Is the juvenile cluelessness and stupidity of HBGary’s Aaron Barr’s IM exchange with an unnamed (but clearly smarter) coder, with his poorly spelled assertions that despite the math, he was still right, any different than G. Gordon Liddy’s elaborate charts with plans to hire hookers and blow up the Brookings Institution?  Only in scale; both were flagrantly illegal and potentially disastrous if exposed, but they both served the purpose of further empowering the powerful at the expense of everyone else, so they were, shall we say, “on the table.”  Both were immediately showered in a hail of non-denial denials from the faux-horrified higher-ups, and scapegoats were duly chosen and dispatched.

Unfortunately, 2011 is not 1974, and today one could drop a bomb on Washington and not injure anyone who is even surprised, much less outraged, at such chilling, multimillion dollar hijinks against ordinary citizens and journalists.  After all, planting fake documents with their adversaries and then loudly “discovering” they were forgeries worked pretty damn well in the more capable hands of Karl Rove when he needed to get rid of Dan Rather, so why not try it again?  Smearing progressive groups with guilt by association and doctored “evidence” was a great success in killing ACORN, so why not get the SEIU and all the rest of them next?  We can make fun of the childish bravado of Mr. Barr and and the absurd melange of venom and pearl-clutching pouring out of the Chamber of Commerce, but who laughs last?

As Glenn Greenwald, one of the operation’s chief targets, points out, the only thing unusual about this story is that we actually found out about it before the damage was done.  That generally isn’t so, as careers are ruined, punitive lawsuits are filed, and voices of dissent are routinely crushed as the comfortable, well, get comfortable-er, and the media gazes on approvingly.  After all, if it’s good for the Chamber of Commerce and Bank of America, only a dirty America-hating hippie could possibly be against it…   The Obama DOJ even recommended the ridiculously well-connected (scoff) law firm, Hunton and Williams, who assembled Barr’s team of Merry Pranksters, to BofA to aid in its preemptive attack on WikiLeaks, and is currently arresting hackers faster than HBGary was ever able to find them.

While it’s heartwarming to see the other firms involved in this skulduggery, like Palantir and Berico, denounce such behavior in the scathing terms their lawyers undoubtedly concocted for them, anyone who believes for a moment that they are chastened by this little episode ought to consider that this is the new normal, and nobody involved is going to jail, or even go help Jimmy Carter build houses or something.  ”Security,” devoted to squelching public opinion when it conflicts with, or worse, impedes however slightly, the aims of the elite, is the only growth industry left in post-Bush America, gobbling up the budgets of governments and corporations alike, and as everyone but the rich continue to be squeezed it will only become more “necessary.”

For a moment, the whores have been dragged into church, and as you’d expect, they’re a little nervous there.  But Saturday night is always just around the corner, and there are plenty more customers waiting.

In today’s LA Times, David Eisenhower typed up a little something that shows pretty starkly that if one wants to maintain one’s grasp on reality over time, then marrying into the Nixon family might be a mistake.  The piece (of what, I’ll let the reader decide), is a rather boring, phoned-in paean to something called “civility,” which seems disturbingly popular these days.  (Not civility itself, of course, but the word, especially with Democrats, whose unerring and self-defeating civility just cost them the House.)  He longs for that imagined past, wherein both victorious Generals like his father and commie whoremongers like John F. Kennedy were considered Good Americans, despite their differences.  The not-insignificant difference that in the end, Kennedy was rather quickly assassinated, while David’s father lived to play golf for several more years after two terms in office has evidently slipped his mind.   Memory loss of this sort is understandably an adaptive quality for Mr. Julie Nixon, and he’s really letting it show here.  (Those rolling pins do hurt…)   Marvel, if you will:  (There’s more, but I’m sparing Hag readers the dreary task of reading it all….)

On Jan. 17, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a historic farewell address, followed on Jan. 20 by President John F. Kennedy’s storied inaugural address. These two speeches, delivered by political opponents, offer obvious contrasts in style and political philosophy. But the addresses converged on key points, namely on questions of citizenship in the modern age and on the belief that the American system of self-government can rise to any challenge.

This historical oddity that Eisenhower perceives, however dimly, is that back in the day, nobody thought Social Security was a “Ponzi Scheme,” McCarthy and his demonizing tactics had been vanquished and discredited, and rich people were taxed at a top rate of 91%, even under the Presidency of his Republican dad.  Times have changed a bit, haven’t they?  Further, Eisenhower failed to notice that the same kind of unhinged, violent rhetoric we hear today would soon target Kennedy, figuratively at first, but later kind of literally.  He was a n*gger-loving Communist, he was part of a Papal conspiracy, and on and on.  Furthermore, a substantial chunk of the opposition party doesn’t believe that the current President even is a citizen.  Honestly, David, I’m beginning to suspect that your news consumption, then and now, must rival Sarah Palin’s.

