Whenever I’m working out of town, it’s always a treat to listen to a different lefty talk station; when I was in Napa over Thanksgiving I tuned in daily to Green 960, a San Francisco-based Clear Channel station which, though lacking any local programming, has a good mix of national shows I don’t generally hear at home.  Of course, the signal is pathetic; you can get Rush Limbaugh blaring through your dental work but if you want to hear, say Randi Rhodes, the radio must be positioned just so and finely tuned to a minuscule range of the dial.

Still, the station, which used as one of its taglines “Occupy Your Mind,” was a welcome salve to my daily drudgery, beginning with Stephanie Miller in the morning and ending with Norman Goldman in the late afternoon.  Like KPOJ here, it was stuffed with advertising for everything from Home Depot to homeopathy, and must surely have been pretty popular in the famously liberal and long-commuting Bay Area.  Perhaps too popular.  It seems that Clear Channel, recently purchased by Mitt Romney’s old outfit Bain Capital (h/t Bradblog), just decided that that hot new phenom, Glenn Beck, and a bunch of other soundalikes would be a better fit for the 2012 election year on this vanishingly slim speck of the AM dial.

Aside from a tiny afterthought HD FM station, which can be heard by no one, there will be no liberal talk in the Bay Area, but a half dozen blasting AM signals devoted to the hate radio of the right.  Curiously, Clear Channel has chosen to leave Randi Rhodes on 960, sandwiched between Glenn Beck and Lord knows who in the noon-3:00 pm slot.  That’s some clever programming, if by “clever” you mean, “doomed to fail.”  Even to liberals like myself, Randi can be a skosh grating at times, and unlikely to win converts among the Beck fans.  More likely, she’ll receive a lot of hate mail and death threats and then be dumped after a month or two.  Mission accomplished.

Of course, such political moves are always presented as simple and necessary programming decisions, dictated from above by bloated and unaccountable corporations like Clear Channel, divorced of any negative impact on public service programming over the (once) public airwaves.  The station’s website, which is updated hourly with news all day, carries not the slightest indication that it will go out of existence in less than a month.  Thanks a lot, Bill Clinton, for that lovely Telecommunications Act of 1996, which was sold to the public as promoting competition.

Back in the glory days of self-interested media barons who used their outsized mouthpieces to advance personal agendas, there was at least personality behind the propaganda being catapulted.  You may not have agreed with Henry Luce, William Randolph Hearst, or the Chandlers, but they were people, with personalities, egos, and most importantly, life spans. Now, it’s just faceless, immortal behemoths dictating what we read and hear, responsive to no one but shareholders.  And, rather than lording over a few cities or a family of regional broadcasting outlets, media Goliaths like Clear Channel and News Corp span the globe, spouting the company line across platforms from book publishing to entertainment, bending governments to their will as they gobble up competitors and further narrow the range of acceptable opinion, always pulling it further to the right.

In dismissing the significance of the change, Talkers magazine explained that in such a liberal enclave as San Francisco, there isn’t really a need for liberal talk; talk radio thrives among the disenfranchised minority.  This is, of course, ridiculous; they’ve previously explained the complete absence of liberal talk in conservative areas because there aren’t enough liberals to listen to it.  But we’ll never know; being Clear Channel means never having to explain yourself.

It’s unlikely that the political complexion of the Bay Area will be much impacted by the loss of its sole lefty talk outlet, but given the rank misinformation pouring out of the many remaining righty stations, the level of the dialogue will be sorely diminished, and figuring out the truth that much harder.  But that’s the point, isn’t it?

Everywhere you go today you’ll find another righty, from Sarah Palin on down, blaming crazy people for their craziness, loudly and revealingly attempting to exonerate not just their heinous words, but more significantly, their disastrous policies, which both are almost designed to precipitate just such craziness.  Nearly lost amid the narcissistic pout-rage of which Palin’s, well, “reprehensible” Facebook blather today was only the clumsiest, nobody is talking about the 12th paragraph or so of all these stories, wherein unlikely bipartisan agreement finds that the collapsing economy, lack of mental health care, and skimpy government services leave a lot of crazy people roaming the streets.  Mission Accomplished, Republicans.

It’s depressingly familiar by now that Republicans like to crash the economy and benefit politically from doing so;  in classic “Shock Doctrine” protocol, they revel in the kind of destabilizing insecurity that allows fiscally debilitating policies like the Bush tax cuts or multiple wars to be implemented, and then the resulting catastrophes make their other, even more undesirable programs seem necessary and right, leading to further disasters, crazier solutions, and on and on.  But you have to hand it to them for covering their bases.  Who knew that Reagan’s deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, punishing recessions, elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, relaxing of gun control laws, aggressive militarism, and top-down class warfare were all designed, and rather well, to serve a singular purpose?  At least until halfway through Bush’s tenure, anyway?

