Faux Hawks

Remember that episode of Soth Park when the kids went to Mel Gibson's house to get a refund for "The Passion of Christ," and found Gibson to be a freaky torture fetishist who literally chased them down, begging them to poke fiery metal pointy things into his body? Pay close attention. See? That's so totally Fox News.

Fox News, and the conservatives who love them, have taken this whole "the liberal media is OUT TO GET US!!!" paranoia to a whole new extreme. They're feeding off the over-the-top feigned outrage that's become the normal defensive response during this presidential campaign. Now, paranoia can be convincing if there's a grain of truth to it. But by searching out things over which to melt down, Fox & Co. are starting to look like the proverbial boy who cried wolf.

This, for instance, just made me laugh out loud. PBS's Gwen Ifill, who will moderate the VP debate on Thursday, has written a book. That book contains the line, "the black political structure of the civil rights movement has cleared the way for post-racial politicians to ascend to new heights." Fox sees something incredibly threatening in this factual observation, and proceeds to flip the hell out.

Now, Ifill may be the most middle-of-the-road reporter in the blandest news organization in the country. There's a reason you don't see her often on prime time, or scoring big bucks on the lecture circuit - she's not the partisan analyst that cable news loves. She's the furthest thing possible from an Olbermann, a Matthews or an O'Reilly. Gwen frakking Ifill? You're attacking Gwen frakking Ifill???

To me, this looks like a preemptive strike to go ahead and paint Ifill as biased toward the Democrats, so that if Gov. Sarah Palin does poorly in the debate, there's already a built-in scapegoat. It's Fox's bad luck that the person they sought to demonize is - I don't know if I mentioned this already - Gwen frakking Ifill. That dog just won't hunt.

And I'm getting pretty aggravated at the conservatives' war on the media. I'm as critical of the corporate press as anyone, but please spare me this "liberal media bias" bullsh*t. The press has one bias, and one bias only: the "what will get us the most readers/highest ratings?" bias. Never in modern times as an administration gotten such a free pass from the press, and they've had such man-love for John McCain it's not even funny (until he kicked them off his bus over the summer, that is). And we can please stop saying "in the tank?" What, was that the phrase of the week in your right-wing propganda memo?

UPDATE: Here's the full version. Can't you just see O'Reilly chasing Obama down in a bus?