Rory McCarthy Does Lebanon
July 17, 2008
The headlines in the media about the Hizbullah-Israeli prisoner exchange have been quite sensational. In the following letter Ali Abunimah of the Electronic Intifada addresses some of the more outrageous language. (via Angry Arab)
Dear Mr. McCarthy,
On what basis do you write that:
“Five Lebanese prisoners, including the notorious murderer Samir Qantar, crossed free out of Israel today in a prisoner swap after the Hizbullah militant group handed over two black caskets containing the remains of two Israeli soldiers”?
Is it on the basis of the claims of the Israeli government that you refer to Mr. Quntar as a “notorious murderer”? I agree that if the Israeli account is true, then he would be a murderer. But Israel lies at every turn and its claims can never be believed without independent verification, as you should well know.
The New York Times reports today: “Mr. Kuntar, who was formally pardoned by Israel on Tuesday as part of the swap agreement, gave a different version of the night of the attack in his court testimony in 1980, excerpts of which were published for the first time on Monday in Yediot Aharonot, an Israeli newspaper. He told the court that Israeli gunfire had killed Mr. Haran as soldiers burst in to free him and that he did not see what happened to Mr. Haran’s daughter.”
Hey Joe
January 8, 2008
In the expanding stable of mediocrities who serve as columnists for the Guardian, Brian Whitaker is certainly not the worst. Six years back, he did write one decent article. His subject at the time were the Neocons and the various Israel lobby institutions. As any careerist hack would know, this doesn’t do one’s career much good. As a consequence, Whitaker has turned to a subject that guarantees popularity with the powers that be: bashing Islam. These days his average article is a collection of trite quotes gleaned from random blogs which then serve as evidence of whichever prevailing prejudice he has chosen to recycle in the article.
As a born again Orientalist, Whitaker’s new shtick is the argument that the West needs to civilize the Islamic world (how original!). In his present one he is speaking about ‘honour killings’. According to him, this practice is exclusive to the Muslim world. I had to shake my head as only recently I had discovered that the primary cause of death for women under 35 in UK is domestic violence. Whitaker does quote Joseph Massad pointing out that one third of all women killed in the US are at the hands of boyfriends and husbands, but he says this is a false comparison as this is not condoned in the West. Presumably it is condoned in the East? Perhaps Whitaker knows something about the place that I missed growing up in, of all places, Peshawar. But even in Peshawar I couldn’t miss one of Jimi Hendrix’s more famous songs, Hey Joe. Subject of the song? Honour killing.
Hey Joe – by Jimmy Hendrix
Our Man in Annapolis
November 28, 2007
Angry Arab reveals that the overly uncritical coverage of the farce in Annapolis by the Guardian correspondent Ian Black may have to do with the fact that his son serves in the Israeli Occupation army.
And now for some truth: IMEU has two Palestinians reporting on the realities the Guardian and others will not report.
The right to our land must be restored
Fareed Taamallah, IMEU, Nov 27, 2007This week in Annapolis, Maryland the United States government will host a conference between Palestinian and Israeli leaders to launch peace talks on a permanent agreement. A vital component of the peace proposals to be discussed involves exchanges of territory that would allow Israel to keep its West Bank “settlement blocs” while compensating Palestinians with land inside Israel.
Guardian’s Rendition
October 19, 2007
So Hollywood finally gets around to addressing an issue of grave contemporary relevance, and Guardian assigns the review to a half-wit wanker. The outcome is predictable: there is much obsessing with a single alleged weak link in the plot, and complete lack of comprehension regarding the larger issue. But what caught my eye is this passage:
It’s a structural device that implicitly carries the rational lesson that the US is not an island entire of itself, to paraphrase John Donne, that its actions have consequences for other people’s lives, and are themselves determined by factors outside its borders. It also asks the audience to consider that the natives of other countries have families and feelings, too. There’s a decency in this, but also a naivety and a moral equivalence…
Imagine that? Someone actually naive enough to ‘to consider that the natives of other countries have families and feelings, too’!
