The Daily Background

DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE. Ahahahah sweet victory is ours!

Okay a bit of background here. Fox News was planning on hosting a Demcratic Presidential primary debate in August in Nevada. A really poor choice, according to pretty much everybody here. If they host one of our debates, they’ll be able to ask any type of question they want, and you can bet they’ll all make our candidates look terrible because they’re a right-wing noise machine.

John Edwards’ campaign recognized this and decided not to participate. Obama’s campaign showed some signs of not wanting to participate, as did some other campaigns. Hillary seemed on the fence. Only Richardson had committed (and he dropped it earlier today). But our pressure paid off and they’re now cancelling the debate alltogether because Fox was just planning to make Democrats look awful as usual. The blogosphere played a big role in this victory, as did MoveOn. Here’s The Politico:

According to MoveOn, more than 265,000 people signed a petition sent to the Nevada State Democratic Party. The organization launched a website — http://foxattacks.com/ — as part of its campaign.

FOX News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes gave the progressive activists more ammunition on Thursday when he jokingly compared Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois, to Osama bin Laden.

By the way, Fox Attacks is a project of Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films, not MoveOn. Kos writes:

The Big Winner: the Progressive movement, which came together at all levels — netroots, grassroots, and even some institutional players.

The other Big Winner: John Edwards, whose early leadership dropping out of the debate spurred intense media coverage (hence pressure) and fueled its demise.

Snatched victory from the jaws of defeat: Richardson, who announced he was pulling out just an hour or so before the official demise of the debate. He would’ve been left isolated, the only candidate to agree to a now-dead debate. Spared by the hair on his chinny chin chin.

Mild loser: The other campaigns, especially Obama, who could’ve shown some leadership and hit back at the network that has been tormenting them with non-stop smear attacks. Instead, they played it safe.

The Big Loser: Fox News, which will now face a whole new round of stories discussing their “conservative bias” and propaganda function. For a network that wanted this debate to obscure their partisan purpose, this is the worst of all worlds.

I think one of the reasons why Obama was so hesitant (there’s no question he hates Fox as much as we do– after the Madrassa scandal he shut out their reporters) was that if he didn’t attend that debate, he wouldn’t have attended any by that time since he skipped the C-SPAN one that everyone else attended last month.

Update: Statement from Fox News Vice President David Rhodes

“We have not received official word from the Nevada State Democratic Party disclosing a change in debate plans. Rumors are being circulated and if true, news organizations will want to think twice before getting involved in the Nevada Democratic Caucus which appears to be controlled by radical fringe out-of-state interest groups, not the Nevada Democratic Party. In the past, Moveon.org has said they ‘own’ the Democratic party—while most Democrats don’t agree with that, we’re waiting to see if that’s the case in Nevada.”

Filed under: Presidential election, Z-TDB Blog