Fox News is REALLY scared of girls

Mommy, why is the scary lady the lead story at the Fair 'n' Balanced network again?

A top adviser to New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has admitted that an official "Green New Deal" document posted by Ocasio-Cortez's office contained a guarantee of economic security even for those "unwilling to work" -- but not before he went viral in progressive circles for claiming the exact opposite, repeatedly, in an interview with Fox News' "Tucker Carlson Tonight."

Hard to see how that adds up to a schooling of the "freshman Dem," but you can tell there's still nothing that scares Fox News quite as much as Rep. Ocasio-Cortez. She's so scary, indeed, that she was the subject of the commentary in the No. 3 position on Sunday afternoon as well:

We are reaching a turning point that will forever determine our future -- how we live our lives and how our children will live theirs.  The gap between the ever-widening left and right has never been wider, and yet amazingly it continues to widen.

Every time we turn on a TV, open a laptop or listen to the radio, another bizarre, offbeat, outlandish idea brings us closer to socialism and the destruction of capitalism. And it is being pushed by the left.

Here she is again on Feb. 9 -- the almost-as-scary Ilhan Omar is the lead story, but there's another commentary in the No. 2 position in case you thought the socialist menace was retreating:

The Democratic Party’s lurch to socialism led to a presidential rebuke at the State of the Union on Tuesday night. From Sen. Bernie Sanders’s call for “Medicare-for-all,” to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal of a “Green New Deal,” to Democratic presidential hopefuls’ hankering for stiff tax hikes, prominent members of the Democratic Party seem unwilling to miss any opportunity to advocate for greater government control of the economy.

Yet as Democrats justify grandiose proposals by decrying income inequality, many of us who immigrated to the United States from socialist countries see great irony. After all, unending income equality is what drove us to leave our native lands in the first place.

Ocasio-Cortez is the lead story three times on Feb. 8 (note that the third example has another twofer with the "slam" from a Wall Street Journal columnist; Ocasio-Cortez herself is mentioned exactly once in "Guns, Grub and Driveways"):

 And the lead story twice on Feb. 7:

She was especially scary on Feb. 6, the day after the State of the Union address. It's tempting to score this as a hat trick, but the "sullen Dems" in the commentary at the No. 2 spot isn't quite conclusive):

She was the lead story on Feb. 5:

... with, in a different daypart, another commentary meant to reinforce the danger of it all:


It’s been two years since the end of the Obama presidency and in that span, the mainstream Democratic Party has made an extreme shift to the far left.  In 2019 the Democrats have put their weight behind increased taxes, universal health care, open borders, and third-trimester abortions.

How do we account for this radical trend?

I don't know, dude. No Schlitz, Blatz. No Blatz, improvise. But of course, she was also the top story on Feb. 4:

Imagine, using the guest list to score political points. But there were two other downpage appearances that day as well:

Another lead story on Feb. 3:

Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore declared U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the new leader of the Democratic Party, while urging political moderates to take a position because there “is no middle ground anymore.”

“She is the leader. Everybody knows it. Everybody feels it,” Moore said of the freshman congresswoman from New York during a Friday interview on MSNBC.

For a Friday story at the top of the Sunday page, that seems singularly low-bore, but perhaps Fox is unusually scared of Michael Moore too. Or it could have been trying to make up for lost time, in that there seem to have been no stories about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez among the top five on Feb. 2! There was, though, this to start the month:

New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez acknowledged her “privilege” as a “cisgendered woman” during a podcast interview this week, explaining she will never know the “trauma” of being transgender.

The progressive-favorite’s comments came during a wide-ranging discussion with The Intercept, a liberal news site.

Fox has its usual liberal hand with the scare quotes, though whence the hyphen in "progressive-favorite" is beyond me. That's probably not as interesting as Fox's inability to decide among "democratic socialist," "Democratic Socialist" and "Democratic socialist," or its swinging back and forth in January between Ocasio-Cortez's family name and given name, or assorted substitutes like "AOC" and "Alex," or the more customary "Dem Socialist darling." Indeed, there's a whole catalog of frontpage representations from January that just kept getting -- overtaken by events. 

Our question at the end of the year was whether Fox News is scared of girls. The first few weeks of 2019 seem pretty conclusive. Fox News is absolutely petrified of girls. If you are a girl, please don't knock Fox News down on the playground and take its lunch money.

Always at war with... wait, what?

There seems to have gone out a decree from Caesar Augustus: Be scared! No, scarederer! Could we suggest that, if they really want to make the fear appeal work, certain media outlets need to spend a little more time in the files?

Not to say no one's going into the files at all -- the Fair 'n' Balanced Network, for instance, is recycling a photo from February 2014 to illustrate the "DANGER AT SEA" posed by Iran. Interestingly, in that case, the story it illustrated was there to point out that the two Iranian dreadnoughts headed straight for our precious bodily fluids electric grid were in real life "a pair of 'rust buckets' Tehran is using to prove to its people it can project power around the globe."

The Washington Times documents a different outcome of Kenyan fecklessness:

The United States is now Iran’s air force.

Good thing we've already sent them the antiaircraft missiles, huh?

The recycling-without-reading prize, though, goes to Times Editor Emeritus Wes Pruden. After a few did-this-in-Caesar-seem-ambitious paragraphs that cover the golf, the Islam and the bust of Churchill comes this:

The president even loves Israel, but in his way. It’s tough love to bring the Jews to heel. Just as Secretary of State John Kerry is topping up a deal to satisfy the mullahs in Iran, comes the news that the United States has declassified a 386-page report that reveals in minute detail Israel’s super-discreet nuclear program. Everybody knows Israel has one, but until now Israel, with American support, has never acknowledged it. To do so, all mature hands have agreed, could set off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

Is there a fixed number of times the party press has to be reminded of this?* The prize for unveiling the "super-discreet nuclear program" goes to ... the party press itself: Rupert Murdoch's Sunday Times. Unless you want to give a few points for effort to Ehud Olmert in 2006:

“Iran openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level, when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel, Russia?”

As Fox itself noted -- in a rather detailed explanation of the Nixon administration's frustration over Israel's nuclear program -- Olmert's aides said he was describing responsible states, not nuclear ones. Oddly, though, there doesn't seem to be any record of the Times calling for any Fox reporters' heads on plates. No doubt that's because we were still at war with Eurasia Eastasia.

* The link suggests the original hed: wesley-pruden-obama-reveals-israels-nuclear-progra/

Pancho was a robot boy

What did all the federales say there, Mail Online?

You might think there's already enough random episodic stuff to be terrified of out there, but then you'd miss this candidate for Most Thorough Claim Quote of the (no longer young) Year: