Salon's Jim Newell sees Bill Ayers being interviewed by Megyn Kelly on Fox News and is puzzled:
It's not entirely clear why Bill Ayers would break his relative public silence on the set of "The Kelly File." Perhaps for a laugh?Well, not just for that. Ayers wasn't just interviewed by Kelly -- he participated in a debate with Dinesh D'Souza, which aired on Fox last night, and which you can watch at Mediaite or Fox Nation. D'Souza is a relentless self-promoter, of course, and debates are a key part of his self-hype: go to YouTube and there he is debating Susan Jacoby on whether Christianity is good for American politics, debating Daniel Dennett on whether God is a man-made invention ... and, yes, debating Ayers, at Dartmouth this past winter, on a variety of subjects.
I'm not sure what Ayers thought he was accomplishing with that Dartmouth debate, but the right clearly didn't think he was going to advance the cause of leftism: the debate was sponsored by the Young America's Foundation (slogan: "The Conservative Movement Starts Here") and presented by the right-wing campus paper D'Souza wrote for in the 1980s, The Dartmouth Review. The debate was hyped by TownHall's Katie Pavlich as a "must see"; she noted that "a preview of D'Souza's new movie, America, is played at the end."
Ahhh, yes -- D'Souza's new movie. It open tomorrow (July 4, naturally). Fox wants to plug it, so someone got in touch with D'Souza's old debating partner, and I guess he was only too happy to help out.
(There's a tradition of this kind of thing -- back in the 1980s, G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary did a series of debates that were so friendly one columnist compared them to "a traveling vaudeville act." They sure look happy in this publicity photo. And you could say the entire marriage of James Carville and Mary Matalin is an embodiment of this sort of toothless frenemy verbal combat.)
In the solo part of the Kelly interview, Ayers distanced himself from President Obama:
KELLY: ... President Obama, let me ask you this, how much ideology did the two of you share?Salon's Jim Newell thinks it could be a mistake for Fox to run interviews like this:
AYERS: Zero.
KELLY: Good friends, not good friends?
AYERS: I knew him as well as he knew 10,000 other people, and today I wish I knew him much better, and I wish he had listened to me....
KELLY: You want him to go further to the left.
AYERS: Oh, I want him to stop droning people. I want him to close Guantanamo, I want him to, you know, universal health care. Don't you think we deserve universal health care? Seriously. Medicare for all.
It's entertaining stuff when Fox News interviews real leftists, and hopefully they'll do more.... But doing so is a real risk to their business model. Because as soon as leftists start listing their many complaints about Barack Obama, it disrupts the narrative -- on which a lot of time and money has been staked -- that Obama represents the radical leftward pole of the American political spectrum.Well, no, it doesn't, because Fox viewers are clearly ignoring the difference between the narrative they've been sold and what Ayers actually says about his political distance from Obama. Here are a few comments from the Fox Nation thread on the Ayers-D'Souza debate:
Seems like everyone that likes obama isn't an American or proud to be one...It doesn't matter what actually said about Obama -- for Fox viewers, the Fox narrative trumps the facts.
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Why is Ayers still free? He destroyed property,Is a self admitted Comminunist and Hates America, where he can freely preach Hate and destruction, but wait He's Demfilth, many of whom hold similar beliefs including Osatan our President.
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Bill Ayers and Michelle Obama would make a good couple if they lived outside of the US.
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Oh... and ... take the fake POTUS in the WH with.
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I was listening to Ayers deformed views on America and saw an exact parallel to the way Obama behaves --- with a touch of Rev. Wright's hate of America. No wonder I get the feeling Obama hates America.
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Ayres is Obama's terrorist buddy. all of you infidel Obo voters should be proud
But the point, ultimately, is to show that Dinesh D'Souza is a True Patriot who's proud to be an American, as contrasted with a guy like Ayers, who eagerly says he's not proud to be an American, eagerly offering himself up as the subject of Fox's Two Minutes' Hate.
I'm sure it's going to sell a lot of tickets to D'Souza's movie.
4 comments:
Our leadership does not hate each other as much as you think they do.
Sure there is a lot of bullshit you see on camera that leads you to think the Republicans are batshit crazy and the Democrats are powerless wimps... then go to some select DC steakhouses and you see them all hanging out and laughing it up. With the Democrats furious that their base isn't cheering slashing social security or using the social security trust fund to pay off the debt, and right wing Republican congressmen pissed that their base won't let them pass imigration reform because we really need low wage workers to compete with China.
The difference between the sides, is largely one of what given role they play on TV and how long they stay in character. In person, they are all friends and on the same page.
@Geese-I wouldn't go quite that far. I'm sure there is some socializing, but both sides must cater to two bases: the Party base and the Fundraising base.
You may hear Dems say disturbing things about SS, but that's just to appease the Fundraising base, who want to get their grimy paws on all that money. It'll never happen, though.
And SteveM, I'm not sure the commenters at FoxNews correlate with the actual viewers. Those folks are still busy trying to set the time on their VCRs.
I still can't understand why any Democrats or liberals agree to go on FOX.
If they're not there to be shouted down by the host and a gaggle of honking conservative geese, it's to be held up and displayed to the rubes in the base as an example of total evil - as if one of Statan's minions could be summoned in a church, to get more donations.
Why isn't D'Souza serving time in prison yet?
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