Quote of the Day (Roger Ailes, to a Client He Masterminded to Victory)

“Jesus, nobody likes you. Your own mother wouldn't vote for you. Do you even have a mother?”— American television executive and media consultant Roger Ailes (1940-2017), before creating successful ads for his client, eventual 1980 New York Senate race winner Alfonse D’Amato, quoted by Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News—and Divided a Country (2014)

It may be hard for some voters to see, but some candidates, like former Senator D’Amato (nicknamed “Senator Shakedown” by The New Republic), cannot be stomached at any level, no matter what sleazy commercials and social-media posts that will reach an Election Day crescendo may tell you about an opponent.

Roger Ailes might agree with the proposition that a politician can be sold like soap, but I don’t think that does justice to what he and other political consultants have wrought. Now, crud can be sold as if it’s soap—at least, if you make the perfectly logical equation that certain politicians are crud.

So take your responsibility seriously as you cast your ballots on Tuesday. If you’re not careful, you might get 18 years of a politician that even his consultant can’t stand, as New York State did once it elected D’Amato, the sleazy product of Joseph Margiotta's Nassau County political machine.

(The image that accompanies this post about Roger Ailes, president of Fox News and chairman of the Fox Television Stations Group, was taken at the Fox News Headquarters in Times Square, New York, June 14, 2013, by Sgt. Christopher Tobey—before, of course, Ailes lost his job over sexual harassment allegations.)

Quote of the Day (Roger Ailes, on ‘Wet Noodle’ Patriarch Rupert Murdoch)

“He’s walking into walls. He doesn’t know what time it is. It’s old man time. Rupert is an odd bird. A cold fish, but a f-----g wet noodle — it's pathetic — around those kids. They're always stomping off and giving the poor guy the finger.”—The late Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, on Australian-born media baron Rupert Murdoch, quoted by Michael Wolff, The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty (2023)

As a youngster listening to the original “Eyewitness News” broadcast in the New York area, I would smile and lean forward whenever I heard short, dour reporter Milton Lewis tell the audience, “Now listen to this,” in a confiding, “you’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you” tone.

I experienced the same sensation when I read Jim Rutenberg and Jonathan Mahler’s New York Times report this week that three of Rupert Murdoch’s children have united against their father. They are arguing in court against him changing the family’s “irrevocable trust” to ensure that his anointed successor, eldest son Lachlan, will stay in charge of the conservative multinational media empire.

Lewis’ “this” happens, in 1924, to be a plot twist right out Succession. There’s little that the creators much-honored comedy-drama did not imagine. Maybe they dismissed this idea in the belief that their audience would never accept this kind of switcheroo coming from a nonagenarian.

Murdoch is a nightmare spin on Dylan Thomas’ notion that old age should burn and rave at close of day. Having assisted at the birth of Trumpism, he finds himself unable either to embrace or evade his handiwork. 

However much he may carp about the former President, his attempts to promote an alternative GOP candidate have foundered. He’s even been dissed by Don Jr.: “There was a time where if you wanted to survive in the Republican Party, you had to bend the knee to him or to others. I don’t think that’s the case anymore.”

And now, this mess.

The discovery process in the litigation can only reveal more embarrassing secrets, the kind he sought to avoid after reaching a $787 million settlement in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against Fox.

Or maybe Murdoch is beyond mortification at this point in his life. After all, who else would marry for the fifth time at age 93 and dare to risk comparisons with billionaire oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall, who was a mere 89 when he wed Anna Nicole Smith?

Fox News and Murdoch’s New York print mainstays, The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, have been making great sport of President Biden’s age-related difficulties. But Ailes came up with that “old man time” phrase about his former boss eight years ago. What could that line possibly entail now?

This Day in Media History (Beck, Palin Lead Pseudo-Event, ‘Restoring Honor’ Rally)

Aug. 28, 2010—In one of the more curious manifestations of the growing Tea Party movement, Glenn Beck (pictured) and Sarah Palin led a “Restoring Honor” rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial that attracted hundreds of thousands of attendees.

The event, audaciously held on the 47^th anniversary of the “March on Washington,” had little discernible content but demonstrated plenty of discontent—principally, with an African-American President whose election two years previously would have been inconceivable without the civil-rights movement that had reached its rhetorical zenith on this spot.

