Before we get started, here’s a list of quotes:

• Yesterday he admitted to breaking the law, because authorizing wiretaps without search warrants is against the criminal law.
• I've been a proponent of using 50,000 Guard to back up the Border Patrol. The administration won't even try it.
• And it turns out that we had false information. Condoleeza Rice I think said an untruth a number of times, saying the ones Iraq has can only be used for that. So you want to talk about truth? I think this administration has a big problem with the truth.
• The leadership is in question. Former FEMA head Michael Brown has basically defended his agency's dismal performance in the days after Katrina. And now we have a ballooning gas price situation that is hurting millions of Americans.
• I, for the life of me, considering this is our No. 1 vulnerability, why would the president do this? Is it for votes?
• This new Patriot Act, consistent with the old one, would allow the FBI to bypass the constitution. Wrong, dangerous, and obviously unconstitutional.
• I’m going to be against George Bush for the next four years.... I don’t agree with him. It’s in the democracy. I’ve got a right not to agree with the son of a--the guy.
• Mr. Bush has two choices. He can explain the Kay report and admit the mistakes made. Or he can ignore the issue, hoping Americans will ignore it come next November.
• FEMA should stop watching TV and get housing and emergency plans together. And if they have any extra time they should come on TV and explain what they're doing. Are we really paying federal bureaucrats to watch TV and complain?
• The Clinton administration decided they'd try to do something about it, then they threw up their hands and said we can't. The Bush administration the same thing.
• Polls say that 70 percent of Americans want the borders tightened up. The Bush administration hasn't done it.
• Like Mr. Clinton, President Bush didn't do much to protect us. Yes, they both say we should develop alternative fuel, but little concrete action has been taken.
• And let me show you something that President Bush, a commercial that President Bush ran during his last campaign for president.... He ran a commercial using a little girl who lost her mother during 9-11 and used that and that helped sell him to the American people.
• The government’s appetite for spying on Americans is so voracious it must be restrained. This is not East Germany.
• Pat Tillman was given the third highest medal this country gives for heroism, the silver star....somebody should go to jail for lying.
• For the life of me, I can't figure out why President Bush isn't more proactive on the environment. ... Today we find out that the White House tried to sanitize a government study on global warming. Instead of including both points of view on the issue, the Bush people have shaded the report to the side that sees warming as bogus.
• How the hell did this happen? I mean, how did we veer so far from the constitution for so long?

Keep these in the back of your mind. We’re going to return to them in a bit.

Best Wishes to Megyn Kelly from HuffPo!

Megyn Kelly announced this week that she is expecting another child, and the news was generally greeted with good-natured congratulations. But when we saw that the Huffington Post had picked up on our video of Megyn’s announcement, we headed over to see what the Huffers had to say. Some of the following comments thave already been deleted, others will be after this is published, but all were approved for publication. As we have noted before, in order to be a Fox hater, you first have to be a hater:

• Nasty, I didn’t know it could reproduce. --somefool
• Someone captured her first birth on camera: http://youtube.com/watch?v=TufUH1T-F18 --Mike4Obama
• I fell [sic] sorry for the kids having such a lying hatefilled [sic] person for a mom! --cfswift1
• My bet is it will be bright pink (almost red) have two heads, one will look like Rush and the other will look like Rove, both will have forked tongues and it’s [sic] name will be RushRover Kelly. --PlatoSunTsu
• A new racist child will be born. --konybvg
• Stalin had children too, what is your point? --Cash4Gold
• Make America safe, eat a Fox baby. --pbnyc59
• Fixed Noise Stepford Wife. --countdown69
• the repub hags are horny toads, are they? --celticsrule
• Another stoopid kid about to enter America. --LegallyPalin
• IT is spawning! --moose and squirrel
• She’s a Fox bimb0 --Freesia2
• Does she know who the father is? --Jerry Vasquez
• She deserves less than some war criminals. --baileywick
• Her child could be a lizard. --invirginia
• Wonder if it’ll be an angry freak like its mommy. --Mike4Obama
• Great...another generate [sic] of bleach-blonde bimbettes for the Fox News Wehrmacht. --aceshigh
• They are like Murdoch's stepford wives. Their heads are empty but they sure are eye candy for the bloated old white men who watch Faux News. --saizy1
• She was repulsive before she got pregnant, being pregnant doesn’t make her any less so. --somefool
• great just we [sic] need is another facist child! Satan must be proud. --buttlicker
• Better if she had not bred --ex-pat, HuffPost Community Moderator

Around the Interwebs

Chris Golas continues to keep an eye on the dissemblers over at Media Matters. Our pal Eric Boehlert wrote a piece giving his own wacky explanation for why Bill O’Reilly didn’t mention Keith Olbermann’s suspension. Unfortunately, Eric’s explanation was kind of demolished, because Mr Bill did mention the suspension. Mr Golas notes Boehlert’s stunning silence on this and on another matter, the call for ‘revolution’ by Ted Rall on MSNBC:

RALL: At stake: our lives, the planet, freedom, living. The government, the corporations, and the extreme right are prepared to coalesce into an Axis of Evil. Are you going to fight back? Will you do whatever it takes, including taking up arms?

