As we approach the 2012 elections, I have to admit grudgingly sympathizing with the poor Republican contenders on  some level; everywhere you look, one (hilarious) presidential aspirant after another has to deal with the fact that large blocs of their party hates them, for one reason or another.  The reasons, to a sane person at least, often seem a bit unfair:  the party of George W. Bush and Tom DeLay “hate” Newt Gingrich for being a corrupt Washington Insider with a tenuous connection to reality?  The party of David Vitter and Rudy Giuliani “hate” Mitt Romney for (barely) straying from Christianist orthodoxy, fully clothed?  What the hell?

Well, let’s call it what it is, an embarrassment of riches.  Long ago, before Fox News (!) and 24/7 hate radio, conservatives realized that the only reason, given their relative wealth, that they didn’t bestride the world like a Colossus was that their ideas were both dumb and detrimental to most Americans, let alone other humans on earth.  In his infamous 1970 Memo, which led a bonkers, elitist ideologue to a Nixon lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, Lewis Powell spoke for fellow plutocrats in saying that, essentially, the far-too-comfortable rabble has caught on to our scams.  We’d better have a Plan B, but fast.

That plan, of course, was to flood the public discourse with propaganda from think tanks, media outlets, and newly endowed “professors” to spout the plutocrat line, which, as you might expect, wouldn’t be too successful if other opinions were heard.  Thus, the strategy’s practitioners, chief among them Nixon himself, decided that rather than bothering wih refuting liberal ideas, still a somewhat tall order to this day, they would focus on refuting liberal people, whom, duly discredited, would finally shut up once and for all.  The Hate Campaign was born.

This wasn’t the easiest proposition, understandably, given that the poorer and less educated group they were attempting to persuade would undoubtedly be harmed by their ultimate goals.  They had to go for hate, and go big, before anybody wised up.  To this end, taxes, which largely went, than as now, to support the military and (then, anyway) beloved entitlement programs for white people, had to be re-branded as extravagant cash transfers to shiftless Darkies; wars had to be sold as rare opportunities for vicarious triumph to an increasingly marginalized and powerless populace, and respecting foundational civil liberties had to be portrayed as dangerous capitulation to treacherous hordes abroad and at home.

It’s a neat trick, really….  Convincing the dumbest and most resentful in any society that everything, and I mean everything, they don’t like is somehow connected. Once you’ve done that, you’re off to the races.  You see, most people, particularly in the hard times Republican policies invariably create, are left looking around for solutions to what ails them; the key to eliminating such dangerous receptivity is to have the most reasonable, but unwanted, solutions pre-tainted by painstakingly encouraged cultural biases.

With Nixon, this meant a whole lot of industrial-grade hippie punching, and it worked so well at he time that it’s still in wide use despite its often tinny, anachronistic feel.  It may be both dumb and insultingly cheesy to lots of people, but the fact that the hippie’s modern-day equivalents want to, say, protect the environment, reliably creates a massive call amongst rank-and-file righties for more pollution has become, for polluters, anyway, the gift that keeps on giving.  That the (now proven correct) resistance to our retarded, failed adventure in Iraq was advanced by  our younger and less conservatively attired Americans means that Fox News “culture warriors”  will dutifully scream for more wars until kingdom come, sooner rather than later.  And on and on.

As I’ve said many times before, this is a project that has become a victim of its own success.  Hopelessly saddled with a befuddled band of followers whose hate, like a 1960′s Alabama firehose, must constantly be turned  on something, the Republicans are finding that even their own bespoke suits might get unseemly wet spots.  Just mention without utter disdain an idea that at some point a “liberal” might have ever endorsed, no matter how mundane, and the fury is unleashed.  George Bush found this out when he tried to hand his anti-labor supporters an immigration bill, John McCain was similarly chastened when he said, from experience, that torture wasn’t okay, and Ron Paul, who is momentarily leading the polls in Iowa, was nonetheless almost booed off the stage for the impermissible effrontery of talking about pointless, costly wars like they were a bad thing.

In their relentless pursuit of hate-driven infallibility, Republicans have painted themselves into an interesting corner when it comes to sewing up a presidential election….  Their people have been taught, carefully, you might say, to hate so much that they can no longer love.  Even their own candidates.

It couldn’t have happened to nicer guys.

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?

