Obviously Time To Start My Birthday Fundraiser

Since it looks like I have a lot of catching-up to do.

Because while there is a lot of yadda yadda in this article about what a clueless, sleazy little hatepimp Ben Shapiro is --

Welcome, Ben Shapiro
What a precious snowflake.

Ben Shapiro is the kind of person who talks about opening the door to civil, genuine conversation, then slams it on your foot and taunts you if you say “ouch.” ...

-- here is a cold, hard fact, with a little emphasis added to liven up your field of vision:

His speaking tour is sponsored by the Young America’s Foundation, a big-budget conservative youth organization that uses its outside money to coordinate and pay speakers who come to campus, ostensibly at the invitation of their campus YAF chapters. The organization is more top-down than its preferred, heroic, resistance narrative of “small campus conservative group takes on the liberal goliath” and standing up against the “self-perpetuating aristocracy” that is the public university. The YAF holds over $71 million in assets. Thanks to a $10 million gift from the DeVos family, the national organization recently bought the Ronald Reagan ranch, and a 2016 $16 million bequest has turbo-charged their national speaker initiatives. The YAF is also closely affiliated with the State Policy Network, a web of conservative think tanks awash in Koch brothers money and the organizational power behind the ALEC initiatives to get ultra-conservative template legislation into state legislatures. Real outsiders. Alumni of the YAF include Jeff Sessions, Stephen Miller and Ann Coulter, while current speakers range from the anti-Islamic Robert Spencer to the questionably credentialed Ted Nugent.

Simply put, the kind of money the Right puts behind even a clueless, sleazy little hatepimp like Ben Shapiro buys him and his filthy agenda a place at the table.

With that kind of money, you can buy your way into national media conversation and onto the national agenda.

With it, you can buy your way back into the spotlight no matter how miserable an excuse for a human being you are:

Fox was trying to convince the public that its culture had changed. But they were determined to keep Bill O’Reilly. https://t.co/0ykzHam7Ik

— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 21, 2017

Without it, you're just another crackpot standing on an orange crate, annoying the passers-by.

So here's the deal.

If I can raise just a tiny fraction of what Fox News spent to buy Bill O'Reilly out of prison time and back into prime time ... just a wee percentage of what the Young America’s Foundation is willing to drop to keep America's media pantry stocked with human toe-jam like Ben Shapiro ... say, a million dollars ... I solemnly promise to run right back down to the Dollar General and buy this very copy of Newt Gingrich's Brick Of Turgid-Bullshit (assuming someone hasn't snapped it up by then) -- 

-- and send it -- autographed by me -- to the person who puts me over the top!

Behold, a Tip Jar!

The Patient Capital Of Crazy

This is Warner Todd Huston.  The one on the left.

Longtime readers will be somewhat familiar with his work from posts I have occasionally done over the years like "Big Red Todd and the Monsters".

Mr. Huston's oeuvre is repackaging wingnut talking points and pooping them out like little paving stones on the road to Hell. And at this job he is very persistent. He just chugs along, rain or shine, diligently reprocessing the bottom of the RWNJ birdcage into content for a variety of Conservative sites you have known and been alternately amused and repulsed by during your sojourn through these here internets:

Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com,  StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDailyReview.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany's Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.

Huston has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events. Huston's work has appeared on Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Neil Bortz, and Michael Savage. He has appeared on the G. Gordon Liddy show, many times on Chicago's WGN 720AM, and dozens of local shows from coast to coast, and many blogtalk radio shows.

Mr. Huston has appeared on local TV news to discuss his writing, has been a guest on Fox Business Network, CNN's blogger lunch, and has appeared on Breitbart TV's B-Team show.

Warner is also the editor of the Midwest Editor for RedCounty.com and has a blog on the Tribune-Owned ChicagoNow.com website. He is a well known writer on Illinois politics.

He has also written for Liberty Ink Magazine, several history magazines and appears in the book "Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture"which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of PubliusForum.com. Mr. Huston's work has also appeared in several College Textbooks...

Keep that in mind.

Well, yesterday Ol' Warner got kinda famous outside of the precincts that corner of Crazytown where he plies his trade.  You see, the cult Warner works for spends half its time shrieking about President Obama being the antichrist because of whatever he did yesterday, and the other half of its time all twitchy and amped and hair-trigger ready to go absolutely apeshit over whatever President Obama does tomorrow.  And it literally no longer matters what the President actually does or does not do -- whatever he has for breakfast tomorrow, that thing will be spell the Death of Freedumb and Our Glorious Republic unless we act to defeat this tyrant now!now!now!

Rinse and repeat.
Forever and ever.
You know the drill.

