It’s been over 25 years since radio shock jock Howard Stern went national and in his own way helped to define today’s AM radio. So, it’s amazing to see the liberal media now suddenly discover a mean puritanical streak in what looks to be an effort to silence voices on the Right. And I thought it was the Christian right that seeks to enforce some moral order on the population?

With cross-over media and careers being so much in vogue today, should it really be a surprise that what may work, or be fine in one medium, could be interpreted as inappropriate on another? And why is it that only conservative voices seem to suffer this guilt by association, generated by the Left, to try and get them kicked off the air? This despicable political tactic deserves to be called out for what it is, the modern day equivalent of book burning.

Call it a Vast Left-wing Conspiracy, or some interesting connections if you follow New Media. It seems that not long after former Politico staffer Ben Smith moved to Buzzfeed, Politico may now be linking up with Buzzfeed to put some distance between itself and ideologically-biased media outlet Media Matters.

The most aggressive would be book burner at Politico these days appears to be Dylan Byers. After going after Big Journalism editor, Dana Loesch, he’s now targeted Erick Erickson for comments made on his AM radio show.

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On Monday evening, the political blogosphere was rocked by the unprecedented publishing of a 200-page opposition research book on Mitt Romney written by the John McCain campaign for the 2008 GOP presidential primary. Who decided to release this information to the public? It wasn’t ThinkProgress; it wasn’t Newsweek or the Washington Post or Mother Jones. It was by a website which currently features the headlines “Martial Artist Kicks Down Banana Tree,” “Baby Flummoxed By New Sound,” and “Jessica Simpson Wearing A Giant Deformed Penis Mask.” I kid you not.

BuzzFeed, the name of the site in question, is the latest venture for Politico’s JournoList-er Ben Smith, as previously reported by John Nolte. Smith is heading up the “Politics” section of BuzzFeed, and while he claims objectivity, the case of this leaked document reveals exactly how he plans to use the site to hurt the GOP and aid Obama’s reelection campaign.

Screenshot of BuzzFeed’s politics page

The “About” page of BuzzFeed presents the site as nothing more than a place where readers can find interesting and viral Internet content:

We feature the kind of things you’d want to pass along to your friends: an outrageous video that’s about to go viral, an obscure subculture breaking into the mainstream, a juicy bit of gossip that everyone at the office will be talking about tomorrow, or an ordinary guy having his glorious 15-minutes of fame.

The site’s niche naturally extends to its political page, headed up by Smith. The political news cycle is chock full of bizarre and hilarious information that normally doesn’t end up on NPR–Mitt Romney sparring with pop group LMFAO, Herman Cain singing “Imagine” with pizza-themed lyrics, or Rick Perry blasting a coyote while jogging, for instance. Thus, a site to present this kind of offbeat content (the categories on BuzzFeed include “LOL,” “WTF,” and “Fail”) sounds like a great place to unwind, to set aside all the partisan bickering and just check out posts “for the lulz,” as we whippersnappers say.

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This is BuzzFeed today, a site co-founded by Jonah Peretti, who also co-founded the Huffington Post.

A match made in heaven for our infamous JournOlister, Ben Smith.

Don’t click that BuzzFeed link and laugh, though. What looks like a goofy pop culture site won’t be one for much longer. The idea is for Smith to hire a dozen or so political reporters and (in his own words):

…to help build the first true social news organization – that is, an outfit built on the understanding that readers increasingly get and share their news on Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms.

This is a natural evolution for the left’s number one New Media hitman. The only thing Smith and I might have in common is an understanding of the awesome power of social media to undermine and make irrelevant the MSM — not when it comes to information gathering and news reporting, but most definitely when it comes to narrative building. In a recent interview, Smith didn’t express it exactly like that, but the subtext is pretty obvious:

Twitter, Smith says, is “sort of draining the life from the blog.”

“Where people were hitting refresh on my blog because they wanted to see what my latest newsbreak was, now they’ll just be on Twitter, and I’ll tweet it out and they’ll see it there,” he says. “What I’m doing right now is just incredibly old school. I might as well have ink all over my fingers and be setting type.” …

The idea that Twitter could be a promotional tool, driving traffic back to his blog and to Politico, doesn’t reassure him. “I now have as many followers—40,000—as the number of unique visits I get on a slowish, average day on the blog,” he says. “At what point do I have more people reading my tweets than reading my blog? I don’t know.” (He actually has almost 50,000 Twitter followers, which may answer the question.)

