Fair And Balanced

It's a tired analogy, but only because it's so true - do you think that, if a reporter for NBC or CBS or ABC quit his or her job to sign on to work on a Democratic Presidential campaign, wouldn't that be a major, major story for the insaneosphere and the right-wing noise machine?

The word spreading all over Capitol Hill today is that longtime Fox senior congressional producer Jim Mills is leaving his booth on the House side to join the Fred Thompson quasi-campaign as spokesman. NBC has confirmed that Mills will join Thompson's organization effective August 20.

By the way, NBC simply reported this as news, and with a gushing, fellating tribute to "Millsy" thrown in besides. But let's understand what's happening here.

A longtime Fox News "journalist" is becoming the spokesman for a Presidential campaign. Tony Snow was an anchor, and he gave his opinions on Fox News Radio all the time; he made no secret of his conservatism. This is a "senior congressional producer," someone who by any normal journalistic practices would be something less than a partisan hack.

I think that's slightly significant. And couple it with this quote from Ann Coulter, which again commits the sin of telling the truth:

Ann Coulter's latest column claims that "New York cabbies' compliance rate on daily bathing" is less than 48 percent; dilates upon the reporting in the "Treason Times"; and reflects, "Fox News ought to buy a copy of Monday's Democrat debate on CNN to play over and over during the general election campaign," because the only people it could possibly convince to vote for a Democrat are "losers blogging from their mother's basements."

Now why ever would Fox care about electing Republicans, given that they're a news organization in the business of "fair and balanced"?

(To be clear, I don't think Fox News has much of an impact on the debate in this country, at least not anymore; I think that their audience is never much likely to vote anything other than straight Republican ticket anyway, and while the network feeds a lot of nonsense into their heads, I question whether that really does penetrate into the general public. I just think it's funny when their ideological slip shows, especially in the context of all the shrieking about the "liberal media".)

People That Link To Me Watch

This site "Exposing the Neo-Right" is curious in its hatred of neoconservatives but also "faggot loving liberals." I somehow merited a link from this chap, and, emboldened by Mister Leonard Pierce's extremely amusing look at a far-right Islamophobe site by "Foehammer," I decided to take a closer look.

I appreciated that fact that "Exposing the Neo-Right" is essentially a screed about how Bush/Fourthbranch have hijacked the Republican Party from moderate conservatives like him, and to illustrate this the masthead picture is of the Capitol Dome... you know, where the President lives. He appears to really hate Michelle Malkin (but only for not letting him leave a comment on her page) and Ann Coulter along with the Bush Administration for ruining his perfectly good Republican Party. On Coulter he says this:

Also, saying things like you did about John Edwards and Family, simply makes you look like some idiotic Jack Assed fool. Ann’s problem is, she’s a narcissistic person, she’s full of herself, very full of herself [...] Let me say this, it’s okay to have conservative beliefs, but when you mingle broadside personal attacks with it, you disqualify yourself from the legitimate discussion.

Following that plea for a return to comity and civilized discourse, we have this post:

I don’t know what hole this jack assed fooled crawled out of, but quite frankly, I wish he’d go back.

Here’s the idiotic tripe:

Greg Gutfeld / The Huffington Post - Seven Things We Now Know About Today’s Car Bombing Attempt

I ain’t quoting that bullcrap, I do wish someone would blow a bomb up at the headquarters of the Huffington Post. and further more, I wish someone would cut that fool Greg’s nuts off and feed them to him.

Mind you, this is a self-described "moderate" conservative. Good thing he's not far-right, I guess.

Other things I learned from this guy: liberals love "faggots," and we enable them too, and law enforcement is America is also run by "liberal faggots."

It's really good to see someone take a stand for responsible discourse. Bookmark it!

(I spent way too much of my life paying attention to this)

Good For Elizabeth Edwards

Is all I have to say. Normally I wouldn't give Ann Coulter the time of day, but as long as she's on every major news show in this country spouting her bile, she ought to get challenged on it once in a while. And Edwards was very controlled and smart against and out-of-control hack comic who resorted to using the same tired lines she has for years.

