Log in
Control Panel
|
|
|
|
Notifications
Who is online?
In total there are 4 users online :: 1 Registered, 0 Hidden and 3 Guests :: 1 Bot
The Last Outlaw
Most users ever online was 156 on Wed Jul 03, 2019 11:22 am
The Last Outlaw
Most users ever online was 156 on Wed Jul 03, 2019 11:22 am
Statistics
We have 32 registered users
The newest registered user is JeffVAU
Our users have posted a total of 3980 messages in 1663 subjects
The newest registered user is JeffVAU
Our users have posted a total of 3980 messages in 1663 subjects
Latest topics
CBOX
The GOP’s Questions To Mueller Seemed Bizarre — Unless You Watch FOX News
Page 1 of 1 • Share

The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not necessarily represent the views of Bethea's Byte
From Nicole Hemmer to The Washington Post

When Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) had his turn to quiz former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III during a hearing Wednesday morning, he came armed with what he seemed to think was a smoking gun: that neither Glenn Simpson nor Fusion GPS were mentioned in the Mueller report.
Most Americans no doubt shared Mueller’s apparent confusion about the line of questioning: He said he was not familiar with Fusion GPS, a private strategic intelligence firm, and that Simpson, the organization’s founder, was outside the scope of his investigation. Yet as the hearings wore on, Republican lawmakers returned again and again to Simpson and Fusion GPS, treating them like household names. And for conservatives on a steady diet of right-wing media, they are: the linchpins of a conspiratorial witch hunt to impeach President Trump.
The GOP’s laserlike focus on Simpson, Fusion GPS, former FBI agent Peter Strzok and other bits of right-wing witch-hunt lore probably played well in conservative media (and, as a consequence, in the Oval Office). But these topics were probably inscrutable to any American who is not dialed into FOX News and right-wing talk radio or conservative-leaning Facebook feeds. That has real consequences for a party that, in learning to speak to its siloed-off base, has forgotten how to reach a wider audience.
Chabot was far from the only Republican speaking to the Fox News crowd. In his opening statement in the House Intelligence Committee’s afternoon hearing, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) first dismissed election interference as the “Russia collusion conspiracy theory,” then spun out a conspiracy of his own, a rush of names including Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and — of course — Fusion GPS’s Simpson, a topic Nunes returned to again. Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) interrogated Mueller on the number of times his report referenced The New York Times (75) and The Washington Post (60) vs. FOX News (25), as though the answers provided mathematical evidence of just how biased the special counsel’s team was. When Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) started speaking, he focused on the government “spying” on the Trump campaign, he name-checked “Halper, Downer, Misfud, Thomas” and Azra Turk, barely pausing to suggest who they were, much less what they might have done or how their circumstances exonerated Trump.
Republicans did not always speak in an impenetrable dialect. Well into the 2000s, Republican politicians had found ways to dog-whistle to the base while still addressing a broad national audience. But as conservative talk radio proliferated and the importance of FOX News as an influence on intra-GOP politics crystallized, Republican candidates increasingly turned their attention, and their rhetoric, toward that narrower audience. For good reason: Whenever Republican officials stopped moving in lockstep with conservative media and the base that consumed it, they found themselves enveloped in scandal, as when Republican National Committee head Michael Steele was forced to apologize for criticizing Rush Limbaugh in 2009; or out of a job, as conservative stalwarts such as Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) found out when they lost primary elections in 2012 and 2014 to candidates who sounded more like talk-radio hosts than mainstream politicians.
The hearings this week, though, were not the first time FOX News-speak has been a problem for the right since that dynamic took hold. In 2014, President Barack Obama sat down for a pre-Super Bowl interview on the main FOX broadcast network with Bill O’Reilly, who at the time hosted the most-watched program on Fox News (O’Reilly would be ousted three years later over multiple sexual-harassment lawsuits). It was a huge opportunity for the network: O’Reilly’s show drew, at its peak, about 3.3 million viewers; the Super Bowl that year drew 112.2 million. Even if just a fraction of those game-watchers tuned it, it would be a substantially bigger, and different, audience for O’Reilly.
