Say, does the mellowed "new" Rupert Murdoch know what his Fox Noise goons are up to? Perhaps someone should tell him -- maybe Master Rahm?

Yes, Rachel reports -- while getting Ana Marie Cox to do the dirty work on Republicans' newfound passion for "teabagging" -- they're now officially "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties"! (And be grateful that MediaMatters' County Fair turned me on to the Rachel clip. You were going to get a clip of Glenn Beck talking to Indianapolis "tea party" organizer "Richard the Plumber" Behney, who makes the interesting but unexplored claim to be "literally working my butt off -- I literally have no butt here.")

by Ken

In the above-noted Glenn Beck clip, Richard the Plumber, explaining his disenchantment with U.S. politics, says feelingly, "Here a segment of our society and our politicians want to come in and take everything away and spread it around." Of course nobody wants to take anything away from Richard (who by the way is licensed, Glenn establishes) or his company or employees. That's just the swamp of lies and delusions festering in his head.

"It's time to stand up for freedom," Richard concludes, and we're left once again to reflect on the American miseducation system, which tolerates or maybe even encourages such fundamental ignorance as having not the slightest clue what "freedom" means. Of course we're desensitized after eight years of hearing Chimpy the Prez abuse the word.

And it's hopeless to expect Glenn Beck to know any better, since his brain is literally made up of lies and delusions -- there's literally nothing else there. (Maybe Glenn's original, God-given brain is hiding out with Richard's missing butt?) When Richard the Plumber cites as the turning point in his political consciousness "the Joe the Plumber debacle," it's far from clear that he understands that everything Joe said was either a lie or a delusion, and that those lies and delusions were then deployed as propaganda by a presidential campaign that didn't utter an honest syllable in its entire history.

But I digress. The point here is the curious role that our Glenn and his Fox Noise brothers and sisters have taken on as promoters of the anti-Obama tea parties. (If you watch the Glenn-and-Richard clip, you'll note that Glenn tries to claim that they aren't anti-Obama. Of course that's what they are.) What's perhaps most astonishing is how little comment this Noisemakers' chorus has attracted. At this point, I guess, the country is beyond shock at any kind of political agitating the Foxies engage in.

I'm wondering, though, where the Fox boss of bosses, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, is in all of this.

For a while now we've been hearing these reports about how Rupert Murdoch has mellowed, possibly under the liberalizing influence of his present wife, and how he wants good relations with the Obama administration. And yet his very own Fox Noise propaganda machine has gone into high gear propagandizing against -- and arguably agitating for the violent overthrow of -- the elected government of these United States, with "news" coverage that has generally been unusually ignorant and dishonest even by its own infinitely liberal standards of ignorance and dishonesty regarding all of the president's proposals and programs, and its commentators have ramped up the campaign of lies to a degree that must surely be taking them close to, if not already inside, the preciincts of treason.

Take these anti-administration planned Tax Day "tea parties," which are supposed to have sprung up spontaneously -- a supposition that is roundly sneered at by my colleagues who specialize in wingnut-loon-watching (look, for example, at this Think Progress report yesterday) -- and are now being actively promoted by the Fox Noise goons. MediaMatters' Karl Frisch has written a column, "This tea may cause severe damage to journalistic integrity," running down the Noisemaker tea-party connections.

"Talk to any political organizer," Karl writes, "and they'll tell you the hardest part about pulling off a successful protest rally is building a big enough crowd for the press to show up and cover the festivities. As tax day approaches, conservatives planning anti-Obama "tea party" demonstrations across the country have found a way around this once-daunting organizer's dilemma: Fox News."

Fox News . . . has provided attendance and organizing information for the events on air and online dozens of times. You name it, they've likely done it. Fox has offered viewers and readers such vital organizing information as protest dates and locations and addresses of websites where people can learn more. It has even posted information and publicity material for the events on its own website. Tea-party planners are now using the planned attendance of Fox News hosts to promote their protests and listing Fox News contributors as "Tea Party Sponsor[s]" on their website.

You see, Fox News hosts Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Neil Cavuto, and Greta Van Susteren are all scheduled to broadcast live from tea parties in different cities across the country, and they've wasted little time in diligently working to boost attendance levels for the April 15 events.

On his Fox program, Hannity has told his viewers, "And don't forget, you can log on to our website to get all the details one week from tomorrow, our special, 'Tax Day Tea Party' show. You can attend. It's live. It's in Atlanta." Cavuto struck the same note, telling his audience, "By the way, this tea party movement that's going against largesse, it is growing. And folks are fed up with out-of-control spending. To that end, we are going to be broadcasting live from one of the biggest of these rallies on April 15, Tax Day. We are at California's state capitol in Sacramento. This is the epicenter of this tax revolt beast, if you will." Buried under the fault line of this "epicenter"? Cavuto's integrity.

