(Community Matters) A Vanity Fair, Roger Ailes profile. HT & quotes from today’s playbook:
“One day during the 2012 primary season, Newt Gingrich complained that Fox News’s support for Mitt Romney was responsible for Gingrich’s poor showing. Rick Santorum had made a similar claim … Gingrich and Santorum had been Fox commentators before getting into the race, and Ailes found their complaints self-serving and disloyal. Brian Lewis, his spokesman, asked Ailes for guidance on how to respond to Newt. ‘Brush him back,’ Ailes said. ‘He’s a sore loser and if he had won he would have been a sore winner.’ Lewis nodded. Ailes was silent for a moment and then added, ‘Newt’s a prick.’
‘Lewis then read Ailes a summary of the flap over Democratic operative Hilary Rosen’s comment that Ann Romney, mother of five, had never worked a day in her life. Ailes spun it without hesitation. ‘Obama’s the one who never worked a day in his life. He never earned a penny that wasn’t public money. How many fund-raisers does he attend every week? How often does he play basketball and golf? I wish I had that kind of time. He’s lazy, but the media won’t report that.’ He noticed my arched eyebrows and added, ‘I didn’t come up with that. Obama said that, to Barbara Walters.’ (What Obama said was that he feels a laziness in himself that he attributes to his laid-back upbringing in Hawaii.)
“‘I like Marco Rubio,’ Ailes told a staff meeting of Fox News Latino when talk about the Florida senator being Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential pick was at fever pitch. ‘But I don’t know about as a vice-presidential candidate. He’s a nice guy, and that role requires kicking the crap out of your opponents.’ He paused, thinking about vice presidents he had known. ‘I have a soft spot for Joe Biden,’ he said. ‘I like him. But he’s dumb as an ashtray.’ … ‘I do have a hair trigger, but I only use it on things that don’t matter these days,’ [Ailes] said. ‘I just do it to blow off steam, create some bullshit.’
“Ailes has a very acute sense of his own mortality. ‘I’d give anything for another 10 years,’ he often says … ‘My doctor told me that I’m old, fat, and ugly, but none of those things is going to kill me immediately,’ he told me shortly before his 72nd birthday. ‘The actuaries say I have six to eight years. The best tables give me 10. Three thousand days, more or less. … Because of my hemophilia, I’ve been prepared to face death all of my life. As a boy I spent a lot of time in hospitals. My parents had to leave at the end of visiting hours, and I spent a lot of time just lying there in the dark, thinking about the fact that any accident could be dangerous or even fatal. So I’m ready. Everybody fears the unknown. But I have a strong feeling there’s something bigger than us. I don’t think all this exists because some rocks happened to collide. I’m at peace. When it comes, I’ll be fine, calm. I’ll miss life, though. Especially my family.'” http://vnty.fr/XpTG4H
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