Yes, Congressman Burgess said male fetuses masturbate. The only thing more bizarre than actually saying this in public is the fact that he looked at a blurry, pixelated sonogram, observed a fetus doing something with its arm and then took the super-colossal leap to the conclusion that the fetus was masturbating. Put another way, someone who connects fetuses and masturbation so easily has, you know, issues. Perhaps the authorities should check his crawlspace for a soiled clown suit.

Now, to my knowledge there really isn’t a liberal equivalent to what Burgess said, at least coming from a Democratic member of Congress. But what’s become glaringly obvious over the last couple of weeks is that a popular, highly visible faction of the left has grown increasingly divorced from reality and reason. Not Burgess crazy, but disturbingly unhinged, kneejerk and highly susceptible to groupthink. And this schism has been exacerbated by the NSA story, leaving two very distinct left-wing factions. On one side, pragmatic liberals with a skeptical eye on these events, and a well-known clique of Utopians who refuse to acknowledge the realities of politics.

There’s a tea party emerging on the left, slowly and without the actual tea party’s major party support, but a lefty tea party nonetheless. It’s already underway — minus the tea bags. (Instead of tea bags, the left has long acronyms and puppet-effigies.)

For now, today, it’s orbiting around the binary Greenwald-Snowden system, armed with invective, quaint idealism and “Obamabot” keyboard macros ready to hurl in the direction of anyone who dares to examine the veracity and wisdom of Edward Snowden’s leakage and so-called heroism. (Side note: Rick Perlstein wrote a post for The Nation in which he examined the cult of Greenwald fanboys. In response, Greenwald tweeted, “If you find yourself writing an entire article whining about mean things said to you on Twitter: really, just don’t bother.” So says the man who blocks everyone on Twitter who challenges his reporting.)

What’s astonishing and disturbing is the recklessness and ignorance of this subgroup; its willingness to embrace the actions of a random IT hacker character who only emerged 10 days ago, and who remains curiously vague on key areas of his story. No, this isn’t about Snowden or Greenwald, but they happen to be the ringleaders this week.

Remember when the Republican Party and the broader conservative movement embraced a nobody named James O’Keefe when he purported to have evidence of systemic abuses and wrongdoing within ACORN and Planned Parenthood? It turned out he was a fraud who selectively edited his videos.

While it’s entirely possible that Snowden’s story is 100 percent true, it’s also possible he’s a smarter, better-spoken James O’Keefe whose only goal is to instigate. O’Keefe certainly spurred the right into action, and so has Snowden on the left. But at what cost? Just as soon as the ship has begun to turn slowly leftward following years of right-wing political domination, the left is in danger of running face-first into a credibility trap, latched to the wagons of two men who haven’t been entirely forthcoming.

Even if Snowden turns out to be 100 percent on the level, it’s difficult to embrace his motives and methods, especially when it comes to his utterly irresponsible leak of the G20 surveillance operation. But the left-wing tea party appears to believe that if you think this particular leak was a bad idea, you’re automatically an apologist for the Obama government — a mindless servant of the establishment.

It’s interesting how the loudest critics of the Obama “cult of personality” will thoughtlessly climb aboard the Greenwald outrage zeppelin every time. Not surprising considering how this is Greenwald’s tactic any time someone, be it Kurt Eichenwald, Joy Reid, Rick Perlstein or Charles Johnson, questions the highly visible gaps in his story or his understanding of how the NSA functions — gaps that could indicate an implosion waiting to happen.

Contributing to the implosion is, as a movement, the blind endorsement of the view that the United States should disassemble most if not all of its surveillance operations, and whatever remains of it after the cull ought to be conducted in the light of day. Based on what we’ve been reading, and to paraphrase a notorious line, it appears as if the goal is to shrink the U.S. intelligence community small enough to drown it in the bathtub.

Meanwhile, we’re evidently supposed to be the only industrialized nation that doesn’t spy on other nations — a practice that’s existed since nations were invented. I’m not interested in being a part of a movement that seeks to cripple America’s basic ability to function diplomatically on the international stage. I suppose I’m just an Obamabot automaton for questioning a stunted worldview that demands we only surveil nations that have declared war against us. I’m not interested in attaching myself to a movement whose collective judgment is lightyears beyond the zero barrier between reality and puerility.

