(h/t Heather at VideoCafe)

Why-oh-why is Dana Loesch being invited on the Sunday news shows? The Editor-in-Chief of Breitbart's BigJournalism site deserves no such association with either honest brokers or journalism. Actually, considering the larger panel discussion on the Susan G. Komen controversy and the massive amount of misinformation muddying the issue by Matthew Dowd and George Will, honest brokers and Sunday morning news shows have very little to do with one another either, but I digress.

Loesch is particularly worthy of scorn because she uses a discredited "sting" by the discredited Live Action organization, led by the discredited Lila Rose to amplify her point:

Now, you would think at some point in the past — it's been a year to the date since Live Action called Planned Parenthood clinics in 27 different states to ask whether or not they had mammography machines. You would think that at that point — they'd had a year — Planned Parenthood would invest in obtaining licenses to operate and own mammography machines and give mammograms so they could have avoided this whole thing.

Yeah, about that lack of mammography machines ... turns out, the whole thing was a sham.

HOAX EXPOSED: Rose's Video Does Not Establish That Planned Parenthood Ever Discussed Mammograms Provided By The Organization

Richards Discussed "Access" To Mammograms Through Planned Parenthood - Not Mammograms Actually Provided By The Organization. In the video at the center of Rose's hoax, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards discusses access to health care - including mammograms - not actual health care services provided by Planned Parenthood. Discussing GOP efforts to defund Planned Parenthood during an appearance on The Joy Behar Show, Richards said:

If this bill ever becomes law, millions of women in this country are going to lose their health care access, not to abortion services, to basic family planning. You know, mammograms, cancer screenings, cervical cancer. [CNN, The Joy Behar Show, 2/21/11, via Nexis]

Pro-Life Activist Jill Stanek: Richards Was "Correct." From Stanek's blog:

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Let me introduce you to the face of America for the rest of the world. Empirically, Dana Loesch is an attractive person. But what she represents with her statements as a CNN contributor is sheer ugliness and worse, it is how we are perceived in the rest of the world.

Loesch, you see, saw that video of troops urinating on the corpses of alleged Taliban and she decided to celebrate what she saw as a completely acceptable act of American dominance.

On her radio show, CNN contributor and Big Journalism editor Dana Loesch cheered on an Internet video reportedly showing U.S. Marines urinating on what appear to be dead Afghans, saying she would "drop trou and do it too."

That shiny hyperbole of American exceptionalism rarely plays well past our shores. Back in 2004, I had to travel to Europe for a writers' conference and opted to extend my stay with a visit to a close friend in Holland. My friend was eager to share with me the rich history and culture of the Dutch. Everywhere we went, she introduced me to friends and acquaintances as the "good kind" of American, namely one who wasn't an Ugly American like Dana Loesch. I didn't support our invasions and occupations in the Middle East; I didn't hold myself up as bastion of goodness and light and civilization (the presumption to do so in a country that can boast Rembrandt, Vermeer and Anne Frank!) nor was I dismissive of Muslims (although admittedly, Holland is struggling with deep anti-Muslim bias as well). Never, in a million years, would it occur to me to celebrate an act that lowers us down to the level of barbarians we claim the other side is.

CNN, in their typically gutless way, tried lamely to distance themselves from Loesch's words

CNN contributors are commentators who express a wide range of viewpoints—on and off of CNN—that often provoke strong agreement or disagreement. Their viewpoints are their own.

Well, not her own entirely. But make no mistake: giving Loesch a microphone and putting a camera in front of her face tells the rest of the world that you have no problem with what she said, CNN.

I think there are a few people out there who shrug at the notion of caring about how others see us. But this cavalier attitude truly becomes a national security threat. A threat that CNN continues to promote on its airwaves:

There are no words to express my disgust at the video making the rounds today, of U.S. Marines apparently urinating on the dead bodies of the Taliban. As an Iraq War veteran who works with Iraq and Afghanistan veterans every day, I can truthfully say that the Marines in the video have undermined everything that I and those who served with me tried to do.

That's why I'm just as disgusted by right wingers like Pamela Gellar, who said, "I love these Marines" and joked, "Perhaps this is the infidel interpretation of the Islamic ritual of washing and preparing the body for burial."

Comments like these not only go against everything our military stands for, but only serve to put our troops on the ground in increased danger. It just shows that some on the right still just don't get it when it comes to our mission in Afghanistan.

No matter what one thinks about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars (and I have been plenty critical of them and how they've been waged), one indisputable fact is that most troops on the ground have tried their best to build the trust of the population. Believe me, it isn't easy. Having worked with the Iraqi Army on my second tour, I'm acutely aware of what challenges we face when trying to get the trust of the population.

Understandably, Afghans and Iraqis looked at us pretty skeptically, if not outright as invaders.

Horrific incidents like at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo further undermined American forces by reinforcing the population's most negative feelings about us. But since that time, we've made great strides. General Petraeus and McChrystal, especially, took winning hearts and minds very seriously, and implemented a number of tactics to reach out to the populations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Doing so wasn't just the right thing to do, it was absolutely crucial to their counter-insurgency strategy.

That work is now at risk, because of these Marines.

Aside from basic human decency, corpse desecration harms our mission by disrespecting the culture of Afghanistan and the families of the dead. Think this video isn't circulating in Afghanistan already? You think some young Afghan male who was on the fence about the insurgency won't be knocked off it?

Erick Erickson just wasn't enough for CNN. No, they had to go just a little farther into Tea Party land and hire Dana Loesch, editor-in-chief of Andrew Breitbart's Big Government and St. Louis Tea Party wingnut.

