Liberty in Progress Now, whose primary function often appears to be a repeater for Media Matters clips, actually published something original: an attack on your humble blogger. It seems they didn’t care for our most recent FHWiR:

Our favorite wing nut blogger, Johnny Dollar...decides to malign Olbermann as blaming Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Sarah Palin, and Fox News for the shooting when he never did so.

In fact, we never once wrote that Olbermann blamed any of these people for the shooting. This is count the lies, so now we have [1].

To start off, Dollar claims that Olbermann “couldn’t wait” to “exploit” the shooting tragedy in Tucson. But, Dollar fails to prove how there was any kind of exploitation...

Oh, by using a mass murder to attack people who had no part in it, perhaps.

He barely even mentions how, during his “Special Comment“, Keith reprimanded himself for his own past rhetoric that may have ignited some kind of violence or backlash. In fact, Dollar only claims that Olbermann made a “passing reference” to it.

Well, that’s what it was.

However, if you watch the segment, you can see how Keith referenced (and apologized for) his past metaphor, or anything he said that might have ignited violence, more than once. So, Dollar either lied on purpose or dozed off in his rocking chair while watching the segment.

He made a generic apology, but what we wrote was that while he rattled off one instance after another from Fox News or people on the right, he only enumerated one example from the left. Ergo, we didn’t lie, but LiPN did [2].

Dollar than [sic] shows an example of Schultz attacking Vice President Dick Cheney saying that he wants to “rip [Cheney's heart] out and kick it around and stuff it back in him“. But, in a typical show of lazy far-right research, Dollar fails to show an example of Glenn Beck’s ridiculous antics, especially when he literally joked around and laughed about poisoning former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on his Fox News program.

We were pointing out Olby’s hypocrisy. We didn’t question what Olbermann said about Glenn Beck, or argue it was wrong. We didn’t put it in issue.

Dollar than [sic] tops his previous stupidity (from a sentence earlier) with just pure laziness. He claims “There is at least as much evidence that the killer is a deranged leftist as there is to suggest he’s a deranged rightist.”

LiPN does a little creative editing here, omitting the sentence just before that, where we point out that the man is most likely mentally ill--something that makes attempts to pin political labels on him superfluous and exploitative.

He linked his gullible viewers to a link of how the shooter, Jared Loughner, could be a lefty (because of what one former classmate said), but completely ignores linking them to how he could be a righty, as well.

Sigh. We’ll try to explain this again to LiPN, more slowly. We didn’t say there wasn’t evidence of him being right-wing. We didn’t put that in issue. It was Olbermann who named people on the right as possible influences to this guy. We responded to that by showing that, contrary to Olby’s implication, there is also evidence of him being susceptible to left-wing influence. Ultimately neither matters because he appears to be psychotic. (And by the way, bloggers generally have ‘readers’, not ‘viewers’.)

At this point LiPN launches into an argument so fatuous that it’s a waste of space to quote, but it boils down to something like this: because the victim was a Democrat ergo the shooter was a right-winger. Read it if you like. LiPN next objects to our pointing out Olbermann never criticizing Randi Rhodes’s bullets-shooting-Bush skit:

He could have voiced his opinions about what she did off-air...

Well, that settles that. No broadcaster can ever be criticized because they might have said something different off the air? When none of his viewers can hear it?!? Yes, this is what passes for argumentation at LiPN.

That kind of thing goes both ways, because typically liberals will not go after liberals for their own sides’ rhetoric, and the same goes with conservatives.

Congratulations. A textbook description of hypocrisy, the whole point of our post. He then goes on another tangent about Ed Schultz criticizing Mike Malloy, which leads us to wonder: what does that have to do with Keith Olbermann?

I’d appreciate if Dollar would make an effort in supplying a soundbite or footage of somebody on the right going after someone else on their own side for saying conspiratorial stuff.

Why? What would that have to do with Olbermann’s hypocrisy, cable news, or Fox haters? Please, try to focus.

After that complaint, Dollar attacks Olbermann because he sarcastically and satirically referred to far-right hatemonger Michelle Malkin as a “mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick“. While I don’t appreciate anybody lowering themselves to that level, it’s the thin-skinned wing nuts who can’t take anything, even a joke, said about them.

Hold it. Just a couple of paragraphs earlier, LiPN went after Glenn Beck for joking about Nancy Pelosi. So does this make LiPN nothing more than a ‘thin-skinned wing nut who can’t take a joke’?

But, when they have somebody like Rush Limbaugh making his own share of sexist comments against Democrats and liberals, they immediately turn their backs and plug their ears like it never happened.

Another irrelevancy! What do Limbaugh’s comments have to do with cable news?

LiPN gets slightly more on track complaining about Olby featuring a kill-Cheney joke and showing Limbaugh as the target in a shooting range. The former he dismisses because we don’t know if Olbermann laughed or not (yes, he thinks that’s a salient issue). As for the latter:

NewsBusters and Dollar seem positive that this means Olbermann wants Limbaugh to be shot.

Wow, talk about reading comprehension! It’s just the opposite! Making someone the target in a shooting range is in horribly bad taste, and the same sort of thing Olby was whining about, but we don’t think any of this silly drivel about ‘rhetoric’ or ‘symbols’ proves Olby, Beck, etc really want someone killed.

