"Fox News’ Brit Hume on Tuesday made a big mistake when he shared a screenshot from his iPad without first closing all the other browser tabs he had opened."

Raw Story has the report on why the name Brit Hume is trending on Twitter this morning along with the phrase "sexy vinyl vixen."

"Fox News isn’t supposed to work for you."

Fox News isn’t supposed to work for you. https://t.co/kQDY4UKv8z

— Brit Hume (@brithume) August 28, 2019

You'd never know it...

You’d never know it from much of the coverage but no federal employees have missed a paycheck yet.

— Brit Hume (@brithume) January 8, 2019

And I still don't feel that I "know" it. There's no link to an article in this tweet. Mainstream media is a horrifying wasteland.

"Brett Kavanaugh said Monday he was a virgin in high school and college..."

The full Kavanaugh interview will air at 7 Eastern on Fox News.

And, I'm listening to Fox News now and hearing Brit Hume saying something very close to what I said this morning. I said:

The new allegations — from Avenatti and The New Yorker — are, I think, helping Kavanaugh's case.... After all the careful work creating credence and empathy for Christine Blasey Ford, we now have an onslaught, a piling on, and it's making Kavanaugh into a sort of hero, who must stand his ground. 

There was a problem when there was only Blasey's accusation, and it did seem that you'd need multiple accusations to take down Kavanaugh. Multiple accusations were needed to take down Weinstein, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Alex Kozinski, etc. But this new material doesn't seem like more Blasey-like allegations, but something different and much more questionable and more noticeably unfair.

There's a real contrast to the carefully built up Blasey incident, and while the conflict with Blasey seemed to be too much of an unresolvable he said/she said, to say he said/she said was to elevate Blasey to equal status: her word against his. There was dignity in that, and Kavanaugh supporters were being circumspect and allowing that dramatic confrontation to unfold. Now, Kavanaugh antagonists have escalated the attack and seem willing — some of them, anyway — to use anything. I think more sober Kavanaugh antagonists — such as the NYT — rue this development.

ADDED: If the allegations are not true, Kavanaugh must stand his ground. If this effort to take him down works — if the allegations are not true — the same strategy will be used against the next nominee and the one after that. It will never end. If the allegations are true, he should have done something long ago. Either he should have have withdrawn, or he should have conceded his past wrongdoing, apologized sincerely, and said tactfully what he could to minimize the relevance of the incident to the question of his qualification to serve on the Court.

This is exactly what I thought should happen: Tucker Carlson gets the Fox News time slot vacated by Megyn Kelly.

I should have blogged it. Then I could exult in my prescience. Here's the news from Drudge:

TUCKER NEW CABLE KING/GETS 9 PM FOXNEWS...

The dramatic move caps Carlson's rapid rise at the nation's top-rated cable channel.

"Tucker has already proven to be an audience powerhouse at 7 PM, now sky is the limit!" an insider explains. ... In recent weeks, the Carlson show hit #1 audience and demo with a mix of explosive interviews and hard-hitting topics.

Carlson totally deserves this. They gave him an early slot and he knocked himself out making it as exciting as he could. He replaced Brit Hume who was just filling in after Greta Van Susteren left suddenly. Hume coasted amiably, doing his grumpy but mellow old man routine. Here's how he acted on election night. That's peak excitement from Hume.

I'm charmed by Hume's demeanor, and Carlson annoys me. But Carlson operates by being irritating. I've said this before. He deliberately antagonizes his guests by being an annoying man. That's how he manufactures a show, and it's not easy. He's won an audience doing that and he has thereby earned the time slot upgrade.

I think there was an assumption out there that a woman would be chosen to replace Megyn Kelly.  Fox News has its woman problem, but would that problem be solved by finding the best woman they've got and leaping her over the go-getter, high-performing Tucker Carlson? I don't think so. Fox has entered its new era, post-Roger Ailes.* And it should operate in a new way. Giving Carlson what he deserves is a good start. Give Carlson's slot to a woman and challenge her to prove her worth, the way Carlson did.

And I'm saying all this as a woman and a woman who finds Carlson very annoying. (And I do record his show and attempt to watch it until he annoys me too much.)
_____________________________

* I'm not going to get back into the Ailes matter, but here's "The Revenge of Roger’s Angels/How Fox News women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media."

Is it sexist to tell a woman to smile?

Dem. Sen. Claire McCaskill says HRC should smile a lot during debate. When I said that, I was called a sexist. https://t.co/U9T5GnZJe1

— Brit Hume (@brithume) September 16, 2016

It depends on how you say it. And in this case, it depends on whether we think you're actually trying to help or just criticizing her — and whether criticizing you seems like a way to stir up energy in support of the woman.

But in general, it seems that people expect more sociability and openness from a woman and are more likely to feel uneasy it she keeps a stern or grim face. The relaxed female face gets the jocose description "resting bitch face." So serious women can have trouble being serious as people express what might only be a simple desire to overcome their own uneasiness but might also be a more virulent urge to exclude women from serious enterprises. So it's naive to become another one of those people who tell women to smile.

But smiling is still a great facial expression that most people ought to want to know how to use to their advantage, and some advice to smile is good and not always sexist. Other people are absurdly responsive to smiling.

Here's my experience. I do a lot of walking around town, an average of 4 miles a day (according to an app in my iPhone), and I'm nearly always listening to audiobooks, and I tend to listen to serious things. There was the summer I listened to "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" and all the many months it took to get through the 4 volumes of Robert A. Caro's biography of LBJ.

