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“I don’t know if she really wants Obama dead, but to say that she was “calling for his assassination” is a little absurd.” — Anonymous commenter on Liz Trotta’s Wikipedia:talk page
Via multiple sources but this one’s via Firedoglake
Liz Trotta: “and now we have what … uh…some are reading as a suggestion that somebody knock off Osama …uh..um..Obama [after being prompted by the FNC anchor]....well both if we could [laughing]”
Other Fox News talking head: Talk about how you really feel?
It seems to me that everyone who’s willing to give Hillary Clinton the benefit of the doubt on her remarks about Robert Kennedy’s assassination ought to be willing to give Liz Trotta the benefit of the doubt as well.
Sure, with Ronald Reagan’s Roger Ailes running it FOX News has been a purely Republican organization. It’s less well known, however, that FOX owner Rupurt Murdoch backs Clinton, at least to the extent of having held a fundraiser for her. Also her husband Bill included Murdoch in at least two of his Clinton Global Initiative conferences.
So my point is that Liz Trotta, a Murcoch employee, yes, but also a Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism alum from back in the early 1960’s, the first woman war reporter on television**, a three-time Emmy and two-time Overseas Press Club award winner who’s biography, Fighting for Air: In the Trenches With Television News
I mean, if you don’t give Senator Clinton the benefit of the doubt then it’s fine not to extend it to Trotta either. On the other hand if you’re going to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt then you ought to be willing to let Trotta’s remarks slide as well. (Full disclosure: Like the original Wikipedia commenter I’m sure neither Clinton nor Trotta hopes Obama will be assassinated, but at this point I don’t have much respect left for them either.)
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Update Here’s another charming little brick in the wall: It’s a Craig’s List item and so I don’t know how long it’ll remain available, but just so you know, there’s an anonymous post titled “Liz Trotta of Fox deserves cancer” that opines that she’s “nothing more than a [all-caps anatomical Anglo-Saxon noun]” and “[Anglo-Saxon verb] her if you can stand the stench.” Sentiments she’s no doubt had to endure since she had the temerity to enroll in Columbia roughly the same year Betty Friedan was finishing The Feminine Mystique. But in fact Trotta deserves neither cancer or the gendered aspersions. Sure, like the rest of her colleagues she’s a contemptable, tasteless, nominally conservative partisan hack who’s serially in need of the benefit of the doubt, but gender has nothing to do with that.
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Update:
On the other hand, via Shakespeare’s Sister, Kevin of A Slant Truth points out that both Liz Trotta and Hillary Clinton (who would also have been 16 in 1963 and in college in 1968) ought to remember the murders of John Kennedy, Malcom X, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and crippling of George Wallace pretty bloody well — well enough to remember darn well how that seemingly endless stream of mid-day announcements affected America (as it affected my elementary school teachers… as it affected even little 3rd-graders like me, and later, again, even 5th- or 6th-graders like me.) So if they do remember then it’s even more tasteless to mention it, if they don’t remember they must have been really busy with something else!
Yet another update: Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo says
Yesterday, we flagged the comments of Liz Trotta, a Fox News contributor, joking about wanting to off both Osama bin Laden and Barack Obama. A laugh a minute, you might say. Today she gave what I guess is called an ‘apology.’ Says Trotta, it was a “lame attempt at humor.”
Another “sorry you were offended apologies, and not quite owning her shit, but a start.
[** Link via Juan Cole. —fl]
