‘Love-Fest:’ Megyn Kelly Blasts Donald Trump, Flirts With Michael Moore

by JOHN NOLTE27 Jan 201610,919

Those of us who obsessively observe the media never thought we would see a day like yesterday, a day when someone finally got the better of Fox News and Roger Ailes. The infallible network proved itself fallible with two of the biggest strategic errors in the history of its existence. First, The Mighty Fox fired off a snarky but strategically stupid press release that played directly into Donald Trump’s hands. Then, an obviously rattled Megyn Kelly seeking solace from Trump’s withering spotlight, sought that solace in no less than anti-American filmmaker Michael Moore.

To understand just how big of a blunder this is, we have to step back a few months.

Ever since the first Fox News Republican primary debate took place back in August, Trump has been pounding the cable news network for what he felt was a gang tackle from the three moderators, Kelly, Bret Baier, and Chris Wallace, and there is no shortage of those on the political right who agree with him. Trump’s primary complaint was directed at Kelly, who didn’t so much ask a question as much as she attempted to paint the billionaire businessman and reality TV star as a degenerate sexist.

To put it mildly, Trump took umbrage with the question and for the past six months the two have been feuding. To his credit, Trump has been openly attacking Kelly. Via Twitter and various interviews, he has criticized her directly. Kelly’s and Fox News’s response has been subtler, and some might say dishonest. “The Kelly File,” a primetime cable news juggernaut, is seen by many as a Anti-Trump Organ for Establishment Republicans.

In the lead up to Thursday night’s debate, the final one before actual voting begins in Iowa, Trump has used every opportunity to again express his concerns about Kelly’s return as moderator. Fox News refused to budge on the issue. But Trump obviously found his way into Ailes’s head because Tuesday night the network made an unprecedented strategic blunder by releasing this statement:

We learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president — a nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings.

When a major presidential candidate is accusing your network of bias, unless you want to prove him 100% correct, this is about as tone-deaf and dumb as it gets.

Knowing he had Fox by the short hairs, Trump waved the snarky press release and further burnished his brand as a leader and fighter by announcing his withdrawal from the debate.

In short: Trump spent a half-year carefully crafting and building the Narrative that Fox News was out to get him, and with one press release, Roger Ailes blundered right into it.

The benefits for Trump are obvious. 1) Just 5 days before Iowa, he will own the news cycle at least through the Sunday shows. 2) The controversy will overwhelm any opportunity his opponents might have had to get their message out. 3) Trump has completely upset any gameplan his rivals had planned, not only for the debate, but as a closing argument in Iowa. 4) The Fox News debate has been diminished into an undercard event because Trump’s competing event will dominate the news cycle.  5) Beating up on Fox News will hardly hurt Trump in a general election. 6) Trump looks like a badass who refuses to jump through the media’s hoops — which is exactly the type of candidate the GOP base has been praying for.

As though the gods smile on The Donald, just a few hours after the world came crashing down on The Mighty Fox, left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore made an already-scheduled appearance on “The Kelly File,” and it was an unmitigated disaster.

After the August debate, I actually defended Kelly’s questioning of Trump. My rationale was that Kelly, unlike the rest of the mainstream media, is tough on everyone — right and left alike. Presidential candidates should be asked tough questions. As long as the questioner isn’t biased in favor of one side or another, nothing should be off-limits.  As Kelly played kissy-face with Moore last night, I started to feel like a fool for defending her.

Moore isn’t some run-of-the-mill celebrity pitching his latest blockbuster. He is an anti-American propagandist, a fabulously wealthy hypocrite, and a degenerate liar. Under normal circumstances, it would be nauseating to watch Kelly giggle, joke, softball, and get all chummy with this cretin. The fact that she did so in the wake of Trump’s charges of bias showed an extraordinary lack of judgment.

Watch for yourself what even the left-wingWashington Post and Salon described as a“love-fest.“:

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Is it just me, or did Kelly actually flirt with Lenny Riefenstahl?

