Outsourcing to Jon Stewart

Hardly anyone in big media has the guts to criticize the bullshit of Fox News. I guess journalists all fear some future job interview after Sarah Palin privatizes her Minitru into the capable hands of propagandist Rupert Murdoch. A job interview, they hope. That cage of rats around the face, ugh, almost as disgusting and painful as Glenn Beck!

So the New York Times outsources its critique to Jon Stewart by pretending to merely report what he says:

[Stewart] said on the show this week that he criticizes [Fox] a lot because it is “truly a terrible, cynical, disingenuous news organization.”

Evidence for Stewart's assertion, if anyone is obtuse enough to still need it, is Fox's drumbeat that the logo of the recent nuclear summit is derived from the characteristic Islamic symbol of the evening star at new moon. The logo, which the Times unaccountably neglects to show, is:


Hydrogen! Oh my Lord Jesus Christ! (No, not Allah. Never Allah.)

Just say for sake of argument that the logo is a reference to Islam. If so, it would only serve as a stark reminder that radical Islam and nuclear proliferation are indeed a serious threat that we in the liberal west are rightly working against. Would that concern be unpatriotic? Hardly.

The whole logo controversy only works as propaganda if its recipients are already in thrall of delusions about President Obama. It only appeals further to their unreasoning beliefs and, mostly, to their tribal, often bigoted mistrust of him.

Nor is this the first time the wingnutosphere has made mountains (for Mohammed!) out of graphical molehills. They actively search for invidious touchstones to enrage their easily manipulated flock of dittoheads.

The obvious purpose of Fox's logo-rrhea (hyphen signals scatological joke) is to keep its audience in constant angry arousal for electoral purposes. Many of them are armed, and quite a few of those gun owners are clinically insane.

Fox doesn't care. The coming violence - coming further violence actually - will only drive ratings up, and Fox's large stable of provocateurs will piously declaim that they had nothing to do with the violence, that it was of course liberal words and government that forced the neo-Confederates off the deep end. Because, God save us, the Muslims have already taken over Microsoft!


Still don't believe me? Fox and the neo-Confederates didn't object to this far more Islamic logo:

Crescent moon, stars! But it's a Republican logo. IOKIYAR. And we know that Saudi Arabia's party in America couldn't possibly have anything to do with Islamic symbolism.