Both speeches continue to fascinate. Fifty years on, Eisenhower’s famous warnings still seem prophetic. He warned that the American democratic process could be undermined by the “unwarranted acquisition of influence … by a military-industrial complex” and that public policy could fall captive to domination by a scientific-technological elite. In 2011, the threat remains, but the military-industrial complex of which he candidly spoke is relatively smaller (in terms of GDP). And since 1961, the political branches, perhaps heeding his warnings, have retained control over the Pentagon and military policy.

Generalissimo Petraeus would be surprised to hear that, as would Dick Cheney; they’d also be pretty disappointed too, as members in good standing of the only Reality-Based Community that matters, the Pentagon.  I don’t know where he gets his figures, since military spending in 1961 by almost every measure took a much smaller bite out of the budget than it does now, and every President, including “Democrats” like Clinton, Carter, and Bush, have supinely deferred to the military brass on matters of both budget and policy ever since.  But do go on, David;  despite your blandness and wooden prose, this is getting as interesting as a rant about family scandals from a drunken uncle at Christmas.

Likewise, Kennedy’s vision of a “peaceful revolution of hope” continues to galvanize efforts to overcome poverty and encourage wise development at home and abroad, as do his memorable words about the social responsibilities inherent in a free and just society. “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor,” Kennedy declared, “it cannot save the few who are rich.”

Alright, that does it.  HOW can any sentient primate be so clueless to imply, even vaguely, that Kennedy’s vision of social justice has somehow prevailed, in a country where the ascendent faction in the house thinks Jesus would have wanted sick children to just die if they have some “preexisting condition” or the other?  Or that unemployment insurance, and essential countercyclical tool the government has routinely used since before World War II to counter downturns, is “unconstitutional?”  More hilariously, just a couple weeks after the Republicans vowed to punish the whole world if they couldn’t get the richest “few” relieved from a 4% tax increase amid crushing deficits, Eisenhower couldn’t manage to Google thoroughly enough to find a quote less snicker-inducing than that?  For Pete’s sake.

And “wise development at home and abroad?”  Has the guy not read about Baghdad, Fallujah, and Kandahar?  Or more locally, Detroit, Cleveland, New Orleans, St. Louis?  These days, we do un-development.  We’re #1 in that, anyway.

The historical blinders required to see these two historical moments as both similar and different as they are, but for what amounts to the opposite of the real reasons, must have come in handy all these years for a guy who, before he needed reading glasses, thought it would be a good idea to marry Julie Nixon.  Days before President Nixon resigned, poor David was overruled by his bride, and glumly acquiesced to the “Loyal Nixies” Quixotic attempt to “continue the fight,” and look how that turned out.  Double-crossed and outsmarted by is sleazeball father-in-law, he’d been rightly consigned to history’s dustbin, but evidently not by the LA Times, who have  now trotted him out of deserved obscurity to comment, pathetically, on the SOTU this evening.  I guess Jonah Goldberg was busy.

UPDATE: As commenter Retzilian notes, ol’ David is the Grandson, not son, of Ike and Mamie. CHNN regrets the error, but reserves the right to make more in the future.

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.

Stephen Colbert’s “testimony” before Congress last week was a clear sign that ironic rot (if you’ve got a better term, let me know) is sinking into the foundation of our political system.

Well, given that Jonah Goldberg has been in the LATimes for years, I’d say “ironic rot,” which is admittedly a pretty pathetic attempt at coining a term, has eaten well into the structure.  Maybe his readers will try to help him write better, maybe not.  (He was riding a humiliating 1 1/2 stars (out of five) when I copied this.)

Irony or post-irony or ironic post-whatever has been metastasizing through the culture for decades. The most famous example was “Seinfeld,” a hilarious show that was famously “about nothing” and much-derided by earnest writers on the left and right for its detached mockery of any deeply held principle or conviction.

A more famous example would be Jonah’s ol’ cocktailhag ma, Lucianne, of course, but Jonah understandably changes the subject to the supposedly “elevated” discussion of an irrelevant old TV show.  He must have just eaten a pair of Double Downs, and isn’t thinking too clearly.

But it hardly began with “Seinfeld.” David Letterman launched a talk show that made fun of talk shows. Before that, “Saturday Night Live” crafted brilliant fake commercials and newscasts (which, sadly, are the only funny parts of the show these days).

Funnier than your column, Fatstuff, unless you count the unintentional humor.

