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Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Jeffery Scott Shapiro Is A Deluded Whackaloon!

And yet again, FoxNews demonstrates a profound lack of journalistic integrity. Why am I not surprised?  Updates noted in the text


Seriously, Minnesota, what the fuck?

Do I miss George W. Bush?

Are you kidding me, Minnesota?

 

You’ve all seen the news reports, there’s a sign on I-35 outside some flyspeck conservative chancre sore of a town named Wyoming, Minnesota. It features the smirking fuck-you features of our erstwhile president, Chimpy McBush, and the caption, “Miss Me Yet?”

No, asshole, I don’t miss you. 

Frankly if it was up to me, I’d erase George W. Bush from history the same way Egyptian Pharaohs used to have their stonemasons chip the images of their predecessors off the sides of the temple walls.

The sign was put up by a small group of anonymous businessmen who seem to be suffering from teabag poisoning there in their little Minnesota Unibomber cabins.

Needless to say, it made the news.

Needless to say, it made FoxNews.

And in fact, FoxNews' Jeffrey Shapiro’s article waxes nostalgic for Bush in what may be one of the most bizarrely creepy cases of puppy love FoxNews has yet published.  The man clearly loves his Bush to a disturbing degree.   

As is usual for FoxNews (Fair and Balanced!) the article is more made up hyperbole than accuracy.  Take this little Fox factoid:

President Bush remains the only president in history to face a foreign attack on the continental mainland of the United States. His responsibility was unlike any other commander in chief in history.

Apparently neither Shapiro nor the FoxNews editors have ever heard of The War of 1812 and that dustup where the British took Maine away from the United States, and then marched into Washington and ate the President’s dinner at his own table before burning the White House to the ground while President Madison and the First Lady fled into the hills.  After the White House wiener roast, the Redcoats set about burning, looting and destroying the rest of the US capital.  

The British then moved on to Baltimore – you might have heard of that battle, the Battle of Baltimore - The Star Spangled Banner is based on it.  But I guess that neither Shapiro nor the great American Patriots at Fox are familiar with either Francis Scott Key or the defense of Fort McHenry.  But you know, fuck it, it’s such a small footnote in American history why confuse Fox’s fair and balanced reporting with facts. Right?


Update: The FoxNews article linked to above has been clumsily edited to read:

President Bush remains the only president in history since the 1812 burning of the White House to face a foreign attack

on the continental mainland of the United States. His responsibility was unlike any other commander in chief in history.

The editorial change is not noted anywhere in the article.  Fox simply changed history and pretended like it didn’t happen. 

Way to show that fair and balanced journalistic integrity, Shapiro. Really, way to go.


Other than that though, there was never any attack on the mainland US.

Well, other than the Mexican American War.

Or that whole Civil War thing.  Lincoln, that big sissy never shouldered the kind of responsibility George did. No siree.

I also really like Shapiro’s qualifier “continental mainland” (and really, what the hell does that mean? Is that like dark black? Or Neocon Wackaloon?) because if you include the attacks on the Alaskan and Hawaiian territories that marked the opening of WWII, or the Japanese and Nazi submarine attacks on American shipping along the Continental US’s coastline (including the dropping of saboteurs on the mainland), well that just sort of renders Shapiro’s whole argument null and void.  And, of course, FDR’s management of the country during that conflict pales in comparison to the burden born by George.

I can see why Shapiro deliberately couched his statement to exclude mention of the WWII attacks, because even Fox’s ignorant subscribers wouldn’t let you get away with making such an obviously false statement, unless you deliberately excluded the attacks on Pearl Harbor and Kiska.  And make no mistake, Shapiro knows what he’s doing, otherwise he wouldn’t have phrased his article the way he did, he deliberately limited the scope of his accusation in order to make his point.  In journalism this is no different than outright lying, it’s lying by omission, and the fact the Fox’s editors let him get away such a clumsy and obvious lie speaks directly to the network’s credibility and turns their tag line, “Fair and Balanced,” into a mocking dig at their own readers.  Shapiro couldn’t tell the truth, it would have voided the false point he was trying to make and, after all, the truth wouldn’t meet Rupert Murdock’s editorial standards for fair and balanced Obama bashing if actual facts were included in Fox’s articles. And beside, actual history might just confuse Teabaggers and Neocons - who just sort of make up history as they go along anyway.

 

FoxNews is what happens when you let pinheads like George W. Bush “reform” public education. Ditto times two for FoxNews subscribers.

 

Shapiro sort of waves his hands over Bush’s declaration of two wars and the resulting massive disaster and budget deficit, then he brushes that aside like a battered wife discussing what a wonderful husband she has while she holds a hand over her swollen eye and split lip,

But he saved America, not just from the terrorists, but also from the apologist self-doubt and self-loathing that President Obama appears to support.”

