via The Carpet Bagger

I hesitate to criticize Hugh Hewitt's Weekly Standard articles, not because they're awful on the merits, but because it’s practically a blogging cliché. It’s almost too predictable to bother. Hewitt's latest, however, was too offensive to ignore....read on

Indeed, the piece is filled with ad hominem attacks against Americans United and it's director, the Rev. Barry Lynn. (Like too many conservatives, Hewitt finds it easier to make personal attacks than persuasive arguments.) Hewitt's argument follows a certain child-like reasoning: Lynn is bad, Lynn is presenting an argument, therefore the argument is bad.

It's a shame Hewitt didn't think this through a little more. It's not Lynn and Americans United who have gone after the Air Force Academy; it's current and former cadets who’ve been the victim of discrimination and are looking for help. It’s not “hearsay” if the cadets have seen — and been the victim of — the harassment fist hand....

This is an important story, but as usual Hewitt is incapable of sustaining an intelligent argument...whoops...I started an ad hominem attack...Steve is right. It is pretty easy to do.

DOWNLOADS: (1083)

PLAYS: (4623)

Embed

Well, we knew the National Tea Party Convention this week was going to be a real festival of outrageous wingnuttery, but Tom Tancredo's speech to kick things off will already be hard to top:

Tancredo: Every year, the liberal Dems and the RINO Republicans turned up the temperature ever so slightly. It seemed after awhile that we'd all be boiled to death in a cauldron of the nanny state.

And then something really odd happened -- mostly because we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country.

[Applause]

People who cannot even spell the word "vote," or say it in English -- [applause] -- put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. Name is Barack Hussein Obama.

It's hard to say which was more disturbing: Tancredo's apparent call for reinstituting laws that, as John Byrne at Raw Story points out, were a fundamental component of Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction South, or the massive round of applause he received for saying it. (The New York Daily News has more on the literacy tests.)

Yes, these people really are nuts. Witness, for instance, the applause Tancredo got for saying he was glad McCain lost -- because, after all, McCain was for "amnesty" too:

If McCain had been elected, the neocons would be writing flattering editorials in the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal. Congressman Gutierrez and President McCain would have been posing in the Rose Garden with big smiles as they received accolades from La Raza for having finally passed an amnesty.

Of course, most of the speech was just Tancredo channeling Glenn Beck. (The boiled frog metaphor was the giveaway, along with the "committed socialist ideologue" bit. As well as lines like this:

So the race for America is on, right now. The President and his left-wing allies in Congress are going to look at every opportunity to destroy the Constitution before we have a chance to save it.

But as always with Tancredo -- as with his audience -- the real motivation comes down to defending white culture:

Some things we can deal with in just a political way -- which is, you know, by the votes we cast. Other things will require a commitment to passing on our culture -- and we really do have one, you know, it is based on Judeo-Christian principles whether people like it or they don't!

[Applause]

That's who we are! That is who we are! And if you don't like it, don't come here! And if you're here and you don't like it, go home! Go someplace else!

As the editors at Imagine 2050 observed:

It is obvious that Beck and Tancredo are trying to push the issue of immigration to the forefront of the tea party movement, something that was explicitly clear during Tancredo’s speech. The acts that followed paled in comparison to Tancredo, who definitely stole the first night spotlight of the three day event.

Indeed. If you thought the Tea Partiers went nuts at those town-hall forums on health care, wait till immigration reform is the issue. It's going to be very ugly.

Tom Tancredo, of course, will be leading the way, pitchfork in hand.

DOWNLOADS: (519)

PLAYS: (1676)

Embed

I watched this last Sunday on Reliable Sources and saved the clip because there was a lot going on during the week. Howard Kurtz' segment was how skeptical the press was over how successful President Obama's climate talks in Copenhagen were. The Weekly Standard's Matthew Continetti makes a fool of himself with this statement about President Obama and the press:

CONTINETTI: Well, I think the puncturing began earlier in the summer with the Nobel Prize announcement and the failure to win the Olympics. And, for me, that's the turning point. That's when the press started to actually start criticizing the Obama administration, not giving it always a free pass.

