WHERE THEY'RE COMING FROM.

To those of you who worry that mainstream attention to the con artist Charles C. Johnson will damage the reputation and efficacy of journalism, I have to say you're waaaaaay late, and submit in evidence this Ole Perfesser Instapundit post from today in its entirety:

WHAT’S SAD IS THAT IN THE OBAMA ERA IT’S ENTIRELY PLAUSIBLE: Matt Drudge says spending bill passed because NSA has ‘dirt’ on John Boehner.  

Matt Drudge of the influential Drudge Report news aggregation site expressed discontent over a federal spending bill that passed with votes from both Republicans and Democrats in the House.

The $1.1 trillion spending bill that runs through September 2015 is now up for a vote in the Democratically-led Senate. Many conservatives, including Drudge, are upset that the bill funds both Obamacare and President Obama’s immigration executive orders.   

“Obama got EVERYTHING,” Drudge tweeted Friday. “NSA dirt on Boehner must be incredible. Chicago wins.” 

I’ve seen similar speculation about John Roberts in the ObamaCare case. Sad what this country has become under the Obama Machine.

This isn't just some nut, The Perfesser is king of the rightbloggers and a regular contributor to mainstream journalism outfits, and here you see him not only promoting a ridiculous conspiracy theory out of Matt Drudge, but limning it with his own bullshit.

The damage to journalism has not only been long-lived, but deliberate. The point was always to obviate any distinction between the verifiable or even believable and boob bait.

It's a different kind of problem from the bias, if that's the word for it, found in the mainstream media. The Rolling Stone/UVA story got caught by the Washington Post's Erik Wemple and others, the whole world came to know about it, and much soul-searching was seen over it in the journalism community. Even if they were insincere, they at least had to pretend. Conservative crap-merchants, however, don't soul-search. They'll dish anything, and their audiences, convinced that everything the MSM says is a lie, takes the absence of these stories from the big papers and nets as proof that their heroes are telling the truth the Lamestream won't dare to print.

This has provided a fertile environment for hucksters to throw shit, and for a loyal audience to not even care if it sticks. Johnson's just a logical mutation of that. While most of these guys just duck out of the way of the debunkings and negative attention their stories receive, Johnson welcomes the attention and makes himself the story. He's standing on the shoulders of midgets; good thing for him there's such a lot of them.