Via Raw Story, something that proves more than ever that wingnuts are nothing but a bunch of WATBs. Now one is complaining that two years ago, Oscar the Grouch made a crack about "Pox News":

Forget Tinky-Winky, or whatever his name was. Meet Oscar the Grouch.

A conservative blogger at Andrew Breitbart's "Big Hollywood" website -- the onetime right-hand man for conservative maven Matt Drudge -- is now targeting Sesame Street for its "unfair" portrayal of Fox News as "trashy news show."

Evidently, Oscar the Grouch's "GNN" is not trashy enough. (Oscar, the furry green puppet, if you remember, lives in a trash can.)

During a Sesame Street segment, Oscar finds himself interviewing a puppet celebrity. A crabby viewer calls in to rebuke him after one of his subjects begins kissing him.

“I am changing the channel," the viewer crows. "From now on I am watching ‘Pox’ News. Now there is a trashy news show.” Story continues below...

Breitbart's "Stage Right" blogger will have none of it -- even though the episode was originally broadcast two years ago and only recently re-aired.

"If Mom and Dad watch cable news, it’s better than 50/50 they watch 'POX News,'" the blogger pens. "So what gives? PBS — a network partially funded with my tax dollars — has the right to tell my kids that their parents watch “trashy” news?

"The message is clear," the blogger continues. "I can’t even sit my kids in front of 'Sesame Street' without having to worry about the Left attempting to undermine my authority. And don’t tell me, 'If you don’t like it change the channel.' There are no channels left! It’s everywhere. Just last week I had Obama’s service and volunteerism promoted on every single major network, including Disney and Nickelodeon."

Yeah, no channels left, and certainly no conservatives. No "Morning Joe," no Lou Dobbs, Pat Buchanan, David Frum... oh, never mind. What's the use?

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Media Matters' Karl Frisch takes us through just how the right wing noise machine works, and a photo that starts out being criticized on Free Republic ends up making its way into the main stream media.

A classic example of how the right-wing noise machine works was unfolding before the American people. A non-story starts on a right-wing website and works its way into the mainstream. It usually involves Drudge, the fedora-wearing boy who cries wolf (almost daily) on the Internet, and mainstream news outlets follow his lead, offering up under-researched and factually inaccurate story lines.

Had the mainstream media done their job -- you know, checking the video to get the context from which the photo was taken -- they would have clearly seen that Obama was attempting to navigate high steps, while reaching back to help someone behind him do so as well. As Fox News host Greta Van Susteren said after airing video of the event, "Yes, a still picture can lie. And this one does."

Of course, the next morning after Van Susteren's show, the Fox & Friends crew went right back to trashing the president with lascivious speculation that was contradicted by easily accessible fact.

Loud noises!

Let there be no doubt that Matt Drudge is the world's biggest douchebag. The gigantic screamer headline above leads us to this ridiculousness, written by Drudge himself:

On the night of June 24, the media and government become one, when ABC turns its programming over to President Obama and White House officials to push government run health care -- a move that has ignited an ethical firestorm!

Ethical firestorm? How is broadcasting from the White House an ethical firestorm? Even someone as thick as Drudge should know that every major press agency has a reporter INSIDE the White House every day reporting the, you know, news. Many of them -- GASP! Siren Light Animated GIF!!!! -- report live from inside the West Wing press room or on the front lawn.

By the way, remember when Fox News Channel's resident Monchichi Brett Baier did a whole thing from "inside the White House"?

O'Reilly, too. And then there were all of those Bush White House press releases that FOX News Channel aired verbatim.

But since Drudge is making a big pee-pee dance about this, expect all of the press to soon follow -- despite reality.

(Cross posted at Bob Cesca's Awesome Blog! Go!)

