trump v fox

Is Fox News fair to Donald Trump? Was his decision to withdraw from the latest Fox News debate for Republican Party Presidential nominee candidates, justified? Trump had expressed repeated reservations about the selection of Fox host Megyn Kelly as a moderator at the debate. His decision not to attend the proceedings apparently came after Fox issued a mocking press release directed solely at him, that contained the following: "We learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet him if he becomes President - a nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings."

1. Fox News is a brash slightly tabloidish network which those of us of a principled disposition tend to look to for a fairer hearing than is available on the bankrupt liberal atheistic abortionist left wing Muslim appeaser broadcasters CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, the BBC and Sky, et al. Particularly Al. I hate him.

2. Fox is not really a conservative or principled station. It is a commercial enterprise whose business model is to be fairer to Americans of principle than other networks are. Although its reputation is as a right wing entity, it is owned and controlled by the Australian media baron Rupert Murdock who also controls the left wing British and European news network Sky, In addition Murdock and his family own the Wall Street Journal, the Times of London newspaper and sundry other media entities. The wheel is rigged and it's the only game in town. I have suggested that the Murdock's News International company should be broken up under anti trust legislation following the discovery that News Corp in Britain was routinely bribing police officers, subverting politicians (again through bribery) and hacking the phones of private citizens. I believe the threat implicit in the Murdocks owning so many news outlets far exceeds the threat which had arisen the last time anti trust legislation was invoked to smash an international monopoly, ie when the Hunt ramily tried to corner the market in silver a hundred years ago.

3. Fox has many presenters of insight and ability though its dress style for its women employees, with short skirts, high heels and thunder thighs waving in the camera, is unseemly.

4. Presenter Sean Hannity, whose hall mark is a certain gruff gregarious decency, is an enthusiast for Donald Trump's campaign for the Republican Party Presidential nomination. Hannity seems to appreciate the ideas, vitality, honest discourse, drama and sheer chutzpah which Mr Trump has injected into the race. He also seems to enjoy the classically American quality of Trump's emergence as a candidate and sudden surge in popularity across the nation. Fox has extended to Hannity a significant measure of editorial control over what he says on air about Mr Trump, ie he's been left free to say whatever he likes.

5. Presenter Bret Baier is in my view, partisan in his opposition to Mr Trump.

6. The three man panel routinely featured on Bret Baier's programme is consistently partisan in opposition to Mr Trump. One of these regular panel members Charles Krauthammer, a very capable commentator, seems to be nursing a grudge against Trump. He has an excuse having been mildly mauled by Trump after an early criticism in the campaign.

7. The flagship programme styled The Five features one clear Trump fan, Eric Bolling, among its five regular presenters. Kimberly Guilfoyle is fair to Trump. Dana Perino, Greg Gutfeld and Juan Williams are partisanly hostile to Trump.

8. Megyn Kelly is partisan against Trump. Her guests and panels are almost uniformly hostile to Trump. Like Krauthammer she has an excuse. Trump's criticism of her line of questioning at a previous debate may have been excessive. However her leaked comments about Trump in a forthcoming magazine interview seem mischievous, irresponsible and unmerited. Mr Trump has a wife and family, Loose talk without any substance about him trying to woo her seems unacceptable to me. It was unacceptable to Trump too. She was his initial excuse for floating a possible withdrawal from the latest Fox News Presidential debate. The above cited press release from Fox seems to have been the last straw.

9. Bill O'Reilly's programme is fair enough to Trump.

10. Greta Van Susteren who eschews the Fox dress code compelling women to wave their thighs in the camera, and is one of the more professional broadcasters at the station, is scrupulously fair to Trump.

11. Fox Contributor Laura Ingraham, another broadcaster of merit who eschews the thunder thighs school of journalism, has some respect for Trump's courage and individuality. She is generally fair to him on those much too few occasions when she's on air.

12. Presenter Neil Cavuto is fair to Trump.

13. Regarding their internet coverage, I believe management at Fox News has deliberately downplayed the popularity of Trump in online reporting for several months. I would suggest there has been a policy, dating from his first spat with Megyn Kelly, to selectively deny him publicity.

