in his book, Patel printed an appendix naming 60 of them. “This list only includes current and former executive branch officials and is not exhaustive. It does not, for example, include other corrupt actors of the first order such as Congressmen Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, members of Fusion GPS or Perkins Coie, Christopher Steele, Paul Ryan, the entire fake news mafia press corps, etc.,” he wrote. Some names are unsurprising — Democratic leaders who have criticized Trump over the years like former President Joe Biden and his vice president, Kamala Harris. Prosecutors who investigated Trump’s actions leading up to and on Jan. 6, 2021, and his subsequent retention of secret documents made the list, as did those who took part in the FBI’s earlier investigation into Trump’s acceptance of Russian assistance to help win the 2016 election.
Trump’s own attorney general, Bill Barr, is on the list, as is Alexander Vindman, the NSC whistleblower who revealed Trump’s attempt to coerce Ukraine into investigating then-candidate Biden. Wray, who resigned rather than force Trump to fire him, is on Patel’s list, as are Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, and Obama’s attorney general, Loretta Lynch. CIA Director Haspel, whose threatened resignation made Trump reconsider his attempt to make Patel her deputy, is now on Patel’s enemies list. Also on the list, though, are Trump administration officials whose only offense appears to have been refusing to go along with his scheme to remain in power despite losing the 2020 election. Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone and his deputy, Pat Philbin, are both included. They advised Trump against taking illegal actions in the final weeks of his first term and, prior to that, opposed Trump’s effort to install a pliant attorney general who was willing to help spread his lies about a stolen election.
Kash Patel will be grilled in the Senate today, and he’ll face questions over his enemies list and QAnon support, among other issues, such as January 6th.
Republican analyst Amanda Carpenter said she believes supporters of President Donald Trump could be planning to make acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney the scapegoat for allegations levied at the president during the impeachment inquiry.
Republican strategist Amanda Carpenter has suggested that supporters of President Donald Trump may be "setting up" acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney to take the fall for the president in one of the ongoing impeachment inquiry's most important claims.
"I think there is a strategy coming together at play where they think they could scapegoat all of the crazy meetings, all the conspiracy theories on Rudy Giuliani—but leave the discussion about aid somewhere else," said Carpenter on CNN's The Lead Wednesday. "Because there's really only one person that I think can answer that question and it is probably Mick Mulvaney. They are setting him up, I believe. And we'll see where that goes."
Carpenter was part of a panel discussing the Trump impeachment inquiry testimony of U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland. The ambassador appeared to have caught Republicans off guard Wednesday by apparently confirming that the president had attempted to pressure Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy into investigating political rival Joe Biden. Sondland said he was involved in the scheme "at the express direction" of Trump. He also claimed that "everyone was in the loop" about the arrangement, including Mulvaney.
