IMPEACH TRUMP RUMORS - DIRTY DEMOCRAT POLITRICKS

IMPEACH TRUMP RUMORS - DIRTY DEMOCRAT POLITRICKS:

OBAMA & DEM LEADERS WANT TRUMP IMPEACHED.

THEY'RE WORKING BEHIND SCENES WITH SOROS TO DISCREDIT TRUMP'S ADMINISTRATION.

PRAY FOR TRUMP TO SUCCEED NOT FAIL.


Sources: Fox News, NBC, Radar Online, National Enquirer, YouTube


****** Nancy Pelosi cools Trump impeachment


Impeach fever: “When and if he breaks the law, that is when something like that will come up”
Democrats in Congress are under immense pressure to resist President Donald Trump at every turn, with a historic 40 percent of Americans already clamoring for the new president to be impeached. But the top Democrat in the House, Nancy Pelosi, is ruling out the extreme measure — at least for now.

At a Monday news conference with the top Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee, the California Democrat took steps to distance the party’s leadership from the comments of a fellow Democratic congresswoman: Maxine Waters of Los Angeles. On Friday Waters had said it was her “greatest desire” to lead Trump “right into impeachment.”

On Monday, Waters clarified her comments without backing down. “I have not called for the impeachment yet,” Waters said. “He’s doing it himself.”

She further explained: “Let me just say the statement I made was a statement in response to questions and pleas that I am getting from many citizens across this country: What are we going to do?”:

How can a president, who is acting in the manner that he’s acting, whether he’s talking about the travel ban, the way that he’s talking to Muslims or whether he’s talking about his relationship to Putin and the Kremlin — and knowing that they have hacked our [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee], DNC and knowing that he is responsible for supplying the bombs that killed innocent children and families in, um – in, um – yeah, in Aleppo.

Waters continued:

And the fact that he is wrapping his arms around Putin while Putin is continuing to advance into Crimea — I think that he is leading himself into that kind of position where folks will begin to ask, what are we going to do? And the answer is going to be, eventually, we’ve got to do something about him. We cannot continue to have a president who’s acting in this manner. It’s dangerous to the United States of America.

Trump may dismiss the concerns of Waters’ California constituents as being just as “illegal” as their votes, the desire to push him out of office is hardly a fringe notion.

More than a third of the country wishes to see the president impeached, according to a national poll released late last week. This 40 percent of Americans who said they want to see Trump removed from office is greater than the 35 percent desiring to see him go a week prior to this.

to the inauguration, freshman Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat, said in an interview that he expected Trump to head down the impeachment path.

“But I would say if you were taking odds, this president appears to be on a course in which he is going to be engaged in a lot of impeachable activities,” Raskin said.

In the two weeks since Trump’s inauguration, Democrats have struggled to contend with the Republican president and Congress while satisfying a swelling demand from their progressive base to resist Trump’s actions in total.

Pelosi made clear on Monday that, despite the newly elected president’s “reckless” and seemingly unpopular actions during his first weeks in office, they are “not grounds” for impeachment. “I’m not here to talk about impeachment today,” she told the gathered reporters shortly after Waters made her comments. “Any of the things that the congresswoman said are grounds for displeasure and unease in the public about the performance of this president, who has acted in a way that is strategically incoherent, that is incompetent, that is reckless.” But, Pelosi added, “That is not grounds for impeachment.”

Pelosi continued, “When and if he breaks the law, that is when something like that would come up.” Of course, since they are outnumbered by Republicans in both the House and Senate, Democrats would have an uphill battle if they sought to impeach Trump.

The House minority leader’s comments came after a Sunday appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in which she indicated Democrats won’t try to blindly obstruct the Trump administration in the way Republicans did to former president Barack Obama.

“If we can talk about job creation and infrastructure legislation, that’s a real infrastructure bill and not a tax break for his rich friends, then there’s something we can talk about,” she said. “If we can talk about work and family balance, about child care and early childhood education, paid sick leave,” let’s see where that takes things.

HILLARY CLINTON'S 2016 VP PICK IS KASIM REED?? BIG MISTAKE (RUMORS)

HILLARY CLINTON'S 2016 VP PICK IS KASIM REED?? BIG MISTAKE (RUMORS)

BETTER CHOICES:  JULIAN CASTRO OR ELIZABETH WARREN

Sources: AJC, 11Alive, WSB, YouTube

There are political rumors floating that 2016 Democrat presidential Frontrunner HILLARY CLINTON has added Atlanta Mayor KASIM REED to her VP pick shortlist.

If this rumor has legs or any credibility, I want to scream from the top of my lungs to Hillary's campaign staff, "NO!"

Before anyone takes this rumor seriously, I would encourage you to visit the city of Atlanta and risk driving over a death-defying Pothole.

Visit Atlanta and stuff your mouth with some Greasy, Ghetto fare.

By the way where are Atlanta's FARMERS MARKETS in the BLACK communities??

Finally I want to encourage you to travel through Atlanta's Hartsfield Airport and experienced being treated like Dirt by Atlanta's arrogant, extremely rude TSA agents who are arrogant & rude by choice.

Atlanta needs more Diversity as in WHITE voters and a WHITE Mayor to cancel out years of Complacent leadership practiced by BLACK leaders who have neglected their constituents.

Hillary Clinton choosing Kasim Reed as her VP is a long shot at this stage in the game.

A better choice would be someone like JULIAN CASTRO or ELIZABETH WARREN.

Kasim Reed would be a good fit for Congress one day but as a VP, let's just say he is not ready yet for politics on such a grand scale national level.

Kasim Reed is a skilled politician but he is NOT on Obama's level......yet.

**** Is Kasim Reed in the running to be vice president?

Hillary Clinton hasn’t locked up the Democratic nomination yet, but rumors are swirling already about her possible vice presidential pick. And one of the names that’s floating out there, at least among some in the local punditry class, is that of Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed.

A local television crew on Wednesday asked the two-term Atlanta mayor, who appeared with Clinton at a campaign event last week, whether he’s been approached. He answered it the way virtually any politician would:

I don’t have any comment on that. I don’t know anything about it. The only thing I’m focused on is being the mayor of the city of Atlanta and going out and doing a great job for Secretary Clinton and making sure she’s the next president. I feel about this campaign the way I felt in 2012 when President Obama was running.

I don’t think any American can sit and watch what is going on in our national discourse and not want to get involved on one side or the other. We will hash it out and pick a president. I haven’t been asked to be considered for the vice presidency. I don’t know anything about that. The only thing I’m focused on is being mayor.

Recall, too, that Sen. David Perdue has answered similar questions about the possibility of being a running mate.

Reed also told our AJC colleague Scott Trubey that Democrats should count on Donald Trump to be the GOP nominee.

“I expect Mr. Trump to be the nominee unless they engineer a way to take the nomination from him. He’s either going to be the nominee or there are going to be a lot of people who voted for him that are going to have a lot of frustration because to avoid him being the nominee they are going to have to engineer a way to prevent him from getting it.”

I DON'T WEAR WIGS OR EXTENSIONS (NATURAL HAIR)

I DON'T WEAR WIGS OR EXTENSIONS

Source:  YouTube

Since there have been some inquiries and curiosity as to whether or not I wear Wigs and Extensions, I decided to weigh in and dispel all rumors.

No I have never worn wigs or extensions.

No I have never used Perms or Relaxers on my hair.

Yes the hair on my head is all my natural hair.

BILL COSBY'S LUSTFUL PAST FINALLY CATCHES UP WITH HIM; WILL PUDDING POPS SAVE HIM?

BILL COSBY'S LACK OF SELF- CONTROL AROUND YOUNG WOMEN HAS FINALLY CAUGHT UP WITH HIM.

WILL PUDDING POPS & "RESPONSIBILITY" SPEECHES SAVE HIM??

THAT'S WHAT BILL GETS FOR THROWING HIS OWN RACE UNDER THE BUS FOR FAME & MONEY.

**FYI: For years I've heard rumors about BILL (a Married Man) Lusting after and Raping Young Women.**

Article Source: NY Daily News

"Cosby’s Burden"

One by one, they accused Bill Cosby of rape or sexual assault, their collective stories carrying enough weight to prompt NBC and Netflix to cast a near-sainted American figure into pariahdom.

Ruination came swiftly for the entertainer and cultural commentator nearly a decade after a woman first named him in a lawsuit as a predator and two more came forward with similar tales. Cosby settled the court action, seemingly impervious to accusations that he dismissed as false.

But, of course, he wasn’t.

However reluctant America once may have been to topple an icon based on the words of three women, their retold stories and the emergence of others have resonated with career-ending power in an era of hyper-vigilance toward sexual crimes.

Thus far, the heretofore beloved celebrity father figure’s attorneys have issued denials, one baselessly describing the accusations as discredited. Given the chance to speak directly in his own defense by NPR’s Scott Simon, Cosby offered only painfully awkward silence.

Decades after the alleged events, none of which were reported to police, he confronts the huge challenge of disproving accusations whose number and consistency lend them credibility.

Andrea Constand, who settled the lawsuit, says Cosby drugged and molested her in 2004.

Tamara Green, a lawyer, alleges that Cosby drugged and sexually assaulted her in the 1980s.

Beth Ferrier claims she was in a relationship with Cosby in the 1980s that ended when he drugged her coffee. She says that she awoke in a car, with her clothing disheveled.

Barbara Bowman asserts that Cosby mentored her as a teen actress, “brainwashed me in to viewing him as a father figure,” then assaulted her.

In a first-person account published by the Washington Post, she wrote:

“In one case, I blacked out after having dinner and one glass of wine at his New York City brownstone, where he had offered to mentor me and discuss the entertainment industry. When I came to, I was in my panties and a man’s T-shirt, and Cosby was looming over me. I’m certain now that he drugged and raped me.”

Joan Tarshis alleges that Cosby attacked her in 1969, when she was a young comedy writer.

“He always made the drinks; he didn’t have a bartender. And then next thing I know, I was being undressed on his couch.

“I was so out of it. . . . He was holding me down. He’s much bigger than I am. He’s very big. I couldn’t resist. He was forceful. He definitely used force. There was nothing I could do except wait for it to be over.”

Janice Dickinson alleges that in 1982, Cosby gave her a glass of red wine and a pill, ostensibly for menstrual pains.

“Before I woke up in the morning, the last thing I remember was Bill Cosby in a patchwork robe, dropping his robe and getting on top of me,” she told Entertainment Tonight.

There are two possibilities: Some or all of the women are assassinating Cosby’s character for unknown reasons, or Cosby did in fact engage in criminally exploitative behavior.

