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?

Maybe that’s why they’ve joined the new Republican Peace Movement; as a belated gesture to the literate Americans that sorry publication has lost in droves over the years, and in so doing confidently assuming that a left-handed show of abandoning its tiresome warmongering might do the trick.  I’ve got news, you craven, snobby Brits….  It won’t work, and that’s only half the story.

In terms of being wrong about everything, The Economist has given Bill Kristol a run for his money over the last ten years, and as Bob Haldeman memorably put it, that toothpaste is hard to get back in the tube.  At least over at Fox News, they have the advantage of appealing to the stupid, who are a lot more forgiving of even the grossest errors, but The Economist heretofore relied on its snobby, faux-erudite, well, elitism, to put the exact same contemptible bullshit over.  To the wrong people.  I can’t be the only one who, halfway the third long and boring essay about the wonders of the Bush Tax Cuts and/or the evils of regulation, sorely regretted buying such a crummy piece of low-rent propaganda and vowed never to do so again. Their annoying and intrusive advertising at Salon and elsewhere further cemented my undying hostility and lack of respect for them, even from a marketing and business standpoint, since their undoubtedly expensive advertising would be more wisely placed in the Murdoch media.  (They’d probably get a discount, to boot.  Especially on Beck’s show…)

Previously, I was inclined to be opposed to this, as all other, wars.  As a rule, I don’t believe in American Exceptionalism raining from the skies in the form of bombs.   But now that the Economist has put on the love beads and patchouli, I’m tempted to buy a Hummer, adorn it with flags, and go out cruising for hippies to run over.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

UPDATED BELOW: (UPDATE V: SUNDAY)

Well, it seems that yet another mysterious “lone wolf,” acting completely spontaneously of course, has shot recently reelected Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in a Tucson parking lot.  In the head.  Coincidentally, Sarah Palin has suddenly removed her infamous, crosshair-dotted congressional map from her website, and Giffords’ Teabagger opponent Jesse Kelly has, just as coincidentally, also scrubbed reference to a campaign event billed thusly:  ”Get on Target for Victory in November.  Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office.  Shoot a Fully Automatic Rifle With Jesse Kelly.”  The Memory Hole is filling up fast, but MSNBC helpfully posted the video above from March of last year, when Giffords’ office doors were shot out by a teabagger yahoo.  Notice how the pudgy and brainless Chuck Todd and his bimbo sidekick both try to blame Giffords for drawing attention to the fact that the right is well, violently crazy, even when she was, unfortunately, doing no such thing.  The blue dog-ish Giffords slips easily into the “both sides do it” meme at the rather pointed direction of her interviewers, not knowing she would be, at least reportedly, assassinated in less than a year.

We do have a problem with political violence in this country, and it comes from one side of the aisle, period, the side that is most naturally violent, antidemocratic, and authoritarian.  The side that revels in war and torture.  The side that brings guns to political rallies.  The side that routinely declares that vast swaths of the American people are unworthy of voting because they’re less than fully American.  The side that immediately turns to “Second Amendment Solutions” when they deservedly lose elections.  Fox made the bed, and now Gabrielle Giffords is lying in it, along with several others.  This isn’t complicated.

Asked whether his daughter had any enemies, Spencer Giffords replied, “Yeah.  The whole Tea Party.”  Father knows best….   When we find out that the 20-something shooter was a devotee of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh who believed that Obama was going to take his guns away, expect no one to be surprised except, perhaps, Chuck Todd.

More later on this CHNN station, and on CHNN news overnight.

UPDATE: Big surprise….  Rumors of Gifford’s death were at least somewhat exaggerated by our thorough, responsible mainstream media.   She appears to have come out of surgery alive and “responding to commands.”  (What, they’re already bossing her around?)  Federal Judge John Roll was among the six or so killed, along with a child under twelve.  The shooter’s name is Jared Lee Loughner, 22, who has some vague “law enforcement” background.

