Dick Morris Kicked Off Fox News

Impact

No more Dick Morris. His contract to spew vitriolic nonsense and completely misleading political predictions on Fox News is expiring, and the network has chosen not to renew it.

Morris, a former Republican adviser to Bill Clinton who pressured the president to adopt center-right economic policies and later converted to an acrid critic of the Clinton administration, was originally ditched from the White House after allegations of his later-confirmed affairs with prostitutes emerged in tabloids.

Morris then became a professional Clinton-hater, writing a series of books describing Hillary Clinton as “the most ruthless American politician since Richard M. Nixon” with a “sense of entitlement” and who “dodges criticism by pretending that every attack is directed not just at her, but at every working woman in America.”

He launched some of the right wing’s lowest blows on President Obama, once asking “Is Obama a socialist? A Muslim? Anti-American? Pro-Palestinian? Or just a man who is right sometimes and wrong most of the time?” In 2009, he said that Obama “is visiting Buchenwald” but “could be opening the door to another Holocaust” by being insufficiently bellicose to Iran.

He promoted conspiracy theories and gave ludicrously off-kilter predictions on politics. Most recently, and likely the reason he’s losing his job, he predicted a “Romney landslide” and instead the country “ended up with an Obama squeaker” (nevermind that the same “squeaker” he credits to Obama is the same percentage he said would qualify as a Romney “landslide”).

It’s far from the first time Morris has made a terrible prediction: in 2010, he predicted that Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) had “squandered her opportunity” and would lose to GOP challenger Joe DioGuardi, saying she “stands for nothing in a year when voters are looking for sincerity.”

Gillibrand won re-election with 61% of the vote. That's just another of many, many races Morris has called incorrectly, and never in favor of a Democrat.

Morris wasn’t fired then, but it appears that after a humiliating Romney loss in November, the network can no longer afford to deluge itself with embarrassingly inaccurate pundits: Fox News also recently parted ways with GOP VP contender Sarah Palin, and while Republican consultant Karl Rove was re-signed, Fox keeps a tight leash on his appearances.

Goodbye and good riddance.