“The high standards and wise judgments of people like Walter Cronkite once acted as a national immune system, zapping scandal mongers and quashing wild rumors,” wrote former “green jobs czar” Van Jones in the Sunday New York Times.

When the facts are against you, as another rightie smear merchant of no discernible qualifications, Hannah Giles, said, “Always attack, never defend.”  The Pantload eagerly takes her undoubtedly sage advice, and types the following:

This may be one of the most unintentionally hilarious lines in recent memory. Jones left the White House when his background — as an alleged 9/11 “truther” and as a self-confessed “communist” and “revolutionary” — became grist for the Fox News mill. Mainstream media mostly ignored the story until after he was fired.

Since no one knows unintentional hilarity better than Goldberg, he feels especially qualified here.  The alert reader will notice that he tosses in “alleged” to paper over the most soundly debunked lies, and then addresses the less obvious lies, which were produced by selective reading and backdating only on Fox, as fact.  This fatass knows his audience, anyway.

Now Jones, with billets at Princeton and the Center for American Progress, casts himself as yet another victim, just like Shirley Sherrod, the Department of Agriculture employee fired last week after website publisher Andrew Breitbart released a misleadingly edited video of her (Breitbart, a friend, insists to me that he did not edit the video himself).

Ah, that product of the meritocracy, who only isn’t wearing a WalMart smock right now because his mother was a duplicitous cocktailhag who almost brought down Clinton, is so comfortably ensconced these days that he’s denouncing other people’s earned success.  Knock me over with a feather.  As a bonus, he flatly admits a plain conflict of interest in even discussing the issue, with unaccountable pride in his corrupt credulity.   More smears follow, natch:

You’ve just got to love Jones — a former member of STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement), a Mao-influenced organization with a “commitment to the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism” — giving Cronkite, the dashboard saint of bourgeois America, his props as a linchpin of American democracy. Yes, yes, Jones says he’s no longer the Red radical he says he was, say, a decade ago. But still: Come on.

I must say, I find such nonsense exhilarating and exasperating.

Exhilarating, in the sense that I have a thin reed to cling to as I drown in my own BS, but exasperating in the sense that people other than me are allowed to speak their piece in the newspapers.  You’ve just got to love Jonah.

For generations, conservatives lamented the decline in “gatekeeping.” When Hollywood portrayed glandular instincts as the new moral compass of the secular age, conservatives waxed nostalgic over the lost decency of the “studio system.” When the education industry shelved the great books and hugged every self-esteem fad, conservatives lamented the “closing of the American mind” and the demise of the three Rs. When the left became enamored with a “riot ideology” that mistook lawlessness for political protest, conservatives invoked “law and order.” Name a front in the political and culture wars, and conservatives defended the authority of authority and the tradition of tradition, while liberals and leftists defended sticking it to the man.

In other words, everything the right has done for fifty years was, basically, a temper tantrum against the will of the majority, and will continue to be, forever.  Where do I sign up?

Except all the other times. Teacher unions and tenured professors, now that they control their guilds, are near reactionary in their white-knuckled grip on the status quo. Liberal legal scholars are a cargo cult to stare decisis, because the precedents are all on their side. On these fronts, the conservatives serve as the stick-it-to-the-man brigades, while liberals like gatekeepers.

Ah, defending tax breaks for the wealthiest among us, letting corporations buy our elections, and letting rich incompetents trash the economy and the planet is, to Goldberg’s Twinkie-addled mind, “sticking it to the man,” and somehow teachers (!)  are involved.  Sheesh.  Are people in LA that dumb?

Nowhere is this more true than in the temples of journalism, where the high priests are barricading the doors with pews and candelabras to fend off the barbarians.

Oh, for Pete’s sake.  This is happening, but it’s always to defend wars, the wealthy, and Republicans from deserved embarrassment…  Does Goldberg read even less than Sarah Palin?

