Roger Ailes really, really wants Chris Christie to run for president

[TomCADem]

Source: Salon

Fox News chief Roger Ailes created his own parallel media world and then locked himself in it, which appears to have made him go mad, if every single recent profile of the man is any indication. As a former Nixon aide, I assume he's always been driven primarily by paranoia and resentment, but he now literally believes that the president is creating a secret police force because he proposed expanding the Peace Corps, according to Gabriel Sherman's Ailes profile in this week's New York.

Oh, Ailes is also unhappy about the fact that no one wants to vote for any of the various clowns he hired to be pundits. He keeps begging New Jersey governor Chris Christie to run for president, but Chris Christie is too busy being surprisingly unpopular at home. And according to one unnamed person, Ailes thinks Sarah Palin is an idiot.

The big story is that Ailes is having Fox "pivot" back to being semi-reasonable after a few years of being completely insane. Those were profitable and entertaining years for everyone, but whipping up hysterical opposition to Barack Obama is more of a "midterm" strategy than a presidential election strategy, and for Ailes, the head of a cable news channel, electing a Republican president is the primary goal. (Haha can you imagine a story about the head of MSNBC repeatedly, personally begging Democrats to run for president against Bush back in 2004 or something? There would be such a massive freak-out, probably ending in mass firings and a public stoning.)

So Ailes wishes for sensible "moderates" like George H. W. Bush to control the Republican party, which is why he keeps asking Chris Christie to run, but he is also more responsible than anyone besides maybe Karl Rove for the current insane state of the conservative movement. He probably doesn't see it this way, but as I said he's basically gone mad.


Read more: http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/05/23/ailes_christie/index.html

[Old and In the Way]

1. Sucks to have a well oiled propaganda machine, but no one to drive it.

All that money and cutting edge technology trying to sell a political idea that is essentially rooted in the demise of the bottom 95%. A shame Ailes wasn't a liberal/progressive...boy, could that machine be put to good use.

[xxqqqzme]

2. There's a mental picture for you,

christie and ailes side by side. That would suck all the air out of the room.

[yellowcanine]

3. Ailes knows the GOP - and by extension, Fox News, is going to implode in 2012.

And it chafes his sorry ass.

[JPZenger]

4. New Jersey is an unusual case

New Jersey is different than many states because it is such a high tax state. The real estate taxes on average are the highest in the US. New Jersey's income tax rates also are very high (I believe up to 9%), and their schools have some of the highest costs per student in the US (over $20,000 per student in many cases). New Jersey spends much more per resident than PA. As a result, New Jersey was more welcoming to a spending-cut governor than many other states.

However, in many of these situations, the Governor simply pushes the expenses onto the localities, resulting in slightly lower state taxes but much higher local taxes. That is exactly what happened when Pawlenty was governor, and it is about to happen this year in Pennsylvania with Corbett as a governor, who is slashing state funding for public schools.

[Ter]

5. Actually that's not correct

The current Tea Party hates Karl Rove with a passion (and he equally hates the Tea Party), and thinks anyone with the last name "Bush" is anenema. Rove and the Bush's are neo-cons, Tea Baggers are not.

[southernyankeebelle]

6. Don't you just love what happens when a person overreaches. Payback is a bitch.