I have decided to come out of retirement as a muckraker. The inspiration for resuming my career as a scandal-monger is the abundance of dirt being spread on the Internet, in the nation’s tabloids and spewed from the mouths of right-wing radio and TV lunatics.

This time around, its going to be easy for me to uncover scandals. I plan to rely on the journalistic standards of the goofy birthers and other conspiracy theorists. No more having to dig through courthouse records and/or documents produced by thousands of government bureaucies. No more midnight meetings with secret sources. No more playing the role of con man in extracting information from reluctant, low level criminals. And no need blackmailing people by threatening them with exposure if they fail to cooperate with my muckraking projects.

Henceforth, I am pursuing a new form of journalism, which I call “impressionistic investigative reporting,” or more simply “f–k facts.” So let us begin with an exposé of Rush Limbaugh—the former disc jockey, pill-popper and compulsive liar who has adopted “f–k facts” as his daily mantra.

My claim that Rush Limbaugh is gay is based on overwhelming evidence when compared to the threshhold established in this new era of Internet, tabloid and right-wing muckraking. For example, it is well known that many outspoken homophobes are hiding their own sexuality. Witness the number of homophobic politicians, preachers and high profile public figures who have either come out of the closet or been outed—often by gay publications. A Rush Limbaugh’s quote pretty well sums of up his views.

“…let’s say we discover the gene that says the kid’s gonna be gay. How many parents, if they knew before the kid was gonna be born, [that he] was gonna be gay, they would take the pregnancy to term? Well, you don’t know but let’s say half of them said, “Oh, no, I don’t wanna do that to a kid.” [Then the] gay community finds out about this. The gay community would do the fastest 180 and become pro-life faster than anybody you’ve ever seen. … They’d be so against abortion if it was discovered that you could abort what you knew were gonna be gay babies.”

In short Limbaugh is a homophobe. So moving along to “f–k facts” criteria number two. He arranged to have Elton John perform at his wedding. Music I presume. Granted, Limbaugh reportedly paid the entertainer a million bucks. Maybe everybody has a price. How much money would it take to get Barbra Streisand to sing at the wedding of notorious Nazi, David Duke? Beats the hell out of me. But the question is unimportant since this missive is not about Barbra Streisand. 

Rush Limbaugh “f–k facts” evidence number three. He maintained a home in the Congressional district of Republican Representative Mark Foley—the disgraced politician with a yearning for young pages working in the nation’s Capitol. Again, I quote homophobe Limbaugh who suggested that Foley was target of a plot by Democrats.   

“I’m just thinking out loud here. What if somebody got to the page and said, you know, we want you to set Foley up. We need to do a little titillating thing here. Keep it and save it and so forth. How would you get a kid to do that? Yeah, who knows? You threaten him or pay him. There’s any number of ways given the kind of people that we’re dealing with and talking about here.”

So there you have it folks, three pieces of weak evidence that Rush Limbaugh is gay—more than enough to meet my new standard of “impressionistic investigative reporting.” I’m not saying he is gay. But just think about it.

Meantime, how about Glenn Beck and his plural marriages? I’m still gathering information on this potential exposé. But I already know that he is Mormon. Although the mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints opposes polygamy, plural marriage is still practiced by a small number of Mormon crazies—meaning that Glenn Beck meets at least two of my ”f–k facts” standards. I will devote more time to ”Dr.” Beck’s multiple nuptials when I uncover a third piece of evidence.

I want to wrap up this shocking missive with a couple of comments about traditional forms of investigative reporting. My career as an “award-winning” digger of dirt was marked by a great deal of serendipity. By happy coincidence, I reported my first ever major exposé—a bribery scheme involving a bank and a state official—three days after burglars broke into the Watergate offices of the National Democratic Party. The ensuing scandal leading to President Richard Nixon’s resignation made muckraking an honorable profession. And for the next 30 years, I rode the an investigative reporting tsunami that took me from journalism anonymity to national semi-prominence as a network correspondent.

Unfortunately, in the late 1980’s and throughout the nineties, aggressive take names and kick ass investigative reporting began to disappear—especially on television. And so did I. Except for an occasional PBS documentary and some consulting work, I retired from digging dirt after CNN bought out my contract a decade ago.

The current issue of American Journalism Review has a lengthy article on the mainstream media’s diminishing commitment to investigative reporting. Be forewarned that the article is long and boring unless you are a news junkie.     

http://www.ajr.org/article_printable.asp?id=4904

I can assure you that whatever is written in American Journalism Review is gospel, given the magazine’s remarkable superb judgment many years ago in displaying my picture on its cover and describing me in a profile as one of the best investigative reporters in the country. I did not ask for a retraction.

In fact, as I embark on a new career as an “impressionistic investigative reporter,” I invite the magazine to embrace my “f–k facts” initiative. In the role of pioneering new opportunities for unemployed investigative reporters fired by the mainstream media, I hope American Journalism Review will again considering putting my picture on the cover.

Although it has been two decades since the first cover article, I’m prettier now. That late career facelift really helps out.

My memoir, Odyssey of a Derelict Gunslinger, is available at amazon.com and independent bookstores. It offers much more than $19.99 worth of laughs. The book is an account of my illustrious (I choose the adjectives) career.

Varying shades of truth influence nearly all aspects of our lives. Indeed, there is a lot of truth in the cliché, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” We tend to see many things through the prism of our cultural backgrounds, religious beliefs, education, prejudices, and personal experiences and preferences.

