Republican silliness or funny papers?

More than once have I railed against the right-wing Republican silliness factor. It has long been my contention that much of what top GOP operatives say and do is not as inherently evil as it is just plain silly. It is as if the emotional development of the Karl Roves and Roger Ailes and other high-value GOP scoundrels was stuck somewhere around the third grade. That is even though these prominent folks may be political geniuses.

Rove, the bespectacled Young College Republican nerd, is known to have spent time carrying out silly, but nonetheless dirty, pranks against local Democratic candidates. Of course, this was probably all done in between studying for Poly Sci quizzes and playing Dungeons and Dragons.

I suppose I wouldn’t be nearly as hacked off at today’s Republican Party were it not for so much of their rhetoric falling into on to the “flat out silly” category. I probably need not go on about this but thought that I would just provide one more example just to get it out of my system.

Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple writes today of how a journalist who is writing an unauthorized biography of GOP activist and Fox News jefe Roger Ailes was denied a subscription to a New York state newspaper that Ailes bought and turned over to his wife.

Gabriel Sherman, a New York magazine writer and editor, had subscribed to the Ailes-owned Putnam County News and Recorder and upon logging in to the paper’s Website discovered he was blocked behind its paywall. Sherman talked with News and Recorder editor Doug Cunningham and was told that the paper did not want a “financial entanglement” with Sherman because of the book he was writing. Sherman also later tried and failed to subscribe under his wife’s name. Gawker scribe John Cook, who had written a critical piece about Ailes, was likewise denied a subscription.

Wemple rounds out his post by posing similarly silly — though humorous — questions of the News and Recorder and its odd policy of barring subscriptions to its critics such as did Ailes buy the paper just to deny access to his enemies? Other penetrating questions posed by Wemple include whether the paper has a watch list and how does one qualify to make that list?

Silly is as silly does? Maybe, but while a newspaper certainly has the right to deny service to a potential customer it seems more on the side of bad business even more than one of silliness when a paper with the circulation of 4,200 turns down anyone who wants to subscribe.