March 16, 2015

The Israeli elections are less than a day away, and Fox News is pulling out all the stops to prepare its audience for a possible Likud Party defeat. Liz Cheney appeared on Fox and Friends with Brian Kilmeade in an attempt to incense viewers by falsely claiming the President and his staffers are illegally meddling in the elections in the Jewish State. Yesterday I explained the faux Republican outrage over American corporate involvement in this election, and today, Liz weighs in on the controversy. It seems she's a little nervous about things in her favorite powder keg, the Middle East.

The infotainment network can't stress enough how dastardly the idea of the president's 2012 reelection campaign "field general," Jeremy Bird helping the "V15" opposition which backs Herzog/Livni to oust the hawkish Bibi. What is never said, that Netanyahu has engaged his own dirty smear campaign in retaliation to what seems to be an organic populist movement against his terrible middle class economic policies and his push for a state of perpetual war.

Here's the stuff the Fox News people don't want their viewers to see. Netanyahu's campaign has morphed into a G.O.P. fear-mongering campaign so much like the ones they conduct in the U.S.

V15 isn’t the only controversy. Likud hired a 26-year-old Republican strategist, Vincent Harris, who’d leveraged digital campaigning to get Cruz elected in 2012. Harris and Likud denied reports that Cruz had sent Harris to Israel.

Since Harris began working for Netanyahu, the prime minister has opened an Instagram account, issued a torrent of captivating short videos – including one suggesting liberal Israelis would surrender to the Islamic State – and tweeted his insistence on speaking against a deal with Iran in Congress. Harris enthusiastically amplified these moves on Twitter, peppering his feed with photos of Netanyahu and quotes from Psalms (“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem, may they be secure who love you!”).

Liz Cheney mentions that there is a bipartisan committee investigating Bird's involvement, which, they conclude, would implicate President Obama. However, OneVoice began working with 270 Strategies in 2013, long before the Israeli elections were announced. Their assertion that this is a direct insertion of the president in Israeli politics is as plausible as their omission of the fact the G.O.P. is doing the exact same thing, but with extra fear-mongering.

The American OneVoice has a subsidiary in Israel, Victory 15. Fox reports the investigation is very bipartisan in its effort to get to the bottom of this. That is not surprising considering that Clinton loyalist Claire McCaskill is the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee. But we know that McCaskill is really a Blue Dog Democrat, so calling this a "bipartisan" effort is a stretch.

Fox and Friends does not mention, because it would negate this whole claim of illegal interference, that Fox and the Republicans (leading this auxiliary witch hunt, that isn't Hillary) believe is a there there. The last payment to OneVoice by the State Department came in November 2014, a month before new elections were called in Israel. Brian Kilmeade mentions,

"One Voice was funded to the tune of $350,000 by the State Department."

So he asks Liz Cheney about this. She said,

"If you get on (One Voice) their website, you'll see that, you know, their efforts have very much been along the lines that they say they're trying to encourage peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. They are now working, hand and glove, with this Victory2015 Organization which is dedicated to electing anybody BUT Netanyahu. They say they are not supporting any particular candidate but they want Netanyahu out."

That's the whole problem. The worst part, if Bibi's Likud Party loses, the new leader might try to promote peace in the region, and Darth Cheney Junior hates peace and loves war.

Netanyahu may actually lose this election and Fox News needs a scapegoat for a Zionist Union victory. This must be the fault of that Kenyan Muslim Socialist and his dirty staffers. It couldn't possibly be the fact that the middle class is suffering in Israel and they aren't any safer by way of his hawkish policies towards their neighbors. It's so much easier to blame the black guy.

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