WHY PROPAGANDA WORKS. While license-holder Jeff Goldstein shuffles around the mansion in Kleenex-box shoes, the kitchen help at Protein Wisdom are playing with the pots and pans. One such functionary headlines a post about the humorous revelation by Sandra Day O'Connor that one Barbara Jane March tried to poison the Supreme Court with rat-poison cookies thusly: "OLBERMANN FAN?" This is because Olbermann said, on air, he was going to cut Bill O'Reilly's hamstrings, then apologized, on air, which event stoked the holy fires of Michelle Malkin, who seemed to think this trumped the anthrax threats sent to politicians and celebrities by her own biggest fan.

So far, so what; but you know how it is with amateurs -- they always go too far: the PW poster asks, "So, it will be interesting to see what kinds of affiliations the MSM turns up on Barbara Joan March."

That's the great thing about the internet -- it has sites like The Smoking Gun, where I got this government sentencing report:

The defendant's conduct does not appear to be motivated by any personal, political or professional animosity toward the intended recipients of the letters. Rather, interviews with the purported senders of these letters [whose return addresses March had purposefully placed on them], as well as factors cited in the presentence investigative report, suggest that the defendant's conduct likedly was motivated by a misplaced anger toward the purported senders of those letters, former friends and colleagues who in the defendant's mind somehow had abandoned or wronged her.

And I have dial-up!

This kind of chickenshit wouldn't be worth noting but for the pattern of which it is a part. Longtime readers will recall the story of Foster Barton, a serviceman who got in a fight with an ex-serviceman at a Toby Keith concert (!), and whose beating was improbably blamed on the John Kerry campaign by every winger website in the known world. This obvious propaganda remains, for the most part, the blogospheric record of the event. (Barton might be the Horst Wessel of our age, but for the fact that Wessel was actually shot by a Communist.)

One might imagine these guys are too lazy or stupid to check sources, but I think it's worse than that. I think they just don't care what's real or unreal. They know what sort of thing plays to their constituents, and they also know that those constituents aren't concerned with the bullshit content in their kibble, so long as they keep getting fed.

UPDATE. I should mention that Old Hickory was among the few, the proud, the brave who picked up the Barton bullshit.