I don’t know about you wingnuts, but for my money the finest, most patriotic organization currently doing Gaia’s work in the never-ending battle against Rethuglican malevolence is the George Soros–funded Media Matters for America. Yes, media really does matter for America, and the media that really matters for Amerikkka is Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. If it weren’t for Faux News (as we lefty wags, justly renowned for our sense of word play, like to call it), the scales would fall from America’s media-mattering eyes, and the legions of the unblessed would suddenly achieve a moment of perfect clarity. Fox News’ lies are America’s demise. Or something like that; I’m still working on the word play.
In case you’re one of the dupes and fools who believe everything they hear on Fox News, Glenn Beck, and Fox News, Media Matters is in no wise a left-wing fever swamp of overpaid, high-dudgeoned hacks and nonentities, chained to their desks in fancy offices on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington as they monitor the latest outrages from Fox News and Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Not at all. Instead, it’s a not-for-profit, $10-million-a-year, 501(c)3 “progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media” that’s now threatening “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” against —
You guessed it: Fox News.
Like the minutes of a Union Square Communist cell in the 1940s, Media Matters eschews stylish writing and individual voices. It’s a true tool of the leftist collective, the media that matters for an America that needs its media to matter. No matter which of its many “senior fellows” is writing “research” or “columns” about Fox News, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, the Koch brothers, and Fox News, it all sounds exactly the same. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Eric Boehlert, Ari Rabin-Havt, Jamison Foser, Sarah Pavlus, Simon Maloy, or your great-aunt Hilda, the heroic prose reads like the product of the best J school in Belarus — or my alma mater, the Columbia Graduate School of Social Research, Marxism-Leninism, and Journalism. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
Leaving aside for the moment the unfortunate resemblance of many of the names of MMFA staffers to those of the moochers and looters in Ayn Rand’s mean-spirited “novel,” Atlas Shrugged — Wesley Mouch, Floyd Ferris, and Balph Eubank — here’s a typical example of 501(c)3 non-partisan, tax-exempt columnizing, from a drone heroic people’s writer named Karl Frisch, who can turn a weather story into an attack on, well, Fox News.
This is as a [sic] good a moment as any to note that there is a very real difference between weather (what we experience outside over a short period of time) and climate (the study of weather over a relatively long period of time). Got that? Conservative media figures telling you that this week’s blizzards (short period of time) disprove global climate change (relatively long period of time) are either lying or shockingly misinformed. I’ll let them choose which is a more apt description.
Leading the anti-science idiocy is a host of conservative Fox News figures.
So imagine the tingle that ran up my leg when I learned that David Brock and the rest of his Soros-financed fellow-travelers are finally ready to take the gloves off and bring Fox News and Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and the Koch brothers and Roger Ailes and Fox News to their knees. Brock, you vicious savages might recall, is one of the sterling exemplars of the American Left, someone who started out as one of you, then came over from the dark side and into the light of sweet reason, smashed windows, and George Soros’s moolah. He’s sort of David Horowitz in reverse, except that people on our side are actually afraid of David Horowitz, because his mommy really was a Commie and he knows what he’s talking about.
All I can say is, it’s about time. For decades, we’ve been turning the other cheek as you hateful, hurtful right-wingers have inflicted injury after injury upon us, like beating us in elections every once in a while. Here all we want to do is effect a fundamental transformation of your entire country — its morals, its politics, its economic system, its place in the world — and you refuse to play along. And this with the splendid examples of my beloved Soviet Union and Communist China staring you in the face. How many people do we men of the Left have to kill before you take us seriously?
And we thought we had you. Using the media that really matters for America — our lapdog media, whose stories are written and broadcast by our friends from the old neighborhood, the same people we still live among on the Upper West Side, in Brentwood, on the Cape, and on the Island — we had kept Amerikkka blinkered and blindfolded, distracting the rubes from our slow-moving demolition derby with trash-culture stories whenever it seemed your side might finally be waking up. Thank Gaia for Liz and Dick, for Tiny Tim, for Elton John, for Paris Hilton and Charlie Sheen and all the others who have changed the subject in times of great national peril.
But then along came Fox News and Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and the Koch brothers and Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch and Fox News, and all of a sudden, in our minds at least, the field was level again. It didn’t matter that we still had CBSNBCABCCNNMSNBC in our corner; that’s what we keep parrots for. But Fox News had the temerity to want to fly, free as a bird (I dunno, an eagle, a hawk, a buzzard, but not a parakeet), and we simply can’t have that. Like Maya Angelou, we know why the caged bird sings, and it’s to sing for his supper.
Oddly enough, I’ve taken my share of grief from the tovariches over at Media Matters, who, unlike you humorless dopes, take what I write quite seriously; with their trenchant prose and jeu d’esprit they really know how to hurt a guy when they decide to dudgeon him to death.
So, as His Serene Majesty Barack Hussein Obama II, Lord of the Flies, Keeper of the Hoops, Master of the Greens, Bringer of Kinetic Military Action, and Protector of the Holy Cities of Honolulu and Chicago, likes to say, let me be clear:
Hey, Media Matters for America. I’m here, on the inside, in the belly of the Buckleyan beast, monitoring the media that matters for America. Don’t blow my cover, dudes! I’m down with the struggle! I’m the spy who stayed out in the cold!
But I still have to eat. And that’s why I’ve been inspired at just this moment to come up with a new screenplay pitch, which I’m calling my agent about later today:
Clash of the Titans II — Soros vs. Murdoch: This Time, It’s Bloody Personal.
I’d pay to see that, wouldn’t you? Hell, I’d even pay to see it on Fox News, but only if Jamie Colby plays the girl. I’ve still got my principles.
— David Kahane misses the Berlin Wall, because it was so much easier being a double agent in the good old days. You can write to him in invisible ink at kahanenro@gmail.com or pretend to have read his book, Rules for Radical Conservatives, and become his Commie-cell friend on Facebook. Don’t worry, he won’t blow your cover.