George W. Bush saved America. He saved America from the terrorists.

Really?

Then why are we still fighting them? Why then are conservative media outlets like FoxNews and their pundits like Beck and Limbaugh crying that the terrorists are winning? Why then are conservative media whores like Sarah Palin urging us to declare war on Iran in order to “get tough on terrorism?” 

Why then is Osama Bin Laden still out there, eight years later, still making videos and financing attacks on the US?

Calling Bush America’s savior is a lot like thanking ENRON for rolling black-outs. This idea is so ludicrous that it damned near defies comprehension. 

And I’ve never been able to figure out where people like Shapiro get the whole “apologist self doubt and self loathing” bit – unless they’re talking about how they always end up apologizing for George W. George.  Apparently if you hide out in the National Guard when the country needs you, you’re a patriot as long as you wear an American flag pin on your lapel and send other people’s kids off to fight and die in a foreign land. Shapiro’s logic is this, George the Monkey Boy loved America. Everything he did, he did out of love. He should be forgiven for everything, all those lives, because his love for America was so great and so pure.  And when his approval rating fell to the lowest in American history, well George just took that in stride because he loved us all too, despite how disappointed he was in us personally for letting him down.

Shapiro opines that this billboard marks a return to courage, the courage of the George W. Bush years.  He then mentions that the folks who love America enough to put up this sign, there on that road outside Wyoming, Minnesota, remain anonymous – you know, like true patriots who are too afraid to use their real names, or you know, go off to war and actually fight for this country, or… well, you get the idea.  I guess they love this country too, just like they love George.

As long as you love America, it’s not hypocrisy.

Shapiro ends with:

We do miss President Bush, and we will never forget what he did for America and the world; not now, not ever

I miss George W. Bush and his band of lunatics like I miss a case of tertiary stage syphilis and an outbreak of genital warts.

But Shapiro got the rest of it right, we will never forget what Bush did for America and the world.

Miss Me Yet?

No, Shapiro, I don’t miss George W. Bush.

Not now, not ever.

 


 

If Shapiro has a bigger than life-sized poster of George The Pinheaded, oiled and clad only in a loincloth, hanging on the wall of his bedroom - I don’t want to know about it.  You can keep that shit to yourself.

20 comments:

  1. Thank you, Jim: few things piss me off like the historical revisionism that "forgets" the fact we got our asses handed to us in the War Of 1812 (something else to thank France for, indirectly; first they gave us our Revolution, then they sort-of inadvertently kept us from losing it when Napoleon gave the Brits something else to worry about), along with the Mexican-American War or, as you point out, the fact that the American Civil War was technically a fight between one side that considered itself a foreign nation and a side that was responding to that with a resounding, "Fuck you, no." For that matter, you can basically add in the overspill from the Mexican Civil War--General Pershing spent a notable chunk of his career pursuing Pancho Villa's revolutionaries through the Southwest, experience that didn't hurt when America became involved in WWI--also notable in the context of Shapiro's asshole comment, since Pershing's Mexican campaign was retaliation for Villa's attempt to burn down Columbus, NM.

    These defeats and/or embarrassments are the kinds of things Americans should learn and remember for the sake of humility. It's not to disparage the U.S., as some pinheads would certainly claim. No, it's because remembering the times we were handed our asses might remind us that we're not perfect, that there are limits to our power, that there are other actors in the world who might be wilier than we are (Villa) or maybe even more powerful (the 19th Century British Empire). Instead, we have a miserable record of not merely celebrating our victories, but of acting like our humiliations didn't even happen. Hell, we're already well on our way to re-mis-rember-forgetting the history of the Vietnam War; it's only a matter of time before we have a generation of Americans that thinks we won it.

    Shapiro is an asshole.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Shapiro is an asshole

    That was actually the original title of this post.

    Then I changed it to

    Shapiro is a fucking moron but I thought that might be insulting to morons and I was afraid Sarah Palin would get upset and call for my resignation.

    So I went with the whole bitingly sarcastic, yet playful, "wackaloon."

    ReplyDelete
  3. Just to be clear, I will NOT send you a poster of GWB on a bikini.

    You're welcome.

    doing -- what? A real word? seriously? A real word?

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  4. And I am eternally grateful to you for that charity, Michelle.

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  5. History. It's like science. We ignore it.

    Oh, and about that sign. Not my fault. Blame the weird people that voted for Michelle Bachman. Even we have our whack-a-loons.

    And pity me, because every time I go down to Rochester where my mom is, I get to see it. I carry Dramamine for just that reason.

    butsmsh: a brain disease Jeffrey Shapiro et. al. have contracted that leads them to "think" the way they do.

