Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei continue to perform bukakke on the American public:
Now you’d think, given all the embarrassing trail puff pieces and the fact that 24 hours ago one of Politico’s best reporters called Breitbart a hack, the pub might just go easy on the gauze. You’d be wrong.
* The conservative writer and personality lives on the West Coast — a fact that gives him a certain mystique among Washingtonians accustomed to seeing the same faces again and again.
* Still, it’s more than rarity that makes Breitbart a party get. He’s an ideal guest. … “Andrew’s fun, provocative and obviously not afraid to speak his mind,” Huffington said about her conservative counterpart.
* He’s dead-on and witty at the same time,” said [David] Bass.
Exactly how much more credibility must Breitbart lose before this stops?
These people are sociopaths.
Morbo
Uh oh, my breakfast…
Pangloss
Joseph Goebbels was a great “party get” at one time, too. If I were making a guest list for a Berlin cocktail party circa 1935, he’d be right there at the top.
ruemara
Let me see if I get this. Huffington Post has a big banner headline castigating Obama for “passing the buck” on the blame for the Sherrod firing, with no proof that the man is working on regional post HR in addition to hanging out with the PM and, you know, doing presidentin’. However, Adrianna Huffington finds Breitbart “…fun, provocative and obviously not afraid to speak his mind”. I can’t understand why I’m liking progressives as much as I like conservatives. Oh wait, yes I can.
Nellcote
Does Britebart have video of VanderHarris fucking goats?
It would be irresponsible not to speculate…
Davis X. Machina
A phrase that, while well-formed, is without meaning.
Oh, and mind the colorless green ideas — they’re sleeping, and must not be disturbed.
dmsilev
Who is David Bass, and more importantly, who is his supplier of hallucinogenic drugs?
dms
General Stuck
I don’t know what to say on this. Obviously graduate students at Baghdad Bob’s School of Journalism.
Emma
I do NOT read or watch American news any longer except for the McClatchy feed. Sorry. Even the best of them are disgustingly obssessed with their own status in the pack. It’s like watching the movie Heathers over and over and over again.
The Moar You Know
He never had any. Obviously, in the world of the Villagers, this is not an issue.
Zifnab
@ruemara:
Adrianna Huffington’s history puts her just to the left of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and her current media foray makes her about as valuable a progressive asset as a left-wing allied Rupert Murdoch. She was a Republican pundit in the 90s, she’s married to a Republican ex-Congressman. And she’s made Forbes magazine on a number of occasions for doing such a good job of businessing up politics.
If you want “progressive”, don’t look Ms Adrianna. I’ve seen supermarket rags with more progressive content than the Daily Vaccine Scare she calls a blog.
bemused
A certain % of humans must be born without a bs detector gene.
Violet
I’m sure Charles Manson would be a fascinating party guest too. Supposedly he’s very charismatic. Doesn’t mean he should be let out of prison.
El Cid
Yeah.
Reality, even beyond the constant lying race-baiting fraud:
The only fair conclusion is that Andrew Breitbart supports the use of child soldiers in black Africa, because he hates black African children.
Darius
I’m glad someone else caught the discrepancy between Ben Smith’s comments and Politico’s continued fluffing of Breitbart. In a way, I kinda feel bad for Smith – his colleagues are making him look like a complete fool.
Oh, and Huffington totally did a hatchet job on Obama with that “passing the buck” headline.
Nazgul35
Hitler’s dogs seemed to love him…can we schedule him for this week’s Sunday shows?
ruemara
@Zifnab:
Don’t tell many of its fans. They think of it as a go to source for progressive news. Considering how much of DKos is all about the same header right now, I’m not sure she’s that out of the progressive mainstream.
General Stuck
And his final scene was a real head banger.
Punchy
Comedic genius. Brilliant.
Please, for the love of god, make this a damn rotating subtitle/tag thing. Peeps need to be reminded of this daily.
sukabi
@ruemara: the thing to remember about Arianna Huffington is that she’s “a convert”… used to be a hard-core republican until their sociopathy became too overt. So these are the people she’s used to and comfortable around.
She never did do the necessary lifestyle change that’s required if you’re going to fully recover…. much like addicts need to sever relationships that are feeding their addiction in order to fully recover… it’s something Huffington has never done. Those cocktail gossip parties are too much fun, and this whole thing is a game to them.
