RSSBrian Kilmeade Walks Off FOX and FRIENDS Set in Dispute over Obama Bashing … More Humor than Statement
Discussing of “a typical white woman” leads to this on Fox and Friends … Its seems being called “typical” is not appreciated.
Its hard to imagine or take serious that Brian Kilmeade’s would really walk off the Fox and Friends TV set after so called Barack Obama bashing. After a heated discussion and being called “a typical sports guy,” Kilmeade stormed off the set and took his toys with him. It would appear from the antics that the morning crew, Gretchen Carlson, Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade are famous for that this was more of a hyperbole gag than a walk out in protest.
Humor is one of the greatest ways to get one’s point across. That’s why at SM we do caption contests or in some cases write sarcastic commentaries. It would appear that some liberal blogs do not have a sense of humor. What a shock. Others seems to think the stunt was real.
WHAT DO YOU THINK … REAL OR FAKE?
Should we consider it serious or not. To me, it seems to be a faux protest. However, if it was truly real on Kilmeads part … KEEP WALKING.
UPDATE I: By the way Fox & Friends, not all the bloggers got the walking off the set stunt wrong. Only liberal bloggers like the Huffington Post et all who are void of any sense of humor and always look for the negative did.
Unlike liberal blogs, we get sarcasm.
Posted March 22, 2008 by Scared Monkeys Barack Obama, Bizarre, Fun, Politics, Presidential Election 2008, Sports | 13 comments |
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13 Responses to “Brian Kilmeade Walks Off FOX and FRIENDS Set in Dispute over Obama Bashing … More Humor than Statement”
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the laughter from his co-hosts really say more than anything. obviously a joke.
the dem sites are just looking for any dis chord.
Yep I’d say a joke too, not very funny though.
Brian K has never been a favorite of mine either.
Yeah, I’d say it was a joke as well.
R
I am taking my toys and leaving….so there!
I saw that exhange and studied it carefully, not sure at first if the walk-off was real or scripted.
I have to say… I decided Kilmeade was truly ticked off.
Gretchen had been talking over Brian and driving him up the wall. Brian got up and stormed off -exiting the studio door to make it LOOK LIKE a joke.
He returned, but with body language that betrayed an annoyance he was willing himself to reign in.
The acid test? During Chris Wallace’s Friday morning “cut-in”, Wallace “disagreed” with the extent of the Friends’ coverage re: Obama. Gretchen looked at him in angst and Doocy looked perturbed also…
Brian Kilmeade is a nice guy, but he can be a bit of a hot head. Gretchen, back from Spring Break, was doing tanned cartwheels around the room. Brian just wasn’t up for it!
Its FAKE…Calm down people. It was a bit of theater for our enjoyment. Just enjoy and dont read all that much into it.
In Barak Obama’s recent speech on race relations, what if he had focused on his own conduct instead of everyone else’s? What if he had applied his principles of hope and change to himself? What kind of speech would he have delivered? The following is one Obama admirer’s concept of what he would have said.
A MORE PERFECT CANDIDATE
THE BARAK OBAMA SPEECH
I WANTED TO HEAR
ON MARCH 18, 2008
Good evening. The major television networks and cable channels recently aired a series of video clips showing portions of sermons by my pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Reverend Wright served as the leader of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. I have attended the church for the past 20 years. Many Americans thought the sermons were anti-American, anti-white, and anti-Semitic. Therefore you may be wondering whether I share those contentious views. I do not. Tonight I would like to explain my beliefs and dispel the misconceptions I have created about my leadership ability and judgment.
For me, hope and change is not just a slogan. It is a principle to live by. It starts with me taking responsibility for my faith and my place of worship. Hence the following atonement.
First I want to apologize to the black American community. I gave you the impression, by participating in the Trinity Church, that I endorsed the church’s black liberation theology. The truth is, I never identified with that brand of Christianity. I appreciate the history of the movement, with its muscular concepts of oppression, victimization, and empowerment. But America has come a long way since then. I would rather build on that progress than dwell in a perpetual re-run of the 1960’s.
