An honest question: Fox News, how are you okay with this? The rest of the punditry world:
Is this the bounds of "professional" discourse now?
Fox News contributor Keith Ablow went on an unhinged racial rant against President Obama, accusing him of failing to protect the country against Ebola because his "affinities, his affiliations are with" Africa and "not us ... He's their leader."
Keith Ablow is the Fox News resident "psychiatrist," and his long-held schtick is to come on Fox News, usually in the already dismal caverns of
Fox & Friends, to explain why the current president of the United States is not a true American in spirit. Period. It is presented as a medical opinion and given the accompanying jargon: The opposition president (opposition to Fox News, that is) has any number of psychological conditions that cause him to hate America, and to want to destroy America, and to be glad when something bad happens to America, and all of this is conducted via "Dr." Keith Ablow's patented method of psychological seance.
It nearly all revolves around the central observation that the first non-white president of the United States had a black father, a black foreign father, and that the president's own inherited genes and skin tone and the presumed heritage that goes with those things make him therefore mentally unqualified to lead true America. Sometimes it is presented as dog whistle. Just as often it is stated outright, as you can see below the fold:
The Fox News contributor also veered into racial territory when attacking the president. When asked why Obama wouldn't impose a travel ban on flights from Africa, Ablow responded that Obama's "affinities, his affiliations are with them. Not us. That's what people seem unwilling to accept. He's their leader ... we don't have a president." He added: "We don't have a president who has the American people as his primary interest."
Our president is not our legitimate president, says the "medical expert" presented by one of the most powerful media outlets in the country;
he is African at heart. From a professional, medical standpoint, you see. And he wants to damage America, either directly or via inaction, because his inherited genetic blackness has sown in his heart the notion that America ought to be punished for slavery, and colonialism, and all the other sins the nation has committed against his
genetic ancestors.
Ablow started by explaining that from his perspective "as a psychiatrist," Obama thinks he's a "citizen and a leader of the world" who doesn't belong to one country and "perhaps least of all this country because he has it in for us as disappointing people. People who've been a scourge on the face of the Earth. And so for him to then say we're going to seal the borders and protect Americans when in my view, in his mind, if only unconsciously, he's thinking, 'Really? We're going to prevent folks suffering with illnesses from coming across the border flying into our airports when we have visited a plague of colonialism that has devastated much of the world, on the world? What is the fairness in that?' I believe Barack Obama is thinking."
He continued, speculating that the president believes America shouldn't be immune to Ebola when "others are suffering, when we are a bad people."
This is what "Dr." Keith Ablow does. This is why he regularly appears on the Fox News networks, giving his pseudoscientific, medical opinion of why the nation's first non-white president is captive to his blackness. He does this over and over again, on Fox News invitation, providing an ostensible "medical" rationale for the illegitimacy of the nation's leader expressed by all the other Fox hosts and pundits on all the other segments. He is the white-coat phrenologist asserting that the viewer's mistrust of their black leader is not racism, but the result of an obvious and dramatic flaw in the black man as a result of his lineage.
This, to put it bluntly, is repackaged Klan shit.
We've got people in America hopping the White House fence because they're unhappy with the president. We've got people opening fire on the White House because they have a grievance with the president. We've seen time and time again instances in which the persons railed against by the angry Fox News hosts as being destructive to America, whether they be abortion-providing doctors or little-known foundations, have been murdered or become the targets of attempted murders conducted by supposed patriots who have taken it upon themselves to rid the nation of those enemies. And we've got Fox News regularly, for years, inviting "Dr." Keith Ablow to weigh in with his supposedly professional opinion that the president of the United States is un-American and means to do the nation harm.
What, exactly, are we expecting to happen here? What is the desired effect of this discourse? How should a "patriot" react to the Fox News-broadcast theory that the opposition president of the United States, the first black president, may be intentionally trying to kill Americans with Ebola in order to vindicate the African people? Fox News, we ask directly: What is your intent with this rhetoric? We have established that Fox News as a media outlet considers declaring the president of the United States to have anti-American intent to be not merely within the bounds of acceptable discourse but a point needing to be pounded into the heads of viewers on a regular basis, and given a professional media sheen, and given the credence of medical diagnosis.
Have we—have you—reached that point? Is the intent of declaring that the nation's first non-white president is so beholden to his genetic African homeland that he seeks to do America harm from within the White House—is the intent of this rhetoric as obvious as it seems? Are you, as an institution, truly the media voice of this?