Making Shit Up

Americans are really, really fond of making shit up. It's a time-honored tradition; ask Samuel Clemens, although the thing of course predates him, rooting more probably as an Anglo-American tradition in the swishy Alexander Pope and the unconscionably dangerous Jonathan Swift. Please note that this very likely exhausts my recall of things to which I paid attention in English class.

Be that as it may, I know a trend when I see one. Heck, I'm no stranger to making shit up my ownself.

See that? That was a really cool ploy, there. I made up an excuse to get you to click on the links for old, useless posts. Damn, I'm cute. Damn, I love making shit up.

It's a right that we hold pretty inalienable, is making shit up. Pry it from our cold dead fingers and all that. This sort of thinking, of course, tends to lead pretty directly to cold dead fingers, but then again, what doesn't, in the fullness of time?

Media Matters, now carried in the Sausage Roll to the right, is devoted to exposing twits who expect to be taken seriously, yet who are Making Shit Up. Let's be clear, here. No one is paying attention to me, and that's as should be; I'm a dim bulb who enjoys vomiting on things that piss me off. I'm nobody. I'm a net exporter to the intellectual sewage system that is the Internet. The eight of you who have rediscovered that I am occasionally posting are the only ones who see this nonsense, and you have enough sense to understand irony, even not-particularly-good irony.

There are those who have wider exposure, however, and they should be held to a certain standard of honesty and truthfulness. You know who I'm talking about; don't make me name names or haul out my well-thumbed and suspiciously sticky copy of the Ad Hominem Thesaurus.

Let's digress a moment. It's perfectly acceptable, under some circumstances, to indulge ad hominem attacks. I'd like to point out to a certain segment of the population that ad hominem does not mean "unfair" or "unreasonable." It simply means that a thing (usually an attack) is directed at a person, rather than at the person's ideas.

Well, poppycock. The two are often intimately connected, and if a person is fucking stupid enough to believe or generally agree with the O'Reilly's and Malkinses and Assrockets of the world, then the person probably deserves an ad hominem attack, ne c'est pas?

Where was I? Oh yeah, Media Matters ripping O'Reilly and Malkin a new one. The site's been a little obsessed with Glenn Beck lately, and I suppose there's something to that, Glenn Beck being a high-volume provider of bullshit to call out. But today, the site exposes a bit from O'Reilly's show, wherein his guest is Our Lady of the Concentration Camps herself (aside: the still pic of Malkin from this makes her look exceedingly brown; how the hell can she stand herself?). They proceed to attack a California law requiring the addition to history curricula information about the positive historical contributions of gay persons.

O'Liar and Our Lady proceed, in the clip, to demolish truth, claiming that the law prevents all negative speech about gay persons, and to claim that the law was "a form a fascism."

Are their fingers cold and dead yet?