I joined the Trinity Church for reasons of acceptance. The church enabled me to accept Christ in my life. It helped me accept my black heritage. It accepted people in need. It accepted me, even though I hardly fit the profile of a resident of south side Chicago. In return for the church’s acceptance, I accepted the offensive parts of Reverend Wright’s sermons: his obscenities, his use of the “n” word, and his denunciations of America, whites and Jews.
For 20 years I listened politely to the Reverend’s slurs, tacitly playing along with his social blame game. I never heard his worst outbursts until a few days ago, when I watched the videos. But that is beside the point. The Reverend was my spiritual mentor and friend for 20 years. I had already heard plenty of similar lyrics in his jarring song. Indeed, I repeated some of them in my 1995 book, “Dreams for My Father.” There I recounted the Reverend’s “Audacity of Hope” sermon, quoting the line “[W]hite folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere…That’s the world on which hope sits!”
My staff was also familiar with the Reverend’s divisive prose. That is why they advised me to dis-invite him from my campaign.
The point is that I never should have accepted the unacceptable. My silence was complicity. I should have used my position as a prominent American leader to challenge the Reverend’s views and show my fellow congregants a better way. If I had succeeded in effecting change, I could have started the kind of constructive inter-racial dialog that is long overdue in this country. If I had failed, I still could have shown leadership by leading the way out the door. Unfortunately, I was afraid of losing my church’s acceptance. So I kept up appearances at the cost of my ideals.
You deserve better from a U.S. senator, especially one who aspires to be president. And for that, I am deeply sorry.
Going forward, I will make sure that Trinity Church cleans up its act. If the new pastor continues in Reverend Wright’s tradition, I will leave the church. It should not be hard to find a place of worship that offers acceptance without peddling the politics of hate. After all, Christ never said ‘hate thy neighbor.’ If I cannot find a tolerant church in the black community, I will find one elsewhere. I feel no compulsion to join a black church simply because I am half-black. By the same token, I could not be a parishioner of Pastor John Hagee. Pastor Hagee is the white evangelical preacher who said Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment of the City of New Orleans for holding a Gay Pride parade.
Next, I owe an apology to white Americans, and by extension, America in general. My involvement in the Trinity Church helped popularize its anti-white theology. How much that swelled hatred towards whites or America, we will never know.
This we do know: in the age of the Internet, anything we say can and will be used against us in the court of world opinion. Take the disgraceful episode of prison abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In April of 2004, during the Army’s criminal investigation of the wrongdoing, one soldier released some of the investigative evidence, namely, a series of photos depicting the shameful abuse. Within one month, Al Qaeda terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi conducted a video-taped beheading of U.S. citizen Nick Berg. The militant announced that he was responding to Abu Ghraib.
Here is another example of how we Americans help shape our image abroad. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack, an anonymous foreign source published the unfounded conspiracy theory that Israel’s intelligence agency warned Jews to leave the World Trade Center before the attack. Then others mass-e-mailed the lie. One of the spammers was Malik Zulu Shabazz, head of America’s New Black Panther Party. Eventually, an opinion poll found that the majority of the “Arab Street” regarded the falsehood as fact.
Mr. Shabazz and his group may not be Islamic militants any more than the U.S. soldier in Iraq. But his words, however inadvertently, give them rhetorical ammunition.
We know the standard narrative of radical Islam: it could be any story, fanciful or true, shaped to demonize Americans, Jews, or capitalism. Often the alarmism is accompanied by some religious invocation. For example, Osama bin Laden refers to “the oppression and tyranny of the American/Israeli coalition against our people.” He adds that “oppression and the intentional killing of innocent women and children is a deliberate American policy … to keep busy their various corporations.” Then he claims “Allah” is his “Guardian and Helper.”
Notice the similarity of Reverend Wright’s caustic themes. He yelled, “God damn America,” called us “the number one killer in the world,” and accused our government of inventing AIDS as “a means of genocide against people of color.” He said we invaded Iraq “for oil money.” He referred to the word “Israel” as a “dirty word” and filled one issue of his newsletter with an article by a Hamas official questioning why anyone should “concede Israel’s ‘right’ to exist.” He explained the 9/11 attack as “America’s chickens coming home to roost.” I can just imagine bin Laden salivating before his in-cave TV set and rubbing his hands with glee.
