Fox Relentlessly Hyped Cantor's Lie

Daily Kos

As you probably know by now, yesterday Eric Cantor, the second-ranking House Republican, falsely claimed to the national press corps that his campaign office had been targeted by a gunman in the wake of Sunday's health care reform vote.

Here's a bit more detail on what happened: an office in the same building where Cantor has an office (it's unmarked and not in his district) was hit by a bullet that had been randomly fired skyward. The bullet could easily have been fired a half-mile away*, but even setting that aside, the fact that Cantor had an office in the building was not widely known (it's not listed on his website). Anyone actually targeting Cantor would have picked a different location.

Cantor's tale was an an obvious attempt to give the national media a "Fair & Balanced" narrative that both sides are doing it when it comes to threats of political violence. But that narrative is not true. So Cantor simply lied. Made it up. Saw himself some Tuzla sniper fire. Carved a virtual backwards B into his cheek.

He abandoned any pretense to honesty and accuracy, and demonstrated his utter contempt for the national media by crying wolf straight to their face. And Fox ate it up and spit it right back out at their audience, completely, wholeheartedly, and absolutely uncritically.

Just as Eric Cantor is a liar, this incident shows (yet again) that the crew at Fox News are not journalists.

* Richmond police announced this morning that the bullet was an "act of random gunfire," leading critics to say Cantor had jumped the gun in sharing the story yesterday.
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Anyone who believes anything these A-holes say is...

What incredible chutzpah on the part of Cantor. Did he really not think that he might be be found out or does he simply live in a fantasy world. Fox's machinations are par for the course.


P.S. Did you also hear about the tea party leader who has been railing against the govt but who turns out to be living off govt disability money? You just cant make this stuff up.

Yes, I did hear about this "leader" of the brain-dead idiots.

Hypocrisy, lies, vicious hatred, misdirection, distortion, inferiority, racism, love of violence, authoritarianism, phony patriotic fervor, religious idiocy and constant drooling are what drives them. So nothing ever surprises me.

Joshua Holland

Oh, the hypocrisy, it burns …

The Washington Post today has a profile of Mike Vanderboegh, the 57-year-old former militiaman from Alabama who last week posted a call for people to throw bricks through the windows at Democratic offices around the country to protest their votes for Health Care Reform…

A radical libertarian, champion of getting big government off the people’s backs, his day job? Vanderboegh lives on government disability checks down outside of Birmingham, Alabama.

A few weeks ago, NPR did a fawning profile of Keli Carender, aka “Liberty Belle,” one of the founders of the tea party movement. Steve M. over at No More Mister Nice Blog digged into “Liberty Belle’s” background, and came up with some interesting tidbits:

Carender is an actress and improv comic — here she is in the cast of her sixth show for Seattle’s Wing-It Productions. And, gosh, what’s this? Why, it’s a list of arts grants issued by Washington State in 2009 — including $3,750 to Wing-It Productions! In order to fund that, Washington State had to take from some people in order to give to the other people!

But Carender’s never asked about that — or about the National Science Foundation-funded research project she worked on in 2000.

So, two anecdotes, which doesn’t amount to data. For that, try Bloomberg’s new poll (HT: TPM):

More than 90 percent of Tea Party backers interviewed in a new Bloomberg National Poll say the U.S. is verging more toward socialism than capitalism, the federal government is trying to control too many aspects of private life and more decisions should be made at the state level.

At the same time, 70 percent of those who sympathize with the Tea Party, which organized protests this week against President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul, want a federal government that fosters job creation.

They also look to the government to rein in Wall Street, with almost half saying the government should do something about executive bonuses. Supporters are also conflicted over whether private-enterprise elements should be introduced into government programs like Social Security and Medicare.

As an aside, watch for that euphemism for privatization, “private-enterprise entitlements” — it’s a new one to me.

Anyway, this all goes to illustrate a point I’ve made many times before: A central rule of the American political economy is that people are attracted to the idea of “limited government” in the abstract — and certainly don’t want the government intruding in their homes — but they really, really like living in a society with good, fully-funded services. They like what government does in the specific, even if they have an inherent suspicion of the idea of “big government” (the phrase itself was coined to counter liberal attacks on “big business”). That’s the reason the Right can’t argue honestly for its preferred policies. They can win votes by shouting about “government tyranny,” but when they try to mess with a program like Social Security, or cut the budgets that put cops on the beat, firemen into shiny red trucks or offer health-care to children or the elderly, they get clobbered.

They understand this very well, which helps explain their completely unhinged freak-out over a decidedly centrist approach to HCR.

