Today's a good time to return to Howard Kurtz's October 25 hatchet job on the White House's policy on Fox News. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAwqRqPpccM  He gathered together an ex-Fox commentator Jane Hall, and some Psycho-Lady from Reverend Moon's reactionary Washington Times, and the three of them beat up on a game fellow "Nico" from Huffington Post.  Together they recited 16 talking points from Fox almost on cue, masquerading as discussion.  It honestly had the feel of very professional propaganda, just enough reality to make the bombardment of baloney seem credible.  Kurtz has been spreading the laughable tale BTW that Washington Times is "more legitimate than ever" now since some guy he used to work with at the Washington Post has prostituted himself by joining the Mooney Tunes.  Eager to saw of the limb upon he was already so pecariously perched, Kurtz apparently used that baloney to justify booking Psycho-Lady of all people!  His pal is a good chum, so Psycho Lady must be fair and balanced also!

The three of them ticked off Fox talking points on why WH strategy is bad, seriatim: 

PSYCHO-LADY:

(1) "because it's an attack on the media!", and (2) it's such big (and presumably harmful?) story for the White House that "other networks have to cover it!" 

JANE HALL:

(3) "have to differentiate between their commentators and their news." 

John Stewart did a great job (For Fox Sake!) of exploding this canard:  the "opinion" wackaloons spew their insults and, then the "news" team reports their agitprop as though news:   DEEP VOICE OF CONCERN:  "Many today are beginning to question," blah-blah. 

(4)"Not a good strategy for Obama Administration"  (This was repeated three times.)

(6) They "don't know"  the difference between news shows and opinion.  That's right! "Don't know."  Yuh!

PSYCHO-LADY: 

(7) Obama talks to MSNBC-TV and that's wrong. 

(8) It's not at all like Bush/Cheney's 24/7 control of media access, since Olbermann is just the same as that great journalist Rush Limbaugh (I don't even undersand this but this is what the crazy Washington Times Psycho-Lady said). 

KURTZ: 

(9) Why it certainly *is* "Nixonian"  to dismiss the propaganda network, Kurtz helpfully concludes, supported by the others (dredges up idiotic quotes from misguided liberals). Veteran Nixon conman Ailes, now of Fox, personally came up with this talking point so enthusiastically recited by Kurtz. 

PSYCHO-LADY (up on her high horse): 

(10) What is really terrible is they are attacking the free press!  Repeats this insanity later also. We have already seen in this blog what passes for journalistic "freedom" in Murdoch propaganda mills.

KURTZ: 

(11)  Our host agrees with Psycho-Lady's sourcing for the important point above, and then,

(12) stokes the fire by bloviating about the Press-Pool incident, a cherished and endlessly repeated Fox News half-truth about a non-newsworthy non-incident.

(13)  It is fair to go after MNSBC-TV! (though, isn't it funny how they never say, "But on the other hand, unlike Fox's propagandist "news," they do have NBC News, and even with right-winger David Gregory moderating their now much-degraded Meet the Press?)

And HERE is the piece de resistance!  Kurtz declares, really unbelievably, that it is

(14) "unfair to judge an entire organization by a few commentaries." Read that again, it's a direct quote.   A few commentaries!  That was his conclusion, his sum-up!  LOL!

Does Fox even say that craziness?  I thought that their lie was that it is important to distinguish their propagandistic "news"  from their brownshirt commentary, no?  Did fair-and-balanced Howard outdo them in deceit? 

Meanwhile, Jane Hall used Chris Wallace's stock talking point (not, "Hey big boy!"),  (15) "you can't whine!" several times 

and (16) added Fox's trump card that supposedly decides the argument, "THEIR RATINGS HAVE NEVER BEEN HIGHER!" (Most say, "their ratings have shot up!") 

See, we have to accept that if Fox gets high ratings, and especially increased ones, WH simply must regard them as a news network since WH is then supposedly boxed in.   

Make any sense?   

Apparently this passes for logic among the MSM; they nearly all chimed in to endorse the non-sequitur.  The White House showed courage in saying the truth, and has shown rare leadership, even if it may be harmful to them in short term. We can be happy our children have a President prepared to face facts.  MSM has been cowardly, with most nearly as terrible as Kurtz.  Ratings might be how Fox would like to measure things, but the White House is not stupid: 

Either it is news or not, and it certainly is not news, not even if you drag out every last spinning-eyed Psycho-Lady from the funny farm!  But finally we learn that that last talking point is not only irrelevant, but like so much from Fox, 

it is also a lie!!  http://mediamatters.org/columns/200911030004  Fox's ratings are NOT up!  (You see, MSM?  That's is real reporting, you begin with facts!)  Meanwhile, the MSM has dutifully reported Fox's (a) disinformation and (b) sophistry on this subject, how often would you say? 

