What a day Wednesday was for the paranoid little terrarium that is the modern conservative mind.

First, the poltroons running the American Broadcasting Company chickened out and handed creepy little yahoo James O’Keefe another win. From HuffPost:

In a video released Wednesday by Project Veritas, which is infamous for its attempts to infiltrate the media through undercover operations, Wright is heard criticizing ABC News and other cable news networks over their coverage of President Donald Trump and the 2020 election cycle.

“We don’t hold [Trump] to account,” Wright says in the low-quality recording. “We also don’t give him credit for what things he does do.”

Wright made the comments to Project Veritas affiliates, who had presented themselves as documentary filmmakers and secretly recorded him, according to a source familiar with the matter. The exchange was reportedly recorded earlier this month while Wright was in New Hampshire covering the state’s primary. Wright, who joined ABC News as a correspondent in 2000, also accused the network, which is owned by Disney, of engaging in too much self-promotion. ...

Asked at one point if he’s a democratic socialist — that is, a follower of the political philosophy embraced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — Wright responds that he instead considers himself a “socialist.”

“I think there should be national health insurance,” Wright says in the video. “I’m totally fine with reining in corporations. I think there are too many billionaires.”

You want to know why line reporters are timid? Here’s a guy griping in a bar about his bosses—something that, as we know, is virtually unprecedented in American journalism history—who gets taped by a nightcrawling ratfcker and, instead of throwing the nightcrawling ratfcker out a window, the ABC executives give him a win. Time was when your bosses had your back. Now, it appears, you could scare these bastards out of their wallets by mail.

Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, is now the subject of a conspiracy theory. Samuel Corum Getty Images

But even worse is the sudden dispatch of the flying monkeys against Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the career official at the Centers for Disease Control whose specialty is epidemic respiratory diseases, of which the coronavirus is one. According to Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Rush Limbaugh, apparently channeling the latest twist in the president*’s brainstream, the concern over the disease is an attempt on this presidency*'s life because Messonnier is...Rod Rosenstein’s sister!!!!!!!!! From Yahoo! News:

“Dr. Nancy Messonnier of the Centers for Disease Control — which today warned it could be bad, it might be bad, don’t go to school and don’t go to work, stay at home and teleconference — is the sister of the former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein,” Limbaugh said on Tuesday’s program. Rosenstein, who resigned from the Justice Department last May, oversaw the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller that President Trump sought to stop.

Limbaugh explained why he believed Messonnier’s relationship to Rosenstein mattered: “It’s just in that town, I’m telling you, everything is incestuous. Most of that town is establishment-oriented or rooted, which means they despise Trump,” he said. ... On Monday, Limbaugh dismissed the danger presented by the coronavirus outbreak, which has so far killed over 2,700 people worldwide. “It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump,” Limbaugh said on his radio program. “Now, I have to tell you the truth about coronavirus. ... Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.”

Is this insanity being picked up by the fever-swamp right-wing media? Of course it is. By St. Patrick’s Day, your crazy uncle is going to be convinced that Chuck Schumer and Robert Mueller are after him with syringes full of Mars germs. Count on it.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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