There. Is. No. Tea. Party. -- Stupid Media Edition

The stupidest poll you will read all month comes to you courtesy of (surprise!) the Washington Post:

Just 7 percent of journalists are Republicans. That’s far fewer than even a decade ago.

BY CHRIS CILLIZZA

May 6 at 12:52 pm

A majority of American journalists identify themselves as political independents although among those who choose a side Democrats outnumber Republicans four to one, according to a new study of the media conducted by two Indiana University professors. Write Lars Wilnat and David Weaver, professors of journalism at Indiana, of their findings:

Compared with 2002, the percentage of full-time U.S. journalists who claim to be Democrats has dropped 8 percentage points in 2013 to about 28 percent, moving this figure closer to the overall population percentage of 30 percent, according to a December 12-15, 2013, ABC News/Washington Post national poll of 1,005 adults. This is the lowest percentage of journalists saying they are Democrats since 1971. An even larger drop was observed among journalists who said they were Republicans in 2013 (7.1 percent) than in 2002 (18 percent), but the 2013 figure is still notably lower than the percentage of U.S. adults who identified with the Republican Party (24 percent according to the poll mentioned above).

...

Wow. Sounds terribly one-sided doesn't it? And how very lucky that it also just so happens to perfectly reinforce the longstanding Beltway fairy tale that the dang Librul Media bends our national narrative so far to the Left that its only fair to stack the deck in favor of the Party of Louis Gohmert whenever and wherever possible?

Because Fairness.

Also Balance.

And thus things will stand...until anyone with a functioning cerebral cortex pushes even lightly against the assumptions underlying these stats, at which point the most amazing things start to happen.

For example, you discover that, according to paid Republican liar Sean Hannity, Sean Hannity is not a Republican, as you would know if you had listened to this exchange between definitely-not-a-Republican Sean Hannity and Congressman Keith Ellison from 2013:

...

ELLISON: Quite frankly you are the worst excuse for a journalist I have ever seen.

HANNITY:  I can’t hear you.

ELLISON: You heard me.

HANNITY: No, say it again.

ELLISON: I heard you — what you just displayed was not journalism, it was yellow journalism, it wasn’t anything close to try to tell the American people what’s really going on and I mean, it’s just shocking.

HANNITY: Yellow journalism, to play Obama in his own words is yellow journalism.

ELLISON: With the background music and the lead up before you let the president talk. Let me tell you, I was here. Everything the president said is absolutely true.

HANNITY: Yeah.

ELLISON: And for you to try to make the American people make you think it isn’t is deceptive on your part and is a breach of everything, every journalistic ethic I heard of was just violated by you. And the president was truthful. The president was honest. What the president said was dead on accurate and for you to say the president is to blame here is ridiculous. I was there August, 2011 when the Republicans, your party, which you shamelessly …

HANNITY: I am not a Republican

ELLISON: You are nothing but a Republican.

Shrieking wingnut welfare radio hack, Mark Levine?

Also not a Republican!

... Levin said when it's time to govern, Republican establishment politicians "jettison" their positions and promises made on the campaign trail.

He also blasted those in the chattering class who were once liberals, hated and did not support Ronald Reagan, and who mock constitutional conservatives, just like the liberal hippies and poets they are, choosing to work with Republican establishment operatives to trash conservatives.

Levin reminded his audience that in 2006, "George W. Bush and his right-hand political hack Karl Rove lost the House of Representatives and the United States Senate."

He said nothing good was happening within the Republican party until 2010 when the people "rose up through the grassroots" after they had enough of George W. Bush's policies and the direction Obama was taking the nation after the election.

Levin, whose book Liberty and Tyranny sold a million copies without being reviewed by mainstream outlets and who was a precursor of the Tea Party movement, said the Tea Party tidal wave in 2010 was not fueled by lobbyists or establishment consultants. Instead, he called it a "spontaneous movement of patriotic Americans with conservative beliefs"--individuals who were fed up with the overreach of Democrats who controlled Congress.

"Did the Republican Party stop them? No. You stopped them," Levin thunderously declared...

And I am willing to wager that any one of you who still gets blast-emails from Republican friends or colleagues or relatives can attest to the fact that right around the time the serial catastrophes of the Bush Administration reached full bloom and the Kenyan Usurper was elected...

...suddenly...

... all of those Rush-loving, Liberal-hating, lifelong Republicans who had screamed for Clinton's impeachment over smoke and shadows for eight years and then spent the next eight years called you a cheese-eating, terrorist-loving surrender-monkey for not shutting the fuck up and blindly supporting George W. Cheney vanished!

Vanished utterly in a confetti-cloud of hastily shredded "Bush/Cheney '08" bumper stickers!

Vanished in the night in their tens of millions...and (thanks to the Magical Bush-Off Machine) been replaced by legions of "independents" and "independent constitutional conservatives" and "independent fiscal conservatives" who had never even heard of George W. Bush.

Even Paid Republican liar and "Majority Maker" Rush Limbaugh has confirmed what I have been saying since the joint Koch Brothers/GOP weasel-out-of-taking-responsibility-for-all-the-shit-we-wrecked rebranding scheme called the "Tea Party" was launched:

...

I guess they had some people with meters that were being used to register their reaction to what they were hearing, and I noted that the independent and Republican lines tracked identically. When there was a positive reaction to whatever was being said, the independents and Republicans were perfectly aligned. There was not a gap between them. When there was anger or disagreement with whatever was being said, the Republican and independent lines tracked identically, with very little space between them.

I think there's been a fundamental shift in who the independents are. I think the independents of today are, in many cases (and maybe a majority now), former Republicans who are fed up. They're actually conservatives, former Republicans who feel disconnected from the Republican Party as it's defined by the establishment. They have simply given up the party ID. They simply registered as independents.

...

If you're just joining us, I actually apologized to independents today for getting it wrong 'cause I think now what's happened, the vast majority of the independents are Republicans who have left the party in one way or another.

Of course, back in 2009 when I explained the surge of Fake Independents in an open letter to paid Republican liar David Brooks as follows (The "Independent" Granfalloon) I put a different spin on it --

... And based on simple observation, guess who appears to be the largest group of late-blooming independents?

Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every fucking day, that's who.

Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their live and futures.

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

But they fool no one.

Except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks.

-- but the results are same.

Most of this county's newly-minted "independents" Republicans -- Republicans who spent eight years gleefully kicking the shit out of you for not getting on-board with their horrible ideas, and who went into a Beltway-Media-abetted witness-protection program once the Bush Regime went tits-up.

And any journalist who doesn't bother to mention that fact is selling something.  

And that "something" is usually "Both Sides Do It":

The movement toward independent status among reporters is in keeping with a similar move in the broader electorate as they find the two parties increasingly rigid and, therefore, less welcoming.