FNC Never-Trumper Chris Wallace speeds channel's plummet into MSNBC gutter
And about daddy Mike...
"Watching @FoxNews weekend anchors is worse than watching low ratings Fake News @CNN or Lyin' Brian Williams...and the crew of degenerate Comcast (NBC/MSNBC) Trump haters..."
- Pres. Trump 7/7/2019 tweet.
Chris Wallace interviewed Trump White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney during Fox News Sunday, earlier that day. The host exploited the president's legitimate criticism of border protection-obstructionist Rep. Elijah Cummings and the third world conditions in some sections of traditionally Democrat-run Baltimore.
"Cumming district is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess," Trump had tweeted, in part. "If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous and filthy place."
"This goes back to what happened with the four members of 'The Squad,'" Wallace charged. "Nobody objects to the president defending his border policy, but this seems to be the worst kind of racial stereotyping."
Hm. About that...
In 1987, according to the Ann Arbor News, Chris Wallace's father, Mike Wallace, was pursuing for 60 Minutes a story about a San Diego Savings and Loan scheme. The S and L contrived to dupe poor and minority homeowners into signing away their homes as collateral for new air conditioners.
During a break in Wallace's interviewing of a Savings and Loan official, that person conceded the contracts were difficult to decipher.
"You bet your ass they [the contracts] are hard to read if you are reading over the watermelons or over the tacos," replied Mike Wallace, wrongly assuming recording had stopped and you would never hear his words.
Now, the rules about social acceptability of jokes change, over time. Ask a veteran stand up.
One healthy component of humor is spotlighting peoples' differences, exaggerating and playfully mocking cultural idiosyncrasies. It's a game all can play.
I miss the comedy of earlier decades, in which we all had a good laugh at our neighbors and ourselves, and no one feigned offense.
Car 54 and The Honeymooners pointed up cultural distinctions with grins. So did Phil Silvers and Henny Youngman. Lenny Bruce did it, too, though he often included more serious implications.
Newly arrived immigrants were sometimes the objects of innocent joshing, no harm done. Try imitating a foreign accent today, and see how fast you're personally and professionally ostracized.
(A sign of the present-day liberal sphere's clenched keister: Some would rush from the campus to declare there can be no 'foreign accents' in America, a nation that is, they would further assert, an illegitimate concept, to begin with.)
Mel Brooks has lamented that PC has destroyed comedy. And I recall the late Alexander Cockburn writing in The Nation that some Jewish jokes can be funny in ways Holocaust jokes never are.
But a crucial distinction exists. There was no punchline, no implied jocularity, to Mike Wallace's behind-scenes words. They existed only as pernicious tools.
He spoke them in what he thought was a private circumstance. That suggests he intended the remark more as secret armchair hostility shared between confederates than benign humor.
In 1987, students at the University of Michigan protested a scheduled Mike Wallace speech there, citing his watermelons and tacos remark. (Their action did presage current shut-downs of controversial speakers; never a wise or fair option, regardless of provocation.)
The Ann Arbor News story noted Mike Wallace had, over the phone, declared "Not now nor ever have I been a bigot and a body of work over 35 years I believe attests to that."
Ultimately, Wallace did give the speech. "During Wallace's address, about a dozen students turned their backs to him," UPI reported.
My intention isn't to imply guilt to son Chris for sins of father Mike. And again, '80s students' fulminating against a speaker do remind of current speech-squelching of voices like Milo.
Authoritarian Social Justice standards are rigid and uncritical. Cross those lines -- or even be falsely portrayed as having done so -- and the activists and pundits will seize up the torches and pitchforks.
Those aren't my standards. And they may not be yours. But they are essentially the ones Mike Wallace was pilloried for abridging. And social justice warriors and mainstream journalists like Chris Wallace insist those very rules be respected, in 2019.
Under this gimmicky standard, no one "of color" can be criticized for any cause at all without race necessarily being the motivation. The actual reason for the criticism remains unaddressed, thanks to the spurious 'racism' allegation tactic.
And so, Chris Wallace breezily misrepresented the president's factually sound dilapidation comments as race-based.
Chris Wallace isn't alone. Many these days distort words and policies opportunistically, exploiting ethnic concerns as cudgels with which to batter ideological adversaries against whom they have no honest, substantive arguments.
Some occupy elected offices. Others have bylines.
In response to Chris Wallace's attempted "racial stereotyping" slur, Mick Mulvaney noted (per Breitbart):
"When the president attacks AOC-plus-3, when he attacks 'The Squad,' last week, he gets accused of being a racist. When Nancy Pelosi does it a few days later, the left and many members of the media, not you, in particular, I want to make that clear, come to Nancy's defense: 'It couldn't possibly be racist. She was simply attacking their ideas.'
"The president is doing the same. The president is attacking Mr. Cummings for saying things that are not true about the border. And I think it's right for the president to raise the issue...I think the president's right to raise that it has absolutely nothing to do with race."
Chris Wallace's careening away from fairness may well be of a part with other FNC hosts' misbehavior, including Bret Baier's alleged role in the mistreatment of Judge Jeanine Pirro. It may be, as some have suggested, that the channel is more concerned with courting Democrats than being fair to the president of the United States.
"Fox News is changing fast, but they forgot the people that got them there!"
Pres. Trump May tweet.
"Something weird is going on at Fox."
- Trump June 17 tweet.
Note: To falsely impute racial bigotry to the president, Chris Wallace rattled off the names of several black politicians Trump has criticized.
Among white political and media figures Pres. Trump has also recently directed harshness: Nancy Pelosi, Jerrold Nadler, Chuck Schumer, Katy Tur, Jeff Bezos, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Anderson Cooper, Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom, Paul Ryan, Maureen Dowd, Rachel Maddow...