I don't look at my face when I'm walking, but I assume I look fairly grim when listening to that sort of thing. But sometimes I put iTunes with a shuffled playlist of songs I'm pretty sure I'm going to like to hear if they pop up — The Monkees "I Wanna Be Free," Herman's Hermits "Dandy," Elvis Costello "Watching the Detectives," Cher "All I Really Wanna Do," etc. etc. Again, I'm not looking at my face. But I know I must be smiling, because suddenly, on my usual walk, everyone I pass looks at me and smiles, like they're seeing an old friend.

Greta Van Susteren is leaving Fox News... immediately.

Announced the same day as Fox News's settlement of the sexual harassment case filed by Gretchen Carlson. The case was about things done by Roger Ailes, and Van Susteren had defended Ailes.

Van Susteren was said to be one of the FNC on-air talent who had a clause in their contact to walk if Ailes left the net....

Does that mean she quit or was fired? We're only told that contract negotiations stalled. Opaque.

Brit Hume takes over the show, beginning tonight.

Do you believe the drone policy really is: "Before any strike is taken, there must be near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured"?

That's what Obama said last week, but I don't see how it can possibly be true, and I don't really understand why he would state a policy in terms that are so plainly unbelievable. If that were the standard, how he could use drones at all — let alone carry out hundreds of attacks? And if that's not the standard, why say it's the standard, since (if it's believed) it's encouraging the enemy to defend itself by keeping hostages and other innocents in their midst? If it's not believed — and I think it's on its face unbelievable — it wrecks his credibility.

These questions occurred to me as I listened to the panel discussion on "Fox News Sunday" yesterday, which began with a clip of Obama saying the words that appear in the post title:

[AP reporter JULIE] PACE: [W]hen he said that we were not going to take strikes unless there was a near certainty that civilians would not be killed[:] How can you -- how can you be sure of that?...

[National Journal reporter RON] FOURNIER: ... I think anybody who... has a problem like I do with this drone strategy, still has a problem. And maybe more so, the fact that the president promised that... he was going to be transparent, about how, about why and how we conduct war from a robot in the air blowing people away.... [W]hen the president of the United States says we're going to deal with near certainty, really? How do you come up with near certainty? Is that just a talking point that you say two years ago and then we find out that you can't do it? Let's put some meat on the bones, Mr. President.

[Fox News political analyst BRIT] HUME: It seems to me that they probably had near certainty. What they didn't have was actual certainty. And that's always going to be the case....

So one answer to my questions is: It depends on what the meaning of "near" is.

The drone policy was also questioned because of the way it kills people who could be captured and used for intelligence, which is related to the question of near certainty, because intelligence is needed to get to near certainty. If you keep killing everyone, how do they know whom they're killing? I suspect that after the fact they deem everyone who was there an enemy, at least as far as they can (and they couldn't in the case of the 2 specific hostages). And they don't want the trouble of detainees.

How Hillary Clinton turns "a crashing banality" into something "highly controversial."

On Fox News Sunday this morning, reacting to Hillary's statement about "Showing respect even for one's enemies, trying to understand and insofar as psychologically possible empathize with their perspective and point of view, helping to define the problems to determine the solutions":

George Will: The English language is not Hillary Clinton's close friend. She's just not a fluent speaker. And we're going to have a lot of experience with these — we've had it already, we're going to have a lot more going forward. She thinks — what she was saying was a crashing banality in the most artless way possible, she's saying we ought to try and understand the other guy, get inside his mind, understand his motivation. Fine, that's how you say it. Instead she had to talk about a kind of gaseous new-age rhetoric about respect and empathy and all of this. She was saying nothing particularly controversial, but she was saying it in an unfortunate way.

Brit Hume: She meant to say something uncontroversial and ended up saying something highly controversial, just as she did a few weeks ago when she said you know, don't let anybody tell you that it's businesses and corporations that create jobs....

"Brit Hume: Obama told a friend of mine before he was elected, 'Wouldn’t it be great for the world if I were president?'"

If true, it suggest that Obama himself believed The Fantasy of the Face... or at least believed he could sell it.

Brit Hume evangelizes Tiger Woods.

Key passage:

The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith. He is said to be a Buddhist. I don't think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So, my message to Tiger is, "Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world."

That's just so weird coming from a news commentator. I could understand if he'd put it in PR terms: Tiger, the American people will embrace you once again if you do a big Christian conversion routine. But Hume has phrased it in terms of psychological well-being. That is, he's presented it as sincere advice, the way a truly religious person would promote his own religion. It's very strange to see that on a mainstream TV opinion show, and it is especially off for the way it pits one religion against another.

That said, I wonder which religion provides the best rehabilitation to a person who's indulged in great and transgressive sexual adventures and ruined his family and his reputation. Put aside which religion, if any, is the true one. Let's examine Hume's assertion that Christianity is the psychological solution for Tiger Woods. From what I understand, Buddhism originated as way to deal with suffering in this world. Perhaps all the religions will give you some foothold as you struggle to deal with your personal problems, and whether it brings you peace and happiness depends mostly on you.

So, let's talk about how weird Hume was and which religion works best in the pre-afterlife. And PR. And the strength of our aversion to talking openly about the way a particular religion falls short.