What has to be galling to Smith and others like him is that social media allows anyone with a popular Twitter or Facebook account to not only have as much impact as a blog at, say, Politico, but also a faster impact. Moreover, one smart, well-written tweet or Facebook post can undermine and deconstruct a news article or blog post before it has a chance to go viral and enter the national narrative. This new reality drives the corrupt MSM crazy. The last thing these people want is to be wallflowers when it comes to what Americans are talking about.

This is why, for over a year now, I’ve written and marveled at the power of social media, especially Twitter and Facebook, to go around the toxic filter of the MSM. More than once I’ve witnessed national narrative changes occur on Twitter that took  blogs a full day to catch up on and the MSM two or three. What’s happening is that through these extraordinary social media platforms, the American people are are having a conversation amongst themselves. We’re educating each other, learning from one another, sharing information, and exchanging ideas — and the MSM has zero say in any of it.

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Wednesday, I came across this Columbia Journalism Review interview with Politico’s Ben Smith, in which he describes his work in this context:

The news cycle now is about these tiny segments, and I think my stuff is what people are talking about in any given segment reasonably often. Scoops speak for themselves. If you have some new piece of information, it gets passed around and it’s fun to see people discovering something because you broke it. It’s one of the basic rewards of journalism in some way, I think. To tell people stuff they didn’t know.

For those of you who don’t know, Smith has a blog at Politico all to himself, was a member of the infamous Journolist, and would prefer to be seen as an objective journalist with no agenda one way or another.

It was just a coincidence that I came across that interview on the same day I was thinking about writing a piece responding to a “scoop” Smith had posted the day before:

‘Rudy’ writer: Newt no Rudy

Newt Gingrich’s campaign yesterday pulled the soundtrack from the film “Rudy” from his campaign ad after I asked about the copyright, though they didn’t respond directly to questions about whether they had the rights to use it online.

I heard today from the film’s writer and producer, Angelo Pizzo, who expressed his dismay that Gingrich would associate himself with the movie.

“I think what the movie’s about and what Newt’s about are at polar opposites,” he said. “One thing about the character of Rudy: He’s always consistent in his purpose, his philosophy, and his goal, and he does it honestly and straightforward. He was a person of absolute ethical and moral integrity, and I think Newt is anything but that.  He’s all over the map on any number of issues.”

At first glance that might seem like a frivolous story, but there’s a method to Smith’s madness at work here. Gingrich is on the rise, and the MSM loves to pull Republicans off message for a day every time some musician whines about his or her music being used without permission by a campaign.

This is Smith doing what Smith does so well: tossing chaff at a Republican, creating a distraction-narrative over nonsense, all in the apparent hope of getting the campaign off-track and off-message.

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To anyone paying attention, the so-called Birther, or birth certificate controversy, surrounding those misguided rumors that questioned whether or not President Obama had been born in this country, was a controversy both Obama and his MSM allies loved and maliciously stoked to keep alive. For them, it was a beautiful issue that gave them a racial brush with which to tar all Republicans and, better still, it worked as the perfect distraction to keep conservatives off message and on defense. For example, NBC’s David Gregory demands Congressman Eric Cantor take a firm stand against Birthers, and when he isn’t harsh enough to please a leftist like Gregory, that becomes the only story that comes out of a full-length “Meet the Press” interview.

All part of the plan.

And for a number of years it worked, at least until Donald Trump finally slew the Birther Dragon by turning the issue into such a negative for Obama, he was forced to finally act. After the President produced the very same birth certificate the MSM had assured us he could never get, the scalded media then attempted to spin it into a win for Obama, when in reality both they and the White House had just lost a powerful weapon both were counting on to reelect Obama. Without the shiny toy of Birtherism, conservatives might actually be allowed to get their 2012 message out and the country might actually have a discussion about Obama’s dismal record.

Today, Obama’s Media’s Palace Guards are desperately searching for new methods of distraction. So desperate are they that Politico’s Ben Smith and Slate’s Dave Weigel (both former members of the infamous Journolist) now have a regular cottage industry in coming up with anti-GOP nonsense distractions (today’s journolisting provides two perfect examples). But as diligent as those two are (What Fast and Furious?), they obviously aren’t enough.