For six months Kelly has played it cool. With Trump’s blistering spotlight on her, she’s put on a face meant only to assure the world and her critics that she’s a professional journalist interested only in holding The Powerful accountable. Most of all, Kelly wanted the world to know that Trump wasn’t living rent-free inside her head.

Well, now we know the exact opposite is true because all it took for Michael Moore to play Kelly like a fiddle, to turn her into a giggling Rachel Maddow, was to open the interview by commiserating with her about that awful Donald Trump.

Even the Washington Post noticed the gooey affair:

[A]fter Kelly introduced Moore’s “Where to Invade Next?” — in which, as Kelly put it in an opening that probably made many Fox viewers’ skin crawl, “Moore travels through Europe to highlight what he believes to be America’s shortfalls” — Moore didn’t want to talk about himself. For the man who hounded General Motors chief executive Roger Smith and vilified President George W. Bush, it was all about Kelly and her bold stand against Trump.

“What does this feel like for you?” Moore said. “Because you don’t want to be the story — you’re a journalist.”

Kelly’s rejoinder: “I get to ask the questions here!”

“I feel bad for you,” Moore said. He then wondered why Trump would deprive himself of Kelly’s company: “What’s he afraid of? I’m sitting here. I don’t feel any fear.”

“You shouldn’t,” Kelly said. “I’m a pussycat.”

“You can ask Donald,” Moore said, volunteering to play chaperone for the candidate. “Donald — come down. Come sit beside me. I’ll hold your hand. She’s fine.”

Kelly: “Stop that!”

Somehow it got worse. Moore asked her out, and the Washington Post thinks she may have blushed:

 “I was thinking I was maybe going to have to, like, take you out to dinner afterwards,” Moore said. “We could talk. You could emote … get it out. I’m here for you.”

“I had no idea there was this side to you,” Kelly said.

Maybe this all was a joke. Maybe it wasn’t. But then, Moore got real about Kelly and Trump.

“In all seriousness, let me say this,” Moore said. “… You’ve done something that Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Rubio, Cruz — none of them have been able to do. Which is to, essentially, frighten him.”

“Would you move on from the Trump situation?” Kelly said. But, at least on some laptop screens, it appeared she may have blushed.

In short, Megyn Kelly made a fool of herself, and Donald Trump can now add two more scalps to his collection: Kelly’s and the previously unbeaten Fox News.

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Michael Moore: ‘God Bless You Megyn Kelly’ — ‘War on Women’ Question to Trump Was ‘Great’

by IAN HANCHETT26 Jan 2016686

Filmmaker Michael Moore told Fox News Channel anchor Megyn Kelly “You asked a great question [to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump], by the way. The war on women. God bless you Megyn Kelly” on Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “The Kelly File.”

Moore began by addressing Trump skipping on the FNC debate, saying, “I feel bad for you.” And “What’s he afraid of? I’m sitting here. I don’t feel any fear. … Donald, come now, come sit beside me, I’ll hold your hand. She’s fine.”

He also told Kelly that she had frightened Trump and “made him run, shut him down.” Something no candidate had done.

Moore ended the interview with, “And before I leave, I just want to say again, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, it’s pp to get elected president in this country, you have to come on this network. You have to play ball with this network. Donald Trump today said I’m not playing ball with this network. That’s a historic moment, and it’s going to be interesting to see where the real power is. Trump thinks he doesn’t need Fox News. I think Fox News probably has something else to say about that. And it’ll be interesting to see where do the powers that be go with this?”

He then said to Kelly, “You asked a great question, by the way. The war on women. God bless you Megyn Kelly.”

Moore said of Obama, “I wrote to him and I said you’ve got to get off the dime here and do some of the things we elected you to do, because it’s not going to be enough in the history books to say the big claim to fame is that you were the first African-American president. That’s an important thing, but we need you to do some other things for us, and we need you to do it before your term ends.”

