This Is the Real Fox Effect

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire Magazine

02 May 12

n a day when the full voice of the British government told the world that the media empire of Rupert Murdoch is a truthless, reckless enterprise, the journalistic equivalent of a hazardous waste dump, this story about the EPA guy who resigned really rather leaps with hobnailed boots on my very last nerve.

The Brits have give everyone who doesn't work for a Fox News cover now. Nobody has to pay attention to what they say ever again because they are part of an organization unworthy of attention, let alone respect. Their little hobby-horses can be mocked, their little crusades ridiculed. And, certainly, the government of the United States can treat them like the half-assed crooks that they are.

But no.

Consider what happened here. This guy said these things two years ago. Nobody said anything, not even the local reporter covering the story. But a career whackaloon like James Inhofe opens his yap and lets the bats fly forth, Fox picks up the stupidity, and the guy resigns. My question is why did Lisa Jackson even care? Why couldn't she simply have said, "Look, goober, we don't have to pay attention every time you decide to gin up the rubes who watch your network, and we don't have to care what Inhofe says, either, because his brain was used as a placemat at Golden Corral 10 years ago. Go sit over there on the Group W bench with the birthers and the UFO guy. We'll get to you some time in 2017." What is the political price to be paid here? Nobody who gets his urethra in a knot over something like this ever is going to support the president anyway. I don't understand it and I never will.