I Am The Eggman. I Am The Eggman. I Am the Douchebag!
“You know, just when I think you're the shallowest man I know, you somehow manage to drain a little bit more out of the pool.”
Elaine to Jerry—Seinfeld, Episode #59, “The Implant”
I know not to expect anything remotely resembling class from a bottom-feeding miscreant like Matt Drudge, what with his track record for blaring, and then cowardly running away from self interest-serving lies, operating as an unabashed smear hit-man for the right, and of course covering the asses of his wingnut benefactors through widely disseminated push-back (written by them). He's a disingenuous hack, masquerading as some sort of next-wave “journalist”, when in the end he couldn't write his way out of a wet paper back if his pen had a diamond tip. The key to his “success”? It is in no way related to the quality of his “reportage”. It merely is the manifestation of something my father used to tell me all the time about seeming unfairness and how merit oftentimes does not win out.
“Sometimes son...it isn't about being good. It's about being FIRST.”
Drudge? Merely the dude with an idea and a faster baud modem than his pre-histor-internet peers.
Add to that good timing a petty, and vindictive personality and his having all the scruples of a rabid jackal loping about the unguarded newborn wing of a hospital and you get the man in whole.
However, give the devil his due. The one thing the marble-mouthed cyber-thug has going for him is a well-cultivated network of snitches and lapdogs waiting with bated breath for his every gutteral utterance.
Thus, when he breaks a story—regardless of how damaging—it can hit with the force of a stray spark in a vapor-filled gas main.
He did just that late last week when he blared in a banner headline the till-then-clandestine presence of Britain's Prince Harry's serving with his fellow British troops in Afghanistan. Clandestine because of known threats against the young Royal's life, and his unit should his location become known.
Just...wow. (via Crooks & Liars)
Tsk...tsk...tsk...
The 23-year-old prince was posted in mid-December to the restive Helmand province of southern Afghanistan under a cloak of secrecy following an unusual agreement reached between the media and the army.
However, the arrangement collapsed after news was leaked on the US website, the Drudge Report, yesterday.
The ministry said the decision to withdraw the prince, who is third in line to the throne, was taken primarily because “the worldwide media coverage of Prince Harry in Afghanistan could impact on the security of those who are deployed there, as well as the risks to him as an individual soldier.”
So, this lunk-headed bomb-tosser basically jeopardized not only Prince Harry's life, but that of his unit-mates just-fucking-because? I am no fan of war—it's a disgusting, life-coarsening thing whether justified or not, but I will give serious credit to those who put their asses on the line to fight—for the poor grunts humping it for college money, or a sense of duty or family tradition. And for someone like Prince Harry who deigned to serve when he—unlike the VAST majority of the children of political privilege here in this country—could have sat on his ass, sippeing at Pimms and Sevens till he was a silver-haired do-nothing King. Via birthright he could have ducked anything—he could probably garotte “Who Want's To be A Millionaire's” Chris Tarrant in the middle of a programme and in the end, walk away unscathed.
But...he chose to serve and was doing so with an understanding that it would be kept secret as a matter of national security until apparently Matt Drudge ran out of unflattering Hillary pics to run and ran dry of synonyms for ragheaded darkie to pillory Obama with—so, he went with a stupid, attention-getting, red-cheeked shit-in-the-street leak of confidential and potentially danger-increasing information.
You know Goddamned well that were it one of President Bush's responsibility-phobic daughters' Apple-tini sodden asses on the line in a secret war-zone location, Drudge would've made the Sphinx look like a sodium-pentatholed Chris Tucker with not only his silence, but a vicious lashing out at anyone daring to break that silence.
And that's the crux of it—his naked partisanship and a-moral “fuck propriety—I'll run with any manner of story about anyone who isn't fellating me with deference and perks” style. He'll trash you not out of any sense of wrong or right (or whether what he's pushing is actually true or not—as Sidney Blumenthal, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton all would painfully find out), but just because he can, because it serves his wingnut masters, and because dirt fucking sells.
