Rand Paul Is His Own Worst Enemy

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

So, it looks like another clown has exited the Republican circus car.

This week’s entry is the junior senator from Kentucky, Dr. Rand Paul, son of Ron, who threw his hat into the ring in a rally in Louisville. There he promised, as every presidential candidate who ever took the podium has promised, to “take the country back.”

The campaign then showed its modern-day tech savvy by going live on the day of the announcement with a spiffy new campaign website, where you can peruse the candidate’s views on subjects like “Eductation” (that’s how they spelled it).

You can also buy that all-important Rand Paul merchandise, such as a Rand Paul cornhole game, a campaign poster in the form of an eye chart (Dr. Paul’s an ophthalmologist) for only $20.16 (get it?); a blanket with a picture of the Constitution on it (only $75!); and if you’re still craving some of that Constitution-y goodness after a night’s slumber underneath a representation of our nation’s founding document, you can get the senator’s signature on a copy of the Constitution for only a thousand bucks.

So much for the sizzle. How about the steak? Well, if Sen. Paul hews as a presidential candidate to the same positions he’s espoused in the past, he may end up in a spot of trouble with primary voters.

Oh, sure, he hits some of the talking points beloved of the far right, such as a constitutional amendment to balance the budget and a flat tax. He never, of course, fully explains how both of those things can exist at the same time. But then, the libertarian right is known for its embrace of “magical thinking”: If we just believe hard enough, we can make two plus two equal five.

Paul also likes cutting spending, particularly spending on Those People. You know, the poor (working and otherwise), the sick, and of course, children whose parents can’t afford to send them to private schools. He’s proposed budgets that, among other things, eliminate most of the Earned Income Tax Credit; eliminate Section 8 housing vouchers and K-12 education funding; and slash the budgets of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.

But certain other positions of Dr. Paul are going to be, shall we say, problematic with the GOP base. For one thing, those budget proposals we just talked about would eliminate or drastically reduce all foreign aid — including aid to Israel. “I just don’t think you can give other people’s money away when we can’t rebuild bridges in our country,” he said in 2011.

While the right is all for cutting money for starving black or brown people in furrin lands, they’d cut out one of their own kidneys before they’d deprive Bibi Netanyahu of a single F16 or Iron Dome missile.

Which leads us to Sen. Paul’s defense and foreign policies. His proposed budgets included cuts in defense spending of as much as 30 percent, saying he wants “to reduce the size and scope of the military complex … to one that is more in line with a policy of containment.”

This is going to be anathema to neoconservative hawks who never saw a world problem they weren’t chomping at the bit to “bomb back to the Stone Age” before throwing someone else’s children at it, and for whom the word “containment” is the same as “appeasement.”

(Other words they equate with “appeasement” are “treaty,” “agreement,” “dialogue” and “negotiation” — pretty much any word other than “air strike,” “invasion” or “war.”) His perceived dovishness has led some on the right to begin mobilizing against Dr. Paul. “A group calling for a more hawkish U.S. policy on Iran is prepared to launch a $1 million ad campaign casting him as weak on the issue,” says an article in Politico.

On the campaign trail and in the debates, the Honorable Gentleman from Kentucky is going to find that the GOP may flirt with the type of small-government, low-spending libertarianism he claims to embrace.

But when the last dance is called, they’re going to be in the arms of the defense and Israel lobbyists. And, if by some miracle, Paul survives the primaries and gets the nomination, his budget radicalism will doom him in the general election.

Rand Paul is going to be another candidate who flares brightly and makes it to front-runner status for a week or two, then sputters out when people start using that status to actually take a look at him.

Poor sad clown.

Look, How Wrong Can You Be?

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

The office was cramped and cluttered, with dusty posters of old TV personalities on the wall: Edward R. Murrow, Howard K. Smith, Walter Cronkite. The single window behind the desk was half open, letting in the noise from the street below.

“So, you wanna be on the network news talk shows,” the man behind the desk said.