Statutes of limitations will almost certainly prevent law enforcement investigations. But the public can render judgment on both the believability of the accusers and on the persuasiveness of Cosby’s defenses.

A man of great wealth and public affection, he alone can clear his name.

Lark Voorhies: OMG! What Happened To "Lisa Turtle's" Face? Plastic Surgery Gone Bad??

Has anyone seen the face of former "Saved By The Bell" cast member Lark Voorhies lately?

She used to be so Beautiful.

Now she looks like the Walking Dead!

What happened??

Is it a case of Bad, Cheap Plastic Surgery?

OMG!






Lark Voorhies, former ‘Saved by the Bell’ star, looks barely recognizable with drastic new look


"Lisa Turtle", is that you?

Lark Voorhies, who played the spoiled student on “Saved by the Bell” from 1989 to 1993, has fans all atwitter over her drastic new appearance.

The 38-year-old actress looked barely recognizable during a recent interview with Yahoo!’s “The Yo Show,” in which she wore a different hairstyle and heavily-applied makeup over a puffy face.

During the chat, Voorhies admitted she would be open to the possibility of an onscreen reunion with her former cast mates Mark Paul Gosselaar, Mario Lopez, Elizabeth Berkley, Tiffani Thiessen and Dustin Diamond.

“I really honestly believe if it did happen it wouldn't be a bad thing ,” the actress and producer said. “We tend to circumvent and come around to this topic quite often, so I think the buzz might catch.”

As for the rumors that she once dated Gosselaar?

"No, we were all that close," Voorhies said. "We just had a great chemistry and it registers very powerfully (on-screen)."

Nowadays, the former teen star said she has been "very busy” with her new company, Yo Soy Productions. In September, she will appear in an episode of VH1's new reality show “Miss You Much,” in which viewers are updated on what their favorite TV, movie and music stars are up to now.

Whoa! See What Lark Voorhies Looks Like Now


If the Bayside High Class of 1993 reunion ends up happening, Jessie, AC, Kelly, and Zack might have a hard time recognizing their old pal Lisa Turtle.

Now 38, Lark Voorhies--who played the spoiled Valley girl on Saved by the Bell from 1989-1994--recently sat down for an interview with Yahoo!'s "The Yo Show," setting the internet abuzz with chatter over how the actress has changed since her faux-high school days.

Voorhies, whose last major role was in 2001's How High, debuted a dramatically different hairstyle and a fuller face, heavily made up with poorly-matched shades.

During the chat, the actress and producer--who currently owns her own production company, Yo Soy Productions--opened up about what she's been up to lately, and more importantly, whether she and her former costars plan to reunite.

Though she wouldn't confirm if a reunion with Mark Paul Gosselaar, Mario Lopez, Elizabeth Berkley, Tiffani Thiessen and Dustin Diamond was in the works, Voorhies did admit she would be interested in signing on.

"I really honestly believe that if it did happen, it wouldn't be a bad thing," Voorhies revealed. "We tend to circumvent and come back to this topic quite often . . .so I think the buzz might catch."

As for the rumors she once dated costar Gosselaar?

"No, we were all that close," Voorhies says. "We just had a great chemistry and it registers very powerfully [on-screen]."

This fall, the former teen star is set to appear in VH1's new reality show Miss You Much--which updates viewers on what their favorite 90s entertainers are up to now--alongside the Wonder Years' Jeremy Miller.



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Sources: AOL, Huffington Post, NBC, NY Daily News, US News, Yahoo, Yo Productions, Youtube, Google Maps

Sarah Palin & Glen Rice Hooked Up New Book Claims! Rice Confirms! Palin Is Silent

Sarah Palin had sex with basketball player, snorted cocaine and cheated on husband, book claims

Sarah Palin bedding a budding NBA star, snorting coke and cheating on the First Dude?

You betcha!


The scandalous details are revealed in the highly-anticipated tell-all "The Rogue: Searching for The Real Sarah Palin," written by best-selling author Joe McGinniss.

Palin bedded future pro hoops player Glen Rice while he was playing at the University of Michigan, the about the McGinniss book.

The sharp-shooting Rice - who spent one season with the Knicks - was playing in the annual "Great Alaska Shootout" while Palin was a sports reporter with Anchorage television station KTUU, the Enquirer said.

Their one-night stand over Thanksgiving weekend 1987 reportedly occurred in the dorm room of Palin's kid sister at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

Palin was described by a friend as the aggressor, with the pal reporting "she hauled his ass down," the Enquirer said.

Less than a year later, Palin was pregnant by husband Todd and the couple eloped.

The book also repeated allegations - denied in the past by Palin - that she had a six-month affair with her husband's business partner in the mid-'90s.

The dalliance put a chill on the Palin marriage, with Todd complaining to friends about the loss of intimacy in their relationship, the Enquirer reported.

McGinniss, the author of "Fatal Vision" and "The Selling of the President," rented the house next door to the Palins in Wasilla while researching the bombshell book.

His agent, David Larabell, declined to comment on the Enquirer excerpts.

"As this is an embargoed book I can't comment on the specificity of its contents," Larabell wrote in an e-mail.

"Also, I haven't seen the National Enquirer article. I don't know about this instance, but they often get these reports right."

The book also reports that Palin was once seen snorting cocaine off the top of a 55-gallon drum while snowmobiling with friends. She also smoked pot with a professor while at Mat-Su College, the book says.

And it quotes a Palin family friend as saying that husband Todd Palin also snorted coke, describing him as "on the end of the straw plenty."

The Enquirer quoted a publishing source about the explosive stories contained in the 320-page book, due in stores next week.

There was no immediate response from the Palin camp.



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Sources: Miami Herald, National Enquirer, NY Daily News, Youtube, Google Maps

Rick Perry Will Beat Romney & Become GOP Front Runner; Victim Of Gay Smear Campaign? (Videos)

Enter Rick Perry, Formidable Fund-Raiser

When Gov. Rick Perry of Texas arrives in South Carolina on Saturday to begin his presidential campaign, he might claim any number of credentials for the country’s top office: Creator of jobs. Cutter of taxes. Defender of gun rights.

But it is a credential Mr. Perry is unlikely to highlight that could make him the most formidable entrant into the Republican primary so far: he is among the top political fund-raisers in the country, with a vast network of wealthy supporters eager to bankroll his presidential ambitions, and he has the potential to energize a Republican donor class that has shown only limited enthusiasm for the candidates already in the race.

In three campaigns for governor, Mr. Perry has raised $102 million, including more than $39 million during his successful 2010 bid for re-election. The Republican Governors Association, of which Mr. Perry is chairman, raised a record $22.1 million during the first half of this year. And in recent months, even as the candidate himself was coy about his presidential ambitions, Mr. Perry’s campaign finance operation has shifted into high gear, holding meetings around the country with dozens of the party’s top uncommitted donors, some of whom have already pledged to raise money for him.

“He is the most successful fund-raiser in the history of Texas politics,” said Craig McDonald, director of Texans for Public Justice, a watchdog organization that tracks campaign spending. “He may be the best in the country. He will have no trouble raising the money he needs for his presidential campaign.”

People familiar with Mr. Perry’s plans say that he would aim to raise up to $10 million within a few weeks of formally entering the race, twice as much as any Republican candidate except for Mitt Romney has raised all year. Mr. Perry’s top “bundlers”— supporters who gather checks from friends, family members and business associates — could be asked to raise as much as $250,000 each, though campaign officials said that hard targets were still in flux.

To jump-start his fund-raising, Mr. Perry will hold events in nine cities between Aug. 29 and Sept. 1, according to an e-mail sent to his top donors Thursday afternoon.

“We are trying to get in the first million dollars of contributions very rapidly, to give the campaign its initial capital so important to get off the ground well,” wrote George Seay, Mr. Perry’s Texas finance chairman.

“From a fund-raising point of view, he looks very formidable,” said Barry D. Wynn, a former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party and a top fund-raiser for former president George W. Bush. “He’s battle tested with regards to his gubernatorial race. And I think a number of the people who have been pretty successful raising money for other campaigns are people he’s been able to make contact with.”

Last month, about two dozen current and potential Perry supporters met in Austin with members of the governor’s fund-raising team to discuss a potential run, many of them donors who supported the presidential bids of Mr. Bush or former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York in 2008. Mr. Perry’s aides did not ask for specific dollar commitments at the meeting, participants said, but several volunteered anyway.

“A number of people just volunteered that they were going to do their part in L.A. or San Diego or Palm Beach or Philadelphia or New York,” said Mr. Wynn. “Without being asked, they said, ‘We can do it.’ ”

Mr. Perry’s strength as a fund-raiser reflects, in large part, his lengthy tenure as governor — he is the longest-serving chief executive in Texas history — in a state that is a treasure trove of Republican money and has few restrictions on political giving. And as a sitting governor, he has one advantage that the Republican field’s current top fund-raiser — Mr. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor — no longer enjoys.

In Texas, individual and political action committees may give unlimited contributions to candidates for governor, and Mr. Perry has exploited that leeway to the hilt: according to a study by Texans for Public Justice, fully half of Mr. Perry’s campaign contributions, totalling roughly $51 million, have come from just 204 donors giving $100,000 or more. A single couple, Robert Perry, a Texas homebuilder, and his wife, Doylene, who are not related to the governor, have given Mr. Perry more than $2.5 million over the years.

In a state whose government is fragmented among dozens of commissions, boards, and agencies, Mr. Perry has also raised aggressively from his own appointees, an approach permitted by state law and practiced by governors of both parties. According to Texans for Public Justice, since taking office Mr. Perry has raised more than $17 million from 921 of his appointees or their spouses.

“Democrats and Republicans have traditionally done this,” said Mr. McDonald. “But he’s taken it to a higher level than anyone else.”

In part because federal law caps at $2,500 the amount individuals can give to any one candidate during the primary, Mr. Perry will not be able to raise money nearly as easily as he has in the past. But Mr. Perry’s top donors represent a corps of bundlers-in-waiting that any of his rivals would envy.

And thanks to loose campaign rules in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, whatever money his wealthiest Texas supporters cannot give directly to Mr. Perry could easily end up in the coffers of one of the half-dozen or so “SuperPACs” — technically independent groups that in the wake of the court’s decision can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to support a candidate — that have been set up in recent weeks by former Perry aides and supporters.

One former Perry aide, Dan Shelley, recently formed two independent expenditure groups, Veterans for Rick Perry and the Jobs for Vets Fund. Another group, Make Us Great Again, was formed with help from Mike Toomey, a former chief of staff to Mr. Perry who is now an Austin lobbyist.

