Roger Ailes
Let's all give Fox News President Roger Ailes a big round of applause, because he just won the 2013 Bradley Prize, which is basically a lifetime achievement award in wingnuttery. And in his acceptance speech, he demonstrated why he so richly deserved the award by "
explaining" why Fox spends so much time on Benghazi:
Ailes delivered remarks for winning the $250,000 award — he said he would donate the money to a charity for senior citizens — at the Kennedy Center and addressed the IRS scandal, Benghazi and how Fox News covers currents events. According to the speech posted on FoxNews.com, Ailes said the network reported on the deadly attack in Benghazi “even though no other network would touch the story.”
“I have come to the conclusion that even I don’t care what the president of the United States was doing that night,” he said. “However, I would like to know what the commander in chief was doing that night.”
Ailes also called Benghazi “an important story because it involves two hundred years of our military ethos, which is: If we ask you to go out in the middle of the night and risk your life for America, we promise that we will backstop you. And, try to get you out if it is humanly possible. In Benghazi we did not do that.”
First, everybody knows where President Obama was on the night of the attack. He was in the White House Jihadi Room, kneeling on a prayer rug, praying to Mecca, asking Allah for forgiveness for slaying Osama bin Laden in history's most obvious false flag operation. And he was doing all that while snorting cocaine and smoking opium from Afghanistan.
Second, what happened to the Benghazi talking points and Susan Rice? I thought the Benghazi "scandal" was all about the talking points cover up. But now, Ailes isn't even mentioning those—instead he's floating some sort of conspiracy theory under which President Obama decided to let Americans die in Libya. I guess even Roger realizes that Darrell Issa and John Boehner's leakers pretty much ruined their case.
Third, if you're a chicken hawk like Roger Ailes whose propaganda machine helped deliver a decade-long war in Iraq that cost thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, you've pretty much lost all credibility to lecture others about "two hundred years of our military ethos." What happened in Benghazi is terrible, but it's hardly unprecedented, and on balance, President Obama has done a much better job of protecting not just the country but also the military than his predecessor.
I guess the moral of the story here is that the conservative Bradley Foundation couldn't have picked a more deserving winner of its top award.