But O’Reilly used the opportunity to air a number of conservative grievances that meant very little to nonconservatives: the number of days it took to fully assess a terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya; an already-debunked accusation that the Internal Revenue Service had persecuted conservative organizations; Obama’s statement that his election would play a role in “fundamentally transforming” America. Each of these were played as “gotcha” questions, but anyone watching who wasn’t already familiar with the stories must have been wondering what, exactly, had been “got.”
Maybe Republicans on Wednesday, and O’Reilly back then, were trying to expose non-Fox News watchers to conservative arguments. But in neither case did they explain the underlying conspiracy theories to which they were gesturing. Rather, they dropped keywords such as “Benghazi” and “Glenn Simpson” that left conservatives salivating and the rest of the country confused.
These in-group moments are great for the base, but they squander the right’s opportunity to shape a broader national debate. When it comes to major congressional hearings such as Mueller’s, that is a major political shortcoming. That’s because such proceedings have real power (or at least, they used to). In the 1960s and 1970s, televised hearings helped remake the country in powerful ways, from ending a war to curbing government abuses.
The Fulbright hearings in 1966, for instance, empowered the antiwar movement when it brought to light serious questions about the origins of the Vietnam War. Though not the first congressional hearing on Vietnam, it was the first one to be televised — and it had a profound effect in eroding public support for the war. The hearings were able to do that because the senators made their case to the public, not because they spun off half-understood references to conspiracies about the Lyndon Johnson administration.
The same was true of the Church committee hearings, televised in 1975. The hearings were deliberative inquiries into the secret and often illegal action of the intelligence community during the 1950s and 1960s, including assassination attempts and domestic spying. They involved careful inquiry into wrongdoing, which, when laid out for the public, helped build support for a number of policies, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.
There is little chance that Republicans grilling Mueller on Wednesday will inspire the same sort of change in policy or public opinion, because there is little chance that their questions made any sense to most of the people watching. That’s because they were not there to investigate but to instigate, to rile up a base that had made up its mind about Mueller around the same time Trump did.
Republicans traded their big-tent strategy for a base-only one a long time ago. Their conduct at the hearings was just another sign that they have given up on reaching a broader public and will instead double down on minoritarian politics. Questions that wander off into the weeds of right-wing fever dreams are of a piece with efforts to purge voting rolls, gerrymander districts, strip power from Democratic officials and change the census. The strategy may be inscrutable to the rest of us — but it’s still helping the right retain its hold on power.
From Nicole Hemmer to The Washington Post
When Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) had his turn to quiz former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III during a hearing Wednesday morning, he came armed with what he seemed to think was a smoking gun: that neither Glenn Simpson nor Fusion GPS were mentioned in the Mueller report.
Most Americans no doubt shared Mueller’s apparent confusion about the line of questioning: He said he was not familiar with Fusion GPS, a private strategic intelligence firm, and that Simpson, the organization’s founder, was outside the scope of his investigation. Yet as the hearings wore on, Republican lawmakers returned again and again to Simpson and Fusion GPS, treating them like household names. And for conservatives on a steady diet of right-wing media, they are: the linchpins of a conspiratorial witch hunt to impeach President Trump.
The GOP’s laserlike focus on Simpson, Fusion GPS, former FBI agent Peter Strzok and other bits of right-wing witch-hunt lore probably played well in conservative media (and, as a consequence, in the Oval Office). But these topics were probably inscrutable to any American who is not dialed into FOX News and right-wing talk radio or conservative-leaning Facebook feeds. That has real consequences for a party that, in learning to speak to its siloed-off base, has forgotten how to reach a wider audience.
Chabot was far from the only Republican speaking to the Fox News crowd. In his opening statement in the House Intelligence Committee’s afternoon hearing, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) first dismissed election interference as the “Russia collusion conspiracy theory,” then spun out a conspiracy of his own, a rush of names including Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and — of course — Fusion GPS’s Simpson, a topic Nunes returned to again. Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) interrogated Mueller on the number of times his report referenced The New York Times (75) and The Washington Post (60) vs. FOX News (25), as though the answers provided mathematical evidence of just how biased the special counsel’s team was. When Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) started speaking, he focused on the government “spying” on the Trump campaign, he name-checked “Halper, Downer, Misfud, Thomas” and Azra Turk, barely pausing to suggest who they were, much less what they might have done or how their circumstances exonerated Trump.