In the 1990s, Washington fell in love with Hollywood in an unprecedented way. In countless films, politicians, reporters and pundits played themselves. There was also an influential, and occasionally funny, sitcom called “Murphy Brown” that jumped back and forth from make-believe to reality. Things got particularly confusing when Vice President Dan Quayle criticized the show for glamorizing out-of-wedlock birth, and the show’s creators responded by having the fictional Murphy Brown whine about personal attacks on her lifestyle.

Goldberg must have forgotten how effective that was, and that Bush and Quayle deservedly lost for their stupidity….  Not content to let Quayle get all the thrown tomatoes,  (or were they potatoes?) Bush also mocked “The Simpsons,” and Bart himself responded, and made him look like a losing, out of touch ass, which he was.

Things got outright weird with the creation of “The Daily Show,” a fake news program hosted by Jon Stewart since 1999 that often provides some of the best (and occasionally the worst) criticism of American politics (and is revered on the left as somehow newsier than news). For what it’s worth, a senior Republican congressmen told me that “The Daily Show’s” piece on the GOP “Pledge to America” was the only one that drew blood.

Ah, now we see what’s got Jonah’s skidmarked undies in a twist…  Liberals are funny, and he is not.

“The Daily Show” begat “The Colbert Report,” in which Colbert plays a jingoistic, know-it-all, borderline bigot. In other words, he pretends to be what many liberals claim Bill O’Reilly is. That’s the joke, get it?

He was going to be you, Jonah, but you’re too fat and uncharismatic, so he picked someone better.

It was this Stephen Colbert who was invited to testify before a House judiciary subcommittee on immigration and labor. It was an excruciatingly inappropriate spectacle. “This is America,” Colbert inveighed. “I don’t want a tomato picked by a Mexican.”

Of course, Colbert said many other things, several of them quite serious and thus demeaning to Republicans, who constantly vilify immigrants while taking money from the industries who need a steady supply.  Jonah must have run up against, uh, space constraints, to have left that out.

But who, exactly, is Colbert parodying here? O’Reilly doesn’t talk like that. Nor does Sean Hannity or any of the usual targets Colbert’s supposed to be lampooning. The real upshot of Colbert’s shtick is that he’s mocking people who disagree with him — or with the left-wing base of the Democratic Party — on the complicated issue of immigration.

Well, both are kind of white supremacists, as is their network, and they often talk just like that, but evidently Jonah can’t hear over the crunching of the Cheetohs.

This was made abundantly clear by the sober testimony of Carol Swain, a Vanderbilt University professor of law and political science, who argued quite effectively that a steady flow of cheap migrant labor depresses wages for poor blacks and other American workers while keeping working conditions grim.

Which is exactly what Republicans like, unless they’re lightweight hacks like Jonah who get paid to write whether they have an argument or not.  Republican support of amnesty and immigration in the past, which was actual law rather than the current impotent bluster, is quite well known.  Time for some big-time misdirection, however inept, from our paunchy pontificator:

Though Colbert would obviously deny it, his testimony amounted to calling Swain — an African American woman of very humble background — an ignorant bigot, because her analysis runs counter to the liberal party line.

Ah, just like calling liberals fascists…  No, wait a minute….

Colbert’s defenders point to the fact that other celebrities have testified before Congress. “I would like to point out,” Rep. Judy Chu (D-El Monte) noted during the hearing, “that in the past the Republicans have had witnesses such as Loretta Swit, who played ‘Hot Lips’ Houlihan from ‘MASH,’ to testify on crush videos.” True enough. But she didn’t testify as “Hot Lips.”

No, but James Inhofe did call in crazy fiction author Michael Crichton to testify, falsely, about global warming, and Republicans frequently bring in all sorts of uncredentialed charlatans to “support” their demented arguments.  They have no choice, you know.

Colbert’s testimony reduced the topic to a black-and-white issue in which people on the other side are fools or bigots worthy of cheap mockery. I thought the whole point of Colbert was to stand against that sort of thing by making fun of it, not by doing it. Are our politics really improved by making congressional hearings even more of a joke?

Your presence on the op-ed page of a major American newspaper, Jonah, is the joke, and unlike Colbert, it isn’t funny.

On Oct. 30, Colbert’s “March to Keep Fear Alive” will join Stewart’s “Rally to Restore Sanity” on the National Mall. They will rationalize the stunts as send-ups and putdowns of all that is wrong with our politics. But by slowly degenerating from satire into plain old mockery, these guys are slowly becoming too-clever-by-half versions of the very people they claim to deplore.

So much better to be too dumb by several factors of magnitude, Jonah.  You, defending standards of decency in politics?  What are you going to do for an encore?  Call Al Gore fat?