He was a big man with a florid, jowly face and a cigar stuck in one corner of his mouth. He had his suit coat off, and his short sleeves were rolled up. The name plate on his desk read, “Mort Nuttman, Talent Agent.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “See, I’ve been writing this political column for years, and I think I know a lot about the subject. I was wondering if maybe I could be one of those high-paid TV pundits.”

Nuttman grunted. He opened the folder of columns I’d brought and scanned through them. After a moment, he set it down. He looked at me, up and down, for a long moment, without speaking. “The question is,” Nuttman said finally, “how wrong can you be?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Look,” he said, “You wanna make the big money as a guest pundit on the big shows — “This Week,” “Fox and Friends,” “Situation Room” — you gotta show that you can be completely wrong. Not just once, but over and over. Look at the heavy hitters — Bill Kristol, Dick Morris, The Cheneys, Palin, even John McCain. You know what they have in common?”

“They were all wrong?”

“You bet they were!”

“I don’t know if I can be like those guys,” I said. “I’m kind of center-left.”

He rolled his eyes. “Dear Lord,” he moaned. “Not a liberal.”

“That’s a problem?”

He shook his head. “Liberals are hard to work with, pal. They show up with facts, and figures, and” he made air quotes with his fingers and put a sneer in his voice, “reee-search.”

“Facts are bad?” I said.

“Facts make people change the channel,” he said. “I don’t need another Alan Colmes on my client roster.”

“Who?”

“Exactly. Now, if you were an actual liberal, you’d be dead in the water.”

“What about Rachel Maddow?”

He waved a hand dismissively “One show. One network. Plus, she’s a looker. The big money’s in being able to do a lot of shows, and it’s easier to do that if you’re a far-right wacko. More entertaining. We can work around the ‘center-left’ thing, like we did with James Carville and Bill Maher. But you’ve got to be willing to do what it takes to grab people. Now, yell!”

“What?”

“C’mon, yell! See if you can drown me out.”

I was confused. “Yell what?”

He handed me a piece of paper. “This script’ll do.” He began talking in a calm, measured voice. “One thing that makes the current border crisis more complicated is the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which was signed by President George W. Bush…”

I looked down at the paper and began to read at the top of my lungs. “WHEN IS OBAMA GOING TO STOP BLAMING BUSH FOR EVERYTHING?!” I hollered, doing my best to shout Nuttman down. “A COUNTRY THAT CAN’T PROTECT ITS BORDERS IS NO COUNTRY AT ALL! AAAAAAH!”

I stopped and looked up. He was nodding.

“OK,” he said, “good projection, just the right edge of barely controlled rage. We might have something here. But you still need to have been wrong a lot.” He sat back down. “So,” he said. “Were you in favor of the Iraq War? Do you still think it was a good idea?”

“Oh, God, no,” I said. “It was a debacle that should never have happened.”

Nuttman grimaced. “How about Romney? Were you predicting he’d score a landslide win over Obama as late as Nov. 6, 2012?”

“What are you, nuts?”

He pressed on. “Did you predict that Obamacare enrollment numbers weren’t going to reach predicted levels?”

“Nope.”

He sighed. “Sorry, pal. You just don’t have what it takes.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “The people who have been consistently wrong about everything get to pull down fat salaries on TV? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“What do you think this is, kid? News? This is infotainment. No one likes people who are right. Audiences like people who agree with them. Loudly.”

“Even if they’re wrong?”

“Especially if they’re wrong. People who know they’re wrong want someone to tell them they’re right, so they never have to admit it.”

I shook my head. “I hate to say it,” I said, “but you’re right.”

“Don’t let it get around,” he said.

The Hot New Fad For the Right Wing Asshole On The Go

This is, I guess what you'd call the "Director's Cut" of this week's column,  since I can't say "asshole" in the paper. Even though it's exactly the right word).

Imagine, if you will: You’re driving along the road, minding your own business, when you pull up behind one of those great big pickups that would be very useful hauling feed and seed or towing a horse trailer, but which is way too clean and unscratched to have ever seen an actual farm.