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  6. We did, of course, get back at the British in the finest action of the War of 1812 -- The Battle of New Orleans. Complete and total victory for us. Yay! Only one pesky little detail. The peace treaty had already been signed and the war was over. Real pain to get your news by sailing ships...

    Dr. Phil

    abilybet -- gambling on one's ability instead of a gut feeling.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Phil,

    I'm pretty sure Andrew Jackson (my hometown's namesake), would have fought the battle even if he knew the war was over.

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  8. The war of 1812 was started by the US in an attempt to free Canada from British rule. They expected that Canadians would be happy to throw off the bonds of their oppressor and live in Republic.

    The US may well have succeeded except that Upper Canada (Ontario) had a large population of British Empire Loyalists who formerly lived what is now the US. Despite the treaties at the end of the American Revolution the Loyalists were stripped of their property and were forced to flee to Canada. Their descendants learned to hate Americans and fought vigorously when attacked.

    The moral is that you should be nice to your enemies after you defeat them, you may need them as allies later.

    sowles: What Wyoming, Minnesota is not

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  9. The funny part here is that apparently pretty much everybody knows more about history than Jeffy Shapiro or FoxNews.

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  10. In Dunkirk, NY there is a plaque that lays claim for the location being the start of the War of 1812. It seems a bunch of drunks (some of them soldiers) had some fun throwing a number of foreigners into Lake Erie. One of these was the nephew to the Polish Ambassador to the young United States. No one has ever challenged the validity of the plaque but then again no one in Dunkirk has sobered up long enough to check the facts. Oh and didn't a band of terrorists fail in two attempts to blow up the World Trade Center using rented vans during the Bubbah presidency?

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  11. The part of the country I'm from would (without getting into pointing blame fingers) remind you of among others The Blackhawk War.

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  12. Jim, after this 1.4 percent pa raise, my bank account is staarting to miss dubya.

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  13. Oh and didn't a band of terrorists fail in two attempts to blow up the World Trade Center using rented vans during the Bubbah presidency?

    Yeah, but Fox News guys don't consider WJC to have been either an American or a President, and if you try to explain it to them all they want to do is talk about oral sex, which gets pretty creepy pretty quickly, especially if you're talking to Glenn Beck because he'll probably start crying, so now you're trying to have a conversation about terroism during the Clinton Administration with a weird-looking man with tears streaming down his face who's obsessed with semen stains.

    It's just a bad scene, man. A really bad scene.

    -----

    viathea: relayed through a deity.

    ReplyDelete
  14. History, schmistory. You pinko tree-hugging terrorist-loving liberals are always moaning about "facts." That's just wrong, doncha know? It shows that you don't really love America because you stop and think instead of reacting viscerally as the Party commands.

    As true believers know, Bill Clinton is at fault for pretty much everything that's wrong with America, especially since he let bin Laden slip through his fingers, thereby setting the stage for the most horrific attacks on US soil years later, even if it wasn't an attack on "real" America (New York being second to Las Vegas in terms of sinnin' and evil).

    FYI -- That was my attempt at tongue-in-cheek humor, but you're all smarter than I am, so I'm sure you got it.

    I learned a lot about the War of 1812 today. Thanks.

    And wouldn't the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, be considered an attack on the U.S. mainland by a terrorist?

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  15. Bill, don't be silly. Timothy McVeigh was a domestic terrorist and an upright Christian. So we DON'T DISCUSS IT.

    Ahem.

    uncielbr = my new ulcer medication.

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  16. And while we're all living it up 1812 style, let me represent and give a shout out to Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry and the Battle of Lake Erie. You, sir, rock.

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  17. @Janiece -- Plus, McVeigh was white. I totally forgot.

    "vatio" -- where vampires sit to enjoy the moonlight and a nice glass of Type O.

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  18. McVeigh was raised a Christian, but in letters to his sister from prison referred to himself as an atheist - which of course gives Christians more ammunition when it comes to pointing out how ethics and morality only come from God via Christ.

    Someone pointed out to me recently that McVeigh is typical of atheism, no morality, without Jesus there was nothing to stop him from killing people. I said, well by that logic Jimmy Swaggart was a pretty good example of evangelical hypocrisy. To which he responded: "Swaggart isn't a real Christian." "Yeah?" Said I, "Atheists don't consider McVeigh a real Atheist either. So I guess we're even. If I have to take McVeigh, you have to take Swaggart."

    He was not happy with the arrangement.

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  19. In my opinion, McVeigh's fall from Christianity into domestic terrorism just illustrates the fragility of having your entire moral basis depend on unquestioning faith in a nebulous supreme being and His plan for the world.

    Once his foundation got shaky, the whole thing came crashing down. Unsound building practices.

    --Rens.

    ReplyDelete

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