And so a day that began with news of the Journolist all-stars celebrating Obama’s election win by sneering at “f***ing Nascar retards” and fantasizing about throwing conservatives through plate-glass windows ends with a lecture on decency and ethics from the most tinpot left-wing demagogue on the airwaves. Ethics? This is a guy who runs an echo chamber so notorious that it actually qualified as news when Dave Weigel told him something about Sarah Palin that he didn’t want to hear. Decency? This is a guy who compares Fox News to Al Qaeda (unfavorably!) and right-wingers to terrorists and derides the tea-party movement as some sort of neo-Klan at every turn, yet has the mammoth balls here to lament conservatives’ “fomenting of hatred of Americans by Americans.” Even some of his own regulars couldn’t take it anymore and cut ties to MSNBC in the interests of … ethics and decency. And of course, on the critical question of just how culpable “Fixed Noise” or whatever he’s now calling Fox is on Sherrod’s firing, he’s wrong on his facts. As noted earlier, Vilsack pulled the trap door on her before Fox ever ran the clip.

And yet, and yet, here’s Mediaite breathlessly slobbering all over him for a “classic” rant. Even if lefties agree with him on the substance and even if, somehow, they can stomach the gallons of hypocrisy he’s funneling down their throats, how can they stand the sheer pompousness of the performance? The extended Dreyfus metaphor, the heavy-handed dramatic camera cuts, the pathetic emphatic pronouncement of Breitbart’s name: How do you not cringe? All that’s missing by way of theatrical pathos is a final close-up a la Iron Eyes Cody of Olby turning towards the camera as a single tear rolls down his cheek.

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