Tag Archives: FOX news

Newt Gingrich: Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner At Tiffany’s To The Tune Of $500,000?

Greta Van Susteren, host of the Fox News progr...

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Now I get it.  A “real” fiscal conservative like Newt Gingrich considers himself suitable to run the country’s budget, finances and economy yet the sky is the limit on his personal Tiffany& Co. jewelry store debt.  I figure you would have to eat breakfast, lunch and dinner at Tiffany’s to accumulate the time it would take to spend $500,000 in a couple of years. I know Tiffany’s is pricey and it would depend entirely on purchases but Gingrich and his third wife Callista sure don’t practice fiscal conservatism in their “real”  life.  Don’t they know they can pick up perfectly good fake Tiffany jewelry on any New York City corner or Mexican resort town?

The ex-Congressman and Speaker of the House who has thrown his hat into the Republican Presidential nominee ring on various changing platforms like family values (he has been married three times and divorced a wife who had cancer) and of course fiscal conservatism. The Tiffany story broke yesterday by Politico’s  Jake Sherman.  It immediately made the rounds of all the usual places but Gingrich and his camp have been busy “no commenting” on his revolving charge at Tiffany’s with an extraordinarily high debt ceiling.  Interest rate? Unknown.

Shockingly, Greta Van Susteren somehow mustered up the nerve (Gingrich was until recently a Fox contributor) to ask him on her show last night about the Tiffany & Co. bill.  She of course, backed down immediately when he said “I’m not commenting on stuff like that.”  Fox has long had this love-affair with Gingrich and his political analyst skills (quite the joke to me).

So, I’m wondering if Gingrich the professed candidate does not want to comment on “stuff like that,” what exactly is he willing to comment on that just might be of interest to potential voters?  Are we really supposed to believe that he is in touch with the masses?  Or that he can be fiscally conservative with our money in Washington?  Does he think  for one minute that just because the wimps at Fox News back down from asking him questions that the rest of the media will too?  This guy is so far out of touch with real people that I can’t even believe Republicans will end up standing for whatever it is he says he stands for. The reality is Gingrich stands for the elitist, business-as-usual, good-old-boy image that even the Republicans are trying to shake.

I’m going to go out on a very short limb here and say that Newt Gingrich is toast. He’ll never win the Republican nomination and he will keep rubbing everyone  (including his own party) the wrong way until the only show he will be wanted on is Fox. That’s how you know you are toast.

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O’Reilly to Juan Williams; “I’ve got your back”

I really hate to beat a dead, already signed by Fox News horse but…I keep thinking about the Thursday night Bill O’Reilly and Juan Williams love fest where O’Reilly told Williams; “I’ve got your back” and then Williams told O’Reilly; “You know what, you are a standup guy”. When Williams uttered those words on O’Reilly’s show, I knew he had been bought by Fox News, hook, line and sinker.  Of course as we all know now, by the next day (Friday) Williams had a $2 million contract with Fox. It was like the mutual admiration society of these two spawned a new reason for living. Plain and simple; NPR bashing.

I like Juan Williams and you can tell by sifting through my blog archives that I am not in the O’Reilly or Fox News fan club.  I have already noted in my Thursday blog that I felt NPR’s firing of Williams was done in an unprofessional, and thoroughly distasteful manner, so no need to re-tread that.  Not many of us would get the opportunity to bash our ex-employers in a public setting but hardly anyone gets the national platform to do so, lucky him.  I found myself amazed that Williams was  so totally hyped up on O’Reilly’s show Thursday (with a ton of prodding from O’Reilly) that he appeared to gleefully relish knocking an employer of 10 years (an employer that helped make him pretty famous by adding to his credibility). 

While I understand that he was upset with his firing, as anyone would be, I didn’t really notice the calm, classy, voice of reason that I had come to expect from him over the years.  When O’Reilly’s Friday show hit the airwaves and Williams was pitch-hitting for an absent O’Reilly, much of the show was about the Williams and NPR continuing saga as everybody and his brother was dragged out to be “shocked” and “horrified” by what Williams had been subjected to. It seemed quite weird to me that Juan Williams was doing a show about Juan Williams.  Pushing his case, bashing NPR, explaining away and dissecting his Muslim statement as if we had all not heard it 100 times in the last 48 hours.

It was as if in the blink of an eye, the flash of a lost job and the promise of $2. million , Williams fell quickly into Fox mode. Journalism be damned, I’m a Fox pundit now for real, no more treading lightly as an “analyst’.  So, welcome to the “Fair and Balanced News” Juan Williams, and oh yeah, watch your back.

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The Fox News viewer primer

The definition of a fox; carnivorous, alert, mammal, most are predators, sly, crafty, to bewilder or baffle, cunning, confuse, to trick or fool. That pretty much sums up FOX News for me. Lest they be mistaken for a “fair and balanced” news outlet, I feel a Fox News viewer primer is in order because as we all know what you see isn’t always what you get.
1. If Glenn Beck starts crying on air it is what is known in the biz as a diversion/tactic. He has either run out of news copy, forgot what he was supposed to say, can’t make up stuff fast enough or has run out of guests. Sure to bewilder and baffle.
2. If Bill O’Reilly is doing a full-blown on-air apology, you better believe that someone who has a better than 50/50 chance of winning has threatened to sue his/Fox’s you-know-what. Crafty indeed.

3. If you see or hear a headline on Fox News that has little or no connection to the actual news story they ultimately show or tell do not be concerned. This is part and parcel of their “fair and balanced” policy. Some parts of the story can be fair, or the headline can be balanced or parts of the story can be balanced or some of the headline can be fair or everything can be just made up. Confusing? Of course.

4. In a real news world there is a distinct line between “news” and “editorial commentary”. One is of course, fact and the other is opinion.  Most good commentators use facts as a basis for an opinion.  In the Fox News world it appears the boundary lines are skewed. With opinion showing up as fact, opinion being based on a right-wing and a prayer  and facts either obscured or deleted. Cunning indeed.

5. Fox News has many names. Some self-imposed, some handed out by viewers or non-viewers. So if you hear people call it Faux News or Faux Noise or as  www.msnbc.com Keith Olbermann recently coined “the Perpetual Fraud Machine” it is one and the same. By the same token if you hear Fox News on-air “personalities” referred to as bobble-heads, Barbie dolls and if I only had a brain commentators, these too are the real deal Fox staffers.

Just in case you might think that Fox is indeed a predator and trying to trick or fool us into believing that everything they say is true, fair and balanced , you would be correct.  But by knowing this we have already out-foxed them.

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