On the first day of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), I asked Andrew Breitbart and film director Steve Bannon what would make their upcoming video "exposing" Occupy Wall Street successful despite being panned by critics and audiences for their previous work, "The Undefeated" by about Sarah Palin.
Breitbart immediately went off.
Breitbart: Who's Andrew Metcalf, I want to see, this is always a fun gesture, is that your name?
Me: Yes that's my name, I just checked IMDB and ["The Undefeated"] got a 1.7; on Rotten Tomatoes it got a 0 percent.
Breitbart: Who do you work for?
Lady sitting next to me: Crooks and Liars!
Breitbart: Crooks and Liars, that's it, it's a radical left-wing website, he can answer for himself, the way you've presented yourself you represent Occupy very well.
Me: I'm actually asking a legitimate question, about one of your previous movies being panned by both critics and audiences. What's going to make this one any different?
At that point, Steve Bannon took over and notified me that the Sarah Palin flick did have a broad audience in DVD sales and pay-per-view orders. He said the movie was well-received by conservative critics and there wasn't one factual error in it.
Bannon: Professional entertainment critics, yes, they went after the film quite harshly, just like they did her... I showed the... the useful idiots of the entertainment business that completely vilified and eviscerated a woman that has a track record as a performer that actually stands for a populist agenda... you kind of asked it in a snarky way, but it is a legitimate question.
I suppose it's fitting that an unfunny comedian would also just happen to be a Breitbart Big Government blogger and find himself performing at a Sarah Palin event back in the days when she pretended she might run for President. Yet, that is exactly what happened here, when Eric Golub decided it would be funny to mock special needs children in an unfunny attempt to mock liberals.
"The left should love Sarah Palin," comedian Eric Golub, who also blogs at Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood, noted at the tea party-affiliated "Restoring America" rally in Indianola, Iowa. "She has a beautiful, adorable special needs child... For that reason alone, the left should worship Sarah Palin and adopt her as one of their own. Because the leftist haters are an entire political ideology of special needs children."
I'll give him this. Golub is an equal opportunity hater. He's just as likely to rip on Ron Paul as he is liberals. At the end of the day, all these self-professed 'tea party' types are just regular dyed-in-the-wool Republicans and Golub is no exception.
He's got a ways to go until he's number 1, though. You've chosen this video to land in the 37th spot.
Today's daily dose of wingnuttery was so rich I hardly know where to begin, so I'll just dive in. We begin with Pat Robertson, who is very, very worried about President Obama's visit to Indonesia.
Robertson:You know Lee the thing that somehow concerns me, they say he’s going back to the place that he spent his childhood, he spent four years in Indonesia, I don’t know if he was trained in a madrassa, one of those Muslim schools, but nevertheless that is his inclination. His father was a Kenyan socialist and he talks about the roots of his father. So he’s got an African and an Indonesian background. I don’t know what his mother was doing; she just sort of flitted around. But nevertheless, this may give him a warped perspective of what needs to be done to make America the greatest nation on earth.
Yes, of course. The President is going back to the country where he spent a few childhood years. Funny how Robertson never thinks about whether those childhood years were as great as he thinks they were, because you know, every 9-year old looks back with fondness on local children pelting him with rocks for being a black guy, after all.
Pat Robertson, king of the smarmy insinuation, pandering to the Christian loyalists waiting to lap it all up.
Then we have Rick Perry sounding the dog whistle for the faithful with this, via TalkingPointsMemo:
Rick Perry says President Obama, the son of a teen mother who frequently was absent from his life and often was stretched financially, grew up the easy way. It’s the latest in a series of winks at conspiracy-minded conservatives deeply suspicious about the president’s background.
Perry’s comments came as he discussed his new ad attacking Obama for saying US policymakers have grown “lazy” about honing America’s competitive edge, a comment that Republicans have inaccurately suggested was aimed at American workers. Asked by FOX News host Sean Hannity about the spot, Perry launched into a highly personal attack on Obama.
“It reveals to me that he grew up in a privileged way,” he said. “He never had to really work for anything.”
He added that “we need a president who has been through their ups and downs in life, and understands what it’s like to have to deal with the issues in our economy that we have today in America.”
Why that dirty, lowdown, food-stamp sucking President! Rick Perry's going to set the record straight about him, because you know, those poor folks just don't ever work for anything. They just wait for the government to hand it to them, right?
