Fox Report and Endless Obama

Fox News ran a story during The Fox Report with Shephard Smith that a group of unnamed, "bipartisan" "Senators" want Iraqis to pay for the Iraqi "reconstruction" bill.

I may be no judge, but I think Shephard Smith is good at reading the news. I do not like the politics of the show, although the coverage of one story tonight certainly gave Pelosi the best of Bush.

The thing is, maybe someone at Fox News should watch a news station, perhaps Fox News would have done. See, Fox probably covered the Petraeus/Crocker hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee. If they had happened to watch the news, they would have seen Ambassador Crocker's opening statement, and they would have seen him saying that US funding of Iraq reconstruction was over. Done. He repeated this same fact later, in an answer to a question of Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

Obama's comments got an enormous amount of coverage. So far, more than all anti-Iraq War invasion speakers combined. Karl Rove gets particular bad marks for his hatchet job, where he expands Obama's remarks to include all rural people, instead of the people he was actually talking about, industrial workers whose jobs have been shipped overseas and they haven't come back for 25 years. Do any of those people cling to anti-trade or anti-immigration ideas?  You can bet your famn damily.  Dan Abrams on MSNBC, whose show I'd never seen before, copped the attitude that the media was making too much of the story, blowing it out of proportion, and then continued to host a panel discussion about it, and talk about it more than some other shows.

When I think of religion and losing wealth, I think of the Dark Ages. The Papacy was the biggest tax collector in Europe at the time, could pick Kings (sometimes) and could send the nations of Europe to war (sometimes).

UPDATE: Although all three of the 24 hour cable news stations extensively covered Obama's week old comments, not one of these "news" organizations covered any of Obama's comments today (speech at the Washington Convention Center) concerning those self-same comments.  He explained further, very specifically, again, referring to the same industrial workers who lose their jobs as firms move them overseas. 

Oh, and imagine what the news would look like if, for the last eight years, we parsed each time Bush said something really off the wall!

UPDATE2: So, if we are already done paying for reconstruction, what are Senators Nelson, Collins and Bayh talking about?  Well, part of it is the "reconstruction" fantasy, but part is this glorious idea, which I first heard of during the recent Petraeus/Crocker appearance on Capitol Hill.

Their bill also would require that Baghdad pay for the fuel used by American troops and take over U.S. payments to predominantly Sunni fighters in the Awakening movement. Plans are to propose the legislation as part of a war bill to cover spending through September.