As you prepare to pass this wheeled behemoth, your car is suddenly enveloped in a cloud of choking black smoke that causes you to weave dangerously. As you fight your way clear of the blinding cloud, you see the truck pulling off and faintly hear the derisive laughter of its occupants.

Congratulations. You’ve just encountered some Good Americans who are patriotically protesting against Obama’s fascist nanny state by engaging in a practice they call “Rolling Coal.”

Are you the kind of “conservative” who thinks that the first question that needs to be answered when analyzing a political position is, “Will this annoy liberals?”

Are you the type of person who, if the First Lady comes out in favor of something like, say, healthy meals and exercise, immediately starts howling that your rights are being violated worse than those of Jews in the Holocaust and declare your intention to stuff as much junk as possible into your face because that’ll show them, by golly?

Are you the type of person who’s decided to shop every week at Hobby Lobby, even though you’ve never shopped there before and you don’t actually have any hobbies, but you want to show those danged feminazis that you’re not taking any of their guff?

In short, are you a typical right wing asshole?

Well, you could always run for a Republican congressional seat. But if that seems like too much trouble and/or expense, then maybe Rolling Coal is for you.

Get yourself a big ol’ truck, go to an Internet site like Dieselhub.com or one of those magazines aimed at truck aficionados, and order you some “smoke switches,” “aggressive tuners and modules,” and “special injectors” which will, and I quote, “trick your engine into thinking it needs more fuel.”

This will allow you to blow out a huge cloud of black smoke on command when you encounter, say, a Prius or other hybrid. (You can even get a sticker along with your gear that says “Prius Repellent.”)

But don’t stop there. You can also use your new gizmos to smoke people with liberal bumper stickers. Or bicyclists. Be sure to use your smartphone to record your hilarious encounters with those enemies of all that is free and good about America.

Then you can join the Coal Rollers on YouTube, where your fellow freedom fighters have posted videos of their blows against The Man, a category which includes the aforementioned Prius drivers, liberal bumper sticker displayers, and cyclists, as well as cops and pretty girls walking by the side of the road (because nothing gets a woman hotter than having acrid toxic gases blown in her face by a truck the size of small aircraft carrier).

Of course, you knew that once a few brave souls began spewing The Black Cloud of Liberty in everyone’s face, Obama’s Islamocommiefascist Iron Fist of Doom was going to come down to crush it the way the Chinese crushed the flowers of freedom in Tiananmen Square.

The jackbooted thugs of the EPA have issued one of their fatwas, saying, “It is a violation of the Clean Air Act to manufacture, sell, or install a part for a motor vehicle that bypasses, defeats, or renders inoperative any emission control device.”

Translated into American, that means that after-market devices intended to increase fuel consumption and belch clouds of pollution into people’s faces are regarded as illegal by Obama’s EPA. This is how freedom dies, my friends.

If there’s one silver lining for the right, it’s that the Republicans in the House finally may have found the grounds for bringing the Articles of Impeachment they’ve been feverishly fantasizing about for so long. I mean, to heck with requiring some sort of “high crime or misdemeanor” as grounds to impeach. You just do NOT mess with a man’s truck.

Is Hillary Clinton a Replicant? Some Say Yes, Some Say No...

You know, if I was to tell you in these pages that a Republican politician was contesting his loss in a primary election on the grounds that his victorious opponent was, in fact, dead and being impersonated by a synthetic body double, you’d probably roll your eyes and go “he’s gone too far this time. That doesn’t even work as satire.” 

Well, maybe it doesn’t, but it’s actually true. In Oklahoma’s 3d District, Timothy Ray Murray, whose website [now taken down] describes him as a “human, born in Oklahoma,” got himself roundly shellacked in the primary by the incumbent, Rep Frank Lucas, with Murray taking a mere 5.2% of the vote to Lucas’ 82.8%. You’d think this would be a knockout blow to Murray’s campaign “to help bring House leadership back to traditional values.” But wait, Murray says, not so fast. “It is widely known,” Murray asserts in a press release addressed to “News Person”, that “Rep. Frank D. Lucas is no longer alive and has been displayed [sic] by a look alike.” Poor Frank met his end, it seems, on a “white stage” in Southern Ukraine, where he and “a few other Oklahoma and other States’ Congressional Members” were executed by hanging at the hands of (of course) The World Court. This rendered Lucas ineligible to serve on account of being, as noted above, dead.  

