Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Bulldog Edition

So today was Axelrod Day. He was everywhere; on almost all the national talks, the local Fox affiliate, and on local NBC, in an apron making omelets or something.

100%-drama-free omelets.

Every programs except “Face the Nation” where Austan Goolsbee (Obama economic adviser) announced “The era of dithering is over.”

About all of which more later, but I wanted to run off this early edition of SMCD to flag something really quite extraordinary that I saw over on Fox News Sunday.

After John “Lil' Weepy” Boehner went on to pitch his same, tired, failed agenda of capital gains tax cuts and deregulation as the solution to all problems, came this;

Wallace: Apropos of nothing whatsoever, aren’t unions evil? And shouldn’t the Evil Union Card Check program be opposed by all right thinking people who don’t want the destroy the economy? I mean, after all you get secret ballots in Congress. Why is it OK for Congress to have secret ballots and not for workers.

And after thinking “Well maybe because Congresspersons can’t be thugged out of a job by management?” I thought no more of it.

Until, one minute later, they went to commercial, I got the shock of the week when the first paid commercial was from an outfit called “Americans For Job Security” repeating VERBATIM the Boehner/Fox Party line “question” that Wallace had awkwardly wedged into the middle of a “news” broadcast not sixty second prior.

You get secret ballots in Congress.
Why is it OK for Congress to have secret ballots and not for workers

Wow.

“Americans For Job Security” is, of course, a well-funded wingnut front organization that operates as a hand-in-glove/cash-in-bag advocate for the Conservative’s radical, anti-labor agenda. Here’s the background:

Americans for Job Security (AJS) is a Republican "sham front group that would be better called Corporations Influencing Elections ... masquerading as a non-profit to conceal its funders and the scope of its electioneering activities,"[1] the Center for Responsive Politics wrote in April 2007.[2] Incorporated October 1997 in Virginia, AJS was described by the Center as "pro-Republican", "pro-business", and "established to directly counter labor's influence".[3][4]

The Center also reported that, in 1998, AJS "pledged to raise and spend $100 million on issue ads over the next five years."[5]

It is alleged that AJS was founded by Marc F. Racicot "with a $1 million donation" from the American Insurance Association. Racicot headed George W. Bush's 2004 re-election campaign and is a former Republican National Committee chairman.[6] In June 2005, Racicot coincidentally became the new head of the American Insurance Association, which "represents 435 major property and casualty insurance companies."[7]

I mean, Fox is and always has been something of a hybrid between a panty liner and a puke bucket for the GOP, but I honestly can’t remember seeing an example of teevee this openly, nakedly sponsors-writing-dialogue whorey since the days when Rob Petrie pimped for Kent.

And even at that apex of overt advertiser control over programming, “Dick Van Dyke” was a fucking comedy show. It wasn’t spending vast sums of money every day desperately trying to pretend it was a legitimate news organization, and it never openly flogged product in the middle of the script.

Also it was better written, and its actors didn’t scare small children.

Afterward, during Bill Kristol’s litany of the Awful Things that may precipitate another Great Depression was…wait for it…card check.

Of course Fox has always been a nest of fifth columnists working to advance the wingnut agenda, and of course the lockstep Right has always obediently repeated marching orders faxed to them from the Murdoch White House, but to see it happen in real-time right in front of me -- to see the exposed sausage-grinding gears of a regime grown so lazy, sloppy and desperate that they have, at last, completely dropped the final, skimpy shred of fig leaf covering the oozing, syphilitic reality that is Fox News -- was really rather amazing.

UPDATE: The video is up on Teh YooTubes now and, no, I didn't imagine it. It is one of those glorious occasions where you can actually see the clammy tentacles of Fox's corporate wingnut masters up Chris Wallace's ass, working him like the sock puppet that he is.



(And a big thank-you to Heather and the C&L Video Cafe -- your One Stop Shoppe for the Kobe beef tenderloin cuts of timely video -- for the great work of getting this up and out so fast)