10,000 times around the world, estimating conservatively?  Thanks to Media Matters for being maybe the only pros.

Bible Spice sucked up a lot of attention and air time, and that was the kooky McCain campaign's strength, but also its undoing.  By the time people had taken in her full freak show two or three times, and especially after Katie Couric, they were ready for Tina Fey to eviscerate the ignoramus.   

So with health care also; way too much time on the boob tube with nothing to say,  i.e., Republicans have made the same strategic error.  Overexposed loudmouths who have nary a thing to offer.  That hideous Coburn has made a fool of himself, indeed a Scrooge, and so now has Cantor, in similar and all-too-predictable ways. Got no solutions, and that has registered. 

Americans listened to envenomated Republican surrogates and their bizarre invective, gave them every chance.  And finally concluded  that they are naught but a bunch of bigots and buttholes.  Enter President Clinton as relief pitcher, and he is throwing smoke.  (Go dawg!) 

The polling shows that Americans may be unhappy with some of Obama's leadership, but they are moving away from these ignorant haters and corporate stooges.  The nabobs claim (incoherently) that giving Americans what every industrial country already has now is excessive, and the voters think, "Overreach THIS!"   Voters won't move back because Republicans have taken their best shot, and people reached the conclusion that they're peddling snake oil:  accordingly, we are going to win. So we can decide for ourselves if the public option really is a good idea, because we are going to get it, and we will all try it out together. 

McCain wanted these town meetings all along (we just didn't realize what devilry he had in store), remember that?   He got the rough equivalent with Palin and her idiocy.  Now GOP has staged the real thing, and Americans were shocked but not impressed.   Republicans can try the same tactic in 2010, of course:  put a bunch of screaming people on the news night after night, who don't have one intelligent thing to say.  So far, it has failed twice.

Some people change careers, and Chris Wallace was a journalist until 2003.  He got his start by trading on the name of his overrated father, Mike Wallace, though he did well on his own. 

Since 2003, he is unburdened by the strictures of journalistic discipline, and works, as Obama did, as a community organizer.  But he has funding from billionaire wackaloon Rupert Murdoch and Fox, and together they toil to create a pro-assassination environment and bring down the government by extra-Consitutional means.  Whenever they get into trouble, Wallace is paraded out in a silly reporter's costume and tries to convince himself and others that he still has his old journalist job, and is not a front-man for a corporate sponsored sedition (domestic terrorism?) movement.  This weekend, one week after the Fox-organized insurrection rally with its Hitler signs and gun threats  in Washington, Wallace had the breathtaking temerity to quip, "Every president is thin-skinned, but I wonder whether this administration, this White House, has a particular problem with criticism."  (I.e., blaming the people they are spending millions continually to attack for defending themselves.)  They try to hide behind double talk about how the paid insurrectionists are not from the news division of the news department, or some utter malarkey:  No real journalist would ever dream of working as such a 1984-style corporate stooge, and he is no more a journalist now than were the KGB officers who wrote op-ed for Soviet newspapers.  But Chris Wallace is unfazed and he pronounces the ludicrous words above as though he of all the low, disgraceful individuals had the standing. 

I'm tempted to be more nuanced and say tar-and-feather him (and surely boycott), but I honestly can't bring myself to pull the punch.  RECOMMEND PLEASE, if somebody oughtta wipe that smirk off his face by giving Wallace a GOOD SOCK IN THE MOUTH.  

Thank you,

O.T.  

"No one is really sure exactly how the cartoon character Taz originated. Some theorize that it may have been an inspiration of Errol Flynn, a native Tasmanian and a 1930s star of such movies as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). His father, T.T. Flynn, was a professor who did some of the first studies of the Tasmanian devil's biology. "One story is that a producer from Warner Bros. saw a devil in a traveling zoo," says Nick Mooney, a wildlife biologist for Tasmania's Department of Primary Industries, Water and Environment. 'The animal was driven crazy by confinement and was racing around in its cage, sort of like in the cartoon.' "

==========================================================

Tasmanian Devils originally ranged through much of Australia (not fully clear), but some 400 years before European colonization began in 1788, came to be restricted the large Southern Island that gave their name.  Tasmania would be the 42nd largest U.S. State after S. Carolina and before West Virginia at 26,421 square miles.  Put another way, Tasmania is just over 2/3 the size of the whole of Ireland. 

