[continued from previous message]   
      
   won't be the first – in 2013, a former EPA official admitted to   
   stealing $900,000 from the government by pretending to work for   
   the agency – but he will be one of the most prominent. "Why   
   didn't someone at the CIA, or some retired CIA person, go to   
   Fox?" says Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer and   
   journalist. "There's plenty of fakes out there. But most of them   
   don't get on TV." The simplest answer might be that no one had   
   much incentive to probe Simmons' past. Once he started appearing   
   on Fox and had an audience, he became useful to the government;   
   once he was useful to the government and was granted an audience   
   with Rumsfeld, he became even more useful to Fox.   
      
   But while Simmons may have been the most egregious charlatan, he   
   wasn't the only fringe member of the shuttered military-analysts   
   program who stayed on the air. "The difference between Simmons   
   and the more legitimate people probably isn't all that great,"   
   says Robert Entman, a professor of media and public affairs at   
   George Washington University. "He may have said more outlandish   
   things, but totally legitimate spokespeople said many misleading   
   things too." Just last year, retired Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely, who   
   participated in the military-analysts program, said that   
   President Obama was "intentionally weakening our military,"   
   which sounded almost reasonable next to comments from Tom   
   McInerney, who insisted on Fox News that terrorists had flown   
   the disappeared Malaysia Airlines 370 to Pakistan.   
      
   Not every conspiracy theory takes, of course, but as the   
   Benghazi controversy shows, a few people with impressive-   
   sounding titles can go a dangerously long way. Simmons rose from   
   obscurity to prime time on Fox News, which burnished his   
   credentials in the eyes of the government, which raised his   
   profile on Fox and with the public at large even further. If   
   only someone had listened to Simmons in 2007, when he went on   
   Fox to criticize the hiring of a CIA agent who had entered the   
   United States illegally. "Without knowing who we're hiring and   
   who we are employing to protect our nation, we are in big, big   
   trouble," Simmons said. "Somewhere along the line?...?whoever   
   was responsible for the background check at the FBI really fell   
   down."   
      
   http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-rise-and-fall-of-a-   
   fox-news-fraud-20160126   
          
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)