And of course, he's not the only one who seems determined to play the victim at every turn. Check out today's helping of bullshit from Charles Krauthammer.
Fox wars
The 'post-partisan' president makes an enemies list
The White House has declared war on Fox News. White House communications director Anita Dunn said that Fox is "opinion journalism masquerading as news." Patting rival networks on the head for their authenticity (read: docility), senior adviser David Axelrod declared Fox "not really a news station." And Chief of Staff Emanuel told (warned?) the other networks not to "be led [by] and following Fox."
The signal to corporations is equally clear: . . . Think twice before you run an ad on Fox.
. . . the current White House goes beyond that. It wants to delegitimize any significant dissent.
Fox News is no monopoly. It is a singular minority in a sea of liberal media. ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC vs. Fox. The lineup is so unbalanced as to be comical -- and that doesn't even include the other commanding heights of the culture that are firmly, flagrantly liberal: Hollywood, the foundations, the universities, the elite newspapers.
The signal to corporations is equally clear: . . . Think twice before you run an ad on Fox.
. . . the current White House goes beyond that. It wants to delegitimize any significant dissent.
Fox News is no monopoly. It is a singular minority in a sea of liberal media. ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC vs. Fox. The lineup is so unbalanced as to be comical -- and that doesn't even include the other commanding heights of the culture that are firmly, flagrantly liberal: Hollywood, the foundations, the universities, the elite newspapers.
So, maybe Charles Krauthammer actually believes that making an unflattering (though demonstrably correct) remark about FOX News is tantamount to declaring war.
And maybe he does really believe that ABC, NBC, CBS, etc. are lefty equivalents of FOX.
You know, I could maybe give him MSNBC if we ignore the fact that they give Republican Congressional alumnus and Gingrich revolutionary Joe Scarborough his own show. And ignore the fact that they trot out Pat Buchannan every couple of days as if he had anything legitimate to say. But even if we pretend that MSNBC is the liberal FOX, no rational person could think that ABC, CBS, NBC, etc. are doing anything other than doing a second-rate job of reporting the news. So I had been assuming that people like Krauthammer were just being disingenuous. But maybe they aren't. maybe they really do think of themselves as victims.
I think people of that ilk have confused supremacy with parity. I think that they look at FOX, where their view is given complete supremacy (and facts be damned) and they actually see it as fair and balanced. Whereas they look at, say CNN where their viewpoint is treated as one possible point of view they actually see this as an attack on them and their values.
Maybe this is why, when the cashier at Wal-Mart says "happy holidays," thus acknowledging that some people celebrate Channukah or Kwanza, or nothing, they see this as a "War on Christmas!" Maybe they really do feel this way, as if Christmas is under attack from some unseen malevolent force.
So maybe Bill Donohue really looks at multiculturalism as a threat to Western Civilization. Maybe in his mind, if the Dead White Men canon is not taught as the indisputable pinnacle of achievement, it's the same thing as saying Shakespeare Sucks! To a normal person, it sounds like "Shakespeare was a great writer, but so were James Baldwin and SEI SHŌNAGON. But to the Donohoes of the world, it's one or the other. If Omar Khayyamm was a great poet, then somehow that diminishes Keats and Whitman.It's like you say to a Philadelphia fan, "hey, the Phillies are a great team, but the Yankees are looking pretty good, too" and the guy from Philadelphia shouts "Why are you always running down the Phillies?"
So maybe this is why these folks always seem to think that everyone's against them, everyone's out to get them!
Look, Krauthammer even thinks "the foundations" are biased against the right.
. . . . flagrantly liberal: Hollywood, the foundations, the universities, the elite newspapers.
The foundations include groups like the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Family Research Council, the Hoover Institute, The Free Congress Foundation, the CATO Institute, The RAND Corporation, the Adolph Coors Foundation, the Koch family foundations, and the various Mellon-Scaife family foundations. And there are more conservative/right-wing foundations where these came from.
And sure, there are also progressive foundations like People for the American Way, MoveOn.org, etc. but the right-leaning groups far outstrip progressive ones in numbers, money and influence. But to someone like Krauthammer, the fact that there are progressive foundations at all translates in his mind to the world of the foundations being biased towards the left. Either the foundation-o-sphere is the exclusive domain of right-wing opinion or it is irreperably slanted against the right. There is no in-between.
Maybe that's why there's no reasoning with people like that.
