Chris "Tweety" Matthews is indeed an insufferable blithering jackass, a creepy Irish-American misogynist who fits nicely into conservative Catholic Jack Welch's similarly-pedigreed stable of thoroughbred infotainwhores.

Bob Somerby can tell you all about it, and in fact he seems to have gotten in ahead of me on this comments thread (see above).

I find it interesting that admirers can somehow brush aside Tweety's adolescent loathing for Hillary Clinton (I'm not a fan), or his embarrassingly homoerotic gushing over men in power. During the post-war era of Freudian psychotherapy, Tweety would've been instantly classified "latent homosexual". Talbot's characterization of Tweety as a shallow, superficial blarneymonger comports with my mercifully limited experience of him.

Yeah, I'm glad Tweety somehow missed jumping on the pro-war bandwagon. Thank God for small favors. But his twisted inside-politics shtick is devoid of gravitas and intellectual depth or integrity. He is the epitome of the "chattering class".

PS: Methinks "anti-conspiracists" protest too much. Nor am I much impressed with the tactic of firmly Putting Down dissenters by insisting that the truth is well-settled and beyond dispute. (Bugliosi said it; I believe it; that settles it.) I hope the reward of smug superiority and the much sought-after virtue of Closure is worth it.

But even if it turns out that JFK actually committed suicide, Tweety remains an overpriced hack who should be limited to regaling the regulars from his stool at the neighborhood taproom.

"What is the point of printing White House statements without having any idea if they're true and without bothering to find out."

Now, Glenn, don't be disingenuous and try to slip those rhetorical questions in without a question mark!

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I offer a tangential point: the other day, I was reading comments to an article in the wildly uneven "Huffington Post"-- wildly uneven because it's part bottom-feeder trash-tabloid, part political commentary forum. HuffPo has launched an unfortunate site redesign which makes it impossible to find items published more than a day or two ago, so I'm unable to locate the article and comments in question.

The HuffPo article discussed the hot-button issue of "mainstream" vs. blog reporting. I was struck by the seemingly educated and literate commenters who continued to espouse the belief that "real" news organizations were inherently entitled to greater respect and a presumption of verity. One commenter in particular argued that the difference between a blog report and something published in The New York Times was precisely that-- the latter appeared under the Masthead of the New York Times. (emphasis and gratuitous caps my own, of course) The commenter argued, in effect, that anything published in the NYT was backed by the full faith and credit of that enduring and prestigious organization. And that counted for something, especially when contrasted to the possibility that blog reports might just originate from the proverbial guy in a basement recycling material from other guys in basements, or otherwise just pulling stuff out of his ass.

I was sufficiently irritated by the commenter's condescending and supercilious tone that I suggested that the commenter seemed to think that the worst that could happen at the NYT is that a Jayson Blair would occasionally creep in and be detected, exposed and banished. I wondered how the commenter could continue to feel confident in an institution which champions the likes of infotainwhores* like Judith Miller, Michael Gordon, and Jeff Gerth, and whose ombudsmen and "public editors" overwhelmingly support and defend their pathological "reporting" techniques and output.

I raise this issue here just to note that the Mike Allens of the world prosper not only because of their personal predilection for skilled stenography and a shameless obeisance to those in power. They also prosper because new media outlets are hungry for prestige and uncritical acceptance; these are the precursors of financial prosperity, which is after all the true purpose of modern media enterprises. Thus, they eagerly seek to acquire the services of one whose résumé reflects a long association with established prestigious organizations. The new enterprise presumes that they're not only acquiring a top-notch infotainwhore, but one whose professional résumé and bona fides will enhance the new organization's worth. In a nutshell, better a proven "senior Beltway reporter" than a talented nobody.

The Mike Allens of the world will continue to be regarded as a "good catch" as long as enough otherwise intelligent citizens buy into the canard that corporate news organizations are generally trustworty, reliable, and operating in the public interest.

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* I believe that "infotainwhore" is an original neologism. I find it a bit clumsy, and possibly annoying to "serious" readers. Still, in the same way I often in blog comments refer to the War Criminal-in-Chief as the "Unitard™", I choose to use it because it expresses appropriate derision.

McLeary and Drum plainly believe that the end justifies the means.

It's such a useful concept! Face it, no matter how diligently enlightened thinkers have attempted to refute or repudiate this simple precept, it persists as the go-to rationale for persons in power. Its application is universal, and it never wears out.

Like a really good laundry detergent, this maxim has proven safe and effective on even the toughest stains!

FWIW, I'm not all that familiar with Berkely Breathed, so it's not like I'm a rabid fan or anything. (It's never too late, though.)

But this cartoon is tolerably funny. Some may disagree, but that appears to be because they are substituting utterly humorless scrutiny and self-righteousness for their sense of humor-- if they have one, and it hasn't been dumbed, numbed, and repressed for the occasion.

Obviously any joke can be made to seem flat, offensive, or misguided if one approaches it with deadly seriousness. That is, to use an idiomatic expression translated from Italian that my grandmother liked: if one is "looking for cats to comb".