This is not the sort of thing a “traditional values” guy like Murray is going to take lying down. “I will NEVER,” he promises, “use Artificial Intelligence look alike [sic] to voice what The Representative’s Office is not doing nor own a robot look alike.” Well, I know I’m reassured. 

In truth, Timothy Ray Murray may have done a huge favor for the Raving Nutter Wing of the Republican Party (aka “the base”). Now that birtherism has been thoroughly discredited except in the heads of a few sad dead-enders and the grifters who prey on them, maybe the GOP can embrace “make the Democratic candidate prove she’s not a replicant” as their pet lunacy for the next couple of years. 

It can start, as such madness often does, on the Internet. A few well-placed posts on a few fringe cites claiming that, say, Hillary Clinton’s “fall in the shower” in December 2012 was actually fatal and that she’s been replaced by a vat-grown flesh-droid with the personalities of Saul Alinsky, Huey P. Newton, and Bill Ayers (preserved on floppy disk by Steve Jobs in 1995) downloaded into its blank consciousness. Gradually, the idea will percolate upwards to the slightly less nutty environs of the right-wing blogosphere, like National Review Online, where someone will observe “of course, Hillary Clinton could just dispel the rumors by providing a DNA sample.” 

After that, it’ll snowball. Fox News will soon be running show after show, with the usual endless parade of outrage-mongers looking into the camera with brows furrowed and demanding “Where’s the DNA?” 

Finally, Clinton will make the mistake of knuckling under and actually providing a sample. Then the blood, so to speak, will really be in the water. Overnight a few dozen self-appointed DNA experts will flood the Internet, insisting that the test is a fake, because, I don’t know, the streaks on the test card are the wrong shade of gray on their computer monitors or something. Nothing will do to prove Clinton’s humanity, the GOP will say, but full genome sequencing. “I’m not saying that Mrs. Clinton is really a replicant,” they’ll say piously, “but I’d like to see the sequencing of all of her chromosomal DNA as well as DNA contained in the mitochondria.” It won’t matter that that’s something that none of them will have never heard of before the brouhaha. Angry Tea Partiers (as if there are any other kind) will show up at Town Hall meetings with an American flag in one hand and a bag of disreputable looking goo in the other, raging at insufficiently crazy public officials:  "I have a DNA sample here that says I’m human! Why are you people ignoring the chromosomal DNA!?” before they drown out the response by singing “God Bless America.” Finally, Clinton will grit her teeth and undergo the procedure—the results of which will also be denounced as fake by “DNA experts” who failed high school chemistry. And the beat will go on…

Too crazy, you say? Could never happen, you say? I would have said that about birtherism, until it described pretty much the same arc I’ve laid out above. If there’s one thing researching this column has taught me, it’s that there is literally no theory too outlandish for wingnuts and their captive media to promote from fringe to mainstream and no evidence that they’ll accept to refute it. It could happen here…

Dusty Rhoades lives, writes, and practices law in Carthage. 

Suppose They Had a Revolution and Nobody Came

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Those wild and wacky wingnuts are at it again!

What are those zany scamps up to this time? Why, trying to overthrow the government, of course! Unfortunately for them (and hilariously for citizens of the non-crackpot variety), the government didn’t seem to notice.

It happened (or more accurately, didn’t happen) last weekend, at an event called Operation American Spring, OAS for short. OAS was the “brainchild” of a former U.S. Army colonel named Harry Riley. On his website, Riley laid out his plan to “restore the Constitution.” In fine military fashion, Riley broke the op down into three “phases.”

