Muck Mills and teh Derp

I came of age during the Watergate hearings and the fall of Saigon.  I’d like to say that the constant bombardment of  news surrounding incredible levels of deception during my status of adult-in-process gave me a jaded eye and sensibility.  I have to admit that I haven’t trusted much of anything coming from self-appointed authority figures since I figured out the Santa/Easter Bunny scam some where around nursery school.  I’ve since extrapolated those lessons to any concept of a ‘supreme’ being and a noble fourth estate.  I might as well worship and read the World According to the Great Pumpkin.

The entire Clinton penis obsession in the 1990s sewed up a lot of my earlier hypotheses.  Recent events have caused me to consider them good theory.  There is way too much evidence now.   We even know now that Woodard of Woodard and Bernstein might as well sport a set of fluffy ears and hop on down that bunny trail. I seem to have a friend in Charles Pierce.  There are no more Studs Terkels or Jack Andersons and we might as retire the term muckraker  and create a new one, say, Muck Mill.

Derp.

Pierce writes about the Conservative News Media–e.g. Muck Mills–that exist to Donald Segretti our policy conversations, news, and current events. As always, his blog post is glib and biting.  It is also a disconcerting reminder of the power, audacity, and hubris of Muck Mills like Fox “News” and what ever it is that republican court eunuch Tucker Carlson has created in his out-of-the-mainstream media reincarnation. Carlson’s lack of genitals and gray matter has been out on display all week.

Pierce believes the Muck Mills are imploding. Afterall, Limbaugh has lost many patrons after attacking a young law student who argued that all insurance policies should include access to birth control, Rove is trying to remain relevant since his meltdown last election season, and Snowflake Snookie can only get a gig at CPAC now.  Some of these things do carry the frankincense whiff of the beautiful hands of a divine and just goddess. However, I prefer the wisdom of the great American Saint  P.T. Barnum and the catechism of “There’s a sucker born every minute.”  Wherever there are suckers, there will be religious viewers of Fox News and readers of Red State.

First, there was the embarrassing revelation that a host of rightwing bloggers — and one from the port side, Jerome Armstrong —  were on the fiddle with the Malaysian government to the tune of almost 400 large. (One of them, Ben Domenech, was a recidivist embarrassment, having previously lost a sweet gig with the endlessly credulous Washington Post because he was a proven thief of other people’s work.) Then, last night, it was revealed that Tucker Carlson’s vanity project, The Daily Caller, appears to have been caught trying to sucker its audience regarding the tale of New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez’s patronizing of prostitutes. (TDC is standing by its reporting for the moment, although its explanation is rather heavy with the squid ink.) This is hardly the way you want to celebrate Holy Week commemorating The Passion Of Andrew Breitbart. On the other hand, maybe it is.

This has been coming for some time. The conservative media establishment is so self-contained as to be positively incestuous, so it can’t be any surprise that, sooner or later, there are some two-headed cousins gamboling over the public landscape. There is no internal governor to its enthusiasms; there are only wealthy sugar-daddies pushing the boundaries gleefully outward. There is the very strange and self-fulfilling sense of both victimhood and outlawry, that the people who cash checks from the Koch brothers, or from some shadowy Malaysian fixer, are the true revolutionaries. There has been no accounting because there has been nobody to call them to account, and that is not entirely the fault of the conservative movement. Actual journalists have taken a dive as well.

There’s been a little crowing in the establishment media over the accumulated comeuppance. On the liberal MSNBC last night, Lawrence O’Donnell went to dinner on the Menendez material. But return with us now, if you will, to those thrilling days of yesteryear — to the 1990s, to be precise, because that’s where it all began, and it began with the complicity, and the active participation, of the respectable press. This is one of those moments in which Bill Clinton must chuckle ruefully to himself before he gets on with his day.

The pursuit of the Clintons — which morphed into the pursuit of the president’s penis — is where it all began.

I guess I don’t quite feel the white hot cleansing heat of the implosion quite yet.  Let me offer up a few chomps and bits just from searching around the headlines today.  For example, Pierce offers up the the clown car side of the Muck Mills. This is James O’Keefe who has to be the posterboy for the DSM of Mental Disorder’s entry on pathological narcissism and lying. He’s the edit happy pimp court enuch of ACORN fame. Now, we all know that ACORN disappeared from the face of their flat earth after the Muck Mill Meme production spit out a lot of its usual lies and outrage.  Why on earth should poor people be allowed to vote or have an advocacy group? However, sucker exhibit one is this weird item: ACORN, In New GOP Budget Bill, Would Be Defunded Again, Even Though It No Longer Exists.   One can only reason that defunding of the Friends Of Hamas and the Junior League of Al Quaida is next.

Rogers’ bill also explicitly bars the use of the funds it appropriates for computer networks that do not block the viewing and exchange of pornography. It further bans the transportation of detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to facilities in the United States, even though the Obama administration has not transferred any detainees from Guantanamo since 2009 and has announced no plans to do so.

What can you say to the ongoing placement of conspiracy theories into US Law by crazed Republican Congresscritters?  Derp.

Meanwhile, we continue to watch The Daily Caller try to weasel its way out of the Menendez Prostitute Fantasy.  If only they were around to actually chase David Vitter who really did have a series of paid liaisons to investigate and likely use of public funds or assets supporting his diaper fetish.  Vitter has gubernatorial ambitions now while Elliot Spitzer still can’t get a real job. Derp.

Then, there’s the current Pressketeer Anything can Happen Day where MSNBC declares Joe Scarborough an obvious winner of a Charlie Rose finagled debate between Dr. Paul Krugman, acclaimed economics professor and said morning hack.   Yes, Joe clearly won because he can interrupt folks with gusto and read decades old news and declare them Bazinga!  worthy.  This quote is an example of Joe’s debating skills? Derp.

Krugman: If it wasn’t for me and a few people who are loudly saying, ‘the deficit is not a problem’ without first qualifying it with three paragraphs of–’well, you know, longer term it is a problem.’  I don’t think this message that spending cuts are hurting the economy would be getting across at all.

Scarborough (laughing): By the way, Paul, it’s very important to note:  Paul just agreed that only three people agree with him and are saying this.

Krugman: No, no, only three people–I said only three people are saying it without prefacing it with the obligatory three paragraphs. On the substance–Ben Bernanke gave a speech last week that was, for all practical purposes, saying the same thing I’m saying.  He said–you know, the deficit–the outlook looks relatively okay for the next ten years.  Now, we would like it to be lower, but it’s relatively okay.  But spending cuts right now are a really bad thing.

Yes. It some point we had real intellectuals writing and editing newspapers.  Ben Franklin comes to mind.  Now, we are regaled by the random Muck Mill-inspired propaganda of news readers–like Tom Brokaw–who would prefer they were the only ones with serious answers.  Yes, even when those serious answers are clearly made-up, invented, woven from thin air, and against all data, evidence, and reality.  I’m sticking to my atheist, science-based, jaded sensibilities. Here, there be Muck Mills.

Derp.