If you're paying any attention to what's actually going on in the world, watching Fox can be a dizzying affair. One minute, they are accusing President Obama of being the driving force being a government conspiracy to take over health care in the guise of the public option, and the next minute they are saying that he's been an avowed opponent of the public option, at least since his speech to Congress on September 9.
Take, for example, America's Newsroom which yesterday accused President Obama of hypocrisy by working behind-the-scenes (as reported by the L.A. Times) to bolster Senate support for the public option.
In Fox's version of reality, President Obama is sneaking around, trying to build support for the public option despite a public promise to support alternatives.
But outside of Fox's universe, everybody knows that while President Obama did say he was open to exploring alternatives to the public option -- if they would accomplish the same goals -- he also remained a supporter of the public option.
Indeed, the clip Fox cropped was taken from a seven minute discussion of the need for a public option. Immediately before the portion Fox cropped came this sentence:
It’s worth noting that a strong majority of Americans still favor a public insurance option of the sort I’ve proposed tonight.
President Obama's couldn't have been more clear. He wasn't abandoning a public option. He was proposing one, and there's no way Fox misunderstood what he was trying to say. Instead, they obviously and willfully distorted his words by selectively cropping video in order to make a partisan political point. In other words, they lied. Or as they put it, they were "Fair & Balanced."