NonyNony
@Zifnab:
Zifnab is almost correct in this block. Except for the part where she’s divorced from her Republican ex-Congressman bisexual husband. And that it’s Arianna not Adrianna. But other than that spot-on.
Arianna is progressive only in the sense that she’s too libertine to be a modern Republican. She likes gay people, isn’t anti-choice, thinks that perhaps a progressive income tax isn’t the same as socialism, and is uncomfortable with the idea of starving children in America. This makes her too left-wing to be a Republican anymore so she rebranded herself.
If you want to get mad at progressives because of people like Jane Hamsher more power to you – but don’t lump Huffington in with progressives or liberals. She’s at best a left-leaning California moderate.
Davis X. Machina
HuffPo is where it is because when it started, there already was a Drudge. If there were no Drudge, HuffPo would be right over there, on the right.
Path dependency, pure and simple.
FlipYrWhig
This is the stupidest fucking thing I have ever fucking heard.
Kryptik
@Punchy:
New Tag: Journalistic Bukakke?
But seriously. What the fuck. What the fuck is wrong with our media?
Mark D
@Zifnab
I actually tried posting over at the Huffinglue Post this morning on a thread about the whole mess, and my comment (as one would imagine) was less than flattering to Andy the Race Baiter. It contained no profanity, was on topic, and in no way, shape, or form violated their TOU. It was just critical of the clown.
Yet the comment was removed and I’m suddenly not able to post comment there any more.
It’s disgusting that so many on the left think it’s the greatest thing ever — as if it’s really an outlet for actual progressive ideas when, in reality, it’s nothing more than a way for Arianna to make more money, for celebrities to feel like they’re somehow engaged (when most of the time they’re just idiotic), and for her pals to pimp their sites, books, etc.
I feel so … used …
**hangs head in shame for being slow on the uptake**
eemom
ah, an opportunity to mock my fellow Greekess, Arianna Huffington. And I thought I wasn’t gonna have any fun today.
First of all that accent of hers is bullshit. At the very least ridiculously exaggerated. My Greece-born mom is an old lady, was not educated in the US like Arianna, and her accent isn’t nearly that thick.
Second of all I have utter contempt for any woman who parades her Greekness under her ex-hubby’s ultraWASP surname. Greek women in Greece don’t even change their names when they marry.
Third of all she’s a fucking fraud. She became a “liberal” only when
Huffington dumped her and she got a gazillion dollar divorce settlement that enabled her to set up her her glitzy HuffPo. She bought her way into emmessemmdom, plain and simple.
Fourth of all she knows nothing about anything, which makes her even more annoying to.
The ONLY good thing about her is that she makes Jane Hamsher green with envy. Tee hee.
c u n d gulag
Sure, he fondled my neice and nephew, spit on my mother the feminist, drank everything above 17 proof, didn’t tip the black guy who parked his car, and buttf**ked my dog in front of the champagne fountain, but he’s an entertaining guy!
WHAT A GREAT GET!!!
General Stuck
My first thread of commenting on Balloon Juice was a debate on Bukakke. It took a while to where I could comment on a second.
Scott
He gets on TV. That’s all the credibility the Village needs. Truth, lies, sociopathy, who cares about labels — he gets on TV, and that really gets the Village’s rocks off.
Quaker in a Basement
The state of our political discourse in just 10 words:
“it’s more than rarity that makes Breitbart a party get”
Keith
He’s “fun”? Damn, everything I have seen and read about him indicates to me someone who is mentally unstable. *Every* interview he has given (that I have seen) shows a man with manic tendencies, and he often shows serious delusions of grandeur. Anyone here disagree with that assessment? I could make a list of half a dozen instances that I would have a shrink look at just off the top of my head, and if I searched for more vids, I bet I could come up with twenty, at a minimum.
Zifnab
@ruemara: Please don’t confuse the DKos diaries with the DKos front page. Any yahoo can put up a post on there, and if you type in big enough font you might even make it to the Recommended list. But then “40 Hot Women Over 40” makes it to the top of the Rec list on Digg and Reddit all the time, and they both have valuable progressive merits notwithstanding.
