Fox host Jesse Watters “faced calls to resign after stating Harris would be ‘paralyzed’ by generals who ‘would have their way’ with her in the White House Situation Room,” Daily Mail reported on Tuesday, August 28, 2024 (read story here).
You can hear Watters, who replaced Tucker Carlson as Fox‘s lead talk-show host, make the remark at the beginning of the video below. Although he was trying to insult Harris by implying she’d be a weak commander-in-chief, it shouldn’t be lost on anyone that he also insinuated the Joint Chiefs are rapists.
The Daily Mail, which typically criticizes Democrats, said Watters “has repeatedly attracted controversy – not least by cheating on his first wife with a junior Fox colleague,” and insinuated his job could be in jeopardy.
The tabloid tried to explain that Watters “was discussing foreign policy and criticizing Harris’ perceived lack of credentials when he dropped the controversial comment.” Yeah, I think most of us get that; but his choice of phrase couldn’t possibly be innocent. It’s obvious he was going for a double-entendre.
And lack of credentials? What on earth is Daily Mail talking about? Harris has been vice president for 4 years, and in the Situation Room many times; before that she was a Senator for 4 years, and before that was a career prosecutor and California’s attorney general. The idea that she can’t hold her own is absurd.
Watters has no special knowledge of foreign policy or military affairs. He graduated from college in 2001, a few months before the 9/11 terror attacks, and while others were joining the military he got a job at Fox. He’s never worked anywhere else.
Today he’s a propagandist, not a pundit; and as this comment shows, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Barbara Comstock, a lobbyist who served in Congress as a Republican from Virginia, calls Watters the “dumbest and most obnoxious man on Fox.”
But that doesn’t matter at Fox, where only ratings and audience matters, and Watters knows how to stir up the rubes c0mprising Fox‘s prime-time audience. A typical Watters one-liner goes like this: “I heard that scientists said the other day that when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.”
That’s not intellectual fare, the network that airs it is unserious, and the audience that laps it up isn’t the tree growing the smartest coconuts. But if it rakes in money, that’s good enough for the people who run Fox. My guess is Watters’ job is secure.