Is it just me, or does <a href=http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080715/tv_nm/rove_dc_1 target="_blank">this headline</a> sound like something from The Onion?<blockquote>LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Former White House aide Karl Rove denied on Monday that his close ties with Republican politics and John McCain's presidential campaign undermine his credibility as an election analyst for the Fox News Channel.</blockquote>Undermine his credibility? His ties to the GOP are exactly what his credibility (to Fox viewers) is built on.

The credibility and independence of most cable new pundits is weak to begin with. That goes double for conservatives (who tend to be paid shills of right-wing think tanks), and triple for anyone on Fox News. Debates about the objectivity of such characters are almost always a feeble joke.

Rove is a perfect storm of everything that's wrong with cable punditry, multiplied by 100. And yet he's also the perfect contributor to the Fox News propaganda network (founded by another GOP political consultant turned "newsman", Roger Ailes).

Despite all this, Steve Gorman's piece seems intended to be entirely irony-free.