At the time, "Restoring Honor" garnered quite a bit of attention, typified by the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, which devoted three articles in one issue to the rally: William Kristol’s lead editorial, along with features by Harvard government Professor Harvey Mansfield and Lee Harris, author of The Next American Civil War: The Populist Revolt Against the Liberal Elite.

Searching the Internet for more recent retrospectives on the rally, though, I came up with nothing significant. You might wonder, then, why I am even writing about something that left so little discernible impact on the popular memory.

But I would argue that it is worth discussing—not only as a demonstration of the amorphous anger that coalesced into the Democratic Party’s midterm drubbing the following November, but also as an example of what the historian Daniel J. Boorstin had, in his 1961 book The Image, termed a “pseudo-event.”

That resentment and the movement’s penchant for such synthetic happenings were integral elements in both the Republican Party’s domination of Capitol Hill through much of this past decade as well as in the rise of Donald Trump and his continued popularity among Republicans.

But back to Beck.

Three years ago while on a tour bus in Savannah, I saw another passenger, a middle-aged man, blinking nonstop. I couldn’t think right away who he reminded me of. Then it hit me: this was a Glenn Beck look-alike. I groaned at even this low-grade, undoubtedly unconscious imitator.

Starting out as a radio personality, Beck made the leap to television at CNN’s Headline News. Eventually the libertarian commentator came to the attention of Roger Ailes, who was casting about for an additional ratings magnet besides Bill O’Reilly. After meeting with him, the Fox News head hired Beck.

Debuting the day before Barack Obama’s inauguration as President, Beck was attracting more than 2 million viewers daily within a few weeks. Despite appearing in the 5 pm slot—not even the coveted prime time spot—Beck soon became the third highest-rated personality on the network.

 

He endeared himself to his audience with such pronouncements as that Obama had “a deep-seated hatred for white people” and that Nazi tactics were progressive tactics.

Besides Beck, Fox had also had a hand in promoting Palin. From the moment of her selection as GOP Presidential nominee John McCain’s running mate, Ailes saw her as a natural for his medium with her biting criticism of both GOP regulars and liberal press outlets, or, in a term that has been endlessly and mindlessly retailed on social media ever since, “the lamestream media.”

With mounting legal bills from the election and her new-found celebrity status, Palin stepped down as governor in July 2009. Early the following year, she was on board as a Fox political commentator—as well as a star in the insurgent right wing whose endorsement could catalyze previously moribund candidates.

Although recognizing their ability to boost ratings, Ailes before long found Beck and Palin distinctly high maintenance. That feeling began to solidify with the “Restore Honor” rally, which—particularly in Beck’s case—the news head saw as an attempt at brand building outside the umbrella of the network, according to Gabriel Sherman’s biography of Ailes, The Loudest Voice in the Room.

In no small part, that explains why Fox made no special attempt to cover a happening by one of its own stars.

Ailes’ suspicions about Beck may have sprung from a conjunction of the rally itself, the anniversary of the civil-rights milestone, and his star’s own venture. Only a couple of days after “Restoring Honor” was held, Beck launched TheBlaze, a conservative cable media company. Indeed, it might be said that the venture arrived amid a “blaze” of publicity for its founder.

Whatever the rally’s shortcomings as actual news, it was certainly the kind of “pseudo-event” that Boorstin had in mind.  Using his criteria, it was planned rather than spontaneous; planned primarily to be reported or reproduced; ambiguous as it relates to the underlying situation; and intended as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even more obnoxiously, it sparked pseudo-events meant to counter it: on that very day by the Rev. Al Sharpton, and that fall in Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s “Rally To Restore Sanity and/or Fear.”

But in another sense, "Restoring Honor" was not just a pseudo-event but also a daring act of political appropriation. More specifically, Beck and Palin capitalized on the inevitable association with Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech without acknowledging the true nature of his challenge to the American political and social order of the time.

In a single sentence, Palin lumped King together with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln as having “the same steel spine and moral courage” as the crowd.  Leave aside for a second the blatant flattery of those gathered together, not to mention the fatuity and fallaciousness of grouping them with a trio who risked death for establishing or extending freedom to Americans.

In essence, Palin was conveying that she knew that King was somehow important, but not why. The causes that drew her and Beck to the Tea Party—less government and lower taxes—were antithetical to the aims of Dr. King, who saw the federal government as the necessary guarantor of the rights of African-Americans and who in the weeks before his death was advocating for labor unions and the “Poor People’s Campaign” for jobs, unemployment insurance, a fair minimum wage, and education for poor adults and children.