Well, here we are.  Unlike anything since Weimar Germany, we have all the elements required for the establishment of the kind of fascist dictatorship ol’ Prescott Bush et al longed for back in the day, thanks to a series of either conscious or at least lucky moves by the right over the last thirty years.  Shocking income inequality, massive unemployment, and widespread poverty.  National humiliation from failed military adventurism.  Crippling debt.  A two-tiered legal system that pits the all-powerful government against its lowliest citizens and leaves the well-connected unscathed.  Those horrendous, Banana Republic characteristics aren’t bugs, they’re features.  From there, all you need is repetitive, 24/7 demonizing propaganda against some easily marginalized Other and a lot of money to put it out, and you’re off to the races.  ”It works the same in every country,” as they said at Nuremburg, and as the escalating political violence and stiflingly narrow political discourse in America today shows, that ol’ Nazi was right.

You see, the right needs violent crazies roaming the lightly-policed streets to convince people that a more repressive police state would be good.  They rely on economic insecurity to goad the non-rich to learn to get by with less.  They require “Others” to blame for the serial disasters they create with such alacrity.  They even create enemies abroad, usually to simply grab resources, but just as often to make a mess that will inevitably lead to a lavish payoff, win or lose, to the military industrial complex and enable them to denounce and even prosecute their critics in a “Time of War.”   Heads they win, tails we lose.

This probably explains the extreme aversion to criticism Palin’s otherwise just routinely offensive video exemplifies….  Anybody capable of fogging a mirror could see through a blindfold that the mess we’re in, of which the Tucson shooter is just a small but telling part, is completely a Republican creation, the logical result of the fearful, fact-averse, and Darwinian society they had to have in order to realize their larger goals, and every so often, somebody is going to get killed.  That’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Right wing hero Winston Churchill once described his political nemesis, Clement Atlee, as “a modest man, with a lot to be modest about.”  In a world deliberately made crazy, mostly for profit, that practically seems like a compliment today.  Given the untold horrors their ideology has produced at home and abroad, Palin and her ilk have a whole lot to be modest about, but what do you know?  They aren’t modest at all.

Trouble is, of course, that mass genocide is problematic, both logistically and politically, and as such a whole lot of human beings unworthy of consideration stubbornly continue to exist, seemingly out of spite.  Take the world’s billion or so Muslims:  ”They” attacked us on 911, and as such no threat of national bankruptcy can deter us from teaching them a lesson, using bombs, drones, invasions, broomsticks, and buckets of water  as visual aids, and when they’re slow on the uptake, bring in the dogs.  War is peace, and don’t you forget it.  Chickenhearted fretting about the inevitable blowback is dismissed out of hand, and the cost, what cost?  Apparently, the “small government” righties so relentlessly fetishize can afford to have lots of wars going on while enforcing deep austerity at home, even though thousands of years of history say no.

In an interesting little video speech of Jay Rosen talking about Fox News that Balloon Juice linked to over the weekend, Rosen outlined the ease with which right-thinking Americans are taught to forget what happened five minutes ago, at five-minute intervals, and thus continue to hold their rather counterintuitive but yet startlingly consistent beliefs.  Though Rosen lapses into a lot of boring self-indulgence in his 15-minute lecture, he hits on an important truth:  what is actually happening on any given day is incidental to the right, since the story told will always be the same.  Those elitist liberals and dirty darkies are at it again, and here’s why you should be resentful, and continue watching Fox to feel better.

Some sharp-eyed liberal smarty called this drearily familiar phenomenon “epistemic closure,” and ought to be permanently silenced for it.  What it is, you don’t need a sheepskin from Harvard to see; a bunch of craven and self-interested malefactors of great wealth have bought up huge chunks of the public discourse and with it a thriftily  slim majority of our elected officials, and they have a neat and ever expanding fairy tale to explain why this is a good thing for people who think “epistemic” has to do with boils or something.  These people are being systematically taught to reject all “facts” as some sort of liberal plot, and keep clicking their heels and visualizing Kansas, even as their puppet masters laugh all the way to their eighth vacation  home (via Gulfstream).

Republican policies, which above all favor the wealthiest over everyone else, always tend to make most Americans angry and insecure, so Republican politics, since they’ve been in such ascendance these past dozen or so years, are now about channeling that understandable anger into electing more Republicans, usually by declaring that non-Republican people are just bad, and no attention should be paid to them.  They call liberals naive Utopians and whatnot, but yet their own unbroken and provable record of failure is airily dismissed because the despised and un-American liberals stood in the way of their greatest achievements, and next time they’ll get it right, you’ll see.

