Last updated on August 10th, 2014 at 05:00 pm
As President Obama’s first term moves along, Fox News is becoming more and more detached from reality. It used to be that FNC would broadcast stories that might have had a small basis in truth, but FNC has mirrored the slow psychological destruction of the Right, until all that remains now are delusions, dreams and conspiracy theories.
Fox News has gotten so desperate to bring down Obama and the Democrats that they are making up absolutely implausible stories. For example, the recent claim on Fox and Friends that Obama and the Democrats are planning a special tax hike just for Red States.
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Here is the video from Media Matters:
Fox and Friends host Steve Doocy asked guest Andrew Napolitano, “So New York’s Democrat Congressman Jerry Nadler is proposing that we raise taxes only in Republican red states. Come on, is that constitutional?” Napolitano replied, “It is absolutely not constitutional and on that basis, the judges would stop it. Here’s why it’s not constitutional. Because the Constitution, the law of the land to which Mr. Nadler and everyone in the government has taken an oath to uphold, requires equal protection. Equal treatment. Similarly situated people being treated in a similar manner. So you can’t have a different tax rate for Republicans and a different tax rate for Democrats. If you do, then you are violating the Constitution, and it is the duty of judges to stop the majority from doing that.”
Notice that Napolitano who is supposed to be a legal expert assumes that Democrats could and would pass such a bill. The reality is that the bill Fox is distorting, The Tax Equity Act, would provide regional cost of living adjustments, which would actually lower taxes in Red States, but since the Right believes that Democrats never lower taxes, this reality must be denied. If this denial of reality occurred in an average person they would be sent for medical help and their sanity would be questioned, but Fox News is allowed to spread a collective political mental illness to an average of 2 million people a day.
More evidence of the collective conservative break with reality came during the Friday edition of The O’Reilly Factor when former Bush Press Secretary Dana Perino claimed that Republicans voted for extending unemployment benefits. Here is the video via Media Matters:
It is one thing for Fox News to offer a conservative point of view. It is quite another when it seems that they can’t accept basic facts. Only Maine Republicans Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe voted to end the GOP Senate blockage of the unemployment benefits extension. This does not match up with Perino’s claim that the Republicans supported extending unemployment benefits. They didn’t, and they demonstrated their lack of support by blocking the bill on several occasions.
The fracture of the collective Fox News psyche has occurred in phases. The first phase happened right after Obama won the election. It was characterized by paranoia and hate for all things Obama and Democratic. This was Fox’s heavy duty conspiracy theory phase. During this time they claimed that Obama was going to close auto dealerships owned by Republicans, give more stimulus money to states that voted for him in 2008, and Obama was even going to ban fishing.
Phase two can be described as the resistance and retribution phase. This was the time when Fox News threw their weight behind the Tea Party, and actively campaigned against healthcare reform. This was also when they cut off their live coverage of an Obama healthcare event, and on air revealed their panic and desperation before the final healthcare reform vote.
The passage of healthcare reform only served to accelerate the mental illness of Fox News. The network has collective slipped into a delusional fantasy world in which Andrew Breitbart’s edited Shirley Sherrod video was not only a news story, but also a legitimate fact. When the video was quickly exposed as an edited fraud, Fox News did not demand an apology from Breitbart, but they did ask everyone in the free world to apologize for calling them racist.
Fox News is a mirror for what has happened to the Right during the presidency of Barack Obama. They were in denial and angry over the loss to Obama in 2008. They quickly moved to resistance on the issue of healthcare reform, and after they were defeated, they retreated from sanity and into a safe little fantasy land with Fox News, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Sarah Palin as their guides. Obama has caused a collective nervous breakdown for the Right. A group of people who once mocked the Left for what they considered a lack of character and strength are now cowering in the corner anxiously feeding their fears and delusions with various Obama conspiracy theories.
It turns out that the strength the Right demonstrated earlier this decade was really nothing more than a mirage. All it took to reduce them to tears was one historically incompetent Republican president, one midterm election loss, and the popular election of the nation’s first African American president. Barack Obama has caused Fox News and much of the Right Wing movement in this country to suffer a collective nervous breakdown, so when you hear the Right openly dreaming about taking back Congress this fall, remember that these people left their sanity at the door a long time ago, and their dreams are all they’ve got.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
