Wait. On Second Thought, Let's Do Make Ken Starr News.

JOE Conason, whom The Daily Show really should consider hiring as The Questioner, à la Mark Green on Firing Line, to handle blobs of human ambergris like Marc Thiessen:

Now that the moldy remnants of "Filegate" have at last been properly trashed, can anything relevant be learned from its distasteful history? Certain of the most assiduous promoters of the phony scandal are dead or retired from public life. But others are still around, exaggerating in the same old style when attacking the Obama White House, ACORN, and Democrats in Congress. So the pronouncements of all those responsible for pushing the bogus FBI file controversy are forever subject to the deepest doubt. Googling the term "Filegate" brings up stories that should embarrass the Wall Street Journal editorial page; the Media Research Center, whose chief wingnut Brent Bozell continued to flog this discredited fake as late as November 2007; National Review Online; WorldNetDaily; Fox News Channel, then in its noisome infancy; and indeed, nearly every other organ-grinder and kazoo-blower of the Republican noise machine.

If you've got a couple minutes, read his old piece on Safir(e), too. And remember that the paranoia and the pathological lying of "Conservatives" is their one true birthright. Or that the invention of an alternative "reality" to counter the one the Librul Media was treasonously manufacturing dates to the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam, two events so distant by the time Liz Cheney was in high school that the lies, which side was lying, and the ethical swampland of a political agenda they were using them to sell were matters of established fucking fact, not opinion, and there's no earthly excuse for her not recognizing it. This goddam Xenophobia for Hire, coupled with a beatific conviction that the Tokyo Fire Raids represent both God's Own Imprimatur on American Exceptionalism and a template for dealing with whatever international annoyance these people decide to focus on next, is just a fucking tic at this point.

Y'know, every time Hugo Chavez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says something obnoxious enough that the News finds it worthy of lowering the impermeable barrier against the non-natural-disaster outside world enough to report it, it comes accompanied with the man's full psychotic history. So why don't we point out that "Conservatives" have run this game since Yalta, at least, and the only time it remotely came true--a one-off terror attack--they were the ones in charge of national security? We do not need to have a debate on whether their approach is superior to the Obama administration's. That question has been answered. Too bad they're not the only ones who'd been better off if it hadn't.

And let's say this again: if you had a neighbor who ranted about low-hanging powerlines every fucking day for forty years, you wouldn't still be giving him a hearing. You wouldn't be searching the Google, the Classifieds, or the Insane Asylums for a more reasonable spokesman, a "moderate" who thought that low-hanging powerlines were, indeed, a threat, but that your neighbor may have overstated the risk slightly. No. You'd just stay th' fuck indoors whenever you saw him on his lawn.

We're always a day behind on Daily Shows here, so yesterday I'd hadn't seen Thiessen ooze onto the set and light into a fake newscaster for ridiculing Chuckles Krauthammer . "But, but, but, John Adams…

[Okay, sorry to interrupt, but not only did Adams not say "The Constitution is not a suicide pact"--if Dr. Merkwuerdigliebe is gonna invent the quote, you think he'd add "except for the Second Amendment!" just to keep things tidy--if he had said it it would have been in defense of the Sedition Act. ]

"…but John Adams clients were criminal defendants!" This is apparently what the man was steaming about in the Green Room for fifteen minutes. Forget that Krauthammer had it wrong; forget that the legal issue was precisely the detainees' status; forget that the Court, not exactly a hotbed of civil libertarians, had--oh, sorry, except for the Second Amendment!--ruled precisely that way. These second-generation Nixonians don't even realize there's any other game out there. They don't even realize they're Nixonians, for fuck's sake. The supposed massive failure of today's public schools to teach reading and math pales in comparison to the faux-balanced malarky these Reagantots were fed in their day, and then never took the personal responsibility to double-check.

Speaking of Firing Line, the he's dead, we're grateful, racist who hosted the thing has garnered a lot of press lately for his supposed expulsion of the Anti-fluoridationists at the dawn of the Goldwater Era. Like, you know, because "Conservatism" has been so goddam sensible since. Like some Extremely White Knight is gonna ride in again and purge their precious party of 98% of its membership, and leave Ken Starr in charge. Bring Buckley back all the way, too. Orson Welles once said that happy endings require you to end the story before it's finished; Right-wing reasonableness depends on leaving vast chunks out altogether.

[SECOND Conason link fixed, thanks to Brendan.]