Here's a bit about Loesch from some research I did last year.

Andrew Breitbart, Bill Hennessy and Dana Loesch are also associated with American Majority. American Majority is funded by the Sam Adams Alliance. The Sam Adams Alliance has a newly-established relationship with close Dick Armey associate and former chief of staff Denis Calabrese. Denis Calabrese is also founder and principal of The Patriot Group, a lobbying firm established with the goal of "lobbying with backbone."

Hennessy's most recent post links to the American Majority 'grassroots summit' in Kansas City this weekend. One of the featured speakers is Eric O'Keefe, Chairman of the Sam Adams Alliance, also on the board of Wisconsin Club for Growth and a former director of Americans for Limited Government. ALG has been associated with Howard Rich and Grover Norquist.

Scroll down a bit further on the page and you'll find the Koch connection through the Americans for Prosperity Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska sponsorships.

So it goes once again. These so-called grass roots activists are really all just part of the thug wing of the Republican party. If we were to analyze the DNA of the St. Louis Tea Party, we'd find Jack Abramoff, Grover Norquist, Charles Koch, and a bunch of College Republicans on the main strand.

Here she is defending the guy who brought a gun to a town hall meeting, discovered only after it fell out of his pocket:

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The Bush fanboys are back, led by Breitbart's Dana Loesch, the Queen of double-talk nonsense. She wrote a post glorifying Bush, who is out on his image-makeover/revisionist-history tour.

I love how his face seemingly peeks out from the black-and-white news columns of the day to defiantly whisper: “PSSST. HEY. Still heeeeere.” His existence may have been obscured by the hubris surrounding the current administration, an increase in terrorist attacks, a movement born partly because of several Bush policies, and an election; the sudden appearance of Bush across all the networks and on the front and cover pages reminds us that even though he isn’t the sort of GOPer grassroots adore, he was infinitely better than the man currently in the White House, a man who bows to anything with a pulse.

The excerpts from his book give insight into the process leading up to the decisions what the rest of the world would see and whether you agreed with him or not (I’ve long been on record abhorring NCLB; also the prescription drug act was neither “compassionate” or “conservative,” and neither was TARP) the man would make a decision and stick with it. Mainly though, I love how fist-in-the-air defiant he is in the book.
---
Defiance on steroids. Balls!

(h/t Digby)

Have you noticed all these conservatives who now say that Bush wasn't a beloved figure? Where were they when Bush was attacking countries that didn't attack us, and torturing terrorism suspects, for starters? Of course, he increased the debt as much as he could while giving all our surpluses to the richest of the rich. Now that he's back and trying to spin his way out of being the worst President in the history of America, the wingnuts are making it up as they go along.

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Bill Hennessy is co-founder of the St. Louis Tea Party, self-published political guru and a sales guy who also works in tech. He's also an angry man with a message: Blame "the left" for everything wrong in the world. Hennessy has a platform and a voice and he's not afraid to use it, particularly in furtherance of his primary goal, which he lays out in a post castigating fellow Tea Party agitators for failing to put a stop to a sales tax increase:

The tea party is out to destroy the left in America. If we’re not going to do that—if we’re going to just wave yellow flags and wear clever t-shirts—then let’s go back to our regular programming.

Seriously, ask yourself not what you believe, but what you will DO. The time for standing in a park shouting is over. It’s time for action.

Ordinarily Hennessy's threat would be a shruggable event. The politics of personal destruction don't play all that well on the main stage, and the idea of "destroying the left" reeks of John Bircherism with a large dose of indoctrination by right-wing anti-taxers.

Except for this: Bill Hennessey, right-wing radio pundit Dana Loesch, and Big Government publisher Andrew Breitbart are using Kenneth Gladney's bogus injuries as their proxy for race-baiting and union bashing to leverage gains in the upcoming midterm elections.

After all, war is war. When you're out to destroy people, truth just doesn't seem to make that much of a difference. It doesn't seem to matter that Gladney's injuries didn't come close to matching up with what he claims was done to him, or that his original "lawyer" was also his employer, or that the whole dustup began over insulting imagery on buttons he was handing out at a town hall meeting. For these folks, and Hennessy in particular, it's war. All-out, scorched-earth kind of war.

Adam at St. Louis Activist Hub has put together a timeline of false accusations, outright lies, and machinations to promote Gladney's case and discredit not only the Obama administration, but anyone whose politics fall to the left of, well, just about anyone. It's pretty damning, no matter how many blustery posts they write claiming otherwise.

Still. I could shake my fist in the air and write it all off as more of the same, but there's this one thing that keeps nagging at me. Andrew Breitbart, Bill Hennessy and Dana Loesch are also associated with American Majority. American Majority is funded by the Sam Adams Alliance. The Sam Adams Alliance has a newly-established relationship with close Dick Armey associate and former chief of staff Denis Calabrese. Denis Calabrese is also founder and principal of The Patriot Group, a lobbying firm established with the goal of "lobbying with backbone."

Hennessy's most recent post links to the American Majority 'grassroots summit' in Kansas City this weekend. One of the featured speakers is Eric O'Keefe, Chairman of the Sam Adams Alliance, also on the board of Wisconsin Club for Growth and a former director of Americans for Limited Government. ALG has been associated with Howard Rich and Grover Norquist.

Scroll down a bit further on the page and you'll find the Koch connection through the Americans for Prosperity Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska sponsorships.

So it goes once again. These so-called grass roots activists are really all just part of the thug wing of the Republican party. If we were to analyze the DNA of the St. Louis Tea Party, we'd find Jack Abramoff, Grover Norquist, Charles Koch, and a bunch of College Republicans on the main strand.