Does anyone really think that Beck and Palin would regard such measures collectively as anything other than socialism?

Certain aspects of the rally—all mentioned in the trio of Weekly Standard articles—gave it a veneer of non-partisanship: its stress on the non-objectionable “God and Country”; the ban on signs; the lack of specific references to political parties; even proceeds from the event to be designated for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation.

But all of this contrasts with the lack of progressive speakers who could have balanced the more conservative Beck and Palin, not to mention the use of the “Restoring Honor” label itself, which Professor Mansfield bluntly admitted was “a jab at President Obama.”

In retrospect, the irony of that “jab” is glaring. 

Whatever his real shortcomings as a leader, President Obama has conducted his private life without the sexual scandals that plagued a predecessor (Bill Clinton) and the current occupant of the Oval Office, and his administration was largely free of the ethics violations that characterized administrations of both parties going back nearly 40 years. Beck and Palin would have been better advised to employ that "Restoring Honor" tag now for the individual seeking reelection rather than a decade ago.

The best way to illustrate the fundamental shortcoming of Restoring Honor, though, is to contrast it with the March on Washington. 

Religious conviction animated most of those on the official program (King, John Lewis, gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, Archbishop Patrick O'Boyle, and Rabbi Joachim Prinz) as surely as those at “Restoring Honor,” but they were there to promote concrete objectives—passage of civil-rights measures, ending school segregation, enforcing the 14^th Amendment, and minimum-wage and fair-labor legislation.

On the other hand, “Restoring Honor” was centered around themes—God and Country. They were not only unassailable (were liberals really against either?), but also, for that reason, unmeasurable.

Beck, for instance, had proclaimed, "Something beyond imagination is happening. America today begins to turn back to God." How to begin to assess the truth of that? What constitutes turning “back to God”? Who decides what that even is?

In producing a return to God, Beck and Palin might have done better to dispense with smarmy self-congratulation like this in favor of painful self-examination. 

They might have asked how many people might have been turned off by the religious right's near-incestuous embrace of political power, or how so many leaders of religious-affiliated institutions had alienated their faithful through their own financial and/or sexual corruption (seen most recently with Jerry Falwell Jr. and, in the past few decades, with the American hierarchy of my faith, the Roman Catholic Church).

Trump’s Advisers: Kitchen Cabinet—or Pig Sty?

In the wake of Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory on Tuesday night, speculation now turns to the informal advisers who might influence his decisions. In the past, this group of supporters, well-wishers and friends who had Presidents’ ears were known as the “kitchen cabinet.” (The term dates back to the quartet that Andrew Jackson consulted, often far more assiduously than his regular Cabinet.) Teddy Roosevelt’s similar group was nicknamed, in keeping with that President’s hyperactive physical fitness regimen, the “Tennis Cabinet.”

I can’t imagine, however, given how little interest our President-elect has in history, that he will recall these nicknames. Nor do they adequately convey the nature of  his shameless surrogates at the tail-end of the primary season and throughout the general election.

Historian Ken Burns has called the full assembly of GOP officials who threw in their lot with Donald Trump “Vichy Republicans,” and though this captures the sense of their collaboration with evil and madness, it is neither pungent nor precise enough to describe the particular men (and it is all men) who came to cling to him as a way of keeping their hand in the political game when their fortunes were on the wane. No, only one name will do for this group: The Pig Sty.

That name evokes more than merely disgust over their opportunistic loyalty to a reality-show star manifestly unsuited to the Presidency. It also describes their treatment of women—starting with those in their personal and professional orbits, and proceeding to the Democratic candidate. No surprise in that: Like their candidate, they all belong (psychologically if not chronologically) to the era of Mad Men, when political and business leaders regarded women as playthings rather than people.

You might notice that they all have developed a noticeable stoop. This is not simply a function of their age (ranging from middle age to senior citizen), but because they carried so much water for Trump throughout his scorched-earth campaign.

Let’s examine what each brings to the table, shall we?

