Happy Hour Discurso

Today's opining on the public discourse.

It seems we had a National Media Assclowns Day, and nobody bothered to tell me.

CNN apparently believes that a bit of creative editing can solve their Dobbs dilemma:

This week, CNN aired a new four-hour documentary called “Latino in America,” exploring how Latinos are reshaping American communities and culture. The broadcast sparked protests in cities around the country, including outside CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta, with minority groups calling on the network to fire anti-immigration crusader and serial misinformer Lou Dobbs.

The New York Times reports that CNN “has not commented on the protests or covered them on its news programs.” But not only has CNN ignored the Dobbs protests, the network edited out criticism of Dobbs from civil rights lawyer Isabel Garcia during a taped interview with controversial Arizona Sheriff Joe Arapaio that aired on Anderson Cooper 360 this week:

[Garcia] who was featured in “Latino in America” and organized an anti-Dobbs protest in Tucson on Wednesday, said that CNN edited her comments about the anchor out of an interview. [...]

She said she called Mr. Arpaio and Mr. Dobbs “the two most dangerous men to our communities,” and said that “because of them, our communities are being terrorized in a real way.” She also asserted that CNN was “promoting lies and hate about our community” by broadcasting Mr. Dobbs’s program. The comments were not included when the interview was shown Wednesday night. “They heavily deleted what I did get to say,” she said.

CNN, come over here.  We need to have a talk.  When you have an outrageous ass bringing shame upon your network, silencing his critics and refusing to acknowledge the slightest criticism of him won't take care of the situation.  Shipping his ass to Faux News with a great big bow will.  You know how it's done.  Remember Glenn Beck?  Yeah.

Trust me.  He'll fit right in.  Faux News is now filled with so many twice-divorced-from-reality, paranoid, self-pitying hacks they can't even tell when they haven't been snubbed:

Adding to the Fox News v. White House feud today is a dust-up over an interview with pay czar Ken Feinberg. Turns out, it was a sort of miscommunication, but the White House adds that if they had left Fox out it would be a case of "Not that there's anything wrong with that!"

The version Fox has pushed all day is that the network was excluded from an interview roundtable with Feinberg yesterday, and that bureau chiefs from ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN came to Fox's defense.

TPMDC dug into it, and here's what happened.

Feinberg did a pen and pad with reporters to brief them on cutting executive compensation. TV correspondents, as they do with everything, asked to get the comments on camera. Treasury officials agreed and made a list of the networks who asked (Fox was not among them).

But logistically, all of the cameras could not get set up in time or with ease for the Feinberg interview, so they opted for a round robin where the networks use one pool camera. Treasury called the White House pool crew and gave them the list of the networks who'd asked for the interview.

The network pool crew noticed Fox wasn't on the list, was told that they hadn't asked and the crew said they needed to be included. Treasury called the White House and asked top Obama adviser Anita Dunn. Dunn said yes and Fox's Major Garrett was among the correspondents to interview Feinberg last night.

Simple as that, we're told, and the networks don't want to be seen as heroes for Fox.

I don't blame them a bit.  I wouldn't want to be seen as Faux News' hero, either.

Glenn Beck's gone batshit again - this time, complete with bat:

You know where the phrase "jumping the shark" originates, right? It's from the episode of Happy Days where Fonzie, wearing his leather jacket and some swim trunks, jumps over a confined shark with a pair of water skis. As Wikipedia explains, the phrase originally referred to TV shows whose desperation for ratings leads them to indulge stunts that underscore their having "lost it."

Well, Glenn Beck is hardly desperate for ratings -- yet -- but on his Fox News show yesterday, he jumped an entire school of Great Whites with Pinky Tuscadero on his shoulders.

He devoted an entire 14-minute-plus rant to depicting the Obama White House as being like Al Capone and his gang of thugs in The Untouchables, bashing people's heads in with baseball bats. And to illustrate the point, he waved about a big wooden Louisville Slugger and affected a tough-guy gangster voice, all to depict the administration as a bunch of petty thugs who threaten their opponents.