If I’m understanding this correctly, we’re not supposed to use drones, we’re not supposed to engage in surveillance of any kind (other than in war) and we’re certainly not supposed to have boots on the ground (military, CIA or otherwise). So how the hell are we supposed to learn anything about friends or foes? Ask them nicely? There’s a creepy Project Mayhem nihilism at work here and it could blow up in the faces of anyone standing too close.

But if I’m wrong on this, where’s the line? What exactly is an acceptable level of intelligence gathering? What methods shall we use, specifically? And what should remain secretive? I’d honestly like to know. Reality dictates that there’s a generally acceptable splinter of government intrusion into our personal lives. The personal information contained in your tax return — a mandatory process for all American citizens every April — is far greater than anything the NSA might have. Same goes for your U.S. Census data. The IRS also has direct access to your bank account and can seize your money via a tax levy. It can demand to see your financial records and shopping receipts during an audit. If you’re evasive, it can fine or imprison you. So while any NSA overreach ought to be checked, it ought to be kept in perspective. But that’s not happening.

Of course, this about much more than just the specifics of the NSA story. It’s the embarrassing and self-destructive way this information has been processed that concerns me, and what exactly the consequences will be.

I’m old enough to remember the 2000 election when the left abandoned Al Gore because, among other things, he was just like the Republican nominee, George W. Bush. I was one of the idiots who voted for Ralph Nader because I naively believed what prominent liberal activists like Michael Moore said at the time: the two parties are the same and that the only way to break the paradigm is to vote for a third party. Yeah, that worked out well didn’t it? There are observable, proven realities about both politics and governing this massive nation that can’t be ignored. In that case, we should’ve supported Al Gore while smartly and pragmatically applying leftward pressure. Instead, too many of us reached for an impossible, unrealistic goal and violently choked in the process.

Fast forward to the same dynamic 13 years later… During a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday, a not insignificant chunk of the testimony featuring NSA Director Keith Alexander had to do with plugging the gaps in the NSA surveillance apparatus so as to prevent another low level IT analyst from absconding off with top secret documents. In other words, a consequence of Snowden’s actions could be that future Snowdens will have a much more difficult time exposing the system, and the process could become even more secretive than it is today.

Flailing, indiscriminate activism is worse than no activism at all. The only activism that will continue a leftward political trend will be pragmatic, thoughtful, smart activism that embraces reality and healthy skepticism. However, a sure-fire way to be marginalized is to act like fire-eating, paranoid crackpots screaming about conspiracy theories and deifying un-vetted heroes.

Bob Cesca is the managing editor for The Daily Banter, the editor of BobCesca.com, the host of the Bubble Genius Bob & Chez Show podcast and a Huffington Post contributor.

Michael Hastings, the fearless journalist whose reporting brought down the career of General Stanley McChrystal, has died in a car accident in Los Angeles, Rolling Stone has learned. He was 33.

Hastings’ unvarnished 2010 profile of McChrystal in the pages of Rolling Stone, “The Runaway General,” captured the then-supreme commander of the U.S.-led war effort in Afghanistan openly mocking his civilian commanders in the White House. The maelstrom sparked by its publication concluded with President Obama recalling McChrystal to Washington and the general resigning his post. “The conduct represented in the recently published article does not meet the standard that should be met by – set by a commanding general,” Obama said, announcing McChrystal’s departure. “It undermines the civilian control of the military that is at the core of our democratic system.”

Hastings’ hallmark as reporter was his refusal to cozy up to power. While other embedded reporters were charmed by McChrystal’s bad-boy bravado and might have excused his insubordination as a joke, Hastings was determined to expose the recklessness of a man leading what Hastings believed to be a reckless war. “Runaway General” was a finalist for a National Magazine Award, won the 2010 Polk award for magazine reporting, and was the basis for Hastings’ book, The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan.

Ben Smith at Buzzfeed (where Hastings worked as well) had the following to say:

Michael Hastings was really only interested in writing stories someone didn’t want him to write — often his subjects; occasionally his editor. While there is no template for a great reporter, he was one for reasons that were intrinsic to who he was: ambitious, skeptical of power and conventional wisdom, and incredibly brave. And he was warm and honest in a way that left him many unlikely friends among people you’d expect to hate him.

