We've all seen the type. The standoffish, petulant misfit who doesn't really have any friends but wants to be in the center of everyone's group. When they don't get what they want they start playing gossip games and trying to turn one against the other.

Tucker Carlson is one of those. Eclipsed back in the day by Anderson Cooper on CNN, he moved on to MSNBC, where he didn't quite fit, and from there to Fox where he is comfortably nondescript and not particularly useful.

But Tucker is resourceful, cunning, cruel, and petty like most conservatives, so the idea of weaseling his way onto a private listserv where members thought they were speaking on a private email list in order to then publish those private emails selectively...well, that was too delicious for Tucker to resist. I'd call him the Hedda Hopper of the Internet age but that gives him too much stature.

Long story short: Tucker weasels his way onto a private listserv of journalists owned by Ezra Klein which, to everyone's shock and awe, has...liberal journalists on it. Oh, the horror, the awful, awful horror.

And then, I read his intellectually dishonest, lizard-scaly, creepy self-justification and just had to say it: This Daily Caller has no balls.

Tucker rushes to his own defense with this:

To be clear: We’re not contesting the right of anyone, journalist or not, to have political opinions. (I, for one, have made a pretty good living expressing mine.) What we object to is partisanship, which is by its nature dishonest, a species of intellectual corruption.

Errrrr...what part of being a senior fellow at Cato Institute isn't partisan, Tucker? Just sayin'. And no, it's not a species of intellectual corruption. Human beings are, by their nature, social and tend to gather in affinity groups where they share similar goals, outlooks, hopes and dreams. Partisanship is but one way of expressing that.

Again and again, we discovered members of Journolist working to coordinate talking points on behalf of Democratic politicians, principally Barack Obama. That is not journalism, and those who engage in it are not journalists. They should stop pretending to be. The news organizations they work for should stop pretending, too.

Why TUCKER, I'm so glad you looked in the mirror! You might have even seen your reflection if it weren't daylight and you weren't a slimy little vampire sucking notoriety off of ginned up blown out of proportion pronouncements. But hey, let's just see whether you actually measure up to your own standard.

• This interview with Ron Paul where you admitted you voted for him and "slobbered all over him"? You're right. It's partisan pretending, and shouldn't be considered journalism. (Pssss, Tucker. Ron Paul is a Republican. Partisan. Party. Republican.)
• How about admitting that liberals like Barney Frank "fill you with hatred"? Partisan. Not journalism.
• On supporting the Iraq War before the flip-flop to not supporting, how about your defense of Karl Rove? Partisan. Not journalism.
• Or perhaps this slam against Al Gore in 2007 where you said if he were President we'd be living in yurts? Partisan. Not journalism.
• Bashing Hillary Clinton in 2006? Partisan. Not journalism.

I could go on, and on, and on. But you get the idea. And while we're on the topic of the corruption of journalism, perhaps it's worth pointing out that Tucker Carlson's petty two-bit "who can pee farther" contest with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann smacks of desperate penis ratings envy?

But this-- this might just frame Tucker Carlson's hypocrisy perfectly. From a Salon interview when he was pimping his book:

...even though we claim to withhold judgment until we know all the facts, but we don't, all the times. And our prisons are nAoot packed with innocent men, but there are some. And I think we all, especially those of us in the press, ought to remember that.

Unless, that is, your name is Tucker Carlson and you're a slimy weasel named Tucker Carlson who slithered onto a private email list and made a lot of weaselly Tucker Carlson promises about not flaming and then cherry-picked the email list to paint liberal journalists as incompetent partisans because your name is Tucker Carlson and you're a pathetic loser who couldn't figure out a REAL STORY. If that's who you are, then you're just pathetic.

Not innocent. Not a journalist. Not immune. Just pathetic.

Update: Oh, Jon Perr and BlueGal just sent me more reminders of how "non-partisan" Tuckie is. Among the invited guests to the Daily Caller's launch? None other than Scooter Libby. Scooter is Tuckie's special friend after he talked him up all over cable news during his trial while Tuckie's daddy was promoting and managing Scooter's Legal Defense Fund.

