Before Breitbart mainstreamed conservative obsessions, he got a graduate-level course in how the MSM worked. Mickey Kaus, in his idealized obituary of Breitbart, tells the story that illuminates the power Breitbart had as the co-editor of the Drudge Report: Breitbart, working on a tip from Kaus, told the Smoking Gun to track down an old interview in which then-gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger bragged about participating in orgies. He publicized the result at Drudge, and it instantly became national news. Work at the Drudge Report was rarely quite so entrepreneurial — usually news outlets would do the work on their own and beg for a link.

The end result of a media environment so fixated on the predilections of this one oddball and his hyperactive aide-de-camp was the rise of Drudge-baiting — the pursuit and promotion of stories designed solely to attract the interest of the Drudge Report. This often involved freak weather and news about Madonna, but it mostly meant things that made Democrats look bad. (The Schwarzanegger story, chosen in part to illustrate Breitbart’s essential fairness, qualified because it had just enough celebrity and sex to make up for the fact that it was damaging to a Republican.)

The sensibility was Drudge’s, but Breitbart was the guy people in the press desperately befriended at parties. The new gold standard of long-form campaign reporting is Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s “Game Change,” a book that tackles a presidential campaign as a series of hopefully Drudge-worthy nuggets of inane gossip. (Halperin’s previous book was essentially an ode to Drudge’s influence and import.)

The apotheosis of Drudge-bait is Politico, a site that aimed to take the national politics section of a newspaper and strip it of everything but Drudge-bait. Some days half its content seems to be relatively fact-free stories proposing or reinforcing Drudge-friendly narratives (Obama is angry and uses teleprompters, some say).

And there is the one-time “liberal Drudge,” the Huffington Post, which now has consumed the content portion of AOL itself. Breitbart was a co-founder of the site, and though he wasn’t there long, he made his mark. He loved the “celebrities blogging” gimmick that much of the early HuffPo was based around. This remains HuffPo’s most mockable and often detestable feature. (One other idea he might’ve brought to the table: hosting slightly rewritten newspaper and wire copy on the site itself, instead of linking out, as Drudge did, to Breitbart’s consternation.)

“Aggregators” like Drudge and HuffPo have mostly given way to partisan sites that specialize in the actual creation of content. Much of this content is designed as (unpaid) work-for-hire for larger news outlets — be it Fox & Friends or MSNBC — and Breitbart’s “Big” sites helpfully designed and packaged ready-made pseudo-scandals for Fox and others to fixate on.

A fixation of the online conservative movement is “scalp-hunting”: the elevation and demonization of some usually obscure liberal figure done in the hopes of getting them nationally shamed and fired. (Righties sort of do this as “retribution” for what happened to various conservatives who got in trouble and whose trouble was reported in the press, like Oliver North or Scooter Libby.) This is what the Shirley Sherrod video was supposed to be — a routine Van Jones’ing — and what it briefly was until it blew up in Breitbart’s face. It can be done with dead people, like Saul Alinsky, and organizations, like the New Black Panther Party, though the firing of still-living individuals is the primary means by which the conservative press “keeps score,” so it’s best to narrow your focus.

The Sherrod video was also an example of the limits of another of Breitbart’s gifts to modern media: the false “proof.” It is a sad fact of online publishing that some ridiculous portion of readers only read the headlines and look at the pictures before moving on. (The percentage of online commenters who do this is approximately 90 percent, according to studies I have skimmed and had strong opinions about.) Breitbart’s sites exploit this: “OBAMA MARCHES WITH NEW BLACK PANTHERS,” or something like that, goes the headline. The story can’t support the claim. It doesn’t matter. The headline means it’s true for the majority of the readership.

Shirley Sherrod’s anti-white racism became a “fact” that led to her firing because of that convention of online muckraking. The headline said she was racist and there was a YouTube video attached that probably proved it, if anyone bothered to hit play and listen.

This is how right-wing myths are created and sustained — did you hear that Oprah banned Sarah Palin from her show and Michelle Obama spent $30,000 on lingerie? Those are both lies, but they were also both Drudge headlines! — and in a media environment where, thanks to the work of activist/publishers like Breitbart, most previously agreed-upon facts are regularly up for debate anew, introducing new myths can be full-time work.

And in his war on the “mainstream press,” Breitbart played on a long-standing paranoia that Drudge’s rise also depended on: a fear that all the “liberal bias” claims were in fact true, and that what seemed to be nutty, conspiratorial nonsense emanating from the right-wing fringe media was actually the next hot story.