Tisdall’s Game
September 18, 2007
It is only months since the Guardian’s front page was turned into a conduit for Pentagon propaganda, leading to widespread condemnation. Here it is now inflicting another load of tosh on its unsuspecting readers: a piece celebrating the latest Israeli aggression against Syria. Bylined once again by pipsqueak scrivener Simon “Officials Say” Tisdall, it tells us Israel’s ‘real-time targets are, potentially, Iran’s nuclear, military and command facilities. And Israel, no longer content with trial runs up and down the Mediterranean, just demonstrated how easily it could hit them.’
So here we have a senior journalist for a liberal UK daily taking a whole article to speculate why Syria may or may not have been bombed by Israel without at any point addressing the more relevant question: does Israel have a right to take unilateral decisions to bomb other countries at will? Imagine for a second how the same news story would read, if lets say Iran were to make a similar demonstration of ‘how easily it could hit them’. Would Tisdall write an article speculating whether its Israel’s treatment of Palestinians that made Iran do it, or was it the belligerent rhetoric of its leaders? Was it its known arsenal of nuclear weapons, or was it its supply of weapons to the extremist settlers in the West Bank?
Update: ‘Officials Say’ Tisdall is back on the Comments pages of the Guardian, this time lamenting why US-Israeli threats against Iran have not been acknowledged with display of appropriate terror in Iran. He offers gems such as, ‘Britain’s sober view that Mr Kouchner had merely stated the obvious appears to have been dismissed, too.’ For one who feels there could be multiple justifications for Israel bombing another country, it must certainly be ‘obvious’ that there should be a war against Iran, as its leaders seem to have failed to show due deference to rattling US-Israeli sabers.
On the one hand this, on the other hand that
September 6, 2007
Norman Finkelstein has chosen to resign, and the cowardly adminsitraiton of DePaul University has tried to expiate its guilt by acknowledging his academic excellence. But check out how it is reported by this cretinous hack (Donald MacLeod of the Guardian). If the ‘one the one hand this, on the other hand that’ approach were not bad enough, he actually goes on to quote Alan Dershowitz! — the man whose academic fraud was exposed in a live debate on TV by Norman Finkelstein. And notice how it is Finkelstein who is ‘controversial’, not the man who plagiarized two whole chapters from Joan Peter’s hoax. I also noticed the interesting use of quotation marks: Finkelstein is presented as a critic of ‘the holocaust ”industry”‘, rather than ’the ”holocaust industry”‘, implying that he somehow is skeptical of the holocaust, rather than of the organizations which have been using it for ideological and financial gain. Either this MacLeod has not read anything Finkelstein has written, or he intends to mispresent and smear the author. And yeah, is it not nice when someone quotes ‘Little Green Footballs’ as proof of his fair-and-balancedness? But I demand consistency. If someone is going to quote Little Green Footballs for ‘balance’ evertime someone says something controversial like ‘human rights should be universal’, they should also quote the Flat Earth Society every time someone suggests the earth is round.
The Propaganda Machine
August 24, 2007
Jonathan Cook is an excellent journalist with phenomenal analytical skills. It is hardly a surprise then that that Israel’s cyber army should feel threatened by his reports. In the following preface to his latest article he describes his motivations behind writing for Guardians Comment is Free section. What is ironic — not to say amusing — is how the GIYUS crowd responded to his latest article just the way he described they do to anything critical of Israel. (Thanks Ann)
I published an article entitled “Kosher in Tehran” on the Guardian’s popular blogsite Comment is Free on 7 August 2007 (the same piece is archived on my own site as “Israel’s Jewish problem in Tehran”). Like most articles criticising Israel on Comment is Free, it — or rather I — was greeted with much abuse from the Israeli apologists who frequent the site. Which is one reason, I suppose, why it is worth publishing there. If the “hasbara” crowd are so determined to shout invective every time criticism of Israel appears on Comment is Free, then it is a sign either that the site is influential or, at the very least, that they think it is influential.
All of which encouraged me to air on the same site some simple observations about the purpose of hasbara and its effects on the freedom of journalists, particularly in the US, to publish news and views critical of Israel. That involved mentioning my own experiences at the hands of the Israel lobby and pointing out how a well-respected newspaper, the International Herald Tribune, caved in to such pressure. I do not believe my experience is unique, or special; in fact, I know it is not.
