If the smarmy morning show Fox & Friends is the lead paint of news—and it is—then Fox News' The Five probably ought to be considered something akin to a war crime. Co-host Eric Bolling's contribution to the haplessly moronic gabfest of late has been to insist that whether Donald Trump is right and "thousands" of New Jersey Muslim-Americans were cheering September 11, or whether Trump is willfully lying through his two-story load-bearing combover in order to stoke his campaign of overt xenophobia isn't important.
Or, to quote the actual supposed punditry person on actual supposed punditry show, "who cares?"
“Whether or not it was thousands, a few hundred, a handful, who cares?” [...]Bolling insisted, “It doesn’t really matter to me, because I know there were Muslims and Muslim groups who were happy that the World Trade Center came down and they were in the United States when that happened.”
Which is about the most Fox News-ish thing that a Fox News persona could say—and heaven knows, saying such things makes up most of the network's lineup. Whether or not the facts are this or that is hardly important, compared to the far simpler task of just deciding what "I know" to be true and leaving the rest for the pissy historians to sort out later.
But Bolling has decided that he's going to be very invested in this premise, and took to Twitter to shout that, well, he lost "close friends" on that day, thus rendering him the nation's authoritative Decider Of What We're Now Going To Claim American Muslims Did, and—even more curiously—citing a 2001 Fox News story describing a scene of five men "congratulating one another" on a rooftop as evidence of his claims. There's a problem with that.
