The year on Planet Fox

Dunno. Where was they?

Anyway, the year-end roundup at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network is as nice an illustration of the "paranoid style" as we could ask for:

From radical advisers in the Obama White House to hacked e-mails showing questionable work by climate scientists, 2009 has seen its share of scandals. But if you only followed the mainstream media, you might have missed some of the biggest stories of the year.

This is the sort of clever, bank-shot question-begging that the F&B's excel at. Through the rose-colored 4-D glasses sold on Planet Fox, all those advisers are "radical," the e-mails actually illustrated "questionable work," and the tea party movement really was a national groundswell born of the Boston Massacre, the shelling of Fort McHenry and the Manchurian candidacy of B. Hussein O-Bow-Ma. One "czar" wants mandatory abortions, another wants the children raised at least to molestable age and your neighborhood ACORN office is ready to import enough teenage prostitutes to swing the balance either way as soon as the prevaricator-in-chief stops dithering.

There's a reason, of course, that "the mainstream media never touched the controversy" about John Holdren. There wasn't one, and no amount of lunatic quote-mining could bring one into existence. If there's a controversy at all amid this torrent of fabricated threats to the American way of life, it's the Times's apparent willingness to roll over in the face of it.

Anybody still need a New Year's resolution? When the herald from Planet Fox shows up at your newsroom demanding to know why you're suppressing the 2010 version of Climategate, let your model of responsible journalism be Walter Burns: Tell him his poetry smells and kick him downstairs.