No tendentious description of the phenomenon is required, nor is a detailed and boring historical context necessary, since they (like the poor) “have always been with us.”   But the sudden “surge” of poseurs, fakers, demagogues, deadbeats, and crooks stands out right now, as our vaunted world economy teeter-totters, and institutions – from colleges to banks to temples of journalism, and pinnacles of power – croak under the strain.

Here’s a partial list, culled from today’s headlines, of new and emerging Little Men.  Please feel free to add a name which may have been missed in this initial installment.  Step right up!  There’s room for everyone, and probably no end to it, once the battle has been joined.

Herewith:  The Little Men Of The Moment!

Silvio Berlusconi - the blessedly former prime minister of Italy.  The ultimate Mistero Buffo of Italian politics pledged to resign (and by God he did!) if a new, technocratic government now in formation can begin cobbling together a fiscal plan to prevent massive default by Italy, a member state in the Eurozone.  But like the magician/clown he is, some skeptical Burlesquecrony-watchers are wondering if this world-class fraudster and cockmaster will ever leave the stage (and, by God! – he hinted upon departing he might continue lurking behind the arras, in Milan).  What is not in dispute is Berlusconi has diddled and fiddled within his court of  whores and bunga bunga hangers-on, while failing, over twenty years, to do the job he was elected to do, so that Italy – more than Greece, Portugal, Spain, or Ireland – may truly sink the European “common market,” and possibly, the world economy itself.  Basta!

Joe Paterno – the disgraced former head football coach of Penn State.  Whereas Berlusconi was not a great man, Paterno might have been, to the extent he fashioned a winning, and honorable, sports tradition.  He did win a lot of football games; ya gotta give him that!  Brought truckloads of money to Beaver Stadium too!  His teams won, or contended for, quite a few national championships.  And he did, judging by the loyalty of the Penn State community, demand and get excellence from his players, on and off the field, for over two generations.  Some of them actually read books; most graduated.  He did not, sadly, measure up when faced with an unavoidable moral dilemma.  He has experienced a great fall.  His catharsis, and that of Penn State, awaits.

Jon Corzine – resigned CEO of MF Global, former Democratic governor and senator from New Jersey, former Goldman Sachs honcho.  Corzine took a mere year and a half or so to capsize MF Global, which traced its lineage to the sugar trade in late 18th century England.  Corzine bet on sovereign debt and lost.  Big.  MF Global under Corzine, a darling of Democratic big wigs, reported a nearly $192  million quarterly loss after betting on European government bonds.  At the end of October the company’s credit rating went to junk, and it filed for Chapter 11.  About a thousand Wall Street wizards went out on the dole.  Just like that.  MF Global’s demise has been logged in as the 8th largest bankruptcy in American history.  Corzine, a little man posting big losses, appears to have a few little Democratic Party leaders around him, saying:  “sssshhhh.”

Bill O’Reilly – reigning Fox News gasbag.  O’Reilly, a little twit with global reach, has been enjoying a two months-long perch on the New York Times bestseller list with a book he “wrote” on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.  However, the “no spin” king’s tome has been banned from the shelves of the Ford’s Theater book store, operated by the National Park service.  Ford’s Theater was where Lincoln was shot by the mad thespian, John Wilkes Booth.  Among numerous errors cited in the book, O’Reilly asserts there was an Oval Office in Lincoln’s White House, when in fact the executive suite was not built until 1909, when, presumably, there was a federal budget surplus.  In another egregious error, O’Reilly for some reason had Honest Abe “furling” his brow sometime before he was shot (he might have been furling about the feckless Gen. McClellan).  Everyone knows a man would “furrow” his brow, not furl the damn thing, whatever the situation, right?  This flap from Ford’s Theater appears to be a collection of minor quibbles to the author.  O’Reilly’s publisher says the little man is working on another quickie about presidents, to be written in a “narrative, novelistic fashion.”  O’Reilly responded to the Ford’s Theater critique by saying, “Enemies are trying to hurt my book.”

Rick Perry - governor of Texas and Republican presidential candidate.  Perry doesn’t know which federal departments he wants to shut down, but he does know he wants American foreign aid under his administration to start with no money.  Way to go, little man!  Perry may seem drunk at debates he’s appeared in, but it’s just the best a little man from Texas can do.  What can you expect from a guy who used Whiteout on a rock at the entrance to his family’s vacation retreat, but can’t remember why exactly?  Also, such a little man should be cut some slack if he thinks real, light amber New England maple syrup might work as a companion to barbecue sauce!