The results, again particularly in the US, are clear: the media is profoundly fearful of allowing articles seriously critical of Israel to be published, and any journalist who dares or manages to sneak such a piece past the editors is in for a career-damaging bashing afterwards. Obviously this is an assault of the highest order on freedom of speech in the West about our support for one country, Israel, and its involvement in regional confrontations that are increasingly having global consequences. It ensures that a whole realm of US-assisted foreign policy, conducted by Israel, is entirely off-limits to debate in the mainstream American media, even more so than US foreign policy itself.
(On a related side note: the original article mentioned here, “Kosher in Tehran”, was offered by the Institute of Middle East Understanding as an op-ed to all the main newspapers in the US. Every one of them rejected it. Interestingly, an obscure web page on the Camera site that published attacks on me over two articles I published in the Tribune in 2003 and 2004 shot up the Google ranking on a search of my name. Does that mean US newspaper editors, unsure of who I was, checked first to see if the Israel lobby had had a problem with me in the past? We will never know, of course.)
Unfortunately, and with no little irony, the editors at Comment is Free excised the last part of my article, in which I discussed my own experiences, even if briefly given the length restrictions on articles. Exceptionally, therefore, I am archiving the submitted article rather than the published one. Anyone who wants to read the version on Comment is Free can do so here.
Anyone interested to learn more about my run-in with the Israel lobby can find Camera’s letter of complaint to the Tribune in 2003 and my response here.
Unfortunately, as far I can see, Abraham Foxman’s pro forma letter on the Anti-Defamation League’s website is no longer available in its archives.
My letter responding to the “largest mailbag in the Tribune’s history”, as the comment editor told me at the time, over the 2004 story can be found here.
Now for Cook’s description of The Propaganda Machine.
It is an honour of a kind, I suppose, to briefly have the most active thread on the Comment is free site. But not much of one when 95% of the posts rarely rose above the level of vitriolic name-calling. The posters probably know that by now I am immune to playground taunts of “scum” and “Nazi”, but the abuse, I suspect, is meant more as a warning to others who might criticise Israel. Keep quite - or else.Volcanic outbursts of hatred on Cif greet anyone who objects to Israel’s policies: in my case, I sinned by pointing out that its leaders have turned the small community of Jews in Tehran into pawns in a struggle to persuade the world that Iran is a genocidal threat to world Jewry. My point was that Israel’s concern is entirely hollow. It simply wants to mobilise support for an attack on Iran, either by itself or the US.Some posters to this site seem to be aware of the organised nature of these critic-bashing campaigns. They note that sites like giyus.org rally the faithful to the cause. But most posters are probably not aware that giyus and its ilk are only the tip of a much larger effort called “hasbara” by Israel and its supporters. Usually the word is translated as “advocacy for Israel”. I call it by its proper name: propaganda.
The main goal of hasbara is constantly to disseminate good news about Israel, largely independent of whether the news is true or not, in the hope that over time a benevolent image of Israel will be reinforced. Here’s an example: in 2000 it was reported that an Israeli court ruling had ended the country’s system of land apartheid, a legally enforced territorial separation that keeps Jewish and Arab citizens apart in most of country. To this day apologists cite this ruling as proof of equality in Israel, even though the decision only applied to one Arab family, has yet to be enforced, and the Israeli parliament is currently passing legislation to make sure it never is.
But the charm offensive is only the upside of their work. The downside is, as Cif posters know well, a relentless campaign to target, discredit and silence critics of Israel. It can take many forms, not only name-calling. I was intrigued to see several posters thought I had no right to criticise Israel because my wife is an Israeli citizen, though - and this is presumably her and my offence - she also happens to be a Palestinian. They would have a field day - but fail to see their own double standards - were I to suggest that only non-Jews be allowed to apologise for Israel.
A few posters made what appeared to be a substantive point: why had I failed to note that, while today 25,000 Jews live in Tehran, another 80,000 have fled? But look closer and the case crumbles. The overwhelming majority of those 80,000 Jews left in the wake of the country’s Islamic revolution in 1979 - that is, nearly 30 years ago. They are irrelevant to Israel’s current claims that the Iranian leadership is preparing to commit a genocide against the Jews. In any case, most of those fleeing Jews left because they were middle class and secular and saw no future in an Islamic state, despite reassurances from Ayatollah Khomeini that they would left in peace. In other words, they left - like many other Iranians - for economic reasons, not political or religious ones.