What I want to know is, when will other top liberal writers get such a platform because "they sell books," as Chris Matthews has repeatedly said to justify Coulter's hourlong appearance? Will Glenn Greenwald, whose new book is #1 in nonfiction on Amazon, for example, get an hourlong slot? By the way, Coulter's books aren't even selling all that much anymore.

Lights are On, No One's Home

What a breathtaking day yesterday was, so much going on. But there was one thing I forgot to mention. In the wake of Ann Coulter's comments at CPAC (which are losting her advertisers), you would think it would register a mention that she appeared prominently at the beginning of Fox' 1/2 Hour News Hour show just two days later.

Of course, somebody would have had to have NOTICED that it was on.

And this is a fairly pathetic attempt at justification by my old friend Kurt Long, who clearly is so embarrassed by his performance that he changed his name for the show.

Dighton homey-gone-Hollywood Kurt Long doesn’t think his anchor gig on Fox News Channel’s “The 1/2 Hour News Hour” will torpedo his career.

“If Robert Downey Jr. can get busted for heroin, be found sleeping in a stranger’s bed and still be on the Academy Awards last week, how much could this hurt me,” laughed the co-anchor of FNC’s new right-wing news spoof.

So, ah, why hide behind the name “Kurt McNally” on the show????

“Is Kiefer Sutherland ‘hiding’ behind Jack Bauer on ‘24?’ ” said Long. “Being behind the desk on the show is just another acting gig for me. I’m not playing me (a la the left-leaning ‘Daily Show’ host Jon Stewart), I’m playing an anchorman who is oblivious to the jokes around him.”

Dude, friend, you're hiding. You're transparently hiding. There's no "mystery" to the vomitorium of comedy that is that show, no character to be projecting. You're not oblivious to the jokes, you're telling the jokes, and they're not funny. You're doing the devil's bidding, spitting out talking points that Republican operatives want in their audience's brain. You're mostly hiding from yourself.

And when the lede of a story is you claiming that your latest gig WON'T destroy your career, uh, it's destroyed your career.

Blink

And you would have missed all discussion of Ann Coulter's remark about John Edwards on ABC's This Week, despite their roundtable holding a long discussion of the CPAC conference where she was essentially the keynote speaker. "This audiene wants a lot of red meat," said George Will.

"Like Ann Coulter," said George Stephanopoulos.

Will replied, "The less said about her the better."

And that was it. Mind you, George Will APPEARED at CPAC, knowing what he knows about Coulter and her history of commentary, and had no problem with it.

Annals of the Liberal Media

So Adam Nagourney of the New York Times did an entire story on the CPAC conference, including a discussion of Ann Coulter's speech, without bothering to mention that Coulter called John Edwards a "faggot." Nagourney wasn't really alone, as most media outlets chose not to cover Coulter's comments. Joe Sudbay makes a great point:

During the 2004 campaign, comedian Whoopi Goldberg told a joke about George Bush at a fundraiser attended by John Kerry. The right wing erupted and the media went agog over it. The Bush White House led the charge against the comedian trying to keep the story alive. Ken Mehlman was particularly riled up. Then everyone in the right wing demanded John Kerry apologize and rebuke Whoopi, who is, again, a comedian.

Let's review: comedian makes a joke about the President, media frenzy. On the other hand, top conservative calls a Democratic candidate a "faggot" -- an extremely vulgar term that demeans a significant population of Americans and their families -- at an event attended by all the major GOP candidates and the Vice President of the US and it's not even news. Does Dick Cheney approve of that language? You may recall that his daughter is a very prominent lesbian. When Kerry and Edwards mentioned that true fact, the media also went beserk.

And they say it's a liberal media. So many reporters are just patsies for the right wing.

So this obvious media blackout generated enough outrage that Nagourney had to address it. And how did he do so?

