I’m sure you’ve probably heard all about the recent back and forth between various organs of the SCLM about Obama and his early education. Short verision: a website published a claim that he was educated in extremist madrassas when young, and that he is a kind of ’stealth-Muslim’ now as he runs for the highest office. These claims were picked up by FOX, and later complicated by other claims that even though the story was false, it originated from the campaign office of Hillary. Smears within smears, if you will.

The smearing continues, but not perhaps as you may think. Let’s take a walk down Highbrow Smearing Lane, shall we? (I’m leaving out the livelinks which you can find in the original article)

WASHINGTON, Jan. 28 — Jeffrey T. Kuhner, whose Web site published the first anonymous smear of the 2008 presidential race, is hardly the only editor who will not reveal his reporters’ sources. What sets him apart is that he will not even disclose the names of his reporters.

web site + anon smear + won’t disclose = blogs are not real reporting, don’t trust them.

But their anonymity has not stopped them from making an impact. In the last two weeks, Mr. Kuhner’s Web site, Insight, the last remnant of a defunct conservative print magazine owned by the Unification Church led by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, was able to set off a wave of television commentary, talk-radio chatter, official denials, investigations by journalists around the globe and news media self-analysis that has lasted 11 days and counting.

Impact on whom? The Deeply stupid, those who don’t have the good sense to read the Times, that’s who. Those people, you know, talk radio types, Moonies. No one like in your bookclub or PTA. This is how new trends begin, folks. It’s now officially a good thing to be a Volvo Liberal again, and cluck-cluck at the unwashed masses who are truly responsible for this mess we’re in over in Iraq and elsewhere. Times readers have always known better.

The controversy started with a quickly discredited Jan. 17 article on the Insight Web site asserting that the presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was preparing an accusation that her rival, Senator Barack Obama, had covered up a brief period he had spent in an Islamic religious school in Indonesia when he was 6.

A few details about the vitrol and extreme nature and style of these claims would be helpful, but the Times isn’t interested in sullying its pages with the ugly details of eliminationist rhetoric and websites, despite the fact that they lie at the heart of more “news” controversies than I can easily recount. Hiding that putrid, rotten center of right-wing discourse is a key part in the effort of “bipartisanship,” one beloved by the SCLM as well as the politicians they hold in fearful thrall.

(Other news organizations have confirmed Mr. Obama’s descriptions of the school as a secular public school. Both senators have denounced the report, and there is no evidence that Mrs. Clinton’s campaign planned to spread those accusations.)

I like the way the parentheses are used here. Kind of throwaway, easily forgettable, a detail and not a key part of this report.

In an interview Sunday, Mr. Kuhner, 37, said he still considered the article, which he said was meant to focus on the thinking of the Clinton campaign, to be “solid as solid can be.” But he declined to say whether he had learned the identity of his reporter’s sources, and so perhaps only that reporter knows the origin of the article’s anonymous quotes and assertions. Its assertions about Mr. Obama resemble rumors passed on without evidence in e-mail messages that have been widely circulated over the last several weeks.

Blog writers = chain emailers. And just as vapid and annoying, at least to those who exchange long selections from the Times literary sections and eschew the “Top 10” lists of the Bud-swilling mobile home dweller.

The Clinton-Obama article followed a series of inaccurate or hard-to-verify articles on Insight and its predecessor magazine about politics, the Iraq war or the Bush administration, including a widely discussed report on the Insight Web site that President Bush’s relationship with his father was so strained that they were no longer speaking to each other about politics.

Because Insight is inaccruate, it’s equally wasteful and foolish to discuss the “rumors” that Bush and his father don’t get along. Times readers should also ignore any analysis that includes this assertion, when speaking about W’s motivations and actions in the Middle East and elsewhere. All that is just ’conspiracy theory.’

The Washington Times, which is also owned by the Unification Church, but operates separately from the Web site, quickly disavowed the article. Its national editor sent an e-mail message to staff members under the heading “Insight Strikes Again” telling them to “make sure that no mention of any Insight story” appeared in the paper, and another e-mail message to its Congressional correspondent instructing him to clarify to Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama that The Washington Times had nothing to do with the article on the Web site.

“Some of the editors here get annoyed when Insight is identified as a publication of The Washington Times,” said Wesley Pruden, editor in chief of The Washington Times.

Because goodness knows, the Times would never, ever collude with another large corporate or political entity on a story while at the same time protesting the separation and independence of the two. That’s never happened, ever. Only the crazy Moonies do that.

And in an interview, John Moody, a senior vice president at Fox News, said its commentators had erred by citing the Clinton-Obama report. “The hosts violated one of our general rules, which is know what you are talking about,” Mr. Moody said. “They reported information from a publication whose accuracy we didn’t know.”

