Dah Nooz

Spoken like a true Chicagoan.




This has been popping up here and there on the Internet. Of course, it's Fox, so we know the reason for it.

However, Digby linked to this story, which points me in a somewhat less obvious direction:

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced that a deal reached yesterday between the city and EarthLink could make San Francisco the first major city in the country to offer free universal wireless Internet access.

The implications of this are enormous, and it's the sort of thing that should have the knuckle-dragging wing of the Republican party shaking. You see, if everyone has access to information, it becomes very easy to figure out that they're lying.

Y'know, we could do a lot worse than turning the country into San Francisco. I like San Francisco.

And, by one of those strange loops that tends to happen here, I come back to the Jamil Hussein story. Take Fox as the "mainstream" version of the Malkin-Reynolds-Coulter-Limbaugh axis. (Yeah, well. . . .) Digby has an eye-opening post comparing the MRCL axis to the holocaust deniers who recently met in Teheran. As Digby says, same methods, same logic (which is to say, logic, yes, but rationality, none).

We keep expecting that reality is going to change things. For instance, we logically thought that the president would have to begin to withdraw in Iraq once his popularity tanked to unprecedented lows and his party lost the election. Instead, he just carries on, no matter what happens out here in the real world, because in the world the right wing has created, this last election shows that he has a mandate to escalate the war.

Likewise, I would have thought that Michele Malkin would be compelled to issue a mea culpa for her jihad against the AP once it was proved that they didn't make up their source. Nothing. In fact, Eason Jordan chastizes the AP for its attitude rather than the relentless "critics" many of whom commonly accuse them of being in league with terrorists.

The AP erred in part by responding in a hot-headed, antagonistic way to questions about the existence of Jamil Hussein and the credibility of AP reports featuring comments from Captain Hussein. The AP's harsh statements fueled the suspicions of critics and those who otherwise would give the AP the benefit of the doubt.

This is the Eason Jordon who, as Digby points out earlier, is busy sucking up to the nutcases who took him down earlier. Thre's some sort of syndrome here that I don't understand, maybe because I really don't have a good attitude toward authority, partiucularly people who claim authority they don't really have. People like Malkin, Coulter, Reynolds are obviously conniving asshats who have no morals, no integrity, and no shame, and yet somehow people in positions of power and influence are trying to cater to them instead of calling them out.

The most blatant example, and arguably the first to reach national prominence, is the Dan Rather story and the "fraudulent" memos concerning Bush's National Guard service -- or lack of it. See this post by Glenn Greenwald, and partcularly the e-mail from Mary Mapes, who produced that story and lost her job fo it. I confess that I had assumed that the documents had indeed been proved to be forgeries. I, at least, am willing to admit that it was no more than an assumption, fed by the volume and vitriol of the right blogosphere.

I really don't like the idea of dismissing news out of hand because of the source, but when the sources have been wong again and again, and not only mistaken but have actually, as we say in the blogosphere, "made shit up," I have to discount people like Glenn Reynolds, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter (who has all but admitted she's in it for the money and doesn't believe a word of it herself), and the whole run of rightwingers. (This seems like an apt place to point out once again GayPatriot's story on "The Democrats' Culture of Corruption" at the height of the Abramoff scandals. This is ludicrous. And Chris Crain says he's "always found their perspectives to be fresh and interesting and thought-provoking." As you know, I seldom find any evidence of thought on that site at all. One thing that's instructive from Crain's post, however, is that he, Carroll, Sullivan, et al., all fit very nicely into the Republican country-club mentality. It's the same syndrome I've noticed in a couple of Malkin's posts -- one of the most significant aspects of their output is the name-dropping.)

Back to an important point that Mapes raises in her e-mail to Greenwald, and one that is implicit in the image that heads this post:

Sadly, I worked for a news organization that had become little more than a corporate brand.

Of course the MSM is sympathetic to Bush and his agenda -- he's corporate-friendly, and they are corporations. Ethics, factual accuracy, real reporting are secondary to the bottom line, and the bottom line depends on sucking up to power. In that context, who can realistically expect journalism?