Brent Bozell, Michael Powell, And Snake Oil

This news is about a week old, which is what, 13 years of blog-time, but I've been waiting for Wonkette to spare a word or two. To sum up the situation: 99.8% of the decency complaints registered by the FCC last year were engineered by Brent Bozell's noxious "Parents Television Council," a pressure group whose name sounds like a PBS advisory committee but whose raison d'etre is actually making sure that adults don't get to enjoy adult freedom. Advocacy groups have too much power in general, but the scope of disproportionality here, the self-parodying nature of the PTC's (apparently) successful effort at widespread, systematic fraud "for the good of the nation's morals," the impenetrability of the FCC's incompetence, the ambitiously censorship-happy culture at the Commission that enabled it, and the brazen, intelligence-insulting, credulity-straining excuses of the FCC's 1st-Amendment-contemptuous chairman all stagger the mind individually, let alone in conjunction. In all seriousness, Howard Stern, to take the most obvious example of which I'm sure there are dozens more, should sue the FCC, Michael Powell personally, and of course Bozell. Who could have imagined that the no-indecency patrol turned out to be ethically indecent?

As usual, by the way, Wonkette puts things in perspective:

Yes, democracy: Where a small group of religious fundamentalists aggressively patrols all forms of mass culture and tells the rest of us what we can watch. Wait. That's not democracy. That's... that's... wait, what's that called?

The tightrope one must walk to draw the necessary moral distinction between murderous theocrats abroad and relatively benign theocrats at home continues to get tighter. [Thanks, Ohio!--ed.]