Jones’ nostalgia for Cronkite — truly one of the most overrated national icons of the 20th century — is ultimately so much self-serving bunkum. For instance, when the Climategate e-mails — between leading climate scientists — were released in 2009, a veteran New York Times environmental reporter refrained from posting the private e-mails, a standard he probably would not have taken with internal e-mails from, say, BP.

Who are you calling overrated, Fatso?  Look at the unbroken record or your own wrongness and stupidity, including that last statement, and marvel how dumb you have to be to bring up yet another long-debunked fake scandal to “prove” your idiotic point.  The other side won, as numerous investigations have shown, in “Climategate,” even though the planet lost thanks to you and others’ tireless efforts.  Please make a note of it.

The house Cronkite built did many fine things. It also locked out competing points of view, buried inconvenient bodies, spun the news and racked up a formidable list of Shirley Sherrods all its own. The New York Times whitewashed Stalin’s genocide. Cronkite misreported the significance of the Tet offensive to say the Vietnam War was unwinnable. Dan Rather, Cronkite’s replacement, began his career falsely reporting that Dallas schoolchildren cheered JFK’s murder and ended it falsely reporting on forged National Guard memos. The Rodney King video was misleadingly edited; Janet Cooke made up her stories for the Washington Post.

Pathetic, truly.  Cronkite was right about Vietnam, and the right gets even more wrong as they continue to beat that dead horse.  That’s an argument?  Further, none of the rest of the desperation-tainted examples would pass the Sesame Street test of relatedness, but this portly prevaricator is clearly on a roll:

The media environment today is so dizzying because of two revolutions. On one front we have the upheaval of the Internet, of which the WikiLeaks story — the leaking of 92,000 government documents about the war in Afghanistan — is Exhibit A. (The leaks weren’t just private; they were official secrets! But who cares!) On the other front there’s the consumer backlash — largely conservative, with Fox News as Exhibit A — against the old ideological media monopoly. This pincer movement can be scary. But it’s progress over the Cronkite era.

Yes, we now have a Right-wing propaganda factory posing as a news organization, spitting out provably false but rarely questioned horseshit every day, 24/7, and along with that, we have one obscure outlet for whistleblowers that is under constant harassment and vilification by both parties.  I can almost smell the freedom; either that or the pantload needs another diaper change.

One of the funniest things about the right is that they never lose, even when they do, and they even have rather disturbing success convincing others, or at least the media, that this is so.  A lot of us, and certainly any trained psychiatrist, would look at their behavior each day, and think they were no more or less living in fantasy land than, say, Snoopy was when he battled the Red Baron on top of his doghouse; but continuing the Peanuts metaphor, the press reacts to these routine delusions like Charlie Brown does to Lucy holding the football.  The main difference is that Charlie Brown ends up on his back, humiliated, and our mainstream media keep their jobs, or even get better ones, so they can’t wait to kick again.  The New York Times never carried Charles M. Schulz’ iconic comic, preferring unfunny written versions on its op/ed page, although it’s considerably less entertaining, much less just, when their string of Charlie Browns always get awarded the field goal for the ball everyone can see Lucy is still holding over her shoulder.  The Republicans have noticed this phenomenon, and adapted to it predictably.

Usually, they can point to some to some fly in the ointment of the other side’s victory, no matter how microscopic, and failing that, they have a lot of ways to cheat, lie, and bloviate their way to some semblance of at least doubt that they did, in fact, lose again.  The fact that they lost the popular vote in four of the last five presidential elections, they ought to be by now a defeated and irrelevant minority in Congress, given their numbers, their leaders are all nincompoops, charlatans, and crazy people, none of whom can open their mouths without lying would, in a rational world, render them, well, not very interesting, at least as credible policy or political spokespeople.  But in our media landscape, lies are more interesting than truth, and crazy is much more interesting than sane, and they therefore continue to dominate public discourse, despite the fact that their policies, and even their people, are despised by a clear majority of Americans.  Ironically, that unpopularity plays to their psychological game; because they’re so vile, aggressive, and obvious about it, people do actually hate them, in addition to opposing them, in large numbers, so then these committed opponents of political correctness can cynically play the persecuted minority card and loudly cast themselves as oppressed and silenced victims.  Remember Bush Derangement Syndrome?  Anyone with a pulse or grasp of the English language couldn’t bear to watch the guy for a lot of very good reasons, but somehow they were cast as deranged meanies who just hated Our Leader, as Bush coasted blithely from disaster to disaster, quite predictably but free of any “mainstream” criticism for eight years.