FOX news can be trusted, because they always admit their mistakes. You don’t have to agree, Gentle Times reader, they’re beneath your genteel notice. But they are professionals, like the Times, and like the gentlemen they are, they will always do the right thing, in the end.

Mr. Kuhner’s ability to ignite a news media brush fire nonetheless illustrates how easily dubious and politically charged information can spread through the constant chatter of cable news commentary, talk radio programs and political Web sites. And at the start of a campaign with perhaps a dozen candidates hiring “research directors” to examine one another, the Insight episode may be a sign of what is to come.

Dubious + fiery/charged + chatter + talk radio + web sites/blog + hired not really professional (hence the quotes around “research”) = Don’t trust any of that rabble, Good Reader of the Times. We determine what is fact, and only we will always present to you fact, nothing but fact, and all the facts. Be sure to shower if you do spend any time at one of these organs of filthy accusation and rhetoric.

To most journalists, the notion of anonymous reporters relying on anonymous sources is a red flag. “If you want to talk about a business model that is designed to manufacture mischief in large volume, that would be it,” said Ralph Whitehead Jr., a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts.

With so much anonymity, “How do we know that Insight magazine actually exists?” Professor Whitehead added. “It could be performance art.”

See, the Times has Professors and other Serious Thinkers at its disposal; no blog can make that claim. We’re also a “Business Model” that works, we make money and have been in business for decades. And we use names, real names even, all the time. Anyone who won’t use a real name can’t be trusted.

But hosts of morning television programs and an evening commentator on the Fox News Network nevertheless devoted extensive discussion to Insight’s Clinton-Obama article, as did Rush Limbaugh and other conservative talk radio hosts.

And the Fox News rival MSNBC has picked up several of Insight’s other recent anonymous “scoops.” Among them: that Mr. Bush was afraid to fire his adviser Karl Rove because “he knows too much”; that there is a rift between President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice over the president’s support for Israel; and that Mr. Bush spent the months before the midterm elections in a bunker-mentality focused on the Iraq war and the elections to the exclusion of all else. Mr. Kuhner has appeared as a guest on both networks.

Aren’t you glad, Times reader, that you’re a full time investor and white collar professional, too busy to sit around a trailer watching morning news shows and listening to Rush? You’re also above gossip, educated and serious person that you are, you’d never stoop to discuss those childish accusations that the Adults aren’t really in Charge. You’re patient, and sober minded, and you don’t look for scoops, you look for facts, which you can only find here at the Times.

A spokesman for MSNBC declined to comment. Representatives of News World Communications, the arm of the Unification Church that owns Insight, could not be reached for comment on Sunday night.

Mr. Kuhner said, “Our report on this opposition research activity is completely accurate,” and he argued that all major news organizations relied on anonymous sources. Mr. Kuhner, in an editor’s note on Insight, said the Web site could not afford to “send correspondents to places like Jakarta to check out every fact in a story.” The Web site pays up to $800 for an article.

The grownup professionals at MSNBC are hiding in shame, and the Moonies- well, it’s not like you really wanted to know what they had to say, did you? But the nutjob speaks, and look at how poor and easily mocked he is! We all know you cannot trust the poor to investigate or report accurately.

Mr. Kuhner said he was not yet convinced by reports from officials of the elementary school that Mr. Obama attended in Indonesia about its secular history. “To simply take the word of a deputy headmaster about what was the religious curriculum of a school 35 years ago does not satisfy our standards for aggressive investigative reporting,” he wrote.

What a fool. Being skeptical is something one must earn, the old fashioned way, after many garden parties with the Right People and after accumulating the Right degrees from the Right schools. Anyone else who doubts anything is obviously crazed and unbalanced.

Insight was founded two decades ago as a conservative print magazine called Insight on the News. It started the career of the journalist David Brock, who became famous for writing sensational magazine articles and books about Anita Hill and later Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Brock later recanted much of what he had written, and now runs a liberal media group dedicated to countering what it considers be conservative bias in the news media.

We don’t need to tell you his website though. For some reason, he likes to pick on us almost as much as FOX or Rush. Because he’s a flip-flopper who used to work for the Moonies, and is only out to squeeze money out of the other side now, crazy and untrustworth webbie-blogger-person that he is.

Insight had thousands of subscribers, but its reputation was checkered by its false reports, which included an assertion that President Bill Clinton was selling plots at Arlington National Cemetery to Democratic campaign donors, and, during the Bush administration, that Saddam Hussein’s purported weapons of mass destruction might have been found.

Moonies sure are crazy, and aren’t you glad you never made any of those claims? We sure are we didn’t, and that we never believed that the Clintons had done wrong or Saddam had WMDs. Because you know, we never, ever said that or implied that in a single one of our reports to you over the last 15 years. We’re the Serious Paper, and would never do that.

