Sinister Genius ...

Click here for an excellent article by Hunter at Daily Kos entitled "How Karl Rove, Rich Lowry and Politico are damaging America."

In short, the execrable Karl Rove lies, and says that those lies cast doubt on Hillary's fitness to be president. The execrable Politico gives the execrable Rich Lowry a platform to say that if you disregard the lies, Rove's underlying point -- Hillary may be unfit to be president -- is a good one that deserves honest debate.

The correct response? "Karl, you are telling obvious lies, easily debunked; your argument is without merit, unworthy of public debate."

But no, now that the question has been raised, "debate" has actually begun; Fox News and others chime in to amplify what Rove and Lowry have said. So Rove's lies have created a "debate" on Hillary's fitness to be president -- and the right-wing position in the "debate" is premised on lies. Nevertheless, the nattering nabobs of negativism bring the debate to a crescendo. In the words of that silver-tongued orator George W. Bush: "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."

So blatant lies prompt earnest discussion among the pundits. Hunter says:

And this is how it works, chapter and verse. The professional liar pipes up with a bald-faced lie. Though it is quickly and easily disproven, other professional liars pipe up to say that if we ignore the fact that the liar is lying, the liar raises a good point. The liars take to the op-ed pages to note that the liar is just asking the question, and now the question is out there. And they will make damn sure the question is out there for as long as it takes to get a flock of morons and dunderheads to believe that there is a conspiracy to not answer the question, even though "the question" was a lie to begin with and no less a lie through each of the various iterations meant to sanitize it enough for the public to forget that the whole thing was a fiction from the start.

He concludes:

This is how it works, and this is why we are now a nation that sees the ghosts of conspiracy in every corner. This is why there is a Bundy ranch standoff, and why Benghazi! will get more hearings than all other attacks on American diplomatic outposts combined, and why climate change will continue to be disputed even as large parts of Antarctica cave off into the rising seas. This is why we fought a war in Iraq, and why those that peddled it have faced no professional repercussions. Because we continue to treat truth and ideologically laced falsehood with exactly equal merit, as if they are two equally worthy opponents for our attention and our respect, and govern ourselves with notions taken just as liberally from the falsehoods as from the facts.

This attitude permeates public discussion. A widely accepted figure is that 97% of publications in peer-reviewed scientific papers support the position that significant harmful climate-changing effects are man-made. No matter; right-wing politicians, bereft of scientific knowledge, their wallets stuffed with petrodollars, loudly trumpet a contrary view based on ... nothing. An overwhelming body of scientific evidence shows that dinosaurs first appeared 230 million years ago and ruled the earth for 135 million years; Christian fundamentalists thunder from their pulpits that the earth is 6,000 years old, a belief based on ... faith in the Bible. Rather than dismiss these radical, baseless views, pundits "evenhandedly" give them equal space in public discussion.

Such is the state of American journalism today.

UPDATE: Here's a segment I transcribed from a Fox News clip on Crooks & Liars. I don't know the names of the Foxers, but they're clearly quite happy with the situation:

FOXER 1: Michelle, of course Hillary Clinton's health and her age are fair game, like anybody who runs for president, if indeed she does that. But did Rove go further than that, and did he overstate the case?

FOXER 2: It's what he does. And I think there is a certain sinister genius to it. He'll get a lot of blowback now, but the issue will be out there, and people will focus on it, and they'll forget why they even brought it up to begin with. And as we go along, it will be in there, and people will discuss this -- a lot.

FOXER 3: I couldn't agree more with you, Michelle. Because what they did was they floated -- he floated a trial balloon for political coverage for 2016 elections, and even though that balloon was being shot down by liberals, it's still -- the issue is still being talked about. Politico, on the day that this happened, had eight different stories talking about this. And I checked, and MSNBC, as of Thursday night, in its prime time schedule, was still talking about it on four of the five shows.

I rest my case.