Howie Kurtz definitely is at home at Fox News where he really doesn't have to pretend he's a media critic at all. He can just go with the stream of right-wing consciousness and in the process, spew a few more falsehoods into the already-toxic stream of rubbish flowing out of the place.
This segment of Howie and Billo is brought to you by the Conservative Opiners & Whiners Affiliates Really Destroying Our Politics (COWARDOP). We begin with a clip of Jonathan Karl, ABC White House Correspondent and Collegiate Network graduate, mustering all of the fauxtrage he can to challenge Josh Earnest over ISIS.
He might work for ABCNews, but his heart is over at Fox, so we like to think of Karl as ABC's right wing mole. That was followed up by Ed Henry concern trolling about whether Obama was 'detached' because of the critics coming after him. Oh, Ed. You just don't do trolling well when you pretend. We all know you're a troll. Come out and admit it.
Howie wants us to think there was a romance between Obama and the media. He further expects us to believe that the media is being 'very quick to push back on excuses."
Blah, blah blah. But what's remarkable is Kurtz' argument for the "bad marriage" of media and the President.
Travel back in time with me to a year ago today. Republicans had shut down the government, and everyone was in a tizzy over that. Also, Healthcare.gov rolled out.
For about a week, headlines were about the government shutdown. Many people were annoyed about Healthcare.gov, but the headlines were about how Republicans shut down the government.
By October 10th, while the government was still shut down, that changed. Here's Wolf Blitzer talking about how it would be good for Obama to delay enrollments in Obamacare to appease Republicans who have shut down the government because they wanted to end Obamacare.
On October 16th the shutdown came to an end. Republicans were universally reviled by people around the country, and the media was still talking about the shutdown.
That all changed on October 17th, when the headlines shifted to the Healthcare.gov site and stayed focused through the end of 2013.
Now here's what Howie says. He says the media "fell out of love" with Obama over the botched rollout, then went full-scale with the VA scandal. The beheadings were just the icing on the cake.
He said that with a straight face without once acknowledging that these "scandals" are inventions of the right wing media floggers. They probably have a schedule in front of them of which scandal they plan to flog when.
There's only one scandal they consistently ignore. The fact that Republicans shut down the government in order to deny ordinary Americans access to health care. They never talk about that. Never.
Howie Kurtz is blowing more smoke up Roger Ailes' ass. I hope the big wet kiss he gets for doing his part is worth it, but let's not pretend it's anything like media criticism.