Which helps to explain this insipid nonsense:

Many Republicans, however, don’t regard government jobs as actual jobs, and are eager to see them disappear. Republican governors around the Midwest have aggressively tried to break the power of public unions while slashing their work forces, and Congressional Republicans have proposed paying for a payroll tax cut by reducing federal employment rolls by 10 percent through attrition. That’s 200,000 jobs, many of which would be filled by blacks and Hispanics and others who tend to vote Democratic, and thus are considered politically superfluous.

Believe it or not, that’s a Sunday New York Times’ editorial attempting to make the case that wanting smaller government is, yep, racist.

Does the New York Times really believe that?

Of course not. The Times’ editorial is an obvious political tactic, not a serious policy position. The Times is intentionally toying with us, hoping to make us angry and put us on defense. ’Racist’ is the new ‘Birther.’

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Today’s opening snark courtesy of Journolister Dave Weigel from his Slate perch:

Big Government breaks the news that Bill Ayers hosted a fundraiser for Barack Obama; well, this was broken by Ben Smith in 2007, but still.

I call it a “snark” because the word “lie” feels a little harsh during this holiday season. However, it’s just a fact that Big Government didn’t position the piece as “breaking news” and as far as I can tell it wasn’t even a featured story. But you have to admire a guy like Weigel who poses as an objective journalist and yet sees no news value whatsoever in new video of a notorious domestic terrorist speaking openly about his relationship with a sitting President of the United States.

But is it really that Weigel saw no news value in it or that he knows that Obama’s re-election could be in even more trouble were he to receive the kind of vetting Journolisters like Weigel did everything in their power to prevent in 2008?

Naturally, Weigel isn’t alone. Here’s Politico’s Ben Smith joining in on the wrist-flicking of the new Ayers video:

Oh, and did you know Ben Smith was also a member of Journolist and that something he didn’t find at all, uhm, “footnote-y” was the possibility that Sarah Palin might own a tanning bed.

Priorities.

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I must respectfully disagree with my insightful colleague John Nolte about Jennifer Rubin, the resident conservative blogger at the Washington Post.

First, full disclosure: Rubin is a friend. I was privileged to get to know her during the 2010 elections after admiring her work throughout the dark days of 2008.

Jennifer Rubin speaking in Illinois, 2010

There’s a risk for any conservative when going “in-house” at a mainstream media outlet. In my view, Rubin’s held her own and maintained her independence.

[UPDATE: I am reminded, also, that the radical left and their mouthpieces, like Media Matters, hate the fact that Rubin is at the Post because they worry about her ability to use her blog to legitimize conservative views for the newspaper's liberal readership.]

I think it’s precisely her independence that fascinates–and frustrates–Ben Smith and other mainstream journalists. They wish she could be cast as a shill.

She’s been very aggressive in attacking Gov. Rick Perry–but then, she’s not the only conservative who has done so openly and stridently.

I don’t agree with fellow conservatives who have described her as “establishment,” either (if I had to characterize her views simplistically, I’d say they were “urbane”).

There are plenty of conservatives who are, like Rubin, critical of some of the social or foreign policy views that have emerged among the Republican presidential candidates.

I don’t think a single one of them wants to see Barack Obama re-elected. On the contrary, they want to see the best possible challenger emerge from the pack. (more…)

This is pretty typical of what Ben — “Tanning Bed” — Smith does over at his Politico perch. From what I’ve observed over the last few years, the liberal Smith’s job is to use his blog to feed the MSM’s narrative stream with mostly anti-Republican talking points — especially when a campaign’s on. Today, he’s feeding his MSM pals anti-Herman Cain anecdotes, though I guess we should at least be grateful they’re not the same kind of racial attacks we’re seeing elsewhere in the media.

This irresponsible, second-hand anecdote opens his post and caught my eye:

Herman Cain’s rise has been swift, and infrastructure free. One reason many people following politics closely assume he’ll go the way of Donald Trump is in part because he doesn’t really have a campaign on the ground, or a fundraising apparatus — I heard a story today about wealthy fans trying in vain to reach his campaign — or any other real way to capitalize on a surge.

Really? Wealthy fans weren’t able to reach his campaign to help? Do they have access to the Internet? Because this.

And here’s my anecdote,which isn’t second hand. While I remain undecided, my wife most certainly is not. The day Herman Cain won the Florida Straw Poll she immediately donated $100 to his campaign (Note to “wealthy fans,” she did so via this InterTubeNet thing).