For his part, Beck, Fox's conspiracy-theorist-in-chief, managed to escape his "doom room" -- Beck's words -- where he regularly hosts survivalist fringe characters prophesying our impending demise as a nation, long enough to encourage his viewers to come "[c]elebrate with Fox News" at any of four "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties." . . .

[I]t's one thing for a news outlet to cover a political protest -- that's pretty logical. It's quite another for a news outlet to repeatedly encourage its viewers to attend a political protest. Far from practicing legitimate journalism, it's blatantly and unabashedly political.

This got me to wondering about where the mellow "new" Rupert is in all of this? Of course if he had tried anything like this against the Bush regime, he would have been lucky to come out of it with News Corp. reduced to, oh, operating a few parking lots. Now I'm not suggesting that the Obama administration would or should use the kinds of tactics that Bush's enforcer, Karl Rove, employed as a matter of course. But sticking strictly within the bounds of legal and ethical propriety, the administration has some pretty formidable resources for encouraging News Corp. to be a better corporate citizen. It just needs someone to deliver the message to Master Rupert that there's a new sheriff in town, and the stench from the News Corp. stables makes them not just an eyesore but a public health menace that requires cleaning out.

And who better for a job like that than Master Rahm Emanuel? After all, according to the Legend of Rahm, isn't this supposed to be the one and only justification for his earthly existence? Rahms plays hardball. So goes the legend. Of course, whenever we here at DWT get a glimpse of Master Rahm at play, his targets always seem to be progressive Democrats. But his defenders always insist that somehow that's just us.

Well, here's a chance for the Master to show what he's made of. Get word to Master Rupert that, at a time when through a combination of the company's own bungling and the dismal economy its finances are reportedly in considerable disarray, any friendly attention -- or, more likely, friendly in-attention he was hoping for from the Obama administration, well, that's over as long as News Corp. makes it a pillar of its business to poison the political environment.

Take those FCC waivers old Rupert managed to get the Bush FCC to grant, whereby, even though he's not supposed to be allowed to own so much as a single New York City TV station while simultaneously owning the New York Post, he in fact owns not one but two TV stations. (I suppose Rupert's News Corp. flunkies could argue that the cross-ownership rule against owning a TV station and a newspaper in the same market don't apply to the Post on the simple ground that it hasn't functioned as a newspaper since it was sucked into the Murdoch empire. This might be a tough argument to rebut, but so far the News Corp. folks don't seem to wish to go that route.)

More generally, I'd be surprised if there's any Murdoch enterprise that could withstand close legal scrutiny. I'm thinking that if old Rupert got the message that the "news" operations of News Corp. are at risk for being turned into Rush and Billo and Hannity and Beck running bake sales to support the surviving News Loonies website, and that financial and other shenanigans throughout the rest of the News Corp. domain will be investigated and prosecuted to the max, well, I'm guessing there might be some changes made.

FOOTNOTE

You'll note in the clip that as of March 31 our Glenn, still undecided as to which tea party he would attend, was tempted by Richard the Plumber's Indianapolis do because this bozo who impersonates Thomas Paine will be participating.

I gather that Paine, the firebrand of the American Revolution, has become a hero in wingnut phony-intellectual circles. Undoubtedly a few wrenched-out-of-context quotes have been mashed together to make it sound as if Paine would have been crusading with the wingnuts. This is yet another assault on reality perpetrated by the lying ignoramuses of the Loony Right. Since they're too lazy or stupid to actually read, they haven't a clue what Thomas Paine believed in. He would have been appalled and sickened by people who have intentionally used their delusional authoritarian ravings to eliminate any possibility of rational political discourse.

They're revolting, all right, but not in the sense understood by the author of Common Sense.


POSTSCRIPT: MASTER RAHM'S PRIORITIES

In his weekly syndicated column, our friend David Sirota writes this week about "The best investment money can buy," which turns out to be "something so old-fashioned that even amateur investors can understand it! It's called "graft."

He cites the financial industry's $5 billion worth of campaign contributions that bought them "deregulation, which generated trillions for executives. And when the bubble burst, there was another boatload of free money!" He points to (by Bloomberg News' count) "$12.8 trillion worth of taxpayer loans, grants and guarantee — all to Wall Street." He quotes the AP calculation this week that "companies that spent hundreds of millions lobbying successfully for a tax break enacted in 2004 got a 22,000 percent return on that investment," or $100 billion in real numbers.

And then, as he explains that it's important to invest in the right "political stocks," he writes:

For example, the banking industry recently paid Rahm Emanuel $16 million for about two years of work. That investment was recently paid back when, as President Obama's chief of staff, Emanuel led the January campaign to release another $350 billion in bank bailout funds. Turning a $16 million down payment into a $350 billion payout -- that's huge!

That's huge, all right -- maybe huge enough to explain why Master Rahm is otherwise occupied when he might be tightening the screws on Master Rupert.

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