As the nation awaited President Obama’s first State of the Union speech, few prepared for it as eagerly as the pundits of FOX News. They began denigrating the speech and propping themselves before it began, and once he had finished speaking, their misinformation only continued unabated by reality.
People everywhere expected the factually challenged folks at FOX to step up in their attacks against President Obama, hence the move by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to recommend reporting FOX falsehoods, but few could have anticipated how much of a head start FOX would give Sarah Palin. Before President Obama uttered a word of the speech, FOX brought in Palin to undermine the content by evaluating what she anticipated it to contain.
She discussed things such as an expectation of the president “to mollify, rationalize what is perceived as a more lax-adaisical approach to dealing with the war on terror.” Clearly reaching to discuss the unknown, Palin provided little analysis into the the president’s eventual speech, but she did make transparent that someone had prepared her statement and littered it with terms intended to make her appear more intelligent, probably at the behest of others at FOX. Given that Palin failed to even write her autobiography and her inability to correctly pronounce all of the terms, the author of her words almost certainly was not her, calling into question what insight she had to offer at all.
After the speech, Palin and Sean Hannity attempted to dissect President Obama to find inadequacies in him and the speech he delivered. Hannity tried to write it off because “it was not as presidential as I would expect it to be…I thought it was extremely partisan.” Of course, coming from a host positioned on the far right, the president might take Hannity’s “partisan” perception as a compliment.
Hannity would go on to ask Palin’s opinion of Justice Samuel Alito’s obvious mouthing of “not true” when President Obama mentioned how the Supreme Court’s decision a week ago opened the possibility of corporations from around the world flooding candidates with money. Failing to mention the obvious breach in decorum from Alito, Palin criticized the president’s actions since “this is why people are disenchanted…because when we see an issue like this, words spoken that may not be true, coming from our president and embarrassing our Supreme Court and not respecting the separation of powers.” Palin’s choice to imply that President Obama had lied flew in direct contradiction to the four justices in the dissenting opinion that supported President Obama’s sentiments, not to mention his exceeding expertise on the topic as a former Constitutional-law professor compared to the aspiring pundit.
FOX’s choice to bring in someone who played a major role in losing the election in 2008 that brought President Obama into office to talk about his first State of the Union address made FOX’s goal unambiguous–belittling the president before and after the speech, regardless of its content. Palin had little to contribute other than an attempt to burnish her own appearance and suggest the president as an enemy of the nation, whereas Hannity mostly provided a means for Palin to do so while getting in a few petty digs of his own. So long as they focus more on themselves and their agenda than helping the nation, viewers should aim to ignore them — and choose to Turn Off FOX.
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FOX Personalities on the State of Themselves: Sarah Palin and Sean …: As the nation awaited President Obama’s fi… http://bit.ly/aeAoxQ
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FOX Personalities onState of Themselves:Palin&ScumBagSean Hannity Before&After SOTU http://bit.ly/bKHXk2 #turnofffox #p2
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