Bob Cesca caught this interesting top item at Drudge last night:

This headline of a mad man doesn't link to anything, it just sits there like something rapped out on the keyboard out of frustration. It seems like Drudge is implying that everyone is wrong but him. Perhaps he is upset that the media didn't take his lead and report on the unreliable poll he posted a couple of weeks ago showing Obama with only a two point lead. Maybe he is just trying to steer away attention from the story turned hoax that he pushed so hard last week of Ashley Todd.

No matter what the reasoning for this odd headline, it is obvious Drudge has had a rough time lately pushing his misleading and just plain wrong stories. As matter of fact times have been so rough for Drudge that it looks like he just want to end 2008 now:

Notice the title of his page? Poor Matt Drudge has now transported himself to 2009. I really doubt 2009 is going to be much better for him.

Eric Boehlert thinks that might be the case:

The race is unrecognizable in terms of where the players are situated now and where they were five weeks ago. (Between September 15 and October 19, there was a 12-point swing in the Gallup daily tracking poll.) Now ask yourself: What role has the Drudge Report played in that burst of campaign movement? The answer, of course, is zero. Zilch. Nada. Nothing. His trademark flashing red lights have gone missing.

The dynamics of the campaign have irrevocably changed, and the mighty Drudge Report, the news site Beltway journalists trip over themselves to genuflect in front of, has been a complete bystander in the closing weeks of the 2008 campaign. [..]

The reason is simple. Because of the unprecedented economic turmoil, we're now in serious times. (Fifty thousand home foreclosures this year, in the state of New Jersey alone, is serious business.) And the Drudge Report doesn't do serious. The American public's attention has shifted from the campaign to the economy, and that's why the Drudge Report remains largely irrelevant to that unfolding story.[..]

As long as those patterns hold, Drudge finds himself in no-man's-land with no levers of power to pull.

Couldn't happen to a more deserving hack. While we're looking at influence exerted during this campaign, Peter Daou urges the netroots not to underestimate our power.

  Pat Buchanan gets laughed off the Hardball stage by Tweety and Bob Shrum for saying that Palin won the debate because she topped Biden on the Drudge and AOL polls. Forget CBS and CNN, you know, the real pollsters. If non-scientific polls on sites primarily frequented by right-wing nutjobs say Palin won, then dammit, she won.

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Buchanan: "Well, I mean Drudge found it 70-30, AOL found it 500,000 split."

Matthews: But those aren't polls. Those are people emailing in on conservative blog sites. We can do those! [laughter]

Shrum: "For Pat to be citing, like, the AOL poll or the Drudge poll which is set up, shows us how much he wants to do cartwheels because she didn't commit a pratfall on stage."

The imagery isn't lost on Matt Drudge. He's a just a plain old pig---no matter how many times Mark Halperin praises him. Take a guess at how he'll frame Obama next. Might it include a hood of some kind? (h/t Chris)

Steve posted Fri about ABC News’ Jake Tapper's article that completely misrepresented what Bill Clinton said in a speech delivered in Denver on Wed regarding climate change and the economy. Brad at Sadly No! justifiably raked Jake over the coals for his apparent illiteracy in interpreting what Clinton meant from the transcript, but I must add that after seeing the video which Tapper has posted several links to in his article, I'm inclined to believe there's just no way anyone could have misinterpreted what he meant. See for yourself.

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Even though Tapper apparently watched that same video, he has since added in an update that he "wasn't sure just what Clinton meant." Now whether it is even possible for a journalist at ABC to be that stupid or whether he just continues to be deliberately misleading, I suppose that could be open to debate, but the problem is that now, days after Jake's misleading piece had been thoroughly debunked and taken to task by blogs on the left and the right, the story unsurprisingly made it into the echo chamber where it was picked up by the likes of Drudge, Rush Limbaugh and now is showing up in publications with titles such as "Bill Clinton Wants An Economic Slowdown" and "Slow The Economy? Chill, Bill."

I can only shake my head. Churchill was so right.

