No More Mr. Nice Guy!

When assholes attack

Imagine Karl Rove without his evil genius, Robert Novak without his writing ability (such as it is), or John Bolton without his moustache. In other words, imagine a generic, vanilla older-white-guy with no talents or distinguishing features, but a surfeit of extreme-right partisan bile, anger and hatred, and no regard for facts, logic, reason or basic fairness. The result would be something very much like Doug MacEachern.

The Arizona Repulsive, as it's affectionately known, is the only daily newspaper in the sixth-largest city in the US (apart from the parochial East Valley Tribune). As such, it has a special responsibility to be what used to be called "fair and balanced" (before Fox Noise deprived those words of all meaning), to practice responsible journalism with at least some effort to get at the facts of an issue, and to allow diversity of opinion. Instead, it's nothing but a shill for the George Bush Junior regime, with its stable of crapped-out, bottom-tier scribblers carrying water and mindlessly regurgitating talking points for the junta's attack machine (with the honorable exceptions of Steve Benson, Jon Talton and maybe E.J. Montini on a good day). But by far the least able of the bunch is also the most obnoxious, hypocritical and out of control - the aforementioned MacEachern.

MacEachern has a long record of writing editorial hit-and-run pieces that are stunning in their amateurishness, bile and double standards. For example, when Whoopi Goldberg made some lame remark about keeping Bush where it belongs, not in the White House, MacEachern was incandescent with rage about the infinite depravity and evil of the Democrats, the potty-mouthed profanity the likes of which had never before sullied Washington, yada yada yada. A short time later, the President of Vice, Cheney the Dick, picked a fight with Senator Pat Leahy and screamed "Go f*** yourself" on the Senate floor. MacEachern's response? He gushed effusively about the manliness of Cheney and his "lively greeting."

Another example: when the story broke about John Bolton chasing a female subordinate and throwing a heavy stapler at her head, MacEachern sneered about "ill-founded allegations of wadded up paper sheets being thrown at a hotel room door." MacEachern, as you may have gathered by now, has no moral compass and nothing but contempt for the facts. Any behavior by a kindred spirit, however outrageous by objective standards, is praiseworthy in his eyes. Anything done by a non-reactionary is infinitely evil and likely to provoke a meltdown of extreme-right rage.

In a way, MacEachern's jaw-dropping hypocrisy is almost endearing. Does he really think we don't notice it? It's like the child that's caught with his hand in the cookie jar and chocolate smears on his face, stamping his feet and screaming: "Didn't neither!"

But MacEachern has been especially tiresome in the last couple of weeks, as he pursues a berserk crusade against Air America Radio. It seems he glommed onto some pseudo-story that has been buzzing around the extreme-right blogs; one of those periodic outbreaks of mad wingnut disease where they all work themselves up into a lather and cite each other as the source of some earth-shaking scandal that, after the most cursory investigation, turns out to exist only in their fevered imagination. Now this tenth-rate hack, who has been promoted way past his level of incompetence, is abusing his position to wage partisan war based on lies and smears in the pages of what some still imagine to be a reputable newspaper.

Here's the story: Evan Cohen, a Republican businessman with a shady past as a political operative in Guam, was one of the original investors in Air America Radio. He somehow managed to "borrow" several hundred thousand dollars from Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Club, a Brooklyn-based charity of which he was Director of Development, in the name of AAR. He has since absconded with the money, and AAR never saw a penny of it. However, they have made an ex gratia payment to the charity to make good their loss, though the payment has been put in escrow due to the fact that the charity has gone bankrupt. The Republican Evan Cohen is now rumored to be in Hawaii and still scamming charities.

Needless to say, it's a tragedy that Air America Radio and a worthy charity were ripped off by this Republican crook, but AAR are to be heartily commended for doing the decent thing even though they are not at fault and had no legal liability to compensate the Club. But of course any story involving Air America and embezzlement is blood in the water to the sharks that are continually circling the right blogosphere. Now there is a feeding frenzy going on, based on total and willful ignorance of the facts, and outright lies about Al Franken stealing from underprivileged kids. Barbara O'Brien has a good summary of how the rightards have hyped up this sordid story into an all-out attack on Air America. Notice that as soon as she did what journalists are supposed to do, investigate the sources, the story quickly fell apart.

Doug MacEachern, however, isn't a journalist, he just tries to masquerade as one. He thinks that means mindlessly and credulously repeating the breathless claims of far-right partisan extremists who have no pretensions to objectivity or journalistic credentials. He makes no effort to do even the most basic, cursory checking of the facts of the case or get the other side of the story. He doesn't give a rat's ass what the facts are - all he cares about is having another stick with which to beat the liberals. Today's bloviation is only the latest in a series of attack pieces, all of them basically lifted wholesale from the wingnut blogs.

Of course, we can't expect anything better from MacEachern. What's troubling is that the Repulsive, instead of sitting on him as it should, has apparently given its blessing to this mouth-drooling private crusade. It hasn't done any objective reporting on the story, or done anything to rebut MacEachern's egregious lies and distortions, outrageous libel and shoddy non-journalism. It's been left to the readers to answer MacEachern's frenzied attacks in letters to the editor, and if it were not for the one or two letters published, most readers would have no idea of the real story behind the crock of BS MacEachern is dementedly spewing. It's a prefect example of the transmission belt that carries the deranged rants of the ultra-extreme right from their trial-balloon stage on the fringes to a position of respectability in the mainstream.

MacEachern is a tenth-rate, no-talent partisan hack and a disgrace to a paper which is itself a disgrace to journalism. If the Repulsive had an iota of integrity, it would fire his flabby ass.