Mark Penn's WSJ piece on blogging exemplifies AGAIN why no one should listen to anything he says, ever

This morning I linked to an article about blogging in today's Wall Street Journal written by Mark Penn that was so breathtakingly, staggeringly stupid in every way that I can't seem to stop thinking about it. I just re-read it for the 4th time and am even more astonished by its utter wrongness than I was the first time, so excuse me while I get this off my chest so I can move on with my life.

Mark Penn, you'll recall, was the woefully-inept political General who managed Hillary Clinton's run for the presidency, perhaps the closest thing to a "sure thing" as there's ever been in the history of politics, and still managed to steer the car right off of the cliff. Do you remember hearing the phrase "being human is overrated" in regards to how Hillary should present herself to the American voting public? MARK FUCKING PENN SAID THAT! That was just one of his many little nuggets of imbecilic wisdom. Is there anything else that really needs to be known about this guy? Even worse, she's still trying to raise money to pay off the 2.3 million bones she still owes him!

Penn, to his credit, is a bit of a modern human enigma in that he is one of those rare individuals who seems to go through life failing upward. The guy fucks up over and over and over again, seemingly turning everything he touches into a flaming pile of horseshit, onward and upward he fails, and yet people remain undeterred in forking over wheelbarrels of cash for his expertise, so he can fuck up even more things in even more places! It's really kind of amazing. He's out there still being paid millions to consult and even went and got himself hired as a columnist at the Wall Street Journal so he can single-handedly destroy its decades of accumulated credibility in one fell swoop. Go figure!

So Penn wrote this piece for WSJ, a botched abortion of journalism if there ever was one, and it's so overflowing with wrong that I truly don't know where to begin. But let me try. Here are a few of the more egregious falsehoods, beginning with the two opening lines of the piece...

In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. Already more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers or firefighters.

Wait, WHAT? How does this one line even get past the WSJ fact-checker without that person using the paper it was printed on to wipe his or her ass with? This is next to impossible. He goes on...

Blogging is an important social and cultural movement that people care passionately about, and the number of people doing it for at least some income is approaching 1% of American adults.

Again, how does this manage to get past the fact checker? Has Bill O'Reilly forced Rupert to fire all of them?

It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year.

No, no, NO! 100,000 unique visitors per month does not equate to $75,000 per year in income. I KNOW THIS! All this fuck had to do was email just about any blogger with a moderately well-read blog to find out that this notion is a myth, and a rather dumb one at that. Penn does not cite a single blogger as a source and instead relies on faulty statistics. WE'RE NOT THAT HARD TO GET IN TOUCH WITH VIA THE EMAIL ASSHOLE!

At some point the value of the Huffington Post will no doubt pass the value of the Washington Post.

Even with the newspaper industry reeling right now, I just don't see how this is possible. Ever.

In his piece Penn uses statistics culled from Technorati and other online research organizations to formulate his drivel, a fallacy explained well by this guy. So his "facts" are dead wrong and the rest of the piece reads like an article on blogging you'd find in an AARP newsletter or something.

Here's the ultimate irony about Penn's blogging piece...that thing would be embarrassing as a blog post, much less something printed in the Wall Street Journal. If I had run across it on a blog somewhere, I'd probably think something along the lines of..."Wow, this is a horrible fucking blog post!"