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Oy.  For reasons known only to them, Hannity & Colmes decided to feature this "rare" interview of internet gossip maven and Republican smear mouthpiece Matt Drudge did with SkyNews in the UK.  Maybe it's because Drudge didn't cite FOXNews' oft-documented issues with accuracy when discussing the importance of getting information from varied sources.  But then again, we all know the issues that the Eggman has with accuracy himself.  

However, my irony meter redlined at this point:

Q: Big election next year. How big a role do you think the internet and websites will play in the way people make their decision of who to vote for?

DRUDGE: Well, it depends what the broadcast outlets do and don't do. Back in the last Clinton administration, during Lewinsky, for instance, which I had to break on the internet, because the other people wouldn't. If we're again faced with a corporations (sic) who don't want to report real news, the internet will play a very valuable role in the underground, catching real stories that are in spite. (sic)

Is that what you think you're doing, Drudge?  REAL stories?  Huh.  I would have categorized it as hit-pieces-as-blind-items supplied to you as the useful tool of Republican operatives, but that's just me.  

Will Bunch has the story.  Do you think this kind of shameless lack of journalistic ethics or integrity will curb the Politico and others from linking to Drudge constantly and finally view him as the hack he is?  Nope, me neither.

George Soros doesn't rule the world...

  Matt Drudge and Bill O'Reilly earn Monday's World's Worst.

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Many right wingers jumped on Drudge's post that Michael Ware heckled John McCain at his presser to you know---paint him as an activist reporter that is lying about his war coverage. Atrios posts:

Matt Drudge Rules His World

Instapundit versus reality.

Reynolds quotes John Tabin to emphasis Drudge's erroneous accusations:

Heckling at a press conference is very rude, and wouldn't be acceptable even from an opinion journalist (I wouldn't dream of laughing in Nancy Pelosi's face during a press conference). That said, isn't it better when guys like Ware let their biases hang out, rather than embedding them in reports that are ostensibly objective?" Wouldn't it be better still if they just did an honest job of doing, you know, their jobs

Michael Ware denied the claims vehemently....Unfortunately for the Eggman's followers, Raw Story has the presser and Ware does no such thing. Now Tabin updates his post simply saying: "Drudge's report is apparently erroneous"

Will Glenn Reynolds apologize to Ware? And will Mike Allen change his tune? And will Drudge apologize since he pulled the story off his front page?

The Cavewoman is in a hissy fight with Drudge. If you're not familiar with The Eggman story---click here. Anyway, Drudge made fun of her Hotair videos...

Just ugh. The things I want to say right now. But we’ve got an FCC. The things I want to say. Maybe we’ll do, uh, uh, a commentary on the Internet like Michelle Malkin. Maybe I’ll stand in front of like a blue screen and hold a banana and start talking into the Internets. (Sneering tone) ‘This is Matt Drudge reporting on Hot Air.’ Agggh. You know. It’s ridiculous. Looks like, you know, Captain Kangaroo time, Michelle. Get real.

The Cavewoman responds:

We at Hot Air certainly don’t have the resources to look like the slicksters at CNN or the dinosaur networks. We don’t have multi-million dollar sets, graphics, and wardrobes like Katie Couric. We put substance first over bells and whistles. (You would think someone with a website design circa 1980 might appreciate our priorities.)

Now why would they be jousting? TRex fills us in with an explanation...

 Calling Mark Halperin---calling Mark Halperin: The conservatives are imploding right in front of our monitors.

Instead, this off-the-wall theory was picked up by one of the most popular sites on the Internet, the Drudge Report -- the very same Drudge Report that ABC's Mark Halperin recently compared to Walter Cronkite, writing that "if Drudge has a siren up, people know it's something they have to look at."

In fact, the "Bush in a burqa" story (that was the headline on the top left of the Drudge Report an hour ago) is so ludicrous that even Drudge didn't promo it for very long. However, it was up long enough for Raw Story to catch a screen grab, which we are showing here...read on