The Devil is the only remaining carnivorous marsupial (after the disappearance of the stripey marsupial wolf, or Thylacine last in captivity in Hobart, capital of Tasmania, in 1936).  Marsupials, with pouches, are a sub-class of mammals (oh, excuse us!, infraclass, claims Wikipedia in their tedious, been-to-college vernacular).

The Devils were so named by Europeans for their ferocity, and trademark piercing screams. The strongest bite among any mammal, it is said, and reportedly a real threat to livestock.  The size of a small dog, it's meat is said to taste like veal.  Malevolent toward one another, they are surprisingly tolerant of wildlife officials, and often rest calmly when physically handled.  But all is not well.

The poor Devils now mostly have a hideous transmissible cancer on their faces(!) and mouths; they contract this from biting into one another's faces (which they spend a lot of time doing), and the population may be about 80-90% down according to the worst estimate.  This horror dates to around 1996 and its origins are unknown; infectious cancers are exceedingly rare and there are only probably three such types in the world.  Of course, frequently biting into the large cancerous facial lesions of other infected Devils makes potentially every one of them a member of the at-risk population, regrettably.   

Curiously the cells transmitted are not those either of the infect-ing Devil or the infect-ed; but of a Devil from around 1996 who somehow caught the ailment and is long deceased (Devils survive only three months with this scourge, not being able to eat when the fast-growing tumors expand to obstruct their mouths).  If they are thus alien tissue, why don't their bodies reject the alien cancer cells?  That's what most animals would do!  Well, Devils on Tasmania are almost genetically identical and no one knows the reason for that; the result is that their immune systems don't recognize the cancerous cells of that long-deceased infected relative as foreign, and just accept the wretched infection as if their own tissue. 

But wait!  Tasmania is big enough, you see, that the population in the Northwest is just different enough genetically, that a Devil named Cedric from there did reject cancer cells and this meant in a nature series that I saw, cue the lights, there is hope and we will beat this thing!  Hollywood ending, as Cedric points the way! 

Except, uh, that Cedric later caught a mutant form of the cancer, or at any rate was somehow infected by December 2008.   They have cut out the tumors in order to (maybe) save Cedric's life, but the hope that Cedric brought has dwindled.   There is no durable strategy for the wild Devils now, except by quarantining tiny, uninfected populations, for example, in a fenced-off area of the island (Tasman Peninsula), also on an island nearby, and through maintaining captive (zoo and other) populations.  Hobart, which housed that last marsupial wolf, has stepped up to support a captive population.  

To review:  the entire population is at risk, there is no cure and none really expected (even though post-operative Cedric may be still alive), and substantially all Devils in the wild are slated to die in perhaps 10-20 years!

If every individual in the wild expires, then presumably captive Devils can be reintroduced after a time. But first one must make quite certain that the contaminated wild ones are all good and dead, not one survivor, ghastly as this is.  It complicates things further that Devils also eat carrion; there is little doubt they would eat a deceased Devil and there may be risk of infection there as well; little is known.  In incidentally, they typically live perhaps eight years in the wild, but the longevity world record is not known.    

Something already wiped out much of their population in (presumably) epidemics of 1909 and 1950, by the way, and they obviously recovered.  They are important to Tasmania incidentally in controlling the red fox, an appalling threat to the island introduced by "ecoterrorists" in 2001. Tasmania is over 1/3 covered by parks and refuges, and many of Australia's vanished animals live now only the island (what kind of awful person would introduce foxes intentionally into the fragile ecosystem is difficult to imagine).  

Warner Brothers, responsible for the undersigned's logo and the wonderful Taz character has stepped up to offer support, as has Ted Turner.  In the Northwest, the population is still little-affected by the way, so there remains a flicker of hope that they could somehow be resistant, despite Cedric's predicament.  Maybe. There is now talk of fencing off the entire Northwest; no one seems to know if that is realistic.

Save the Tasmanian Devil's site is http://tassiedevil.com.au/.  If you are in a position to help, please do so.  In any case, thank you for reading, and don't be afraid to tell others.

-O.T.