Eight Feet Deep

  For quite awhile now the loonies of right-wing pun­ditry land have had a pretty free hand in telling lies on their oppo­nents with lit­tle con­se­quence. But no less than the pres­i­dent of the United States is now chal­leng­ing the verac­ity of Glenn Beck and Fox News and friends.

 The White House responded Wednes­day on its blog to charges Beck and oth­ers have made regard­ing Obama’s attempts to gain an Olympic bid for Chicago. White House blog­ger Jessie Lee wrote on a post titled “Real­ity Check: Try­ing to Turn a Point of Pride Into a Moment of Shame” that the Olympics were once a point of pride and unity for the coun­try but …

 ” … once again Fox News’ Glenn Beck pro­gram has shown that noth­ing is wor­thy of respect if it can be used as part of a par­ti­san attack to boost ratings.”

 In the words of some long for­got­ten barfly who sat in the bar stool next to me in Jim’s Lounge back dur­ing my Navy days in Gulf­port, Miss.: “You got that right!”

 Obama’s folks are no longer play­ing nice and let­ting com­pletely absurd untruths to slide by. The White House Blog post noted:

  “RHETORIC:    BECK SAID VANCOUVER LOST $1 BILLION WHEN IT “HAD THE OLYMPICS.”   Glenn Beck said, “Van­cou­ver lost, how much was it? they lost a bil­lion dol­lars when they had the Olympics.”  [Tran­script, Glenn Beck Show, 9/29/09]

 “REALITY:   VANCOUVER’S OLYMPICS WILL NOT TAKE PLACE UNTIL 2010.   Van­cou­ver will host the 2010 Olympic and Par­a­lympic Games from Feb­ru­ary 12 – 28, 2010 and March 12–21, 2010, respec­tively. [Vancouver2010.com, accessed 9/29/09]”

 You can read the rest for your­self and see how the Obama admin­is­tra­tion has a whole new ball­game under way in deal­ing with even its most pow­er­ful critics.

 Obama has snubbed Fox more than once lately and his avoid­ance has been noth­ing if not matter-of-fact.

 More thought­ful pun­dits say Obama is mak­ing a mis­take not talk­ing to the large audi­ence watch­ing Fox News. But the fact is, his elec­toral base is not the typ­i­cal Glenn Beck watcher. Plus, Fox has become increas­ingly even in its over­all news cov­er­age — for­get talk shows like Beck, O’Reilly and Han­nity — more biased toward the right. The ads Fox took out falsely claim­ing other news out­lets avoided cov­er­ing the events of the recent Tea Partyista’s march on Wash­ing­ton are just some of the more bla­tant exam­ples of the cable chan­nel head­ing toward a dom­i­nant role as a right-wing pro­pa­ganda tool.

 I am happy for this bold­ness towards Fox and dem­a­gogues such as Beck. Their lies do noth­ing but obscure infor­ma­tion the peo­ple need about their gov­ern­ment. Likewise, it becomes more dif­fi­cult to gov­ern and to be governed.