Fox News continues to be a reliable mouthpiece for screwing Americans for the hell of it. No, it doesn't really even count as news anymore, but I'm still stumped as to just who the Fox News audience is. Who is this network catering to at this point, pissed-off ferrets
with a craving for human flesh?
On Fox & Friends, co-host Steve Doocy asked why the AARP would want to enroll eligible seniors in the [SNAP] program and "encourage a welfare state." Fox Business host Stuart Varney responded by dismissing the need to feed seniors -- even those in extreme poverty -- and claiming that the effort in Pennsylvania was about buying votes. He expanded:
VARNEY: Now the AARP, huge supporters of President Obama politically and financially. Big supporters of Obamacare. And now they're out there signing people up for food stamps. This is part of the buy the vote campaign. They're really shifting America, changing what America really is.
Oh no, an advocacy group for seniors is helping poor seniors eat food. Those
bastards. But I have to ask—who, in the (remarkably, stunningly old) Fox News audience is this meant to piss off? I can see getting your audience riled that the probably-not-Christian black fellow probably did something-something-something therefore
Benghazi. I can see how the particularly dim corners of the Fox News audience, the dirt-stupid folks for whom waving a little imported flag around constitutes the beginning and end of their entire civic duty towards their country and fellow citizens, will clutch the "IRS scandal" to their chests and never let go, not if you debunked it ten times or a hundred. "The AARP" was already a damn unlikely addition to the ACORN-Benghazi-Obamaphone conspiracy roundup, though, and that their perceived crime is wanting poverty-stricken people to get access to a monthly food budget considerably smaller than the price of the wine at Stuart Varney's last restaurant outing—no, that one's a bit odd.
Stuart Varney is a particularly odd duck; the most positive thing I can say about him is that he is still a member of the dwindling number of business news personalities who can count themselves as Not Yet Indicted. The week's fast food strikes were met with analysis from Stuart Varney that included an "expert" muttering about how these workers could not possibly be paid more because it would destroy the entire fast-food sector; that the "expert" was a particularly prominent lobbyist for the fast-food industry itself never came up. This once again suggests that the network considers the only possible expertise on financial matters to come from persons with direct financial interest in feeding viewers a particular line—a constant practice that doesn't even rate a casual mention. In other words, it's all just a continuation of the same pay-to-play scam that the entire American marketplace has fallen into. (Hypothesis: "business networks" are nothing but the prosperity gospel with the God stuff taken out of it. It's all faith based, it's all based on motivational-sounding hucksterism masquerading as a genuine expertise in something else, and it's all presented by people who make the majority of their money telling you why you should send them yours.)
It's painfully obvious that what we have here is that the AARP once threw their weight behind "Obamacare" based on the general non-Foxian premise that we really oughtn't to let quite this many Americans die annually when we don't have to; that sin is what made them a Fox News enemy, full stop, so now the crayon scribblings in the Fox playbook say that no matter what the historically conservative group does, it will now be used as evidence that they like old people or want to feed poor people or any of the other top-notch things that now constitute actual Fox News conspiracy theories. The network is very much that dumb, as is evidenced by the appearance of Fox & Friends avec Stuart Varney at all, and their audience is apparently much, much dumber.