I have a yellowed clipping on my bulletin board from a few years ago wherein a NYT reader says that the reason there are so few “conservative” academics is that, “Academics look at evidence and come to conclusions.  Today’s conservatives start with a conclusion and then try to find anything to support that conclusion, regardless of contrary evidence.  Their arguments fall apart under the lightest scrutiny.”   The writer only left out, “then comes the shouting.”  Thus was the case with the talented Mr. O’Keefe.  Conservatives were beside themselves that ACORN was registering voters who, in sufficient numbers, would spell their doom, so they decided that ACORN needed to be silenced.  A “sting” was ordered.  Out of nowhere, a demonstrably unhinged but unalterably committed schoolboy was found, funded, and sent around the country to stage video that, properly edited and hyped, could get rid of ACORN, once and for all, and thereby at least temporarily forestall the GOP’s imminent demographic demise.  As luck would have it, there was already a huge infrastructure of right-wing “journalism” in place to mindlessly promote O”Keefe’s “work,” and better yet, to once again intimidate what remained of the mainstream media into covering his “revelations,” regardless of whether they had been deliberately manipulated or were outright false.  Everybody, including Congress, fell for it, and to the casual observer, it appeared that O”Keefe had found a “scoop” that the hapless liberal media had either missed or consciously ignored.  The subsequent court cases that largely exonerated ACORN were lost in the shuffle, and no one ever thought to ask how, why, or with whose money O”Keefe got his expose.  Win, win.

Flush with this “success,” Breitbart obviously ate a bunch more doughnuts while O’Reilly and the lesser Foxes waited with bated breath for the next O’Keefe blockbuster.  Money obviously changed hands, as we are belatedly discovering, Republican pols and operatives were duly enlisted, and these overconfident propagandists decided, based on past success, to up the ante.  Oops.  The fuzz showed up this time.  Waxing Nixonian, all the establishment righty mouthpieces quickly distanced themselves from this “prank,” or “third-rate burglary,” as RN would have put it, and instead went bananas over any small mistake made by the MSM in reporting it, and started yelling incoherently.  Why not?  It worked before, and it may well again.

Thus, the whole point of this new phenomenon of right-wing “journalism,” which is to destroy and discredit the very idea of truth , has bumped up against the final barrier to its dominance, the criminal justice system, and it’s quite obvious that they are resorting to the usual misdirection and lies to get out of this unaccustomed pickle.  I myself had a Breitbartian exchange with a righty mouth-breather at FDL over the last day or so, who, like Breitbart, repeatedly demanded that I document where, get this, Michelle Malkin had specifically lied about the teabugger incident in her hurried, ad hoc denunciation of O’Keefe.  Never mind the many well-documented and ethically dubious political missions of either miscreant; like the Bush defenders of yore who demanded “proof” of how Bush and Cheney had “personally profited” from their wars and other flagrant shenanigans, insisting that anything short of bank statements would prove all critics to be garden-variety liberal liars, I must somehow “prove” some specific lie, or shut up, but fast.  The burden of proof, you know, belongs not to the initial lying loudmouth and his/her many media outlets, but to the obscure blogger who asks a few questions.

The success of this venture can hardly be understated.  A political movement that is inherently unpopular, focused as it is on harming the many for the benefit of the few, has to get creative, and it certainly has.  The hated “liberal media” is hopelessly cowed, along with the political class, and, as long as the cops don’t show up, they have a good thing going, and a few Presidents and Supreme Court Justices notched in their otherwise unblemished bed posts.  What they aren’t, and never will be, is Journalists, and the truth, despite O”Keefe’s desperate and probably illegal tweets, will never set them free.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

UPDATED BELOW:

Well, I fully expected this to be a rather depressing day, what with the President’s concession speech ahead, but boy, oh, boy, did it turn out differently.  First, Measures 66 and 67 passed by a veritable landslide, at last count 54-46, and a lot of obnoxious rich people will have to make good on their threats to leave.  Yay!  I know Phil Knight will just love living in Washougal, Washington, since I once wanted to live there myself, when I was a kid and noticed that they get a whole lot of snow days.  FreedomWorks, Dick Armey, and the whole clown car of national anti-tax people converged on little old Oregon to clobber the modest tax increases on corporations and the rich, and still came up snake eyes.  In addition to writing what was quite possibly the most illiterate and unpersuasive op/ed the Oregonian has ever run, (and that’s saying something…) Nike gazillionaire Phil Knight pissed away over $300,000 of his own ill-gotten gains, or roughly 5000% of what the taxes would have cost him from now until death, and lost.  I find myself questioning my atheism, all of a sudden.

