"Is Roger Ailes the GOP's Worst Enemy" by Eric Boehlert at Salon

Is Roger Ailes the GOP's Worst Enemy

By Eric Boehlert at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2013/03/22/gop_rebranding_doesnt_apply_to_roger_ailes_partner/

"SNIP................................................


Dubbed the “Growth & Opportunity Project,” the RNC’s laundry list of campaign failures urges the party to become more inclusive, tolerant and able to engage and persuade non-believers. Or to at least be able to not turn them off entirely with angry, absolutist rhetoric. “On messaging, we must change our tone,” the report concluded.

Right now though, the Republican Party, riding a White House losing streak (2-4 since 1992), has a massive messaging problem, thanks to Roger Ailes.

As Variety confirmed last year, “the voice of Republican opposition throughout the Obama administration has been Fox News Channel, and the de facto leader of the GOP its chairman-CEO Roger Ailes.”

It’s fitting that the RNC report, which represents a concerted effort by the GOP to turn the page on its losing ways, arrived the same week Ailes was busy taking his book-release star turn and presenting himself as a clarion voice of the conservative movement. Via the book we learned Ailes, when not making weird media references to Hitler and Stalin and comparing Islamic charities to terrorist organizations, dismissed America’s first black president is “lazy” liar who’s “never worked a day in his life.” (Ailes was clumsily misrepresenting comments Obama had made about himself in a 2011 interview with Barbara Walters.) Then in an interview with the Daily Beast, Ailes lashed out at another prominent African American, Van Jones, calling him a “communist infiltrator” who “ has one job, to stir up racism whether he can find it or not.”

.............................................SNIP"