A Telepalmer President?: Sarah Palin

BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT
by Jeffrey Joseph

FOX continues to deny, despite all available evidence, that it did anything to promote the Tea Party movement. Still, FOX's latest pundit, Sarah Palin, delivered the main speech on Saturday night (an appearance for which she was paid $100,000) one that revealed Palin as not only a liar and misinformer but also reinforced the hypocrisy in her criticism of President Obama.

Palin, in a speech delivered from prepared remarks, complained about the president's handling of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, occasionally known as the underwear bomber, claiming that he "lawyered up" and would not provide further information. Reports from FBI Director Robert Mueller and Director of Intelligence Dennis Blair suggested quite the contrary. According to them, Abdulmutallab has and continues to provide valuable intelligence, even after the US granted him the same constitutional rights Palin worried would protect him too well.

Another invalid concern of Palin's had to do with what she perceived as President Obama's inability or unwillingness to use the term "war." Hardly an original accusation, Palin's sentiments echoed those of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Neither apparently did the research to recognize President's use of the terms more than half a dozen times throughout his State of the Union speech, an especially troubling lack of attention paid by someone FOX bothered to bring in to analyze the speech before and after its delivery.

However, she also took a familiar swipe at President Obama, one that even the Palin cheerleaders at FOX & Friends' Brian Kilmeade found disrespectful in referring to the president as a "guy with charisma and a teleprompter." The "teleprompter" criticism, hardly a new one and proven totally unsubstantiated when President Obama took on the GOP en masse, struck an acutely hollow note when close inspection of the Q and A session Palin had at the convention revealed she required crib notes to survive the softball interview. Reviews of the earlier speech showed exactly what Palin had written down, namely generalizations such as "Energy," "Tax," and "Lift American Spirits." Making the situation that much worse for her, researchers have successfully isolated images of Palin needing to look down at those terms to find her footing during the simplest of questions. The situation so undercuts Palin's tired criticism of the president that her fellow FOX employee Steve Doocy made a mocking allusion to it on air.

FOX's investment in the would-be telepalmer president shows just how little commitment they have toward responsible, intelligent journalism. Their newest pundit and FOX's most prominent bridge to the Tea Party movement turned one of the network's favorite memes into that much more of a joke than it had already become, endangering all the other misinformation FOX likes to perpetuate since Palin's echoing of them further diminishes their credibility. Viewers deserve better than to endure an intentional misinformer and hypocrite -- and should choose to Turn Off FOX.

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Originally posted at Turn Off FOX.

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