Republicans did not always speak in an impenetrable dialect. Well into the 2000s, Republican politicians had found ways to dog-whistle to the base while still addressing a broad national audience. But as conservative talk radio proliferated and the importance of FOX News as an influence on intra-GOP politics crystallized, Republican candidates increasingly turned their attention, and their rhetoric, toward that narrower audience. For good reason: Whenever Republican officials stopped moving in lockstep with conservative media and the base that consumed it, they found themselves enveloped in scandal, as when Republican National Committee head Michael Steele was forced to apologize for criticizing Rush Limbaugh in 2009; or out of a job, as conservative stalwarts such as Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) found out when they lost primary elections in 2012 and 2014 to candidates who sounded more like talk-radio hosts than mainstream politicians.
The hearings this week, though, were not the first time FOX News-speak has been a problem for the right since that dynamic took hold. In 2014, President Barack Obama sat down for a pre-Super Bowl interview on the main FOX broadcast network with Bill O’Reilly, who at the time hosted the most-watched program on Fox News (O’Reilly would be ousted three years later over multiple sexual-harassment lawsuits). It was a huge opportunity for the network: O’Reilly’s show drew, at its peak, about 3.3 million viewers; the Super Bowl that year drew 112.2 million. Even if just a fraction of those game-watchers tuned it, it would be a substantially bigger, and different, audience for O’Reilly.
But O’Reilly used the opportunity to air a number of conservative grievances that meant very little to nonconservatives: the number of days it took to fully assess a terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya; an already-debunked accusation that the Internal Revenue Service had persecuted conservative organizations; Obama’s statement that his election would play a role in “fundamentally transforming” America. Each of these were played as “gotcha” questions, but anyone watching who wasn’t already familiar with the stories must have been wondering what, exactly, had been “got.”
Maybe Republicans on Wednesday, and O’Reilly back then, were trying to expose non-Fox News watchers to conservative arguments. But in neither case did they explain the underlying conspiracy theories to which they were gesturing. Rather, they dropped keywords such as “Benghazi” and “Glenn Simpson” that left conservatives salivating and the rest of the country confused.
These in-group moments are great for the base, but they squander the right’s opportunity to shape a broader national debate. When it comes to major congressional hearings such as Mueller’s, that is a major political shortcoming. That’s because such proceedings have real power (or at least, they used to). In the 1960s and 1970s, televised hearings helped remake the country in powerful ways, from ending a war to curbing government abuses.
The Fulbright hearings in 1966, for instance, empowered the antiwar movement when it brought to light serious questions about the origins of the Vietnam War. Though not the first congressional hearing on Vietnam, it was the first one to be televised — and it had a profound effect in eroding public support for the war. The hearings were able to do that because the senators made their case to the public, not because they spun off half-understood references to conspiracies about the Lyndon Johnson administration.
The same was true of the Church committee hearings, televised in 1975. The hearings were deliberative inquiries into the secret and often illegal action of the intelligence community during the 1950s and 1960s, including assassination attempts and domestic spying. They involved careful inquiry into wrongdoing, which, when laid out for the public, helped build support for a number of policies, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.
There is little chance that Republicans grilling Mueller on Wednesday will inspire the same sort of change in policy or public opinion, because there is little chance that their questions made any sense to most of the people watching. That’s because they were not there to investigate but to instigate, to rile up a base that had made up its mind about Mueller around the same time Trump did.
Republicans traded their big-tent strategy for a base-only one a long time ago. Their conduct at the hearings was just another sign that they have given up on reaching a broader public and will instead double down on minoritarian politics. Questions that wander off into the weeds of right-wing fever dreams are of a piece with efforts to purge voting rolls, gerrymander districts, strip power from Democratic officials and change the census. The strategy may be inscrutable to the rest of us — but it’s still helping the right retain its hold on power.