1: OAS would “field millions, as many as 10 million, patriots” who would assemble on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., “spiritually/ Constitutionally armed” to replace the “current government.”

2: One million of the 10 million (Riley later told Alan Colmes that the count could go as high as 30 million) would remain on-site “as long as it takes to see Obama, Biden, Reid, McConnell, Boehner, Pelosi, and Attorney General Holder removed from office.”

3: “Those with the principles of a West, Cruz, Dr. Ben Carson, Lee, DeMint, Paul, Gov. Walker, Sessions, Gowdy, Jordan, should comprise a tribunal and assume positions of authority to convene investigations, recommend appropriate charges against politicians and government employees to the new U.S. attorney general appointed by the new president.”

Yes, there’s nothing that says “restoring the Constitution” like a minority of disgruntled voters overthrowing a freely elected government because they didn’t like the election result, then establishing an unelected tribunal to arrest and punish those they designate as political undesirables. Reign of Terror, anyone?

The coup wouldn’t be easy, Riley warned.

“It will be painful,” he said, “and some people may die because the government will not be nonviolent; some of us will end up in a cell, and some may be injured.”

A fellow named Terry Trussell, who identified himself as OAS’s “chief of staff,” told the “Patriot Nation” radio show that “if things got bigger,” the administration could “pull in drones,” but confidently predicted that “when the government destroys the capital just to get rid of us, I think it’s going to work to their discredit.”

Well, yeah, I guess that would be true. If, that is, the basic premise of the statement weren’t bat-spit crazy.

So the big day, May 16, rolled around, and — well, not much happened. From the live feed that the OAS people thoughtfully set up on the Internet, it looked like about 200 people showed up. It was kind of hard to tell, because for a long time, the camera was apparently lying on its side.

What could be seen in the feed, and in various photos posted from the event, was small knots of people (mostly older, almost exclusively white) milling around aimlessly, shouting a lot, and most definitely not being slaughtered by Obama’s Killer Drones.

“It’s a very dismal turnout,” 61-year-old Jackie Milton, the head of Texans for Operation American Spring, glumly told The Washington Times. One “patriot” was even more poignant; he stood in front of the camera and screamed “Where you AT?” over and over.

It is true that, in advance of the coming of the OAS wavelet, the president and Mr. Biden actually did flee the White House — all the way to a local Shake Shack, where they had a nice lunch and talked to reporters about raising the minimum wage. From the pictures, a lot more people showed up at that event than at the Mall.

Faced with this kind of embarrassment, some OAS supporters took to Twitter, with a variety of excuses for the poor turnout that were so lame that #Americanspringexcuses became a trending topic all its own.

30 million "patriots" descend on DC disguised as empty chairs! Clint Eastwood was proud! #OperationAmericanSpring pic.twitter.com/PbTxMUbCIB
— KHARY PENEBAKER (@kharyp) May 17, 2014

Some posted photos of massive crowds on the Mall, only to have others note from a cursory examination of the signs and clothing that the pictures were from civil rights marches from 40 years ago.

My personal favorite was the often-repeated “well, a lot of these patriots have jobs.” Possibly, but here’s a thought: When the horrible tyranny under which you claim to suffer isn’t enough to make you ask for a personal day to overthrow the government, then maybe the tyranny isn’t so horrible after all.

Another right wing attempt to overturn the election has failed, because, despite the drama-queen ranting of the worshippers of “West, Cruz, Dr. Ben Carson,” etc., normal people look around and, for the most part, see things as getting better. They may not be completely happy, but unlike the deluded misfits of OAS, they’re not unhappy to the point of treason.

The Well Truly Has No Bottom

You know, after my last column, I didn't think there was anyone who would be low enough to rise to defend the late Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church. When even the usual gang of haters fell silent (the ones who show up every week to tell me how uninteresting they find the column they read every week), I thought there would finally be someone so vile, even the wingnuttiest of the wingnuts wouldn't throw in their lot with them.

I was wrong.

