bullshit

Q. How can you tell when a Republican is lying?

A. Their lips are moving.

Well, today on Hardball, Andrea Mitchell let fly with one big, fat whopper of a lie.  Of course, this should surprise no-one, given her previous history of fabrication, obfuscation, and prevarication on the topic of the Plame leak and Libby trial.  Still, to watch her not even bat an eye as she pulled this one out of her ass, well, it's not so much remarkable that it happened as it is how easily and swiftly this one keeled over and died once it was exposed to the world outside Mrs. Mitchell's rarified NeoCon colon.

To wit:

Journamalism

Andrea Mitchell, Hardball just now:

They're going to try to really tamp this down and appeal to the polling which indicates that most people think, in fact, that he should be pardoned. Scooter Libby should be pardoned.

CNN poll says 18% support pardon.

Ah, modern journalism.
-Atrios 6:44 PM

Now, with old-line conservatives, you could at least count on them to be able to handle simple math problems.  They may have been a bunch of stingy, war-mongering, racist dickheads, but in theory at least, they would know the difference between 20% (a minority by any standard) and 70% (the clear majority).  That's the spread between the "Free Scooter" (18%) folks and the "Lock up the dirty bastard!" (69%) crowd.  Now, how Mrs. Mitchell got "most people" out of that, I haven't a clue.  Maybe it was "most people" who she shared a cab with this morning, or "most" of the "people" on her housekeeping staff, but "most people" in this country clearly understand the charges against Mumia-Scoot and think he should pay with his freedom.

But onward!  Yes, on to that paragon of mendacity, Matt Drudge.  You all know, he's one of my favorite gay GOP collaborators, right?  No rumor is too baseless or sordid for Drudge to run with.  He's the Reich Wing's main source of "news".  He runs the most heavily trafficked site on the web, right?

Wrong.

It seems that one of Mr. Drudge's biggest and most egregious falsehoods (and there are SO MANY to choose from) is that he's inflating some of his traffic figures by about, oh, 2000 percent.

I'll let the folks at ValleyWag (a kind of Silicon Valley Media Matters) explain it all for you:

The Drudge Report may be the most successful independent news site on the web. Matt Drudge's decade-old site sets the news agenda, and not only for conservative platforms such as Fox News. The fedora-wearing eccentric's property, considering it's largely put together by just two people, has an impressive audience: more than 1.2m unique visitors from the US in February, according to Comscore. But those devotees may not check the site quite as often as Matt Drudge would claim.

But-!  But-!  Matty wouldn't LIE to us, would he?!

Why yes.  Yes, he would.

A site's 'meta refresh' setting is a web page's meta tag used to specify a time-interval after which a web browser will automatically refresh the page. Most sites leave it to readers to call for the latest version of a page; but popular news sites often assume that visitors will leave their pages open, and ensure the page is reloaded so that the latest headlines show.

Nothing wrong with that — except that the Drudge Report is automatically refreshed way more often than the frequency of new stories would justify. At 20 times an hour, Drudge is twice as aggressive in his use of this tactic as the next news site we checked.

What's the effect on the site's traffic? Each refresh counts as a new pageview, whether or not the user is watching, or the window remains visible. And there must be plenty of these inattentive readers: one site owner I know experienced a 20% jump in traffic after he introduced, as an experiment, an automatic refresh every half hour. Drudge loads anew every three minutes.

So, when Matt Drudge trumpets his gigantic traffic — he recently passed the 20m pageview a day mark — take that claim much like one should parse one of his headlines. There's some truth to it — Drudge is indubitably popular — hyped up to the point of misdirection.

(Emphasis mine.)

"But, TRex," you may be asking yourselves, "What's it matter if that sad little man cooks his books like Jeff Skilling?  Who cares?" 

Two words, chickens!  Advertising.  Revenues. 

I know.  I'm just shattered by this news.  Matt Drudge, that harmless old queen is a serial, self-aggrandizing liar?  Wow.  You sure coulda fooled me.  He's always seemed to me to be such a nice boy, not like some kind of majorly conflicted, closeted, self-hating fuck-up at all.  No, really.  I swear I mean that in the nicest possible way.

And finally, tonight, an update from the Coulter Wars.  From Editor and Publisher:

Published: March 12, 2007 2:40 PM ET
NEW YORK An Illinois daily that's asking readers to help it decide whether or not to keep columnist Ann Coulter is getting loads of input.

"I expected a pretty good response, but I'm not sure I was expecting people to be THIS fired up about it," said Mike Matulis, editorial page editor of The State Journal-Register in Springfield, Ill.

He told E&P this afternoon that 1,357 votes have been cast since a yes-or-no Web poll began yesterday, with 737 (54.3%) wanting the paper to get rid of Coulter and 620 (45.7%) wanting to keep her.

Another 48 reached The SJ-R by phone, with 28 anti- and 20 pro-Coulter messages recorded. And Matulis is currently sifting through more than 100 e-mail messages with comments about Coulter. 

While those numbers might indicate to Andrea Mitchell that "most people" want the paper to keep conservatism's bleached banshee on, the rest of us can see that a majority want her gone.  Still, 54% versus 45%, that's just a little too close for my taste, gang. 

You know what to do.

Mr. Matulis's email address is: mike.matulis@sj-r.com

And for the full list of papers who are still clinging to their illusion that Coulter is a voice of consequence in today's media environment, you know to go to Media Matters, right?

ATTACK!!

ATTACK!!

ATTAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!!

Coulter is probably expecting things to die down this week with only eight papers having dropped her column.  I think we can do much, much better than that.  Annie, your moment is over.  We're just helping you leave the room gracefully before you have another vodka martini and start dry-humping the banquettes and moaning Joe McCarthy's name over and over. 

And remember kids, the closer the newspaper is to your home town, the more likely the editors will listen to you.  Hell, even offer to subscribe if they'll drop her.  They'll hear you on that one.  Newspapers everywhere are starving for subscribers.  To my thinking, it would be worth the annual subscription fee to know that I had a part in scrubbing that syphillitic old bat from America's Op Ed pages FOREVER!

Goodbye, Annie.  May the rest of your days be spent in loneliness, misery, and obscurity.  I swear I mean that in the nicest possible way.  Really.

Amen. 

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