Finally, we have Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood editor-in-chief, John Nolte spewing a series of tweets hoping for violence against OWS protesters.
Apparently there was a tea party convention in Illinois called TeaCon, which attracted very serious and sensible conservatives like Glenn Beck, Dana Loesch and the always, very serious Andrew Breitbart. Guess who else was on the bill? Rep. Joe Walsh, the deadbeat dad.
A Chicago judge issued a preliminary ruling Wednesday against U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) in his child-support dispute with his ex-wife, ordering the Tea Party favorite to explain why he appears to be $100,000 behind in child-support payments.Cook County Circuit Judge Raul Vega also wanted to know why Walsh wasn’t in court Wednesday — the McHenry Republican’s ex-wife, Laura Walsh, was there — and initially said he expected him to show up for the next hearing...read on
Anyway, with the class and dignity that only Breitbart can bring to any event, he spews obscenities at Janeane Garofalo in this video and is just as vile in the next.
Here’s one of the star speakers at TeaBagCon this weekend, Andrew Breitbart, spewing obscenities at his enemies. He calls Janeane Garofalo “Hollywood’s sympathy f*ck,” to a wildly cheering audience of conservatives.
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He follows up this classless rant by telling union leaders James Hoffa and Richard Trumka; “F*ck you,” again to wild cheers and applause.
Meanwhile, we learn that one of the event’s main organizers, Chicago Tea Party Patriots Director Steve Stevlic, was arrested last September for soliciting a prostitute.
Teabag family values, proudly on display.
UPDATE at 10/1/11 11:02:00 am
And the scandal is getting even more interesting. Breitbart’s own far right blogger Warner Todd Huston notes that TeaCon organizer Steve Stevlic, whose whereabouts are currently unknown, may also have been playing some funny games with the Chicago Tea Party’s money.
You can click over to LGF and watch the other video. He's a very angry person. But I'm sure the Beltway media will still take him seriously because they love conservative street performers and the rodeo clowns they produce going back to Jack Abramoff.
Bill O'Reilly always pulls a sliver of a video during his Fox show to make sure his audience hears profanities or what he decides is vulgar language or inappropriate behavior from some lefty every chance he gets. Being part of the fair and balanced network I hope he'd give these videos a chance with his crowd. It would be the only fair thing to do.
We're starting to get a clearer portrait of Anders Breivik, the right-wing extremist whose rampage in Norway yesterday took at least 95 lives, the vast majority of them young people attending a youth camp.
The picture that's emerging is of an ordinary right-wing man stoked into anger by theories about "Cultural Marxism" that originated on the anti-Semitic far right but have in recent years been spreading into more mainstream venues, promoted by the likes of Andrew Breitbart, among others.
Based on online posts apparently by Anders Behring Breivik circulated in Norway, the alleged terrorist opposed multiculturalism and Muslim immigrants in Norway. Breivik championed opposition to "Cultural Marxism," a right-wing antisemitic concept developed primarily by William Lind of the US-based Free Congress Foundation, but also the Lyndon LaRouche network.
... The idea is that a small group of Marxist Jews who formed the Frankfurt School set out to destroy Western Culture through a conspiracy to promote multiculturalism and collectivist economic theories. A key "Cultural Marxist" guru William Lind spoke at a Holocaust Denial conference, and worked at Free Congress Fdn. which sponsored a former Nazi collaborator, the late Laszlo Pasztor. See Bill Berkowitz article on Cultural Marxism for Intelligence Report at SPLC website .
At the core of the far right's concept of cultural Marxism are the Jews. Lind made this plain in June 2002, when he gave a speech on the subject to a Washington Holocaust denial conference hosted by the anti-Semitic journal, Barnes Review.
Although he told his audience that his Free Congress Foundation was "not among those who question whether the Holocaust occurred," he went on to lay out just who the cultural conspirators were: "These guys," he explained, "were all Jewish."
Over the weekend I was re-reading the infamous Powell Memo, written by written in 1971 by former Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell, who at the time was working as a corporate attorney. The memo is in essence a letter to the Chamber of Commerce in which Powell urges the American business community to begin investing more money trying to capture the hearts and minds of Ma and Pa America. You see, back in the early '70s a handsome young buck named Ralph Nader was making life miserable for the American business establishment, particularly the automobile industry. While Nader today is considered a crank by most of the country, at the time he was quite effective, a sort of anti-corporate Andrew Breitbart who loved to stir the pot, make trouble and collect scalps.