UPDATE II:

Knock me over with a feather; from HuffPost’s Sam Stein:

(Bold added by CH)

There will be, in the next few days, painstaking efforts to uncover and understand the background of Jared Lee Loughner, the alleged shooter of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. And right now reporters are generally going off of bits of information taken, primarily, from Google searches.

The most illustrative window is Loughner’s YouTube account, which appears to be hub of anti-government zealotry, obsession over currency and language standards, and, to put it bluntly, outright paranoia.

“In conclusion, reading the second United States Constitution, I can’t trust the current government because of the ratifications: the government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar,” he writes in one video posting. “No! I won’t pay debt with a currency that’s not backed by gold and silver! No! I won’t trust in God!”

Here is a link to Loughner’s YouTube site.

There are also some biographical details that can be culled from the page. Loughner attended Mountain View High School, Northwest Aztec Middle College, and Pima Community College. He also appears to have been in the armed forces, at one point in time.

“Every United States Military recruit at MEPS in Phoenix is receiving one mini bible before the tests,” he writes in one video. “Jared Loughner is a United States Military recruit at MEPS in Phoenix Therefore, Jared Loughner is receiving one mini bible before the tests.”

If this guy isn’t a teabagger, then I’m Rudy Giuliani.

UPDATE III:

Arizona’s Cocktailhag-in-Chief Jan Brewer has this to say, on Fox News of course:

Brewer said law enforcement and government at all levels have a “shared determination to ensure justice is fully served.”

“I am just heartbroken,” Brewer said. “Gabby is ore (sic) than just a colleague, she is a friend. She has always been a noble public servant … It’s an unbelievable tragedy that the people of Arizona experienced today, one of which of course in our worst nightmares we never would have imagined.”

She added that the shooting is not something that shows favor for the state, but that the incident doesn’t represent the vast majority of sentiment among Arizonans. As is the case elsewhere, “We have disturbed people in our community that do terrible, violent things.”

I would add that she doesn’t show a lot of “favor for the state,” as they evidently say in Fox-ese, either, and that pretty much all of her supporters are, well, a little disturbed, if you’re going to get technical about it.  At least she (presumably) got through her statement without any embarrassing minute-long pauses.  On Fox anyway, she is growing in office.

UPDATE IV:

Somebody gets it.

UPDATE V: (Sunday) Rebecca Mansour, Sarah Palin’s spokesmodel, informed us that the gunsight images Palin removed from her website were, contrary to what you’d think given Palin’s ostentatious gun-worship, not gunsights at all, but, get this….  SURVEYOR’S MARKS!  Those surveyors, you know, are always reloading those thingamajigs they use, and not just to perforate Bullwinkle with a varmint rifle, but to perhaps “survey” certain congressional districts.  The most hardened Palinbot will never believe such risible hooey, but there it is.  As Tbogg would say, “Shut up, Dumb Lady.”

UPDATE VI: The right wing fainting couch is filling up, due to Pima County Sheriff Gupnick’s accurate comments above.  Get a load of this steaming pile from local right wing hate talker Jon Justice (!)…

I feel incredibly bad for our brave Pima County Sheriff’s Officers who have to serve under Clarence Dupnik. Within hours of the horrific shooting that took place at the congresswoman’s event Dupnik was telling local media that talk radio and the media was partly to blame, only to repeat his statements again during the press conference that was receiving national attention. We have no idea at this point the motivation of this murderer’s act. Yet Dupnik took his moment in the spotlight to drive a political wedge into the event. They were reckless and dangerous statements made by someone who should have known better. He should have been using his time to help bring the community together. Instead his statements made Tucson appear to be a city full hate, bigotry and vitriol. To say, as Dupnik did, that comments made on the airwaves essentially motivated this person to commit this crime is exactly what he blamed talk radio of doing, inciting through pure rhetoric. It was complete misuse of his power and he owes the media in town, TV and radio, an apology for his horrible comments in the middle of such a tragic day. He should step down immediately from his position as Pima County Sheriff.

Really.  These guys may have small dicks, but they’ve got awfully big balls.