No Republican has ever balanced a budget in my entire lifetime, and no Democrat has ever markedly increased it, but the Republicans are the party of Fiscal Responsibility.  The stock market, under Democratic Presidents, has performed markedly better than under Republican misrule, but the Republicans are the party of prosperity.  Abortions go up under Republican Presidents and down under Democratic ones, but the Republicans are the “pro-life” party.  No Republican has ever won a war (since that man, Lincoln, anyway), but the Republicans are the biggest, baddest, thing going on the world stage.   No Republican has ever advanced a policy whose benefits would even peripherally redound the the non-rich majority, but they call the Democrats “elitist.”

It isn’t easy living with so many flagrant contradictions, but it is easier when you believe, as the Red Queen said, many “impossible things” before breakfast.  That’s why God made “Fox and Friends.”  If Miss America believes it, it must be true, especially so early in the morning.

Koppel targeted Fox News and MSNBC, comparing them to bling-addled boxers in the big media ring, glaring at each other from their respective neutral corners, and then raining rhetorical spitballs, as they move, night after night, to the center of the big canvas:  American cable television.

Typically, there’s been a lot of reaction.

Sssssnnnnnnorrrrrrrre !!!

Koppel furrowed mightily about the underlying threat to the Republic if trends (in place and quite profitable for a helluva long time, thanks) continued, led by O’Reilly/Olbermann, Beck/Maher, Limbaugh/Stewart food fights.

BUT !!!!

It may be The Big Media Story is way ahead of Ted and all these other clowns, at least in terms of the dire state of cable itself.

From the Financial Times, 11/18/10:

“The number of people subscribing to US cable television services has suffered its biggest decline in 30 years as younger, tech-savvy viewers lead an exodus to web-based operations, such as Hulu and Netflix.” *

• Total number of subscribers to cable and satellite in the third quarter:  down by 119,000
• Compared to gain of 346,000 in the third quarter of 2009
• Net falloff in subscribers in the third quarter of 2010:  741,000

“The figures suggest that ‘cord-cutting’ – one of the pay-TV industry’s biggest fears – is becoming a reality as viewers drift to web-based platforms.”

• Online subscription services now priced at $7.99 per month (Hulu and Netlfix)
• Hulu’s revenue up over $130 million this year compared to last (Hulu owned jointly by News Corp., Disney, and NBC Universal)

“Research from The Diffusion Group, a technology research company, found that more than a third of iPad users were likely to cancel their pay-TV subscriptions in the next six months.”

* Source:  SNL Kagan

Reagan took this a step further when he did away with the Fairness Doctrine, all but eliminated the public service requirements of broadcasters, and jovially needled major outlets for their imagined “liberal bias,” which at the time was a pretty laughable notion, given the reverence with which the media treated the Great Communicator, but is even funnier now, since they still do.  Before long, the AM Radio dial was (and remains) 99% conservative, even in Democrat-dominated markets, and a whole new consciousness emerged, untethered from reality.  Bill Clinton greatly exacerbated the problem with his Telecommunications Act of 1996, which is incidentally the same year Rupert Murdoch spent a half billion dollars launching Fox News, and further consolidation quickly followed.

All this time, newspapers, the last bastion of in-depth news and community service in the industry, continued to cannibalize once-revered names in journalism; clobbered by the ever-increasing demands of Wall Street for the kind of profits that would make Nike blush, formerly independent papers like the LA Times, Washington Post, and yes, the New York Times cut staff and content, raised prices, and thereby steadily drove readers to cable and the internet.  Politicians now proudly ignore the media entirely and benefit from it;  Rick Perry was elected governor in Texas without a single newspaper endorsement.  CNN’s John Avlon was moved to write about this sorry state of affairs, at some length, while ignoring the, well, elephant in the room:

Keith Olbermann’s suspension for making political contributions to three Democratic candidates is just the latest example of the problems that come with the rise of partisan media.

In the fallout, other MSNBC personalities were also found to have given to Democratic candidates, while Media Matters uncovered the fact that more than 30 Fox News hosts and contributors had donated to conservative candidates.

No such Democratic contributions have come to light, of course, but Joe Scarborough, Pat Buchanan, and other MSNBC contributors did contribute to Republicans.  Never let the facts get in the way of a good story, I say.

Whole news networks are being transformed into little more than on-air advocates for political parties. The idea of objectivity is now increasingly dismissed as a myth rather than honored as an ideal toward which the news industry should strive.

