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Brent Bozell makes Ed Schultz's Psycho Talk segment for coming on the Lou Dobbs radio and saying that "You can't point a finger to anything that Fox News has done incorrectly".

After reading this, I have to conclude that Conservatives really can't tell reality from fantasy and are easily manipulated by movies and TV. I'm starting to understand why the Brent Bozells are always trying to sue some TV show or other. They think it's real; I mean, why would anyone sue a Buffy TVS episode, right?
Anyway, Digby's post covers the Jack Bauer influence on the right wing party.

It's very creepy and disturbing.

The Wapo also reports that the thing was just about to be operational before the plug was pulled last month. The plot thickens.

The LA Times says that the "CIA Was A Long Way From Jason Bourne" but when I read that description of a secret hit squad with no limits, I was reminded of something else, which I wrote a year ago:
Fanboy Interrogations

Dahlia Lithwick has a great column in this week's Newsweek about the biggest influence on the thinking of members of the Bush administration in regards to its "interrogation" policies: Jack Bauer.

I've written a ton about this shocking phenomenon over the years, but even I didn't know that John Yoo actually cited the show in his book:

"What if, as the Fox television program '24' recently portrayed, a high-level terrorist leader is caught who knows the location of a nuclear weapon?"...read on

Read her full article because she ends with this.

Rush was actually asking the right question. I laughed at him at the time,thinking he was an embarrassing torture fanboy. But it turns out that the military really was getting ideas from the show:

According to British lawyer and writer Philippe Sands, Jack Bauer—played by Kiefer Sutherland—was an inspiration at early "brainstorming meetings" of military officials at Guantanamo in September of 2002. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial new interrogation techniques including water-boarding, sexual humiliation, and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer "gave people lots of ideas."

This probably worries me as much as anything I've heard about the antics of the Bush administration. These people are so fundamentally unserious that they found inspiration in a television show when the stakes were about as high as they could possibly be. It's horrifying to think these powerful people were this daft. But they were.
It seems it was actually worse than I thought.

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Brent Bozell during a discussion on William F. Buckley Jr.'s book The Reagan I Knew on C-SPAN's Book TV opining over the state of the media today and wondering if William F. Buckley Jr. and Ronald Reagan would have had their voices heard in today's television media. He makes the huge stretch of comparing Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow on cable news today to Walter Cronkite, David Frost and Merv Griffin, like they had the same audience.

While I completely agree with Bozell that way too many on the cable news networks are forced to come on television and try to make a point in two minute sound bytes and that does nothing to add to any real political discourse in this country, him using that pretense to say that either Ronald Reagan or William F. Buckley Jr. would not have had their opinions propogated by our sorry excuse for a "main stream media" is a complete joke.

Other than Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann we don't have any progressives controlling the narrative out there... period, on any of the cable news networks or on the big three. We have sorry milk toast excuses for surrogates that supposedly represent the "liberal" side of an issue and the Democrats apparently have not gotten the message yet that the press is not their friend. When they decide to break up these media monopolies that are controlling everything we watch and listen to I'll feel that maybe they have started to get a clue.

I had a conversation with a friend that I sadly found out liked Sean Hannity recently. It made me wonder how much time I wanted to spend with her in the future since it is hard to have sane conversations with someone who's basically been brainwashed, but at least we had an honest dialog that evening about where this country is headed and she answered a question I had for her about how many progressives she even knew existed.

She had no idea who Amy Goodman or Bill Moyers were, and she had no clue that any of the major much less lesser read liberal blogs out there even existed. I named a bunch of them off and let her know that if she didn't know who those people were she actually had no idea what the other side of the story was, and what an alternative view point to Sean Hannity was.

Brent Bozell may not be happy that the conservatives of our time actually have a couple people out there taking them to task on the TV machine as Rachel puts it, but to try to pretend that conservatives haven't had a chance to put their narrative out there because Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow have been allowed to be on the air on MSNBC is an utter and complete joke. And comparing them to anyone who anchored a major news network when that's all the public had to watch at the time during the era of Cronkite is an even bigger joke.

For weeks the dying Conservatives attacked Obama as being a Socialist when it came to his economic philosophy, but once it became apparent that he was going to win, suddenly he became a Reaganite.