Thank you, ******* **** of Carthage, NC for your letter (yes, an actual mailed letter) that proved to me there actually are people in my own town who will defend picketing the funerals of slain children, murder victims, and soldiers fallen in the service of their country, all in the name of hate and in the name of God. Thank you, ******* **** of Carthage, NC for proving that the well of hate, ignorance and abject stupidity truly has no bottom.

Dusty

PS: Thank you especially for attaching a copy of the column to your note, because I certainly would not have known what I'd written otherwise. Also thanks for attaching the obit from Time Magazine with the highlighted sentence that you think proves your point, but which actually does nothing of the sort. If you hadn't done that, I might not have realized I was dealing with a complete dimwit.

Yours in Christ, D

(Updated to remove the actual name, since this sort of idiot would use it to whine and play the martyr.)

Where Do The Haters Go Now?

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

This past week, the big question in the great state of Arizona was “will she or won’t she?” — with “she” being the state’s governor, Jan Brewer, and the question being whether or not she’d veto an act passed by the state legislature making it legal for businesses to refuse service to gay or lesbian people on “religious grounds.”

The bill, which would allow businesses to do to gay and lesbian customers what they can’t do to black, Latino, Jewish, etc. ones, all in the name of religious freedom, passed the state House 33 to 27 and the Senate 17 to 13.

The hullaballoo was fierce and immediate, with gay and lesbian activists such as actor and politician George Takei urging a boycott of the state if the law takes effect, and business leaders calling for Brewer to veto the bill because it would kill jobs and commerce.

Companies like Apple (which is planning to build a plant in the state), American Airlines and Marriott also called for a veto.

Officials of the NFL, which is holding next year’s Super Bowl in Arizona, issued a statement saying, “Our policies emphasize tolerance and inclusiveness and prohibit discrimination based on age, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation or any other improper standard,” thus raising fears that they might actually move the Super Bowl, like they did in 1992 when Arizona refused to enact a Martin Luther King Day holiday.

Interestingly, among the people urging a veto of the bill were three of the senators who’d actually voted for it.

“While our sincere intent in voting for this bill was to create a shield for all citizens’ religious liberties,” wrote Sens. Bob Worsley, Steve Pierce and Adam Driggs (the majority whip), “the bill has instead been mischaracterized by its opponents as a sword for religious intolerance. These allegations are causing our state immeasurable harm.”

Turns out religious principle might end up costing money. Can’t have that, can we?

This whole argument that we should be allowed to discriminate against people if we can find some justification in the Bible raises the question: Where does it end? I frequently get emails from a virulent racist who peppers his angry and often incoherent screeds with supposed biblical support for the oppression of — well, I can’t use some of the words he uses.

And this fellow isn’t alone. Should people like that be allowed to refuse to serve African-Americans, Latinos, Jews or interracial couples on the ground that their interpretation of the Bible forbids mixing of the races, even at lunch counters? Are we going to return to the vileness of Jim Crow laws so long as we can drape that ugliness in religious robes?

Finally, Gov. Brewer saw sense and vetoed the bill. I’m sure a lot of people who would have loved to freely exercise their hatred in the name of the Baby Jesus were let down. But I want to help, because that’s the kind of guy I am.

If you really want to live in a country where they put the gays in their place, may I suggest Russia? They’re all about conservative Christian values these days. Of course, the weather is horrific, the food is worse, the plumbing doesn’t work, and packs of feral dogs roam the streets, but these should be small prices to pay to safeguard yourself from having to deal with gay people.

Or how about Uganda? Their president recently signed a bill that makes homosexual acts punishable by life in prison. The original version of the bill made those acts punishable by death, and hey, you can’t hardly get more biblical than that.

Just last week, a Ugandan newspaper helpfully published a list of what it called the country’s “200 top” gays, to make it easier for the authorities to enforce traditional family values at gunpoint. Now, the country is periodically racked by unrest followed by vicious government crackdowns and there’s terrible poverty and disease everywhere, but hey, there probably won’t be any gay people coming into your business if you set it up there.