Yeah, nothing says nonpartisan quite like the whiff of Daddy's BigBuckBuddies in the Republican Party. Good going, Tuckie.

DOWNLOADS: (943)

PLAYS: (3277)

Embed

Gossip Boy -- which has been all over the case of onetime "Oath Keepers" figure Charles Dyer, arrested for the rape of a 7-year-old girl -- is reporting that the leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, is running away from Dyer as fast as he can.

Rhodes, as you can see in the video from his Oct. 21 appearance on MSNBC's Hardball, tries to project a straight-shooter image, even though the underlying beliefs of the Oath Keepers' "oath" is a swamp of bizarre conspiracies.

So now Rhodes has scrubbed any mention of Dyer from the Oath Keepers site, and is claiming to have had no association whatsoever with him:

“Charles Dyer never became an actual member of Oath Keepers. I met him when he attended our April 19, 2009 gathering at Lexington, and back then I considered him for a position as our liaison to the Marine Corps, but I decided against that when he made it clear he intended to train and help organize private militias across the country when he got out of the Marines. I considered such plans to be incompatible with the Oath Keepers mission and goals, and certainly incompatible with any leadership position within this org. He understood and agreed with my decision to not have him become officially involved with Oath Keepers. All of that was long before we even offered official memberships. So, he was never a member, and never in any leadership position.”

One little problem with this explanation, as Gossip Boy explains, is the evidence from our friends at Google cache:

Yep, that's the same Stewart Rhodes announcing that Dyer would be representing the Oath Keepers at the July 4 Tea Party in Broken Arrow.

Indeed, the reality is that Dyer has been a significant figure for the Oath Keepers all along. His first video, released in March, in fact put the Oath Keepers on the map Internet-wise by going viral.

As we noted, at least Dyer's friends at American Resistance are standing behind him. You can't blame Stewart Rhodes for wanting to cut and run, but he's not exactly helping his cause by being the opposite of forthcoming about it all.

OK, what's wrong with this inside-the-Beltway gossip spot? We need a blogger ethics commission on this one.

d-day has much more.

The Mahablog: Who's the meanie?

Common Cause Blog: What kind of impact do Clean Elections have on participants in democracy? A big one.

Princess Sparkle Pony's Photo Blog: Condi meets...Kiss?

American Street: South Korea doesn't want our beef

The Opinion Mill: It's the Weasel Boy Special vs. the Straight Talk Express! Should Republican sleaze weasels be rewarded for telling the truth after the fact? Should presidential candidates be rewarded for retooling themselves along the lines of the people they ought to despise? Only the Opinion Mill's Sunday Bookchat dares to ask!

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: The jerk at the podium..."What liberal media?" department...Press corpse getting Iraq war wrong all over again...What does the decay of journalism have to do with our appetite for celebrity gossip?...It took years, but our press finally noticed the frightful surge in Iraq vet suicides...Killing your customers is a bad business model...Find out what the world thinks about US...WSJ bizarrely claim surge's "success" means troops must stay

(h/t Scarce)

Craig: By choice or by circumstance I've always been the subject of innuendos, gossip and false accusations. I think this is despicable.

"In an ABC News report, then US House Rep. Larry Craig issues a preemptive denial regarding any involvement in a congressional sex and drug scandal."

Howie and Pam have more...Update: He resigned from Romney's campaign.

Matt Ortega: "Did Romney Scrub YouTube of Larry Craig?"

Think Progress has the latest example of the apparent lack of self-examination and rank hypocrisy of the right's favorite gossip maven.

Drudge - the operator of the right-wing pseudo news site Drudge Report - was talking about the Venezuelan government's shutdown of the country's oldest private TV station when he veered the discussion into a hit piece on Olbermann. "When we start hearing that the National Guard is seizing television stations, alright then I'm on board," Drudge said. "Then I'm on board, Olbermann. Until then, it's all pancake, makeup, and Edward R. Murrow ‘good night and good luck' and...complete and utter camp."