Mr. Perry is also poised to make inroads among donors who had hoped to back either Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, or Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana, before each man opted out of running. Many of those donors have relationships with Mr. Perry through his work with the governor’s association.

“In my time around the R.G.A., Perry’s genuinely one of the handful of governors who’s really been active nationally,” said Henry Barbour, Haley Barbour’s nephew and a lobbyist in Mississippi. “So he’s got those relationships, and I think that gives you a confidence.”

Mr. Barbour added: “When you’ve asked people for $100,000, or $250,000, or even a million dollars, you can do this at the national level.”




Next up for Mitt Romney is Rick Perry

Mitt Romney celebrated the final night of an extended summer vacation Thursday, emerging as the uncontested and still unscathed front-runner from an eight-way scrap.

That won’t last long.

The two-hour debate here, the third of the GOP presidential campaign, lacked the candidate who could ultimately present him with his stiffest competition: Rick Perry. Without Perry, and without the candidates taking any significant swipes at Romney, the forum had a preliminary feel to it — which is why the former Massachusetts governor never had to break a sweat.

Perry’s expected entry into the race Saturday will change all that.

The Texas governor may present the last best hope of beating Romney, the tenuous but still dent-free front-runner. And the remaining candidates are already scrapping furiously for a shrinking third-place spot.

Romney offered a glimpse of the race’s next phase with the observation that only he and long-shot Herman Cain “understand how the private sector” works.

“That will be a very effective message against Perry,” predicted former Sen. Jim Talent, a Romney adviser.

Romney’s high command wasn’t ready to directly contrast their candidate’s record with Perry, but they were happy to begin laying the groundwork for a campaign that will portray the decadelong Texas governor as a career politician running at a moment of maximum skepticism toward politicians.

“I think it’s very, very difficult to step into a national race and I think it’s a very difficult time to be running in your third decade in office,” said Romney strategist Stuart Stevens. “People are not looking for, ‘I have experience in government to solve government.”

Stevens also asked if Perry wouldn’t be another in a line of vaunted Texas presidential hopefuls who went bust.

“Is Perry going to be John Connally, is he going to be Phil Gramm — who knows?” he said. “It’s like a first-round draft pick — you just never know.”

Eric Fehrnstrom, another Romney adviser, cited his candidate’s private-sector experience when asked about Perry.

“I don’t want to contrast Mitt’s record with Gov. Perry or anyone else at this point except to say he has led four enterprises,” he said, citing Romney’s two private companies, the Salt Lake City Olympics and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Perry’s top strategist, Dave Carney, would only say of the debate, “There is one clear winner,” an apparent reference to the Texas governor. Perry spokesman Mark Miner declined to comment on Romney’s apparent jab.

But a Perry supporter who has led an unofficial campaign on the Texas governor’s behalf, Robert Schuman, gladly returned fire.

“He was a rancher first,” Schuman said of Perry. “And being a successful governor — as opposed to a mediocre governor — trumps being a successful businessman.”

Even as he emerged unmolested from the debate, Romney’s vulnerabilities were on vivid display earlier in the day Thursday.

“Corporations are people,” he shot back to a heckler at the Iowa State Fair, demonstrating his at-times awkward personal style that makes some in his party wince.

While he doesn’t arrive in Iowa until Sunday, Perry occupied a larger space on the stage than several of the candidates — he was even the subject of a debate question posed to three of them.

“He clearly cast a big shadow over the debate,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, a longtime observer of Republican politics, who was in attendance.

Perry will loom just as large Saturday, when Iowa Republicans come back to Ames for the straw poll and the Texan announces his candidacy in South Carolina.

Some high-profile GOP officials in the Hawkeye State did little to hide their irritation over what they see as Perry’s attempt at scene-stealing.

Rep. Steve King, the influential Western Iowa conservative who is close to Rep. Michele Bachmann, suggested Perry’s timing reflects “his strategy to diminish the effect of the straw poll.”

King and other Iowa Republicans predicted that Perry’s abrupt entry and deliberate timing — the Texan will come to this state Sunday for a speech in Bachmann’s native town of Waterloo — would ruffle the feathers of Iowa GOP activists.

“To turn around the next day [after Saturday’s straw poll] and come here to Iowa and go to the very town and the very building where Michele Bachmann was raised and announced her candidacy — that’s a pretty strong statement,” he said. “That’s not going to be considered subtle here in Iowa. That might be subtle in Texas, but it ain’t subtle in Iowa.”

“It can’t help him,” King said of Perry’s bold approach to the state.

With Perry in the wings, the extended, unabashedly negative exchange that took place between Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty on Thursday demonstrated the new urgency of the undercard battle. Bachmann cast Pawlenty as too liberal; Pawlenty cast her as an ineffectual ideologue. Both are playing hard for victory in the straw poll here, and realizing the sudden reality that there may only be one ticket out of Ames.

A senior Bachmann aide, Ed Goeas, told POLITICO that the campaign sees three spaces in the race: One for Romney, whom Bachmann’s aides believe is capped at less than 40 percent of Republican support; one for grass-roots favorite Bachmann; and one for Perry, if his campaign succeeds in taking off. A Pawlenty adviser, meanwhile, argued that Bachmann has the most to lose from Perry’s entry, and that he will cut into her grass-roots base.

“The straw poll might produce the challenger to Perry,” said a former political director of the Iowa Republican Party, Craig Robinson, who now edits theiowarepublican.com. “There’s gonna be one winner on Saturday between the two of them.”

But Perry remains an unknown quantity heading into a crucial weekend. Recent presidential races have shown that highly anticipated new entrants, from Fred Thompson to Wes Clark, sink at least as often as they swim, and Perry’s strategy of competing for attention with the straw poll Saturday could also pull some attention away from one of his few clean shots at media attention.

And for all the anticipation among insiders, he remains largely unheard of in the state.

“They don’t know him,” said former Des Moines Register columnist David Yepsen. “He’s creating all this media buzz but they don’t know him.”


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Sources: Fox News, MSNBC, NY Times, Politico, Youtube, Google Maps

Sarah Palin First Launched Racist Media Attacks Against Obama In 2008 (Bill Ayers)

AP: Palin's Ayers Attack "Racially Tinged"

By claiming that Democrat Barack Obama is "palling around with terrorists" and doesn't see the U.S. like other Americans, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin targeted key goals for a faltering campaign.

And though she may have scored a political hit each time, her attack was unsubstantiated and carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret.

First, Palin's attack shows that her energetic debate with rival Joe Biden may be just the beginning, not the end, of a sharpened role in the battle to win the presidency.

"Our opponent ... is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country," Palin told a group of donors in Englewood, Colo. A deliberate attempt to smear Obama, McCain's ticket-mate echoed the line at three separate events Saturday.

"This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America," she said. "We see America as a force of good in this world. We see an America of exceptionalism."

Obama isn't above attacking McCain's character with loaded words, releasing an ad on Sunday that calls the Arizona Republican "erratic" _ a hard-to miss suggestion that McCain's age, 72, might be an issue.

"Our financial system in turmoil," an announcer says in Obama's new ad. "And John McCain? Erratic in a crisis. Out of touch on the economy."

A harsh and plainly partisan judgment, certainly, but not on the level of suggesting that a fellow senator is un-American and even a friend of terrorists.

In her character attack, Palin questions Obama's association with William Ayers, a member of the Vietnam-era Weather Underground. Her reference was exaggerated at best if not outright false. No evidence shows they were "pals" or even close when they worked on community boards years ago and Ayers hosted a political event for Obama early in his career.

Obama, who was a child when the Weathermen were planting bombs, has denounced Ayers' radical views and actions.

With her criticism, Palin is taking on the running mate's traditional role of attacker, said Rich Galen, a Republican strategist.

"There appears to be a newfound sense of confidence in Sarah Palin as a candidate, given her performance the other night," Galen said. "I think that they are comfortable enough with her now that she's got the standing with the electorate to take off after Obama."

Second, Palin's incendiary charge draws media and voter attention away from the worsening economy. It also comes after McCain supported a pork-laden Wall Street bailout plan in spite of conservative anger and his own misgivings.

"It's a giant changing of the subject," said Jenny Backus, a Democratic strategist. "The problem is the messenger. If you want to start throwing fire bombs, you don't send out the fluffy bunny to do it. I think people don't take Sarah Palin seriously."

The larger purpose behind Palin's broadside is to reintroduce the question of Obama's associations. Millions of voters, many of them open to being swayed to one side or the other, are starting to pay attention to an election a month away.

For the McCain campaign, that makes Obama's ties to Ayers as well as convicted felon Antoin "Tony" Rezko and the controversial minister Jeremiah Wright ripe for renewed criticism. And Palin brings a fresh voice to the argument.

Effective character attacks have come earlier in campaigns. In June 1988, Republican George H.W. Bush criticized Democrat Michael Dukakis over the furlough granted to Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who then raped a woman and stabbed her companion. Related TV ads followed in September and October.

The Vietnam-era Swift Boat veterans who attacked Democrat John Kerry's war record started in the spring of 2004 and gained traction in late summer.

"The four weeks that are left are an eternity. There's plenty of time in the campaign," said Republican strategist Joe Gaylord. "I think it is a legitimate strategy to talk about Obama and to talk about his background and who he pals around with."

Palin's words avoid repulsing voters with overt racism. But is there another subtext for creating the false image of a black presidential nominee "palling around" with terrorists while assuring a predominantly white audience that he doesn't see their America?

In a post-Sept. 11 America, terrorists are envisioned as dark-skinned radical Muslims, not the homegrown anarchists of Ayers' day 40 years ago. With Obama a relative unknown when he began his campaign, the Internet hummed with false e-mails about ties to radical Islam of a foreign-born candidate.

Whether intended or not by the McCain campaign, portraying Obama as "not like us" is another potential appeal to racism. It suggests that the Hawaiian-born Christian is, at heart, un-American.

The fact is that when racism creeps into the discussion, it serves a purpose for McCain. As the fallout from Wright's sermons showed earlier this year, forcing Obama to abandon issues to talk about race leads to unresolved arguments about America's promise to treat all people equally.

John McCain occasionally says he looks back on decisions with regret. He has apologized for opposing a holiday to honor Martin Luther King Jr. He has apologized for refusing to call for the removal of a Confederate flag from South Carolina's Capitol.

When the 2008 campaign is over will McCain say he regrets appeals such as Palin's?


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Fox News' Plans To Destroy Obama: Decision 2012

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I Used To Really Believe That News Corp-Owned Cable Network Fox News, Was Indeed "Fair & Balanced" As The Network's Motto Proclaims.

After All Fox News Has Invited Many, Many People (Black, White, Muslims, Hispanics) To Appear On Its Broadcast. Including Malik Shabazz, Leader Of The New Black Panthers Party Organization.