Anyway, we all know that the liberal media can’t get enough of these types, and ol’ Charlotte got 3/4 of a page to drop the steamingest pile on liberals I’ve read in quite a while, and that’s saying something.  Her point, if you’d care to call it that, is that because that Shepard Fairey is a plagiarist vandal and Roman Polanski a child rapist, and they’re liberals, no one should ever listen to a liberal again.  (the Palinesque “also” that ought to follow such a demented argument is silent, but you can still hear it….)  It’s funny (peculiar) how this sort of trip works so well for righties, but somewhat less funny (ha, ha) that even the thousandth time they do it, the media treats it as a “stop the presses” moment, and the Charlotte Allens of the world toss aside the bon bons and Vince Flynn novel, and leap from the bubble bath to type.  The story line is so formulaic, the significance of the transgression so flimsy, and the connection to anything worthy of discussion so feeble, that I do have to sympathize with her; sometimes I have nothing to write either, but I write anyway, so I know how Charlotte feels.  I don’t feel too guilty, though, because nobody pays me for it and no space was thus wasted in anybody’s paper, not like such worthies as Charlotte Allen, whose inane and irrelevant bile undoubtedly ruined the mornings of paying subscribers from coast to coast Sunday.

Since Glenn Beck already has such a comprehensive and growing list of people who must be destroyed, along with everyone they’ve ever met, in order to squelch their liberal ideas, Allen clearly had to dig pretty deeply to dredge up somebody remotely connected to Democrats who can be subject to an old fashioned ritual smearing and used to tar Obama and his diabolical hordes of Liberal Elitists as appeasement-minded criminal coddlers bent on destroying everything the Makes America Great, but dig she does.  Her target, graffiti artist Shepard Fairey, whose iconic “Hope” poster of the 2008 campaign drove the right so nuts they’ll evidently never get over it, is, in the tumbleweed country between Allen’s ears, just a whole lot of bad things, like all liberals, natch.  In no particular order, Fairey’s “True Colors,” as Allen paints them, are the lurid hues of: liar, charlatan, vandal, hypocrite, copy cat, braggart, adolescent, potty mouth, and worse, so just as darkness follows daylight for Allen, he’s now a “darling”  and “one of us” to that dastardly and “fiercely liberal cultural and intellectual elite.”  Seriously.  The guy painted a danged poster from one of AP’s millions of published photos (which undoubtedly did help to clobber her hapless party’s dim hopes) and has since squabbled endlessly with that shoddy and litigious excuse for a news organization about it.   But from such an old, inconsequential, and unremarkable story, Allen is somehow able to conjure up for her fan club of one the idea that, you guessed it, liberals have no morals and should all be sent to Venezuela, or something, and her one fan, the LA Times, actually prints such boring, insultingly tendentious nonsense as though it were of any value.

Perhaps recognizing that her premise is so lame it could park in the handicapped zone, Allen desperately rummages through the righty grab bag for another, more timely and sensational story that might add relevance to such a pathetically shopworn denunciation of All Things Liberal, and out pops, you guessed it, Roman Polanski.  You see, he’s also an artist, Whoopi Goldberg defended him, and she’s liberal, so there.  Rumor has it that Obama liked Rosemary’s Baby, too, so if they squint their eyes and watch Fox News for about 36 hours, the whole damning picture just might come into focus for the dumber among us, so lo and behold, a column comes shooting out of Charlotte’s ass about how liberals approve of artists who “thumb their noses at the law.”  Much fainting and pearl-clutching inevitably ensues.  How newsy.

Never mind that the offhand opinions of a few celebrities are somewhat different in kind than the lockstep solidarity that came to be expected by nearly all (heterosexual) Republican criminals  from elected Republican politicians for nearly a decade; it seems Charlotte can’t be bothered by the rather stark difference between, say, Whoopi Goldberg and the Attorney General of the United States, and it shows.  She clearly prefers to leave such flagrant and unapologetic nose-thumbing in the proper hands:  David “diapers” Vitter, Dick Cheney, George Bush, Tom DeLay, and essentially the entire Republican party that loudly and relentlessly continues to embrace them, because, I guess, at least they aren’t the “cultural and intellectual elite.”   (You can say that again…)  Here, she finally has a point, but she didn’t make it, I did.

But if it weren’t for the affirmative action program for righties on the op-ed pages of of the elitist liberal media, and her make-work sinecure at the Manhattan Institute, Allen might actually have to get a job, so it’s unclear to me where all this spittle-flecked ire toward the “elite” comes from, but it clearly isn’t her brain.

And what her article is doing in the LA Times I can’t begin to fathom.