Uh, only one network is such an advocate, and that’d be FOX.  MSNBC has four liberal hosts, along with the Bush-worshipper Chris Matthews and, of course Joe Scarborough.  MSNBC has sponsored no rallies, made no large corporate contributions, and, by the way, does manage to do its advocacy without flat-out lying, unlike at Fox.

Americans are self-segregating themselves into separate political realities — responding to the proliferation of information by consuming news that confirms their political prejudices. Loyal viewers see opinion-anchors like Olbermann or Glenn Beck as the only “truth-tellers” in town, while dismissing the rest of the media as cowardly or biased. We are devolving back to the era when newspapers were owned and operated by political parties.

See, Glenn Beck is JUST LIKE Keith Olbermann, even though Olbermann doesn’t, say, compare any President to Hitler or tell people, nightly, to stockpile guns, gold, and canned goods for the imminent apocalypse.  But, as Murdoch himself said, Fox beats CNN in the ratings, and I’m beginning to see why.

The result: Partisan warfare is on the rise, and trust in media is on the decline. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has documented the trend and concluded that “virtually every news organization or program has seen its credibility marks decline” over the past decade.

Well, the abysmal performance of the media during the Bush years, with the glaringly ironic exception of Keith Olbermann, may have had something to do with this sad state of affairs, but since Avlon works for Glenn Beck’s old employer, he’s paid not to see this.

Even C-Span, which offers unedited coverage of public events without commentary, has experienced a steep — and absurd — decline in believability. In this hyperpartisan environment, people literally don’t trust what they see with their own eyes. Polarizing for profit might be good for ratings in the short run, but its bad for the country.

And who has the highest ratings?  Who is the most polarizing?  And finally, whose audience believes the most false things?  If you guessed Fox, you’re considerably smarter than Avlon.

Olbermann’s on-air protégé Rachael Maddow described the difference between MSNBC and Fox as this: “They run as a political operation, we are not.” She added, “The point has been made and Keith should be back hosting ‘Countdown’” — less than 24 hours after his suspension.

Avlon naturally sidesteps the plain factuality of Maddow’s statement…

It’s natural for Maddow to defend Olbermann — they are close colleagues, talented broadcasters cut from the same ideological cloth. What was more surprising was the number of conservative commentators who rushed to Olbermann’s defense. They embrace the idea of hyperpartisanship in all things news and opinion.

No, stupid, they embrace their own hyperpartisanship, and as expected are clinging to the coattails of a legitimate news organization to justify their own behavior.

Fox News — which rarely loses an opportunity to attack the left — gave comparatively little coverage to Olbermann’s suspension. Here’s the reason for their reaction: Conservative media warriors welcome outright liberal advocates, because they justify the right’s own ideological approach.

No, because they lie 24/7, they like to foster the idea that everyone else lies, too.  Fact checking would help here, but isn’t forthcoming.

Olbermann symbolizes a fight for public opinion that the right believes it can win. After all, at any given time roughly 50 percent more Americans self-identify as conservative rather than liberal. A 2009 Pew poll found that 15 percent of Americans call themselves conservative Republicans while just 11 percent describe themselves as liberal Democrats.

The reason the right believes it can win is because “neutral” outlets like CNN routinely give lies and truth equal billing, and as always, the lies overwhelmingly come from just one side of the political spectrum.  Further, the polls he so grandly cites are just the usual lazy and pointless ones about labels rather than policy; when people are polled about actual policies, liberal policies (regarding taxation, war, social spending, and on and on) reliably win hands-down over conservative ones.

If right-wingers give Americans false choices between the two, they know they can win. But this approach ignores the plurality of Americans who are in the center — and the fact that independent voters are the largest and fastest growing segment of the electorate. That is a huge unmet market looking for a strong advocate.

That’s what CNN thinks it’s doing, and look how that turned out.  Never mind the idiocy of anyone needing a “strong advocate” for the “center,” which has steadily marched further and further right than ever before in American history, thanks in part to muddle-minded gasbags like Avlon, who never tire of seeing Republican shit and telling America it’s really Shinola.

In the current hyperpartisan media environment, it’s easy to forget that it hasn’t always been this way. Broadcast icon Edward R. Murrow was not a registered Democrat or Republican — he was an independent. Before courageously taking on Sen. Joe McCarthy, he was considered an anti-communist, supporting, for example, the execution of the Rosenbergs as spies for the Soviet Union. He wouldn’t have dreamed of giving donations to political candidates.

Murrow was anti-crazy.  CNN, on the other hand, thinks crazy people are worthy of a fair, non-fact-checked airing, balanced by someone relatively sane.  Olbermann is sick of that false dichotomy, and gave a few bucks to keep crazies out of Washington.