Officials of the Unification Church closed the print magazine about a year and a half ago, and tapped Mr. Kuhner to run it as a stand-alone Web site. He worked for three years, from 2000 through 2003, as an assistant national editor at The Washington Times. Before that, he was a history professor, but did not finish his dissertation. After leaving The Washington Times, he worked for a Republican policy group.

Loser! Dropout! Moonie! Blogger! And to be sure, it’s a sign of the greatest failure, to close up the print version of your publication and go with the cost saving web-version. Remember, Gentle Times reader: it only happens if it’s in print, and we won’t let you forget it, even if we will take your money for our writers behind the firewall.

Mr. Kuhner said he insisted on editorial independence, reporting only to the board of New World Communications. Under his tenure, Insight’s Web site has claimed a series of anonymous scoops, many centered on the White House. In addition to the article about Mr. Bush’s feud with his father, there was also a January 2006 report that the United States was preparing for a covert attack on Iran and a February 2006 report that Vice President Dick Cheney would step down after the midterm elections.

Crazy dropout Moonies wouldn’t know the first thing about editorial independence. We do, however, and you should be glad to have such paragons of independence and freedom of thought working hard to bring you news, Good Reader. Oh, and don’t worry about Iran. It’s too soon in the cycle.

Mr. Kuhner said Insight stopped using bylines to encourage contributions from reporters for major news organizations. He said such contributors could not write what they knew under their own names for their main employers, either for fear of alienating powerful sources or because of editors’ biases.

There is no, repeat, NO, editorial bias in the print and traditional media against blogs. Can’t you see from this article? It’s crystal clear.

“Reporters in Washington know a whole lot of what is going on and feel themselves shackled and prevented from reporting what they know is going on,” Mr. Kuhner said. Insight, he said, “is almost like an outlet, an escape valve where they can come out with this information.”

“The team I have has some of the most seasoned, experienced reporters in this town, so I know the material I am getting is rock-solid.” he said. “The reporter has to give his or her word that, ‘It is solid, Jeff,’ ” Mr. Kuhner said.

Can you believe this crazy Moonie is making this claim? What does he know about reporters in Washington, or experience? Didn’t we just tell you what a fool he is? Nothing he says could possibly have any value, because he made up a story about Obama. Good Times readers know that to slur the Boy Wonder is to be a crazed racist, and untrustworthy in all things.

During an interview, he invited this reporter to moonlight for Insight. “I will take a look at your work,” he said. “I will do a background check. You may get a call from me.” He declined to say where the contributor who offered the Clinton-Obama story worked.

“I said, ‘That is a sexy story, if you can confirm it,’ ” Mr. Kuhner recalled. After Insight posted the article on Jan. 17, Mr. Kuhner said, he was disappointed to see that the Drudge Report did not link to it on its Web site as it has done with other Insight articles. So, as usual, he e-mailed the article to producers at Fox News and MSNBC.

These rabble, so priapic and juvenile, so untrustworthy with the Heady Business of Journalism. All bloggers (except Drudge of course) are like this, and you are wasting your time paying any attention to any of them. Snicker, isn’t is To Laugh how our rivals at FOX and MSNBC have stumbled, picking up this bait where we did not? Enjoy your latte, Times reader, and be smug and comfortable that we filter the news for you, the better to keep your Beautiful Mind clean and clear of the filthy, dirty Moonie/Hippies and the blogospherical trash.

Boilerplate: for the record, I think the whole mess about Obama the madrassa student was the biggest pack of anal fudge to come down the winger tubes in a long time, and the smear on Hillary’s office was brilliantly evil and equally false.

Of course, that was never their point: poisoning the discourse and inserting a meme was. They succeeded in their goal, and pearl-clutching stories like this one do little beyond establishing that the Establishment is the place to go for what is established fact. Has the Times run a series exposing the truly awesome reach of the Moonies and the other winger financial moguls who fund and disseminate the worst of the lies and propaganda? If so, I missed it. Instead, they tut-tut about the most extreme eliminationists, missing even the truly vile parts of what they produce, and reassure their readers in staid and sober tones that the whole thing is best passed over as one would decline crackers and cheese when a canape is available.

I’ve read that most people skim news stories and come away with only “keywords” in their memories, and I’ve tried to show what I think those keywords and memes might be. But for all I think the Moonies and their press organs are a huge part of the problem when it comes to the factual, balanced presentation of the news, I also think what the Times does is as bad, if not worse. I confess, I’m jealous of the blend of condescension, superiority and “seriousness,” even as I’m convinced that I’m much better off saving my subscription money and investing in a faster connection and more effective language translators. Very soon, I won’t need that ticket to Jakarta, and will instead be able to ask people there my questions directly via the Tubes.

And that, Dear Reader, is what the Times fears the most.