Dimwitted right-wing "gotcha"-ista "catches" Sen. Sherrod Brown and columnist Connie Schultz canoodling

Plus Sunday Classics bulletin: PBS's Kansas City concert-hall telecast airs tomorrow night

If Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Connie Schultz don't watch out, some right-wing lunkhead might do an exposé claiming that they're, you know, involved.

by Ken

Conflicts of interests -- in every imaginable format, size, and shape -- are right-wingers' stock-in-trade. It's almost impossible to imagine them surviving un-enmeshed in webs of conflicts. So perhaps it's only natural that they have a heightened ability to "spot" such conflicts, whether real or (more often) imagined, in their enemies. After all, these are people who seem always to be looking in the mirror, and never to actually see anyone except themselves, regardless of whom they think they're looking at

In his Washington Post "In the Loop" column, our pal Al Kamen passes on this tale-- file it under Annals of True Romance -- of a modern-day right-wing "investigative" idiot who went wading in the pseudo-journalistic kiddie pool and found himself way out of his depth.

Some bedfellows are stranger than others

Connie Schultz isn’t naming names. The nationally syndicated columnist wrote a post on her Facebook page Tuesday about a “conservative blogger” who ­e-mailed her to say he or she was working on an “exposé” about journalists getting cozy with elected officials.

The blogger had seen many photos of Schultz with Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). Gotcha!

But wait, not so fast.

Schultz e-responded to the conservative muckraker, admitting that she had, in fact, been caught in a compromising position with Brown. In fact, she had a lurid-sounding confession: “I am surprised you did not find a photo of me kissing U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown so hard he passes out from lack of oxygen. He’s really cute.”

Cue conservative blogger drooling on keyboard. This exposé just got its lead sentence.

But then Schultz continued with some deflating details. “He’s also my husband. You know that, right?”

Schultz tells the Loop that she’s not identifying the blogger, in the hope of turning the incident — which has prompted plenty of online discussion — into a teaching moment. She surmises that the blogger is an intern for a conservative outlet, and she figured that rather than simply shaming the young pup, she might impart some journalistic and political wisdom. An intern, after all might be “salvageable,” in a way the editors might not be, she says.

“I wanted to teach the bigger lessons here,” Schultz says. “First, do your research before you call. Second, some of us liberals are not out to make you look bad.”

PBS AIRS KC CONCERT HALL
TELECAST TOMORROW NIGHT

Our Kansas City-area friend Robert Dagg Murphy alerted us awhile back that PBS had a broadcast in the works spotlighting the concert hall in Kansas City's new Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts, whose acoustics Robert described as "amazing." The documentary-plus-performance is scheduled for tomorrow night, at least in my corner of the PBS universe (as always, check local listings), built around a concert conducted by Kansas City Philharmonic music director Michael Stern and featuring a "homecoming" for KC native Joyce DiDonato -- the mezzo's first performance in the Kauffman Center

#