Similar topics
» Watch The Last of the Unjust Documentary Online Free and Full Movie HD, DVDRip or Blu-ray 720p December 2013
» Watch Khumba 3D Online Free and Full Movie HD, DVDRip or Blu-ray 720p December 2013
» Watch Commitment Online Free and Full Movie HD, DVDRip or Blu-ray 720p December 2013
» Watch Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas Online Free and Full Movie HD, DVDRip or Blu-ray 720p December 2013
» Watch Hours Online Free and Full Movie HD, DVDRip or Blu-ray 720p December 2013
» Watch Khumba 3D Online Free and Full Movie HD, DVDRip or Blu-ray 720p December 2013
» Watch Commitment Online Free and Full Movie HD, DVDRip or Blu-ray 720p December 2013
» Watch Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas Online Free and Full Movie HD, DVDRip or Blu-ray 720p December 2013
» Watch Hours Online Free and Full Movie HD, DVDRip or Blu-ray 720p December 2013
Create an account or log in to leave a reply
You need to be a member in order to leave a reply.
Page 1 of 1
Page 1 of 1
Permissions in this forum:
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
» A Tale of Two Farewells
» A Tale of Two Farewells
» Trump Plans Farewell ‘Ceremony’ On Morning Of Biden’s Inauguration, McConnell Gives GOP Senators Permission To Find Donald Trump Guilty
» Last thing you ate/drank
» Pence. Kushner. McEnany. Ingraham. Even Giuliani… Here Are All People Trump Now Reportedly Feels Have Betrayed Him
» What are your plans for the day
» A House Majority Votes to Impeach Trump
» Glenn Beck Compares Twitter Bans to the Holocaust: ‘This Is the Digital Ghetto’
» Scathing Lincoln Project Ad Blasts Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley for Capitol Riot: 'This Is Your Coup'
» GOP Ignored Their Own Warnings About Trump (VIDEO)
» ‘Our President Wants Us Here’: The Mob That Stormed The Capitol
» Chaos ERUPTS As The White House Staff FOOLS Trump Over The Mob 'He Was Delighted'
» This Republican Senator Is Apparently Totally Unfamiliar With Donald Trump
» House Democrats Introduce Article of Impeachment Against Trump
» A Response From a Former California Governor
» The U.S. Capitol Attack Has Left An Indelible Mark On Our National Security
» The Day America Realized How Dangerous Donald Trump Is
» Congress Confirms Biden's Win After Pro-Trump Mob's Assault on Capitol
» Calls for Trump to Resign or be Removed Grow After Capitol Hill Chaos
» Lindsay Graham Makes Exasperated Plea To Colleagues To End It and Certify the Vote
» Eric Trump Warns of Primary Challenges For Republicans Who Don't Object to Election Results
» Jacob Blake Shooting: No Charges Against Officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin
» Kinzinger: Republicans Can't With 'Clean Conscience' Object After Hearing Trump Tape
» All 10 Living Former Defense Secretaries Declare Election is Over in Forceful Public Letter
» Head-On Crash Kills 7 Kids, 2 Adults in California
» In Extraordinary Hour-Long Call, Trump Pressures Georgia Secretary of State to Recalculate the Vote in His Favor
» One Dead, Several Injured in Texas Church Shooting
» Cruz, Cadre of Other GOP Senators Vow Not to Certify Biden Win Without Probe of Baseless Voter Fraud Claims
» Second Stimulus Check
» ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ Reviews: What the Critics Are Saying
» Nashville Bomber Told His Neighbor Before Attack: The World is 'Never Going to Forget Me'
» Leading New Texas Rebellion, Louie Gohmert Sues Mike Pence Because VP Lacks Authority to Overturn Joe Biden’s Election Win
» Treasury, White House Face Enormous Pressure To Quickly Disburse Stimulus Aid After Trump’s Delay
» CNN's Jake Tapper And The White House's Kayleigh McEnany Spar After He Says She 'Lies The Way Most People Breathe'
» Good News About the Coronavirus Vaccine Is Becoming Contagious
» Nashville Explosion Appears Intentional, RV Played Warning Message of Bomb
» Trump Calls COVID Relief Bill Unsuitable and Demands Congress Add Bigger Stimulus Payments
» Voice of Jeopardy! Johnny Gilbert Remembers Alex Trebek: 'Part of Me Left When Alex Left'
» A Flashback Changes This Edition of Free Byte
» December Is Shaping Up To Be The COVID Pandemic's Deadliest Month Yet In The U.S.
