Fox News contributor Dick Morris showed up on Wednesday's Today to plug his new book 2010: Take Back America: A Battle Plan. The booking was a coup for Morris, who has turned a personal vendetta against the Clintons into Fox News career based solely on attacking Democrats and outlining strategies for how to defeat them. Morris uses his books, columns and a website to bash Dems and raise money for Republicans.
Morris' latest book opens with this gem:
Barack Obama is ruining America.
He is destroying everything that makes us great.
Apparently there were not enough primetime Fox News channel opportunities for Morris to plug his venomous and partisan attacks, so NBC felt the need to provide him with a much larger audience.
For some reason, NBC hosts Morris whenever he has a new book out. Last year they hosted him to plug Catastrophe and in 2008, they hosted him to plug Fleeced, an appearance during which Morris mentioned “this whole debate about” whether Obama is a “Manchurian candidate” or a “sleeper agent.”
So the question remains - Why do the other networks care what Dick Morris has to say?
Seriously. Why?
Morris' past attempts at political prognostication have been wildly inaccurate.
His smears are highly partisan and absurd.
Morris has said: “Those crazies in Montana who say, 'We're going to kill ATF agents because the U.N.'s going to take over' -- well, they're beginning to have a case.”
And he once claimed “that the reason 9-11 happened is that Bill Clinton treated the '93 bombing of the Trade Center as a crime, not as an act of war.”
Lately, Morris has been running around falsely claiming that the “average family” will have “their insurance premiums going up by almost $2,000 a year.” In fact, the CBO estimates that premiums will not rise for the vast majority of Americans and will decrease for many.
Does NBC not realize that by giving Morris airtime on its own network, it is boosting his credibility and thus, the overall credibility of Fox News? The same goes for Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove.
When Matt Lauer hosted Rove in December, Rove falsely claimed that Barack Obama “didn't speak out” against the Bush administration's war strategies for Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, Obama advocated prioritizing the conflict in Afghanistan and repeatedly criticized Bush's Iraq war policy.
And Gingrich used his Today appearance last week to promote the Tea Parties, claiming that its leaders “understand that in the end their job is to help defeat Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.”
If viewers wanted such partisan analysis from Rove, Gingrich and Morris, why wouldn't they just turn on Fox News?
In the end, do NBC and the other networks not see that by hosting Fox News contributors and giving legitimacy to the brand of conservative misinformation they bring with them, they are ultimately boosting Fox's ratings?