National media actually titled the squall the Obama administration brushed off in mid-May “Scandal Week.” Wonderful. Brain cramps even infected the nation’s reputable information arbiters. What else could’ve sunk the country’s “scandal” threshold below curb height? 

    Fulminating has obscured the objectionable acts’ legality or grandly lifted those questionable from their picayune importance.

    Laws cover the Associated Press wiretaps. The fine-tooth combing of Tea Party acolytes by the Internal Revenue Service’s Cincinnati bureau must’ve gladdened every anarchist, socialist, and Wobbly back to Emma Goldman, Norman Thomas and Eugene Debs. Except now the rummaging is justified.

    Goldman’s, Thomas’ and Debs’ professed aims towards a fairer, better America. The Tea Party and those intimidated Republicans swearing allegiance to its stated misalliance demand selfishness and myopia as national policies. A k a governance by Ayn Rand.

    Besides, non-profits, both left and right swinging, are forbidden to sluice most of their donations into means determined to undermine the duly-elected United States government. Don’t our courts call that sedition? That’s the Tea Party’s sole reason for degrading public discourse. Disbelieve it? Maybe more of us should listen to those red-faced shouters rather than merely hear them as unwelcome noise.

    Where the hell is A. Palmer Mitchell when America really needs him?

    Hyped code orange or red doomsday semantics aside, the Benghazi attack was a crime by knuckleheads. The kind that happen nightly and skimmed in police blotters throughout America daily.

    Since it occurred in Libya, a precinct way outside any of our distressed neighborhoods where blowing through signal lights is an inner-urban survival strategy for anxious suburbanites, no doubt the see evil conspiracy in everything suspected liberal gang at Fox News likely echoed that night’s Benghazi attack, “a fiendish plot hatched by the most nefarious enemies of America!”

    Specifically, the current week’s most nefarious enemies of America.

    Every seven days over at Fox News it’s a new bunch of shadowy operatives hell-bent to pollute our precious bodily fluids. How soon until America’s own Ministry of Fear’s overuse of misused superlatives drain those adjectives of their small-dog frightening power?

    Benghazi deserved a police spokesperson rather than disjointed statements quickly cobbled together by committees. Unfortunately for the victims and our nation, this country has forsaken the patience to allow professionals to pursue. Even in Sherlock Holmes trifles the answers aren’t easily apparent. Therefore, why should we expect instantaneous clarity in real life?

    One hates thinking that our craving for immediate gratification has also numbed us into short-sightedness.

    Unlike responsible news aggregators, the Fox organization is the perfect megaphone for viewers who have no wish to be confronted nor confounded by a changing or disturbing world beyond their doors. No conscientious media reports. No unpleasant coverage of topics which challenge ironbound beliefs. The kind certain subsets prefer speaking of in quiet rooms, if mentioned at all.

    That’s understandable. Many of us have ideas about our country, of ourselves to go along with them. Discovering America falls short means we’ve fallen short, too. Who wants their projection skewered? By the truth, at that? Fox does its utmost to freeze that image in amber.

    That’s from where all the “liberal media” irritation bubbles. Left to those stubbornly fixated on John Winthrop’s “shining city on the hill,” they’ve been encased by that vision. Winthrop first and foremost. After all to envision he needed ignoring his Colonial era’s pervasive inequities, the nonconforming creeds, pesky natives and human chattel.

    Mythomania requires a clear canvas and an empty conscience as well as a steady drumbeat.

    This is what Fox gives today’s Winthrops. It caricatures truth. Worshipping falsehoods and disputing facts serve as the broadcaster’s misleading principle. Left to Fox who doesn’t believe advances which have raised the country would’ve been stuffed in a bag, the bag tossed in a river?

    Don’t many of our fellow citizens prefer an exclusionary America? One which selectively redacts and prettifies our history. Makes it smell sweeter, too.

    Left to Fox, America never watches marchers attempting to cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge. The Harvest of Shame is never broadcast. That America is out of sight. It may exist in rumor. So what? Those can be dismissed. Therefore, more guiltless airtime for reality-based programming featuring celebrities famous for … leaked (wink!) sex videos.

    I often glue Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich’s Minister of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda, to Fox News. Cleaving him beside its barking heads is meant as a compliment. A backhanded one. For each. While Edward Bernays, the “father” of modern opinion manufacturing, sorry, propaganda, is lauded, stupefying dissemination Fox-style carries Goebbels’ distinct sulphurous taint.

    Surely in the past Fox News curs have deviated from their true master’s rules? Readers, the next time will be the first time.

    Tell lies long. Repeat them shrilly. Persistent repetition will crowd out reason. It will counter truth. Flatter “the people” publicly while treating them as mugs and suckers. Especially exurbanites. They’re generally unreceptive to contrarian views.

    Fox benefits from a viewership predisposed to sop up reactionary gruel as Gospel. It’s why great swaths of America gladly votes against American interests. Such skewed regional voting patterns remind me of lyrics from British electronic band Depeche Mode’s New Dress.

    Best remembered for its refrain about the late Princess Di’s couture, the song’s gist ran “… When you change the facts … You may change a vote/And when you change a vote/You may change the world.”

    Yet Fox doesn’t change so much as plump our lowest common denominators and ennobles ignorance.