Arizona Republican Paul Gosar So Awful, Six Siblings Cut Ad Opposing Him

If six of your siblings are voting against you, you must be a slimy piece of work (and Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar is just that):



He's running against Democrat Dr. David Brill.  Five Thirty Eight and Cook rate this a solid Republican district, but this ad may move the needle a bit.  Gosar is on the fringe of a fringe party and the voters of AZ-4 have some decisions to make, maybe starting with listening to those who know Gosar best.

Tweets Of The Day -- "Captain Cuisinart"

The Very Stable Genius was up early getting his fix of "Fox & Friends" "Three Dolts on a Divan" (h/t Charlie Pierce) during "Executive time" and happened to see serial election loser and NRA hack Don "Bonehead" Bongino opine on this tweet by former CIA Director John Brennan, who was reacting to the Very Stable Genius' "demand" that the Justice Department investigate its actions involving use of an informant in the Trump campaign:

Senator McConnell & Speaker Ryan: If Mr. Trump continues along this disastrous path, you will bear major responsibility for the harm done to our democracy. You do a great disservice to our Nation & the Republican Party if you continue to enable Mr. Trump’s self-serving actions. https://t.co/uAhgL6wfIC

— John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) May 20, 2018

Here's what Bonehead had to say, as regurgitated by the Very Stable Genius:

“John Brennan is panicking. He has disgraced himself, he has disgraced the Country, he has disgraced the entire Intelligence Community. He is the one man who is largely responsible for the destruction of American’s faith in the Intelligence Community and in some people at the....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 21, 2018

....top of the FBI. Brennan started this entire debacle about President Trump. We now know that Brennan had detailed knowledge of the (phony) Dossier...he knows about the Dossier, he denies knowledge of the Dossier, he briefs the Gang of 8 on the Hill about the Dossier, which....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 21, 2018

...they then used to start an investigation about Trump. It is that simple. This guy is the genesis of this whole Debacle. This was a Political hit job, this was not an Intelligence Investigation. Brennan has disgraced himself, he’s worried about staying out of Jail.” Dan Bongino

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 21, 2018

He sounds perfectly sane.

Kevin Kruse had an apt response:

Trump just took 20 minutes and 3 tweets to pass along the insights of Dan Bongino, the genius who thinks you make lemonade by tossing lemons in a blender. https://t.co/wAivqFMR6c

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) May 21, 2018

"Well, sure, John Brennan was head of the CIA, but let's defer to Professor Cuisinart here." https://t.co/cHRaubuoSF

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) May 21, 2018

The NRA and Dan Bongino Have No Idea How to Make Lemonade https://t.co/gpRHaHrQiO pic.twitter.com/nzTfDhFveC

— Mediaite (@Mediaite) February 6, 2018

Meet Your Dudebro Fake News Entrepreneurs

If you want to get an insight on what kind of bottom- dwelling slug produces the fake news that millions of low- information/ high- "economic anxiety" Americans take as The Truth, look no further than this profile of two 20- something dudebros in Long Beach, CA. Moral ciphers Paris Wade and Ben Goldman run a creepy site called LibertyWritersNews.com (please don't give them traffic!) that deals in the most hair afire, made up nonsense about progressives that you're likely to read (but, again, please don't). These two deplorables use social media platforms (notably Facebook) to generate revenue, and they don't much care how they do it because, well, it's so darn easy to fleece the rubes:

At a time of continuing discussion over the role that hyperpartisan websites, fake news and social media play in the divided America of 2016, LibertyWritersNews illustrates how websites can use Facebook to tap into a surging ideology, quickly go from nothing to influencing millions of people and make big profits in the process. Six months ago, Wade and his business partner, Ben Goldman, were unemployed restaurant workers. Now they’re at the helm of a website that gained 300,000 Facebook followers in October alone and say they are making so much money that they feel uncomfortable talking about it because they don’t want people to start asking for loans. (our emphasis)

"... they don't want people to start asking for loans." Or the I.R.S. asking for income taxes perhaps?

What follows in the article are some odious examples of the fake news sewage these two young hucksters like to gin up, but this exchange boils down their business model:

“All successful journalism has shock value,” Goldman says as he and Wade sit at their computers later that day.  

“There was once a lot more competition among newspapers,” Wade says. “It was like a race to see who could write the craziest s---.” 

“And whoever wrote the craziest s--- won,” Goldman says. 

“There used to be a joke that every single day a new world war started,” Wade says. “Because that’s what sold papers.”

In their world of living for clicks and page views, they write their fake news to attract the biggest audience possible, searching for those who are already disposed to accept the Alex Jones/ National Enquirer world view and style of "communication."  Thus, in their own words, they're in competition with the likes of those termites in the foundation of democracy to "see who could write the craziest s---."  And that pretty much sums up the product of their enterprise.

The kicker?

Raised in liberal homes, they both voted for Obama twice, but as they struggled to find better jobs, they began to doubt those votes, their college education and the progressive values with which they were raised.