Yes At One Time I Really Believed Fox Was Somehow "Fair & Balanced", That Is Until The Approaching November 2010 & 2012 Elections.

Several Months Prior To The November 2010 Elections & Immediately Thereafter, Fox Began To Show Its True Media Colors.

More So Than Usual:

1) Attacking Obama In Almost EVERY News Story,

2) Distorting Truth About The Obama Administration's Agenda,

3) Practicing Racism In Its Reporting,

4) Spreading Fear Via Propaganda & Lies,

5) Working Diligently To Destroy Obama's Character,

6) Help Run Him Out Of The White House In 2012 And...

7) Eliminate The Election & Presidency Of Barack Obama From Future American History Books.

What A Shame In The Year 2011, This Kind Of Racist Behavior Is STILL Allowed In Mainstream Media!

According To Fox News ONLY WHITE Men Are Allowed To Govern America's White House!

What A Shame!

Thus My Opinion Of Fox News Has Changed.

I NO Longer Believe Fox News Is A "Fair & Balanced" Cable News Network.

It Isn't!!

Fox News Is Obviously The Racist, Right Arm Of Republican Party Politics Which Helps Fuel Tea Party Populist Anger.

And Why Do You Think All Republican Political Candidates MUST Appear On Fox News?

Fox News/ News Corp/ Roger Ailes Holds The Keys To Republican Party Campaign Financing.

If A Republican Politician Or Candidate Refuses To Be Interviewed On Fox News Or Refuses To Bash Pres. Obama, They Can Kiss Their Campaign Financing Good-Bye!

Now I'm Well Aware That NOT All Republicans Are Racist, Nor Do All Republicans Hate Our Nation's FIRST Black President Barack Obama. Just As NOT All Democrats Support Him.

However It Does Appear Without A Doubt Mr. Roger Eugene Ailes (Pres. Of Fox News), Does Indeed Bear A Personal Grudge Against Barack Obama.

Perhaps A Grudge With Racist Roots.

I Guess This Explains Why Despite Lacking Accurate Knowledge Of American History, Mr. Ailes Hired Sarah Palin As A Network Commentator .

Palin Is Nothing More Than Another GOP Leader With A Race-Based, Right-Winged Agenda To Destroy Our Nation's FIRST Black President.

How Sad!

Because Their Plans WON'T Work!

TRUTH In Media Will Prevail!!

NOT Racist, Fear Mongering Propaganda!

VOTE OBAMA IN 2012!




How Roger Ailes Built the Fox News Fear Factory


At the Fox News holiday party the year the network overtook archrival CNN in the cable ratings, tipsy employees were herded down to the basement of a Midtown bar in New York. As they gathered around a television mounted high on the wall, an image flashed to life, glowing bright in the darkened tavern: the MSNBC logo. A chorus of boos erupted among the Fox faithful.

The CNN logo followed, and the catcalls multiplied. Then a third slide appeared, with a telling twist. In place of the logo for Fox News was a beneficent visage: the face of the network’s founder. The man known to his fiercest loyalists simply as "the Chairman" – Roger Ailes.

“It was as though we were looking at Mao,” recalls Charlie Reina, a former Fox News producer. The Foxistas went wild. They let the dogs out. Woof! Woof! Woof! Even those who disliked the way Ailes runs his network joined in the display of fealty, given the culture of intimidation at Fox News. “It’s like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders,” says a former executive with the network’s parent, News Corp. “There are people who turn people in.”

The key to decoding Fox News isn’t Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity. It isn’t even News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch. To understand what drives Fox News, and what its true purpose is, you must first understand Chairman Ailes. “He is Fox News,” says Jane Hall, a decade-long Fox commentator who defected over Ailes’ embrace of the fear-mongering Glenn Beck. “It’s his vision. It’s a reflection of him.”

Ailes runs the most profitable – and therefore least accountable – head of the News Corp. hydra. Fox News reaped an estimated profit of $816 million last year – nearly a fifth of Murdoch’s global haul. The cable channel’s earnings rivaled those of News Corp.’s entire film division, which includes 20th Century Fox, and helped offset a slump at Murdoch’s beloved newspapers unit, which took a $3 billion write-down after acquiring The Wall Street Journal. With its bare-bones news­gathering operation – Fox News has one-third the staff and 30 fewer bureaus than CNN – Ailes generates profit margins above 50 percent. Nearly half comes from advertising, and the rest is dues from cable companies.

Fox News now reaches 100 million households, attracting more viewers than all other cable-news outlets combined, and Ailes aims for his network to “throw off a billion in profits.”

The outsize success of Fox News gives Ailes a free hand to shape the network in his own image. "Murdoch has almost no involvement with it at all," says Michael Wolff, who spent nine months embedded at News Corp. researching a biography of the Australian media giant. "People are afraid of Roger. Murdoch is, himself, afraid of Roger. He has amassed enormous power within the company – and within the country – from the success of Fox News."

Fear, in fact, is precisely what Ailes is selling: His network has relentlessly hyped phantom menaces like the planned “terror mosque” near Ground Zero, inspiring Florida pastor Terry Jones to torch the Koran. Privately, Murdoch is as impressed by Ailes’ business savvy as he is dismissive of his extremist politics. "You know Roger is crazy," Murdoch recently told a colleague, shaking his head in disbelief. "He really believes that stuff."

To watch even a day of Fox News – the anger, the bombast, the virulent paranoid streak, the unending appeals to white resentment, the reporting that’s held to the same standard of evidence as a late-­October attack ad – is to see a refraction of its founder, one of the most skilled and fearsome operatives in the history of the Republican Party. As a political consultant, Ailes repackaged Richard Nixon for television in 1968, papered over Ronald Reagan’s budding Alzheimer’s in 1984, shamelessly stoked racial fears to elect George H.W. Bush in 1988, and waged a secret campaign on behalf of Big Tobacco to derail health care reform in 1993. "He was the premier guy in the business," says former Reagan campaign manager Ed Rollins. "He was our Michelangelo."

In the fable Ailes tells about his own life, he made a clean break with his dirty political past long before 1996, when he joined forces with Murdoch to launch Fox News. "I quit politics," he has claimed, "because I hated it." But an examination of his career reveals that Ailes has used Fox News to pioneer a new form of political campaign – one that enables the GOP to bypass skeptical reporters and wage an around-the-clock, partisan assault on public opinion. The network, at its core, is a giant soundstage created to mimic the look and feel of a news operation, cleverly camouflaging political propaganda as independent journalism.

The result is one of the most powerful political machines in American history. One that plays a leading role in defining Republican talking points and advancing the agenda of the far right. Fox News tilted the electoral balance to George W. Bush in 2000, prematurely declaring him president in a move that prompted every other network to follow suit. It helped create the Tea Party, transforming it from the butt of late-night jokes into a nationwide insurgency capable of electing U.S. senators. Fox News turbocharged the Republican takeover of the House last fall, and even helped elect former Fox News host John Kasich as the union-busting governor of Ohio – with the help of $1.26 million in campaign contributions from News Corp. And by incubating a host of potential GOP contenders on the Fox News payroll– including Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum – Ailes seems determined to add a fifth presidential notch to his belt in 2012. "Everything Roger wanted to do when he started out in politics, he’s now doing 24/7 with his network," says a former News Corp. executive. "It’s come full circle."

Take it from Rush Limbaugh, a "dear friend" of Ailes. "One man has established a culture for 1,700 people who believe in it, who follow it, who execute it," Limbaugh once declared. "Roger Ailes is not on the air. Roger Ailes does not ever show up on camera. And yet everybody who does is a reflection of him."

The 71-year-old Ailes presents the classic figure of a cinematic villain: bald and obese, with dainty hands, Hitchcockian jowls and a lumbering gait. Friends describe him as loyal, generous and "slap your mama funny." But Ailes is also, by turns, a tyrant: "I only understand friendship or scorched earth," he has said. One former deputy pegs him as a cross between Don Rickles and Don Corleone. "What’s fun for Roger is the destruction," says Dan Cooper, a key member of the team that founded Fox News. "When the light bulb goes on and he’s got the trick to outmaneuver the enemy – that’s his passion." Ailes is also deeply paranoid. Convinced that he has personally been targeted by Al Qaeda for assassination, he surrounds himself with an aggressive security detail and is licensed to carry a concealed handgun.

Ailes was born in 1940 in Warren, Ohio, a manufacturing outpost near Youngstown. His father worked at the Packard plant producing wiring for GM cars, and Roger grew up resenting the abuse his father had to take from the "college boys" who managed the line. Ailes has called his father a "Taft Republican," and the description is instructive: Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio led a GOP uprising to block the expansion of the New Deal in the late 1930s, and spearheaded passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which beat back the power of labor unions.

Roger spent much of his youth in convalescence. A sickly child – hemophilia forced him to sit out recess at school – he had to learn to walk again after getting hit by a car at age eight. His mother worked out of the house, so he was raised in equal measure by his grandmother and TV. "Television and I grew up together," he later wrote.

A teenage booze hound – "I was hammered all the time" – Ailes said he "went to state school because they told me I could drink." There was another reason: His father kicked him out of the house when he graduated from high school. During his stint at Ohio University, where he studied radio and television, his parents divorced and left the house where he had spent so much of his childhood recovering from illness and injury. "I went back, the house was sold, all my stuff was gone," he recalled. "I never found my shit!" The shock seems to have left him with an almost pathological nostalgia for the trappings of small-town America.

In college, Ailes tried to join the Air Force ROTC but was rejected because of his health. So he became a drama geek, acting in a bevy of collegiate productions. The thespian streak never left Ailes: His first job out of college was as a gofer on The Mike Douglas Show, a nationally syndicated daytime variety show that featured aging stars like Jack Benny and Pearl Bailey in a world swooning for Elvis and the Beatles. In many ways, Ailes remains a creature of that earlier era. His 1950s manners, martini-dry ripostes and unreconstructed sexism give the feeling, says one intimate, "like you’re talking to someone who’s been under a rock for a couple of decades."

Ailes found his calling in television. He proved to be a TV wunderkind, charting a meteoric rise from gofer to executive producer by the age of 25. Ailes had an uncanny feel for stagecraft and how to make conversational performances pop on live television. But it was behind the scenes at Mike Douglas in 1967 that Ailes met the man who would set him on his path as the greatest political operative of his generation: Richard Milhous Nixon. The former vice president – whose stilted and sweaty debate performance against John F. Kennedy had helped doom his presidential bid in 1960 – was on a media tour to rehabilitate his image. Waiting with Nixon in his office before the show, Ailes needled his powerful guest. "The camera doesn’t like you," he said. Nixon wasn’t pleased. "It’s a shame a man has to use gimmicks like television to get elected," he grumbled. "Television is not a gimmick," Ailes said. “And if you think it is, you’ll lose again."