At any rate, Powell's memo basically encouraged the business community to take more of an active role in political life. And I don't just mean donating to campaigns -- I mean getting involved in academia and the media to begin influencing public opinion. While it's true that this memo is not the Rosetta Stone of corporate influence that it's made out to be, it is reflective of a general feeling among business elites that they were tired of being pushed around by liberals and leftists and that they were going to start hitting back. This passage is particularly amusing in light of how much corporate power dominates our political landscape today:
[A]s every business executive knows, few elements of American society today have as little influence in government as the American businessman, the corporation, or even the millions of corporate stockholders. If one doubts this, let him undertake the role of "lobbyist" for the business point of view before Congressional committees. The same situation obtains in the legislative halls of most states and major cities. One does not exaggerate to say that, in terms of political influence with respect to the course of legislation and government action, the American business executive is truly the "forgotten man."
Powell is certainly exaggerating the plight of the poor beleaguered business man here, as the business lobby always had a seat at the table even during liberalism's heyday in the 1960s. The difference was, unlike today, the business lobby didn't own the damn table.
One of my favorite scene's in Oliver Stone's "Nixon" film comes when a group of cigar-chomping right-wing businessmen give Tricky Dick and earful about "federal price controls on my oil" and about the fact that "your EPA environmental agency has got its thumb so far up my ass that it's scratching my ear."
And while this is a work of fiction (and an Oliver Stone work of fiction at that), it's still somewhat thrilling to see Nixon stick up for the EPA in the face of corporate pressure. Where have you gone, Tricky Dick, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you!
The point here is that in the early 1970s, the public at large still thought the putting limits on how much pollution a private firm could emit was actually a good thing. That same decade was when Corporate America began investing more cash into think tanks like Heritage and Cato in order to scrub these inconvenient little ideas out of peoples' heads and convince them that air pollution was just one of the free market's many wonders, along with lead poisoning and E. coli.
But back to the Powell Memo. Toward the end of the memo, Powell provides a list of several principles that Corporate America should be defending as part of its propaganda campaign. Some of what you would expect, but others are still surprising:
We in America already have moved very far indeed toward some aspects of state socialism, as the needs and complexities of a vast urban society require types of regulation and control that were quite unnecessary in earlier times. In some areas, such regulation and control already have seriously impaired the freedom of both business and labor, and indeed of the public generally. But most of the essential freedoms remain: private ownership, private profit, labor unions, collective bargaining, consumer choice, and a market economy in which competition largely determines price, quality and variety of the goods and services provided the consumer.
Labor unions??!! Collective bargaining?!!?!!?!!?! This dude would be considered a Communist by the Tea Party's standards!
Powell then closes with a flourish and recites the most insidious meme embedded within corporate propaganda -- that your right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is directly tied to the right of rich and powerful corporations to do whatever the hell they want:
But whatever the causes of diminishing economic freedom may be, the truth is that freedom as a concept is indivisible. As the experience of the socialist and totalitarian states demonstrates, the contraction and denial of economic freedom is followed inevitably by governmental restrictions on other cherished rights. It is this message, above all others, that must be carried home to the American people.
And tragically for our country, this campaign to influence hearts and minds has been stunningly successful. We no longer protect blue-collar jobs, union membership as a percentage of the workforce is the lowest it's been in decades, and average wages have stalled even as corporate profits have soared. And still, our corporatist ideologues demand more. They want to voucherize Medicare in order to pay for tax cuts for corporations and wealthy individuals. They want to privatize Social Security and shift risk even more toward individuals. They want to end collective bargaining rights for public-sector workers all together.
Yes, another Anthony Weiner post. Except this one confirms what I suspected: that the conservatives who "caught" him tweeting that picture were trying to set him up.
A Twitter user employing a fake name posed as a 16-year-old California high school girl in May and tried to get Mr. Weiner to be her prom date, according to people with knowledge of the communications and a review of documents. The person behind another Twitter account created under a fake name claimed to be her classmate and offered to provide the group with incriminating evidence about Mr. Weiner.
Mr. Weiner, who resigned on Thursday after admitting he had sent explicit photos and messages to multiple women on social media sites, had already been the subject of intense focus on Twitter by the conservative group, which calls itself the #bornfreecrew.
