Ouch! That hurts.

Oh holy cripes, readers. Mama’s tired. And not just because it’s Friday.

I was reading this story about how Newsweek has hired Karl Rove as an opinionator in order to “balance” out their earlier hiring of liberal blogger (and personal friend of Grant Miller) Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos.

Which got me thinking - remember when Jon Stewart went on Crossfire, the television program dedicated to that type of left vs. right media circus, and told them to “stop hurting America”?

Well, they’re not stopping. They’re not stopping at all. And it’s just so exhausting.

They want us all to believe that their responsibility is to merely provide us with a partisan from the left, and one from the right. Then all they have to do is shrug and say “I guess the truth lies somewhere in between, folks.”

Except it doesn’t always.

But it seems as if too often the press abdicates their responsibility to not just throw up two disparate opinions, but to actually get to the truth of the matter.

Case in point: Voter suppression vs. voter fraud.

You have to admit that the whole “rampant voter fraud” issue is a really fucking brilliantly placed red herring. The right-wing architects of this strategy really knew what they were doing. They knew the press would go for it, and they did. They so did.

Think of it this way: your future as a party depends upon being able to carry certain key districts every four years. Being able to carry certain key districts depends upon a certain amount of, how shall we say…um, keeping the non-Republicans away from the polls?

And by “non-Republicans,” I don’t mean Hollywood liberals with lotsa bucks and their lawyer’s number on their cell phone speed-dial.

I mean a different kind of Democrat. I mean poor Democrats. Democrats that, if they were to actually make the evening news with their complaint, would most likely be viewed by a certain portion of the America public with thoughts along the lines of “Those people again? What do they want now?”

I mean black Democrats.

So, how do you keep the press from crying foul when you keep the black Democrats from voting? How do you keep the press distracted from what is perhaps the most reprehensible conspiracy ever perpetrated by the Republican party?

That’s right. You counter-charge.

Thus was born the non-issue of “rampant voter fraud” in America.

Which was, of course, the issue behind the firing of all those attorneys at the Department of Justice. The guys that got fired were the guys who looked at BushCo’s “voter fraud is #1 DoJ issue” agenda and said “Are you fucking kidding me? You want me to prioritize a problem that doesn’t exist?”

And who is the DoJ mastermind behind the invention of “rampant voter fraud,”and behind the firing of those U.S. attorneys (read: fucking heroes) who refused to play ball?

Hans A. von Spakovsky.

I’m not kidding.

Formerly, he served in the Civil Rights Division of the DoJ, where he was so respected by his colleagues that they banded together to oppose his appointment to the Federal Elections Commission, calling him the “point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division's mandate to protect voting rights.”

Not that it mattered. Bush gave him one of those handy-dandy recess appointments. You know, like the one John Bolton got? Because that’s just the way he rolls, y’all.

Yes, it’s just another fox-guarding-the-hen-house appointment for BushCo.

But the recess appointment term is up, and Congress must now consider whether to allow BushCo to push through a regular 6-year term on the FEC for this, um, criminal.

Senator Obama opposes the appointment, and wrote an editorial in the Chicago Defender saying so. Good on him.

But Edward Blum at the conservative Weekly Standard contends that Obama, by opposing von Spakovsky is…get this…“playing the race card.”

I know! It’s so fucking…I don’t know…ironic and disgusting and just so completely shitty and perverse that I don’t know whether to, as my momma used to say, shit or go blind.

But the best part? The absolutely best motherfucking part of this whole sad, sick deal?

The Democrats might vote to allow von Spakovsky on the FEC, as long as they get to appoint a liberal member to “balance” him.

Yup.

Y’all must think I’m some kind of bringing-it-all-full-circle kind of god or something, but I swear on my life it’s all true, folks. It’s all too fucking true.