What’s undoubtedly lost on the Fox viewer, of course, is that Dick, personally, did do extremely well by the war and tax policies he embraced and rammed through, even if the rest of America certainly didn’t, so for a change he isn’t lying this time.  In Fox World, anything liberals don’t like is by definition all but Heaven-sent, so even the worst policies, the catastrophic consequences of which still dominate the news today, are treated as great triumphs, niggling things like anemic job growth, stagnant GDP, and unemployment in the Bush era are mere collateral damage in the ongoing war Fox valiantly fights each day.  That’s at least one war Dick can rightly feel he’s won, which is (not coincidentally) the whole point of this supposed “documentary.”   This is Fox, after all, and therefore every story, even the most trifling ones about animals and/or boobs, are always ultimately about the triumph of godly conservatism over perfidious liberalism.  You just fill in new names and datelines, and away you go; evidently  this slapdash formula works just as well when you have months to produce your propaganda, since your well-conditioned audience isn’t exactly, uh, skeptical, except perhaps of Al Gore.

You’d think this would get boring after a while, except for late-stage Alzheimer’s patients, that is, but it apparently never does.  ”The Simpsons,” a rogue planet in the Fox Universe, upped the ante this week by calling the “news” network “unsuitable for viewers under 75,” but count on Bill O’Reilly not to get the joke, since his absurd salary demands it.  Similarly, last week O’Reilly made an utter fool of himself attempting to defend his employer when “The Simpsons”  added a tagline under the Fox News logo, “Not Racist, But #1 With Racists,” even though just a few years ago 50-something Bill described, with genuine surprise, his decidedly un-scary first foray into a predominantly black restaurant, and he routinely defends his obnoxious bigotry and bad behavior by smugly pointing to his ratings.   Bully and authoritarian that he is, he advocated harsh, Murdochian punishment for “Simpsons” creator (and Portland native!) Matt Groening, rather than deigning to address Groening’s completely uncontroversial claim.

Clearly, Fox has long since sailed too far down Fair and Balanced river and is now careening over Don’t Confuse Me With The Facts Falls, to inexorably land in the bottom of Glenn Beck’s Chalkboard Canyon, where it disappears like Wile E. Coyote, in an unheralded and failure-tainted puff of smoke.  And just like Daisy Buchanan, Dick Cheney roars away in his blood-splattered Deusenberg (the Roaring Twenties equivalent of a Hummer), laughing all the way to the bank, while Fox cheers him on.  In more capable hands, this could be quite a “documentary,” indeed; it was a great novel, albeit still unsuitable for readers under 75.

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.

Nixon, under whose tutelage Karl Rove learned his political ropes, reveled in the power of redneck anger, inviting the “hard hats” who beat up hippie war protesters to the White House and famously blaming the victims for the Kent State slaughter, shortly after then-California Governor Ronald Reagan tear-gassed protesters at Berkeley and intoned that the Vietnam problem could be solved by genocidal carpet-bombing, “… pave it, stripe it, and be home by Christmas.”  Bloodlust is now just part of the DNA of the Republican Party; just ask America’s Worst President, George Bush, whose approval rating shot skyward as he babbled, “dead or alive,” and “smoke ‘em out,” to dazzled FOX watchers in nursing home dayrooms all across America.  Republicans clearly got carried away with their initial electoral success at selling violent retribution for its own sake during those years, and now such final solutions have acquired quite a devoted and evidently insatiable following.