And there are many others. But Chris Wallace won't mention them. Because to do so would be counterproductive to his phony narrative.
And about daddy Mike...
- Pres. Trump 7/7/2019 tweet.
Chris Wallace interviewed Trump White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney during Fox News Sunday, earlier that day. The host exploited the president's legitimate criticism of border protection-obstructionist Rep. Elijah Cummings and the third world conditions in some sections of traditionally Democrat-run Baltimore.
"Cumming district is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess," Trump had tweeted, in part. "If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous and filthy place."
"This goes back to what happened with the four members of 'The Squad,'" Wallace charged. "Nobody objects to the president defending his border policy, but this seems to be the worst kind of racial stereotyping."
Hm. About that...
In 1987, according to the Ann Arbor News, Chris Wallace's father, Mike Wallace, was pursuing for 60 Minutes a story about a San Diego Savings and Loan scheme. The S and L contrived to dupe poor and minority homeowners into signing away their homes as collateral for new air conditioners.
During a break in Wallace's interviewing of a Savings and Loan official, that person conceded the contracts were difficult to decipher.
"You bet your ass they [the contracts] are hard to read if you are reading over the watermelons or over the tacos," replied Mike Wallace, wrongly assuming recording had stopped and you would never hear his words.
Now, the rules about social acceptability of jokes change, over time. Ask a veteran stand up.
One healthy component of humor is spotlighting peoples' differences, exaggerating and playfully mocking cultural idiosyncrasies. It's a game all can play.
I miss the comedy of earlier decades, in which we all had a good laugh at our neighbors and ourselves, and no one feigned offense.
Car 54 and The Honeymooners pointed up cultural distinctions with grins. So did Phil Silvers and Henny Youngman. Lenny Bruce did it, too, though he often included more serious implications.
Newly arrived immigrants were sometimes the objects of innocent joshing, no harm done. Try imitating a foreign accent today, and see how fast you're personally and professionally ostracized.
(A sign of the present-day liberal sphere's clenched keister: Some would rush from the campus to declare there can be no 'foreign accents' in America, a nation that is, they would further assert, an illegitimate concept, to begin with.)
Mel Brooks has lamented that PC has destroyed comedy. And I recall the late Alexander Cockburn writing in The Nation that some Jewish jokes can be funny in ways Holocaust jokes never are.
But a crucial distinction exists. There was no punchline, no implied jocularity, to Mike Wallace's behind-scenes words. They existed only as pernicious tools.
He spoke them in what he thought was a private circumstance. That suggests he intended the remark more as secret armchair hostility shared between confederates than benign humor.
In 1987, students at the University of Michigan protested a scheduled Mike Wallace speech there, citing his watermelons and tacos remark. (Their action did presage current shut-downs of controversial speakers; never a wise or fair option, regardless of provocation.)
The Ann Arbor News story noted Mike Wallace had, over the phone, declared "Not now nor ever have I been a bigot and a body of work over 35 years I believe attests to that."
Ultimately, Wallace did give the speech. "During Wallace's address, about a dozen students turned their backs to him," UPI reported.
My intention isn't to imply guilt to son Chris for sins of father Mike. And again, '80s students' fulminating against a speaker do remind of current speech-squelching of voices like Milo.
Authoritarian Social Justice standards are rigid and uncritical. Cross those lines -- or even be falsely portrayed as having done so -- and the activists and pundits will seize up the torches and pitchforks.
Those aren't my standards. And they may not be yours. But they are essentially the ones Mike Wallace was pilloried for abridging. And social justice warriors and mainstream journalists like Chris Wallace insist those very rules be respected, in 2019.
Under this gimmicky standard, no one "of color" can be criticized for any cause at all without race necessarily being the motivation. The actual reason for the criticism remains unaddressed, thanks to the spurious 'racism' allegation tactic.
And so, Chris Wallace breezily misrepresented the president's factually sound dilapidation comments as race-based.
Chris Wallace isn't alone. Many these days distort words and policies opportunistically, exploiting ethnic concerns as cudgels with which to batter ideological adversaries against whom they have no honest, substantive arguments.
Some occupy elected offices. Others have bylines.
In response to Chris Wallace's attempted "racial stereotyping" slur, Mick Mulvaney noted (per Breitbart):
"When the president attacks AOC-plus-3, when he attacks 'The Squad,' last week, he gets accused of being a racist. When Nancy Pelosi does it a few days later, the left and many members of the media, not you, in particular, I want to make that clear, come to Nancy's defense: 'It couldn't possibly be racist. She was simply attacking their ideas.'
"The president is doing the same. The president is attacking Mr. Cummings for saying things that are not true about the border. And I think it's right for the president to raise the issue...I think the president's right to raise that it has absolutely nothing to do with race."
Chris Wallace's careening away from fairness may well be of a part with other FNC hosts' misbehavior, including Bret Baier's alleged role in the mistreatment of Judge Jeanine Pirro. It may be, as some have suggested, that the channel is more concerned with courting Democrats than being fair to the president of the United States.
"Fox News is changing fast, but they forgot the people that got them there!"
Pres. Trump May tweet.
"Something weird is going on at Fox."
- Trump June 17 tweet.
Note: To falsely impute racial bigotry to the president, Chris Wallace rattled off the names of several black politicians Trump has criticized.
Among white political and media figures Pres. Trump has also recently directed harshness: Nancy Pelosi, Jerrold Nadler, Chuck Schumer, Katy Tur, Jeff Bezos, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Anderson Cooper, Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom, Paul Ryan, Maureen Dowd, Rachel Maddow...
And there are many others. But Chris Wallace won't mention them. Because to do so would be counterproductive to his phony narrative.
posted by DC Larson at
July 29, 2019
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