Riiiigggggghhhhhtttt. Never mind the complete incoherence and inability to complete a sentence, much less a thought. Here's a guy who never goes out without his Walter Winchell fedora and whose entire career revolves around repeating salacious bits and pieces of the Starr Report and Andrea Makris's testimony as well as "blind items" fed to him by some RNC slug in the name of "public interest". He definitely knows from camp and phoniness, don't ya think?

Now, now now. No scrubbing allowed.

"Yesterday, the SFist covered the CA-10 campaign (noting, "Oh, it's on."). But the editor also focused on the notorious photo of Bush and Tauscher:

BTW- that photo isn't from her meeting. It's from 2002 when she was about to agree with the Iraq War resolution. Expect that photo to be all over the political blogs like the Britney sans panties photos were on the gossip sites.

Last night the story hit google news and now the photo has been disappeared from Tauscher's federally funded, official government website.

Tauscher, D-Walnut Creek, said in an interview that party loyalty isn't the issue. "I don't remember being elected to go to Washington to be a Democrat," she said...read on" (h/t FDL)

Kos: And if you're wondering what a netroots-backed primary challenge looks like from day one, read this. We're going to have fun with this future race.

Calling Rupert Murdoch.

"A New York Post Page Six staffer solicited $220,000 from a high-profile billionaire in return for a year's "protection" against inaccurate and unflattering items about him in the gossip page, the Daily News has learned. In two 90-minute meetings, characterized by a shocking breach of ethics, Jared Paul Stern, a fixture on the city's gossip scene who also edited Page Six The Magazine, asked for a series of payments from Ron Burkle, the managing partner of Yucaipa Cos., a conglomerate with interests in supermarkets, celebrity clothing lines, and media."

Someone email Deborah Orrin, one of Chris Matthews favorite pundits and ask her for her thoughts. Maybe the Podman too.

(Plame-aholics)

More was revealed on Hardball today than any of us would have thought possible about Vivac, Luskin, Hadley and Rove if true. Special guest stars Jim VandeHei and Nora O'Donnell, shared some new information in this saga. Jane at Firedoglake called and wanted to know if she heard this accurately.

Download | play -WMP Download | play -QT (hat tip themissingamendment for QT)

Bittorrent-WMP

VandeHei : "We still don't know exactly where Karl Rove originally learned about Valerie Plame, that's still one of the mysteries. We know one of them he had heard it from was Hadley as sort of just chatter inside the office, but he had learned it earlier from some other place and we still don't know where that is."

(Did Jim just let a cat out of the bag?)

Hamsher writes:

"I really had to pick myself up off the floor. Nobody batted an eyelash. Were Chris Matthews and Norah O'Donnell just so completely uninformed that they did not recognize what a bombshell this was? They just sat there nodding and blinking like this was no surprise that people inside the White House were casually gossiping about Valerie Plame's identity over the water cooler. Did they not realize that up until now any knowledge of the mad gabbing and plotting had been limited to the Vice President's office? That other than the memo from Karl Rove following his conversation with Matt Cooper nobody had ever tied Hadley to the leak?...read on

What is Baby Luv?
It has been widely reported that socialite Paris Hilton was attacked by her pet monkey, Baby Luv, as she shopped for bras in Los Angeles. Primate lovers reacted with pride and curiosity. Baby Luv's species became a topic of intense speculation. News reports described Baby Luv as part racoon, part monkey. Knowledgeable primate media watchers assumed the gossip collumnists were describing a lemur, or perhaps a galago. But it turnst out that Baby Luv isn't a monkey after all, he's a kinkajou, a racoonlike creature native to South America also known, appropriately enough, as a honeybear.
Does anyone have any footage of Paris with her kinkajou? I want to post it at Crooks and Liars

--Lindsay Beyerstein from Majikthise