Just one measly week later, we received a very pleasant phone call from the Cain campaign thanking us for the donation and asking for more.

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So tell me if I have this right: decades ago, on a hunting ranch Texas Governor Rick Perry’s family was leasing a very small portion of, Perry’s father pro-actively painted over a rock with an offensive word on it and according to the news media that’s not only news but worthy of the furious narrative that’s currently raging everywhere. But…! It’s not news within the intellectually honest way in which I’m framing the story. It’s news within the craven, dishonest way the cravenly, dishonest MSM is framing it.

For instance:

“At Rick Perry’s Texas Hunting Spot, Camp’s Old Racially Charged Name Lingered.“

That was the wildly dishonest headline on the front page of Sunday’s Washington Post and you can bet your sweet life it’s taken on a life of its own from there (which, of course, was the game plan). According to Google, there are now over 1100 related articles already online. Worse still, some media outlets have already entered phase two of this coordinated attempt to permanently take Perry out with a follow-up narrative best represented by Politico’s Ben Smith:

The story isn’t disqualifying, or all that damning. It’s distracting. And it is the latest in a series of distractions that make the key players at this stage in a primary campaign — governors, big donors — more open to Romney’s arguments that the party should unite around him, pivot to confront Obama, and avoid an endless primary, because who knows what’s going to fall out of Perry’s bag next.

Well, golly gee, thanks so much for policing your profession, Ben. You’re a real profile in courage spinning an obvious front page in-kind contribution to the Obama 2012 campaign into the damning narrative of “poor, beleaguered Perry — how will he ever get elected.”

Elsewhere at Politico, the headline went a little something like this…

“Perry’s Hunting Camp Problem.”

…without any context that frames the story in an honest way.

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Is vanity hard to mock? Failure? Addiction to a teleprompter? How about the need to use the word “I”? 

Urging Congress to pass a bill now that hasn’t been written yet is kind of stupid, no? And so is “jobs saved,” “corpse-man,” Attack Watch, and this:

Ben Smith is on Twitter where I can assure you no one has any trouble whatsoever mocking the man he laughingly calls “the leading expert on the complicated, delicate politics of race.” If by that Smith means, the leading expert on calling people racist to cover up your failures, we agree.

Ben Smith:

Tellingly, as Jodi Kantor pointed out, there isn’t even a memorable depiction of Obama on Saturday Night Live. Obama may be harder to parody than his predecessors because there’s no easy stereotype for him — Will Farrell’s George W. Bush was a dimwitted, lucky frat boy; Darrell Hammond’s Bill Clinton was Bubba, with extra sleaze and charisma; Dana Carvey was the patrician George H.W. Bush, failing to connect. 

But there’s another factor as well. Obama’s persona is always a little bit in on the joke. He comments on which stories make it “above the fold” and on the deeper meanings of cable news. He wrote his own memoir before anybody had ever heard of him, and is himself the country’s leading expert on the complicated, delicate politics of race. He projects a kind of self-conscious, sometimes ironic detachment that makes him harder to mock, but maybe also harder to depict and even to like. 

Of course Smith’s argument is absurd, especially the part about our notoriously thin-skinned and humorless president being in on the joke. Obama’s better at creating jobs than self-deprecation. Hey, here’s some mockery fodder… I see a bumbling, hapless President who wears a bike helmet in the Oval Office, is starved to death by his Food-Nazi wife (she sneaks french fries, he sneaks smokes), gets an uncontrollable facial tic every time the word “jobs” is mentioned, and won’t speak to anyone without a teleprompter leading the way.

Imagine a skit where the letter “i” breaks on the teleprompter. Oh the hilarity.

How hard was that, Ben? 

Mocking Obama is actually fish-in-a-barrel if you’re not enamored with the man. Love is blind, after all.    (more…)

The good news is that Politico’s Andy Barr is now going to work out in the open against Palin and the Right, as opposed to what he’s been doing since 2008, and that’s the exact same thing at Politico under the failed disguise of an objective journalist. One wonders if all he had to do in order to get his Democratic Party job was either staple his Politico work to the application or simply write “I work for Politico” when asked for a list of experience in promoting the Leftist cause.

