Breaking! Ermahgerd! Fox News Lies! Like, All The Time!

The mighty ship had already stuck the iceberg, cracked its hull and slid beneath the waves.  All around the hole in the water where the Titanic was killed floated the detritus of hubris and disaster -- doors, mattresses, menus and the bodies of the dead.

And as a handful of half-frozen survivors in half-full lifeboats rowed away from the catastrophe, one voice was heard, floating above the silent waters.

"Be careful!" the voice shouted into the cold, dark night.  "There may be icebergs around here and I hear those things are dangerous!"

From the Washington Post:

It’s time — high time — to take Fox News’s destructive role in America seriously

Don't get me wrong, it's a fine article.  Go read it if you like.  But it is also maddening in that it is the one millionth example of someone in the "respectable" media finally, breathlessly reporting something that we dirty hippies have been saying for literally decades.

See, we on the America-hating, terrorist-loving Left have always taken Fox News seriously.

In fact, we have been standing on our little bloggy orange crates for years, warning that --

--  Fox News and the Republican Party and their enablers in the "serious" media were intermingled like a Rat King.

All collectively complicit in enabling a goon squad of bigots, demagogues, grifters and mad men --

 -- in driving this country right off the cliff.

From me, back in 2010:

Mr. [Juan] Williams' real problem is not what he did or did not say; his real problem is that, after years of being permitted to romp around the American media paddock free and unfettered, he finally ran into one of the last intact sections of the rusty, run-down fence-line that once delineated the boundary between actual journalism and the farce of Fox News.

Because Fox News is not a news organization. It is -- quite openly and unapologetically -- the propaganda wing of the American fascist movement.

It is performance art on a global scale, designed to constantly push-push-push a radical political agenda and lie to the American people by extruding a hard-right-flavored news-looking product 24/7/365 directly into the skulls of the Republican Base.

Think about that for a minute: every single fucking day, the agenda for the entire media-political-economic engine of the last superpower on Earth is prodded along by a single corporation dedicated to perpetrating one, massive, toxic lie after another.

And everybody knows it.

That's the thing. That's what makes it so sickening; the simple, observable fact that, deep down, the Big Murdoch Lie Machine really fools no one at all but hardcore meatsticks of the Republican Party base. The rest of it -- its day-to-day operations -- is all kabuki, depending entirely on the consensual collusion of thousands of media bean-field hands like Mr. Williams who make their daily bread oiling the cogs of the terrible machine, and who, in turn, depend on the rage and savage ignorance of millions of bitter Pig People who will pay any price to have someone in a suit on teevee tell them that they're actually insightful patriots.

It is a great, reeking crack-house which pays Mr. Williams very well for deejaying in the living room. And because -- like far, far too many of his colleagues -- Mr. Williams clearly believes this is all just a game, he can see no reason why he shouldn't be able to work six days a week for a cut of FoxNews' crack-and-hooker trade, and then duck around the corner just in time to strap on a collar and make another few dollars preaching High Church Journalism from the pulpit at NPR.

But this is not an academic debate over journalistic methodology, Juan.

This is a war.

And in this war you have to pick a fucking side.

And for our troubles, the same corrupt media cartel that allowed the Fox News plague to grow and spread in plain sight, mocked us and laughed off as alarmist cranks and amateurs who didn't understand how the media or politics really works.

Funny old world.

Behold, a Tip Jar!