WASHINGTON – It was a historic collapse of credibility. A moment in time when the American people had spoken loudly. However, on Fox News Channel, Karl Rove went deaf. Dumb. Blind. He took along with him Bret Baier and Megyn Kelly, who evidently didn’t have the power to push him off camera in favor of math and facts and the voters speaking loudly. It was the culmination of coverage on the cable network that had been foreshadowed by weeks of hyper partisan coverage of Benghazi, worse than their usual fair, when the rest of the country was focused on the economy.
The remarkable spectacle on Fox News Channel culminated in an epic explosion once Ohio was called for President Obama and he was reelected the 44th president of the United States.
It began when Chris Wallace announced that the Romney campaign was disputing the numbers coming out of Ohio. Moments later Karl Rove starts spinning out the names of counties trying to prove the race had not been won.
In the middle of all this Charles Krauthammer begins a monologue, hissing invectives at Obama, illustrating why Mitt Romney and Republicans deserved to be taken out.
It happened in a way that no one on Fox News Channel saw coming, because the possibility was too horrible for them to consider.
For days, Fox has been spinning that Mitt Romney was surging. Then after it was clear they couldn’t prove it they started shifting the story and blaming Romney’s faltering on nor’easter Sandy, which continued earlier in the night with Bill O’Reilly, their #1 host.
From Dick Morris pontificating about a “landslide” to Sean Hannity’s hit squad, the hatred for the President has dripped day after day, crafting a narrative that a Romney win was in hand. No evidence, just malarkey.
Then tonight hit and Karl Rove couldn’t believe it.
At one point Megyn Kelly got up to go back stage to talk to the statisticians making sure the count was right out of Ohio. They looked genuinely surprised that she was confronting them, though very nicely. The only reason she went back there was because Karl Rove was blowing a gasket on air.
Kelly came back to the set, while Bret Baier looked over his shoulder for Rove, after calling him back on stage. Then suddenly after he came on stage, Michael Barone was summoned as well.
Barone started talking, everyone clearly trying to appease Karl Rove, who was going through the political version of water torture on air. The entire Fox News audience saw the naked cravenness of their favorite channel not being able to accept that Team Obama had beaten the Romney team, with Karl Rove bereft of legitimacy after being exposed for trying to spin that the election was falsely called, thus making Obama illegitimate.
Barone told Rove it was over.
The entire spectacle was a fitting crescendo and finale to what has been building for weeks, as Fox analysts made up out of whole cloth that Mitt Romney would not only win, but do so handily, while there was no evidence to prove their assertions.
Steve Hayes later said, “The polling was more accurate than it wasn’t.”
This is not what happened.
The coverage on Fox was pure fiction. They lied. They said the polls were “skewed.” That up was down. They were made fools by saying otherwise, with conservatives also trying to humiliate Nate Silver in the process.
What’s even worse is that they sucked in their audience who lapped up this wholly ridiculous narrative they were spinning, because the earnest hatred through which it was delivered missed the truth about this country.
Mitt Romney’s campaign and Fox News Channel, along with right wing radio, not only ignored minorities, but told the white audience that laps up the hatred they spew day in and day out towards Barack Obama, that the Millenials, Hispanics and African Americans don’t exist and that women are going to put up with our bodies being made into “social issues” that can be used like poker chips. Democrats do that with women too, but at least it usually ends up to our benefit.
If Fox News was an employee they’d be fired and unable to get hired in the business again.
Nate Silver was correct and beat all the poll hacks pushing false narratives, but are respected simply because they’re paid by the establishment elite. He’ll be serving crow on the mezzanine deck the rest of the month.
As for Karl Rove, I’ve been waiting 12 frickin’ years for this malevolent egomaniac to get his due, but I never dreamed I’d get to watch his unmaking on Fox News in prime election time.
Thank you President Obama for delivering Karl Rove’s head on a plate.
Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Duckworth, Tammy Baldwin, Claire McCaskill… and on and on… winning was the main course, but The Architect trussed on a platter was a spectacular dessert.
Taylor Marsh, a veteran political analyst and former Huffington Post contributor, is the author of The Hillary Effect, available at Barnes and Noble and on Amazon. Her new-media magazine www.taylormarsh.com covers national politics, women, foreign policy, and the politics of sex.