The best part of this is that Multnomah County, the most reliably liberal county in Oregon that includes central Portland, had very poor turnout, and the soundness of the teabagger defeat was therefore secured by the ambivalence of the conservative areas of the state, where the measure failed to gain the usual almost unanimous opposition.  The swing counties were overwhelmingly in favor of the measures, despite the Oregonian’s jihad against them, and their opponents were forced to whine about being outspent by “the unions,” for a change.  This time, nobody believed the righty trope that rich people and corporations are the fountain of prosperity, perhaps because they aren’t, and better yet either didn’t care or didn’t believe that they would really up and leave.   If I were FreedomWorks, I’d be as nervous as a whore in church.  This kind of thing could catch on, and if it did, where would the rich go?  Somalia?  Let ‘em.  Send me a postcard.

Then, the “teabuggers,” about whom I wrote yesterday, started dragging down Andrew Breitbart, FOX News, and every other righty who kissed their pimply asses in Macy’s window for months, not by anything they said or did, but merely by exposing the cravenness and stupidity of their media enablers for the whole world to see.  On the supposedly “safe” venue of Hugh Hewitt’s righty talk show, Breitbart accidentally let slip that head-teabugger O’Keefe was on his payroll; the opposition from David “diapers” Vitter to Sen. Mary Landrieu’s pick for a new Louisiana US Attorney started to collapse in a wave of revelations about a typical Republican coverup; and ACORN is now probably O’Keefe’s only hope to be able to vote again when he gets out of jail, since they have worked so hard in the past for the re-enfranchisement of ex-felons.

Anyway, these rather delightful and interesting developments ought to take the edge off whatever infuriating nonsense comes out of our Commander in Chief this evening, at least for me, even though I have little doubt that he will fail to mention either of them, since they both point to the criminality and unpopularity of the opponents to whom he plans to capitulate.  Thus the drinking game is still on.

But here in Oregon, and down in Louisiana, it’s looking like Obama is the only one who believes that the teabaggers run the country.

UPDATE: Phil Knight, in an interview with fellow anti 66 and 67 activist rag the Oregonian, backtracked on his threats to move to Wyoming, or somesuch. He said “Nike is too big”  (not like his firecrotch penis) to leave the state, and even he himself wasn’t planning to move to Washougal, much to the delight of Clark County residents, no doubt.  Not wanting to admit what a lying sack of sh*t he was so soon after the election, he merely said he was “keeping my options open.”  Please, Phil, keep them open.  You could use a few more snow days.

Anyway, O’Keefe was so tied up in trying to become the next Octomom, that he didn’t bother with checking into the potential ten-year sentence such a crime carries, and was able to round up three other geniuses, one of whom is the son of Republican US Attorney William Flanagan, to dress up as telephone repairmen and blunder into a federal office building and… get this…  when questioned, say they left their credentials “in the van.”  Or something.  Why not?  They had hard hats and tool belts, and even a fluorescent vest or two.  They never suspected, apparently, that sometimes FBI agents are lurking around such places, and that’s where their troubles began.

The best part of this is that now all the right-wing media, from Michelle Malkin to Pajamas Media, are sniffily tut-tutting such amateurish pranks, not because they suddenly realize O’Keefe has been a fraud all along, but because they realize what damage this could do to their own, uh, credibility.  By evening, expect FOX to have declared the whole thing part of an Islamofascistcommielibrulmedia conspiracy to silence the latest, greatest “investigative reporter” the right has yet to produce.  You see, up until this afternoon, O’Keefe was considered a shoo-in to win CPAC’s “prestigious (!) Reagan Award,” for his ACORN “exposes,” and Andrew Breitbart and the whole FOX lineup had hailed him as the second coming of… something.  That sort of fatuous adulation can go to your bony head if you’re a righty twit that has long since given up on getting laid any other way.

Well, O’Keefe’s chances of scoring won’t improve, at least in the way he’d like, in federal prison, and O’Reilly, Breitbart, et al are going to have a tougher and tougher time finding anyone so audaciously  stupid and addlepated to do their “work”  for them in the future.  Even more hilariously, this bunch is bringing up Nixon’s similar but comparatively professional shenanigans, something that had slipped their minds for the last decade or so as Bush indulged in nearly all of them.  Pat Buchanan, he of the proposed Brookings Institution firebombings back in the day, was even brought on to chat with Chris Matthews to share his “expertise” in this drearily familiar area of Republican politics  (Again, h/t sysprog…).

It’s funny…  Even as the Democrats squander their mandate kowtowing to Republican memes, methods, and propaganda, the Republicans manage to go them one better and remind us all what pathetic and lawless authoritarians they are, and we are once again reminded how shoddy reporting, questionable means, and zero fact-checking can blow up in the pancaked faces of our idiotic media when they shower ridiculously obvious charlatans with undeserved adulation and celebrity, solely because the targets are supposedly “liberal,” and conservatives can do no wrong.

Won’t someone on the right “please think of the children?”  One of yours just got left behind.  Big time.