Other posters simply lied, in the great tradition of hasbara. Several suggested I had written that Rafik Hariri was killed by Israel. I hadn’t, and you can check my website to be sure. I had also apparently written that the two Israeli soldiers killed in a Hizbullah operation last year were caught on Lebanese soil. Again a search failed to find the story. No matter. Truth is not what hasbara is about.
And if all this fails to discredit a critic of Israel, simply label him an anti-semite, and the argument can be closed. Game, set and match.
I am not sure if any other country or cause encourages this kind of mainly voluntary propaganda work, but I am sure that no other country or cause has the human resources that Israel can rely on to carry it out. There are thousands of people sitting at their computers ready to pounce. (I know because I have received abusive emails from them, unless it’s just a handful with thousands of different email addresses.) They do not need orders or much guidance. They do it because they love Israel and see it as part of their life’s work to protect Israel’s image.
Doubtless, they believe what they write too. If you have been raised to live in constant fear of anti-semitism, and to see an anti-semitic impulse lurking in the recessses of every non-Jewish mind (an observation that is often publicly made in the Israeli and American media but less often here), then what other motive could someone like me have but anti-semitism for writing what I do? The logic is satisfyingly circular.
But Cif posters may be less aware of how the rest of the Israel lobby works. Giyus is, in fact, the most amateurish part of its operation. These are the “shock troops” on the front line. They overwhelm by force of numbers only. Far more effective are the lobby’s “snipers”. They pick off anyone the shock troops have failed to frighten off and whose voice might be heard in places where it matters: particularly in the American media and on US campuses. Tony Judt has recently felt their ire, as have Professors Walt and Mearsheimer.
A separate lobby system, particularly Aipac, is dedicated to intimidating elected American representatives. This obsession with preserving Israel’s image in the US is not surprising: the country’s fate as an occupying, military power in the Middle East will, after all, be decided in Washington. In the main, the professional Israel lobby cares little about what is said in the European media, although as British newspaper websites like the Guardian start to penetrate the other side of the Atlantic that is changing. There may yet come a day when we will miss the abusive giyus crowd.
The professional Israel lobby have respectable names like Camera (the Committee for Accuracy in Middle Reporting in America), Honest Reporting and the Anti-Defamation League.
Camera has a section dedicated to “naming and shaming” some of the most influential journalists writing about the Middle East. You’ll find a page dedicated to the Guardian’s former Jerusalem correspondent, Chris McGreal, after he made the ultimate faux pas of comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa, a country he knows intimately. There are many who share the honour: the Independent’s Donald MacIntyre, Tim McGirk of Time magazine, Molly Moore of the Washington Post, Jim Muir and Kylie Morris of the BBC, Greg Myre and Neil MacFarquhar of the New York Times. And that’s just a fraction of those whose surname begins with M.
Before, the giyus crowd get to work, let me also point out that once I too was on the Camera list, during a period when I contributed op-eds to the International Herald Tribune. On a couple of occasions the Tribune received the largest mailbags in its history in response to my commentaries. Another small honour, I suppose. There was no doubt the letter-writing was organised: the Anti-Defamation League’s head, Abraham Foxman, kindly provided less imaginative writers with a pro forma letter on the front page of its website denouncing me.
When I stood my ground, the Tribune decided I was too hot to handle. Many writers presumably just buckle under. A couple of entries on Camera is enough to make most US journalists extremely wary of a third “exposure”.
So how will this post be received? What strategy will be used to discredit me?
The professional hasbarists – the snipers — will probably ignore my post. Why stir over this single piece in a chaotic blog on the peripheries of American discourse. Better not to give me and my writing the oxygen of publicity.
What about the amateur hasbarists? Will they bite their lip? I doubt it. Anyone who tries to expose the workings of the Israel lobby is immediately accused of claiming that the Jews are an all-powerful cabal. (For the record, I’m not: I just believe people who have power tend to abuse it, be it the Israel lobby, the National Rifle Association or the US medical lobby.)