» Four Dead As Winter Storm Hits Northeast With 3 Feet Of Snow
» George W. Bush Sends Christmas Card With Pointed Message As Trump Contests Election
» Stimulus Checks Part of Looming COVID-19 Relief Deal as Congress Finalizes Negotiations
» Biden Working With Team to Decide When to Get Coronavirus Vaccine
» UK could override parts of Brexit deal
» CNN's Jake Tapper Thanks Trump For 'Exposing' Republicans Who Supported Texas' 'Un-Democratic, Un-American, Mendacious Joke of a Lawsuit'
» Does Donald Trump Really Believe He Lost The Election?
» The Trump Team Throws in the Towel on Proving Voter Fraud
» What was the last movie you saw?
» MLB Umpire Brian O’Nora Reportedly Arrested in Sex Sting Operation
» 17 Republican Attorneys General Back Trump in Far-Fetched Election Lawsuit
» 'If I lost, I'd be a very gracious loser'
» Barr Says He Hasn’t Seen Fraud That Could Affect the Election Outcome
» Kim Jong-Un Is Reportedly Displaying 'Excessive Anger' Over the Economic Impact of the Coronavirus Pandemic, Ordering the Execution of Two People
» AstraZeneca Faces Difficult Questions About Its Vaccine After Admitting Mistake
» Trump Has Set a Hidden Trap For Biden. It Could Do Great Damage.
» A Trump 2024 Run Is a Terrible Idea—For Him And For The GOP
» Armenians Return to Nagorno-Karabakh After Cease-Fire
» Georgia and Michigan Deliver Blows to Trump’s Efforts to Undo the Election
» US Announces Further Drawdown of Troops in Afghanistan and Iraq Before Biden Takes Office
» Why Moderna's COVID Vaccine Has a 'Huge Advantage' Over Pfizer's
» U.S. Passes 11 Million Coronavirus Cases as Washington State Orders New Restrictions
» Trump Loses String of Election Results Lawsuits
» Alex Trebek, Quintessential Quizmaster as ‘Jeopardy!’ Host For Three Decades, Dies at 80
» MTV and Nick Cannon Inch Closer to ‘Wild ‘N Out’ Revival
» Trump May Accept Results But Never Concede, Aides Say
» Progressives’ Wish List for Biden Starts With Warren and Sanders
» Fauci Optimistic About COVID-19 Vaccine, Says High-Risk Could Get it in December
» Joe Biden Is Right: It Is Time To Move On
» World Leaders Welcome Biden Win, Seek Reset in U.S. Ties
» George Stephanopoulos Says He Has Only Slept for 14 Hours Since Election Day
» Biden Wins White House, Vowing New Direction For Divided US
» Polls Show Biden gaining ground in Texas, Georgia
» America's New Power Couple: Joe and Mitch
» Trump Hits Election Integrity With Unsupported Complaints
» Judge Rejects Moving Trial of Ex-Officers in Floyd’s Death
» Bernie Sanders’s Election-Night Predictions Were Eerily Correct: ‘He Called It WORD For WORD’
» NO WINNER YET. Key Battleground States Have Votes Yet To Be Counted.
» Jeannie Mai Hospitalized, Forced to Leave 'Dancing With the Stars'
» John Oliver Reminds Voters of All Trump's 'Massive F--- Ups' In Handling The Coronavirus
» Seven Big Things Biden Got Right
» How Are Americans Catching the Virus? Increasingly, ‘They Have No Idea’
» What happens to Fox News if Trump loses? Rupert Murdoch is prepared.
» Trump Drags Down GOP Senators, Giving Democrats More Paths to the Majority
» The Verdict Is In: Joe Biden Won The Final Presidential Debate
» Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton are engaged!
» Boyfriend Said N.C. Mom Died After Slipping in Bathtub — But 3 Months Later, He's Charged with Murder
» Lesley Stahl Gets Security Protection After Death Threat Over Trump ‘60 Minutes’ Interview
» Fauci Says The U.S.'s Record-High COVID-19 Cases Put It In a Precarious Position