On July 28, 2007 Rage Against the Machine took the stage at Randall's Island at the Rock the Bells festival. After tearing through several of their numbers, lead singer Zach de la Rocha took issue with the "fascist Fox News" channel and their reporting of his comments a few months back at Coachella. Indeed, RATM was subjected to some serious criticism in the wake of the following comments:
"A good friend of ours said that if the same laws were applied to U.S. presidents as were applied to the Nazis after World War II, that every single one of them, that every last rich, white one of them, from Truman on would've been hung and tried and shot. In this current administration there's no exception. They should be hung and tried and shot as any war criminal should be! "
Of course, what Fox chose to characterize de la Rocha's words as him calling for an assasination, when in fact he was explicitly calling for a trial. In fact, far from calling for an illegal assassination de la Rocha was clearly calling for the application of International Law.
But there are several other interesting points here:
- One prevalent meme with both conservative panelist Coulter and the more liberal panelist Jane Fleming is that Rage Against the Machine is no longer popular or relevant. Interesting that the show drew over 35,000 fans and received great reviews from the NYT, Newsday and MTV, among others...
- That this "fair and balanced" network yielded no one who vaguely came close to agreeing with RATM.
- Shortly after calling himself "a big fan of the First Amendment" long irrelevant Ted Nugent slips up and says "unfortunately, nobody is silencing these guys" before correcting and reversing himself with "or not necessarily silencing, but condemning this outrageous violence that they're recommending." Ted Nugent is on the record as "considering homosexuality morally wrong" and has said about Iraq that "our failure has been not to Nagasaki them".
- But perhaps the greatest irony here is that one of their panelists, none other than Ann Coulter back in the 1990's didn't call for the trial of Bill Clinton but stated, rather that the only question should be "whether to impeach or assasinate" him in her 1998 book High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case against Bill Clinton.
But watch the whole Fox shitshow here and judge for yourself...
"A good friend of ours said that if the same laws were applied to U.S. presidents as were applied to the Nazis after World War II, that every single one of them, that every last rich, white one of them, from Truman on would've been hung and tried and shot. In this current administration there's no exception. They should be hung and tried and shot as any war criminal should be! "
Of course, what Fox chose to characterize de la Rocha's words as him calling for an assasination, when in fact he was explicitly calling for a trial. In fact, far from calling for an illegal assassination de la Rocha was clearly calling for the application of International Law.
But there are several other interesting points here:
- One prevalent meme with both conservative panelist Coulter and the more liberal panelist Jane Fleming is that Rage Against the Machine is no longer popular or relevant. Interesting that the show drew over 35,000 fans and received great reviews from the NYT, Newsday and MTV, among others...
- That this "fair and balanced" network yielded no one who vaguely came close to agreeing with RATM.
- Shortly after calling himself "a big fan of the First Amendment" long irrelevant Ted Nugent slips up and says "unfortunately, nobody is silencing these guys" before correcting and reversing himself with "or not necessarily silencing, but condemning this outrageous violence that they're recommending." Ted Nugent is on the record as "considering homosexuality morally wrong" and has said about Iraq that "our failure has been not to Nagasaki them".
- But perhaps the greatest irony here is that one of their panelists, none other than Ann Coulter back in the 1990's didn't call for the trial of Bill Clinton but stated, rather that the only question should be "whether to impeach or assasinate" him in her 1998 book High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case against Bill Clinton.
But watch the whole Fox shitshow here and judge for yourself...
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