For these “folks,” as Bill O’Reilly calls them, once you have God, Blackwater, and the Koch brothers on your side, the Ten Commandments no longer apply to you, and it’s time to pull out the terrible swift sword, but good.  For decades, as the wealthy benefactors of the Republicans sought to drown out rational discourse, which tended not to go their way, they chose to create an Axis of Thuggery, first by doing away with the Fairness Doctrine, which was rooted in the quaint notion of giving equal time to both sides, and then grabbing the public airwaves to spew right-wing hate radio from sea to shining sea.  Rupert spent a half billion dollars to launch Fox News, to give Hate Radio and its social Darwinist, fact-free ethos a video companion.  Over time, though, the act began to get old, and competitive forces made these propaganda arms more and more difficult to control even as they became ever more violent and apocalyptic in the wake of Bush’s many catastrophes and the election of a, you know, to the Presidency, but a desperate and demoralized party stung by two searing defeats had nowhere else to go.  The craven corporatists stoking this fascistic know-nothingism couldn’t be bothered by the fates of any victims of the violent rhetoric they were sponsoring, for the simple reason that for the time being it seemed to be working.  After all, in midterm elections they needn’t bother with the delicate sensibilities of of the so-called “independent” voter, they go for the guys with guns, missing teeth, and a trailer full of restraining orders, who lap this stuff up like it was spilled Budweiser.  So some hippie chick got her head stomped….   Maybe it’ll teach her a lesson.  It’s hard to believe that, on some level, even a grabby racketeer like Dick Armey or a fiendish parasite like Karl Rove isn’t made a tad uncomfortable by all this unseemly directness; they have spent years perfecting their Victorian fainting, followed by schoolmarmish finger-wagging, performance art over the slightest insult from the left, and now their guys are, pretty much daily, decorating the pavement with liberals.  Worse, they do it so un-heroically…  several larger Americans ganging up on a girl, or an old fat guy, is not the sort of television image Rove could easily pretty up with a sunset or codpiece, which probably explains his occasional, if mild, expressions of distaste.

Unsurprisingly, even as they fall into their unintentionally telling fake panic attack about “voter fraud” that besets them each November, the Republicans now have, or ought to have, twin fears; winning and losing.  Win, and they’ll be saddled with a passel of loudmouth nitwits in Congress, making daily asses of themselves and dragging the brand down even further; lose, and they might realize that there is a bottom to how low one can go in politics, and they have no plan B.  Either way, they will have a self-created,  large and angry army of  conspiracy-minded neanderthals breathing down their necks, or worse.

It couldn’t have happened to nicer guys.

It looks like we have another flamboyant  entrant to the right-wing Sore Winners’ Circle in that pudgy, conniving Church Lady, Virginia Thomas, whose husband’s life tenure and political omnipotence as a Supreme Court Justice despite lacking any qualifications for that job, isn’t enough for her.  Rather than quietly thanking her lucky stars that the creepy dipshit she married didn’t turn out so bad, after all, she now wants an apology.  Of course, Thomas has proven to be spectacularly worse than anything his “high-tech lynchers” could have imagined back in 1991, and his lackluster (when not completely unhinged) performance on the court as well as his repellent personal demeanor in the years since have discredited him far more than Anita Hill ever did, but Virginia has lapsed so deeply into teabaggery that she doesn’t see this, and went ahead and went public with her risible demand for an apology for someone who merely told the truth about the lout she was stupid enough to marry.  Telling the truth is a punishable offense in Teabag-land these days, you know.

Almost as soon as America’s Dumbest Supreme Court Justice slithered onto the bench with barely enough Senate votes to pass, his whining, race card denials were spectacularly exploded, proving he had lied, shamelessly, to Congress to get confirmed.  Other women not only corroborated Hill’s story, but also reported eerily similar treatment at the hands of Thomas, and even the guys at the porno store he frequented ratted him out.  Long Dong Silver gave way to Bad Mama Jama, and presumably a lot in between, if you know what I mean and I think you do.  To the wifey, though, none of this matters, because marrying Thomas, in itself, proves that she’s no member of the Reality-Based Community.  And think of all the Good Things he’s done since then, like approve torture in prisons, appoint George Bush to the Presidency when he had clearly lost, unleash corporate control of elections, and on and on…..   To Virginia, her husband was sent by Jesus to save America, which he did, and flush with the power of corporate cash, Virginia has decided that now it’s time to start burning the heretics.