Gawker provides some more details:

Jim Romenesko confirmed with the LAPD that this crash, which took place Tuesday morning at roughly 4:15 a.m., was the one that killed Hastings.

Hastings is survived by his wife, the writer Elise Jordan.

In this era of debt-ridden education however, the final bell of class now also doubles as the starting bell for the stampede of desperate youngsters rushing to gratefully give away their labor sans payment. The internship, once the reserve of only the most exclusive of industries like politics or journalism, is now a right of passage for almost any young person in the West who still carry delusions about one day carving out careers for themselves. The premise is simple: in lieu of financial recompense, the wide-eyed youngster will in exchange for a brief period of free labour receive invaluable experience, contacts and if they should impress, perhaps that elusive job offer at the end of the internship. Unpaid internships are not easy but at least its the first step on the ladder towards a glittering career, right?

Wrong! Too often interns working tirelessly in the hope of getting that lucky break just resemble a modern day Sisyphus, cursed by Zeus to roll a huge rock up a hill which would forever roll back down before it reached the top.

However, just when it seemed that there was no stopping the unpaid internship, last week U.S. district court judge, William H. Pauley III, broke the mould by ruling that Fox Searchlight Pictures had fallen foul of the law with their use of unpaid interns in the production of Black Swan. Pauley stated that the internships in question were illegal because they ‘were incidental to working in the office like any other employees and were not the result of internships intentionally structured to benefit them.’ Put simply, these young people were not learning anything on their internships, and were in fact  little more than ‘go-fetch’ people brought in to make the coffee and do the work no one else wanted to do. In the creation of this film, itself a story about competitive young wannabees being over-worked and under-appreciated, it seems life was imitating art. With his ruling, Judge Pauley has opened up a debate about morality this practice of unpaid internships, a debate that never occurred before internships insidiously established themselves at the heart of so many industries.

Defenders of the unpaid internship stress the voluntary nature of the agreement. Nobody is forcing these young people to undertake this work after all, if it is so unbearable then why are these schemes inundated with applications? Firstly, when an industry institutionalises internships to the extent that entry-level jobs are inaccessible without them, as is the case in industries as disparate as fashion to finance, then the free will of the individual that the defenders rely upon is seriously restricted. The choice becomes ‘work for free now or accept you will never work in this industry.’ Secondly, despite the proselytising of free-will absolutists, the consent of a victim isn’t enough to absolve the wrong-doer of guilt should he do him harm. That is why the minimum wage does not  carry an ‘opt-out’ option. If it did, there would undoubtably be many who would give up their rights in the hope of getting work, creating downward pressure on all lower income workers. Also, defenders like to argue that while the companies don’t pay out in money for unpaid internships, they do pay out in the time and energy that they spend training these interns. These interns don’t add much value to the company but cost a lot in terms of lost time which is enough of a burden for the companies. But as we have seen, there is often very little training given, not including ‘don’t put the milk in first when making a cup of tea.’ Moreover, this perspective relies on a very altruistic characterisation of businesses. These are profit seeking entities after all, if these internships were costing them so much in lost time and potential revenue, they would be cut faster than you could say ‘where is my photocopy?’

Unfortunately, we currently live in a monetized world where often the only thing the matters is the size of ones pay-check. By the standards of that monetized world, internships are essentially an arrangement in which the companies get something for nothing- a situation which fits the popular understanding of the meaning of the word ‘theft’. Furthermore, beyond the moral argument, unpaid internships also carry the practical consequence of skewing the job market in favour of the children of the wealthy, as only they can afford to work for months without pay. Left unchecked, the trajectory of unpaid internships has unsurprisingly led to the state of not only working without pay but actually paying to work! At a fundraiser for the British Conservative party, prestigious internship positions were auctioned off to pushy-parents for average of £3,000 per position. While that still may be in the price-range of a group of thrifty anarchists wanting to infiltrate a saboteur into the heart of the beast, it is not as expensive as a one-week internship with Vogue, an auction that closed at $42,500 on April 29, 2010.