(Breitbart used the standards of traditional “objective” journalism as a weapon, and it often helped his cause that he was simply too exhausting to argue with, unless you were particularly pigheaded.)

The most modern thing about Breitbart was that he was so ridiculous, and so extreme, and yet taken more or less completely seriously by the mainstream press he claimed to despise. (This is in part because he was fun at parties.) Screaming — literally, screaming — vulgar, stream-of-consciousness insults on national television used to be your ticket out of respectability with the news crowd, but now it is basically indulged.

Honestly, if he helped make false civility less of a requirement for being “taken seriously” in the media world, that is almost certainly a good thing. The rest of his influence is too tied up in the influence of the Internet itself on the world of information for him to be directly blamed, but he was the raging, filter-less, irresponsible, vitriol-spewing, tireless avatar of the new way of doing things.

Allen’s love of the worst of American politics is sincere and heartfelt. Here he is in August 2010 revealing that “the dream of every reporter” is endless legislative gridlock enabling even more grandstanding by self-righteous “centrists”:

MA: (laughing) I don’t know, but I can tell you the press loves the fact that Ken Buck, he’ll definitely be covered. Very colorful, he definitely will be good copy. It’s just like the dream of every reporter is that the Republicans will pick up nine seats, and that Marco Rubio wins in Florida, because Hugh, you know what that means?

It means … an absolute nightmare for people who don’t get off on Senate bickering.

Allen, who notoriously talks in the same canned talking points as the politicians he covers, is one of those political reporters who brags of never voting and professes to have no ideology to betray. Certain things are generally true of reporters who adopt that hoary no-ideology line: One, these reporters tend to treat national politics as a thrilling sporting event, caring much more about strategy and “victories” than policy and the impact of political decisions on actual Americans’ lives. This is why Mike Allen can “analyze” a big political fight before it even happens, judging the Republican and Democratic arguments over a Supreme Court nomination as if it were a figure-skating competition, instead of a … Supreme Court nomination.

Two, these guys worship power and consider themselves peers of the very serious and wise people in the D.C. political class. This is why Allen pointlessly extends anonymity to former Bush officials who send him sniping emails about the Obama administration, and then defends his decision to grant them anonymity by attacking liberals who criticized him.

And three, inasmuch as they’re basically all well-off white dudes who live in nice neighborhoods and socialize with other well-off white guys, they’re mostly moderate Republicans, even if they don’t recognize that fact. And that is why, when Allen and VandeHei launched “The Politico Primary,” a project designed solely to spur me to write something about how awful they are, their idea of unconventional outsider candidates included deficit hawk <strike>former Sen.</strike> Erskine Bowles, a randomly selected CEO and Condoleezza Rice.

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
Let’s say this entire “endorsement” of Erskine Bowles for pretend president, co-written with Jim VandeHei. “The most depressing reality of modern governance is this: The current system seems incapable of dealing with our debt addiction before it becomes a crippling crisis.” When Allen published that, the American unemployment rate was 9 percent, the American prison population was the highest in the world, and the endless war on terror had just begun its 10th expensive, deadly year.

Correction: This piece formerly incorrectly referred to Erskine Bowles as a former senator, which he is not. I apologize for the error.
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)

So every morning he and Mika Brzezinski — who either pretends to be a weak-willed flighty moron because she thinks it’s necessary for her continued professional success as Joe’s oft-belittled second banana/screwball love interest or who is actually tragically stupid — perform the world’s most self-satisfied kaffeeklatsch (along with Willie Geist, the former Tucker Carlson sidekick and a man born to play the guy who dies first in a war movie). Their rotating cast of regular guests includes some of the biggest superstars in political hackery, from Jon Meacham to Mark Halperin to Whitey Bulger-defender/plagiarist Mike Barnicle, but what people who are far too easily entertained love most is the “banter,” that nonstop juvenile japery that I guess passes for wit when it’s 6:30 a.m. and you’re a tragically dull Washington, D.C., lifer. Joe can’t stop cracking up at the word “sodomized” during a discussion of … rape charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn! Hysterical stuff.

(Let’s pause here to remember Scarborough’s long history of being a sanctimonious “decency” crusader, demanding tough FCC penalties for fleeting obscenities on television, which seems to have ended after he said “fuck you” on air one morning, at which point his show instituted a somewhat glitchy seven-second delay.)

