It’s embarrassing to admit when obvious click-bait headlines work like a charm, but when BuzzFeed ran the headline, “Is This The Craziest Rant A Fox News Host Has Ever Done?” it proved hard to resist. After all, we’ve seen some pretty crazy rants over the years.
But Andrew Kaczynski’s report makes a persuasive case that this one really is just stark raving mad.
Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro Saturday night cited a report from conspiracy site WorldNetDaily about ISIS forces being trained by the U.S. and alleged the Obama Administration captured a Benghazi suspect 2 years after the attack for political reasons.She also said President Obama “didn’t have the balls” to try Taliban suspects at Guantanamo Bay, and said Americans “are not convinced” Obama “even knows who the enemy is.”
Watching the segment itself was difficult, if only because the nuttiness factor was turned to 11.
“There have been reports that ISIS was trained by U.S. instructors at a secret base in Jordan to prepare them to fight President Assad as rebels,” Pirro says with a straight face. “Since the Benghazi massacre, reports are that the [Benghazi] annex was a front for a CIA operation shipping arms to the anti-Assad forces through Turkey.”
Um, what? What “reports” would that be?
Oh, right. The unhinged Fox host neglected to mention that her source was a conspiracy website that also tells readers that the president has a secret gay Muslim husband and that the blood moon is a divine sign that God disapproves of the administration’s foreign policy.
(Update: My pal Neil reminds me that this bizarre line about Turkey was also embraced by Sen. Rand Paul, for equally dumb reasons.)
Pirro was apparently on quite roll, sharing Libya conspiracy theories, Syria conspiracy theories, Turkey conspiracy theories, warning of some kind of Islamic crusade that you should be terrified of, accusing both the president and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of “training terrorists,” and on and on (and on) the Fox host went.
Here’s the clip. The tenor and ferocity of this tirade, I suppose it probably deserves a “NSFW” label. I should also probably mention that, as far as I can tell, the clip isn’t a parody. Pirro wasn’t deliberately trying to make the right appear foolish; her angry rant appears to be sincere.
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Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."