For liberals like me, Fox News was the channel to watch last night. As it became clear early on that Obama was going to take this thing, my household quickly switched the channel from CNN to Fox, eager to see the network’s massive breakdown play out in real time. After all, if the job of Fox News these past four years was to make Obama a one-term president, a goal the network not-incidentally shared with the Republican Party, Fox News super-duper seriously failed.

In 2009, White House communications director Anita Dunn called Fox News "either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party.” I don’t know about the “or” part. With massive funds and infinite air time, Roger Ailes’ little network that could spent the past four years demonizing president Obama (after a year of demonizing candidate Obama), and obsessively churning up non-news to scare the shit out of white guys and feed into the GOP bloodstream: from the Black Panthers’ remarkable rise to political power to that thing about the guns and Mexico named after an awesome Vin Diesel movie to the multifrontwar on Christmas/Christians/Christ to The Great Benghazi Conspiracy of 2012.

And what do they have to show for it? Not a Republican president. Not a Republican Senate. Not a repealed health care law. Adding insult to Tuesday’s injury, Eric Holder is still a free man.

Yes, ratings. Yes, money. I hear you. But if Fox News has any actual interest in helping the Republican Party or the conservative cause—and you can want to do this and make money, just like the GOP!—the network really flubbed it. So what happened, other than the mainstream media oppressors shutting down the truth once again and polling places letting Hispanics in?

In 2009, Gawker published a post titled “What’s Bad for the GOP is Good for Fox News,” arguing that Republicans’ worst nightmare—the election of a black, Democratic president who listens to the rap music and gives young, female, and non-white Americans hope—was actually a dream come true for Rupert Murdoch’s money-minting, 24-hour news network. Pointing to this illustrative graph, Gawker’s John Cook (who, full disclosure, is my husband) wrote that “the more viewers Fox attracts, the more voters the GOP repels.”

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