In a belated report on right-wing pundit Ann Coulter's reference to former Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) as a "faggot," New York Times reporter Adam Nagourney purported to explain a denunciation of Coulter's remark by Edwards, as though it needed explanation. Nagourney wrote:

The question of whether the remark was offensive enough aside, the Edwards campaign saw an opportunity in the remarks of a woman who is about as popular in liberal Democratic circles as [Sen.] Hillary Rodham Clinton [D-NY] is in Republican circles (not very). Mr. [David] Bonior [Edwards' campaign manager] sent an e-mail to supporters last night urging them to make contributions to the Edwards campaign.

Hillary Rodham Clinton? What did she do to deserve a comparison to Coulter? Whether or not Coulter is "[un]popular in liberal Democratic circles," the reasons for liberals' denunciations of her could not be more different from the reasons that Republicans might dislike -- and apparently fear -- Clinton. Last we checked, Clinton had not referred to anyone as a "faggot" or advocated the assassination of anyone. Nor has she, to our knowledge, lamented that Timothy McVeigh did not blow up a news organization.

Not just any news organization, NAGOURNEY'S organization! So we have a writer who tries to literally explain away a pre-planned slanderous remark by saying that the speaker is just like Hillary, and intimates that the Edwards campaign is cynically trying to make use of the controversy.

Gotta love that liberal media.

Glenn Greenwald has a scintillating rant about this entire episode.

But the single most prestigious political event for conservatives of the year is a place where conservatives go to hear Democrats called faggots, Arabs called ragheads, and Supreme Court justices labeled as deserving of murder -- not by anonymous, unidentifiable blog commenters, but by one of their most popular featured speakers.

And after she does that, she is cheered wildly by an adoring conservative movement that has made her bigoted and hate-mongering screeds best-sellers, all while they and their deceitful little allies in the media, such as Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post, write idiot tracts about how terribly upset they are by the affront to decency from HuffPost commenters [in between writing obsequious, tongue-wagging profiles of Coulter's most radical ideological allies, such as Michelle Malkin, who penned a lovely defense of the internment of Japanese-Americans, for which even Ronald Reagan apologized (but, I believe, she never cursed while doing so, which is what matters most)].

And the Ritual of Apology Continues

Although I would say it's warranted this time. You can't go out and call John Edwards a faggot (not as a slip of the tongue, either, but as part of prepared remarks), which is pretty much slander, and not expect people to get upset. Like the Human Rights Campaign.

Today, at the Conservative Political Action Conference sponsored by the American Conservative Union, right-wing pundit Ann Coulter spoke saying, “I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot,’ so I — so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.” The Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay civil rights organization, strongly condemned Coulter’s remarks and called on those Republican leaders in attendance to follow suit.

“To interject this word into American political discourse is a vile and disgusting way to sink the debate to a new, all-time low,” said Human Rights Campaign President Joe Solmonese. “Make no doubt about it, these remarks go directly against what our Founding Fathers intended and have no place on the schoolyard, much less our country’s political arena.” [...]

The Conservative Political Action Conference was attended by 2008 Republican Presidential candidates: Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO), Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) and former Congressman Duncan Hunter (R-CA). Vice President Dick Cheney also attended the event.

Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney spoke before Coulter saying, ““I am happy to hear that after you hear from me, you will hear from Ann Coulter. That is a good thing.”

“We demand that every single Presidential candidate in attendance at this conference, along with Vice President Cheney stand up and publicly condemn this type of gutter-style politics,” continued Solmonese. “If not, then their silence will be deafening to the vast majority of Americans who believe this type of language belongs no where near the discussions about the future of our country.”

Of course, maybe us mean angry liberals don't quite get the point here. You see, "faggot" is NOT on George Carlin's list of the Seven Words You Can't Say on Television, the ones we love to use all the time! So it's perfectly within the bounds of acceptable discourse.

I don't think anyone really listens to Ann Coulter anymore, but what's interesting is the generally positive reaction the line got in the room. She is the mainstream of the modern conservative movement. So keep talking, Ann, until you piss the whole country off and have them run screaming in the other direction.