Well, as a professional spreader of conspiracies and amplifier of  bullshit, Warner sorta forgot that he's not actually very bright or capable of distinguishing between the scent of Chanel No. 5 and his own refried Limbaugh farts.  And what with all the copying and pasting and bitching and keening, he kinda got way out over his skis and fucked massively up.  And that fuckup sailed right through the wingnutosphere like ebola through a human centipede before anyone bothered to notice that is was indeed a fuckup.

Which is how got all over the Liberal side of the internet, starting with TPM and spreading outward through the radio, through Esquire and onto the MSNBC teevee machine:

Breitbart Issues Best Correction Since Forever

I generally don't like harping on other outlets' errors or the always mortifying process of issuing a correction. It's a mix of 'there but for the grace of God' and, in this case, look at the source. But I think here we may have perhaps the best 'correction' in the long storied history of 'corrections', especially ones stemming from errors no remotely careful journalist ever would have made in the first place.
As noted a bit earlier, on Saturday Breitbart published an exclusive pointing out that President Obama's Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch was part of the team that defended President Clinton during the Whitewater investigation - not a bad little scooplet. Only it wasn't the same Loretta Lynch, which kind of takes the punch out of the story.
Breitbart then issued a 'correction'. But like I said, it's a correction for the ages.

As you can see, the headline and the entire article is intact, replete with various references to Lynch's time in the early 90s defending the Clintons. There's a little "[Corrected]" tacked on to the headline, even though the headline stays the same. And that's it.
Until you get all the way down to the bottom of the piece.

The best I can say in defense of this comical 'correction' is that it would be challenging to amend the piece in light of the categorical collapse of the article's central assertion. I mean, how do you correct it? I guess you just don't? Which is pretty much what they did here.

But here's the thing.  If I had to bet the rent money, I would bet that this won't harm Ol' Warner's career one little bit.  Sure, he'll get banged around by the Liberal Media for a day or two, but all that means is a promotion from dreckslinger to full-on Conservative Martyr (3rd Class).

And that is the point.

One of the main reasons obviously insane Conservatives win at election time is that they are willing to invest in and cultivate third-tier ideological button men like Ol' Warner.  Willing to invest in their movement's communication infrastructure and and human capital -- materially supporting them, patiently, year after year after year -- until even a plodding goof like Ol' Warner has a steady audience and a resume that would look pretty impressive if you had no fucking idea what you were looking at.

On the Left, there is nothing like this.  Nor are there any plans to develop anything like this anytime soon.

And that is a big part of why we lose.

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

Nasty, Brutish and Short.

Starting things off with a sigh, for some reason, Bob Schieffer of “Face the Nation” (long thought to be The Mouse Circus’ “adult” in the room) apparently believed the wormy spawn of Traitor Dick Cheney had not appeared on the teevee machine nearly enough and held out a chair for her today.

You're back on the list, Schieffer!

On “Fox News Sunday” Chris Wallace interrupted Claire McCaskill to opine that “most Americans” believe that the Democratic Party is too far “to the Left” and shouldn’t she be counseling her Party and President to “move to the Center”? (FYI, the Centrist “compromise” Chris Wallace specifically has in mind it to extend the Bush tax cuts for at least another year or two, because in Fox World, “compromise” is defined as "humping Mitch McConnell’s right leg and capitulating completely to The Crazy Party".)

And because she is such a good, little Blue Dog, McCaskill obligingly hopped into Wallace’s lap and told him how much she loved, loved, loved compromising with Republicans!

Then, without the slightest flicker of irony, Wallace immediately switched from the topic of keeping the budget-crushing tax cuts for rich people in place to the Entirely Unrelated Topic of the Horrible!Horrors! of saddling future generation with debt.

On “This Week” George Will once again went Full-Monty Burns.

First was his giddy, positively chop-licking lust at the thought of a full-on corporate takeover of the United States gummint using angry rubes and bigots as a battering ram, and an infinite amount of secret corporate money as fuel.

Second came his palpable, vinegary distaste at A) being seated next to Meghan McCain ("Smithers, who is this sticky, road-house trollop and why is she being allowed to sit at the grownup's table?!") and, B) being forced into a brief, perfunctory pretense that he gave a shit about anything she had to say about "the young people" before dismissing it all in favor of his own, mildewed wisdom.

Meanwhile, on “Meet the Press” Ken Buck continued to embarrass the good people of Colorado in a variety of ways, most notably by equated being gay with alcoholism. But considering the severity with which the weepy, paranoid side-effects of Buck's rumored, raging, $1,000-a-day Ibogaine habit must be whipsawing him by now, one does not know whether to pity the poor, crazy fucker or simply wish the Flatirons would tip over and tent-peg this hateful swine into the Earth's core.

Oh how I miss the frolicsome antics of the V1.0 Tea Party Hucksters:

at least they had better music.

Buy why are we wasting time talking about this trivia, when two of the most important events of the year are reaching their apotheosis in just two, short weeks?

Some sort of rally down by the national cement pond...

And my Fall fundraiser-cum-birthday shakedown.

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