Naturally, despite the hilarious nuttiness of her unsolicited and supremely untimely demand, Virginia got a somewhat charitable hearing in the media, and especially the oleaginous Chris Mattews, which at the time were as wrong about the story as she evidently still is, but were nonetheless a bit taken aback that she didn’t want to sweep the whole thing under the rug like they had, so they did steer clear of swallowing her story whole hog.  Typical “balanced” comments in the media would include the fact that Hill waited ten years to come forward, along with all the other debunked righty smears against her, but they still didn’t muster the usual deference they routinely award to righty history revisionists.  They don’t want to touch this one with a ten foot pole, and for good reason.  Message:  Shut up.

You see, unlike any other Supreme Court wife, Virginia is steeped in politics, having been lapping at the corporate trough and fighting her husband’s many demons instead of, say, getting a job, for decades, thanks to the lies told, not about her husband, but about Anita Hill, and now SHE wants an apology.  Crazy, but true.  No crazier, though, than the Legacy Projectors, who are in a snit that George Bush doesn’t get enough “credit” for the “victory” in Iraq,  Dick Cheney isn’t worshipped for preventing (imaginary) terrorist attacks, and that we could have “won” in Vietnam if it weren’t for those traitorous hippies and the Liberal Media.  All these people, who in a just world would be both unemployable and objects of nothing but richly deserved opprobrium for their high crimes and misdemeanors, feel no shame at all in running around, loudly and publicly asking to be not forgiven, but praised, for their flat-out, documented, and huge failures, and it is their victims who now must apologize.  Worse, people of no accomplishments at all, good or bad, like Fox News “rodeo clown” Glenn Beck and accidental Alaska Senate candidate Joe Miller, have taken the Pity Party to a whole new level, traveling with a intimidating coteries of thugs and preemptively forcing their detractors into submission, lest the truth sneak out and accidentally expose their lies, corruption, and rampant stupidity.  Compared to them, Virginia looks almost sane; at least her “grievance” isn’t completely imaginary.

Amid the relentless calls from the right this election season that their slightly more liberal opposition needs to “man up,” one wonders, rightly, how these ridiculous, counterfactual temper tantrums from absurdly powerful people is going over, when not a one of them can produce any purported slander against them that has ever proven false, and yet they sit at the top of the American political pyramid, whining.

Nobody likes a sore loser, but sore winners are even more viscerally repulsive, as Virginia Thomas has, unwittingly of course, shown us.  Hill, to her credit, stopped short of giving Virginia the bitch slap she clearly needs, and merely stood by her words, which is understandable, since unlike Virginia for the last 20-odd years, she has a job.   Virginia ought to get one.  She’s making an ass of herself with all her spare time.

It’s frustrating, really, that historical facts of such blatant obviousness even have to be discussed, but they do, since the right wing media noticed that so much of what Bush did, from wars and torture to nationalistic propaganda and cheap theatrics might lead thinking people to remember der Fuhrer, so they hastily had to put their projection hats on.  Luckily, the intended audience was so dumb that they honestly believed that, say, making rich people actually pay taxes and perhaps keeping us down to one war at a time was redolent of the Third Reich.  Not so Richard Iott, aka Reinhard Pferdmann, or Portland’s own li’l Storm Trooper,  police Captain Mark Kruger. (h/t the Oregonian for its reporting)

Kruger, who has repeatedly been a target of federal lawsuits for using excessive force against  war protesters during the Bush years and was widely known to be intolerant of any “dissent from the left,” had already cost the city $300,000 in settlements when it was discovered that he adorned a tree in Rocky Butte Park with commemorative plaques of a guy from the Waffen SS and another guy who executed a whole lot of Greek prisoners of war, among others, and called it an “Ehrenbaum,” or tree of honor.  Kruger says he was honoring the men for their military exploits, not their political affiliations, which definitely makes him sound like a hippie to me.  In his defense, he did put up this undoubtedly touching memorial in his spare time; after all, he’s been on “administrative leave” a lot due to all the legal unpleasantness he attracts like hookers attract crabs.