Peas in a pod

The Daily Caller reports:

With the roaring success “The Undefeated” has already had at changing the conversation about Sarah Palin from tanning beds and crosshair maps to, you know, her actual record as a public servant, the Left and their dishonest allies in the MSM are obviously as worried as they are desperate. As a result, this morning at “The Atlantic” we’re greeted with a 950+ word article filled with precious NPR-esque prose and the delicate pose of a journalist just reporting the difficult truth, all under the following headline:

Sarah Palin Movie Debuts to Empty Theater in Orange County

We’re then told:

It isn’t strictly accurate to say that I sat through the whole movie alone. Just as the previews started, two young women walked in giggling together and took seats three rows behind me. Afraid that they’d ruined the only story I had at that point — What If Sarah Palin Starred in a Movie and No One Showed Up? — I hoped they’d at least oblige me with an interview, and so they did.

From there, the corrupt MSM has been gleefully off and running and amplifying the glorious news:

The hard-left film site Movie Line:

Empty Theaters, 0% Positive Reviews Greet Sarah Palin Documentary

New York Magazine:

For the debut of the Sarah Palin documentary, Atlantic scribe Conor Frieserdorf was alone in an Orange County, California, theater, one of just ten nationwide showing The Undefeated.

Frum Forum:

Palin Movie Opens to No Crowds

Salon:

Palin movie debuts to an audience of empty seats

And naturally, Politico’s Ben Smith of the Tanning Bed Smiths:

The Unwatched

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Ben Smith linked to a progressive website discussing the Fox Twitter hack but made no mention of it on their website.

Because they made no mention that Fox’s account was hacked and not that Fox simply lied, the comments are entertaining:

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As the Weinergate story leaves behind many unanswered questions, the Twitterverse is not likely to get many truthful answers – not as long as Joan Walsh has anything to do about it.  The Salon.com editor had some harsh words for reporters who tried to cover the story from an angle that didn’t suit her own anti-Breitbart bias.

Over Memorial Day weekend, the Weinergate story developed in the wee hours of the night on Friday evening and early Saturday morning, when a lewd photo purported to be from Congressman Weiner’s yfrog account surfaced on Twitter.  Given that the story was literally unfolding on Twitter, where thousands of other users were witnessing the now infamous tweet in real time, it wasn’t exactly a “sit and wait” situation.  In the age of social media, stories make themselves – good or bad, one tweet can erupt into a firestorm in the blink of instant.  This presents both a challenge and an opportunity.  On one hand, media can wait and verify every fact, but at Twitter speed, the story will move far more quickly than standard fact finding and requests for comments can possibly occur.  On the other hand, new media journalism can fill that void and get ahead of such a story before the firestorm gets out of hand.

And this is exactly what the Big sites did when Weinergate erupted.  BigGovernment.com ran with a post just before 12:30am on Saturday, headlined “Weinergate: Congressman Claims ‘Facebook Hacked’ as Lewd Photo Hits Twitter.”  Given that the story was in its infancy but was moving so quickly online, editors merely presented the facts as they were known at the time, indicating that it was a developing story.  They also decided to publish the tweet and photo, but took caution by redacting all of the personal information of the young woman for whom the tweet was supposedly intended. (more…)

With the exception of Jonathan Allen and Ben Smith of Politico, who both deserve credit for covering the Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) story we broke here at the Bigs on Friday night, the mainstream media’s silence on this objectively important story has been deafening. And now that 24 hours have passed since the story originally broke, there’s simply no way to blame the MSM’s lack of interest on the holiday weekend.

After all, this isn’t just any story. Regardless of how it all eventually breaks, what we have here is either the story of a high profile, recently married New York Congressman who’s seriously considering a Mayoral run in Manhattan, tweeting his “junk” to a young woman two decades his junior — and lying to the media about it. Or we have a story involving a high-profile Congressman’s Facebook and Twitter account being hacked with pornographic pictures.

So ask yourself: how does the MSM justify all but ignoring something so juicy? And then if you’re still not convinced of the story’s newsworthiness, remind yourself that these events are not unfolding in one of those odd, square-shaped states our journalist-class fly over every once in a while. This is a New York story that involves the trifecta of politics, sex, and a rising political star. Furthermore, the icing on the cake is Bill and Hillary Clinton. Last July, in a ceremony officiated by former President Clinton himself, Rep. Weiner married Hillary’s top aide, Huma Abedin.