Chris Christie: Leading off with the governor of New Jersey was a no-brainer, considering that his photo—of noticeably porcine proportions—embodies literally, not just metaphorically, the inhabitants of this pig pen. Millions of Americans watched him at the Republican Convention, inciting the rabid crowd to chant “Lock her up!” against Ms. Clinton. More recently, many New Jerseyans wanted to shout the same thing at him when virtually the only point of agreement between prosecution and defense during the Bridgegate trial was that he’d approved the mad scheme to close two of three Fort Lee access lanes into the George Washington Bridge. Nor did it escape the nearly 80% of his state’s residents who now disapproved of his performance that he’d heaped all kinds of abuse on his former deputy chief of staff, Bridget Anne Kelly—first (according to her uncontested testimony at the trial) by hurling a water bottle and cursing her out on one occasion, then by hiring—at state expense—a Republican-connected law firm that, before exonerating Christie of wrongdoing, accused her of orchestrating the bridge closures—and including the gratuitous detail that the single mother of four had been involved in an affair with former Christie campaign manager Bill Stepien. That last episode constitutes what a Daily Beast article has slammed as “Slut-Shaming.”

Newt Gingrich: The former Speaker of the House and GOP Presidential candidate earned Trump’s gratitude toward the end of last month when he angrily dismissed questions from Fox News' Megyn Kelly about multiple sexual misconduct charges against Trump by claiming that she was “fascinated by sex.” More than a few viewers of the exchange observed that it was Gingrich, not Kelly, who was “fascinated by sex.” How else to explain how he married second wife Marianne only six months after divorcing his high-school geometry teacher, amid acknowledgement from congressional staffers that he’d been conducting an affair; or how, 19 years later—amid impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton that Gingrich had initiated related to the Monica Lewinsky affair—the now-ex-Speaker broke with wife #2 to make way for a “breakfast companion” 23 years his junior. (See this Washington Post article about his messy marital history.)

Rudy Giuliani: His descent since hooking up with Trump has been the most frightening to behold of all these figures. Even close aides from his days as a crusading U.S. District Attorney and Mayor of New York have admitted to dismay over his vein-popping, bug-eyed appearances before the GOP convention and on cable news shows, with one quoted in a New York Times article as finding his old boss to be "painful to watch." He ranted on and on about Clinton, so eager to wound her that he couldn’t see the collateral damage to his own reputation. While stating that Mrs. Clinton could only have been a fool not to have suspected her husband of cheating on her, he never saw the natural rejoinder: Was his own ex-wife, Donna Hanover, also being a “fool” for trusting him? Similarly, in fanning rumors, offered up with only the flimsiest of evidence, that Ms. Clinton might be suffering from Parkinson’s, he suggested that listeners Google “Hillary Clinton” and “health”—totally oblivious to the idea that many were finding far more substantiated information by searching for “Rudy Giuliani” and health. Altogether, he seems to have dragged into the sunlight something monstrous from the darkest recesses of his soul.

Roger Ailes: He might have been forced out of his longtime perch at Fox News, but not before performing significant service at the conservative network. He created the echo chamber that would broadcast such dubious stories as Clinton’s imminent indictment for violations relating to the Clinton Foundation. The same network exec whose creation lashed Bill Clinton in the 1990s for sexual harassment has himself now been accused of the same offense by considerably more women (more than 20, if you’re keeping count, according to this piece from the Huffington Post). Naturally, the candidate who talked about “grabbing p---y” made this same disgraced TV executive part of the team preparing him for the debates against Mrs. Clinton.

Roger Stone: A political black arts operative par excellence, he “confirmed” Trump’s suggestion that Ted Cruz’s father might have been involved in the assassination of JFK. He also peddled the phony National Enquirer story that the U.S. Senator from Texas had engaged in extramarital affairs. Of course, this was the same operative fired from Bob Dole's 1996 Presidential campaign after news broke that Stone and his wife had placed ads seeking swinging partners. (Elizabeth Preza's article from Alternet this past May had all the dirty details about this dirty trickster.)

Corey Lewandowski: During primary season, Trump’s first campaign manager ran into trouble because of a scuffle with a female reporter. This was not the first time he got in-your-face with a woman: In one dispute while he was at the Koch-funded super PAC “Americans for Prosperity,” he called one the “C” word. (See Francis Langum's article from the blog "Crooks and Liars" about this "big guy henchman" who's more than a little reminiscent of Richard Nixon's H.R. Haldeman.)

In a May 2016 article in The Atlantic that answered the question, “What Is the Greatest Prank of All Time?”, Candid Camera host Peter Funt nominated Trump’s Presidential campaign—“the 2016 reality-TV show that has convinced many people that Martians have taken over the GOP.” The Trump Pig Sty befouled the atmosphere enough that, if Funt were to consider it now, he’d have to write, “taken over America.”