I find DKos a valuable resource when I want to get a snapshot of the various progressive politicians running in the smaller House and lesser-publicized Senate and Gubernatorial races.
ruemara
OT opinion request. Is it worthwhile to post an attempt at group legislation writing/action request at GOS, or is it too soon during the Great Sherrod Meta War of Aught ’10?
PaulW
The media talking heads are more interested that Breitbart be “fun at parties” over his openly incompetent attempts at journalism?!
This REALLY IS just like fucking high school cliques all over again. These idiots never grew up.
Breitbart Delendus Est.
eemom
more annoying to listen to, I meant to say. Edit time expired. Grrr.
arguingwithsignposts
@Emma:
Hey, why insult a good cult classic movie that way?
Someone mentioned yesterday that Breitfart helped Huffington start the HuffPo. I think that explains quite a lot right there.
Rock
Ahh the banality of elite media. Peoples lives get tossed in the crapper in course of their jobs, but hanging with the cool kids at the cocktail party is all that really matters. All just a game.
I think someone should write a new contrarian essay about how the American media elite (and even most political elite) who are regarded as being much more serious than the dirty hippies, are actually fundamentally un-serious people. Such an essay would have the novelty of being true…..
Davis X. Machina
It’s not just the village.
True story.
20 years ago, give or take, I took some students of mine for a tour of the local TV station, to give them an idea of what they did, what kinds of jobs were in the field, talk to people, etc, etc. We were even allowed on the set while they did the local news-at-noon. We got the riot act read to us — stand behind this line, no talking, and certainly not when the red light was on, etc. And then they went live.
I looked over at my 8-9 students during the second segment. The talent was twenty feet away, performing live — and every one of the kids was watching her do her thing on the monitor.
What was real was what was on the screen.
Noonan
It’s usually pretty tough to find a prostitute who will criticize the work of another prostitute.
I have issues with Baltimore
Still catching up on my stack of New Yorker back issues, I found this profile of Breitbart in the May 24th issue.
Charming.
Triassic Sands
Yeah, and I heard Ted Bundy was a great date, too.
Froley
@FlipYrWhig:
Look ma, here comes a man from Californy! He says there’s an ocean out there, bluer than our’n, and that he hunts commies with his blunderbuss.
Rick Massimo
You know, combined with the “Clickiphilia” post below, I think I’ve got it:
My pet rant this week has been about how every summer, the Republicans realize that there isn’t a lot of real news, yet the 24/7 cable networks are still 24/7, so they’ll run pretty much whatever you give them. So they have fake scandals ready to go. (I said that the Democrats should be ready for this, although they can easily have REAL scandals to push – John Ensign, the fact that ACORN was innocent, et al.)
But here’s the thing – for Politico, it’s always like that. They only cover Washington losers. So in the off-season, they have nothing to do, but even in-season, there are dead times. And because they only cover Washington losers, they can’t fill time or space with dead white girls, heartwarming cancer survivors or cats who can play “Eruption” on the flarinute.
So they’re always going to fall for guys like Breitbart. Every time.
General Stuck
Peak Wingnut defined
Like in your dreams where monsters are chasing you. When you are caught, that is Peak Wingnut.
Scott
I’m really starting to picture the Village as the uglier, drunker, less intelligent, more douchebaggy version of “Jersey Shore.”
sukabi
@I have issues with Baltimore: Breitbart’s just asking for someone as sociopathic as himself to teach him a lesson.
Madeline
Funny you should say that because I was thinking the same thing last night as I considered whether or not my health insurance will cover any illness I my get from this throbbing, nauseating, incessant, overwhelming feeling of disgust I keep experiencing whenever I am subjected to pretty much any news media of any sort.
Michael
@c u n d gulag:
Roman Polanski isn’t given the credit he deserves for being the great man he is. Did you know he was rounded up by Hitler?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@ruemara: Arianna Huffington is no progressive. She’s a publicity junkie who, at the moment, finds it easier to get attention by posing on ‘the left’
as others have asked, what’s a [David] Bass?
KG
That, sir, is an insult to sociopaths everywhere.
Corner Stone
@Noonan:
I’m still pondering this. I have so many questions.
