If there's one thing you can count on from our right-wing media out there, it's that they've got their talking points and they're all going to repeat them over and over ad nauseum. Here's one of the latest, which I'm sure we'll be hearing for weeks and months to come -- President Obama let Detroit go bankrupt. Never mind that he was talking about the auto industry and not the city itself.
Our friends over at Media Matters flagged this segment from last Friday: Fox Conflates The City Of Detroit With Automakers To Attack President Obama:
Reacting to Detroit's recently announced bankruptcy, Fox News' Gregg Jarrett and Chris Stirewalt repeatedly conflated Detroit automakers with the City of Detroit in order to attack President Obama for breaking a campaign promise to not "let Detroit go bankrupt." However, the President's statement was clearly in reference to the Detroit automakers that received government assistance, not the city itself.
According to The New York Times, "Detroit, the cradle of America's automobile industry and once the nation's fourth-most-populous city, filed for bankruptcy on Thursday, the largest American city ever to take such a course." After it was reported that the White House did not plan to offer financial assistance to the City of Detroit, Jarrett and Stirewalt questioned whether President Obama had gone back on a statement he made in October 2012 when he said, "We refused to let Detroit go bankrupt." Jarrett asserted, "The president did vow, 'I will not let Detroit go bankrupt.' But you know, he did, didn't he?"
But, as CBS News reported at the time, Obama's statement was in reference to an op-ed written by Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in which Romney said, "Let Detroit go bankrupt." According to CBS, the president was responding to that op-ed by pointing to the success of his administration's bailout of the auto-industry."
Never one to let an opportunity to attack President Obama go by without taking advantage of it, Sean Hannity took up the mantle this Wednesday evening and played the same game: Obama 'Refused to Let Detroit Go Bankrupt' ... So What Happened?:
Sean Hannity and former Obama advisor Austan Goolsbee got into a shouting match over Detroit. Before the 2012 election, President Obama stated that his administration “refused to let Detroit go bankrupt.”
But this past week, the city of Detroit did file for bankruptcy. Goolsbee assessed that the president was referring to the auto industry. “He said Detroit!” Hannity fired back. “Detroit’s now bankrupt! Why?”
Goolsbee repeated that the president was using Mitt Romney’s “let Detroit go bankrupt” words and in fact, talking about the auto companies.
Hannity wished Goolsbee “good luck” and added, “I think we’re headed to Greece, Spain, Portugal – it’s all coming to America. We’re going to be Detroit if we keep going down this road.”
The other extremely obnoxious thing about this segment that the Fox blog failed to mention is that Hannity decided to play another little game when it came to President Obama's speech this week. Fox cut away after maybe eight minutes and didn't cover it, and Hannity used it as an excuse to have it playing in the background (video only) and to just "cut into" the speech (which aired live hours earlier) for a few seconds here and there to give him an opportunity to mock it sporadically throughout his show.
It's one of the most disrespectful and childish things I've seen on television in a while now. Pathetic even for a Grade-A asshole like Hannity. Fox didn't want their viewers to watch the speech. Hannity's little game here isn't going to change that. This sort of nonsense does nothing but show that Hannity really did not want to and is not capable of arguing against the speech President Obama gave on its merits, so he decided to belittle it as boring and make sure no one in his audience would ever want to watch it instead.
If Hannity thinks economic recovery, GOP obstruction, the plight of the working class and what's left of the middle class and our education system is too boring to talk about, maybe he ought to get out of the business of talking about politics on television for a living. Sadly, given the amount of wingnut welfare Uncle Rupert is paying him to throw flames on the political process week after week instead, we won't be getting rid of him any time soon.