The ultimate irony is that for all his incessant muckraking on others, he's often the first to rail about someone or some entity endangering national security or his backers' interests through their actual tough investigative reporting. And the right-wing media he funnels his swill to join him in that double-standard. “How dare you release the Abu Ghraib pictures! They're inflammatory!” “We need to prosecute those in the press who leaked about this goverment's illegal secret prisons!” “Someone must pay for daring to talk about the depth of our illegality in spying on Americans”. But of course, you've barely heard a word about Drudge's shitty little line-step because he's “their boy”. Add into the mix the fact that Drudge has some nasty “secrets” about himself that he litigiously fights with all of his hypocritical, indignant might—via Crooks and Liars:
Many have asked about the egg reference in my earlier post. It comes from an article in Salon back in 2000. Jeannette Walls had a spat with Drudge over her book entitled “Dish” in which she revealed some of Matt Drudge’s preferences. She actually never mentioned anything about eggs in the book. Matt brought it out into the open:After a mutual friend of both gossips tipped off Drudge as to just what these “lurid allegations” (about him—LM's note) were—a nasty case of pubic lice, a penchant for fully clothed sex in the shower and a bizarre egg fetish—he began to spread them himself….
“He likes to have sex with eggs. He likes them smeared all over naked male bodies.”
“It’s all very well sourced,” she told the New York Post’s Page Six. “If he offers you a bite of his omelet, take a pass.”
Splat!
And here, via Raw Story:
Drudge is a fine example of a nut-job. He’s obsessed with being known—starting non-gay rumors about himself, pestering big papers to get coverage—but wants absolutely nothing “out” about his personal life. Certainly not the kind of details he’d splash across his page, anyway. Unless it’s a rumor he tried to start about himself and Laura Ingraham. He even reportedly asked the New Times that no full body photos accompany that interview. That is either one of the gayest things I’ve ever heard or one of the craziest.
Pretty secretive little panty-sniifing (or should I say,“tighty-whit-ey sniffing”), garbage-picking parasite...ain't he? He uses his contacts and “ins” all over the place to gather dirt on pissed-off, would-be retaliators to keep them from ratting out his own creepy-fuck behavior. The day's gonna come though when somebody bigger, badder and with a more powerful “gun” than him will cut him off at the knees and leave him choking on the refuse cloud in history's dustbin. It happens to 'em all. His political and temperamental forefather Walter Winchell saw his once-mighty influence first blunted, and then quickly drained away as people finally tired of his knee-jerk reactionaryism and then saw himself mocked mercilessly in the media—particularly the scathing classic film (One of my all-time favorites) “Sweet Smell Of Success”...
“The real Walter Winchell, no longer as powerful as he'd been in the 1940s but still a man to be reckoned with, went after (screenwriter) Ernest Lehman with both barrels upon the release of Sweet Smell Of Success. Winchell was not so much offended by the unflattering portrait of himself as by the dredging up of an unpleasant domestic incident from his past.”
In the end, the once omnipotent and widely read Winchell was reduced to standing on a Hollywood street corner handing out mimeographed copies of his “column” for free to disinterested passers-by like some sandwich-boarded, nudie-show barker passing out coupons for “Live Girlz!” Drudge's years of hypocrisy—just like Winchell's—and rank amorality will certainly bring him low when the worm turns, as it always does at some point. It'll be the ultimate comeuppance for a turd-gobbling little cyber-thug like him. Countless people unfairly outed. Security and highly sensitive relationships fatally compromised. Reputations...trashed. Lives actually endangered.
All for the sake of a nasty addiction to running people down, spreading gossip, and shilling for parties who mean no one well. All that and what cheap, fleeting fame it grants. That day of payback's pimp-slap'll be a sweet and vicious one...as it is for all “can't take it” bullies.
The prescient words of a then-Heavyweight Champion Mike Tyson come rushing to mind...
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
How true those words rang...especially when the bullying Tyson would ironically find himself on the receiving end of a sea-changing “punch in the mouth.”
Do “dirt” and you set yourself up for a “dirt-nap” Trade in shit, and you'll find yourself eating it. Callously play around with people's lives and you'll eventually see your own ruined.
Pimp a secret...push a lie. When fate bites back...don't wonder why.
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