Assholes

Well, really, to call these guys assholes is to give defecation a bad name, to imply crap smells better than Chanel Nº 5. In fact, there's no term you can use to describe what Fox does to people it wants to destroy that isn't too mild. It's literally unspeakable. Unwritable.

Following on the heels of their deceitful takedowns of such people as Van Jones and Shirley Sherrod, Fox "news," through its most grievous post-Beckian spewer of sewage, Sean Hannity, goes full Breitbart on Harvard law professor Derrick Bell in a shocking!!! groundbreaking!!!!!! revelation (other than the fact that it's been available online for the last four years) that Barack Obama, as president of the Harvard Law Review, (during which time he was lauded by conservatives for his fairness) introduced the guy at a rally. But wait, there's more!!! Hold onto your tinfoil hats: he hugged him, too. There. I said it.

And -- you won't believe this!! -- at a time of racial turmoil and efforts to find solutions, the man was, to some, controversial. Want to see how controversial? Watch this. Or this. A regular firebrand, just making stuff up. Scary black dude. Would you want him dating your daughter? Even if he weren't dead?

Fox "news," rolling in the corpse of Andrew Breitbart like a dog rolls in, well, you know, gins up the most ridiculous non-story of the century, and spews it to its credulous, waiting-for-the-next-reason-to-hate-the-black-guy audience, certain it'll be gobbled up like chocolate pudding, and retained like a fecal impaction. Anyone but a Foxified audience has got to be laughing. If it were funny.

But back to the original problem, i.e., finding words to describe how truly and beyond definitionally despicable the people at Fox are. Sure, politics has always been dirty, and smears have been its (what shall we say, Frank?) lubricant. But a non-stop 24/7 television network whose avowed purpose is to destroy the President of the United States by any means, with no regard for truth, and whose chosen method is the constant stoking of fear and hate based on deliberate lies, while being viewed and -- astoundingly -- believed by millions: that's unprecedented. Dan Savage led the highly successful effort to come up with an appropriate new meaning for the word "Santorum," but I have neither the wit nor the readership to do the same when it comes to tagging Fox.

While Glennnn Beck was still befouling himself and the rest of us at that network, I used the term "Foxobeckian" to describe their branded brew of paranoia, hate, and deliberate lying. But there's really no word, no string of words, that can convey the level of sleaze and dishonesty that is Fox "news." There are no words extant for the damage they've done to American politics and to the hope of finding complex solutions in a democracy (or so it used to be, before Fox and "Citizens United") like ours.

A guy who talks too loud in a theater, he's an asshole. The one who pulls out in front of you and causes you to slam on your brakes, drives off talking on his cellphone, he's an asshole. But what is a guy like Sean Hannity, who, while smirking like sixth-grader who just found out what "vagina" means, routinely takes people's words out of context, edits video dishonestly, soullessly lies nonstop about everything and everyone with whom he disagrees; and does so before a preconditioned and fully brainwashed audience of millions, deliberately and with no remorse destroying decent people in the process? What is he, if the others are assholes? The pus draining from an asshole? (Don't click the link.) An anal fistula? (Don't click the link.)

(For the truth about Sean Hannity, do click this link.)

I don't think there are enough adjectives -- raging, disgusting, dishonest, lying, vile, foul, putrefying, stinking, loathsome, hateful, detestable, reprehensible, abhorrent, awful, heinous, odious, vile, low, mean, abject, shameful, ignominious, shabby, ignoble, disreputable, discreditable, destructive, nasty, disagreeable, horrid, horrible, dreadful, obnoxious, odious, unsavory, repulsive, distasteful, nauseating, sickening, monstrous, evil, iniquitous, depraved, debased, reprehensible, godawful, lousy, scurvy, wicked, contemptible, nefarious, despicable, deplorable, debased -- another hundred or thousand -- you could line up and digest together into a peristalsa toward the asshole to convey the level of assholery the guy represents. I admit it: I don't have the words. He, and those like them, are the scum that floats to the top of a pond of scum and gets scum on it.

I'm a nice guy. But I hate those people. They're ... assholes.