As usual, wing nuts don’t understand satire in the form of jokes, even in poor taste.

Again it’s just a joke! Remember, it was LiPN who brought up Glenn Beck’s Nancy Pelosi bit--hey LiPN, it’s just ‘satire in the form of a joke’!

After wasting a lengthy paragraph responding to a post on Hill Buzz, LiPN finally gets back on topic and presents his smoking gun:

Dollar also went after the founder of the Daily Kos for supposedly posting a map graphic with bull’s eyes on it...

Um, no we said that Kos published a piece where he openly put a bullseye on Giffords, not that Kos posted a map graphic [3].

Surprisingly enough, the details of the purported graphic, also originally spread by the same ridiculous HillBuzz blog, is found to be a complete fabrication that never existed. Thanks to our friends at Media Matters for America for doing a great job addressing this lie. They showed Gateway Pundit’s deception, where he linked to the photo shopped graphic via HillBuzz.

The laughable ‘exposé’ from Media Matters turns out to be something everyone with half a brain already knew: the screengrab we linked to accurately reflected the article, but the arrows and images and sourcing on the side were added later. Like circling something to point it out. The added stuff is so obvious (like giving the source URL, the arrows, the images, text announcing this is what Kos did in 2008, etc) that it never occurred to us there were people so clueless that they would think otherwise. Yet this is what LiPN hangs his hat on:

So, Dollar and the rest of the far-right blogosphere have been proven WRONG, again, with facts.

Sorry, no. We wrote that they put a bullseye on her district. You can go to the Kos version of the post, still where LiPN says it is, and after listing Rep Giffords as someone who ‘sold out the constitution’ it reads:

Not all of these people will get or even deserve primaries, but this vote certainly puts a bulls eye on their district.

Um, that’s exactly what we said: a bullseye on her district. Our post was not wrong [4].

After another paragraph of irrelevancy (more complaining about stuff written at Hill Buzz, whom we never quoted at all), LiPN decides to tackle our theory that Keithy used this opportunity to try and derail O’Reilly’s Obama interview:

Dollar brags about O’Reilly being the ratings king and how amazing and unbelievable he is because he has huge ratings that beat Olbermann.

Where did that come from? Until LiPN quotes where we said all that, we’re calling it [5].

No matter how much you prove that big ratings don’t prove actual quality of a program, the RWNJ’s will continue to tout the hell out of it.

Olbermann regularly touts his alleged two million viewers.

It seems like Dollar’s job is to make it all into a childish competition of who’s better than the other and who did what first, even though Olbermann never complained in the first place.

More fevered fantasy from the Ehsani swamp.

He even makes a crack about Olbermann telling Obama to refuse the interview. Wow, clever, Johnny… because Olbermann and Obama are secret BFF’s and General Electric is in cahoots, working with the Obama administration on corrupt Climate Change legislation that O’Reilly always propagandizes on his show, right?

What is that supposed to mean, that OIbermann didn’t say Obama should refuse the interview? No, it doesn’t mean that. It means we were right: Olby did say Obama should refuse the interview, and waited for the night of the shooting to say it.

By the way, Johnny even suggests that Olbermann used the Arizona shootings to have a reason to bring up O’Reilly… as if he couldn’t do it before. Let’s see if there are any recent examples of Olbermann going after O’Reilly before the shootings...Wow, two days ago?! Yeah, he must have had some big excuse to attack Bill.

False. We never suggested that Olby used the shootings as ‘a reason to bring up O’Reilly’--he does that obsessively almost every night. We said he used the shootings as an excuse to try and derail O’Reilly’s Obama interview. Again LiPN resorts to rewriting our words [6].

He acts like O’Reilly was a big part of Olbermann’s 9-minute long comment. Sadly, for Dollar, he wasn’t. A very small portion of his “Special Comment” even had to do with O’Reilly, so what the hell is Dollar making such a big deal out of this for?

Try reading the title: Fox Haters Week in Review. O’Reilly...Fox...has the connection dawned on you yet?

It’s also funny to see that Johnny thinks Olbermann should reprimand Daily Kos for posting something they never actually posted.

As LiPN’s own link proves, Kos posted what we said they posted [7].

Somehow, it’s the Daily Kos’ fault that some far-right blogger probably photo shopped [sic] a posting, putting bull’s eyes and targets that were never originally there.

That was obvious to anyone with a functioning brain. We don’t care about the stuff photoshopped in. Here’s a new screengrab without all that extra stuff--for LiPN’s edification those red circles aren’t really on the Kos page. We added them. Clear now? And it still says there’s a ‘bullseye’ on Rep Giffords’s district.

Markos Moulitsas is not a former politician or possible Presidential candidate like Sarah Palin.

So that makes it OK? Or what?

So, nice FAIL, Dollar (and other far-right blogs)

We’d be fascinated for LiPN to quote some of the ‘far-right’ positions that J$P has espoused. But we won’t hold our breath for them to produce something that doesn’t exist. And really...’FAIL’? What better than a juvenile internet meme to sum up an orgy of name-calling, sophistry, and rank fabrication?

Spot something you’d like to see in the next Fox Haters Week in Review? Send us an email!

Tags: mediamatters, kos