He elaborated on Obama, stating, “I would have wished we had a single-payer healthcare system, not Obamacare, something that would be for everybody. … he had two years actually, where he had the House and the Senate, and he decided to play nice and get along and he thought the Republicans were going to get along with him and they had no intention of doing that.”

Moore added, “Guantanamo Bay should be closed by now.” He later said of Obama, “I’m very happy that we’ve had him for these eight years, believe me, after what we had before that.”

When asked if there were any Republican candidates he would get behind, Moore responded, “I would get behind all of them and take them — and push them somewhere.” He added, “[M]y grandfather was the head of the Republican Party in the town that I grew up in. And — yes, but back then, a conservative meant that you conserved your money, you had family values, you had — you conserved the earth, the air, the water, God’s gifts to us. That’s what Republicans believed back then, and those days seem to be gone. I know it’s hard for Republicans who have those feelings, and they have nowhere really to go right now.”

Moore was also asked about criticisms that he dislikes America. He answered, “I don’t get that, because one of the great things about being an American in great this country is the ability to criticize what’s going on and try to make it better.” And “I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. This is the best country to live in. What I want us to do is to aspire to be better. And what we’ve done is, we’ve helped these European countries since World War II. They have gone ahead and done some great things, in terms of helping their people, paid maternity leave, school lunches are not crap on a Styrofoam tray.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter@IanHanchett

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Celebrities Join ‘Stop Hate Dump Trump’ Anti-Donald Campaign

by DANIEL NUSSBAUM20 Jan 20164,964

Dozens of celebrities and activists have joined a new campaign aimed at derailing the presidential prospects of Republican frontrunner Donald Trump and the “politics of hate and exclusion he represents.”

Michael Moore, Kerry Washington, Rosie O’Donnell, Harry Belafonte, Jane Fonda, Dylan McDermott, Roseann Barr, and Lily Tomlin are among the film and television stars who have pledged to “speak out in every way possible” to prevent Trump from becoming the next President of the United States as part of the new “Stop Hate Dump Trump” campaign.

In a statement on its website, the group says it believes Trump is “a grave threat to democracy, freedom, human rights, equality, and the welfare of our country and all our people.”

“We have witnessed Trump inciting hatred against Muslims, immigrants, women, the disabled,” the campaign’s website reads. “We have seen him evidencing dangerous tendencies that threaten the bedrock of democracy: unleashing a lynch mob mentality against protesters, calling for the expulsion of Muslims from the country, bullying, and fear-mongering.”

“History has shown us what happens when people refuse to stand against hate-filled leaders,” statement continues. “We pledge ourselves to speak out in every way possible against the politics of hate and exclusion he represents.”

Other notable signatories on the campaign include Noam Chomsky, Connie Britton, Rosanna Arquette, Reza Aslan, Ani DiFranco, Danny Glover, and playwright Eve Ensler.

“We are offering Americans a chance to be heard and engage in action, as Trump’s campaign gains momentum even as he increases his hateful and divisive rhetoric,” Ensler said in a statement.

At the time of publication, the campaign had gathered 780 signatures.

The campaign website features a number of examples of what it calls Trump’s “hate,” including statements that are critical of former Secretary of State and Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The group also included Trump’s vow to “blow up” and defeat the Islamic State terror group in its list of hateful comments the candidate has said.

Other celebrities have launched their own anti-Trump campaigns in recent months.

In December, veteran television producer Norman Lear announced that his organization People for the American Way would launch an initiative to combat what he called Trump’s “hate speech and anti-Muslim rhetoric.”

A month earlier, Oscar-winning director Alejandro Inarritu and actor Diego Luna joined other Hispanic cultural leaders in signing a letter similarly condemning Trump’s “hate speech,” which they claimed was causing “physical aggressions against Hispanics.”

The anti-Trump campaign was announced just days before the first-in-the-nation presidential caucus kicks off in Iowa on February 1.

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, Donald Trump, Michael Moore, Rosie O'Donnell, Jane Fonda, Kerry Washington, Stop Hate Dump Trump,#StopHateDumpTrump