One Twitter user the group observed seeking to interact with Mr. Weiner was called “Nikki Reid.” She started an online campaign to get Mr. Weiner to be her prom date at Hollywood High School in May, using the account @starchild111. Within days after Mr. Weiner started following her, a Twitter user, also using a fake name, Marianela Alicea, and pretending to be Nikki Reid’s classmate, contacted a member of the #bornfreecrew and said she had information about Mr. Weiner, but never provided any.
I'm not excusing the fact that he did, in fact, send lewd photos and create a stupid distraction for the better part of three weeks. But this story highlights the fact that someone smelled blood and tried to take it to the next level by creating fake underage accounts to lure him into sending photos or flirting. It appears that he did not take the bait, but the fact that there was bait should make everyone sit up and take notice.
As long as identities are nothing more than the next invented email account, everyone is vulnerable. In Anthony Weiner's case, he should have realized that he made himself a target just by standing up like he did, and been leery of any overly friendly people online. Instead he let himself be flattered by it.
Let's hope a lesson is taken from this. These people are unafraid to stoop to the lowest level possible to neutralize politicians and public figures who they consider a threat or an obstacle. The only defense is a good offense, which would include keeping communications public and being careful that they can withstand scrutiny.
I'm not going to write much more on this topic. Yes, I was lied to also by Weiner when he made his denials, and I gave him the benefit of the doubt, and we know how that turned out. There are many questions being asked and that's expected, but saying that, I was glad to see that CNN's Reliable Sources did not vindicate Breitbart's overall track record of bad behavior, simply because it was proven that Anthony Weiner did do many embarrassing and creepy things.
Hall: Yes. You know, someone asked me if I thought this showed dissatisfaction with the mainstream media, that the person went to Breitbart. I said it showed absolutely how the mainstream media worked, which is you give it to Breitbart, Breitbart puts it out, it's all over the place, and the media follow.
If the media were acting responsibly, they would have investigated the allegations instead of waiting for Weiner to hold a presser so they can simply yell questions at him. I'm not writing this because it's a Democratic politician caught up in this one, I've talked about this issue many times before. I know that's part of every scandal, but really, can we have some investigating too? Every network has reporters, staffs and resources to actually practice journalism, but they choose not to much of the time until the feeding frenzy dies down. If the media were as focused on Anthony Weiner as they were on the allegations that led us into the Iraq war by the Bush administration that resulted in thousands and thousands of deaths, the public and the politicians would not have given Bush a free hand in starting that unjust war.
This delicious morsel about the "Meet the Press" host and the vice president was part of the extensive dish Cathie Martin served up yesterday when the former Cheney communications director took the stand in the perjury trial of former Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Flashed on the courtroom computer screens were her notes from 2004 about how Cheney could respond to allegations that the Bush administration had played fast and loose with evidence of Iraq's nuclear ambitions. Option 1: "MTP-VP," she wrote, then listed the pros and cons of a vice presidential appearance on the Sunday show. Under "pro," she wrote: "control message."
"I suggested we put the vice president on 'Meet the Press,' which was a tactic we often used," Martin testified. "It's our best format."
How embarrassing. I posted this Gloria Borger exchange when she caught Cheney in a lie using Meet The Press for his warmongering in a post: (The incredible C&L video archives comes through again. Via a post from 02/08/07 The Guide: How Dick Cheney uses "Meet the Press" to control the message )
It's about time that someone fought back against the fabricated political scandals that are so often aimed at liberal Democrats, and the right-wing sites like Big Hollywood that so eagerly report them. Good for Rep. Weiner! I hope his attorneys find grounds to sue. Via Raw Story:
Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner is consulting with his lawyers after it was reported that the New York congressman sent a racy photo to a female college student from Seattle via Twitter.
"We’ve retained counsel to explore the proper next steps and to advise us on what civil or criminal actions should be taken," Weiner spokesman Dave Arnold told The Daily Caller in an email. "This was a prank. We are loath to treat it as more, but we are relying on professional advice."
Weiner has claimed that his Facebook account was hacked and that, while the photo did appear on his Twitter feed, he did not send it. The photo shows a man's erect penis outlined in a pair of tight boxer briefs. The photo was first published by Andrew Breitbart'sBigGovernment.The photo was quickly deleted along with all the other photos on the congressman's yFrog account.
[...] An analysis of a screenshot of the congressman's yFrog account, which was published by BigGovernment, shows the image was manipulated, according to the progressive blog DailyKos. The screenshot was allegedly altered to make it appear that the racy photo was associated with Rep. Weiner's account.