Nonetheless, the hasbarists will be itching to claim that my piece is another Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious forged document that suggested the Jews were behind a worldwide conspiracy. Doubtless they will find other ways to discredit me too, ways I cannot even begin to imagine. Let them commence…
Guardian’s Mixed-up Reaction to Arabs’ Clear Rejection
July 20, 2007
I don’t know where New Labour rag, the Guardian, finds the nitwits who write headlines for its news articles. So here we have a headline, “Mixed reaction in Middle East as Blair makes debut as envoy“, for an article reporting the enthusiastic embrace of the poodle by one party, whereas the other — the Arabs — unanimously disapproves. That is not a mixed reaction, it is a clearcut affirmation of a decidedly partisan choice from both parties to the conflict. Imagine a headline, ‘Mixed reaction in Europe as Nazi Germany occupies France’: after all, all German’s embraced the move, whereas everyone else disapproved.
I am not sure what is so mixed about the following reactions:
“George Bush wanted to reward Blair for his hostility to the Arabs,” said Galal Nassar in Egypt’s Al-Ahram Weekly. “In backing Bush’s nominee the Quartet has endorsed a disastrous choice.” Columnist Rami Khouri wrote in Beirut’s Daily Star: “If there is an award for the combined negative credibility of an institution plus an individual, the Quartet and Blair should be its first recipients. Appointing Tony Blair as special envoy for Arab-Israeli peace is something like appointing the Emperor Nero to be the chief fireman of Rome.”
Pilger’s ten-ton hammer comes crashing down on the edifice of lies and subterfuge erected by the New Labour establishment to reveal a mass of dead and mutilated bodies that threaten to set the world on a path of perpetual strife.
Just as the London bombs in the summer of 2005 were Blair’s bombs, the inevitable consequence of his government’s lawless attack on Iraq, so the potential bombs in the summer of 2007 are Brown’s bombs.
Gordon Brown, Blair’s successor as prime minister, has been an unerring supporter of the unprovoked bloodbath whose victims now equal those of the Rwandan genocide, according to the American scientist who led the 2006 Johns Hopkins School of Public Health survey of civilian dead in Iraq. While Tony Blair sought to discredit this study, British government scientists secretly praised it as “tried and tested” and an “underestimation of mortality”. The “underestimation” was 655,000 men, women and children. That is now approaching a million. It is the crime of the century.
In his first day’s address outside 10 Downing Street and subsequently to Parliament, Brown paid not even lip service to those who would be alive today had his government – and it was his government as much as Blair’s – not joined Bush in a slaughter justified with demonstrable lies. He said nothing, not a word.
He said nothing about the added thousands of Iraqi children whose deaths from preventable disease have doubled since the invasion, caused by the wilful destruction of sanitation and water purification plants. He said nothing about hospital patients who die every day for want of equipment as basic as a syringe. He said nothing about the greatest refugee flight since the Palestinians’ Naqba. He said nothing about his government’s defeat in Afghanistan, and how the British army and its Nato allies are killing civilians, including whole families. Typically, on 29 June, British forces called in air strikes on a village, reportedly bombing to death 45 innocent people – almost as many as the number bombed to death in London in July 2005. Compare the reaction, or rather the silence. They were only Muslims. And Muslims are the world’s most numerous victims of a terrorism whose main sources are Washington, Tel Aviv and London.
And he said nothing about his government’s role in Afghanistan’s restoration as the world’s biggest source of opium, a direct result of the invasion of 2001. Any dealer on the streets of Glasgow will have the stuff, straight from warlords paid off by the CIA and in whose name British soldiers are killing and dying pointlessly.
He said nothing about stopping any of this. Not a word. Not a hint.
Do the dead laugh? In the new Prime Minister’s little list of priorities was “extend[ing] the British way of life”.
The paymaster of the greatest British foreign policy disaster of the modern era, Brown could not even speak its name, let alone meet the military families that waited to speak to him. Three British soldiers were killed on his first day.
Has there been anything like the tsunami of unction that has engulfed the departure of Blair and the elevation of Brown? Yes, there has. Think back a decade. Blair, wrote Hugo Young of the Guardian, “wants to create a world none of us has known, where the laws of political gravity are overturned”, one where “ideology has surrendered entirely to ‘values’”. The new chancellor, effused the Observer, would “announce the most radical welfare Budget since the Second World war”.