The exchange was a defining moment for both men. Nixon became convinced that he had met a boy genius who could market him to the American public. Ailes had fallen hard for his first candidate. He soon abandoned his high-powered job producing Westinghouse’s biggest hit and signed on as Nixon’s "executive producer for television." For Ailes, the infatuation was personal – and it is telling that the man who got him into politics would prove to be one of he most paranoid and dirty campaigners in the history of American politics. "I don’t know anyone else around that I would have done it for," Ailes has said, "other than Nixon."

It was while working for Nixon that Ailes first experimented with blurring the distinction between journalism and politics, developing a knack for manipulating political imagery that would find its ultimate expression in Fox News. He knew his candidate was a disaster on TV. "You put him on television, you’ve got a problem right away," Ailes told reporter Joe McGinniss in The Selling of the President 1968. "He looks like somebody hung him in a closet overnight, and he jumps out in the morning with his suit all bunched up and starts running around saying, 'I want to be president.' "But the real problem, as Ailes saw it, was a media establishment that he viewed as hostile to Republicans. The "only hope," he recalled, "was to go around the press and go directly to the people" – letting the campaign itself shape the candidate’s image for the average voter, "without it being interpreted for him by a middleman."

To bypass journalists, Ailes made Nixon the star of his own traveling roadshow – a series of contrived, newslike events that the campaign paid to broadcast in local markets across the country. Nixon would appear on camera in theaters packed with GOP partisans – "an applause machine," Ailes said, "that’s all that they are." Then he would field questions from six voters, hand-­selected by the campaign, who could be counted on to lob softball queries that played to Nixon’s talking points. At the time, Nixon was consciously stoking the anger of white voters aggrieved by the advances of the civil rights movement, and Ailes proved eager to play the race card. To balance an obligatory "Negro" on a panel in Philadelphia, Ailes dreamed of adding a "good, mean Wallacite cab driver. Wouldn’t that be great? Some guy to sit there and say, 'Awright, Mac, what about these niggers?'"

Ailes had essentially replaced professional journalists with every­day voters he could manipulate at will. "The events were not staged, they were fixed," says Rick Perlstein, the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. "People were supposed to ask tough questions. But asking a tough question – let alone knowing how to follow up – is a skill. Taking that task out of the hands of reporters and putting it into the hands of inexperienced amateurs was brilliant in itself."

As for actual journalists? "Fuck 'em," Ailes said. "It’s not a press conference – it’s a television show. Our television show. And the press has no business on the set." The young producer forced reporters to watch the events backstage on a TV monitor – just like the rest of America. "Ailes figured out a way to bring reporters to heel," Perlstein says.

After Nixon was elected, Ailes was soon fired by the White House. He had brazenly insulted his boss in the McGinniss book while playing up his own talent as an image-maker, and Nixon, as always, took the snub personally. "In the television field, we have made the move that we should have made long ago," the president sniffed to his chief of staff in a memo uncovered by Rolling Stone, adding that Ailes was not among "the first-rate men that we could have in this field."

Out on his own, Ailes briefly returned to the passion for the theater he discovered during his college days. In perhaps the oddest chapter of his professional life, he formed a partnership with Kermit Bloomgarden – the famed producer of Death of a Salesman – and set out to conquer Broadway. Their first production: an environmental-themed musical called Mother Earth. When the show flopped, folding after just a dozen performances in 1972, it nearly bankrupted Ailes. The next year, though, he was back in the game, scoring an edgy off-Broadway hit with The Hot L Baltimore, which the New York Drama Critics’ Circle named Best American Play of 1973. He was later nominated for an Emmy for a documentary on Federico Fellini, and produced a TV special from the Fantasy Suite at Caesars Palace for Liberace, whom Ailes knew fondly as "Lee."

But Ailes couldn’t stay away from the theater of politics. In 1974, his notoriety from the Nixon campaign won him a job at Television News Incorporated, a new right-wing TV network that had launched under a deliberately misleading motto that Ailes would one day adopt as his own: "fair and balanced." TVN made no sense as a business. The project of archconservative brewing magnate Joseph Coors, the news service was designed to inject a far-right slant into local news broadcasts by providing news clips that stations could use without credit – and for a fraction of the true costs of production. Once the affiliates got hooked on the discounted clips, its president explained, TVN would "gradually, subtly, slowly" inject "our philosophy in the news.” The network was, in the words of a news director who quit in protest, a "propaganda machine."

But TVN’s staff of professional journalists revolted over the ideo­logical pressure by top management. So the fledgling operation purged 16 staffers and brought in Ailes to command the newsroom. "He was involved in the creation of the effort," recalled Paul Weyrich, a leading figure in the New Right who had close ties to Coors. "He was sort of the godfather behind the scenes."

During the time he spent at TVN, Ailes began to plot the growth of a right-wing network that looked very much like the future Fox News. The network planned to invest millions in satellite distribution that would enable TVN to not just distribute news clips but provide a full newscast with its own anchors – a business model that was also employed by an upstart network called CNN. For Ailes, it was a way to extend the kind of fake news that he was regularly using as a political strategist. "I know certain techniques, such as a press release that looks like a newscast," he told The Washington Post in 1972. "So you use it because you want your man to win."

Under Ailes, TVN even signed an open-ended contract to produce propaganda for the federal government, providing news clips and scripts to the U.S. Information Agency – a hand-in-glove relationship with the Ford administration that Ailes insisted created no conflict of interest. But TVN collapsed in 1975, depriving Ailes of the chance to implement his vision for a right-wing news network. “They were losing money and they weren’t able to control their journalists,” says Kerwin Swint, author of the Ailes biography, Dark Genius. Ailes would have to wait two decades to launch another “fair and balanced” propaganda machine – and when he did, he would make sure that the journalists he employed were prepared to toe the party line.

Following the failure of TVN, Ailes re­dedicated himself to political consulting. Over the next decade, drawing on the tactics he honed working for Nixon, he helped elect two more conservative presidents, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. In 1984, after the 73-year-old Reagan stumbled badly in his first debate with Walter Mondale, the campaign tapped Ailes to prep the president for the next showdown. At the time, Reagan was beginning to exhibit what his son Ron now describes as early signs of Alzheimer’s, and his age and acuity were becoming a central issue in the campaign. Ailes – a veteran of Reagan’s media team in 1980 who was overseeing the creation of the legendary “Morning in America” campaign – knew that framing one good shot in a debate could make the difference come Election Day. “Roger had the presence to be a director,” says Ed Rollins, who managed the ’84 campaign. “And Reagan, who had always been around directors, would listen to Roger.”

Ailes – known on the Reagan team as “Dr. Feelgood” – told the Gipper to ditch the facts and figures. “You didn’t get elected on details,” he told the president. “You got elected on themes.” For Ailes, the advice reflected a core belief: People watch TV emotionally. He armed Reagan with a one-liner to beat back any question about his mental agility – and the president’s delivery was pitch-perfect. “I want you to understand that also I will not make age an issue of this campaign,” Reagan winked. “I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.”

Four years later, Ailes was in such high demand that the entire GOP field, with the exception of Pat Robertson, paid court. After hearing all the pitches, Ailes agreed to work for Bush – an effete New Englander who even Richard Nixon said “comes through as a weak individual on television.” Worse still, Bush had baggage: He was neck-deep in the Iran-Contra scandal that had secretly sent arms to Tehran and used the profits to fund an illegal war in Nicaragua. Ailes saw an opportunity to address both shortcomings in a single, familiar strategy – attack the media.

In January 1988, Ailes rigged an interview about the scandal with Dan Rather of CBS News by insisting on an odd caveat: that the interview be conducted live. That not only gave the confrontation the air of a prizefight – it enabled Ailes himself to sit just off-camera in Bush’s office, prompting his candidate with cue cards. As soon as Rather, who was in the CBS studio in New York, began his questioning, Bush came out swinging, claiming that he had been misled about the interview’s focus on Iran-­Contra. When the exchange got tricky for Bush, Ailes flashed a card: walked off the air. A few months earlier, Rather had stormed off camera upon learning his newscast had been pre-empted by a women’s tennis match. Clenching his fist, Ailes mouthed: Go! Go! Just kick his ass!

Bush proceeded to hit Rather below the belt. “It’s not fair to judge my whole career by a rehash on Iran,” he said. “How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set?” It was the mother of all false equivalencies: the fleeting petulance of a news anchor pitted against the high crimes of a sitting vice president. But it worked as TV. “That bite of Bush telling Rather off played over and over and over again,” says Roger Stone, an infamous political operative who worked with Ailes on the Nixon campaign. “It was a perfect example of Roger understanding the news cycle, the dynamics of the situation and the power of television.”

Ailes became the go-to man on the Bush campaign, especially when it came to taking down the opposition. “On any campaign you have a small table of inside advisers,” says Mary Matalin, the GOP consultant. “Roger always had the clearest vision. The most robust, synthesized, advanced thinking on things political. When you came to a strategy impasse, he’d be the first among equals. I can’t remember a single incident where he lost a fight.” As usual, Ailes knew how to use television to skew public perception. His dirtiest move came during the general election – a TV ad centering on Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who had escaped from a Massachusetts prison during a weekend furlough when Michael Dukakis was governor and later assaulted a couple, stabbing the man and raping the woman. “The only question,” Ailes bragged to a reporter, “is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand – or without it.”

Knowing that such an overt move could backfire on the campaign, Ailes instead opted to evoke Horton by showing a line of convicts entering and exiting a prison through a revolving door of prison bars. An early take of the ad used actual prisoners. “Roger and I looked at it, and we worried there were too many blacks in the prison scene,” campaign manager Lee Atwater later admitted. So Ailes reshot the ad to zero in on a single black prisoner – sporting an unmistakably Horton-esque Afro. The campaign also benefited from a supposedly “independent” ad that exuberantly paraded Horton’s mug shot. The ad was crafted by Larry McCarthy – a former senior vice president at Ailes Communications Inc.

After the ’88 campaign, ailes kept on playing the Willie Horton card against Democrats. Working for Rudy Giuliani in 1989, he even tried the tactic against David Dinkins, the first black mayor of New York, running ads that exploited the criminal record of a Dinkins staffer who had served time for kidnapping. But this time, the tactic backfired. Dinkins made Ailes himself the issue, labeling him “the master of mud.” Giuliani lost the race, and Ailes went into a deep political slump. In 1990, he tried to take out bow-tied Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois and whiffed. The following year, he blew a special election in Pennsylvania. One political observer at the time declared that Ailes was becoming “an albatross.”