Currently, with a combination of increased tuition fees and record youth unemployment, the conditions are perfect for companies to drive graduates and students into a race to the bottom. Internships can, when well carefully designed, give young people the opportunity to learn the ropes of their chosen industry. But in this climate of ‘the long recession’ the temptation must be there for struggling companies to take on interns, place them at a desk, ignore them if they don’t need them and when suitable, use them for roles that should be someones paying job, repeat process every 6 months ad infinitum. Society has to be honest with itself and accept that when this happens, the internship is no longer about opportunity but now about exploitation. Because this practice will only lead to a generation of very-educated, very-embittered young people which historically hasn’t been the best thing for governments of all kinds.

Morris for Mayor.

Morris has more than 125,000 likes on Facebook and have inspired citizens to sponsor a donkey and chicken for other elected office.  His slogan is “cat”chy (sorry).  ”Tired of voting for rats?  Vote for a cat.” Given the US Congress has a 10 percent approval rating and videos of cats are nearly universally adored, American electeds may not want to ignore this race.  More on that can be found here.

Currently, more states have waiting periods for abortions than for gun purchases.  While  most gun enthusiasts are quick to point to the Second Amendment, few who want to ban abortion acknowledge it is a constitutionally protected procedure.  According to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence 2008 poll, 65 percent of Americans (and 64 percent of American gun owners) support a waiting period for gun purchases.  Meanwhile a Gallup poll from January 2013 showed that 53 percent of Americans support the Roe v. Wade ruling.  Add to that the data that show wide support for increased background checks for gun purchases and stricter gun control measures in general (read this) the House’s actions on abortion before gun safety make even less sense.

It’s time for Congress to get some real work done and stop this nonsense.  Bills like this show that their agenda has nothing to do with what’s best for the country.

The fight over who was right in the wake of last week’s big NSA data-mining disclosure, the Obama Administration or Snowden and Greenwald, was over before it even started. Let me explain by way of a recent piece in Salon, written by Andrew O’Hehir, that detailed the bizarre public battle being played out between documentary director Alex Gibney and left-wing journalist Chris Hedges. It concerns Gibney’s new movie, “We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks,” which details the rise of the notorious secret-sharing site Wikileaks and its equally notorious founder Julian Assange. Gibney directed the harrowing Oscar-winning documentary “Taxi To the Dark Side,” about a doomed Afghan cab driver’s very unfortunate run-in with the Bush-Cheney-era torture policy, so you’d think he had a good amount of street cred with the institutional left. Not enough, though, apparently, to protect him from being excoriated when it believes he’s stepping out of line with accepted orthodoxy. In “We Steal Secrets,” Gibney is sympathetic but still tough on Assange and his creation — too tough, it seems, for Hedges, who two weeks ago wrote a scathing piece in TruthDig calling the film “agitprop for the security and surveillance state.” O’Hehir’s take on Hedges’s unnecessarily blistering attack on Gibney and his movie, seemingly for the crime of not being deferential enough to Assange’s supposedly well-established status as a demi-god, is terrifically insightful.

“There’s a powerful strain of left-wing thought that insists we need heroes in order not to lose our idealism. I would speculate that for Hedges it’s worth sacrificing Gibney and his film to uphold the avatar of Julian Assange for a generation of young hackers and activists. In his article, Hedges compares (Bradley) Manning and Assange to Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin and Frantz Fanon (and even, later on, to Martin Luther King Jr.). That seems a painful stretch. More to the point, none of those people would have stood for accusing someone who is not your real enemy of being a traitor, a scoundrel and a turncoat for telling the wrong kind of story.”

Not only does O’Hehir nail it with this assessment, he goes a long way in explaining the reason why political disagreements in general in the year 2013 will almost never be objectively decided or even considered: hero worship. It’s not only the left that does it; it’s all of us. We create and then rally behind those we happen to agree with and will generally defend them against all comers, convinced that what we’re doing is contributing to the greater good. While I certainly don’t want to succumb to the dreaded “both sides do it” meme, well, yeah, both sides do it. Conservatives notoriously gather in lockstep behind the people and issues they deify and hold true and, despite a few recent hiccups, rarely break ranks; liberals, particularly the far-left, which suffers from the worst kind of persecution complex, also choose their totems and then guard them at all costs in the name of preserving the sanctity of their value to the overall movement. What’s interesting about the institutional left, though, is that, since it prides itself on intellectual honesty and a strict adherence to thorough analysis, it actually manages to convince itself that what it’s doing isn’t mindless hero worship and is instead something far more noble. Despite Andrew O’Hehir’s willingness to come right out and admit reality, many on the left truly believe they’re immune to confirmation bias. That kind of ignorance is for the less-enlightened beings on the other side, they say.