Murrow’s colleague Charles Collingwood said, “His politics were based on old-fashioned notions of morality and honor, not ideology.” If this sounds simply old-fashioned, it should not. This idea is at the enduring heart of both good government and good journalism.

Sounds like Keith to me, but unfortunately, not like CNN.

Sen. Patrick Daniel Moynihan famously said, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.” But the current polarized political environment results in Americans engaging in civic debates armed with only their own exaggerated partisan “facts” — for example, the latest overheated myth that President Obama’s trip to India was going to cost $200 million a day and be accompanied by 34 warships — and cynicism becomes justified with the knowledge that news anchors are shilling for political parties. This is ultimately dangerous for a democracy.

See?  Republicans lie, every day, so that means liberals should just let them, for fear of being “partisan.”

The current spin cycle might be hitting such a sickening extent that there is a demand for something different — that’s the impulse that I believe was behind the success of Jon Stewart’s Rally for Sanity last weekend. After all, 44 percent of Americans born after 1977 identify themselves as independent, according to the Pew Center. The American people want something more than the predictable parroting of partisan talking points.

Independent on-air journalists don’t have to be without opinion to be nonpartisan — they just have to be honest brokers, punching left and right as their conscience and common sense dictates. We need to play offense from the center and create a strong alternative.

The ideal of independence is being degraded by the proliferation of partisan media. The fact that undisclosed donations by opinion anchors like Olbermann are being defended is evidence of how far off course we’ve gotten. The lines between political and media figures are blurring; we are getting used to journalists functioning as party apologists while elected officials sound increasingly like radio talk show hosts.

But the search for the truth doesn’t conform to a partisan prism. Reasserting reasonable standards of independence can help restore trust in the news media and help stop the political Balkanization of the United States.

Oh, for Pete’s sake.  It’s telling that a dozen years of Fox News’ systematic, flagrant and consequential journalistic malpractice didn’t ever spur Avlon to write this astonishingly inept and clueless piece, back when such a thing might have helped stop an idiot like George Bush from being elected, and/or stopped a disastrous war or two.  He finally got off his lazy ass yesterday to pompously and long-windedly whine about Keith fucking Olbermann’s (disclosed) contributions to a few pretty unimportant Democratic candidates.

I guess at CNN, that’s enterprise reporting.

I remember my frustration in arguing with my older brother about politics in the late 80′s.  Every discussion would begin with his solemn announcement that “the basic policy of the Soviet Union is to take over the world.”  Never mind that as far as I could see, the very idea that a poor, frozen, breadline-ridden country spottily populated by surly, fur-hatted proletarians and lumpy, androgynous women was really poised to conquer the Free World seemed about as likely as Maggie Thatcher and Jeanne Kirkpatrick jointly winning a wet t-shirt contest, the bullying nature inherent in forcing others to believe such nonsense made the entire endeavor of arguing with him an utter waste of time.

All these years later, nothing has changed.  Why tell the truth when a lie sounds better, and of course more apocalyptic, on TV?  In the 90′s, Clinton was going to confiscate all guns, put right-thinking Americans in prison camps, pay reparations to the descendants of slaves, and he had, in addition to all the tarts, a little murder operation on the side, and of course he was going to destroy the economy, to boot.  When none of that panned out (except for the tarts, of course), you’d expect a little humility, but none was forthcoming.  By the time they had thoroughly trashed Gore without having to resort to such demented and discredited soothsaying, the right took a conveniently brief break from worrying about the dire future ahead when they found their Leader in George W. Bush.

Of course, being the fully captured cheerleaders for an administration that was busily bankrupting and trashing America as no administration ever had before, the righties had to find something to talk about, so they turned, quite effortlessly, to racism.  Since the Bush Administration had loudly and unambiguously denounced Islamophobia even as they showed they couldn’t tell one Habib from the next when picking out their wars, illegal immigrants were the preferred scapegoats of the Bush era, and, typically unable to confine their “arguments” to actual facts, the loudmouths of the right thundered about the imminent threat of “Reconquista,” or, you guessed it, brownies taking over.  The threat of the brown menace loomed so large in the eyes of this delusional but devoted bunch, that they actually dealt Bush one of his few defeats; scuttling the immigration reform his agribusiness and union-busting buddies had coveted for decades.  As Bush’s fortunes continued to decline, his faux “tolerance” for the Muslims he was gleefully bombing lost whatever sway it once had, and led to yet another startling defeat on the Dubai Ports deal.  Republicans had learned at least one thing from Bush’s many debacles, Katrina not least among them; when the going gets tough, the tough get racist, and racism is the little black dress of Republican politics; it goes with everything.

