Janeane Garofalo is Foxbushed! And Hannity is SO proud!

The blogosphere is all a-twitter of the confrontation between Ambush Journalist Ken Pittman and Janeane Garofalo.

I shall leave all of the commentary on this aside, to simply observe, trenchantly, that there is a certain basic intent behind ambushing someone.

The idea is to use the element of surprise to get the victim to blurt out something embarrassing and awkward for them.

Regardless of the journalistic ethics or the intent; the form has been variously practiced for good or ill and can elicit many things.

Unfortunately, sometimes it can elicit your own ass, handed you on tape.

At times like this, an actual journalist - or at least, a proper news director, would guffaw, observe with some degree of professional commiseration that "that didn't go well" and suggest that the tape might be improved by being demagnetized, lest someone with a different editorial slant use it to impeach one's journalistic credentials, integrity, judgment, discretion, intelligence, political affiliation and, in my particular case, make innocent-seeming speculations of possible ties to racist organizations.

Surely stupidity alone could not explain this tape being run by both Sustren and Hannity on two separate, high-profile programs. Clearly there must be an agenda. And it seems to be to defend people standing around with racist dinks holding racist signs as "patriots."

I understand Garofalo's confusion on that point, myself. As, well, would anyone with the wit to understand why mixed messages cannot be unmixed using a naked assertion and stirred with rightious indignation.

But that would be the intelligent perspective. This is Sean Hannity and Fox News.

Hannity alleges - and with such a straight face and contemptuous sneer that one cannot question the sincerity of his delusional state - that this exchange PROVES that Garofalo is a "dangerous radical." Then he runs the same footage with only minor editing that does nothing whatsoever to support that assertion.



If it's "radical" to think that a bunch of people standing around chatting with those holding blatantly racist signs may be reasonably presumed to also be racists, paint me a "radical."

I'd refer to it as "common sense," or possibly "situational awareness." But this observation that it's quite impossible to have anything sensible survive association with such visible idiocy is lost on Sean Hannity.

Nor is it in any way a political observation to say that it should hurt to be this stupid.