14, Fox News on air television presentation of commentary re Trump remains fairly diverse. Megyn Kelly and Greg Baier do him no favours. But their partisan hostility is balanced somewhat by Hannity's enthusiasms and Greta Van Susteren's professionalism.

15. With Fox likely to turn more decisively against him, it's hard to see how Trump as a Presidential candidate will function with NO friends among the broadcasting pseudo elites.

16. It is exciting though.

17. Dramatic.

18. Vital and vitalising for democracy.

19. Pure Americana.

20. We have nothing like this in Ireland, Britain or Europe.

okla bleu

Sitting in the cheap seats at the Theatre Des Grands Fesses in Montmartre.
An oddly surrealistic student production of the famous American musical Oklahoma is playing.
How on earth did I end up at this thing?
It's nothing if not avant garde.
The money song "The Farmer And The Cowman Should Be Friends" has been improbably rejigged to reflect news reports of a meeting between Pope Francis (of whom I would be quite criticial and whose papacy I consider may be an ouster of the previous Pope) and President Ayatollah Rouhani of Iran.
The song has some witty insights and the visual performance of it, featuring burka clad hotties dancing with cowboy Padres is certainly striking.
It goes:

"The Ayatollah and the Pope should be friends
The Ayatollah and the Pope should be friends
One man wants Jihad war
The other is a crushing bore
But that don't mean that they cannot be friends
I'd like to say a word for the Jihadi
He thinks he's an apocalyptic Mahdi
He's building nuclear war heads
While Europe sleeps  abed
But that doesn't necessarily ma-a-ake him a baddie
Oh the Pope and the Ayatollah should be friends
The Pope and the Ayatollah should be friends
One man wants the Jews all dead
The other wants the Catholic Church red
But that don't mean that they cannot be friends
I'd like to say a word for Pope Francis
He ousted Pope Benedict through a set up involving his amanuensis
He believes in climate change
And Muslim immigrants being allowed free range
For Christianity he's something of an insider nemesis
Oh the Ayatollah and the Pope should be friends
The Ayatollah and the Pope should be friends
One wants Israel off the map
The other drowns ancient faith in leftist crap
But that don't mean that they can not be friends"

I'm starting to like this version of Oklahoma.
There's something about it.