Case in point: For the past week-and-a-half, the story told by Edward Snowden to Glenn Greenwald has slowly and assuredly been chipped away at by journalists asking very legitimate questions and pointing out very legitimate problems with it. Right off the bat, Greenwald undoubtedly engaged in his own form of hero worship in his initial reporting on Snowden’s disclosure and it seems to have tainted his commitment to objective reality and the pursuit of the truth in all its occasional ugliness and ambiguity. This may seem like an ad hominem attack but believe me it’s not. As I said last week, it’s simply asking that people consider the source when looking at Greenwald’s reporting on a story that just happens to confirm every single one of his firmly held and relentlessly espoused biases. I guarantee you that Snowden did exactly that: he considered the source, understood where Greenwald stridently stood, knew he would be granted not simply a fair shake but a no-tough-questions-asked policy of public glorification, and he dove right in. Greenwald so desperately wants Snowden’s story to be 100% on the up-and-up that he’s making easily spotted, amateurish mistakes in the way he reports it, and all that’s doing is giving his critics all the ammo they need to dismiss him and his “bombshell.”

But that hardly matters to the faithful. For many on the left, Snowden’s tale was unequivocally true and undoubtedly the stuff of paranoid nightmares long before it was even reported. Greenwald’s stories and Snowden’s nebulous accusations and behavior only confirmed that which the left already knew and had been railing about for years without direct proof of their suspicions. Any attempt to refute either, in the eyes of many far-left liberals, now amounts to little more than pro-surveillance state fealty to authority, regardless of how backed up by facts it happens to be. What’s really ironic is that Greenwald has spent his entire recent career accusing anyone who disagrees with him of engaging in hero worship and submission to the “cult of personality” surrounding Barack Obama, and yet here he is now, prostrating himself before a man he himself believes can do no wrong and has in fact done an inarguable right: Edward Snowden. Even if Snowden’s story has holes in it, who cares? The important thing is that he’s a hero to the left. That serves the greater good.

Here’s where I’m more than willing to admit that I generally give Obama the benefit of the doubt when it comes to controversies surrounding his administration. I don’t discount the facts, but I always want to hear both sides of the argument before I rush to judgment simply because, yes, I think that overall Obama has done more good for the country than harm to it. There are certainly issues on which I’ve stood diametrically opposed to the president, including what Frank Rich of The New York Times called the “original sin” of the Obama presidency: his willingness to not only let the criminals who gangbanged the global economy off the hook but to call on them to be our ostensible saviors in the wake of the mess they made. But I’ve always believed that if you’re looking to push through socially progressive legislation, Barack Obama was the best you were ever going to do in a country as evenly divided politically as ours is. That’s political reality and there’s no way around it; stomping your feet and pouting that your utopian ideals aren’t being catered to to your satisfaction by this administration is a worthless endeavor. No one’s saying that the president of the United States shouldn’t be held accountable for his actions, inaction, and trespasses, but there’s a way to do it that doesn’t nihilisitcally burn down the entire house for the sake of making a point. That’s smart accountability — and it’s something Greenwald knows nothing at all about.

Is my willingness to give Obama a little leeway its own form of hero worship? Maybe. Like I said, both sides do it. Confirmation bias can always get the best of us on occasion. But when it comes to Edward Snowden, serious though the overall disclosure of the NSA’s activities may be, there are in fact simply too many holes in his story for me to buy completely into what he’s selling. Couple that with Greenwald’s undeniable biases and, yes, you’ve got yourself a revelation that just can’t be taken at face value. And vehemently questioning the details of that revelation, no matter how much grief it’ll get you from a vocal contingent of left-wing would-be acolytes in need of a hero, isn’t somehow intellectually or morally dishonest. In fact, it’s exactly the opposite.

Alexis Tsipras (Portokalis / Shutterstock.com)

A stark, haunting statement from Greece’s Leftwing leader Alexis Tsipras on the closure of state television in the government’s attempt to cut spending:

“What we experienced yesterday was unprecedented, not only for Greece but for all of Europe…Public television goes dark only in two circumstances: when a country is occupied by foreign forces or when there is a coup.”