(h/t Media Matters)

Just further proof that Sarah Palin's political career is entirely due to all these Republican men thinking with their GOPenises.

In an appearance on Imus in the Morning (now airing on the Fox Business Channel, which is why you probably didn't know it was back on the air), Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace** exposed a little more of his psyche than he probably should have:

WALLACE: We are going to have the first Sunday show interview ever with Governor Sarah Palin. We’ll be down in Nashville with her at the National Tea Party Convention and…I’m excited. First of all, I’m excited to finally meet and interview Sarah Palin. We’ve been chasing her like Captain Ahab and the great white whale for the last year and a half, so it’s going to be interesting to sit down with her and talk. And in addition, I’m interested in going down to the Tea Party convention and get a sense of other than seeing them on TV what they’re…what their platform is, what they’re interested in.

IMUS: When she…when you interview her, will she be sitting on your lap? [laughter]

WALLACE: One can only hope. [laughter]

Ewwww. The dirty old man chuckling made me more than a little nauseated. This is not the first such occasion where Wallace has made really inappropriate statements, as documented by our friends at Media Matters:

Wallace on Brown's looks: A female Fox anchor said, "you guys have all had Sarah Palin, now we've got Scott Brown"

Fox's Wallace asks conservative host Gallagher to "do me a favor ... put in a good word for me" with Palin

Fox's Wallace on ACORN booking: I wish we "were going to have the prostitute [Giles] because she's pretty cute"

Fox's Wallace: NTSB chair Hersman "a babe ... you would not expect a government bureaucrat to be an attractive woman"

However, this time, Wallace got the condemnation of none other than GOP also-ran Fred Thompson and wife, Jeri. Dude, when Fred Thompson wakes up enough to say you're out of line, you have really messed up.

**Corrected. No one should confuse the quasi-journalism/propagandizing of Chris Wallace with any other family member

It's a horrible, unspeakable tragedy that gets you right in the core of your humanity. The poorest country in the Western Hemisphere is flattened by a huge earthquake. Hundreds of thousands killed, thousands of children orphaned, more than 1.5 million now homeless. Bodies of the dead are lain in the street to be bulldozed into mass graves while machete-wielding gangs fight for the scarce resources. The pain, the fear, the sense of hopelessness is palpable.

It is now incumbent upon all of us, as fellow humans, to lend a hand and help the Haitians. And in a rare show of humanity, broadcast and cable television outlets have agreed to pre-empt their regular programming to air the Hope For Haiti Now Global TV Telethon.

Except for Fox News Channel.

Our crack C&L team has checked around the dial and compiled a list of channels participating:

CBS

ABC

NBC

CW

FOX

TNT

Weather Channel

MSNBC

CNBC

CNN

HBO

Showtime

Major League Baseball Network

Style Network

E! Entertainment Network

ReelzChannel

TNT

Comedy Central

Oxygen

Soap Opera channel

Bravo

National Geographic Channel

Sleuth

G4

CMT

TV1

BET

MTV

MTV2

VH1

GMC

FUSE

Current

PBS

It's even streaming live on IMDb, Hulu and YouTube.

But not for FNC or their sister business channel. They're showing Billo and crew.

I guess that tells you exactly what you need to know about Fox's responsibility as a "news" channel.

The Hope For Haiti fundraiser will distribute donations to the following organizations: The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, United Nations World Food Programme, Oxfam America, Partners in Health, the Red Cross, Unicef, and Wyclef’s Yele Haiti Foundation. If you have not yet donated, please consider doing so now.

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Gosh. Looks like we won't have Lou Dobbs to kick around anymore. Except, of course, for when he lands that fat Fox Business Channel gig.

In the meantime, some congratulations are in order -- and, as Greg Sargent suggests, the left blogosphere in general deserves a great deal of credit in finally forcing one of the nation's leading hatemongers -- and disinformation specialists -- out the door.

That's especially the case with Media Matters, which really led the way. (MM has great retrospective of their own.) And the campaigns that organized to compel his ouster at CNN -- including Basta Dobbs, Drop Dobbs, and America's Voice -- should take a bow as well.

While we wait for the right-wing violins to cue their usual "Mean Liberals Went On a Witch Hunt" number, we should also take special note of what this means: It means that liberal activism to force our media to act responsibly works.

I know that a lot of time it feels like we're just shouting into the wind. It's that feeling of utter helplessness that ordinary citizens always get when they pit themselves against the power of big money and big corporations. Sure, we can document all the media misbehavior we like, but it's becoming so voluminous and steady now that it's hard to keep up, and it's even harder to spark outrage over it.

But eventually, if we keep pounding and pounding and working, it works.

The biggest job of all lies ahead, of course: Confronting Fox News, whose daily deluge of disinformation and fearmongering is so immense now that it makes Dobbs' contributions shrink to insignificance.

But it's true: Yes, we can do this. And we must.