Now, please don’t bother to answer any of the above questions. They were rhetorical and answered by the “D” after Rep. Weiner’s name. Naturally, the hacking of a Facebook account connected to one of the best known and most outspoken Democrats in Congress is a bonafide story … unless you’re afraid of where that story might lead. And if you’re interested in what a WeinerGate story looks like when a news outlet is terrified afraid of where it might lead, read this.

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Jonathan Allen and Ben Smith at Politico:

Rep. Anthony Weiner says social networking identity hacking is to blame for the lewd material that a conservative news website reported was sent from his Twitter and yfrog handles to an unidentified woman from Seattle, Washington.

Weiner’s office did not respond to a request for comment on if he has contacted authorities.”

The New York Democrat told POLITICO he thought it “obvious” that his account had been taken over, and he tweeted that his Facebook account had been hacked with the abbreviation “FB hacked.”

A photo of a man’s bulging gray boxer-brief underwear was posted to Weiner’s account with yfrog — an online image-sharing site — on Saturday night, according to biggovernment.com, which is run by Andrew Breitbart. The photograph is from the waist down, and shows no face.

“The weiner gags never get old, I guess, ” the veteran lawmaker emailed a POLITICO reporter in response on Saturday. …

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And so it finally happened. Obviously troubled by the fact that Donald Trump’s questions surrounding Barack Obama’s birth certificate are starting to gain some real traction, Ben Smith at the left-wing Politico finally panicked and fired off the Race Card. Hilariously, Smith did so using my favorite brand of agendized journOlism, what I call the “Some Say” tactic. How it works is very simple. In order for Smith to hide behind his dishonest and arrogant veil of objectivity, he simply finds others saying what he wants to say and abuses his position to amplify the charges directly into the narrative. Today, his chosen ”Some Sayers” are those in the Black community accusing Trump of racism.

How so very convenient.

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I know, my use of the term “on-target” makes me a vitriolic, hateful rhetoric espouser in the eyes of some. It’s not conducive to the “new tone” we are all supposed to embrace for some unfathomable and delusional reason. Of course, this new tone doesn’t apply if one is speaking about Sarah Palin, who is apparently the cause of All Bad Things Ever, in perpetuity. Even here, we are on day three of no school due to snow. In South Carolina. Does Palin’s evil reach have no bounds?!

The Left and the media, as always concentric circles on a Venn diagram, attempted for days to spin a false and odious narrative placing blame for the shooting in Tucson on Sarah Palin and everyone like her. Because, vitriol. Or something. Days of vile political opportunism, on the backs of the dead. Days of disgusting smears the likes of which I’ve never seen before in my lifetime. Days of giddily and gleefully exploiting deaths, including those of a federal judge and a nine year old child, all in an attempt to score political points and to silence and demonize those with whom they disagree.

That the facts did not support such claims even one iota meant nothing. In fact, they absolutely ignored all evidence and truths and proceeded to just make stuff up. All focused on Sarah Palin, who miraculously manages to be a dumb old chick from the sticks and the most evil person alive. She’s kind of like George W. Bush that way, I suppose. Chris Matthews went so far as to put a graphic up during his show last night with Sarah Palin’s picture, reading underneath “Silent: On The Lam.” On. The. Lam. As if some fugitive, implying that she, along with the tea party, is somehow responsible for a massacre perpetrated by a madman.

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For some reason, many people still contend that Politico “has no politics” or is “politically neutral.” If that’s the case, someone please point out its right-of-center equivalent to Ben Smith. The JournoListo über-blogger is back at it today trying to “Joe the Plumber” William Kelly.

For those of you unaware, earlier this week Big Journalism posted video of the Chicago-based conservative talk-show host pursuing an aggressive line of questioning at a Rahm Emanuel media junket, when this happened:

But when you run this story through the JournoList Spin-o-Matic, what comes out is a Ben Smith blog post smearing Kelly Alinsky-style. Politico’s super-sleuth went to the trouble of finding Kelly’s 1995 book on Amazon, and you’ll never believe what he found: Kelly is a fan of noted white supremacist Norman Mailer (the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who contributed to Democrats until his death in 2007) and thinks “criminals should be made to pay for their crimes through hard work.” Busto! How is Kelly going to live this down?

No one sums up the back-asswardness of Smith’s post, and the left’s penchant for the politics of personal destruction, better than a commenter on Smith’s own blog:

Left wing “Reporters” threaten conservative. Ben Smith investigates–the conservative!

Watch out William Kelly, you’ve just been JournoListed. (more…)