Obama’s election finally knit together every thread of Republican obsessions into a glorious Christmas sweater of white angst; the flowering of white supremacy we are seeing now was all but inevitable, and as usual, it is growing in the soil of preposterous predictions: in addition to the usual overheated fears of the Clinton era, Obama is, also, as Sarah Palin might say, a communist/fascist, Muslim/liberation theologist, community organizer/elitist, who plans to enforce “Sharia Law” even as he commits sodomistic acts on white Americans such law forbids.  You see, it doesn’t have to be logical nor subject to the slightest bit of internal consistency; if it’s bad, use it, and let God (or Newt Gingrich) sort it out during the Rapture, carried live on Fox with Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin moderating.

To commemorate 9/11 as only he could, ol’ Newt  has now released (on 9/11, natch…), an unintentionally hilarious “documentary,” America At Risk, available for $19.95, in which he and his robot-Barbie third wife darkly intone that Muslim hordes are about to, you guessed again, take over, making lavish use of scary 9/11 footage and a parade of nutjobs babbling, but all of it has a desperate, warmed-over feel, like the loser gas-pump jockey waxing drunkenly lyrical about his high school football days.  The sky may indeed be falling, but I’ll make this humble suggestion to Newt and his ilk:  just pull out your umbrella, Newtie; it worked for Wile E. Coyote, and it’ll work for you, too.

It’s sad, sort of, to see yet another righty gasbag admit, publicly, that personal beliefs have nothing to do with it; it’s not the principle of the thing, it’s the money.  How can such galling admissions of rank careerism and lack of conviction sit with their audiences, who must go on believing them anyway?  Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Dr. Laura, and all the rest have repeatedly admitted that their paycheck and fame is all that matters to them, which is fine if you’re, say, Lindsay Lohan, but considerably more problematic when your demented vitriol is absorbed, and increasingly acted upon, by millions of Americans every day.

When Ed points out that despite having 95% of the radio dial in the places where they don’t have 100%, not a single one of the thousands of righty blabbermouths has criticized Dr. Laura, Heidi ducks the question by invoking the magic of the market.  Really.  She thinks, or at least says, that this right-wing imbalance has something to with what advertisers want, when any fool could see that bloated, once-illegal media monopolies benefit substantially from pounding audiences with such rich-fellating nonsense as Heidi’s, whether or not GoldLine coughs up a few bucks to subsidize it.  When Rush Limbaugh comes right out and says that one’s vote ought to be proportional to one’s wealth, it’s easy to see how and why Heidi has a recession-proof job.

The same “market” mentality also shows why Rupert Murdoch was willing to flush hundreds of millions of dollars down the toilet to launch Fox News, and billions to buy the Wall Street Journal in an era when national print media outlets can be had for a dollar. Right-wing journalism doesn’t need advertising, it is advertising.   What it sells, all day long, is the propaganda of top-down class warfare, and that takes some doing in the most unequal democracy on earth, so this kind of demonization of lessers and exaltation of betters must be ladled out to the lower orders with every syllable spoken on the once-public airwaves.

Sadly, but obviously of no concern to Dr. Laura or Heidi, a lot of innocent people whose only mistake in life was to be black, brown, Muslim, poor, gay, liberal, working class, middle class, unemployed, or worse than all that, not even nationally syndicated, must now endure the slings and arrows, and even legal or violent repercussions of the loose and ill-willed talk of a bunch of mendacious money-grubbers who are laughing all the way to the bank.

If anyone could make a better argument for the breakup of media monopolies and the return of the Fairness Doctrine than Heidi Harris just did, I don’t know what it would be.

You have to sympathize with Mortimer, and not just because that’s his name.  Not being able to offer the voters anything good each election cycle, Republicans continually have to remind us that all these sacrifices we have to make for their profligacy are the tithe we must pay to avoid something really, really, bad.  The bad things are as interchangeable as they are numerous, and all ludicrously unlikely.  Mushroom Clouds, Communism, Fascism, Death Panels, FEMA Camps, Reparations, One-World Government, European-Style Socialism, Collectivism, and my personal favorite, Sharia Law.  People not confined to mental institutions actually say, on a daily basis, the the Islamofascists are going to come over and forcibly put burquas on our women.  Seriously.  Here’s Rush Limbaugh, whom the Free Market has chosen to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for his yammerings, waxing all feminazi on 600 radio stations across America:

Let’s take, at face value, the template that the partisan political hacks spew at me. I am, according to them, anti-women’s rights. Equal rights for women is no concern of mine, right? I’m the guy that came up with the name “feminazi.” I’m not a friend of women’s rights, they say. If that were true, I would be pushing for the mosque at Ground Zero. If I were anti-women’s rights, I would be all for Sharia law. Sharia law is a not-so-stealth way to undermine women’s rights in this country. It would be a perfect cause if I was who they say I am.