A few months later, Ailes made a show of exiting the political arena. “I’ve been in politics for 25 years,” he told The New York Times in 1991. “It’s always been a detour. Now my business has taken a turn back to my entertainment and corporate clients.” But instead of giving up his work as a political consultant, Ailes simply went underground. Keenly aware that his post-Horton reputation would be a drag on President Bush, Ailes took no formal role with the re-election campaign. But he continued to loom so large behind the scenes that campaign allies referred to him as “our Deep Throat.”

He quietly prepped the president for his State of the Union address in 1992, and he served as an attack dog for the campaign, once more blasting what he saw as the media’s liberal bias. “Bill Clinton has 15,000 press secretaries,” Ailes blared. “At some point, even you guys will have to get embarrassed.” (Last November, Ailes deployed the same line against President Obama, reducing the number of press secretaries to only 3,000.)

Ailes also pushed Bush campaign manager James Baker to “get on the fucking offensive” and “go for the red meat.” From his office in Manhattan, Ailes advised the campaign to spin Clinton’s graduate-school train trip to Moscow into a tale of a Manchurian candidacy. “This guy’s hiding something,” Ailes barked over a speakerphone in Baker’s office. Clinton’s public fuzziness about the trip was proof enough, insisted Ailes: “Nobody’s that forgetful.” President Bush soon appeared on Larry King Live, following the redbaiting advice to the letter. “I don’t have the facts,” the president insinuated, “but to go to Moscow one year after Russia crushed Czechoslovakia, and not remember who you saw – I think the answer is, level with the American people."

In advance of the final debate of 1992, Bush called in his two closest confidants, Baker and Ailes, to help him prepare at Camp David. The advice Ailes offered could serve as a mission statement for Fox News. “Forget all the facts and figures,” he said, “and move to the offense as quickly as possible."

After Bush lost to Clinton, Ailes kept right on claiming that he was through with politics. In 2001, as part of a House hearing into election night news coverage, Ailes submitted biographical materials to Congress under oath that made the break explicit: “In 1992, Ailes retired completely from political and corporate consulting to return full-time to television.”

That is a lie. At the time, Ailes was certainly becoming a force in tabloid TV. He had helped launch The Maury Povich Show in 1991, and – in his first brush with the News Corp. empire – he consulted on A Current Affair. But in 1993 – the year after he claimed he had retired from corporate consulting – Ailes inked a secret deal with tobacco giants Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds to go full-force after the Clinton administration on its central policy objective: health care reform. Hillarycare was to have been funded, in part, by a $1-a-pack tax on cigarettes. To block the proposal, Big Tobacco paid Ailes to produce ads highlighting “real people affected by taxes.”

According to internal memos, Ailes also explored how Philip Morris could create a phony front group called the “Coalition for Fair Funding of Health Care” to deploy the same kind of “independent” ads that produced Willie Horton. In a precursor to the modern Tea Party, Ailes conspired with the tobacco companies to unleash angry phone calls on Congress – cold-calling smokers and patching them through to the switchboards on Capitol Hill – and to gin up the appearance of a grassroots uprising, busing 17,000 tobacco employees to the White House for a mass demonstration.

But Ailes’ most important contribution to the covert campaign involved his new specialty: right-wing media. The tobacco giants hired Ailes, in part, because he had just brought Rush Limbaugh to the small screen, serving as executive producer of Rush’s syndicated, late-night TV show. Now they wanted Ailes to get Limbaugh onboard to crush health care reform. “RJR has trained 200 people to call in to shows,” a March 1993 memo revealed. “A packet has gone to Limbaugh. We need to brief Ailes."

Ailes and Limbaugh were more than co-workers. The two jocular, balding right-wingers had met carousing in Manhattan a few years earlier and had become fast friends: Both were reviled for the virulence of their politics, and both saw themselves as victims of what Ailes would call “liberal bigots.” In a 2009 speech, Limbaugh credited Ailes for teaching him “how to take being hated as a measure of success.” Ailes, in fact, would become a father figure to the king of right-wing talk. “The things I’ve learned from him about being a man, about the country, about how to be a professional, nobody else taught me,” Limbaugh said. “When Roger Ailes is on your team, you do not lose.”

In August 1993, Ailes made his biggest foray into television since his days as a producer for Mike Douglas: He became the head of CNBC, America’s top business network. In his three years as boss, he more than quintupled profits and minted stars like Chris Matthews and Maria Bartiromo. He also helped launch a new cable network called America’s Talking, an odd mash-up of television and talk radio. “The lineup really comes out of my head,” Ailes said. Shows on the new network included Bugged! (about things that irritate people), Pork (a takedown of pork-barrel spending) and Am I Nuts? (a call-in psychiatry hour).

Then in his early fifties, Ailes had shed 40 pounds by curbing his Häagen-Dazs habit, and he had shaved off the salt-and-pepper goatee he sported during his days as a GOP operative. But what he refused to give up was politics. As head of CNBC, he continued to produce Limbaugh’s TV show on the side – and he remained on the take from Big Tobacco, pocketing a $5,000 monthly retainer from Philip Morris “to be available.” In 1994, when the tobacco giant tried to stave off harsher regulation by unveiling a voluntary initiative to curb youth smoking, it once again called on Roger to activate Rush: “Ask Ailes to try to prime Limbaugh to go after the antis for complaining.”

But despite his success at CNBC, Ailes wasn’t being given the power he craved to shape public opinion. In a move that took him by surprise, his bosses at NBC decided to shut down America’s Talking and hand its channel over to an all-news venture called MSNBC. Ailes felt that his creation had been hijacked. The man who imagined himself the king of political infighters had been cut off at the knees.

Ailes responded as he always did to setbacks: by throwing himself into another political battle. This time, though, he would do things on his own terms. Securing release from his NBC contract without a noncompete agreement, he immediately joined forces with a media giant who was equally unabashed in using his news operations as instruments of political power. As Jack Welch – then the CEO of NBC’s parent company GE – put it at the time, “We’ll rue the day we let Roger and Rupert team up.”

Rupert Murdoch had long been obsessed with gaining a foothold in the TV news business. He made a failed run at buying CNN, only to see Time Warner scoop up the prize. Even before he hired Ailes, Murdoch had several teams at work on a germinal version of Fox News that he intended to air through News Corp. affiliates. The false starts included a 60 Minutes-style program that, under the guise of straight news, would feature a weekly attack-and-destroy piece targeting a liberal politician or social program. “The idea of a masquerade was already around prior to Roger arriving,” says Dan Cooper, managing editor of that first iteration of Fox News. Like Joseph Coors before him at TVN, Murdoch envisioned his new network as a counterweight to the “left-wing bias” of CNN. “There’s your answer right there to whether Fox News is a conventional news network or whether it has an agenda,” says Eric Burns, who served for a decade as media critic at Fox News. “That’s its original sin.”

Murdoch found Ailes captivating: powerful, politically connected, funny as hell. Both men had been married twice, and both shared an open contempt for the traditional rules of journalism. Murdoch also had a direct self-interest in targeting regulation-­minded liberals, whose policies threatened to interfere with his plans for expansion. “Rupert is driven by a twofold dynamic: power and money,” says a former deputy. “He had a lot of business reasons to shake up Washington, and he found in Roger the perfect guy to do it.”

But Ailes was determined not to repeat what he saw as the mistakes of TVN, the ideological forerunner of Fox News. Before signing on to run the new network, he demanded that Murdoch get “carriage” – distribution on cable systems nationwide. In the normal course of business, cable outfits like Time Warner pay content providers like CNN or MTV for the right to air their programs. But Murdoch turned the business model on its head. He didn’t just give Fox News away – he paid the cable companies to air it. To get Fox News into 25 million homes, Murdoch paid cable companies as much as $20 a subscriber. “Murdoch’s offer shocked the industry,” writes biographer Neil Chenoweth. “He was prepared to shell out half a billion dollars just to buy a news voice.” Even before it took to the air, Fox News was guaranteed access to a mass audience, bought and paid for. Ailes hailed Murdoch’s “nerve,” adding, “This is capitalism and one of the things that made this country great.”

Ailes was also determined not to let the professional ethics of journalism get in the way of his political agenda, as they had at TVN. To secure a pliable news staff, he led what he called a “jailbreak” from NBC, bringing dozens of top staffers with him to Fox News, including business anchor Neil Cavuto and morning host Steve Doocy – loyalists who owed their careers to Ailes. Rounding out his senior news team, Ailes tapped trusted Republicans like veteran ABC correspondent Brit Hume and former George H.W. Bush speechwriter Tony Snow.

Ailes then embarked on a purge of existing staffers at Fox News. “There was a litmus test,” recalled Joe Peyronnin, whom Ailes displaced as head of the network. “He was going to figure out who was liberal or conservative when he came in, and try to get rid of the liberals.” When Ailes suspected a journalist wasn’t far enough to the right for his tastes, he’d spring an accusation: “Why are you a liberal?” If staffers had worked at one of the major news networks, Ailes would force them to defend working at a place like CBS – which he spat out as “the Communist Broadcast System.” To replace the veterans he fired, Ailes brought in droves of inexperienced up-and-comers – enabling him to weave his own political biases into the network’s DNA. To oversee the young newsroom, he recruited John Moody, a conservative veteran of Time. As recounted by journalist Scott Collins in Crazy Like a Fox, the Chairman gave Moody explicit ideological marching orders. “One of the problems we have to work on here together when we start this network is that most journalists are liberals,” Ailes told Moody. “And we’ve got to fight that.” Reporters understood that a right-wing bias was hard-wired into what they did from the start. “All outward appearances were that it was just like any other newsroom,” says a former anchor. “But you knew that the way to get ahead was to show your color – and that your color was red.” Red state, that is.

Murdoch installed ailes in the corner office on Fox’s second floor at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Manhattan. The location made Ailes queasy: It was close to the street, and he lived in fear that gay activists would try to attack him in retaliation over his hostility to gay rights. (In 1989, Ailes had broken up a protest of a Rudy Giuliani speech by gay activists, grabbing demonstrator by the throat and shoving him out the door.) Barricading himself behind a massive mahogany desk, Ailes insisted on having “bombproof glass” installed in the windows – even going so far as to personally inspect samples of high-tech plexiglass, as though he were picking out new carpet. Looking down on the street below, he expressed his fears to Cooper, the editor he had tasked with up-armoring his office. “They’ll be down there protesting,” Ailes said. “Those gays.”

