Fascinoma

The putative flagship of liberal media The New York Times, always seems curiously happy to plant big wet kisses on the anus of a brownshirt, and today they reach new depths of French dipping with the biggest asshole of them all Fox News chief Roger Ailes. Talk about stenography! – the whole thing reads like Ailes himself dictated it.

We get a thumbnail biography of Ailes, that makes him sound like a gem-quality paragon of Regular Americanism. Among the gems this:

Mr. Ailes, the son of a foreman at the Packard Electric plant in Warren, Ohio, described his upbringing with three words: “God, country, family” and said that credo was responsible for the success of Fox News.

“I built this channel from my life experience,” Mr. Ailes, 69, said. “My first qualification is I didn’t go to Columbia Journalism School. There are no parties in this town that I want to go to.”

The life experience Ailes refers to includes being recruited from the Mike Douglas show by the nauseating and despicable Richard Nixon to airbrush the Mark of Satan from Tricky Dick’s media persona, catapulting the rise of sociopathic politics in America. This was a trend that went on throughout Ailes overtly political career, culminating with the gutterball campaign he and Lee Atwater ran for Poppy Bush, the one that featured Willie Horton, the Revolving Door, and Poppy's carefully crafted lie to Dan Rather and the country abou this involvement in the felonies and treasons of Iran/Contra.

After he left politics, ostensibly, to go into journalism, ostensibly, Ailes was [prime promoter of Whitewater bullshit, especially the paranoid theories about the “murder” of Vince Foster. Since then of course, he’s gone on to run the “Fair and Balanced” Fox news channel, issuing daily Republican talking points to his editors and on-air personalities and putting the some of the scummiest, most unethical irresponsible people in history before the cameras, including Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Hannity, Hume, and Glen Beck. No single person can be more responsible for the degradation of journalism and public discourse in America than Roger Ailes; he has undoubtedly done far more damage to the country than Al Qaeda and the Medellín Cartel combined, but you would not know it from the Times article.

To David Carr and Tim Arango apparently Ailes is just another feisty and mavericky “Conservative,” in their view just about equally likely to irk establishment Republicans and liberal Democrats. The insufferable David Gergen does the money-shot fellating for them, “Regardless of whether you like what he is doing, Roger Ailes is one of the most creative talents of his generation. He has built a media empire that is capable of driving the conversation, and, at times, the political process.”

True, the stenographers do include some vague criticism of Ailes in their profile, making sure it’s undermined by its source, e.g. “liberal members” of Ruper Murdoch’s family. Thus they can kiss up to their future boss, while also appearing “fair and balanced” themselves, further evidence, in itself, of Foxification at the Times and all mainstream media. But they make sure it’s very vague criticism -- no mention of revolving doors, conspiracy theories, or a Federal judge’s threat to invalidate the trademark on Fox’s “Fair and Balanced” slogan – for being laughably false. The closest they come to real critique is a bit too eggheaded to draw blood, but still cogent analysis byRick Perlstein: “Like Richard Nixon, like Spiro Agnew, Fox News can never see itself as the attacker,” he said. “They are always playing defense because they believe they are always under attack, which attracts people that have the same personality formation. By bringing that mind-set, plus the high energy seamless stream of the aggression of talk radio, he has found an audience.”

But, speaking of laughably false – I had to love the one detail the Times stenographers put in so Ailes could wank to it later, his puerile paranoid fantasy of holding off the Evil-Doers from within the Wolverine’s free-market bunker/temple.

[It] was clear in the interview that the 9/11 attacks had a profound effect on Mr. Ailes. They convinced him that he and his network could be terrorist targets.

On the day of the attacks, Mr. Ailes asked his chief engineer the minimum number of workers needed to keep the channel on the air. The answer: 42. “I am one of them,” he said. “I’ve got a bad leg, I’m a little overweight, so I can’t run fast, but I will fight.

“We had 3,000 dead people a couple miles from here. I knew that any communications company could be a target.”

His movements now are shadowed by a phalanx of corporate-provided security.

That’s just too rich. Let’s hope Roger gets an infarction when he creams over it.