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And this, also by Joshua Holland.

To those who demonize the poor by equating “helping the poor” with “spreading the wealth” and “socialism”, I suggest you take the Socialist-Free Purity Pledge:

“I pledge to eliminate all government intervention in my life. I will abstain from the use of and participation in any socialist goods and services including but not limited to the following:

“Social Security – Medicare/Medicaid – State Children’s Health Insurance Programs (SCHIP) – Police, Fire, and Emergency Services – US Postal Service — Roads and Highways — Air Travel (regulated by the socialist FAA) — The US Railway System — Public Subways and Metro Systems –Public Bus and Light Rail Systems — Rest Areas on Highways — Sidewalks –All Government-Funded Local/State Projects — Public Water and Sewer Services (goodbye socialist toilet, shower, dishwasher, kitchen sink, outdoor hose!) — Public and State Universities and Colleges — Public Primary and Secondary Schools — Public Museums — Libraries –Public Parks and Beaches — State and National Parks — Public Zoos — Unemployment Insurance — Municipal Garbage and Recycling Services –Treatment at Any Hospital or Clinic That Ever Received Funding From Local, State or Federal Government (pretty much all of them) — Medical Services and Medications That Were Created or Derived From Any Government Grant or Research Funding (again, pretty much all of them) — Socialist Byproducts of Government Investment Such as Duct Tape and Velcro (Nazi-NASA Inventions) — Use of the Internets, email, and networked computers, as the DoD’s ARPANET was the basis for subsequent computer networking — Foodstuffs, Meats, Produce and Crops That Were Grown With, Fed With, Raised With or That Contain Inputs From Crops Grown With Government Subsidies — Clothing Made from Crops (e.g. cotton) That Were Grown With or That Contain Inputs From Government Subsidies — If a veteran of the government-run socialist US military, I will forgo my VA benefits and insist on paying for my own medical care.”

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Hey conservatives, republican free-marketers and capitalist ideologues...

DO NOT EVER TAKE ANYTHING FROM GOVERNMENT AGAIN. NONE OF THE THINGS ABOVE OR ANYTHING ELSE. AND DON'T CALL THE POLICE OR FIRE DEPT WHEN YOU HAVE A PROBLEM. AND STAY OFF THE ROADS!!

Cantor digs deeper - Update

Greg Sargent gets Eric Cantor's defense (or at least, Cantor's attempt at a defense):
A spokesperson for Eric Cantor is pushing back on criticism that he shouldn’t have referenced the bullet shot through a campaign office window at a presser yesterday about threats on his life, offering a detailed chronology of what happened.

Richmond police announced this morning that the bullet was an "act of random gunfire," leading critics to say Cantor had jumped the gun in sharing the story yesterday.

But Cantor spokesperson Brad Dayspring, in an interview with me this afternoon, offered a chronology of events. Short version: When Cantor gave his statement, all he knew was that a bullet had been fired into his window, there was an ongoing investigation into the incident, and that he had received other threats on his life.

Basically, Cantor's office is defending itself by saying that they had no idea what the facts were. The problem is, in his statement to the national press corp, Cantor was emphatic in his certainty that he had been the target of a shooting incident:

Just recently, I have been directly threatened. A bullet was shot through the window of my campaign office in Richmond this week and I’ve received threatening emails.

Obviously, the claim that a gunman (presumably pro-reform) has targeted your campaign office is incendiary. It's the type of claim that you need to be sure about before you make it. If you don't know the facts, it's incredibly irresponsible to make such a claim. And when you're making it in the context of a political attack on your opponents, it represents dishonesty in the extreme.

On those grounds alone, Cantor's statement was an extraordinary breech of the public trust. But the facts of the matter reveal that what he did was even worse.

First, Cantor was fully aware that the gunshot may have been random. Although he did not say this to the national media, he told a local newspaper that he wasn't sure if the gunfire was random or not. (CNN reported this, to its credit.) So Cantor knew that his statement might have been untrue -- and yet he made it anyway.

Moreover, Cantor was also fully aware that the bullet didn't actually hit his campaign office. It hit an office in the same building as one of his campaign offices.

Finally, there's virtually no way somebody would ever have targeted that particular office if they were going after Cantor. For starters, neither his campaign site nor his official site list the building as his campaign office. The building itself does not have any markings to suggest that it housed his campaign office. And if all that weren't enough, the office isn't even located in his congressional district.

When Eric Cantor made his statement, he was fully aware of each of these facts -- but he proceeded forth, because he thought it made good political sense, truth be damned. He's receiving heavy criticism for that decision today -- as well he should.