The dumbest show on television. No contest.
I see Fox News can, in fact,
get worse:
Pointing to a Fox News report, which claims that Bergdahl “converted to Islam, fraternized openly with his captors and declared himself a ‘mujahid,’” [...] Fox & Friends anchor Steve Doocy asked, “did we trade five Islamic warriors for one Islamic warrior?”
Your first problem is that you're basing that on a Fox News report. I didn't think even Fox News anchors were dumb enough to do that. The second problem is that accusing any POW of collaborating with the enemy while they are a POW is fraught with dangers, as examples of POWs professing to things in order to not be beaten or killed or tortured by their captors include Look It Up, You Compost-Brained Jackass. The third problem is that Steve Doocy should not be allowed to talk at all. The fourth problem is that Fox News bases all of this on the say-so of, and I shitteth thou not,
a former Iran-Contra crook.
The reports are rich in on-the-ground detail -- including the names and locations of the Haqqani commanders who ran the 200-man rotation used to guard the Idaho native -- and present the most detailed view yet of what Bergdahl's life over the past five years has been like. [...]
The group [that wrote the reports] is run by Duane R. ("Dewey") Clarridge, a former senior operations officer for the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1980s best known for having been indicted for lying to Congress about his role in the tangled set of events that became known as the Iran-Contra scandal.
The explicit premise of the "documents" are that Dewey's organization knew the day-by-day goings on of Berghdahl's imprisonment, including the names of the people he was with and where they were, including a 5-day long
escape by Berghdahl, for five years running and yet nobody went to
go get him. I'm calling bullshit on that one, though I am impressed that every single member of the Iran-Contra criminal enterprise has apparently managed to land lucrative extended careers in their preferred sub-genres of bullshitting.
But to Fox News, that's enough to declare an American POW to be a jihadist. Having a beard was enough to declare his father a jihadest as well, so the bar has apparently been lowered to "things your racist grandpa says after he's been drinking." Fox News: It's like a boot stomping on a human face, forever.
If you're CNN, though, you know how to keep it classy.
CNN did an entire segment today on how Bowe Bergdahl — an actual factual person — is just like Nicholas Brody in Homeland, a made up teevee show. [...]
“Their heads were both shaved so you immediately think, ‘Oh, OK, they must be the same person,’” CNN host Sally Kohn observed. “No, there’s interesting parallels, certainly. One, no doubt, is that the show Homeland originated in Israel, and Israel had real-life experience with these kinds of prisoner swaps.”
That
is fascinating. Bowe Bergdahl may secretly be a double agent because all bald people look alike. I can certainly see why that required an interview with the show's creator. And Bergdahl's captivity took place in a desert, so we should probably interview dead science-fiction author Frank Herbert as to the possibility that Bergdahl now knows how to ride a sandworm.
You know what's the worst part? That a week from now neither of these things will be the worst part.