The Fox News Channel clearly isn’t good at reporting the news, but I think we’ve finally discovered what the network does well: follow the instructions sent to them by the Bush campaign.
As Ryan Lizza noticed, the Bush campaign sent out the following message to BC04 “surrogates”:
We will be sending more talking points later this evening, but the decisive line by Vice President Cheney during the debate was the following:
“So they, in effect, decided they would cast an anti-war vote, and they voted against the troops. Now, if they couldn’t stand up to the pressures that Howard Dean represented, how can we expect them to standup to Al Qaeda?”
Sure enough, shortly thereafter:
Bill Kristol just told his Fox News audience that Cheney’s line about Dean was the best line of the night. A minute later on the same program Rich Lowry said, “And Bill is absolutely right about that Howard Dean line, which I thought was devastating.” Talk about message discipline.
I guess FNC isn’t completely incompetent. At least they know how to follow directives from the Bush campaign.