Roger Ailes
Roger Ailes, the chairman and architect of the Fox News Channel, picked up a $250,000 award from a conservative foundation Wednesday night at the Kennedy Center, and served up some red meat to the largely conservative crowd gathered to honor him according to the Washington Post.
One crowd favorite was the story of a liberal in a hot-air balloon that was lost and late for an appointment who then descends to ask a conservative for directions. The conservative pulls out a GPS device and tells him exactly where he is.
“You must be a conservative,” the balloon man says. The man on the ground asks how he knows that. The reply: “Everything you’ve told me is technically correct, I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is, I’m still lost. Frankly, you haven’t been very much help so far.”
Ailes noted the conservative replied that the balloon guy must be a liberal. How does he know? The punch line: “You don’t know where you’re going or where you’ve been, you’ve risen to where you are on hot air, and you made a promise that you have no idea how to keep. Now you expect me to solve your problems. The fact is, you’re in the same place you were before we met and now it’s my fault!”
The Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation, honored Ailes and three others with its 10th annual Bradley Prize for promoting public policies consistent with the foundation’s conservative mission (the group’s goals include school choice, welfare reform and limited government).
Ailes delighted the full house by slamming President Obama, and liberals in general, in his acceptance speech.
To vigorous applause, he implied that the Obama administration had abandoned its duty to protect American diplomats and personnel during last year’s attacks in Benghazi, Libya. “I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t even care what the president of the United States was doing that night,” he said. “However, I would like to know what the commander-in-chief was doing that night.”
Ailes offered a spirited critique of multiculturalism:
“We must stop waving our extended arms in an effort to balance ourselves as we tiptoe along the edges of the Constitution in an effort not to upset weak-kneed appeasers with our unflinching belief in the ideas that made our country different and, yes, great,” he said. “Are we losing America to the inevitable onrushing tide of history? No. But we’re in a storm, the mast is broken, the compass is off, and there’s a damn big hole in the boat. We have allowed ourselves to be manipulated by others, many of whom want to impose their culture and laws under the manufactured utopian idea that all all cultures are equal and most of them are better than America….America is a culture, it has a culture, and it must be recognized….We must not allow our collective memory to fade or morph into trendy revisionist versions of political correctness, which become a substitute for the truth.”