Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.
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Fox News Anchor To Keynote Fundraiser For Right-Wing 'Training' Outfit
January 25 | 2023
Martha MacCallum
Youtube Screenshot
Fox News' Martha MacCallum, one of the network’s main “news side” anchors, is scheduled to keynote a fundraiser for a Republican-aligned organization that helps train conservative leaders in Colorado.
MacCallum is the anchor of The Story with Martha MacCallum and is a regular moderator for Fox News debates and town halls. She and Special Report’s Bret Baier co-anchored Fox News’ coverage of the 2022 midterms. MacCallumhas a history of adopting and arguing for Republican positions in the network’s “straight news” coverage.
She is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the Leadership Program of the Rockies’ (LPR) Annual Retreat on February 17-18. Fox News host Pete Hegseth and network contributors Kimberley Strassel and Jonathan Turley will also speak at the high-priced event. The event will additionally featureRed Pilled America podcast co-hosts Patrick Courrielche and Adryana Cortez, who are described as telling “the stories Hollywood and the Globalists don’t want you to hear.”
LPR is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that, as it wrote on Twitter, “trains leaders to push forward the conservative agenda.” The organization, which offers training sessions and events throughout the year, was previously called the RepublicanLeadershipProgram. Its chairman is former Colorado Republican Rep.Bob Schaffer and its president is Republican consultant Shari Williams.
The Colorado Times Recorderprofiled the organization and reported that “in recent years the already conservative LPR has veered further right, selecting a number of students and featuring speakers whose public positions include not only unwavering support of Donald Trump but openly conspiratorial and bigoted beliefs.” The piece by Erik Maulbetsch also noted that “approximately one-third of Colorado’s Republican state legislators are LPR graduates.”
Fox’s Baier spoke at the event last year. In a clip of his speech posted online, Baier told the audience: “If more and more folks are like you and engaged, I think that, you know, there’s real hope.” Fox News anchor Dana Perino, Fox News anchor and Senior Vice President Neil Cavuto, Fox News anchor Harris Faulkner, and Fox News reporter Lawrence Jones have also spoken to the Republican-aligned organization.
MacCallum’s speech is yet one more example of how Fox News helps Republican-aligned organizations on and off the air. Fox News personalities have also frequently participated in events for Republican Party politicians and organizations. It’s another indication of the decimation of the network’s “news side.”
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.
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Mike Pompeo
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has come under fire for criticizing the global condemnation of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi’s killing, questioning Khashoggi’s journalistic credentials, and cozying up to the Saudi crown prince, whom a U.S. intelligence report concluded had ordered the assassination.
Khashoggi, an ardent critic of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, also known as MBS, was tortured and then murdered by the kingdom's agents in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, on October 2, 2018.
After the murder, former President Donald Trump and Pompeo, then his top diplomat, sprung to the Saudi kingdom’s defense, with Trump describing the public outrage at the Saudis at the time as “just [what we] went through that with Justice Kavanaugh and he was innocent.”
Despite four years passing since the CIA found that MBS had ordered Khashoggi’s assassination and almost two years since intelligence from the Biden Administration affirmed the conclusion, Pompeo, an ex-director of the CIA, and the Trump family, have continued to legitimize the crown prince and parrot the kingdom’s propaganda.
The murder was “ugly” but not “surprising,” Pompeo said in his new book, Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love, wherein he mocked the media for posthumously portraying Khashoggi as “a Saudi Arabian Bob Woodward martyred for bravely criticizing the Saudi royal family.”
Pompeo argued that Khashoggi was “an activist who had supported the losing team in a recent fight for the throne” and could only be considered a journalist “to the extent that I, and many other public figures, are journalists,” insisting that “we need to be clear about who he was,” according to NBC News.
Khashoggi — who blasted MBS, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, for allegedly oppressing critics in the months leading to his death — was “cozy with the terrorist-supporting Muslim Brotherhood,” an oft-repeated allegation that Khashoggi had vehemently denied time after time when he was alive.
\u201c!! Former Sec. of State Mike Pompeo in new book goes after slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi.\n\nPompeo called him an "activist" & mocked media's portrayal as \u201cSaudi Arabian Bob Woodward who was martyred for bravely criticizing the Saudi royal family through his opinion articles..."\u201d— The Recount (@The Recount) 1674567666
In a statement on Tuesday, the Post’s CEO and publisher Fred Ryan Jr. blasted Pompeo for “so outrageously” mischaracterizing the Saudi-born journalist, “falsehoods,” he said, that Pompeo perpetuates to “dishonor a courageous man’s life” and “as a ploy to sell his books.”
\u201cStatement from Post Publisher and CEO Fred Ryan\u201d— Washington Post PR (@Washington Post PR) 1674576890
The Post’s editorial board, in a scathing opinion Tuesday, blasted Pompeo for misrepresenting Khashoggi in an outlandish tirade that “reveals much more about Mr. Pompeo than his critics.”
“[Pompeo’s comments show] that, rather than acting as a principled leader of U.S. diplomacy, Mr. Pompeo coddled the person who sent the Khashoggi hit squad,” the publication wrote.
Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, or DAWN, a non-profit advocating for democracy and human rights in the Middle East, accused Pompeo of echoing MBS’s justification for Khashoggi’s death.
"Pompeo's crass and craven comments appearing to justify Jamal Khashoggi's murder by disparaging his political views and falsely associating them with terrorism mirror the same justifications Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and other tyrants use to excuse their crimes," Leah wrote in a statement.
\u201c\u201c@MikePompeo\u2019s crass & craven comments appearing to justify Khashoggi\u2019s murder by disparaging his political views and falsely associating them w terrorism mirror the justifications MBS & other tyrants use to excuse their crimes." https://t.co/rwmgofZtwO\u201d— Sarah Leah Whitson (@Sarah Leah Whitson) 1674532896
Speaking to NBC on Monday, Khashoggi’s widow, Hanan Elatr Khashoggi, said that her late husband was “not part of the Muslim Brotherhood” and that she hungered “to silence all of these people who publish books, disparage my husband, and collect money from it.”
“Whatever [Pompeo] mentions about my husband, he doesn’t know my husband. He should be silent and shut up the lies about my husband,” Helen Elatr Khashoggi said. “It is such bad information and the wrong information. … This is not acceptable.”
Pompeo dismissed the criticism on a right-wing podcast hosted by Fox New’s Bret Baier, saying that the Post "went on a major mission to undermine the work that we [in the Trump administration] were trying to do to keep America safe and our relationship with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia."
"I didn't write that to sell books,” Pompeo told Baier. “I wrote that to explain how we were thinking about keeping the American people safe."
“Americans are safer because we didn’t label Saudi Arabia a pariah state,” Pompeo tweeted late Tuesday, responding to the Post’s statement. Just b/c someone is a part-time stringer for WaPo doesn’t make their life more important than our military serving in dangerous places protecting us all.
\u201cAmericans are safer because we didn\u2019t label Saudi Arabia a pariah state. I never let the media bully me. Just b/c someone is a part-time stringer for WaPo doesn\u2019t make their life more important than our military serving in dangerous places protecting us all. I never forgot that.\u201d— Mike Pompeo (@Mike Pompeo) 1674586102
On the road promoting his book — which, upon review, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Tim Weiner branded a “master class in the performative anger poisoning American politics” — talked up the prospect of a potential White House run in a CBS Morning interview Tuesday.
"Susan [his wife] and I are thinking, praying, trying to figure out if this is the next place to go serve. We haven't gotten to that conclusion. We'll figure this out in the next handful of months," Pompeo told CBS’s Gayle King.
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