The “values” were fake and so was the new deal. One media-managed stunt followed another as Brown delighted the stock market and comforted the very rich and celebrated the empire, and ignored the longing of the British electorate for a restoration of public services so badly damaged by Margaret Thatcher. One of the first decisions by Harriet Harman, Blair’s first social security secretary and a declared feminist, was to abolish the single parents’ welfare premium and benefit, in spite of her pledge to the House of Commons that Labour opposed these impoverishing Tory-inspired cuts. Today, Harman is Brown’s deputy party leader and, like all of the “new faces” around the cabinet table with “plans to heal old wounds” (the Guardian), she voted for an invasion that has destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of women.
Some feminism.And when Blair finally left, those MPs who stood and gave him a standing ovation finally certified parliament as a place of minimal consequence to British democracy. The courtiers who reported this disgrace with Richard Dimbleby royal-occasion reverence are flecked with the blood spilled by the second-rate actor and first-rate criminal. They now scramble for the latest police press release. That the profane absurdity of the going of Blair and the silence and compliance of Brown – political twins regardless of their schoolboy spats – may well have provoked the attacks on London and Glasgow is of no interest. While the crime of the century endures, there almost certainly will be others.
Shame.
Guardian Does GOP Presidential Debates
June 5, 2007
In his piece on the last GOP presidential debate, the indefatigable Alexander Cockburn had observed,
[Ron] Paul was asked if 9-11 changed anything. US foreign policy, he answered, was a “major contributing factor. Have you ever read the reasons they attacked us? They attacked us because we’ve been over there; we’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We’ve been in the Middle East. So right now we’re building an embassy in Iraq that’s bigger than the Vatican. We’re building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting.
Next came the question, had the US invited the attacks. “I’m suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it, and they are delighted that we’re over there because Osama bin Laden has said, ‘I am glad you’re over on our sand because we can target you so much easier.’”
Rudy Giuliani saw his chance.”That’s an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I’ve heard that before, and I’ve heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th.” There were howls of approval for Giuliani though in fact Paul hadn’t said anything about an invitation.
In the post-debate commentaries Giuliani was hailed for his coup and Paul ridiculed as a nut and apologist for terror. There were demands he be thrown out of upcoming presidential debates. But even as Fox’s pundits tossed Paul on their horns, the instant poll totted up the numbers. Of the 40,000 viewers expressing an opinion, 29 per cent reckoned that Massachusetts governor (and Mormon) Mitt Romney had done best. Second came Ron Paul, with 25 per cent, ahead of Giuliani with 19 per cent. The most pro-war of the lot, McCain, got 5 per cent.
This is the second time Paul has scored big in such debates, and it points to a potential crisis of credibility for both the Republican and Democratic Parties. A majority of Americans–65 per cent and up–hate the war in Iraq and think the US troops should leave. But the leading candidates from both parties fence-straddle at best, and also parrot Giuliani on the “war on terror”. Hence the popularity of Ron Paul, as soon as he gets a national venue.
Richard Adams, establishment hack for New Labour rag, Guardian, is covering the latest GOP presidential debate, and he describes Paul, the only antiwar candidate in the following manner:
Ron Paul: Barely even a Republican except in name, this congressman has a loyal band of internet fans. Supports various crazy ideas, like abolishing tax. Got smacked around by Giuliani last time.
I was compelled to write him the following letter:
Of Ron Paul you write he is “barely even a Republican except in name, this congressman has a loyal band of internet fans.” You mean surfers such as Michael Scheuer, the former CIA head of counterterrorism, or the 25% of Fox News (!) viewers who cast more votes in his favour than in Giulianis?
“Supports various crazy ideas, like abolishing tax.” Something tells me you really meant to say “crazy ideas, like withdrawing from Iraq”. Since I don’t hear you saying anything like “he supports crazy ideas, like continiung to bomb Iraq”, or “torturing people”, which is true of nearly every other candidate in the race.
“Got smacked around by Giuliani last time.” Would that be when he said 9/11 was the predictable consequence of US policies in the region? Guess who else shares that view? The aforementioned Michael Scheuer, the respected historian Chalmers Johnson et al. But ’smacked around’ is an interesting observation. Like the rest of the banalities you recycle, I suspect you are merely reproducing commentary you gleaned off US mainstream media. But considering Paul received higher grades from even the rabidly right-wing Fox audience, wouldn’t you say it is a rather curious way to be rewarded for being ’smacked down’? Pathetic.
