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As we mentioned, the folks at Fox News were all up in arms yesterday about Anita Dunn's scathing commentary in which she pointed out the cold truth: Fox News has become a propaganda arm of the Republican Party. In fact, the outraged howls could be heard on every Fox program yesterday (except Shep Smith's).

Fox's chief defense is that the White House is confusing its opinion shows with its news coverage. It ran one such "news story" outlining the "attacks" by the White House on Fox, which included the following fine whine from Fox News Senior Vice President Michael Clemente:

"It's astounding the White House cannot distinguish between news and opinion programming. It seems self-serving on their part."

Actually, the White House is not alone. Indeed, anyone watching Fox News throughout the day will suffer much of the same confusion.

Fox is trying to pretend that only on its "opinion shows" such as Glenn Beck, The O'Reilly Factor, and Hannity is there free-ranging criticism of President Obama and his administration. But that's a load of hooey.

If you watch Fox's daytime "news" programs -- from Fox & Friends to Happening Now to Special Report with Bret Baier (where this report aired) -- you'll find that, while they lack the viciousness of the "opinion" programs, they nonetheless are heavily slanted with an anti-administration bias. "Reporters" like Carl Cameron and James Rosen constantly bring on Republican spokespeople and reliably transmit GOP talking points as though they represent fact (when in reality they usually have an estranged relationship with the truth). Anchors like Gretchen Carlson and Trace Gallagher regularly comment on the news they're reporting with an unmistakable right-wing slant.

A classic case, in fact, is this very "news" story that ran both on Baier's segment and earlier on Happening Now: It is wholly a defensive piece of propaganda that reliably gives the Fox News line -- comparing Obama's recognition of cold reality with Richard Nixon's paranoid "enemies list" -- with no attempt whatsoever to explain the White House's point of view.

If you wanted to see why the White House might confuse Fox's "news" programming with its "opinion" shows, one need look no further than this "news report" itself. Speaking of "self-serving."

Of course, there is a mountain of such examples already plunked in the middle of our national discourse. The most notorious recent such case was Fox's ardent promotion of the anti-Obama Tea Parties, beginning back in April and continuing through the "Tea Party Express, which produced such "news" segments as the one where Griff Jenkins was openly cheerleading the tea parties, and a Fox producer was caught working up the crowd to cheer. Then, of course, there was the whole 9-12 event, which Fox not only avidly promoted (it was, after all, wholly the creation of Fox's Glenn Beck) but actually attacked other networks for ostensibly failing to cover it as avidly as they did.

But that's just scratching the surface. Everyone knows it -- and Fox just wants to pretend it all away.

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Welp, I've arrived! Some folks are threatening to sue me over this link from Tuesday. Read all the way down...

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(h/t David)

Senate Minority Whip Sen. John Kyl expressed "regret" for remarks made by a fellow Republican senator on health care reform Sunday. Sen. Jim DeMint was quote by Politico as saying "If we are able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."

Sen. John Kyl told Fox News' Brett Baier that those remarks were "unfortunate." "I don't agree with that language," he said. But, tellingly, he didn't disagree with the sentiments, his weasel words trying to deflect the political calculus of it all:

BAIER: Senator, your colleague from South Carolina, Jim DeMint said this this week: “If we’re able to stop Obama on this it will be his Waterloo. It will break him.”

Your colleague from Oklahoma, Sen. Jim Inhofe said this: “We can stall the Democratic effort on health reform. We can stall it. And that’s going to be a huge gain for those of us who want to turn this thing over in the 2010 election.”

Senator Kyl, do you agree with them?

KYL: I don’t agree with that kind of language. I know what Jim DeMint has said is he wanted to break the momentum of the inevitability of passing these liberal health care bills. They said we had to pass stimulus and do it immediately or else the economy would see 10% or 8% unemployment, it’s now gone to 10%. And what we’re saying is slow this down, so that we don’t do…we don’t make another bad mistake here. But I do think that because the language has political implications, it’s unfortunate. Both sides talk about the politics of these issues. I don’t think we ought to be focused on that.

Kyl is nothing but a big, fat liar. OF COURSE they're speaking of political implications, because that's their focus. They don't care about the 76% of Americans who want health care reform. They don't care about the 145,000 Americans who will lose their health insurance over the month of August alone. Plain and simple: They don't care about Americans.

What they DO care about is regaining a majority again to stymie any success Obama might have in his first term in office, much like Newt Gingrich and his Contract On For America did in 1994. This is ALL about politics for the republicans and Kyl knows it. At least DeMint and Inhofe have the intellectual honesty to admit it.

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The top US commander in Iraq says that Iraqi security forces are ready to take over responsibility for security in the cities Tuesday. "The continued improvement in overall stability and security makes this the right time for us to turn this over to the Iraqi secury forces," Gen. Ray Odierno told Fox's Brett Baier.

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The Fox talkers were out trying to spin past the gruesome wreckage of Mark Sanford's political career yesterday, partly by claiming that Republicans always give the boot to such cases of gross immorality, while Democrats are so lascivious that they naturally tolerate such behavior within their own ranks.

First there was Faux Liberal Mort Kondracke on Brett Baier's afternoon show:

Kondracke: But look. You know, multiple affairs did not stop Bill Clinton from being elected president. But that's because the Democratic Party is a lot more tolerant of licentiousness than the Republican Party is. And that's the rub for poor old Mark Sanford here.

Then Ann Coulter attempted more or less the same claim later that day on Sean Hannity's show:

Coulter: But he's a Republican, so he will be gone. Unlike John Edwards, with all of his staff knowing that he --

Hannity: He may not be governor by the end of a couple of weeks.

Coulter: That's right. And even if he is, Republicans vote these guys out, generally.

Oddly enough, Coulter kept bringing up John Edwards, whose political career is pretty much toast -- so it's not a point that actually supported her claim. Moreover, she and Kondracke are glossing over the long history of other Democrats' careers being derailed by sexual hijinks: Gary Hart, Eliot Spitzer, Brock Adams, Jim McGreevy are just a few of the names that come to mind.

Meanwhile, it's not hard to come up with Republicans whose infidelities have been glossed over and "forgiven" (by the pundit class at least). Some of them are major figures in the party even today. To wit:

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Loud noises!

Let there be no doubt that Matt Drudge is the world's biggest douchebag. The gigantic screamer headline above leads us to this ridiculousness, written by Drudge himself:

On the night of June 24, the media and government become one, when ABC turns its programming over to President Obama and White House officials to push government run health care -- a move that has ignited an ethical firestorm!

Ethical firestorm? How is broadcasting from the White House an ethical firestorm? Even someone as thick as Drudge should know that every major press agency has a reporter INSIDE the White House every day reporting the, you know, news. Many of them -- GASP! Siren Light Animated GIF!!!! -- report live from inside the West Wing press room or on the front lawn.

By the way, remember when Fox News Channel's resident Monchichi Brett Baier did a whole thing from "inside the White House"?

O'Reilly, too. And then there were all of those Bush White House press releases that FOX News Channel aired verbatim.

But since Drudge is making a big pee-pee dance about this, expect all of the press to soon follow -- despite reality.

(Cross posted at Bob Cesca's Awesome Blog! Go!)