Fox News and right-wing media in general has had a toxic effect on this country. The latest conspiracy theory to come down the pike is the one about the imaginary White House staffer, or invisible rabbit, it matters not, who controls Joe Biden’s audio and video. Somebody is controlling the horizontal and the vertical, Indiana senator James Risch was told and he asked Anthony Blinken about it today at the hearing on Afghanistan. Blinken looked blank for a moment or two because he honestly didn’t know what Risch was talking about. Neither did lots of other people. But Dana Milbank at the Washington Post put two and two together on the latest scandal and CT du jour.
The story begins with the White House’s Monday press schedule, which announced that Biden would receive a wildfire briefing in Boise. The press coverage was listed as “out-of-town pool spray at the top.” In English, this means that a group of the traveling White House press corps is admitted to the event at the beginning and then brought out after journalists get some video and audio. It’s a routine practice presidents have used for decades. And that’s exactly what happened Monday. According to the pool report, the group was escorted in at 12:08 p.m. for the start of the briefing and “escorted out at roughly 12:35” — a relatively long spray.
That would have been the end of the matter, except that somebody in the research department at the RNC, watching the White House’s livestream, decided that something nefarious had happened. “White House feed cuts out as Biden starts to ask a question,” the RNC tweeted.
Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, crediting the RNC for the scoop, published an article under the headline, “White House livestream cuts Biden mid-sentence as he goes off script.”
“An official White House livestream of President Biden’s remarks was abruptly cut off mid-sentence on Monday,” it began, linking Monday’s “incident” to White House officials’ “fear he’ll veer wildly off-message.”
All that was left was for Risch to trumpet the fabrication — and then to demand to know why Blinken was “unaware this is actually happening.” […]
So Risch knows the facts but perpetuates the fiction. If only somebody could “press the button” and cut off the GOP lie machine before it destroys us all.
It’s typical disinformation and it is toxic. Breitbart chronicled the non-doings of the Clintons for many years, as you know, and it was exactly this sort of thing. You remember when Hillary was supposedly selling the country’s uranium? What that turned out to be was Steve Bannon found out that Bill Clinton had done a speaking engagement for a uranium company in Canada and was paid a fee, and that became nefarious pay off money for something illegal.
This is how the right-wing media operates. I don’t know if we can save democracy with this fifth column activity on the part of the far right fourth estate. I have serious doubts.
Okay, Uncle Joe is either an all-powerful dictator or puppet. Which one is it?! The continuing failure of messaging is obvious with all these conflicting signals.
By never connecting the dots, leaving all the Republican promoted miss-information with a question mark here and there, foments the weak-minded in Trump’s lair to believe virtually any resultant claimed by these rabble-risers …
The instant the skewing started, the press arm of the Whitehouse and the red-head spitfire as the oval office rep should have pointed the blame right at its highest point the big money arm of dis-information …
RUPERT MURDOCH’S power of money, without responsibility to accuracy in reports, leaks reams of poor choices … everything his companies do, should send out a grain of salt with them in a small zip-lock bag …
Last time I saw this much head spinning was Johnny Depp playing the mad hatter.