Roger Moore
@bemused:
You’ve been scooped. Their birth rate has already been estimated at over 500,000 per year by noted sociologist P.T. Barnum.
Corner Stone
I don’t often suggest it, but is there any way we can get a thread about the NYTimes article on Warren and Schapiro?
She’s a Candidate for a Job She Devised
Actually has some useful context in it, IMO
Nellcote
When you’ve lost James Wolcott…
Mr. Wolcott has been prolific this week. He doesn’t link to Politico either.
pharniel
@Keith:
Manics tend to be fun in all the ways a 15 year old girl love – intense, spontanious, off the wall, enver the same person twice.
No one ever thinks of the downsides if you’re only dealing with them for 4-5 hours once a quarter at best.
Those of us who’ve delt with manics longer term know the fucking red flags and to GTFO m8
MeDrewNotYou
John, I’d like to thank you for working bukakke into, well, anything non-porn related. Extra credit for being an accurate and effective, if disturbing description of the media.
slag
Shameless. Gossipy. Assholes.
Also, I’m now pissed at you for making me look up bukakke. Some things I just don’t need to know about.
PanAmerican
@Scott:
I’m gong with the The Human Centipede.
Zifnab
@sukabi: Are you suggesting someone should exercise his 2nd Amendment Rights on Mr. Brietbart?
~ Channeling Sharron Angle
MeDrewNotYou
@slag: Just pronounce it “buck cake” and pretend that its a tasty baked good.
matoko_chan
Has Ariana seen this?
Breitbart incoherently raving about the racist scenes in Crash and somehow connecting that to Sherrod is just the racist version of anti-semite Mel Gibson’s nutso rantings.
slag
@MeDrewNotYou: Not helping.
D-Chance.
Only 2 posts to Godwin… your commenter pool is getting more pathetic by the day, Cole.
As for Breitbart and Huffers and the such… what do you expect? This is pro wrestling at its finest. The heel does something dastardly, you “marks” erupt, the hero gets his licks in, and we move on. And don’t forget to slip another $25 to your favorite PAC, mark.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@sukabi:
If as big a sociopath as Breitbart tried to teach him a lesson, he wouldn’t learn it. He would just promptly turn into a WATB, and suddenly, all his cocktail buddies would develop sympathy for the plight of those attacked by sociopaths.
matoko_chan
@D-Chance.: hey, im not pathetic.
obnoxious, arrogant, elitist intellectual snob maybe. ;)
My hero is Taibbi.
I want to be the science-grrl version of him someday.
I need to work on the quality and quantity of my foulness in language tho.
;)
frankdawg
@Zifnab:
Yup! HuffPo is just a hit whore – anything to generate traffic. I stopped going there a few weeks ago because I can find better pictures of tits if I want elsewhere & probably find better thought pieces on those same sites.
On the topic of Hitler as a dinner guest: Orson Wells said he had dinner at a party in Germany before the little paper hanger became chancellor & the guy was totally forgettable. Compared to Wells I would think anyone would be forgettable but I always found that amusing.
NobodySpecial
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: This is a David Bass.
So, in other words, they went to the corner office for some good words about their true BFF Andy Breitbart.
God, I wish Vandehei read these comment sections. I’d ask him how fucking lazy he had to be to infect the entire staff that badly. Does he make interns carry him to the stall?
freelancer
Mr. Bass needs to look up “witty” again. And not use Conservapaedia this time.
Brachiator
@NonyNony:
@sukabi:
Don’t you get it? For most pundits and Madam Ariananna in her blog/salon/ideological brothel, being progressive or conservative is little more than a convenient costume you don to excite the johns. Otherwise, their stances are much like the James Carville/Mary Matilin marriage: a lot of public shouting to get them all excited for some freaky sex later on in the evening. There are very few true believers to be found here.
Sounds like the typical description of many reporters and the highest paid prima donnas in the Washington press corps.
slag
@D-Chance.: Clearly, you misunderestimated the title of this post.
Corner Stone
@MeDrewNotYou:
What makes you think it isn’t porn-related?
Pangloss
Ariana began her conversion to centrism after she discovered that her Republican congressman husband was bisexual and she developed a friendship with Al Franken through their appearances on Bill Maher’s “Politically Incorrect.”
