If you are looking for portents of apocalypse, September was a fine month. A quick scan through September would make the staunchest patriot queasy. There must have been something in the water.
For our requisite Sarah Palin entry, we have her September-dispensed military advice on how to defeat ISIS. It was, for the record, "Go big or go home." There you go; I think that sums things up pretty well. Bill O'Reilly's notions of how to defeat ISIS were more complex, and consisted of hiring a mercenary army to go do it for us. Really, when has something like that ever gone wrong.
There was Teagate. Honest to God, I'm not making this up. President Obama saluted someone with a cup in his hand, and it was in all the papers. You know, if an asteroid killed us all right now, there's a case to be made that it did it just to spite us for that.
Anti-immigrant rhetoric? Yep. Which do you want—do you want the armed militia confronting camping biologists as possible ferbidden immygrants, or the ambitious candidate that said these children crossing the border may require bombing Mexico, or the congressthings who still continued to insist on more rapid deportations even after learning that some of the children previously deported were, in fact, killed upon their forced return to the countries they fled?
The National Review continued its efforts to capture the title of dumbest site on the internet—a tall order, but it has got more funding than other candidates—with the site's theory that a pattern of violence from NFL players was due to Obama not leading. The Republican efforts to appeal to Normal People devolved into a mere insistence that Republicans "are people too," an effort that would have been funny just as slogan but was elevated to high art by the discovery that the images they used of hip, unusual Republicans were actually generic pictures cribbed from stock photo libraries.
Please read below the fold for September's prime apocalyptic event.
But it would feel odd to have a list of twelve sure signs of the upcoming end of the world without at least one of them being specifically devoted to Fox & Friends. More than any other show, Fox & Friends may represent the final, inevitable destination of all cable news programming. Where other programs may be shallow, Fox & Friends is stupid. While other programs try to invent news out of nothingness on slow days, Fox & Friends keeps a litany of imaginary dangers and paranoias to keep their viewer's larders stocked. It is not merely the worst news show on television—it, much like Crossfire on another network, in another time—works singlehandedly and purposefully toward turning the style of information-dispensation and debate throughout the rest of the nation into something Louder, and Dumber, and Worse.
So we'll give this month's sign of the apocalypse to Fox & Friends as a whole, and specifically to their witty banter upon release of a tape showing NFL player Ray Rice knocking his then-girlfriend unconscious in an elevator with a single full-force punch to her face.
The hosts of Fox & Friends on Monday turned video of NFL player Ray Rice punching his then-girlfriend unconscious in an elevator into a joke, saying that in the future she should “take the stairs.” [...]
“I think the message is take the stairs,” [Brian Kilmeade] added, as co-host Anna Kooiman giggled.
“The message is, when you’re in an elevator, there’s a camera,” Doocy concluded.
Imagine this morning banter, day in and day out, every day for a month or a year or a decade. Surely, this is how civilizations fall.