That boy's just not right in the head.  Neither is his good buddy Ann Coulter, who's decided every bit of political violence in the entire universe has been perpetrated by liberals.  She's either seriously psychotic or Steve Benen's right - she's a secret liberal mocking the rabid right from within. 

Keith Olbermann is frequently my hero, but I really adore him for delivering such a delightful near-fatal beatdown to Tucker Carlson:

How many times did Tucker have this coming when he worked for MSNBC but he never made the Worst Persons list since he was at the same network? Keith lets loose on him in this segment.

[snip]

The runner-up, Tucker Carlson, world sophistry champion. “The two most senior members of the White House staff attempt to bully a news outlet into silence and hardly anyone in the press says a word. Meanwhile, the same White House that had just finished lecturing working journalists on the superiority of straight news coverage hosted a secret, off the record briefing for Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC. The two, along with several other liberal commentators, spent more than two hours with Obama. Why is the press corps giving the White House a pass for behavior it never would have tolerated from other administrations? Conservatives believe it‘s simple bias.”

I‘m a little tired of the sanctimonious, amnesic crap from people like Tucker Carlson. The previous White House planted questions in its own news conference, secretly paid conservative columnists, staged massage briefing sessions for radio hosts, sent out a list of questions they hoped I would use to discredit Joe Wilson, publicly attacked NBC, publicly attacked MSNBC, by the admission of the press secretary, just the other day, cut MSNBC out of access to administration officials, and its party leadership tried to blackmail NBC News into removing me from election coverage by threatening to boycott a presidential debate.

This White House finally called out a group of amoral political operatives posing as journalists. That was it. They didn‘t deny them credentials. They didn‘t try to silence them. They didn‘t take them off the air. They didn‘t try to take them off the air. They called them what they are, the media propaganda wing of the Republican party.

[snip]

I don‘t know if the paranoids of this world, like Michelle Malkin, think Obama handed me my instructions, or she thinks I handed him his. But when I support what this president is doing, it‘s because I think he is right. The operative word is think.

I‘m not, Rachel Maddow is not, Glenn freaking Beck or Michelle freaking Malkin, a knee jerk jukebox of party doctrine, screeching at every reform, mocking every expression of sympathy, repeating anything the nit-wits, which they serve as doctrine slaves, try to palm off on the sheep they hope will lead them back to power.

Awesome.  But then, Keith Olbermann usually is.  Too bad Rachel Maddow's awesome to the second power and rather outshines him sometimes, but hey.

The utterly most awesomest, hilariousest example of media assclownery, though, had to be this:

Right-wing pundit Michael Ledeen published an item this week on Barack Obama's "college thesis," which Obama allegedly wrote as a student at Columbia 25 years ago. Leeden cited some website, which ran a piece in August.

The paper was called "Aristocracy Reborn," and in the first ten pages (which were all that reporter Joe Klein -- who wrote about it for Time -- was permitted to see), the young Obama wrote:

"... the Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy."

That's quite an indictment, even for an Ivy League undergraduate.... Maybe instead of fuming about words that Rush Limbaugh never uttered, the paladins of the free press might ask the president about words that he did write.

Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh picked up on Leeden's report, blasting Obama for the alleged paper.

The first sign of trouble was when Joe Klein noted that he's never seen or written about Obama's college thesis, and has "no idea where this report comes from."

The second sign of trouble was when one stopped to notice that Obama didn't write a senior thesis (though he did write a thesis-length paper on Soviet nuclear disarmament).

The third sign of trouble was when one clicked on the link that Leeden provided as support and found the word "satire."

ZOMFG.

There is a punchline.  I'm forcing you to go to Political Animal to get it.  Make sure you've secured all spillable items and swallowed all liquids before you click.

I know.  After that, Crazy Pete Hoekstra actively campaigning against his own constituents' interests and John "I Can't Even Use a Blackberry" McCain trying to fuck up net neutrality just pales in comparison.  It's hard to top that sort of stupid.


I imagine it'll take the Cons all the way until tomorrow to manage it.