Says Mr Golas:

Hasn't Beck said something similar to that and Media Matters went after Beck. Look if you're going to go after someone one side who talks about this, you should also go after someone else who is on the other side also. Media Matters is either ignorant or playing dumb.

Or they are just galloping hypocrites. You know, like the newshounds:

Freedom of Speech Under Attack!...write to EACH AND EVERY Board of Regents member and express your support for the First Amendment....Believe me there will be enormous pressure put on these people to cave in and fire [Ward] Churchill.

And this:

It is stunning that major TV "journalists" are spending multiple segments a day trying to get a talk show host fired for talking. Censorship is ugly stuff, but that's what they're endorsing in this war on Rosie.

Yes, censorship is ugly stuff, except when it’s newshound censorship:

Please join us in demanding that Fox News fire Beck.

And this:

Glenn Beck Should Be Fired For His Unhinged Vendetta Against George Soros

Can you imagine? The newspoodles want to get a talk show host fired for talking? Censhorship is ugly stuff, but that’s what the bowsers are endorsing. And this is just the latest example. They’ve already called for the firing of Megyn Kelly, Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly. We know how well those worked out.

Meanwhile, it’s business as usual at the kennel. Ellen Brodsky ridicules and demeans an Iraq war veteran for daring to support deficit reduction. Priscilla proves herself to be dense as osmium over a Kilmeade quip regarding Wonder Woman and criminals. (That’s what happens when she tries to comment on a show she obviously never watches.) And in the time-honored tradition of repeating a lie to make it true, we get Aunty Em/Uncle Jon regurgitating the claim that Fox News Beck transcripts get mysteriously scrubbed. It doesn’t matter that AE/UJ can’t point to a single Beck transcript that has been scrubbed by Fox. It doesn’t matter that each of his/her previous claims along this line has been exposed as false. Repetition is the key to The Big Lie, and AE/UJ is/are masters of that domain.

A Few More Maddow Mendacities

Our report last week on the ‘journalism’ of Rachel Maddow engendered a fair amount of discussion. But not, unfortunately, from Dr Maddow, the one person who should have answered for her spectacularly disingenuous agit-prop. There is much more that can be said about it all, but one statement (besides ‘nickels and dimes’) was particularly telling:

We are not a political operation. Fox is. We are a news operation.

The first obligation of a ‘news operation’ would be to cover the news. But MSNBC hasn’t always demonstrated the dedication to news coverage trumpeted by Dr Maddow. When President Obama spoke for the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall falling, Fox aired it live. It was news. MSNBC didn’t bother. FNC carried the President’s speech to the Black Caucus. MSNBC skipped it. Fox even broadcast Al Franken’s netroots speech, while MSNBC showed doc block reruns. Just this past week FNC covered two Obama press conferences while MSNBC, as if to make our point for us, ignored them. But don’t let any of this confuse you. It’s MSNBC that’s a ‘news operation’.

There’s something else from Dr Maddow that deserves note:

Keith was also the one who brought to light Fox News's water-carrying for the Bush Administration.

This dovetails with something the Rhodes Scholar said while interviewing another great journalistic mind, Jon Stewart:


People like Maddow love to talk about Fox News carrying water, or serving as a propaganda arm, for the GOP. Since they are speaking to their own credulous choir, it’s not likely they’re going to be asked to back up any claims they make. And it’s a good thing too. Look at a slice of FNC’s broadcast day from September 26, 2006. This was right in the middle of Bush’s second term, when Fox News was incessantly carrying water for George W Bush. So whom did they interview to mount their non-stop defense of the Bush administration?

• Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D)
• Jack Quinn (D)
• Tim Roemer (D)
• Jim Cooper (D)
• Dick Durbin (D)
• Jeff Bingaman (D)
• John Batiste (Ret)
• Barbara Boxer (D)
• P.J. Crowley (CAP)

This is what Maddow and Olbermann call ‘carrying water’ for the Bush administration? That’s the worst job of programming GOP propaganda in the history of GOP propaganda! And that brings us to that little Fox gem dropped by Dr Maddow to Jon Stewart:

MADDOW: But they never criticized George W Bush for anything. Even when he was doing things that were sort of not conservative. They never criticized him.