Befitting his siege mentality, Ailes also housed his newsroom in a bunker. Reporters and producers at Fox News work in a vast, windowless expanse below street level, a gloomy space lined with video-editing suites along one wall and an endless cube farm along the other. In a separate facility on the same subterranean floor, Ailes created an in-house research unit – known at Fox News as the “brain room” – that requires special security clearance to gain access. “The brain room is where Willie Horton comes from,” says Cooper, who helped design its specs. “It’s where the evil resides.”

If that sounds paranoid, consider the man Ailes brought in to run the brain room: Scott Ehrlich, a top lieutenant from his political-­consulting firm. Ehrlich – referred to by some as “Baby Rush” – had taken over the lead on Big Tobacco’s campaign to crush health care reform when Ailes signed on with CNBC. According to documents obtained by Rolling Stone, Ehrlich gravitated to the dark side: In a strategy labeled “Underground Attack,” he advised the tobacco giants to “hit hard” at key lawmakers “through their soft underbelly” by quietly influencing local media – a tactic that would help the firms “stay under the radar of the national news media.”

At Fox News, Ehrlich kept up a relentless drumbeat against the Clinton administration. A reporter who joined the network from ABC promptly left in horror after a producer approached him, rubbing her hands together and saying, “Let’s have something on Whitewater today.” Ailes mined the Monica Lewinsky scandal for ratings gold, bringing Matt Drudge aboard as a host, and heaped rumor on top of the smears. Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard – the News Corp. property with the most direct crossover on Fox News – trafficked in gossip “that there’s a second intern who was sexually involved with the president. If there is, that will certainly be dynamite.”

But it was the election of George W. Bush in 2000 that revealed the true power of Fox News as a political machine. According to a study of voting patterns by the University of California, Fox News shifted roughly 200,000 ballots to Bush in areas where voters had access to the network. But Ailes, ever the political operative, didn’t leave the outcome to anything as dicey as the popular vote. The man he tapped to head the network’s “decision desk” on election night – the consultant responsible for calling states for either Gore or Bush – was none other than John Prescott Ellis, Bush’s first cousin. As a columnist at The Boston Globe, Ellis had recused himself from covering the campaign. “There is no way for you to know if I am telling you the truth about George W. Bush’s presidential campaign,” he told his readers, “because in his case, my loyalty goes to him and not to you.”

In any newsroom worthy of the name, such a conflict of interest would have immediately disqualified Ellis. But for Ailes, loyalty to Bush was an asset. “We at Fox News,” he would later tell a House hearing, “do not discriminate against people because of their family connections.” On Election Day, Ellis was in constant contact with Bush himself. After midnight, when a wave of late numbers showed Bush with a narrow lead, Ellis jumped on the data to declare Bush the winner – even though Florida was still rated too close to call by the vote-tracking consortium used by all the networks. Hume announced Fox’s call for Bush at 2:16 a.m. – a move that spurred every other network to follow suit, and led to bush wins headlines in the morning papers.

“We’ll never know whether Bush won the election in Florida or not,” says Dan Rather, who was anchoring the election coverage for CBS that night. “But when you reach these kinds of situations, the ability to control the narrative becomes critical. Led by Fox, the narrative began to be that Bush had won the election.”

Dwell on this for a moment: A “news” network controlled by a GOP operative who had spent decades shaping just such political narratives – including those that helped elect the candidate’s father – declared George W. Bush the victor based on the analysis of a man who had proclaimed himself loyal to Bush over the facts. “Of everything that happened on election night, this was the most important in impact,” Rep. Henry Waxman said at the time. “It immeasurably helped George Bush maintain the idea in people’s minds that he was the man who won the election.”

After Bush took office, Ailes stayed in frequent touch with the new Republican president. “The senior-level editorial people believe that Roger was on the phone every day with Bush,” a source close to Fox News tells Rolling Stone. “He gave Bush the same kind of pointers he used to give George H.W. Bush – delivery, effectiveness, political coaching.” In the aftermath of 9/11, Ailes sent a back-channel memo to the president through Karl Rove, advising Bush to ramp up the War on Terror. As reported by Bob Woodward, Ailes advised Bush that “the American public would tolerate waiting and would be patient, but only as long as they were convinced that Bush was using the harshest measures possible.”

Fox News did its part to make sure that viewers lined up behind those harsh measures. The network plastered an American flag in the corner of the screen, dolled up one female anchor in a camouflaged silk blouse, and featured Geraldo Rivera threatening to hunt down Osama bin Laden with a pistol. The militarism even seemed to infect the culture of Fox News. “Roger Ailes is the general,” declared Bill O’Reilly. “And the general sets the tone of the army. Our army is very George Patton-esque. We charge. We roll.”

Ailes likes to boast that Fox News maintains a bright, clear line between its news shows, which he touts as balanced, and prime-time hosts like O’Reilly and Hannity, who are given free rein to voice their opinions. “We police those lines very carefully,” Ailes has said. But after Bush was elected, Ailes tasked John Moody, his top political lieutenant, to keep the newsroom in lockstep. Early each morning, Ailes summoned Moody into his office – often joined by Hume from the Washington bureau on speakerphone – and provided his spin on the day’s news. Moody then posted a daily memo to the staff with explicit instructions on how to slant the day’s news coverage according to the agenda of those on “the Second Floor,” as Ailes and his loyal cadre of vice presidents are known. “There’s a chain of command, and it’s followed,” says a former news anchor. “Roger talks to his people, and his people pass the message on down.”

When the 9/11 Commission began investigating Bush’s negligence in the lead-up to the terrorist attacks, Moody issued a stark warning: “This is not ‘What did he know and when did he know it?’ stuff. Do not turn this into Watergate. Remember the fleeting sense of national unity that emerged from this tragedy. Let’s not desecrate that.” In a 2003 memo on Bush’s overtures for Middle East peace, Moody again ordered the staff to champion the president: “His political courage and tactical cunning are worth noting in our reporting throughout the day.” During the 2004 campaign, Moody highlighted John Kerry’s “flip-flop voting record” – a line that dovetailed with the attacks coming out of the White House. In fact, Fox News was working ­directly with the Bush administration to coordinate each day’s agenda – as Bush’s own press secretary, Scott McClellan, later conceded. “We at the White House,” McClellan said, “were getting them talking points.” (Ailes and Fox News declined repeated requests from Rolling Stone for an interview.)

When Bush was re-elected, Murdoch and Ailes toasted the victory together in the control room of Fox News, celebrating until three in the morning. The network’s relentless GOP boosterism had not only been good for ratings, it also appeared to have paid dividends for the network’s corporate parent. Acting nakedly in Murdoch’s interests, the FCC blocked satellite-TV provider EchoStar’s $27 billion acquisition of DirecTV in 2002 as being anti-competitive. That cleared the way for News Corp. – which had originally been outbid – to buy control of DirecTV for a mere $6.6 billion.

But despite their commercial and political triumphs, the relationship between Murdoch and Ailes has grown rocky. The more profits soared at Fox News, the more Ailes expanded his power and independence. In 2005, he staged a brazen coup within the company, conspiring to depose Murdoch’s son Lachlan as the anointed heir of News Corp. Ailes not only took over Lachlan’s portfolio – becoming chair of Fox Television – he even claimed Lachlan’s office on the eighth floor. In 2009, Ailes earned a pay package of $24 million – a deal slightly larger than the one enjoyed by Murdoch himself. He brags privately that his contract also forbids Murdoch – infamous for micromanaging his newspapers – from interfering with editorial decisions at Fox News.

In recent years, Ailes has increasingly become a headache for News Corp. In 2004, to protect his pal Rudy Giuliani, Ailes apparently interceded in the case of Bernie Kerik, the former New York police commissioner who had been nominated on Giuliani’s recommendation to head the Department of Homeland Security. Kerik proved to be a train wreck: In the most offensive of his indiscretions, he had commandeered an apartment overlooking Ground Zero – intended for rescue and recovery workers – as a love shack for trysts with his book editor, News Corp.’s own Judith Regan. Acting more like a political consultant than a news executive, Ailes appears to have resorted to Watergate-style obstruction of justice. According to court documents, the Fox News chairman “told Regan that he believed she had information about Kerik that, if disclosed, would harm Giuliani’s presidential campaign.” The records reveal that Ailes “advised Regan to lie to, and to withhold information from, investigators concerning Kerik.” The allegation featured prominently in a wrongful-termination lawsuit brought by Regan, which reportedly cost News Corp. more than $10 million to settle.

Many within Murdoch’s family have come to viscerally hate Ailes. Murdoch’s third wife, Wendi, has worked to soften her husband’s politics, and his son James has persuaded him to embrace the reality of global warming – even as Ailes has led the drumbeat of climate deniers at Fox News. Matthew Freud, Murdoch’s son-in-law and a top PR executive in Britain, recently told reporters, “I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’ horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to.”

“Rupert is surrounded by people who regularly, if not moment to moment, tell him how horrifying and dastardly Roger is,” says Wolff, the Murdoch biographer. “Wendi cannot stand Roger. Rupert’s children cannot stand Roger. So around Murdoch, Roger has no supporters, except for Roger himself.”

Ailes begins each workday buffered by the elaborate private security detail that News Corp. pays to usher him from his $1.6 million home in New Jersey to his office in Manhattan. (His country home – in the aptly named village of Garrison – is phalanxed by empty homes that Ailes bought up to create a wider security perimeter.) Traveling with the Chairman is like a scene straight out of 24. A friend recalls hitching a ride with Ailes after a power lunch: “We come out of the building and there’s an SUV filled with big guys, who jump out of the car when they see him. A cordon is formed around us.

We’re ushered into the SUV, and we drive the few blocks to Fox’s offices, where another set of guys come out of the building to receive ‘the package.’ The package is taken in, and I’m taken on to my destination.”Ailes is certain that he’s a top target of Al Qaeda terrorists. “You know, they’re coming to get me,” he tells friends. “I’m fully prepared. I’ve taken care of it.” (Ailes, who was once arrested for carrying an illegal handgun in Central Park, now carries a licensed weapon.) Inside his blast-resistant office at Fox News headquarters, Ailes keeps a monitor on his desk that allows him to view any activity outside his closed door.

Once, after observing a dark-skinned man in what Ailes perceived to be Muslim garb, he put Fox News on lockdown. “What the hell!” Ailes shouted. “This guy could be bombing me!” The suspected terrorist turned out to be a janitor. “Roger tore up the whole floor,” recalls a source close to Ailes. “He has a personal paranoia about people who are Muslim – which is consistent with the ideology of his network.”

