Fox News hits a new lowest common denominator: Thanks to Adam for sending me this eloquent diatribe by Hal Crowther which, although it starts out being about Fox and Murdoch, ends up about alot more. You should read it all, but I can’t resist bulleting his most quotable rantlets, blithely taking them out of context for you:

• ” It’s the inviolable first rule of democracy that all politicians will praise the wisdom of the people — an effusive flattery that intensifies when they ask “the people” to swallow something exceptionally inedible.”
  
• ” The wondrous blessing God bestowed on (the) great chroniclers of contagious stupidity — (Gustave Flaubert,) Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken — is that they lived and died without imagining a thing like Fox News. It’s easy to laugh at Rupert Murdoch’s outrageous mongrel, the impossible offspring of supermarket tabloids, sitcom news spoofs, police-state propaganda mills and the World Wrestling Federation.”
  
• ” Fox News is an oxymoron and Cheech and Chong would have made a more credible team of war correspondents than Geraldo Rivera and Ollie North.”
  
• “…Fox News could easily be taken as pure entertainment, even as inspired burlesque of the rightwing menagerie. But the problem — in fact, the serious problem – is that Fox isn’t kidding, and brownshirts aren’t funny.”
  
• ” If reports are accurate, these troubled men are neither bad journalists nor even bad actors portraying journalists — they’re mentally unbalanced individuals whose partisan belligerence is pressing them to the brink of psychosis.”
  
• ” But the scariest thing about Fox and Rupert Murdoch, the thing that renders them all fear and no fun in a time of national crisis, is that they channel for the Bush administration as faithfully as if they were on the White House payroll… I swear I hate to stoop to Nazi analogies; but if Joseph Goebbels had run his own cable channel, it would have been indistinguishable from Fox News.”
  
• ” Murdoch’s repulsive formula has proven irresistible from Melbourne to Manhattan, and now, by satellite, he’s softening up Beijing. His great fortune rests on his wager that a huge unevolved minority is stupid, bigoted, prurient, nasty to the core. In America today, it’s hard to say whether Rupert Murdoch is an agent, or merely a beneficiary, of the cultural leprosy that’s consuming us.”
  
• “Is it sheer coincidence that the president’s stage manager, Greg Jenkins — responsible for the notorious flight-suit landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln, and for posing George Bush against Mt. Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty — was recently a producer at Fox News?

  If these elaborate tableaus Jenkins choreographs for President Bush seem clumsy, tasteless, condescending and insulting to your intelligence, you must be some kind of liberal.”
  

• “Fox is not what it seems to be. It’s not a news service, certainly, nor even the sincere voice of low-rent nationalism. It’s a calculated fraud, like the president who ducked the draft during Vietnam, and even welshed on his National Guard commitment, but who puts on a flight suit stenciled “Commander-in-chief” and plays Douglas MacArthur on network TV.”
  
• “On the wall above my bed of pain, two familiar quotations: “The tyranny of the ignoramuses is insurmountable and assured for all time” — Albert Einstein; and “Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies.” — George Santayana.

  It violates democratic etiquette to call your fellow citizens “idiots.” (Unless they’re liberals — “We all agree that liberals are stupid,” writes Charles Krauthammer.) Fortunately, the PC wordworks has coined a new euphemism to replace the ugly word “retarded.” It’s “intellectually disabled,” and we have it just in time. How else could we describe a majority that accepts the logic of “supporting the troops”? Protest as I might, a local columnist explained to me, once the soldiers are “locked and cocked” I owe them not only my prayers for their safe deliverance but unqualified endorsement of their mission, no matter how immoral and ill-advised it may seem to me. ”
  

• ” When is it too late to wake the sleeping masses? When a Fox TV show for amateur entertainers turns up more voters than Congressional elections? The marriage of television and propaganda may well have been the funeral of reason.”
  
• ‘There’s a chilling suspicion that major architects of our current foreign policy are insane. Listen to Bush adviser Richard Perle, known since his Reagan years as the Prince of Darkness: “If we let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage total war, (my italics) our children will sing great songs about us years from now.” ‘
  
• “…I believe that the split between liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican is inconsequential compared to the real fracture line, between Americans who try to think clearly and those who will not or cannot. What hope, a cynical friend teased me, for a country where 70 percent believe in angels, 60 percent believe in literal, biblical, blazing Armageddon, and more than half reject Charles Darwin? He didn’t need to add that creationists, science-annihilating cretins, have now recruited President Bush, who assures fundamentalists he “has doubts” about evolution. Whether the president is that dumb or merely that dishonest is beside the point. He knows his constituency.”
  
• “Novelist Michael Malone, a notorious optimist, offered a faint ray of hope when he urged me to ignore all the polls — if the government has intimidated most of the media, he argued, what makes you think the polls are credible?”
  

And finally:

• ” Are we so few, or are the numbers we see part of the Bush-Fox disinformation campaign — like Saddam’s missing uranium and his 25,000 liters of anthrax? This faint last hope will be tested in the presidential election of 2004. If the polls are right and Malone is wrong, as I fear, it’s going to be a long, sandy century for the United States of America, for our children and grandchildren and all those sweet singing children yet unborn.”
  

Related: Atlanta freelance writer and columnist Marc Schultz on how reading Crowther’s screed got him into a very contemporary sort of trouble. When Adam pointed me to the Crowther piece, he wondered whether Crowther is going to end up in Guantanamo.