I’m sure that once Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes see this video, they’re both going to have stool in their blood. You see, right-wing automatons like this numbskull from Alaska only go on Fox to be worshipped, never questioned, and when a normally housebroken Republican poodle like Chris Wallace accidentally commits a wee bit of journalism, going so far as to point out that Miller “didn’t answer my question,” well, I expect that ol’ dog to be dropped off at a Korean restaurant sooner rather than later. Bad poodle.
Of course, this is Fox, so the other bonkers idea Miller advances, that Alaska, the freeloadingest state in the Union, which hands out checks instead of tax bills to its “citizens,” is some sort of paragon of Randian producerism is allowed to be uttered by this vacant corporate toady without comment means that Wallace might be let off with a mere rolled-up newspaper, this time. (Not the Wall Street Journal, which is so thin these days it wouldn’t scare a chihuahua…) But clearly, even at News Corp, this sort of thing could get out of hand, so I doubt it will continue. Maybe Wallace was still peeved that Sarah Palin’s other darling, Christine (salt peter) O’Donnell, blew off his show at the last moment, or maybe he is a bit ashamed at his previous work, but nonetheless he tosses a bit of a monkey wrench into Fox’s plans for 2010, which is to get as many crazies into congress as humanly possible by offering them unfiltered access to the dumbest people in America. The poorly spelled, all-caps hate mail must be just pouring in after this little segment.
Alas, Wallace’s weak but still surprising attempt to point out that a country with record poverty and unemployment has some obligation not to let 50 million people starve is not the sort of thing that will go over big with Fox’s comfortably retired audience, but it still highlights a bit of a quandary for right-wing journalists, even amongst avowed shills like Wallace. (Revealingly, in another Sunday interview with Karl Rove, Wallace doesn’t blink when Rove says, “We all want a Republican congress, and then lamely corrects himself, changing “we” to “I” and convincing no one… Maybe that embarrassing honesty set Chris off.) Perhaps somewhere lurking within the black heart of Rove and the sold soul of Wallace, there is a certain realization that going too far to the right might make America an uncomfortable place, even for the undeserving rich like themselves; you know what a good security detail costs these days? 50 million desperate poor people could get uppity, and all, especially when your lifelong goal is to get the tax man off your back and onto theirs, but quietly.
In the end, as others have pointed out, the problem with the tea party isn’t their goals, which are widely shared by the media elite, but their lack of subterfuge in declaring them. It’s okay to publicly deride the long term unemployed, who outnumber available jobs by at least five times, as lazy and insufficiently humble to accept slave wages in the discount retail industry, but it’s quite another to dismiss the very existence of unemployment insurance as something our powdered-wig Founders never envisioned at a time when our whole GDP was not enough to, say, buy a Senate seat in California. 2010 is not 1795, nor even 1900. The 20th century did happen, no matter how dejected poor little rich Glenn Beck is about it.
On some level, I suspect that what Wallace was trying to delicately convey to Miller was the usual message, that some things mustn’t be said in front of the servants, a rule on which the very existence of the American Right depends. Their hero, the doddering Ronald Reagan, only called unemployment insurance “prepaid vacation for freeloaders” well before he entered national politics; someone must have later patiently explained to him that it was the freeloaders themselves who prepaid it, and anyway it usually stopped the Real People, that is the rich, from losing too much money in the inevitable crashes they’re always causing.
I expect that the result of this interview will be that Miller will join Palin, O’Donnell, Angle, Paul, and on and on in petulantly refusing to grant any interviews whatsoever, and try to run their campaigns entirely through Facebook and the Koch brothers, bypassing even Fox, especially when it gets all tough on Sundays, and that would be a shame…. For a second there, we got some “real journalism” out of Fox News, and that’s saying something.