Never. Never! It must be true. Dr Maddow says so! Here is where we return to that list of quotes from the top of this post. In case you haven’t gussed it by now, yes, those are all quotes from Fox Newsers criticizing the Bush administration, during the Bush years. Quotes Dr Maddow says never happened. And they are just a handful, a tiny fractional sampling that popped up after a few minutes with the Google machine. Here they are again, this time with identifications and documentations:

• Yesterday [Bush] admitted to breaking the law, because authorizing wiretaps without search warrants is against the criminal law. Judge Andrew Napolitano, FNC Senior Judicial Analyst
• I've been a proponent of using 50,000 Guard to back up the Border Patrol. The administration won't even try it. Bill O’Reilly
• And it turns out that we had false information. Condoleeza Rice I think said an untruth a number of times, saying the ones Iraq has can only be used for that. So you want to talk about truth? I think this administration has a big problem with the truth. Alan Colmes
• The leadership [of President Bush] is in question. Former FEMA head Michael Brown has basically defended his agency's dismal performance in the days after Katrina. And now we have a ballooning gas price situation that is hurting millions of Americans. Bill O’Reilly
• I, for the life of me, considering this is our No. 1 vulnerability, why would the president do this? Is it for votes? Sean Hannity
• This new Patriot Act, consistent with the old one, would allow the FBI to bypass the constitution. Wrong, dangerous, and obviously unconstitutional. Judge Andrew Napolitano
• I’m going to be against George Bush for the next four years.... I don’t agree with him. It’s in the democracy. I’ve got a right not to agree with the son of a--the guy. Bob Beckel, FNC Contributor
• Mr. Bush has two choices. He can explain the Kay report and admit the mistakes made. Or he can ignore the issue, hoping Americans will ignore it come next November. Bill O’Reilly
• FEMA should stop watching TV and get housing and emergency plans together. And if they have any extra time they should come on TV and explain what they're doing. Are we really paying federal bureaucrats to watch TV and complain? John Gibson
• The Clinton administration decided they'd try to do something about it, then they threw up their hands and said we can't. The Bush administration the same thing. Tony Snow
• Polls say that 70 percent of Americans want the borders tightened up. The Bush administration hasn't done it. Bill O’Reilly
• Like Mr. Clinton, President Bush didn't do much to protect us. Yes, they both say we should develop alternative fuel, but little concrete action has been taken. Bill O’Reilly
• And let me show you something that President Bush, a commercial that President Bush ran during his last campaign for president.... He ran a commercial using a little girl who lost her mother during 9-11 and used that and that helped sell him to the American people. Alan Colmes
• The government’s appetite for [NSA] spying on Americans is so voracious it must be restrained. This is not East Germany. Judge Andrew Napolitano
• Pat Tillman was given the third highest medal this country gives for heroism, the silver star....somebody should go to jail for lying. Col David Hunt, FNC Military Analyst
• For the life of me, I can't figure out why President Bush isn't more proactive on the environment. ... Today we find out that the White House tried to sanitize a government study on global warming. Instead of including both points of view on the issue, the Bush people have shaded the report to the side that sees warming as bogus. Bill O’Reilly
• How the hell did this [Gitmo] happen? I mean, how did we veer so far from the constitution for so long? Shepard Smith

But remember:

MADDOW: They never criticized George W Bush for anything. Even when he was doing things that were sort of not conservative. They never criticized him.

We have already seen how ‘journalist’ Rachel Maddow lifts ‘research’ from Media Matters. Now we find her going the extra step: making up a claim about Fox News out of thin air! And left unstated is the ultimate irony, the salient fact that in and of itself renders anything Dr Maddow has to say on the subject utterly worthless. Anyone who had watched Fox would know Maddow’s statement was absurd on its face. But then Dr Maddow doesn’t fall into that group. You will recall that as recently as last year Rachel Maddow didn’t own a television set. She bragged that she’s ‘never seen a show on Fox at any time ever’. In her own words:

I don’t have a television. I have never watched more than three consecutive minutes of Fox News ever, ever. I’ve never even seen a single segment of a single Fox News program. So I don’t know all that much about what they do.

Really? Yet she can now characterize eight years of Fox coverage she didn’t even watch by saying FNC never criticized Bush? Rhodes Scholar Maddow may fancy herself a journalist. But when she makes sweeping allegations about Fox News, after boasting of her total ignorance on the subject, why should anyone take one word she says seriously?

Spot something you’d like to see in the next Fox Haters Week in Review? Send us an email!

Tags: megyn, maddow, newshounds, boehlert, mediamatters, slootsky