Do you feel Manipulated yet?

Okay, this is just way too strange not to bring up. It’s not in my area of expertise and it’s going to cause me to link to places I would usually rather not go, but just when I think cable news stations can sink no lower, I find another jaw dropper. I know, I know, they’re sycophants that are paid to misinform. They get ratings by telling folks what they want to hear. But so many people take them seriously that I think it’s dangerous to look away. Besides it has the Schadenfreude element.

So, first up we have Glenn Beck who is doing a dance on the grave of Van Jones’ career by telling the Becksters to send him everything they can find on Cass Sunstein. Sunstein is the next target of the Meanie Becksters.

Beck’s ostensible purpose here is to expose the “czars” who’ve been appointed by the president. Sunstein stands out like a sore thumb, as he’s been tied up by holds and filibusters for months, and Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) only filed for cloture on his nomination at the start of August.

How has Sunstein become so controversial? Basically, conservative Websites have read his iconoclastic, theoretical writing and pumped up the bits that sound really strange. A current example comes from CNSNews.com.

Outlined in the 2008 book “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness,” Sunstein and co-author Richard H. Thaler argued that the main reason that more people do not donate their organs is because they are required to choose donation. … This problem could be remedied if governments changed the laws for organ donation, they said. Currently, unless a patient has explicitly chosen to be an organ donor, either on his driver’s license or with a donor card, the doctors assume that the person did not want to donate and therefore do not harvest his organs. Thaler and Sunstein called this “explicit consent.”

Now, there is a similar call by Keith Olbermann via the Orange Place.

I don’t know why I’ve got this phrasing in my head, but: Find everything you can about Glenn Beck, Stu Burguiere, and Roger Ailes.

No, even now, I refuse to go all caps.

No, sending me links to the last two Countdowns with my own de-constructions of his biblical vision quality Communist/Fascist/Socialist/Zimbalist art at Rockefeller Center (where, curiously, he works, Comrade) doesn’t count. Nor does sending me links to specious inappropriate point-underscoring prove-you’re-innocent made-up rumors.

It gets curiouser and curiouser. Jane Hamshear at FDL (my old hangout) is complaining about all the liberals under the bus and writes this piece as a way of protesting the handling of Jones. She’s calling for liberal organizations to return to their roots and bite the hands that feed them. This has a sort’ve ancillary feel because she believes the President keeps selling out to the right rather than being their enabler. Yeah, right.

The message is loud and clear: incur the wrath of the right wing, and you’re on your own.Wow, is that a way to encourage your team or what.

If these groups, if these liberal leaders, let Jones just hang there while Glenn Beck pounds his chest and celebrates the scalp, we have no liberal institutions. What we have are a bunch of neoliberal enablers who have found a nice comfortable place in the DC establishment that they don’t want to jeopardize, and place on the new K-Street gravy train that they don’t want to lose. Dropping Van Jones from their rolodex is a small price to pay.

Spiders with Substance Abuse Issues weave weird webs

Oh, I got one more quote for you.

Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!

Sir Walter Scott, Marmion, Canto vi. Stanza 17.
Scottish author & novelist (1771 – 1832)

I’m not sure if I want to call this an open thread or what. Just do what you will with it.

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