Judge Jeanine Pirro of Fox News went ballistic over the Middle East last week:
I've told you that you need to be afraid because they are coming for you (points at camera). The ISIS assault, the Islamic state of Iraq and Syria signals the beginning of the "Reverse Crusade." They ARE coming for us. To them, WE are the Infidels. But I for one am not willing to let one more American die or come home with fewer limbs from that part of the world. Americans have shed enough blood there.
My resolution? Air strikes. Bomb them! Bomb them! Keep Bombing them again and again, and I don't care how long it takes. Just take out ISIS. Take out their convoys. Take out those troops!
And even though our President says he "didn't know" - The TOLD us they were coming for us! The head of this band of savages, Abu al-Bagdadi, was released by the Obama Administration and started ISIS one year later in 2010.
. . . ISIS is a fanatical religious terrorist organization. And if you think they are nothing more than rag-tag rebels, you are WRONG!!! They are a sophisticated band of militants who add to their ranks by emptying out jails...
. . . Now, Mr. President, you may see yourself as a war hero. The truth? There has been a 60 percent increase in radical Islamist terrorism since you’ve been in office. And you keep letting these guys out! Like the Bergdahl trade and the five terrorists, you didn’t have the balls to try in GITMO or federal court. You were simply clueless. A paper tiger who only knows how to cut and run!
Bob Cesca on The Daily Banter described Pirro's rant quite well:
Pirro’s five-minute tirade had everything: finger-wagging, fear-mongering, misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, the phrase “cut and run” and, naturally, ball-shaming. It’s a cocktail of Obama Derangement Syndrome delivered with laser-like precision directly into the outrage cortexes of typical Fox News viewers, likely inducing octogenarian white-guy erections with tensile strengths not experienced since Don Ameche, Wilford Brimley and Hume Cronyn splashed around in that magical pool in Cocoon.
GrafZeppelin127 on Daily Kos explained it as "The Truman Show In Reverse" - referring to the Jim Carrey movie about a man whose whole life has been filmed for reality TV
What we are watching on that YouTube video embedded above, what Bob Cesca describes today on his blog, is an IMPROV ACT. It is nothing more or less than a scene in an elaborate, ongoing, endless, perpetual, well-funded, well-orchestrated, non-stop 24/7 production of improvisational theatre, in which the performers get to make up the story as they go along and perform it for the audience. The person called "Jeanine Pirro" that we see and hear on the TV screen, is an actress, a character in a play. This is not a real person saying real things. She's an actress in character doing a performance piece.
. . . The difference between "The Truman Show" as portrayed in the movie and what we see on "Fox News" every day (such as the ugly fact-challenged rant by this character named "Jeanine Pirro" in the video above) is that Truman himself is not on the show. The audience does not tune in to watch Truman and see what happens; the audience is Truman. They don't know that they're watching improv. Just as Truman can't tell the difference between actors/characters and real people, Fox's audience in large part can't tell the difference between an improv act called "News," and news.
One strong response to this fire-breathing fear-mongering came from Russell Brand, a British comedian who took Pirro and Fox News to the woodshed over this tirade with a video entitled "Is Fox News More Dangerous Than Isis?". Towards the end, as he watches Pirro heap abuse on President Obama, even referring to his "b*alls," Brand says she reminds him of a dominatrix yelling at a masochist victim in a porn movie. Gives new meaning to the phrase "fear porn" to describe the nonsense Fox spews into the atmosphere day after day just to frighten their paranoid conspiracy-crazed viewers.
She called them "Infidels"...Don't try to counter religious extremism with religious extremism!
. . . Imagine living with this woman. 'Get in there and cook my dinner! Cook it and cook it again! I don't care how long it takes!' . . . 'I will punch you and punch you again!'
. . . And don't call your fellow human beings savages.... Give aid for the refugees in the region. Try and help them and stabilize their region, and try to build infrastructure. Not the bombing, bombing, bombing system.
~ Russell Brand
From Huffington Post
Brand fired back. "(Fox News is) ... a fanatical terrorist propagandist organization. This isn't reasonable, is it? Like the way she's talking? 'Bomb them! Bomb them!' She's worse ... She's the savage, she's totally espousing savage values."
"It's invective, just incendiary language, just volatile combative, angry language. That - I'm not being sensational - that is more dangerous than ISIS," he added. "That's attitude. That's far-reaching. That's affecting millions and millions of people."
Pundits at Fox pushed back and took Pirro's side:
From Washington Post
This is how Eric Bolling, co-host of the marvelous roundtable program “The Five,” played Brand’s rant: “First up, actor, musician and political provocateur Russell Brand has issues with Fox News and our own Judge Jeanine Pirro. Brand goes bananas in a ten-minute rambling and at times incoherent rant, comparing Fox News to the radical terror group ISIS.”
. . . During the discussion on “Hannity,” for example, Fox News’s own Geraldo Rivera said this: “But furthermore, where are the beheaded bodies here at Fox News? That kind of hyperbole only undermines any argument he has.”
When you’re disavowing studio decapitations, you’ve lost the PR war.