Reverend Wright is a friend and admirer of Louis Farrakhan, another influential Chicago-area spiritual leader who spills gasoline on the fires of terrorist texts. Farrakhan made the bald assertion that “Zionists … manipulated the American government” to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. You may recall that I have already repudiated this man in the strongest terms, despite his unsolicited support of my campaign.
Another purveyor of Osama-style speech is James Meeks, an Illinois State Senator and Pastor of Chicago’s Salem Baptist Church. He refers to America’s mayors as modern-day “slave masters” who are “presiding over systems where black people are not able to be educated.” He also blames “Hollywood Jews” for making the Academy-Awarding winning film, “Brokeback Mountain.”
Many times I have said ‘words matter.’ I meant it. Every American has the cherished First Amendment right to denounce our government. But the more we emulate the terrorists’ propaganda, the more we encourage their terrorist acts. Especially dangerous is the trend of militarizing religion. I do not want my spiritual leaders to hijack Christianity the way certain Moslem extremists have hijacked Islam. We must each decide what we want America to be: a cauldron of clashing civilizations or a pluralistic democracy. Whatever the outcome, we had better decide soon. Our national security is at stake.
By failing to challenge the above haters, I displayed a lack of leadership. All three of them were based in my own backyard of Chicago. All three operated out of the state that I represent in the U.S. Senate. In one of the three cases I tried to conceal the individual’s involvement in my campaign. That lapse of judgment only exacerbated the problem.
Nevertheless, I continue to believe that I am the best-qualified person to move us beyond the racial blame game, which only fuels the rhetoric of our mutual enemies, and start solving our problems through civil debate. That is the core of my proposed agenda as president.
Therefore, I hereby recommit myself to my trans-racial mission by resolving to denounce American racism at every turn. Black, white, brown, or purple, whoever tries to lead Americans in the direction of racial strife will hear from me. I will write them and debate them. I will organize counter-marches and other media events. I will leverage my credentials and contacts. I will rebut their op-ed pieces and soften the cynics. In short, I will do my part to walk the walk in this nation’s march for a more just and equal America.
In addition, I will apply my community organizing skills to form a non-profit foundation that will conduct inter-racial workshops on the social challenges of our day. To the extent that the group can reach solutions though multi-racial consensus, I will propose them in my campaign. There must be ways to invest in education, health care, jobs, and peacekeeping that meet our common goals. My efforts may cost me the votes of a few holdouts who cling to the grudges of the past. But to me, uniting this country is more important than winning public office.
How foolish I was to spend twenty years paying homage to a bigot as my spiritual mentor. Each time the Reverend bashed the “white man,” he was bashing me. I am the one who put myself in that demeaning position. So the buck stops with me.
It is no excuse for either of us that the Reverend’s black racism was caused by white racism. Every clergyman knows that two wrongs do not make a right. And every Christian minister knows the golden rule. In the particular context of racial justice, there can be no double standard. Otherwise we send the signal that it would be ok for someone like John McCain to join a white supremacist church.
In fairness to Reverend Wright, he never used derogatory terms in his conversations with me or his direct interactions with whites. He was like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. For those deeds I remain in his debt. Moreover, the Reverend did worlds of good for his neighbors. He housed the homeless, provided day care services, raised funding for scholarships, and cared for the sick.
Finally, I ask for the forgiveness of the American Jews. Of all the people for blacks to spit on, Jews deserve it the least. Be assured that a prominent goal in my war on racism will be to conquer the forces of anti-Semitism. That is my responsibility as a believer in democracy, and especially as a member of the black race. We blacks have as many as five good reasons to support Jews and Israel wherever we can.
1. Black America could not ask for a better friend than the American Jew. The Jews marched with us shoulder to shoulder through the civil rights movement. They helped establish us in a legally protected class while never seeking the same status for themselves. To this day they join us in every cause from civil liberties, to poverty relief, to the genocide in Darfur.
