Aha, so someone has tried to puzzle out the eternal question: What makes Fox Newsnut John Gibson such a dick?

Thanks to my friend Eugene, who passed along a lovely link for some cheerfully vituperative deconstruction of a passel of right-wing loons, starting with that singularly strange specimen, Fox News's John Gibson. Just recently I was wondering whether anyone else found him so creepy-weird. Now I see that our friendly scribe at fuckchristmas.org has tackled head-on the timeless question: "What makes him such a dick?"

It turns out to be maybe not so mysterious once you track some of the astonishing goofiness that comes out of his mouth. Oh sure, it's always political, always far-right-wing, and always delivered with utter absoluteness and viciousness. But also to an astonishing degree just plain nuts—and I do mean loony-tunes-style nuts. It's the psychotic blithering of a mind in such total disarray as to make its closest antecedent, the nutso noggin of Cheers's Cliff Klaven, seem like a model of order.

And of course we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that Cliff was a fictional character, whereas our John G is apparently for real, or at any rate what passes for real in the far-from-parallel universe of Fox News. Also, Cliff, along with other vaguely human traits that made him not only bearable but treasurable (again, partly because he was fictional), had at least a tiny shred of perspective on himself—enough so that on at least one occasion, after letting rip with one of his loopier riffs, he wondered out loud, "Was that out loud?"

With our John, the electrons just keep misfiring throughout his brain, and he lets it all hang out, spilling out on the convoluted and polluted cablewaves of Fox News.

I guess there's the additional fascination that in our John's previous incarnation on MS-NBC, he looked like a reasonable enough TV news anchor, especially of the more craven cable species. And on MS-NBC, he never seemed to say much of anything. He was just a predictable stooge of rightish-wing orthodoxy. Now that he's found his métier, as they say, when that big mouth opens, stand back—you never know what might come pouring out!