Republican Idealism

I saw that Roger Ailes (of Fox News fame) was on ABC's This Week today. I certainly didn't watch it, but from the commentary I read Paul Krugman and Arianna Huffington gave him a "smack-down". I'm not linking to it for two reasons. First, I think you can find it on the intertubes with minimal effort. Second, it wasn't the epic smack down purported to be. I think the best description is that Ailes seemed dis-interested in the clips I saw.

Then I came across this NYT article via digby and found this little bit:

Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, agreed with me that the paper was “slow off the mark,” and blamed “insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.” She and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies. Keller declined to identify the editor, saying he wanted to spare that person “a bombardment of e-mails and excoriation in the blogosphere.”

Despite what the critics think, Abramson said the problem was not liberal bias.

This is in reference to the ACORN-pimp-propaganda promulgated by the now infamous James O'Keefe. The ACORN story was run almost non-stop despite the fact that the video was heavily edited for content.

Something in my tiny little brain clicked at this point. Why should Ailes care if some effete liberal pwed him on a talk show? Through Fox News, he drives the media narrative. He could care less about how he comes off personally. I guarantee that Fox will have some serious push-back tomorrow about some completely made-up, borderline libelous, issue to placate his fat ego. He knows nobody will call him on it. He knows the rest of the media will breathlessly follow whatever lies he chooses to propagate. Assholes, all of 'em.

Fuck it, we'll do it live!