The perfect page

Can you imagine the fun over at Fox when this one came together Monday evening?

1) Our Hero goes on the attack, heroically demanding a retraction.

2) It's true: voter fraud is EVERYWHERE! Good thing nobody reads the second paragraph, since the story does a pretty good job of demonstrating that double voting is a much less salient risk than, for example, having stupid relatives and ready access to firearms.

3) Iran, the existential threat of our time! Though you really, really need to not read beyond the second graf:

“We wanted to test the Iranian reaction,” one US official told Fox News when asked why the US jets were flying close to Iran.

My favorite, I think, is (4) "Blamed for Benghazi":

Four Americans died in the 2012 terror attack in Benghazi, and those who survived saw their stories of heroism told in a Hollywood movie, but the filmmaker whose work was wrongly blamed for touching off the event lives in obscurity, poverty and fear, FoxNews.com has learned.

If you're a Fox regular, you don't need the active voice to know who did the blaming: it was the Obama-Clinton administration. Unless, you know, you were actually reading Fox on Sept. 12, 2012:

So, yes. Fox was quite happy to blame the video, as long as blaming the video fit with Fox's priorities. Your fault for reading the second paragraph.

In one of its occasional attempts to provide genuine political commentary along with Coyote v. Roadrunner-style election modeling, the FiveThirtyEight blog came up with a list of "10 questions as the stretch run begins." Here's the 10th:

10. What would keep me up late at night if I were Trump?
As the polls have ebbed and flowed, I’ve been 8 or 10 points behind Clinton at my worst moments, but only tied with her at my best moments. I’ve also never gotten much above 40 percent in national polls, at least not on a consistent basis, and I’ve alienated a lot of voters who would allow me to climb higher than that. In other words, maybe that dreaded Trump ceiling is there after all, in which case I’ll have to get awfully lucky to win the election, probably needing both a favorable flow of news in the weeks leading up to Nov. 8 and a large third-party vote that works against Clinton.

I prefer to see things differently. What should keep Mr. Trump awake at night is the thought that at some point, the grownup press will wake up and point out that any Clinton-Obama-Abedin "lies" about Benghazi were enthusiastically spread by Fox News itself. Imagine a world, for example, in which the Associated Press -- with all due credit to its watchdog instincts -- realizes that there's actually a difference between nonprofit charitable foundations and fake universities that stay open through the miracle of the well-greased palm?