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Dee Dee Benkie, a former Bush campaign aide, was on Fox News' America Live with Heather Childers, fearmongering about their favorite topic of the holiday season: the dread Fiscal Cliff. She was demanding that President Obama actually be president instead of the "mac-daddy candidate" and lead on the fiscal issues. She was quite adamant that the Republicans needed new leadership in the House and Senate, which means that Boehner and McConnell must go. She wants Marco Rubio the earth expert to be the minority leader.

Benkie was also all over Grover Norquist, who has become the favored scapegoat for some right-wingers as they look to pass the blame around.

BENKIE: I think Grover is over too. I mean, what is the deal with this guy? He should not be running Washington. He is part of the problem and we do need to find a way to work together.

Jehmu Greene, a lefty Fox Newsie who apologized to Tucker Carlson for calling him a bow-tie wearing white boy, agreed also that we need to take away Grover Norquist's death grip on the GOP so a deal can be made. Then Dee Dee got to talk about what she really wanted to discuss: spending in Washington.

BENKIE: What we have to stop to is the spending, the spending is so terrible in D.C. The waste is unbelievable when we have so much debt. We have to address that right away.

CHILDERS: What spending cuts?

BENKIE: We've got to cut across the board. I mean, Washington D.C. is so bloated, such terrible waste, and we're broke right now as a country. We need to make sure we can take care of Americans and I don't mean in a way (inaudible) as far as all the entitlements. I mean, we take care of the people who need to be -- we need to take care of the job creators so we don't have a stranglehold on them as far as taxing them to death, and then we've got to adjust Obamacare because it's really, a lot of the businesses right now are struggling. There's so much to be worked on.

CHILDERS) John Boehner said Obamacare needs to be on the table.

GREENE: Obamacare is the law of the land ladies and let's not forget it.

CHILDERS: We'll see.

Dee Dee just throws in a sentence or two about how we have to support the middle class, but then retreats to the republican familiar position of cutting taxes for businesses. Nothing about how we should save Medicare and Medicaid from cruel and unjust cuts just to appease the business owners.

Nope, it's the non-job-creating peons who need to shoulder the sacrifice. As always.

Since I wrote my last post for Crooks and Liars, it looks like the nativist noise machine is at it again.  This time it's the foul-mouthed Megyn Kelly spouting half-truths and dehumanizing rhetoric.  It looks like I'll have to add Kelly to the list of folks I'm issuing the Gaby Pacheco challenge to. 

Briefly, for those who don't want to read my previous post, the Gaby Pacheco challenge invokes the revolutionary idea that the people you defame on the air, in this case Megyn Kelly's "illegals", should get a chance to speak for themselves. 

Gaby Pacheco is an undocumented student leader from Florida who wants to be a special needs teacher.  After she spoke out publicly about her immigration status, her family was detained.  She walked 1,500 miles for the DREAM Act on what was dubbed the Trail of DREAMs.  Despite the fact the the only country she knows as her home refuses to recognize her existence, Gaby is not bitter or hateful.  In fact, upon meeting the notorious nativist Sheriff Joe Arpaio, she hugged him.  Gaby loves this country more than I ever will. 

I issued the Gaby Pacheco challenge to Michelle Malkin in my last post.  The fact that all I've received is silence shows, I think, the cowardliness and meaninglessness of the nativist noise machine.  Why can't Michelle Malkin have the decency to sit down and have a conversation with the people and communities she defames on the air and in print? 

I'm now issuing the same challenge to Kelly.  Kelly invited Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) onto her FOX News show, America Live.  She regularly interrupts Gutierrez and exhumes a festering potpourri of half-truths posed as questions.  But there was nothing more grating to my ear than Kelly's use of the word "illegals."

I think even people who are really really against illegal immigration have more empathy for kids who were brought here through no choice of their own by there parents, who are illegals because their parents made a decision that the kids had nothing to do with.

Megyn Kelly - FOX News (19 September 2010) 

I believe very strongly that no human being is illegal, and that the the phrase embodies the essence of the global pro-migrant movement.  That is why, rather than use the adjective "illegal" to define someone's very existence, I prefer to use the terms undocumented or unauthorized.  If people absolutely must use the word "illegal" to describe what's happening than use it to describe the action, not to define the person.  In other words say, people who migrated here illegally, rather than "illegal immigrants."  The media has accepted this dehumanizing phrase "illegal immigrants" as the "objective" way to describe people and I'm sad to say that even I have become desensitized to it. 

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