Month: August 2015

First, Fox’s promotion of Trump worked too well. He went from making the Republican primary more interesting to follow — and thus better for ratings — to dominating the Republican primary and potentially harming the ideological movement that Fox supports. Murdoch’s public opposition to Trump was a signal that the network wasn’t likely to tolerate Trump actually becoming the Republican nominee.

Second, Trump had spent much of his time in the hackier corners of the network — outposts of conservative inanity like Fox and Friends. But the debate was led by Fox’s more serious personalities. Baier, Kelly, and Wallace want to be known as some of the toughest questioners in news business — and Trump was a chance to prove their journalistic bona fides to the world. So where other Fox personalities wanted to treat Trump well in the hopes he would come back on their shows, Baier, Kelly, and Wallace wanted to embarrass Trump.

Finally, Fox News’s incentives had switched. Early in the campaign, the way to get bigger ratings was to build Trump up. But now the whole country was tuning in, and what most people wanted to see was Trump torn down — or at least the fight that would result if Fox News tried to tear Trump down. And that’s what they got. It was extraordinary television, and it led Fox to the highest ratings for any cable news program ever broadcast. Fox figured out how to profit off Trump coming and going, and, better yet, they got to decide when Trump was coming and when Trump was going.

Now Trump and Fox News are at war. And, as Nate Silver writes, this is a war Trump probably can’t win.

Marvel has absolutely no issue with LGBT characters in the Marvel Universe. We are sympathetic to the community that may have viewed Hercules as bisexual based on an implication in “Hercules: Fall of an Avenger.” I thought that Brett White’s op-ed “Why Bisexual Hercules Matters to Me,” was very thoughtful, I took it to heart and I made it recommended reading for my staff.

The guy (Erick Erickson) who made the decision about RedState called Supreme Court Justice David Souter a ‘goat [expletive] child molester’ and First Lady Michelle Obama a ‘Marxist Harpy,’“ Trump said. "He was forced to make a humbling apology. Also, not only is Erick a total loser, he has a history of supporting establishment losers in failed campaigns so it is an honor to be uninvited from his event.

Explaining his decision on Friday, Erickson said that though he had “tried to give [Trump] great latitude, his remark about Megyn Kelly was a bridge too far”. In an online blogpost, he added: “There are even lines blunt talkers and unprofessional politicians should not cross. Decency is one of those lines.”

Erickson also told reporters: “I don’t want to put words in [Trump’s] mouth and I hate using the label misogynist because I think its used too much but he’s suggesting a woman as a lady asked him a question and did so because it was her time of the month.

“It’s just not right. I’ve said a lot of shit in my life – and you can certainly quote me on the record using that word – but I would never suggest anything like that.”

Things Erickson has suggested include the notion that “Obama’s marxist harpy wife would go Lorena Bobbitt on him” – Bobbitt was a Virginia woman who in 1993 cut off her husband’s penis – should he even think about it”.

It, in this instance, was “shagging hookers behind the media’s back”.

Erickson has also suggested that there was nothing wrong with calling Davis, who in 2013 mounted a 13-hour filibuster against a Texas abortion law, “abortion Barbie”.

“The phrase was intentional to discredit Wendy Davis,” he subsequently told the Houston Chronicle, “but I never thought about ‘Barbie’ being something that demeaned women. I have an eight-year-old daughter who loves Barbie.”

On his own RedState blog – from which in 2010 he officially purged “birthers”, those who question Barack Obama’s right to be president – he wrote: “As an aside, one of the most hilarious bits of this is seeing liberals proclaim all references to someone as ‘Barbie’ sexist. Really?”

Erickson has regularly taken aim at feminists in general. In 2010, referring to an anti-abortion ad that ran during the Super Bowl, he tweeted: “that’s it?!?! That’s what the feminazis were enraged over? Seriously?!? Wow. That’s what being too ugly to get a date does to your brain.”