It's all Obama's fault!

We'd have to say they may have been raised with those "progressive values," but they sure didn't stick very long.

(Image:  Writer for LibertyWritersNews.com)

The Clintons And "Right-Wing Media Rube Fleecing"

TPM's Josh Marshall has a good read today on what he calls the "Vince Fosterization" of all things related to the Clintons.  Here's an appetizer:

... As with most things Clinton, there's enough to get everyone interested and virtually never enough for there to be any real there there. If there were less of the former or more of the latter, the story would have a clearer, more satisfying conclusion. With the Clintons, the inevitable gap between their pursuers' hopes and the mundane reality, the expectations and inevitable disappointment is the beautiful face that sets sail to a thousand ships of nonsense, wishful thinking and right-wing media rube fleecing.

Part of what is endless and exhausting about the Clintons is that they really do always push it right to the line. We've seen it enough times to know they're generally smart enough and careful enough not to go over it. Indeed, one of the paradoxical benefits of the endless and frenetic investigations of the Clintons in the '90s is that these probes stand as an unintentional proof that there's no real goods there to find. One of the countless committee investigations and special counsel inquiries would have found it. But, as I said, they push it right up to the line.

Yet it's never enough for the Clintons' perennial critics to be satisfied with potential conflicts of interest or arguably unseemly behavior. It's got to be more. It always has to be more. There have to be high crimes, dead people, corrupt schemes. And if they don't materialize, they need to be made up. Both because there is an organized partisan apparatus aimed at perpetuating them and because there is a right-wing audience that requires a constant diet of hyperventilating outrage from which to find nourishment. Why else do we have 'Benghazi', the President's birth certificate, the Muslim Brotherhood's infiltration of the White House and so much more? And if you think that's bad, you should have seen the '90s.  (our emphasis)

We saw the 90's, lived through it, suffered through it. It was every bit as exhausting as Marshall says, with constant efforts by Republicans (who saw the Reagan years fast disappearing in their rear view mirror) to bludgeon Bill Clinton, capped by an impeachment trial which was not about anything related to governance, but for lying about a b.j.   All the while, the corporate "mainstream media" was happily letting itself be led around by its nose ring by those media-fleecing Republicans. The whole spectacle of undercutting a twice-elected President over fever-brain conspiracies and a dubious impeachment should have kept Republicans out of government at the national level for a generation or more (and would have if the Supreme Court didn't award the Presidency to Dumbya). It also disabused many of us of the notion that the corporate media were  honest brokers when it came to the Clintons or politics in general.

What Marshall refers to the "right-wing media rube fleecing" continues unabated today (witness the digital media anti-Hillary ratf**king and deals cut by the New York Effing Times and the once great Washington Post Bezos Bugle to piggyback on the scurrilous "Clinton Cash" book by right-wing hack Peter Schweizer).  The once great Washington Post's Bezos Bugle's stable of Republican-enabling hacks is working day and night in the hope of uncovering a Clinton money scandal under the "mundane reality" of a successful charitable foundation and publicly available records of speaking fees.  At the very least, these hacks just want to throw up enough mud for others to say "It's out there."

Meanwhile, the hundreds of Adelsons and Kochs in plutocrat land plowing untraceable millions into right-wing coffers, and Jebbie's solicitation of "no more than $1 million, please" from Republican fat cats, is so yesterday's news to these bloodhounds.  Nothing to see here, move along!  But on the other hand, as Marshall notes, critics of the Clintons (and they staff and run both the Times and the Bezos Bugle) are never going to be satisfied in their quest for scandal, because there must be more there!  It feeds their obsession to have Hillary Clinton respond to their questions, as if they were honest brokers for the public's right to know. *

We hope she continues to take questions -- from average Americans, not the corporate "mainstream media."

*BONUS:  Charles Pierce extends and amplifies the point (with ups for slapping the Bezos Bugle's horse race tout rube Chris Cillizza upside the head).

BONUS II:  This is how Hillary recently responded to a "Will you answer my important loaded Fox 'News" question?"  More please.

Skeet Tweet of the Day

As we noted yesterday, the right wing's most recent faux outrage de jour was President Obama's claim that he went skeet shooting at Camp David. When the White House released a photo of him last August doing just that, Obama insider David Plouffe jabbed the "skeet birthers" with this tweet:

Attn skeet birthers. Make our day - let the photoshop conspiracies begin! m.flickr.com/photos/whiteho…

— David Plouffe (@davidplouffe) February 2, 2013

Conspiracy Cartoon of the Day

(click to enlarge)

As Paul Krugman notes in our posting below, there's a lunacy infecting the right wing in this country that has to constantly adjust reality to fit its perceptions. Plutocrats like former GE chairman Jack "I Bring Bad Things To Life" Welch, shady gambling tycoon Sheldon "Smelly Shelly" Adelson, and birther Donald "Rump" Trump have really come out of the woodwork this election year in aggressive attempts to maintain their economic status, country be damned.