There is a reason why Brent Bozell made it onto my "Irrelevant" list. With Obama we have a chance for some much needed change, with Bozell it's more of the same. The man talks out both sides of his neck constantly.
Check this clip out.

On America's Newsroom, Media Research Center president L. Brent Bozell III claimed that President-elect Barack Obama "ran as a Reaganite" and "won over ... the public as a fiscal conservative." But less than two weeks earlier, Bozell accused Obama of espousing "socialism" throughout the "entirety of the campaign."

Wow, in just two weeks:

BOZELL: But when you go through the entirety of the campaign saying the kind of things that you're saying in the debates, where on, for every question, you've got a redistribution of wealth answer, where you've got socialism, where you've got the government controlling every aspect of life. You don't expect a reporter to ask you, "Is this socialism?" Because the media don't ask that question. Well, some uppity reporter did -- and look what happened, they cancelled her. And, by the way, she won't be going to the ball, either.

BOZELL: No, it hasn't. Look at the exit polling. The number one issue was the economy, nothing came close. The American people are fiscally conservative, and the fascinating thing, Bill, is that Barack Obama ran as a Reaganite and won over the fiscal -- the public as a fiscal conservative. That's what the polling data shows.

BOZELL: Well, number one is that the public is conservative; number two, Barack Obama won as a conservative. That means that Barack Obama does not have the mandate to enact the left-wing agenda he wants to enact. He didn't run on it, he ran from it. So, this is not necessarily bad news for conservatives.

Every time I see this happen I flash on the incredible scene in "Chinatown."

Evelyn Mulwray: She's my daughter.
[Gittes slaps Evelyn]
Jake Gittes: I said I want the truth!
Evelyn Mulwray: She's my sister...
[slap]
Evelyn Mulwray: She's my daughter...
[slap]
Evelyn Mulwray: My sister, my daughter.
[More slaps]
Jake Gittes: I said I want the truth!
Evelyn Mulwray: She's my sister AND my daughter!

His neck has got to be aching right about now. Did he use heat or ice to ease the pain?

The Gadflyer: Last night I appeared on Fox News' O'Reilly Factor, debating Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center (he’s the one with red hair and a beard; you may have seen him). If you're not familiar with the MRC, they're one of a number of well-funded conservative groups established to complain about liberal media bias.

Bozell and I were there to discuss the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. I've been on O'Reilly four times now, and the format is always the same: I'm the sacrificial liberal, there to be tag-teamed by the host (in this case guest host John Gibson) and the conservative guest. We'll get to what happened on the air in a moment, but what is of more interest is what happened afterward.After we finished, both of us returned to the green room to remove our makeup. Upon my arrival there, my feeling – as it usually is in this kind of situation – was that it wouldn't do much good for either of us to continue our argument off the air. I feel as passionately about politics as anyone, but let's face it, Brent Bozell and I are not going to convince each other of anything. In person, I try to be polite to everyone, even those whose political views I find repellent. Perhaps a little naïvely, I thought Bozell would feel the same way; we'd wipe our faces, wish each other good evening, and be on our separate ways.

But alas, it was not to be. The moment I walked in, Bozell looked at me angrily and said, "That was horseshit, what you said!" I reconstruct here the rest of the discussion as best I can recall. Although I wrote it down on the way home, a word here or there may be less than precise. Rest assured, though, the nasty parts from Bozell are verbatim:

WALDMAN: What part of it?

BOZELL: You're a liar!

WALDMAN: What are you talking about?

BOZELL: That stuff about Kerry!

WALDMAN: What, about atrocities?

BOZELL: He called them war criminals!

WALDMAN: He didn't accuse any individuals of anything.

BOZELL: You're a liar!

WALDMAN: He never accused those guys of anything.

BOZELL: John Kerry is a liar, and you're a liar!

WALDMAN: What are you talking about?

BOZELL: Fuck you!

At that, Bozell stormed out. I should note that throughout this little argument, I remained calm, partly in an attempt to diffuse Bozell's boiling rage, but also because I was genuinely having a hard time figuring out what he was trying to get across. Bozell, in contrast, looked as though his head was about to explode, his voice growing louder and his face redder. I would say that I was afraid he was going to take a swing at me, but I don't think "afraid" is quite the right word. I'm quite a few years younger than Bozell, and though I suspect he fights dirty, I have a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, so I'm pretty sure I could take him. Fortunately, it didn't come to that.

Read the transcript