Yes, Rush, some Muslims have some weird ideas about women, but your oft-spoken views are as bad or worse, and your relationships with women haven’t exactly turned out stellar, either, so it’s pretty audacious for you to take this line of argument, but do go on:

Anti-women’s rights is a cause of the left. That’s who’s pushing Sharia in this country: The left. It’s the left that wants a mosque at Ground Zero. It’s left who thinks “America’s chickens came home to roost” on 9/11. It’s the American left that thinks we got what we deserved on 9/11. It’s the American left that wants the mosque at Ground Zero. No one can be pro-women’s rights and remain silent about the metastasizing cancer that Sharia law is on women’s rights.

Ah, allowing a church and community center to be built on its own property, regardless of religious affiliation, which is to say, following the Constitution, is somehow related to wanting to impose Sharia Law, when any idiot would recognize it as the opposite.  Better yet, “the left,” which is deliberately presented as some monolithic force, is on the side of the terrorists, because some of the braver among us admitted that our foreign policies in the Middle East probably led to 9/11.  Who knew Ron Paul was a lefty?  But the newly-minted Betty Friedan of the AM dial has more:

The left is closer to the politics of Nazis than I will ever be. The person who was a National Socialist and anti-Israel would be anti-capitalist; pro-nationalization of health care, banks, education, car companies; pro-Central Planning; and try to force Israel (against its will and history) to divide its capital, Jerusalem, and to cave in to all of its enemies. None of that describes me. It describes them. It describes the left. Meaning if I were all that they say I am, I’d be one of them. Here is a leftist statist liberal, a person who believes that people should be treated differently according to their gender, the color of their skin, and their religion. Such as: Let’s use NASA to help Muslims feel better about themselves in math and science, and let Muslims build Sharia law shrines anywhere they want and pretend that we don’t know what that means.

Honestly.  The crazy here is so deep and thick, and so clearly from the fever swamps of the Rapture Right, it’s enough to make your head spin.  While he’s clearly at pains here to point out that although he famously favors ethnic cleansing, aggressive war, and torture, he’s no NAZI, Rush is a fat and happy capitalist who just bought himself a fifth wife (after a little rough patch with the drugs and the hookers); do you think he gives a flying fuck about Jerusalem and all that bible crap?  Of course not .  He’s paid, ridiculously lavishly, to foist this horseshit on Idiot America, and so he does.

Zuckerman must be so envious.

Admittedly, the race-based stuff is new, and is a stark enough reminder that the Republicans, having failed so dismally in their attempts to govern, are reduced to yelling “nigger” in trailer parks to avoid discussing what alternative they might provide to Democratic government.  But seriously, for many years nothing the Republicans have said, no matter how loudly, has been true, and if Democrats and the mainstream media were able to put two and two together, they’d have long ago moved from Ronald Reagan’s “trust, but verify” to Harry Reid’s “whatever they say, you can believe the opposite.”

From Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the war, Reagan’s “Welfare queens,” Bush Sr.’s “out of the loop,” to George W. Bush’s “mushroom clouds,” the lies this bunch has told, and the undue credulity they’ve received, is the story of America’s descent into the fascistic oligarchy in which we find ourselves today.  No lie is too big or small to be used for rank, usually unrelated, political gain, and lies are routinely told even if the truth would sound better.  Before the Right had Fox News, virtually the entire AM dial, and a swarm of fake “think tanks” to push its propaganda, lies had to be used sparingly, and couldn’t be too easily or quickly proven incorrect to work.  Now, lies can work their magic in days, allowing politicians to be besmirched, careers to be ruined, and most importantly, false but nonetheless enduring and damaging narratives can be nurtured and built upon before anybody figures out that the whole thing was horseshit.  Worse, when the story inevitably explodes, the liars’ reputation is often advanced, in the fact-averse world created by the lies that conveniently preceded it.  In this absurd environment the truth can’t get its boots on because it’s already wearing cement shoes, and the lies now have an army of intrepid film editors and “reporters” which can cook up a fake story and disseminate it on any topic, any day.

Think of the people who, against all evidence, thought that the big banks ought to be deregulated–  have their careers, or even reputations, suffered?  What about those who touted the Iraq war as necessary, urgent, and the best thing for all concerned?  Or those who though Sarah Palin was brilliant?  Drill, Baby Drill?   In a just world, they’d all be getting rejection letters from WalMart and selling plasma, but instead they have television shows and multiple houses.  Then there are those who disagreed…  Joe Wilson, Paul O’Neill, Al Gore, Howard Dean, Phil Donahue, Ashleigh Banfield, Dan Rather; the list is long of those who had the audacity to be correct, prematurely, and suffer greatly for it.