Ailes knows exactly who is watching Fox News each day, and he is adept at playing to their darkest fears in the age of Obama. The network’s viewers are old, with a median age of 65: Ads cater to the immobile, the infirm and the incontinent, with appeals to join class action hip-replacement lawsuits, spots for products like Colon Flow and testimonials for the services of Liberator Medical (“Liberator gave me back the freedom I haven’t had since I started using catheters”). The audience is also almost exclusively white – only 1.38 percent of viewers are African-American. “Roger understands audiences,” says Rollins, the former Reagan consultant. “He knew how to target, which is what Fox News is all about.” The typical viewer of Hannity, to take the most stark example, is a pro-business (86 percent), Christian conservative (78 percent), Tea Party-backer (75 percent) with no college degree (66 percent), who is over age 50 (65 percent), supports the NRA (73 percent), doesn’t back gay rights (78 percent) and thinks government “does too much” (84 percent). “He’s got a niche audience and he’s programmed to it beautifully,” says a former News Corp. colleague. “He feeds them exactly what they want to hear.”

From the time Obama began contemplating his candidacy, Fox News went all-out to convince its white viewers that he was a Marxist, a Muslim, a black nationalist and a 1960s radical. In early 2007, Ailes joked about the similarity of Obama’s name to a certain terrorist’s. “It is true that Barack Obama is on the move,” Ailes said in a speech to news executives. “I don’t know if it’s true that President Bush called Musharraf and said, ‘Why can’t we catch this guy?’” References to Obama’s middle name were soon being bandied about on Fox & Friends, the morning happy-talk show that Ailes uses as one of his primary vehicles to inject his venom into the media bloodstream. According to insiders, the morning show’s anchors, who appear to be chatting ad-lib, are actually working from daily, structured talking points that come straight from the top. “Prior to broadcast, Steve Doocy, Gretchen Carlson – that gang – they meet with Roger,” says a former Fox deputy. “And Roger gives them the spin.”

Fox & Friends is where the smear about Obama having attended a madrassa was first broadcast, with Doocy – an Ailes lackey from his days at America’s Talking – stating unequivocally that Obama was “raised as a Muslim.” And during the campaign, the show’s anchors flogged Obama’s reference to his own grandmother as a “typical white person” so relentlessly that it even gave Fox News host Chris Wallace pause. When Wallace appeared on the show that morning, he launched a rebuke that seemed targeted at Ailes as much as Doocy. “I have been watching the show since six o’clock this morning,” Wallace bristled. “I feel like two hours of Obama-bashing may be enough.”

The Obama era has spurred sharp changes in the character and tone of Fox News. “Obama’s election has driven Fox to be more of a political campaign than it ever was before,” says Burns, the network’s former media critic.“Things shifted,” agrees Jane Hall, who fled the network after a decade as a liberal commentator. “There seemed suddenly to be less of a need to have a range of opinion. I began to feel uncomfortable.” Sean Hannity was no longer flanked by Alan Colmes, long the network’s fig-leaf liberal. Bill Sammon, author of At Any Cost: How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election, was brought in to replace Moody as the top political enforcer. And Brit Hume was replaced on the anchor desk by Bret Baier, one of the young guns Ailes hired more than a decade ago to inject right-wing fervor into Fox News.

Most striking, Ailes hired Glenn Beck away from CNN and set him loose on the White House. During his contract negotiations, Beck recounted, Ailes confided that Fox News was dedicating itself to impeding the Obama administration. “I see this as the Alamo,” Ailes declared. Leading the charge were the ragtag members of the Tea Party uprising, which Fox News propelled into a nationwide movement. In the buildup to the initial protests on April 15th, 2009, the network went so far as to actually co-brand the rallies as “FNC Tax Day Tea Parties.” Veteran journalists were taken aback. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a news network throw its weight behind a protest like we are seeing in the past few weeks,” said Howard Kurtz, the then-media critic for The Washington Post. The following August, when the Tea Party launched its town-hall protests against health care reform, Fox & Friends urged viewers to confront their congressmen face to face. “Are you gonna call?” Gretchen Carlson demanded on-air, “or are you gonna go to one of these receptions where they’re actually there?” The onscreen Chyron instructed viewers: HOLD CONGRESS ACCOUNTABLE! NOW IS THE TIME TO SPEAK YOUR MIND.

Fox News also hyped Sarah Palin’s lies about “death panels” and took the smear a step further, airing a report claiming that the Department of Veterans Affairs was using a “death book” to encourage soldiers to “hurry up and die.” (Missing from the report was any indication that the end-of-life counseling materials in question had been promoted by the Bush administration.) At the height of the health care debate, more than two-thirds of Fox News viewers were convinced Obama­care would lead to a “government takeover,” provide health care to illegal immigrants, pay for abortions and let the government decide when to pull the plug on grandma. As always, the Chairman’s enforcer made sure that producers down in the Fox News basement were toeing the party line.

In October 2009, as Congress weighed adding a public option to the health care law, Sammon let everyone know how Ailes expected them to cover the story. “Let’s not slip back into calling it the ‘public option,’” he warned in an e-mail. “Please use the term ‘government-run health insurance’ ... when­ever possible.” Sammon neglected to mention that the phrase he was pushing had been carefully crafted by America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry’s largest lobbying organization, which had determined that the wording was “the most negative language to use when describing a ‘public plan.’”

The result of this concerted campaign of disinformation is a viewership that knows almost nothing about what’s going on in the world. According to recent polls, Fox News viewers are the most misinformed of all news consumers. They are 12 percentage points more likely to believe the stimulus package caused job losses, 17 points more likely to believe Muslims want to establish Shariah law in America, 30 points more likely to say that scientists dispute global warming, and 31 points more likely to doubt President Obama’s citizenship. In fact, a study by the University of Maryland reveals, ignorance of Fox viewers actually increases the longer they watch the network. That’s because Ailes isn’t interested in providing people with information, or even a balanced range of perspectives. Like his political mentor, Richard Nixon, Ailes traffics in the emotions of victimization.

“What Nixon did – and what Ailes does today in the age of Obama – is unravel and rewire one of the most powerful of human emotions: shame,” says Perlstein, the author of Nixonland. “He takes the shame of people who feel that they are being looked down on, and he mobilizes it for political purposes. Roger Ailes is a direct link between the Nixonian politics of resentment and Sarah Palin’s politics of resentment. He’s the golden thread.”

During his days as an overt political consultant, Roger Ailes reshaped Republican politics for the era of network television. Now, as chairman of Fox News, he has reshaped a television network as a force for Republican politics. “It’s a political campaign – a 24/7 political campaign,” says a former Ailes deputy. “Nobody has been able to issue talking points to the American public morning after morning, day after day, night after night.” Perhaps the only media figure in history with a greater sway over the American electorate was Father Charles Coughlin, the redbaiting Catholic ideologue whose corrosive radio sermons – laced with anti-Semitism and economic populism – reached nearly a third of the country during the Great Depression.

“Ailes is actually much more sophisticated than Coughlin,” says Sean Wilentz, a Princeton historian and author of The Age of Reagan. “Coughlin was only on the air once a week, and it was clear that what he presented was his opinion. Fox News is totalized: It’s an entire network, devoted 24 hours a day to an entire politics, and it’s broadcast as ‘the news.’ That’s why Ailes is a genius. He’s combined opinion and journalism in a wholly new way – one that blurs the distinction between the two.”

The phenomenal political power and economic prowess of Fox News has inspired imitation. In recent years, MSNBC has tried to refashion itself as the anti-Fox, with a prime-time lineup stacked with liberal commentators. Such contortions, say media veterans, only strengthen Fox News, emboldening Ailes to tack even further to the right. “He can say, ‘I’m not doing anything anyone else isn’t doing – I’m just doing it on the other side of the fence,’ ” says Dan Rather.

But Ailes has not simply been content to shift the nature of journalism and direct the GOP’s message war. He has also turned Fox News into a political fundraising juggernaut. During her Senate race in Delaware, Tea Party darling Christine O’Donnell bragged, “I’ve got Sean Hannity in my back pocket, and I can go on his show and raise money.” Sharron Angle, the Tea Party candidate who tried to unseat Harry Reid in Nevada, praised Fox for letting her say on-air, “I need $25 from a million people – go to SharronAngle.com and send money.” Completing the Fox-GOP axis, Karl Rove has used his pulpit as a Fox News commentator to promote American Crossroads, a shadowy political group he founded, promising that the money it raised would be put “to good use to defeat Democrats who have supported the president’s agenda.”

But the clearest demonstration of how Ailes has seamlessly merged both money and message lies in the election of John Kasich, a longtime Fox News contributor who eked out a two-point victory over Democrat Ted Strickland last November to become governor of Ohio. While technically a Republican, Kasich might better be understood as the first candidate of the Fox News Party. “The question is no longer whether Fox News is an arm of the GOP,” says Burns, the network’s former media critic, “but whether it’s becoming the torso instead.”

The host of a weekend show called Heartland, Kasich made 42 appearances as a contributor on Fox after he announced his interest in running, frequently guest-hosting on The O’Reilly Factor. He also appeared 16 times as an active candidate, using the network as a platform to make naked fundraising appeals. Most striking of all, News Corp. itself chipped in $1.26 million to the Republican Governors Association, making it one of the largest single contributors to the club Kasich was seeking to join. Murdoch made no bones about why he made such a generous donation to the GOP cause: It was driven, he said, by “my friendship with John Kasich.” Since becoming governor, Kasich has repealed collective-­bargaining rights for 350,000 state workers and killed a stimulus-­funded project to develop high-speed rail for the state.

Fox News stands as the culmination of everything Ailes tried to do for Nixon back in 1968. He has created a vast stage set, designed to resemble an actual news network, that is literally hard-wired into the homes of millions of America’s most conservative voters. GOP candidates then use that forum to communicate directly to their base, bypass­ing the professional journalists Ailes once denounced as “matadors” who want to “tear down the social order” with their “elitist, horse-dung, social­ist thinking.” Ironically, it is Ailes who has built the most formidable propaganda machine ever seen outside of the Communist bloc, pioneering a business model that effectively monetizes conservative politics through its relentless focus on the bottom line. "I’m not in politics," Ailes recently boasted. "I’m in ratings. We’re winning."

The only thing that remains to be seen is whether Ailes can have it both ways: reaching his goal of $1 billion in annual profits while simultaneously dethroning Obama with one of his candidate-­employees. Either way, he has put the Republican Party on his payroll and forced it to remake itself around his image. Ailes is the Chairman, and the conservative movement now reports to him. "Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us," said David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter. "Now we’re discovering that we work for Fox."


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Sources: Fox News, MSNBC, Rolling Stone, Youtube, Google Maps