2. Far from the model of South African apartheid, Israel has set an example of democratic tolerance for minority populations. The freest Arabs in the Middle East are the Arab citizens of Israel. Remarkably, despite continuing animosities between Arabs and Jews, Arabs are represented by multiple parties in the Israeli parliament. They serve as ministers in Israel’s executive branch and judges on its supreme court. They receive Israeli government-provided health care and education and enjoy a much higher standard of living than most other Arabs in the Middle East.
By and large, it is the Arabs in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and southern Lebanon who strap on the explosive vests. Their vision of a future Palestine includes no Jews at all.
Israel’s democratic diversity is also well known in Africa. A continuous stream of refugees from the African conflict zones are literally overwhelming the tiny State of Israel in their desperate search for asylum.
When I quoted Reverend Wright in my book, “Dreams for my Father,” I wrote, “[W]hite folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another ….” The apartheid charge was an anti-Semitic smear. I assure you I will not make that misjudgment again.
3. Blacks, of all people, can identify with the Jewish struggle for survival in a prejudiced world. Both groups were targeted for extermination by the Nazis, both were attacked by the Ku Klux Klan, and both suffered discrimination by the American establishment. Also remember that the 9/11 attack was directed at all Americans, not just whites and Jews. When it comes to the war on terror, just like our other foreign and domestic challenges, we are all in this together.
Today Jews comprise such a tiny percent of the world population that they are nearly extinct. Meanwhile, Israel is surrounded by enemies who have been trying to destroy the nation since 1948, when the United Nations ushered it into existence. Its people are beleaguered by war and terrorism, and its military advantage erodes as we speak, thanks to the emerging power of Iran. We are the guardians of the human right to exist. We cannot stand by while Israel is wiped off the map.
4. Blacks hold the key to conflict resolution. It is called nonviolent protest, and it was Dr. King’s gift. Let us share that gift with all would-be suicide bombers. Imagine the potential transformation of Moslem grievances, not just in the West Bank and Gaza, but Iraq, Lebanon, Nigeria, Somalia, Algeria, Kashmir, Kosovo, Denmark, and France. Dr. King believed the pen was mightier than the sword, and he was right.
5. Whether our black heritage happens to be Christian or Moslem, our religion is an outgrowth of the Jewish faith. We should no more hate the Jews than two sons should hate their mother. As we do God’s work on earth, let us act like the family we are, with mutual caring, respect, and support.
I suppose I could have given a politically safer speech tonight. I could have treated the matter as though it were someone else’s burden. I might have retraced the tragic history of race in America, feigned shock at the language of Reverend Wright, and moralized about his state of mind. I could have pointed out the racial imperfections of others, perhaps including my own mother. I could have pretended that leaving Trinity Church would be tantamount to disowning the black community. I could have tried to melt your hearts with a story about an elderly man’s gesture of racial sensitivity.
But the issue of my leadership ability and judgment is not something I can ignore with the hope that it fades away. I must be fully accountable for the role I played in my controversial church.
To all who support me, I promise to make the needed personal reforms and hope they meet your expectations. I cannot change overnight. But this is my start.
#7 Joel—you should have written Obama’s speech for him. But since he came up with his version of what he thought the general public wanted to hear….he has infused fear and doubt and he will not recover from that too soon.
Very impressed with your “speech” however, brilliant !
Dear New Girl,
Thanks. Glad you liked it. And I agree with you. The issue will probably continue to haunt him.
Fox and friends host “LET’S SEE WHAT YOU SAY OR DO IF A COUPLE OF HIP HOP THUGS APPROACH YOU. Would you think and sat what the typical white person who think and say, or would you run very politely and pray your blessing on them. TRUTH OR DARE…..
Dude had to hit the head.
I watch Fox and Friends almost everyday and think Brian K leaving is no big loss. He takes the stupid side in every debate.
OMG, that was so obviously a joke, I was laughing my head off when Kilmeade “stormed off”.