You have to hand it to them, really.  Anyone who can cast themselves, often successfully, as deserving of the Affirmative Action on steroids they routinely demand and receive from the media and on the political stage, when all they ever fight for is the prerogative of the majority race, religion, and sexual orientation to oppress those who don’t conform, they’re at least standouts for their chutzpah. Then, treating the superrich, enormous and monopolistic corporations, and their many media mouthpieces as beleaguered Davids fighting the liberal Goliath, if nothing else, shows admirable creativity.  But most of all, it shows that we no longer have politics in this country; we have a rigged reality show, and the fact that this makes many people disengaged, uninterested, and no longer interested in voting, rigs the game in their favor, yet again.  Low turnout and disengaged voters tends to make them lose by less, or even occasionally win.

The worst thing about all this, of course, is that every pile of shit presented to Republicans sends everyone from Sarah Palin and Micheal Steele to David Gregory and David Broder excitedly digging for a pony, and of course they always find it, even if the pony does smell a little funny and can’t exactly pull a cart.  Bush’s dubiously legal “landslide” in 2004, and the shameful, Delay-tainted “victory” in 2002, have become so defensively sanctified in the small, pampered minds of our media stars that they continue to pretend to forget everything that, well, actually happened, either before or since.  And since nothing really happened at all unless it got on television, and the only thing our media outlets do even vaguely competently is bury their mistakes, too many Americans fervently believe a whole lot of things that are either just dubious or more often plain, unmitigated bullshit.  As the supposed guardians of our First Amendment, Walter Cronkite pointed out in 2004 that the media, particularly FOX, whose audiences were the most misled, ought to be ashamed of themselves for such malpractice and its horrendous results.  But, alas, he made a lot less money than David Gregory, you know, and Rush Limbaugh’s maids, especially the ones who get drugs for him, probably make more, too.  Money talks these days, and even when it’s lying, we all are forced to listen.*

*Fairness Doctrine, anyone?  Liberal Portland has ONE progressive radio station, which calls itself that, and FOUR right-wing ones, that call themselves “News Talk.”  Most are owned by Clear Channel.  Must be the magical “free market,” again at work.

UPDATE: You can’t make this stuff up.  Before a cheering FOX host, the startlingly nebbishy Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute explains that the real danger of Health Care Reform is that it might force insurance companies to sell a “50,000 dollar policy for (a mere) $10,000.”  France spends about half of what we do per capita on health insurance, but even here we don’t pay nearly that much for our inferior and selective care.  And, after he praised insurance companies for “saving more lives every day than Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi will in their entire lives,” he won the rhetorical point.  Talking, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, about $50,000 dollar medical insurance, would, you’d think, at least raise some eyebrows, and maybe want to at least be adjusted slightly for the talking points, at this politically sensitive time.  But not on FOX.  Lord, have mercy.

UPDATE II: Just when I thought these delusional righties couldn’t get any dumber, along comes this, and some of the chosen language sounds vaguely familiar..  Emphasis on the “liar.”

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide people into two kinds, and those who don’t. — Unknown

I‘m starting to think that one of the greatest dividing-lines of humanity is not the one between Republicans and Democrats, nor between rich and poor, labor and management — it’s the huge chasm separating those who live in reality, from those who don’t.

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.

There are two kinds of people in the political world. One side accepts as fact that human beings respond to incentives (seeking pleasure and avoiding pain); and the other side believes that good intentions will conquer history, psychology, economics and any amount of bad judgment. They will beat, or cheat, reality itself.

© Dan Popp

Have you ever heard such rubbish in all your life?  If you’re a regular Hag reader, I think you have.