It's almost uncanny how Fox & Friends can so reliably manage to be the stupidest of all possible punditry shows. The competition is fierce—I imagine Steve Doocy has to personally chug a gallon of tapioca semigloss every morning just to make sure he brings his 'A' game to the show—
but they pull it off.
A Fox News segment asked whether the "unarmed teen" description of Michael Brown is misleading and featured Fox contributor Linda Chavez arguing that such a description enhances racial fears and is an attempt to play the "race card."
Well, he was a "teen" and he was "unarmed" so the phrase would seem to be as straight-news as you can get, but I'll bite. Go on.
During the segment on Fox, on-screen text asked if the "unarmed teen" description of Michael Brown was misleading while [today's guest crazy person Linda Chavez] argued that Brown was an adult male "who is six foot four and weighs almost three hundred pounds":
So this is where we are. We've got Steve Doocy and company arguing that calling the unarmed teen an "unarmed teen" is misleading, because unarmed American black teenagers are their own dangerous weapons. You shouldn't call him "unarmed" because the unarmed black teen walking down the street is
armed with himself.
That's frequently the unspoken subtext when a black American teenager is shot, whether by police or random patriots or people who fancy themselves the underappreciated superheros of their neighborhood watch associations. As usual, Fox & Friends lacks the necessary subtlety to distinguish between preferred conservative text and subtext and just lets the "theory" rip out loud, complete with interviews and scare quotes. Look at those faces up there. They're pretty sure they're on to something, by jove, something big like gravity or a cure for cancer or figuring out why milk cartons have expiration dates printed on them.
An unarmed American teen should not be declared "unarmed" if Linda Chavez can't personally take him in a fight, I guess. And that's why America can't have nice things, and why Fox News continues to be a boil on a pox on a scab on a lamprey's cloaca.
