POLITICO Hackery… Allegedly Satire?

This morning I checked Memeorandum to see what the Beltway hacks were talking about and came across an article at POLITICO by Roger Simon – their Chief Political Hack (they use “columnist” instead of “hack”). It opens like this:

Paul Ryan has gone rogue. He is unleashed, unchained, off the hook.

“I hate to say this, but if Ryan wants to run for national office again, he’ll probably have to wash the stench of Romney off of him,” Craig Robinson, a former political director of the Republican Party of Iowa, told The New York Times on Sunday.

My immediate question was “Who the hell is Craig Robinson?” So I looked up the New York Times article with this quote in it and it was basically a throwaway line at the end of one of the usual “inside baseball no one cares about” pieces the Democrat Media Complex puts out there to prove something no actual voter cares about. Craig Robinson explains himself here. Again, a big nothing.

Anyway, the rest of the POLITICO piece was this weird thing about PowerPoint presentations and other stuff that anyone who isn’t in the tank for Obama would find ridiculously whiny. But, apparently, a bunch of people who are in the tank for Obama thought this piece meant something.

There’s Paul Krugman acting like this proves something.

Can I say that even though I’m not exactly a fan of Mitt Romney’s, this is just bad behavior? You’re supposed to wait until it’s actually over before you do this kind of thing.

In case you’re wondering, this is called “concern trolling.”

A mess of other websites, some purporting to be “moderates“, wrote about the POLITICO piece. All of them doing their version of the “confirmation bias” the pollsters are doing. The narrative is “Romney is losing” and they’re going out there looking for things to prove it, even using ridiculous turnout models in their polls to bolster the pre-determined narrative.

Basically, the Beltway Media swamp jumped on this POLITICO story to push the narrative. And now there’s some question as to whether the Roger Simon piece was satire or not – from Ben Smith, of all people.

So uh a lot of people seem not to have picked up that @politicoroger‘s column was satire ?? politico.com/news/stories/0…

— Ben Smith (@BuzzFeedBen) September 26, 2012

Was it satire? We don’t know. Roger Simon hasn’t clarified it in public. Is anyone in the Beltway Media going to ask Simon about this and report on it? Probably not. Does it matter? Not really. Because the “damage” has already been done. Now it moves into “false but accurate” territory and the Beltway Media hacks will continue to push more stories that promote their pre-determined narrative regardless of whether they’re true or not.

And they wonder why trust in the media is at an all time low.

UPDATE: Via BuzzFeed. It was satire. Now we’ll wait for all those media outlets to retract their commentary and admit they were duped. (We won’t be holding our breath.)

UPDATE #2: Corrected. Readers pointed out that Roger Simon is the POLITICO hack and Roger L. Simon is the bad ass from PJMedia. My apologies to the Roger L. Simon.