By Frank Moher
Seriously, Kory Teneycke, that’s all you’ve got? Avaaz.org gets 80,000 of the left’s more suggestible adherents to sign its petition against SunTV, manages to rebrand your nascent operation “Fox News North,” and raises $110,000 in the process, and you step down? That’s all it took?
Do you think your spiritual forefather, Roger Ailes, would have folded so quickly? People have been calling Fox News all sorts of terrible things for a long time now, and quite rightly — it is, as I wrote previously, a demonic creation. But Mr. Ailes revels in the abuse, as he knows it it grows in direct ratio to the permeating success of his propaganda operation. Perhaps you need to borrow a layer of his reptilian skin.
Would your master in the manipulation of public opinion, Karl Rove, have retreated from the ring so timidly? No! Even now he is refulgent, as witness his performance in the wake of Tea Partier Christine O’Donnell’s win in Delaware’s Republican Senate primary. “One thing that O’Donnell is now going to have to answer in the general election that she didn’t in the primary is her own checkered background,” he told that same Fox News. “Why did she mislead voters about her college education? How come it took nearly two decades to pay her college bills so she could get her college degree? How did she make a living?”
And this is how he talks about a fellow right-winger. That, sir, is how the job is done.
Mind you, the fact that you gave Avaaz the ammunition to torpedo you, by admitting that you knew who had sabotaged their petition with phony names, and provoking them to hire Clayton Ruby to demand an RCMP investigation, suggests that maybe you don’t have the strategic skills to take your place alongside Ailes and Rove after all. It is hard to say who, in Canada, might. The infandous Alykhan Velshi, maybe? Anyway, that was a surprisingly unclever move, coming from one who once parried with opponents for the PMO.
Still, I imagined you were in this battle for the long haul. I have to to wonder if it’s something else that has you spooked — like, what the consequences might be if the RCMP do undertake that investigation. Avaaz has given them the I.P. address of the Ottawa-area computer from which the deed was done. It wouldn’t take a heck of a lot to narrow down the suspects — perhaps to a single one. If the job had been given to 4Chan, we’d already know.
Not that I suspect you, Kory — I don’t think you’ve lost that much of your old mojo — but getting dragged into a criminal investigation would be an unfortunate start to your tenure as SUN King. Nevertheless, I thought you’d at least be willing to take on all comers. I was even looking forward to it. And I’ll bet you Uncle Roger was too.
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