Stupid Shit Andrew Sullivan Says, Ctd.

Extra Stupid Edition

From Andrew Sullivan, December 3, 2012:

A reader pushes back against my comparison of the two networks:

Can we please stop with the false equivalency that MSNBC is a less-competent Fox? MSNBC is slanted, but here are the things that keep them distinct from Fox:

1) They acknowledge their bias.

2) They don't ignore major news stories.

3) They don't invent news from fiction.

4) They don't fund/promote/create 'grass roots' movements and then cover them as spontaneous.

5) They don't attack and undermine non-partisan fact-checking sources

6) They (particularly Maddow) attempt to get actual important figures from the right to come on, though those figures usually decline

7) They don't employ politicians who are currently running for office while covering those same politicians

These aren't distinctions of competence; they are distinctions of kind. I know you don't care for their treatment of Pat "You-Can't-Say-That-on-Television" Buchanan, but ejecting a single figure for persistent offensive speech is not the same as ejecting an entire class of commentators simply because their arguments may undermine your core propaganda message.

MSNBC is partisan. Fox is false.

I don't think my reader is wrong. But because I'm not a partisan Democrat, all I can say is that Fox is completely shameless in its propaganda and paranoia while MSNBC is just smug with its partisanship and liberalism. So Fox is worse. But forgive me for not watching either - unless for hathetic purposes.

And here you see the beating heart of Fake Centrism baring its mortified Conservative pedigree.  

From Pravda-mendacity-canneries like Fox and Hate Radio to the GOP's bigotry-injected electoral machine, Conservatism's Grand Strategic Plan has always come down to telling comforting lies to a mob of bigots and imbeciles, all day, every day, year after year after year.  It is a plan which has worked so well that their army of brainwashed orcs has all but wrecked American democracy on behalf of the Conservative oligarchs and theocrats who bankroll the enterprise 

This has been going on a very long time, and for most of that time Professional Conservative Public Intellectuals like Andrew Sullivan completely failed this country by refusing to even acknowledge the monster the Right was building until it was far, far too late to stop it.  At the same time, while flying under a separate-but-equally-scurrilous banner, the American mainstream media also completely failed this country by refusing to report honestly on the monster even after it had kicked the doors of lab of their hinges and was running amok in full view, choosing instead to turn every Conservative atrocity into one more bullshit "Both Sides Do It" circle jerk.

MSNBC (and the late, lamented Air America) stepped into the deafening moral vacuum created by the Right's paranoia and fascism and the Center's smothering, willfully-blind cowardice with a business plan that basically came down to exposing the comforting lies that Fox News' tells its mob of bigots and imbeciles. 

It really is that painfully simple, and the fact that Mr. Sullivan finds this smug and partisan is funny enough, but it is JATOed into the upper orbits of high comedy when you realize that this horror of icky, smug, partisan Liberalism is coming from an Andrew Sullivan who has built his entire post-Dubya  career out of odds and ends purloined from the Liberal parts department.

Or as I wrote back in 2009:

...if Mr. Sullivan simply outed himself as a Liberal, he would instantly lose his place in the food-chain, wouldn’t he? Because like that microscopic number of self-loathing black Conservatives who make their daily bread by serving the interests of the Southern Bigot Party, more than any other single factor, it was always the sheer gawking, oddballness of the brazen self-delusion inherent in being the gay champion of the Christopath Homophobe Party that put Mr. Sullivan in the spotlight.

That was what gave him his unique and lucrative cache.

After all, Liberal gay political writers are a dime a dozen, and so in a strange way we find Andrew Sullivan locked in the same kind of mortal combat over labels -- and for exactly the same reasons -- as Roy Cohn's character in "Angels In America" as he adamantly insisted -- even as he was dying of AIDS -- that he was not a "ho-mo-sex-shall".

(Not Safe For Work)

Because, Cohn reasoned, homosexuals were nobodies; losers who had zero clout and “in 15 years cannot pass a pissant anti-discrimination bill from City Council.” And since Roy Cohn could get the President of the United States (or his wife) on the phone -- could take the man he was fucking to the White House and make Ronald Reagan smile at him and shakes his hand -- it therefore followed that Roy Cohn could not possibly be a homosexual.

That unlike every other person in his position on Earth, Roy Cohn was a heterosexual man, who fucked around with guys.

Likewise, even though Mr. Sullivan now, belatedly comes to believe much of what Liberals believe and finally deigns to notice a horde of grotesque truths about his Conservative Movement about which Liberals have been sounding the alarm for 30 years, Andrew Sullivan nonetheless looks us all straight in that eye and argues that he could not possibly be some mere Liberal.

Because in Mr. Sullivan's world, "Liberal" does not refer to a political ideology, but to an impoverishing political ghetto from which no amount of "being right about everything" will permit you to achieve escape velocity. In Mr. Sullivan's world, "Liberal" is a terrible disease that afflicts losers who do not get invited to spout their views on teevee.

Mr. Sullivan regularly receives such largess, therefore he must not be a Liberal.

He instead must be the lone member be of some rare and singular new species; some miraculous form of haploid political minotaur.

Because if he is not something spontaneously-generated and utterly sui generis, then he is just another Lefty-Come-Very-Lately, showing up at our door at 3:00 A.M., 20 years late and trailing toxic baggage behind him like Halley's Comet.

And who in the world would pay him to do his little dance then?