Gregory
@Davis X. Machina:
Did he just use the word “talent”?
[/Groundhog Day paraphrase]
licensed to kill time
__
When I see him on the teevee he comes across as a snarly mean-mouthed drama queen. I guess some people think that’s ‘witty’.
sukabi
@Brachiator: I do get it, and the comment I made that you linked to states that… it’s just a game to her, as soon as she stops getting noticed and invited on TV to offer her “insightful analysis” she’ll reinvent herself to become “relevant” again.
sukabi
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: please refer to this “lesson” that I didn’t suggest.
tim
Yup. Right you are, John.
Arianna is quickly losing it to beltway media groupthink. She has some obscene face-off style bullshit show with Mary Iraq War Group Matalin, and Laura Fucking Ingraham has a blog on Hufpost.
WTF?
Brachiator
@sukabi:
OK. Actually, I had been intrigued by your comments that Arianna was “a convert”… and that “She never did do the necessary lifestyle change that’s required if you’re going to fully recover…” as though there could be some one true faith of political ideology or some reliable test of sincerity.
Arianna may be the High Queen of Ideological Fraud, but she has many minions.
Dave S.
@Scott: Well, we’ve already got Wolf “The Situation (Room)” Blitzer…
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@NobodySpecial: You know there is a RWNJ Bass family, just like the Kochs. I wonder if he is part of it. After all, the founders(money wise .. Allbritton) are RWNJ’s as well. Not to mention people have already forgotten, it seems, that Mike Allen’s dad was a Bircher.
Dave Noyes
From the same story linked to at Comment #39
– Arianna has a history w/this cretin:
“THE WAYWARD PRESS
Rage Machine
– Andrew Breitbart’s empire of bluster”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/05/24/100524fa_fact_mead?currentPage=all
… Through Drudge, Breitbart had met Arianna Huffington, then a conservative commentator. In 2005, Huffington, now a liberal, was preparing the launch of the Huffington Post, and Breitbart joined the enterprise. He worked for several months on the start-up, but lasted less than a month after it went live. “She was the closest thing I ever had to a collaborator who was working on the same energy levels and with the same kind of skill set,” Breitbart says. “It is very frustrating to me now that we find ourselves pitted against each other on an ideological front.” Huffington was, in some sense, a model for Breitbart. “I knew that I wanted to get into what I had helped create for Arianna, but I wanted to do it from a different perspective,” he says. “It was, like, Wow, if she can do that, why can’t I? Well, because I am not world famous, and I don’t have a salon at my house. So I was, like, Well, why don’t I create one?” …
Origuy
I deleted my Huffpo account and removed the link from my address bar for the same reason James Wolcott did. The last straw was the David Klinghoffer article connecting Darwin to Hitler. It’s bullshit, it’s ancient and debunked bullshit, and there are plenty of places to find out why.
Jamie
More sociopath enablers than real sociopaths
Frank
@ruemara:
I watch Countdown on a regular basis. But whenever Huffington is a guest on his show, I immediately change the channel. She has as much credibility as the pundits on FoxNews.
Davis X. Machina
@Gregory: In our headlong rush to embrace the future, a few wise souls still respect the classics…..
xian
why is that name Allbritton familiar? a Bush family crony?
and this Bass guy is a Luntz associate? double-ew!
John Bird
Well, we all knew Huffington was a sociopath when she drifted airily from Clinton-hunting to anti-war debutantism.
…I’m sorry, I mean she’s “high society”. I’m always mixing those two things up, probably because they’re synonyms.
Douche Baggins
@Rick Massimo: “…they can’t fill time or space with dead white girls, heartwarming cancer survivors or cats who can play “Eruption” on the flarinute.” LOLzers.
@Davis X. Machina: cf story about a sociology professor who staged an assault of himself in front of a large lecture-hall audience. His students, products of the teevee age, were riveted to the video displays of the faux beating, and nobody raised a hand to stop it. That’s how war will be fought in the 21st century: By thumb-jockeys in air-conditioned offices thousands of miles away from the action.
Now I’ve depressed myself. Gonna go look at a tree.
mclaren
Since Obama has been giving the American public a golden shower, that covers pretty much all the fetishes.