When You're a Hack

You're a Hack all the way
From your first Richard Cohen
To your last Matthew Bai...

"Salon" has it's list of America's Top 30 Hacks up here.

It is a fine Honor Roll of the Damned which fails on only two, piddling points:

1. It misses being comprehensive by several miles by massively under-representing Fox. This is perhaps due to the fact that the product Fox extrudes can no longer be even nominally defined as a form of "journalism" at which they are spectacularly failing [Hackery] but instead must judged on its own terms: as a purely Republican Pravda-like propaganda delivery and fund-raising machine. A job at which Fox succeeds brilliantly.

2. Seeing David Fucking Brooks bringing up the rear at #30, I can only conclude that someone at Salon has been monkeying the the Excel "sort" function. Less hackish than S.E. Cupp and Pat Caddell? Really? David Brooks is the chief architect and purveyor of the Biggest Conservative Lie Of All: That no matter how fucking depraved the Right becomes, Invisible Liberals are always somehow equally to blame for everything. It is the Big Lie that makes all the hundreds of little Conservative lies possible. He plies his relentlessly dishonest craft from the commanding heights of the most valuable and influential editorial real estate in journalism. This combination easily makes Brooks the most dangerous and duty-derelict hack in America.

But other than a few quibbles, good first effort Salon.

And how sad -- how very, very ,very sad -- that there are absolutely no more good writers or talkers to be found anymore anywhere who could spark just a little light inside the dim, suffocating hack-yurt tree fort of our political discourse.