The Daily Caller stepped up its attacks on Media Matters this week with evidence of an $850k blackmail settlement to David Brock’s former partner and donations from charities connected to Bernie Madoff’s multi-billion-dollar fraud scheme. Andrew Breitbart found an old photo from the Esquire piece in which Brock illustrates his rebellion from and defiance of the conservative movement by lashing himself, “Fabio-style” to a tree.

That Brock sees himself as so dangerous to his enemies that he’d instruct a bodyguard to carry an illegal firearm – or that he’d have a bodyguard at all – says a lot about the founder of an organization that pays its employees in tax-exempt donations to troll Fox News all day (or possibly investigate the private lives of Fox employees).

The definitive profile of Brock and Media Matters from New York magazine back in May is worth reading, if only for how complete the portrait is of Brock as the consummate egomaniac and political opportunist. He became conservative at Berkeley because he didn’t like political correctness, then became liberal because he didn’t like those nasty Fox News anchors. But after years rubbing elbows with the beltway liberal elite you’d think he’d absorb something resembling a political philosophy, or maybe some principles, or a personal outlook on the role of government. Sadly, no:

… despite the fact that Brock has now spent a decade firmly ensconced on the left, he remains uncomfortable talking about the political issues that define it. “I have never had a serious conversation with him about policy or public philosophy,” says one prominent Democrat. “I have absolutely no clue what his ideological moorings are. I don’t offer it as a critique of the guy, but I just literally don’t know.”

…

But now, as he sits on a couch and struggles to define his own beliefs, it’s clear that Brock himself is agnostic about what that message is. “I’m comfortable on the progressive side,” he continues. “But I’m still more pitched at fighting the right than I am about building a progressive platform for the future. It’s fair to say that that conversation doesn’t interest me as much.”

There’s been a lot of good thinking here at ye olde TAC about the biggest problem with the modern right; that it’s more of an anti-left. The debacle over Media Matters and their conviction-less founder is an interesting mirror image of the same phenomenon on the left; Media Matters and American Bridge (Brock’s super PAC and go-to Dem opposition research shop, run out of the same building as Media Matters) have an unmatched power to monitor and attack conservative media and candidates, yet their own founder clearly hasn’t thought much about whether those Democrats his attacks benefit will accomplish change that’s meaningful or good.

Which makes their level of coordination with the administration astounding, right down to a “weekly strategy call” with the White House and the Center for American Progress.  In David Brock, Obama has a professed hyper-partisan with no stake in meaningful policy change, at the head of a rapid-response team to weave apologias as quickly as any criticisms of the administration arise in the media. They aren’t a media watchdog group, hell they aren’t even liberal in any meaningful sense because they exist to deflect criticism of the state. As New York‘s Jason Zengerle wrote, there’s “no such thing as a lonely apostate”; Brock was a pawn of Sidney Blumenthal when he made his conversion, and he’s a stooge of the Obama administration now.