Open Thread for Night Owls, Early Birds & Expats: Ari Fleischer Returns

Does a day go by when the Foxagandists don't invite one of the enablers of the disaster politics of the past eight years to offer his or her wretched opinion about what's going on now?

Out of necessity, the Obama administration is tasked with cleaning up the overflowing cesspool that Cheney-Bush have left behind. The pundithugs, with Bill O'Reilly leading the pack, are chronicling this new era by "interviewing" guests who can be counted on to sling fists full of same old crap. Whatever these experts say, they go unchallenged. O'Reilly concludes each segment with his best Lonesome Rhodes smile and a head-shake or two to indicate that the new guys in Washington are pitiful. See, our expert knows what's happening, he's been there.

Nothing unpredictable, of course, from this world of right-wing conduits who get off on joking about taking baseball bats to people they disagree with. Thus do they extend the lies and trickery of the Cheney-Bush administration beyond its two miserable terms in office.

Ryan Powers over at Think Progress took note Tuesday of the latest pathetic example:

O’Reilly noted that Obama had a prepared list of reporters from whom he planned to take questions. Fleischer explained that former President Bush used a similar method to avoid taking questions from "dot coms and other oddballs." In response, O’Reilly suggested that Obama’s "oddball" screening was perhaps not as effective as Bush’s because the President called on the Huffington Post:

O’REILLY: George Bush came in with a list of guys he was going to call on?

FLEISCHER: Yes, I used to prepare it for him. I would give him a grid, show him where every reporter is seated. And there are some reporters, you know, in that briefing room, you can imagine, Bill, you get a lot of dot coms and other oddballs who come in there. They’re screened.

O’REILLY: Like the Huffington Post. Now it gets called on.

FLEISCHER: And I used to seat them all in one section. I would call it "Siberia." And I told the President, "Don’t call on Siberia."

It would have been inconvenient of O'Reilly to publicly remember at that moment that it was the dot coms which Fleischer chose to snicker at who brought down Jeff Guckert, the partisan hack with no journalism background and belonging to no legitimate news organization and writing under an alias, Jeff Gannon. Although he had absolutely no credentials that should have helped him obtain a press pass at the White House or even a dog show, Guckert/Gannon was someone whom Fleischer had not kept out in the cold. He was instead called upon at press conferences by Fleischer and later lobbed softball questions at Mister Bush himself. He was exposed, in more ways than one, by John Aravosis's Americablog, Media Matters and a collaborative team at Daily Kos before the traditional media got around to busting him, too.

Guckert/Gannon turned out to be just another cog in the administration's various efforts to insert its propaganda into newspapers and other media, no different than, say, syndicated columnist Armstrong Williams, who took a pretty chunk of cash for his shillery. Guckert had ...uh ... other sources of income.

But Fleischer and O'Reilly were the amnesia twins when it came to Guckert the faker. They found it laughable when a real reporter, Sam Stein, who has broken a number of stories from his perch at the Huffington Post, was called upon at a presidential press conference. Well, they didn't really find it funny. It was part of the same old game they play for the right-wing powers-that-be: seeking to discredit anybody they can't control.

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The Overnight News Digest is posted and includes the story, Chevron silent on bribery allegations.