Obama Alinsky Republicans

There's a lot to marvel at in today's Two Minute Hate from The Fox Nation, but let's start with the hed. Who's a noun, who's a verb and who's an adjective? Those pesky nouns can be pretty flexible:

• "Alinsky Republicans" could be a direct object; the NYT is helping some unnamed actor Obama them
• "Obama Alinsky" could be a noun pileup (like "George row doc") modifying Republicans, and the NYT is helping those Republicans
• "Alinsky" is the verb, and the Times is helping Obama to Alinsky some Republicans

If you've been keeping up with the Glenn Beck faction of the American right, you picked Door #3. Saul Alinsky's so well known* that he can be used as a verb (apparently meaning "to practice some concept that sounds like it ought to be in Rules for Radicals even if it isn't"). It's his tune that the Chicago thugs in the White House are playing as they march us toward the socialist abyss. Alinsky has reached the exalted level of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Planet Fox: He can illustrate a story even if he's never mentioned in it (or identified in the caption).

So what's going on with the story itself? Apparently malign L.A. Times dimbulb Andrew Malcolm picked up a story from the Daily Caller claiming that an NYT reporter had advised the White House media staff how to make its Twitter messages easier to follow. Malcolm at least follows up by acknowledging that there's a rather less dramatic side to "what's the hashtag you guys are urging people to use?" -- as in, maybe the reporter was asking for information. At Fox, it's too good to correct.

To paraphrase my favorite almost-certainly-apocryphal LBJ quote: Even if you can't come right out and say your enemy is pronging barnyard animals, you can always make him deny it.

* He gets around for having been dead nearly 40 years.