As an investigative reporter for thirty years, my job was to discern the always elusive real truth. In fact, the only reason for the existence of investigative reporters is the need to expose truth. Still, my truth often deviated from the interpretations of people with access to the same set of “facts.” As a result, courts sometimesdecided the accuracy of my exposés. Fortunately, I never lost. Which is the main reason I survived for three decades in a career noted for its short shelf life.

I was reminded of my “quest for truth” while reading an unrelated news story about retiring U.S. Representative William Delahunt of Massachusetts. The seven-term Congressman is invoking his lame duck privilege by proposing legislation that would be the equivalent of political suicide for colleagues running for re-election. Delahunt’s bill imposes state sales taxes on goods sold on the Internet. Some states already receive revenue from Internet sales. Delahunt’s measure, which makes the tax mandatory nationwide is probably dead on arrival in Congress.  

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20009603-38.html 

Many years ago, Bill Delahunt and I were comrades in arms in “defending truth and justice.” He was District Attorney of Norfolk County, Massachussets and I was a lame duck investigative reporter for Boston’s ABC affiliate, WCVB, then described in the New York Times as the nation’s best local television station—a title it was willing to relinquish in favor of higher ratings and bigger profits.

Anyway, my swan song WCVB exposé accused various lawmen of subverting the criminal justice system to frame Myles J. Connor, a notorious art thief and career criminal with an uncanny talent for bargaining his way out of prison. But as I wrote in Odyssey of a Derelict Gunslinger, a deal he made with Delahunt to help locate the bodies of two murder victims backfired. 

Among Connor’s admirers was one of Walpole Prison’s most dangerous inmates, a mentally deranged vicious killer named Tommy Sperrazza. He occasionally signed letters, “Manson,” in tribute to California’s imprisoned lunatic. Sperrazza was a suspect in numerous homicides, including the murders of two teen-aged girls, who disappeared after witnessing him kill a man outside a Boston bar. Their bodies had not been found.

Looking again for keys to the prison gates, Connor approached Sperrazza with an absurd proposal. If Tommy would tell him the location of the bodies, Myles promised to hijack a helicopter following his release and fly into Walpole to facilitate the killer’s escape. Nobody in their right mind would believe such a proposition. But according to prison psychiatrists, Sperrazza was legally nuts. He drew a map for Myles.

The victims were buried in western Massachusetts, more than a hundred miles from the scene of the murder. Norfolk County District Attorney William Delahunt made a deal with Connor. In September, 1977, he led investigators to the girls’ remains. He was paroled after serving only one year of a four year sentence.

A team of lawmen decided it was time for payback. FBI agents first gathered evidence to charge him with bank robbery. The case was weak and a jury acquitted Connor, even though he later admitted to me that he was guilty.

There is, however, a law enforcement maxim, “If you can’t catch them on the swing, catch them on the slide.” Immediately after the innocent verdict, Connor was linked to the murders of the two girls. The chief witness was none other than Sperrazza. He said Connor gave him a primer in how to kill the victims―a remarkable claim for a guy believed to have murdered a dozen people or more. Myles barely knew Tommy outside of prison. Nor did he have a motive to commit the murders.

Enter on the scene John Connolly, the rogue FBI agent convicted two decades later for his dealings with informants. Connolly promised Sperrazza all sorts of rewards if he linked Connor to the murders, including financial aid for his family. If he didn’t cooperate, the agent threatened to file charges against the murderer’s wife and place their children in a foster home. Sperrazza’s decision didn’t require a lot of deep thought.

Based on the testimony of Tommy Sperrazza and a line-up of witnesses whose pictures should be on Post Office walls, Connor was convicted of murdering the two girls. His conviction flew in the face of an abundance of evidence that he was being railroaded. Justice prevailed when the verdict was overturned because prosecutorial misconduct.  Connor was acquitted following a second trial.

Meantime, FBI agent John Connolly was trying to even scores with Bill Delahunt for making a deal with Connor. He tried to induce one of the trial witnesses into framing the D.A. When I learned of the scheme, I confronted Connolly in an ambush interview that prompted the U.S. Attorney in Boston to label me “a tool of organized crime.”

It was an era in which Bill and I seemed to be standing alone in defense of the integrity of the criminal justice system and we have since remained good friends. Although I don’t generally take pleasure in another person’s pain, I couldn’t help myself when John Connolly got caught up in one of the FBI’s biggest ever scandals 10 years after my encounter with the agent. I thought it was poetic justice that he was sentenced to prison for corrupt relationships with informants.  

More recently, Delahunt has been criticized for failing to prosecute Amy Bishop in the 1986 death of her brother. She is the University of Alabama at Huntsville professor accused earlier this year of murdering three fellow faculty members and wounding two others after being denied tenure. The 1986 shotgun death of Bishop’s brother was ruled accidental. In the wake of criticism about the handling of the Massachusetts shooting, Delahunt and his then assistant D.A. claim that investigators failed to provide them evidence that Bishop intentionally killed her brother.

That is their version of truth. And for the sake of old times, I hope it is the real truth.   

My memoir, Odyssey of a Derelict Gunslinger, is available at amazon.com and independent bookstores. It offers much more than $19.99 worth of laughs. The book is an account of my illustrious (I choose the adjectives) career.