Correctness, it seems, is a dish best served cold as far as the beltway establishment is concerned, a phenomenon that is neither new nor uniquely American: author and admitted Communist Jessica Mitford was tagged for harassment by the Mc Carthyites here and in her native Britain for  her obviously sordid “premature antifascism.”  Somehow, what the Obama Administration has evidently “learned” from this boringly repetitive history is that, maybe this time, the right wing noise machine is onto something, so we had better capitulate pronto.  (Harvard must take anybody these days….)

What this story shows is that the right wing isn’t nearly as racist, deep down, as it pretends to be for its “base.”  They know where to find the people who are most likely to be progressive, smart, and potentially damaging to their worldview in any Democratic administration: amongst its women and minorities, and they thus seek to eliminate and/or marginalize them any way they can.  If the Obama administration had any brains, they would know that Republican smears are the sincerest form of flattery, and act accordingly.  The Republicans would be a little more apoplectic than usual, perhaps, but the Administration would make asses of themselves less frequently.

Republicans had two enemies left to fight from those battles they lost back in the days of Martha Mitchell’s late night bathroom phone calls to Helen Thomas:  journalism and truth.  The first turned out to be remarkably easy, and once accomplished, the second followed with barely a push.  Instead of Nixon’s threats and lawsuits, sunny St. Reagan of General Electric strew flowers before a media that seemed, oddly, chastened by Watergate: offering deregulation, monopolistic expansion the government has wisely theretofore prohibited, and the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, which, by mandating opposing viewpoints, historically made flat-out lying a lot more problematic.  With astonishing quickness, the many, often independent voices in the media lost their power as giant media conglomerates gobbled up everything in sight and the Wall Street profit demands hacked away at news budgets; soon, the administration could kill a potential Watergate like, say, Iran/Contra, with just a couple of telephone calls.  But all the media horses and all the President’s men couldn’t get a creepy incompetent (with poor delivery, to boot…) reelected in 1992, so much so that they later felt the need to compensate by falling all over his dunderheaded son.  This weird, self-flagellating dynamic turned out badly for everyone on the planet, except old-school right-wingers and the new, greatly empowered media elite, whom, perhaps bitter about what fools they’d made of themselves for embracing Reaganism, went after Clinton so mercilessly partly to “prove” to themselves that they hadn’t been so spectacularly wrong about everything for the past twelve years.

I do think that’s what’s at work today.  Surely Tom Friedman can no longer believe that the Iraq war was a good idea, but he’ll continue to play Pollyanna until he chokes on a Double Down, because if you never, ever, admit you were wrong, and you’re in the media, a lot of times people forget.  Surely George Will recognized that “Climategate” was a bunch of blatantly orchestrated FOX/BP horseshit, but he’ll be wearing his bowtie horizontally before he ever owns up to it.   Ruth Marcus must have some clue that rich Americans did pay taxes in excess of 70% for fifty prosperous years, and the drastic imbalance of wealth and power created when they stopped has caused most of our current problems, but to so utter would make her and almost all of her WaPoo colleagues look like lying nincompoops, so she’ll stay mum.  Bill Kristol, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh…  maybe I flatter these charlatans to say they couldn’t possible believe what they say, daily, but I’d bet one of my better furs that they don’t.

The media, as so successfully reconstituted these past few decades, is now as allergic to the truth as the Republicans they fawn over, and in any given situation, you can guess what they’ll say by checking in at Fox Nation.  After all, they’re privileged, often nepotistically promoted, wealthy know-nothings who neither know nor care about the lives of ordinary Americans….  They’ve got theirs thanks to embracing Republicans, no matter how crazy, and their policies, no matter how disastrous, and they intend to keep it; making an ass of yourself is a lot less stinging when you’ve got a cushy, no-work job and millions in the bank.

The latest absurdities, like “Americans are worried about the deficit,” “Americans support torture,” “Americans want to ‘win’ in (insert country here.), and on and on, when polls show the exact opposite, is now par for the course, and given this one-sided and screeching level of discourse, you could (almost) forgive the Obama Administration for caving to the Right on all these things.  Almost.  What the Obama Administration fails to realize is that both the media and Republicans are invested in his failure, if only to try and duct-tape back together their shared records of failure and incompetence, and the only route to political success is to repudiate them entirely and never let a lie go unpunished, either by the liar or the “journalist” who proffered it.  At this crucial point, they need to stop being Charlie Brown and start being Lucy.

Given the record, it’s the media and their Republican masters who ought to be lying on their backs, but they aren’t.  As Charlie Brown would say…   “Good grief!”