considerations of donald trump

Having been somewhat aware of Mr Trump for about thirty years, I have to admit that during all that time I nearly never liked him.
He first appeared in my universe in the dulcet early days of satelite television in Ireland, probably around 1991, when he was a guest on an American chat show hosted by a left wing liberal atheist called Phil Donohue.
Donohue just loved Trump.
To me Trump's inherited wealth and wealth based on bank borrowings was not particularly admirable.
In the 1990's at least four companies owned or controlled by the billionaire would go through selective bankruptcies.
This type of bankruptcy seemed to me like a convenient way to steal money from gangster banks.
The pervasive presence of the mafia in the real estate world of New York and in banking generally in Europe and America, did not edify me in assessing these matters.
I did like Mr Trump's self referentially humorous cameo appearance in one of the John Hughes Home Alone films.
Otherwise I found him consistently unadmirable over the whole of the past three decades.
A television programme in recent years in which he achieved a broader fame by firing an employee every week drawn from members of the public who had agreed to compete for the role of Mr Trump's apprentice, was beneath my contempt.
Then he announced his candidacy for the American Presidency.
I wondered was it just an ego thing.
A sort of hubris which would see him blow a few hundred million dollars to realise that he's not as likeable as his employees tell him he is and that the Presidency is not there to be purchased.
Then Trump said he would put a stop to illegal immigration.
Ah, I thought, the media will now label him as racist and finish him off.
The media did indeed try to label him racist.
But something strange happened.
People begin to think for themselves.
And most of us in the Free World, ie America, Canada, Britain, Ireland, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand, most of us want immigration stopped and we're getting mighty tired of left wing bankrupt media groups suiciding our cultures and our freedoms in the interests of giving Jihadis a new Caliphate on our doorsteps.
The media failed to label Trump a racist.
His ratings among the general public began to climb.
The media next tried to discredit him with a contrived insult during an interview when pollster Frank Luntz informed Trump that former Presidential candidate John McCain had referred to Trump's supporters as crazies.
Luntz' precise words were: "John McCain says your supporters are crazies and John McCain is a war hero."
The war hero tag was meant to silence Trump.
It didn't work.
Trump answered robustly: "He's not a war hero. What! He's a hero because he got captured? I prefer my heroes not to get captured."
I first heard of this exchange when presenters on the left wing bankrupt mysteriously funded CNN mentioned it as a sure sign that Trump would shortly withdraw from the race.
I thought they were miscalling the situtation.
Trump's remarks about McCain struck me as refreshing and spontaneous and a decisive repudiation of Luntz' trap.
They struck a lot of American voters the same way.
It strikes me that people are sick of having our political discourse defined by left wing bankrupt media groups who are accountable to no one except their unnamed foreign donors.
To this day, the exchange with Luntz is routinely misreported in America and Europe without mentioning Luntz' opening insult and the use of the war hero tag by Luntz in an attempt to prevent Trump responding to it.
A similar misreporting is used regarding Trump's statement that a debate host called Megyn Kelly had been unfair to him
"She was bleeding out her eyes, she was bleeding out her, whatever," Mr Trump had said after the debate.
This is routinely and falsely misreported (most recently in Ireland by the Irish Independent's David Quinn) to wit that Mr Trump had said Megyn Kelly was "menstruating."
He said no such thing.
He does say things I disagree with, usually in criticising fellow candidates Ben Carson, Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush.
I also disagree with his criticisms of former President Bush's decision to end Saddam Hussein's murderocracy in Iraq.
But most of Trump's bon mots show good judgement and a high degree of insight.
An obscure question about vaccines for Mumps, Measles and Rubella possibly causing autism, was intended to stump him at one debate. Trump answered it thoughtfully and clearly, and showed an ability to probe beyond conventional establishment medical "wisdom" in doing so.
A question about North Korea was answered with a superb insight, whereby Mr Trump stated baldly that China controls North Korea.
It does.
No one else in the political sphere has had the guts or the ability or the will, to say it.
The next media trap set for Trump was a standard feminist in the wood pile routine featuring an unknown lady lawyer who decades earlier had interrupted a meeting with Trump (which he had afforded her in his office) to use a breast pump on her mammaries supposedly to extend her lactation period for a suckling child who was not present at the time.
With Trump climbing in the polls the lady lawyer emerged from obscurity to say that twenty years ago Trump had called her proposed use of a breast pump in his office "disgusting."
This sort of manipulative feminist toshology could have eliminated a candidate in days of not so yore.
Now it made no impression whatsoever.
Then on foot of the latest sea of Muslim Jihad murders all over the world, slaughters unleashed in California, Paris, Africa and Asia without let or hindrance, came Trump's statement that he would temporarily ban Muslims from entering America and that if elected he would send the Syrian immigrants currently flooding the country back to Syria.
The left wing media exploded in outrage.
CNN, NBC, ABC and all the rest struggled manfully to tear him down.
Support for Trump from the people went up.
Way up.
And at last the liberal left wing media which has so dominated political life in the United States of America, at last, these hijackers and manipulators of our freedoms, these collapsers of our borders, these betrayers of our sovereignty, these facilitators of immigrant mafiosi Jihadis, at last these pious incompetents who have all but erased our countries from the map in favour of Islamic barbarism, at last these concatinated crews of conformist pseuds, these Anderson Coopers, these Wolf Blitzers, these Michael Moores, these Noam Chomkys, these John Pilgers, these Bill Mahers, these cravens, these blocks, these stones, these worse than useless things, at last I say, they each of them, severally and together, suddenly realised they were in a ball game.
Trump would not lie down.
And those of us who never liked him...
We began to think we might just like him as our President.

hartigan's stallion

animal from birth
the fire within
drove to the hill tops
creature of the wind
sinew spirit storm
smitten into form
with half begotten dreams
the mountains the forests and the streams
your temple your refuge your domain