The shield and sword of the Party

The sheer ingratitude of some people. Here's the poor Fair 'n' Balanced Network, working its head off on behalf of the Trump campaign, and all it hears from the top of the food chain is this kind of stuff:

You get the idea that the mean people at the White House simply aren't paying attention, so perhaps we can help a bit. Here's the No. 2 story from the Monday homepage (image at top):

Joe Biden tweeted Sunday night that if he gets elected, his administration “won’t just rebuild this nation — we’ll transform it,” raising speculation online about what exactly in the country will be transformed.

See? Active voice and everything!

The tweet comes after a politically charged Fourth of July weekend, as the country works to manage a new surge in COVID-19 cases and tries to emerge from weeks of tense protests that have resulted in a widening divide between Democrats and Republicans.

Biden’s tweet did not specify what exactly he means by transforming the country. His critics from the left have expressed concern that he served in the upper echelon of government for over 40 years and didn't help solve these major issues in the past. His critics from the right insist that a Biden White House will take marching orders from the Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the party. Some conservatives say his vice president pick will be an early indicator of his administration's direction.
 
Gotta love the style touch on "the Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the party." But at this point, you should have figured out why this is a top campaign story. One of the scariest monsters under the Fox News bed is the scary Kenyan dude's "promise" to "fundamentally transform" the country, so anything that calls that to mind is a win from the outset. (Somehow Ronald Reagan's similar claim from 1989 always goes unmentioned: "We meant to change a nation, and instead, we changed a world.") Still, of course, any claim about transformation needs context and sourcing:

... Scott Morefield, a media and politics reporter for the Daily Caller, responded to Biden’s post and said the transformation Biden was referring to would be the country's turn “into a socialist hellscape."

Read more »

No, not really

Hey, it must be nice to have some positive election news at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network!

Donald Trump this weekend pounced on Hillary Clinton’s email scandal and her continuing efforts to fully explain her culpability, amid Republicans and other supporters now repeatedly urging him to stick with his likely best winning strategy.

At last, all pulling together! So he got the message?

... Last weekend, Clinton told “Fox News Sunday” that FBI Director James Comey said that she was “truthful” to the American public about her use of a private email server while secretary of state -- a statement critics of the Democratic presidential nominee quickly disputed.

However, Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, didn’t appear to fully engage on the issue until Friday night, after Clinton, in a press conference, suggested she “short circuited” her remarks Sunday and was in fact saying Comey acknowledged her being truthful with the FBI during the agency’s investigation into the email issue.

But he's on the beam now, right? Tell us how he pounced on those emails!

At a rally Friday night in Wisconsin, after Clinton’s remarks earlier that day at a National Association of Black Journalists and National Association of Hispanic Journalists gathering, Trump called Clinton “unbalanced” and “unhinged.”

“She's a monster, look at what's happened, look at her history,” Trump said at a rally in Green Bay. “In another way, she's a weak person. She's actually not strong enough to be president."

Uh, OK.

I don't think we ought to classify this as a lie on Fox's part, or even a bullshitting. It's more of a fairy tale -- a moral fable about how the world ought to work, rather than a tedious procedural account of how it does work, told to keep children from climbing strange beanstalks or following hideous old crones into huts made of candy. Things usually turn out OK, even if it gets a little hairy for the protagonists around bedtime (yours, not theirs). One can wonder, though, how the Fox audience must feel when someone opens the door to the hut and there's the witch, sitting down to a dinner of brats in puff pastry.