Good Riddance: Roger Ailes (1940-2017)

Roger Ailes is dead.  [Spit].  Good. 


Ailes ruined America to the greatest possible extent that he could.  If he could ruin it more, he would have.  Gladly. 


The longtime fascist hatchet man for Nixon and Reagan and H.W. Bush was one of the people who saw the opening when Reagan had the Fairness Doctrine removed.  That doctrine had been in place since the dawn of television (1949).  It "required the holders of broadcast licenses both to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was — in the Commission's view — honest, equitable, and balanced." 


Screw that, right?  If people hear both sides of the story, they will never choose the fascist side.  Having that doctrine in place forced even the scummiest of right wing blackhearts to try to seem rational.  Not any more.


Ailes built Fox News to tell right wing lies on a 24-/7/365 basis.  He polluted the American voting public with a perspective that was pure greed and hate.  He made the American spirit smaller, meaner, uglier, and more violent.  He made people believe that immigrants were sub-human.  He got disaffected whites to vote for garbage like the Current Leader - totally against their actual interest.


His professional liars pushed stories that made their viewers believe total unabashed falsehoods.  Viewers who were raised during the Fairness Doctrine era were defenseless against Ailes' army of charlatans.  Of course you believed what the News Anchor said.  Why wouldn't you?  Utter scumbag Brit Hume sounded like Walter Cronkite.  The only difference is that Cronkite never knowingly lied, and Hume never knowingly told the truth. 


Because American political discourse had always been a 'he-said-she-said' proposition, that's how news continued to be reported.  But one side started to be convenient fiction devoid of actual facts.  The Fox News version became complete constant fiction of the most perverse sort. 


The entire economics story of every Fox News liar has always been 'tax cuts for the wealthy will solve everything.'  It's an economic theory that has proven wrong everywhere it has been tried.  It doesn't work in fact and it doesn't work in theory.  But no matter what the problem - literally - tax cuts for the rich are the answer according to the far right mythology that Ailes pimped.  It applied are the same snake oil remedy for deficits as for surpluses.  When W. Bush showed up, he had Clinton budget surpluses to use - so he handed the money to the rich in tax cuts.  On his way to tanking the world economy, the budget deficits W. rang up had only one solution:  tax cuts for the rich. 


One of the most damnable things Ailes did was to order poor whites to reject Obamacare.  Akthough it's hard to choose a nadir for the author of the Willie Horton ad.  People who desperately needed the health care that the ACA provides were lied to over and over and over again for most of a decade - and even longer, to Bill Clinton's abortive efforts to provide a health care.  Even as the ACA worked - and continues to work - the falsehood machine told people it was failing and stealing their money and precious bodily fluids.  . 



Can you imagine driving people who need health care - people who will die early and painfully without it - to oppose their own salvation?  And doing it to preserve the profits of the greed-machine private health care firms?  What sort of monster would do such a thing?


Roger Ailes.  His legacy is an American voting public who can no longer act as responsible citizens.  Americans are now willing to embrace any crazy Nazi fascist racist crap that's shoved at them. 


I'm convinced that the American Leader is a nihilist.  I don't think he believes in anything at all.  And because his nihilism is equaled only by his narcissism he has put America in a constant cycle of crisis since the day he lost the presidential election.  But he's only there because of Ailes.


Congress can thank Ailes for their Gerrymandered majorities.  Those majorities are inept and unable to govern - because they're still using Ailes playbook:  lie.  Lie all the time and people will fall into line eventually.  But when elected politicians try to fulfill promises that were always counter to provable reality, the whole system fails.


That's what we're seeing today.  The system is crumbling because every federal leader has been put in place by telling demonstrable falsehoods and cheating on elections. 


They can't do tax cuts and deficit reduction at the same time.  No matter how many times they promise it, it's never going to be true.  If Speaker Ryan can pass his draconian joke of a budget, the deficit will explode because he gave it all away to the rich. 


Try this experiment:  take all the money you can get your hands on - cash in your retirement savings and take a second and third mortgage out on your house.   Okay?  Good.  Now give it away to rich people.  That's a Ryan budget.  And when you can't pay your bills or feed your kids, it's because you are irresponsible. 
He created an ocean of fear.  The message was always the same - be afraid.  Fear your African-American neighbors.  Fear the Muslim world.  Fear anyone not in our tribe.  Fear is a great motivator.  After 9-11, fear became the currency of American politics, stoked by Fox and the rest of the extreme right.
None of that ever brought him down.  It was the sexual harassment he promoted and committed in his organization that finally forced him out.  But not before he had warped the voting public into a group that would vote for a man caught on tape bragging about his sexual assaults and misogyny. 


People believe that stuff and vote for shitheads like Ryan and Leader because of Ailes. 


Fuck him.