It’s Mr. Scarborough’s jocular chauvinism that is the most immediately repellent thing about him and his program, but what may be even hackier is his utterly unself-aware devotion to the “civility” myth. The civility crowd consists of a bunch of rich elites who’ve convinced themselves that all of America’s problems (their list of America’s problems basically consists of the federal deficit and “incivility”) would be solved if Republicans and Democrats sat down in a room and all agreed to basically become Rockefeller Republicans. This weird fantasy animates most of Scarborough’s political analysis, which is especially rich coming from an actual former Republican congressman who rode into Congress not based on a nationwide yearning for civility but rather run-of-the-mill right-wing anger, and who eventually voted to impeach a president for nakedly partisan reasons.

As an official political media elite professional, Joe rails against the “media elite” in columns written for Politico, the D.C. newspaper and website that used to publish Scarborough alongside a liberal counterpart until the liberal counterpart left and wasn’t replaced. These columns, amateurishly written and barely edited, show just how easy it is to become an important political power player if you have the requisite Bloombergian opinions and the correctly sized head for television.

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
His unconscionably bad 9/11 “tribute song,” an ill-conceived celebrity vanity project that becomes more offensive the more you think of it.
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)

“Partisan gridlock” is to blame for the failure of “jobs bills” from each party.

Which partisans, exactly?

Senate Democrats on Thursday came up nine votes short of the 60 needed to advance their infrastructure bill past a key procedural hurdle. The vote was 51-49, with all Republicans and two members of the Democratic caucus — Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) — voting no.

What happened is that the big jobs bill “failed” in the Senate despite receiving more than 50 votes because of the Republican tactic of effectively filibustering everything. So Democrats split the big bill into smaller bills, which have also failed because every single Republican plus independent Sen. Joe Lieberman and conservative Democrat Ben Nelson joined Republicans in refusing to invoke cloture, thus preventing the bills from actually coming to a real vote. The Republican “jobs bill” is a “jobs bill” in name only, and was presented solely so that Republicans could claim to have a “jobs bill.” Also, Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman are trolls who hate the Democratic Party and constantly work against its interests.

The press has helpfully enabled Republican Senate obstructionism by reporting on it as if bills “losing” despite winning 51 percent of the vote is totally normal and acceptable.

The problem, basically, is that “Republicans continue now-normalized practice of abuse of Senate procedure to block popular jobs bills because they object to raising taxes on rich people and wish to deny the president legislative victories” does not sound as objective as “Both parties block jobs bills.”

But even by the sorry standards of the mainstream press, this story is ridiculous. Both parties have jobs bills, both parties block jobs bills, and the concept of “partisan gridlock” has somehow gained sentience and agency and now works to defeat popular legislation independent of the actions and desires of actual human legislators!

Take it away, former Virginia Democratic Party chairman Paul Goldman and George Mason professor Mark J. Rozell:

We like Joe and respect Hillary. But if President Barack Obama decides to follow the path of his favorite president, Abraham Lincoln, and change running mates, the insiders are buzzing about the wrong Clinton.

That’s right: a Barack-Bubba ticket is the way to go. True, if elected, Bill Clinton would become our first vegetarian veep — since he’s no longer the fast-food guy. Can a real Bubba eat tofu? And yes, he would be the first former president to hold the job, too.

Apparently this is technically possible under the 22nd Amendment, or so these two claim. And, really, this idea is not very much dumber than the Hillary Clinton “buzz,” and it certainly makes more electoral sense than the prospect of a totally unwanted Bloomberg third-party run. Maybe Goldman and Rozell are highlighting the absurdity of the fantasy football school of political punditry? Maybe everyone will decide, upon reading this very silly piece, that the entire running-mate-swap genre of analysis is stupid and embarrassing? (Joe Biden is … not actually unpopular, for one thing.)

Or maybe this will just continue to escalate the imagination-based 2012 campaign analysis arms race. Soon Politico will suggest that Romney select Obama as his running mate in order to win over independents. Or maybe there should be a Biden-Palin ticket? Ron Paul should switch parties and primary Obama. How about an independent Scarborough-Shep Smith ticket? Barack and Michelle Obama must trade places if they want to win in 2012. (Failing that, a Malia and Sasha “Freaky Friday” scenario polls well among married women.) Next week: Mark Penn writes that Obama can only save his presidency by traveling back in time and throwing the election to John McCain. Anything is possible, when you don’t actually understand politics except as an amusing parlor game.