2016 July 30^th

This morning on Fox and Friends, Tucker Carlson, who passes for the program’s resident intellectual, was holding forth about the email hacking of various Democratic groups. Reverend Mike Huckabee was available to comment about this and Carlson invited him to do so. (Exactly why the former governor of Arkansas and failed presidential candidate should be expected to be knowledgeable about email hacking was not explained.)

Huckabee, whose daughter is employed as a Trump surrogate, was quick to give his views on the matter: Huckabee made it clear that he could not understand why only the Democratic emails were being hacked; he was quite specific, declaring that the Republican Party’s candidate’s communications were not involved and he didn’t understand why. It is possible that Huckabee’s knowledge base does not extend much beyond the Arkansas state borders.

The hacking was probably done by Russian national authorities and it was done specifically to discredit and degrade Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The emails were leaked on the eve of the Democratic convention at the perfect time to cause the maximum disruption by Sander’s supporters whose enthusiasms sometimes border on the irrational. Putin recognizes that Trump’s willingness to disregard our NATO treaty obligations make it well worthwhile to do what he can to help Trump win the election and that’s just what he’s doing. He makes no secret of his enthusiasm for Trump.

Trump encourages Putin; he says that if the Russians can capture and release those 30 thousand Clinton emails, they’d be well rewarded. Then after his handlers reigned him in he said he was just being “sarcastic.” No Donald, that isn’t being sarcastic; when you claim after being hammered by Clinton at her convention you will no longer be “Mr. Nice Guy” that, Mr. Trump, is sarcasm.

Fox and Friends brought a Trump surrogate forward to tell us about the differences between the campaign’s vice presidential picks, Indiana’s Governor Pence and former Virginia Governor Kaine. We learn that Governor Pence, who governed Indiana from 2013 to 2016, produced a considerable increase in the state’s employment over that period; Governor Kaine, who was governor of Virginia from 2006 to 2010, was quite ineffective because his state lost jobs steadily over his tenure. Because of this the Trump flack claimed that Pence had been the much more effective governor.

But wait, from 2006 to 2010 when Kaine was governor of Virginia, national unemployment rose from 4.7 to 9.8 percent. This was the result of the Bush recession when we were losing as many as 900 thousand jobs a month. No mention of this by the Trump flack and certainly no mention of this circumstance by “Fair and Balanced” Fox News.

 Pence, who had much better employment data, began his governorship in 2013 when unemployment was 8 percent and he watched it drop to its current 4.9 percent. Could the increase in Indiana jobs have been due the improvement in the national economy? That possibility would never be suggested by Fox News.