Michael Bloomberg - mayor of New York.  Well now he’s done it!  There’s a lot of talk in the city about how bored Bloomberg is with his job; and a guy I know who was hanging around Zuccotti Park on Tuesday morning while the cops were mopping up says simply that Bloomie will run for prez as an indie and pull close to 20 percent, drawing the indie vote,  while cutting into Obama’s hide.  Result:  one crazy Republican president, unless it’s Willard the flip-flopper.  Maybe Bloomie will turn out to be a little big man.

Karl Rove – formerly Bush’s brain.  During an appearance at Johns Hopkins recently, Rove, evidently exasperated by taunts from OWS protestors and other unsavory characters, actually challenged one (or all) of them to a fight.  This does not compute.  It’s just hard to imagine this dweeby little man stepping up to his own challenge.  Bombast knows no bounds.

Rush Limbaugh – radio bombasterbasta! – par excellence.  This week the little man of the airwaves used every slur in the book to denigrate the OWS protesters, particularly those evicted from Zuccotti Park, since Tuesday was not a slow news day, and therefore an opportunity for el Rushbo to spike his sagging rating a tad.  Limbaugh spent minute after minute on one of his shows this week obsessing about the OWSers’ tendencies to spew precious bodily fluids all over public spaces across America’s fruited plain, just to call attention to their sad state, which to dittoheads means they’ll have to move back home with Mom & Dad when it’s all over – as a spent force.  Only a man with a little whatnot could stoop to that.

Well, there you have it!  But there are many other candidates to be nominated, to say nothing of the untold millions of Honorable Mentions, past and present.  Step right up.  Tell the nation who you’d like to see on the Pedestal of Heroes in this category.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Last night Cocktailhag-American Jan Brewer, governor (!) of Arizona, was faced with what turned out to be, for her, an insurmountable task: giving  one-minute opening statement in the debate between her and her Democratic opponent for election to the post she gained only through the Obama administration’s stupidity and tone-deafness, and in it she actually managed to make Sarah Palin look like a Rhodes Scholar.  It was stupefying, really.  She had a a few bland, content-free platitudes prepared and a little anti-Obama red meat, but she clearly had no idea what they might be, even as someone must have been applying her pancake.  Remember, Palin didn’t launch, jaw-droppingly, into moose-peranto until she was foiled by “gotcha” questions from that bulldog Katie Couric; Brewer was unable to read on television, without making a dunderheaded ass of herself, a PREPARED ONE-MINUTE STATEMENT.  On a Fox affiliate, to boot.

Is there any sort of floor, at long last, for Republican stupidity?  The whole point of the exercise is to make bad ideas look good on TV, and even in that pathetically modest endeavor, Brewer just scored a big, fat, fail, which is obviously destined to become a youtube blockbuster.  (The video is inescapable on the internet…  go to digby, tbogg, salon, tpm, or pretty much anywhere to watch it;  just pee first and set down all beverages before clicking play…)  Sure, Palin’s stupidity has been parleyed  into her well-crafted victimhood schtick, and stupid people everywhere are gaga over her for reasons they are unable to articulate, but nonetheless firmly hold; an undoubtedly boffo combination that has won many Republican victories in the recent past, but honestly…  Lengthy seconds of giggly silence, as the huge false eyelashes are cast down at something on her desk (what?  My Pet Goat?  Atlas Shrugged?) doesn’t seem like the sort of performance that is going to win over thinking Arizonans, in the unlikely event that there remains such a thing.

Clearly, Brewer has decided, along with most other far right Republicans running this season, that all media, except Fox and hate radio, is the enemy, and see no reason to engage with it at all.  But since they do have to sometimes appear in public before they are elected and can get on with the looting (in Brewer’s case it’s private prisons, who are eagerly making room for all the SB 1070 arrests already…), impertinent backtalk from the Fourth Estate can’t entirely be avoided, so would you people please, for the love of God, at least practice your vapid talking points?  The answer is obviously no.

Here in Oregon we have the male equivalent of a PalinBrewer ConservaBarbie running for governor, whose total qualifications for office consist of being 7 feet tall, a former Trailblazer, and the worst free-thrower in the NBA.  His name is Chris Dudley, and guess what?  No debates, and no appearances except with right-leaning media, and he has so much money, he just might beat former governor John Kitzhaber that way, with content-free attack ads.  Ah, democracy in the Citizens (!) United  era.  Let the dumbest candidate win.