‘Fox & Friends’ uses Toby Keith soundtrack for ‘mother of all bombs’ explosion

Caitlin Dickson
·Reporter


The “Fox & Friends” crew was criticized on Friday after playing Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” over footage of the massive bombing by the U.S. military in Afghanistan this week.

“That video’s black and white,” co-host Ainsley Earhardt told Geraldo Rivera. “But that is what freedom looks like. That’s the red, white and blue.”

Rivera waxed nostalgic about watching the U.S. strike “that exact part of Afghanistan” back in 2001 and said, “One of my favorite things in the 16 years I’ve been here at Fox News is watching bombs drop on bad guys.”

The Massive Ordinance Air Blast bomb — often informally referred to as “mother of all bombs;” it is the most powerful nonnuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal — was dropped Thursday on an Islamic State group cave complex in Afghanistan. The U.S. military says it killed 36 ISIS militants.

Not everyone shared the enthusiasm of the “Fox & Friends” team.

“Given this culture, maybe the U.S. isn’t the best country to bring humanitarianism and freedom to the world by dropping love bombs on them,” the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald tweeted.

Fox’s patriotic tribute to Thursday’s MOAB explosion echoed the sentiment expressed by MSNBC’s Brian Williams, who drew similar backlash for describing images of last week’s airstrikes in Syria as “beautiful.”

Other tweets about the Fox segment: