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Steve Doocy teamed up with Daily Caller’s Vince Coglianese this morning to dig up one of then-State Senator Barack Obama’s 1999 votes on gun violence and held it up as “proof” that Obama is more interested in cracking down on guns than gun violence. Even worse, the actual digging was done by Obama’s 2004 U.S. Senate opponent. In other words, from GOP oppo research to Fox News airwaves.

Doocy began the Fox & Friends segment by saying that President Obama “sounds pretty emphatic” about curbing gun violence but “when he had the chance to be a part of legislation to crack down on school shooters while he was an Illinois State Senator – what did he do? He voted present.” Doocy deliberately sneered and sad trombone music underscored the "fail" meme.

Coglianese told us that in 1999, after the Columbine massacre, Illinois had a bill to try juveniles who commit school shootings as adults. Although the Illinois’ state senate passed it by a vote of 52-1, Obama was one of five who voted “present.”

Doocy prodded for more. “I see that the Daily Caller, you tracked down a long record of Obama voting against tough-on-crime legislation.”

Well, not exactly – unless your idea of “tracking down” means dusting off the work of an old Obama political foe and looking for ways to use it now. Coglianese said that he and a Daily Caller colleague “went to Chicago – and this was in the midst of the election – and picked up all this opposition research prepared by Jack Ryan, who was one-time Obama’s Republican Senate opponent.”

Somehow, both Doocy and Coglianese forgot to mention that Ryan might not be the most credible of sources to Fox News family values viewers, having dropped out of his U.S. senate campaign after divorce papers revealed his actress wife accused him of taking her to sex clubs.

Even worse, Doocy ignored how Coglianese revealed he had unquestioningly taken on Ryan's slant as his own.

COGLIANESE: (Ryan) found all this information and the way that he framed it - and I think it’s probably right – is that Obama was always very soft on crime but very tough on guns. Every time Obama had a crime vote to take when he was in the Illinois state senate, he always voted present… for two reasons: One, he said that crime, criminal law disproportionately affected African Americans. He saw a racial component there.”

… And additionally, he said that I don’t want to clog the court system with all these cases. Well, what do you want to clog the court system with? And we thought that given his rhetoric on guns lately that it would be interesting to bring up this ’99 vote where he said, “You know what? I don’t want to give tougher prosecution to children who shoot at schools.”

Doocy murmured, “Sure,” approvingly as Coglianese spoke.

But as Media Matters pointed out, this attempt to paint President Obama as a hypocrite on gun laws was either disingenuous or half-baked (or both). Obama’s reasons for voting present in 1999 were his opposition to automatically transferring juveniles into the adult system and none of Obama’s current proposals call for trying juveniles as adults.

Fox must be getting pretty desperate for dirt to throw at Obama's gun proposals if they’re stooping to this.

Tom Clancy’s fiction has never really been my cup of tea, and his rightwing ideology even less so. Clancy, a gun-toting NRA member who famously blamed 9/11 on left wing politicians, has made a vast fortune writing military thrillers. But like a lot of rightwing military fans, Clancy never served in the military, enrolling at Loyola College at the height of the Vietnam War to earn a bachelor’s in English Literature before becoming an insurance broker. His wife of nearly thirty years divorced him after she discovered his affair with Katherine Huang, an assistant district attorney in New York he’d met on-line. He then married Alexandra Llewellyn, twenty years his junior and a cousin to Colin Powell who introduced them while Clancy was still married to his first wife while having an affair with his mistress. Charming.

His personal ethics are reflected in his fiction, not only by its literary content but by the questionable professional practices of its author. His novels gleefully espouse torture such as waterboarding and inducing heart attacks, where every liberal character is an idiot and a buffoon snorting cocaine, scarfing tofu, and determined to raise taxes on the wealthy (the b-stards!), and all the conservative characters are heroic patriots with impeccable principles. Then again, Clancy can’t actually be considered a real writer anymore, since he’s far too busy milking his various cash cows to ever sit down at a keyboard. It might be because since 2002 and the release of Red Rabbit the quality of his novels has greatly deteriorated. “If you haven’t read the new Jack Ryan novel yet, do yourself a favour. Don’t,” read one particularly acrid critic. The following year, his book, The Teeth of the Tiger (where the so-called “good-guys” are an FBI agent who murders a suspect in cold blood, and his cousin, Jack Ryan Junior, a lacklustre foul-mouthed frat-boy with the intellectual acuity of roadkill) was likewise savaged in reviews; the Washington Post calling it a “bloated, boring, silly novel” with “inane dialogue, gossamer characterizations, endless repetition and bumper-sticker politics.”

Ouch. On the other hand, Putnam paid him a cool $50 million for the two new books, which I’m sure did much to assuage any bruising to the ego.

Even so, Clancy didn’t come out with another Jack Ryan novel until 2010, which he didn’t even write – instead, it was written by Grant Blackwood, with his two follow-up novels, Against All Enemies and Locked On written by Peter Telep and Mark Greaney, respectively. That the true authors’ names appear on the cover in squintingly teeny-tiny print dwarfed under Tom Clancy’s name in huge typeface is actually quite remarkable, since Clancy didn’t even previously acknowledge his novels were being ghostwritten by other people past a brief mention in the acknowledgments to their “invaluable contribution to the manuscript.” Raymond Benson and David Michaels wrote the first two books in his Splinter Cell franchise, for which Clancy received millions from his publishers. No idea how much Benson and Michaels got for their work-for-hire hackery. The only thing Tom Clancy has to write these days to ensure a bestseller is two words: his name.

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