At least as far as you’ll know. Because discriminating against gay and lesbian people doesn’t make fewer of them. It just makes for more misery in the world.

All in the name of God, of course.

Journalism Goes to the (Starving) Dogs

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

It seems that the speedy decline of the international news media is continuing at its accustomed pace, and may even be accelerating.

The latest example of sensational, shoddy journalism from people who should really know better came in the reporting about the execution of Jang Song Thaek, the uncle and political rival of bat-spit-crazy North Korean dictator Kim Jong-in.

As you probably remember, reports filtered through last month from that secretive country that Jang had been removed from all his party positions, expelled from the party itself, and jailed. In a move straight out of Orwell’s “1984,” his image was Photoshopped out of photos with other leaders and removed from all official media.

Then, on Dec. 13, the North Koreans officially announced that Jang had been executed for, among other things, “politically motivated ambition” and “obstructing the nation’s economic affairs.”

Then things started to get weird.

Since very little actual information makes it out from behind the veil of secrecy the Kim family has maintained around North Korea for years, the news media resorted to their usual technique of reporting rumors, harebrained speculation, and outright deranged fantasy to fill the information gap.

The New York Times reported that two members of Jang’s faction had been executed with heavy caliber anti-aircraft guns. Another story in the British press quoted unidentified “Japanese media” as saying the executions were carried out in such a gruesome fashion on the orders of a “very drunk” Kim.

Then, to cap it all off, American TV networks, including NBC and Fox News, reported that Jang had been executed by being “stripped naked, thrown into a cage, and eaten alive by a pack of ravenous dogs, according to a newspaper with close ties to China’s ruling Communist Party.”

The Singaporean newspaper the Straits Times expanded on the lurid details, saying that “120 hounds, starved for three days, were allowed to prey on [Jang and his compatriots] until they were completely eaten up.”

Am I the only one who read reports like this and went, “Now, wait just a gosh-darned minute here” (or some reasonable facsimile thereof)?

I mean, Baby Kim’s a homicidal loon, no mistake about it, but when I see something that reads like an account from a James Bond movie or one of those unexpurgated versions of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, I tend to get, shall we say, a little skeptical.

As it turns out, we skeptics were right. Reporter James Pearson of Reuters traced the “Jang was eaten by dogs” story all the way back to a Dec. 11 post on a Chinese satirical website called Tencent Weibo. It did not, in fact, come from any intelligence source, insider or actual witness. It was a joke, albeit a particularly odd one.

Perhaps there’s a lot in Chinese humor that gets lost in translation. Perhaps it’s also payback from the time a few years ago when the Chinese press printed a story from The Onion (”Kim Jong-un Named The Onion’s Sexiest Man Alive for 2012”) as truth.

The clue should have been when, as the NBC News website put it, “the story could not be independently confirmed.”

Now, I’m just a simple country lawyer, not a big-time famous print or broadcast journalist, but I seem to remember hearing about a day when, if a journalist couldn’t get independent confirmation of a big story from at least two sources, no editor would run with it.

But that day is not this day. These days, “independent confirmation” has been replaced with, “Well, I read it from someone who read it in another place who may have seen it on Twitter,” and so on, until there are no real sources or confirmation of anything anymore, just a bunch of credulous rubes on their laptops or iPhones, desperate to generate content and blindly repeating what someone else said he read on another website or Twitter feed, maybe adding a little embellishment before passing it on to the next sucker, each echo getting louder until there’s nothing but a full-throated chorus of total balderdash.

It’s journalism reduced to the level of middle school gossip, only louder and stupider, and it reaches its truest heights of absurdity when its original source is a joke repeated as truth by people who didn’t get it.

I’ve often said that the hardest part of writing satire these days is staying ahead of reality. It gets even harder when satire is breathlessly reported as reality by sensation-hungry media hucksters for whom some stories are, as the saying goes, “too good to fact-check.”

I suppose that’s also meant as a joke, but the end results are more grotesque than funny.