The Don Quixote-like mission of Fox News

Roger Ailes is president of Fox News Channel.

I wonder if Roger Ailes was teased as a child. I wonder if Sean Hannity had college professors harass him.

These people don't deserve a place in the top tier of political discourse in the U.S. They do have such a perch, so we need to try to understand what motivates them.

They approach politics like a siege. The heroes are the conservatives or the Republicans. Only people on the right have the answers for creating a happy and prosperous America.

America isn't getting happier. Technology has created efficiencies the likes of which are hardly done being implemented. The middle class as boomers once knew it has been evaporating.

The Fox News empire hammers away continuously on how only conservatives have the answers. Regulate less. Tax less. Let the rich get richer.

The boomers who endorse this leave me flabbergasted. The disheveled young boomers were idealistic, decidedly to the left side of the political spectrum. Rich people, in our eyes, were like that bad guy character in the movie "The Towering Inferno" - the tycoon who wanted to cut corners.

We subscribed to that paradigm.

Today a lot of us have drifted to the tea party side. We assail "government regulations" of the type that would have protected people in "The Towering Inferno." We assail taxation.

And we are influenced more than we realize by Ailes' Fox News juggernaut.

A lot of us don't have time to watch much of it. But, enough opinion leaders do watch it, that it is a force that looms.

Real Republicans are temperate. They have principles but they don't vie with the other side as if applying flamethrowers. A real flamethrower works (partly) because it denies the enemy oxygen. Fox News strives to deny the opposition the oxygen of open expression.

Democrats don't have real "facts" at their disposal, you see. When Democrats seek to supply facts, those facts are assailed emotionally as having no foundation. Democrats are really an extension of Che Guevara and they are to be stomped down.

When Hank Williams Jr. got into trouble recently it was because he was lulled into thinking Fox News would really put its imprimatur on what he said. The country singer was a guest on a Fox News program. He likened President Barack Obama to Hitler.

Now, why would he get the impression that such a rhetorical hand grenade would go over on this show? People who watch Fox News regularly know.

The network is disrespectful to the other side. It not only disagrees, it laughs and mocks. It is horribly thin-skinned. It recoils at any criticism. It sends out "ambush interviewers" (although I haven't seen this abomination lately, so maybe some pressure was brought to bear from sensible Republicans).

Fox News hassled the Girl Scouts not long ago, merely because the Scouts thought the "Media Matters" website was a useful media critique resource. It was the usual mountain out of a molehill for Fox. Fox decided Media Matters was a "left wing" site, and they exuded the typical odious paranoia.

Media Matters sees itself as a media watchdog, keeping an eye on the extreme right of political commentary - how that element spews misinformation and twists things. It's only a website. I have been there and it seems reasonable. It does not per se seek to indoctrinate people from the left.

But Fox News had kittens until it seemed the story disappeared, probably because a lot of people got ticked off. Again, pressure brought to bear?

The on-air personalities seem like puppets this way, following directives from above. There is a daily script, I would suggest, pushing the right wing angle in certain ways.

Bill O'Reilly seems to have backed off on harassing judges. Again, pressure? Is civility pushing back? Even Bernie Goldberg, often an on-air sidekick of O'Reilly, has said "nay" about the "ambush" interviews which have often been aimed at judges.

Are some judges too "lenient?" What about Haley Barbour? But he's a Republican, so this brings no special ire.

The Barbour pardoning incident ought to keep O'Reilly mum now. But now I have to worry about O'Reilly perhaps sending an ambush interviewer after me. Well, it would spice up our morning at McDonald's if such an individual (like Jesse Watters) showed up. So, come on out to Flyoverland, guys.

Hannity with his prime time show is so bad he almost seems harmless now, a caricature of himself. There is no suggestion of fairness. It's just that the Democrats under Obama are suspicious, ignorant, misguided, unpatriotic and perhaps dangerous. The nightly mantra is tiresome.

But it works, having been essential in elevating the so-called tea party from the fringe status where it belonged. Fox presents the tea party as if it's organic. You know what's organic? The Occupy movement. But Occupy is demonized on Fox News.

Fox tells us the tea partiers, an aggregation led by the usual moneyed Republican interests (all too happy to put on a populist disguise), are the real heroes. All this is done under the guise of being a legitimate TV news network.

The last time I was in the Morris Dairy Queen, the house TV was tuned to Fox News. I haven't been back since.

Here's a question for Roger Ailes: What would America really be like under one-party government? This is what you obviously want. Newt Gingrich says we should even shove aside certain Federal judges. What would America be like if Republicans simply "ruled?"

Have they shown they can even handle a majority in government? When they get power they do what all politicians do: consolidate it and build fiefdoms. You don't do this by "cutting spending." You get re-elected by dispensing goodies.

Republicans are as good at this as anyone and they don't even have the sheen of true populist idealism like Democrats do. They'll say "if we just promote more growth, we'll be OK." Eviscerate regulations, wipe out unions and give the super-rich more latitude. Yup, this will create a contented America.

But the Founders envisioned a vigorous political dialogue in which both sides could find their legitimate place and offer people a variety of solutions. Sometimes the redistributionist ideas have their place. But Republicans view such ideas like Kryptonite.

The "us vs. them" mindset comes through with a relentless tenor on Fox News. Fox identifies little stories that might cast doubt on Democrats (or those nasty "liberals") and elevates them to a suggested scandal stature. They "carpet bomb."

The thinking begins to seep into the minds of some of our leaders. A Republican said after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting that "regardless of the motivation. . .we must condemn this." (This is a paraphrase.) It was as if the idea of shooting a Democrat might actually be weighed.
This politician later issued an amended or additional statement, as I recall, but there was no furor.

Of course, Democrats need to weigh the nuances of every word they utter. Fox News is ready to pounce, to express "outrage" (so typical of cable TV news talking heads) and suggest stupidity or un-American motivations. The healthiest motivations, in the eyes of Fox, might have been expressed by Gingrich when he said certain judges might have to be pushed aside, maybe even arrested.

Let's shove aside the judges we don't like, vote all Democrats out of office and see what kind of America we end up with.

The experts say it isn't wise making Nazi analogies. So I'll try to refrain, but when you impress your opinions as if they're the only legitimate ones, totalitarianism looms.

Frankly, we are seeing a profoundly changing economy and I feel neither Republicans nor Democrats have their finger really on the pulse.
The young people of today have the truest sense - they see the absolute folly of SOPA and PIPA, for example - and they will someday usher in a new economy. They just don't have the power yet. The Newt Gingrich's and Roger Ailes' do.

From these two we'd get the mantra of lower taxes and less regulation.

They'll flog that dead horse until a river catches fire.

It's Don Quixote redux, thrusting at the windmill.

We boomers had to wait to get power. This is always the way of things. Fox News flails away like it has the answers. It speaks to its flock.

And it leads us to nothing but folly.

- Brian Williams - morris mn Minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com