Given that Republicans are no longer shy about promoting Final Solutions for atheists, environmentalists, gays, “union thugs,” Muslims, “illegal immigrants,” Democrats, and pretty much everyone else with whom they disagree, is it any wonder that so many of them are turning up wearing their swastikas on their sleeves?   What’s not to like, if you’re a Nazi reenactor?  When the teabaggers speak of taking our country back, they want to take it to Berlin, circa 1939, or maybe Savannah, circa 1863 or Birmingham, circa 1963, no matter what made-up piffle pours out of Glenn and Jonah, and every once in a while, this fact does get out, inconveniently.

As predicted, fascism has arrived in America, wrapped in the flag and carrying the Cross, not eating granola and driving a Prius.  Don’t expect Beck or Goldberg to notice, though.

I’ve long been a skeptic of the purported “wave” election coming up, wherein the “overreaching” Democrats are steamrollered by a stampede of righteous elephants, no matter how cuckoo and/or substance-free their candidates are.  Although most of the craziest ones have shunned all but their own mouthpieces on Fox and talk radio, they still, once in a while, have to open their pie holes, and stuff like the above clip is the inevitable result.  Intoxicated by the smell of Dick Armey’s farts, bedazzled by Glenn Beck’s delusions of grandeur, and clearly as dumb as a box of rocks, this hectoring harridan, Renee Ellmers, seeks to unseat a Democratic incumbent in North Carolina by jumping on the anti-Muslim crazy train and taking it to Washington.  The irony is pretty rich.

First, she starts by breaking Sarah Palin’s “Speak through Fox” rule, and goes on CNN to “defend” her inflammatory, racist, and outright false ad.  Next, she eschews doing even the slightest bit of pre-interview homework, having no idea who the Imam in NY even is, for one thing, and starts robotically spouting off the most ridiculous, combative nonsense, all easily refuted by the slightest fact-checking.  Then, she tops it off by attacking mild-mannered Anderson Cooper with the sort of bonkers, “anti-Christian” smears that go over great on hate radio, but presumably somewhat less well with CNN’s more sentient audience, a fact of which she seems blissfully unaware.  Worse, the wily CNN host has an expert witness waiting in the wings right after her, a sneaky, effective journalistic trick that makes Katie “Gotcha” Couric look like Greta Van Susteren by comparison.

There’s method to her madness, though….   She will no doubt deceptively edit the clip, throw it up on her website, brag to her racist cracker supporters about how she gave the lamestream media the what-for, declare victory, and they’ll believe her.  The only fly in the ointment is, as the backbench congresswomen she unaccountably thinks she’s qualified to be, she will have no say whatsoever about New York zoning decisions, so the whole premise of the ad is a manipulative lie, designed to goad the ignorant into voting for more tax cuts for the rich and crippling expenditures on disastrous, belligerent foreign policy that will, of course, provoke more terrorism and further impoverish Americans at home.  To anyone capable of fogging a mirror, it’s people like this nutty woman who will pave the way for more American deaths at the hands of terrorists, not fewer, and keeping her out of Washington is one way to stanch the continuing hemorrhage of blood and treasure Republican overreactions like hers invariably produce.

Typical of teabaggers like herself, she’s mum on any salient policy position North Carolinians might want to hear about in this dreadful economy, and better yet, she blames her opponent for resorting to smears and name-calling, since it’s he who doesn’t have anything better to talk about.  Earth to Renee….  You’re in fucking NORTH CAROLINA, and you’re running a campaign for the House on what you deceptively call the “Ground Zero Mosque.”  Who’s short on material?

Polls are tightening from Kentucky to California, roughly coinciding with voters getting an earful of the insultingly stupid horseshit like what just plopped out of Renee Ellmers, and the election is still over a month away.  The Republicans have mammon, in spades, on their side, and they’re happy and eager to tell you they have God, too, but what they don’t have is brains, class, or anything approaching a viable solution to the myriad problems they themselves caused, and miracle of miracles, this fact seems to be dawning on the corporate media, as evidenced here.  If Ellmers is expecting a sweep, it’s too bad for her that she’s borrowed Chistine O’Donnell’s broom, and rejected Sarah Palin’s, uh, “wisdom.”