With this agreement, basically it's an agreement to one day reach an agreement. So it should be taken with the appropriate skepticism.

Conservatives are just not very serious people. They attacked a sitting president for winning a worldwide award and openly cheered when the Olympic committee didn't award Chicago the bid. If anything, their behavior started to turn average American families against conservatives. And Continetti's idiotic view that the press turned on Obama because he lost the Olympic bid is ... how should we say ... ridiculous.

He wasn't called on his lunacy either, which is a systemic problem in TV news. Conservatives are always allowed to spew off nonsense and are never corrected.

(h/t CSPANjunkie)

Full transcript via CNN:

KURTZ: Just in time for the evening news on Friday, President Obama salvaged the climate talks in Copenhagen with an 11th-hour agreement he trumpeted as significant and unprecedented. But the international deal was nonbinding, totally voluntary, and the emissions targets fell short of what the conference's goals were.

So, are the media buying the White House spin that this was some kind of breakthrough?

Continue reading »

I know I shouldn't feed the ego that is Lieberman, but do you want to know how awesome Joe is, Mr. President?

Read this from the Weekly Standard.

Joementum 2012?

Is he the greatest senator ever? He fought for victory in Iraq, he's fighting for victory in Afghanistan, and he's fighting to save us all from Obamacare. Who needs Olympia Snowe when you've got Joementum?

Posted by Michael Goldfarb on October 27, 2009.

And we must never forget TNR's love for Joe.

(h/t Atrios)

And key Democrats correct Lieberman on the fiscal awesomeness of the public option. Are you listening, Joe?

I wonder how Connecticut feels since they support the public option by a wide margin:

Connecticut voters support 64 - 30 percent giving people the option to buy health insurance from a government plan.

Maybe it'll be Palin/Lieberman 2012 for this new crowd of voters.

Talk about "elitism." Last night while discussing "downscale voters," salt-of-the-earth FOX News contributor (and Weekly Standard editor) Fred Barnes ridiculed and demeaned working class Americans by making the distinction that they aren't "lower income," but rather "lower class."

Download | play Download | play (h/t Bill W.)

Look at the smug look on his face as he demeans the majority of Americans. Apparently to Barnes union workers and, indeed, anyone who actually labors for a living, is not as good as him. Kudos to the panel who, for reasons you can decide yourselves, distances themselves from his insensitive and bone-headed remarks.

Something tells me we're looking at Duncan's "Wanker of the day."

TPM has more and Faiz sums it up nicely:

Hume opened the segment by asking Barnes to elaborate on his view that many of Hillary Clinton’s supporters are “downscale.” Barnes could hardly contain his laughter as he explained that the term “working class” is a euphemism because “it’s kind of mean to say ‘lower class.’ It’s as simple as that.” He explained that the “lower class” are people of low “social class.”

Max Blumenthal looks at the "reliable" sources that the Weekly Standard used to try to besmirch Scott Beauchamp: Matt Sanchez and Throbert McGee.

And yet they still get a national platform.

Since the wingnut blogs are scrambling to try to discredit him, good for Scott for coming out from the shadows. Will he get apologies for all the ugliness they've thrown at him? I don't think so either...

NY Times: (reg. req'd.)

The decision of an Army private who has been writing anonymously for The New Republic to reveal his identity has not quieted critics at the rival Weekly Standard who continue to question the accuracy of the soldier's deeply critical accounts from Iraq.

The statement from Scott Thomas Beauchamp on tnr.com.The soldier, Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a member of Company A, 1/18 Infantry, Second Brigade Combat Team of the First Infantry Division, posted a statement Thursday on The New Republic's Web site (tnr.com) saying, "It's been maddening, to say the least, to see the plausibility of events that I witnessed questioned by people who have never served in Iraq."

Private Beauchamp, who wrote "Baghdad Diarist" under the pseudonym Scott Thomas, said: "My Diarist, ‘Shock Troops,' and the two other pieces I wrote for The New Republic have stirred more controversy than I could ever have anticipated. They were written under a pseudonym because I wanted to write honestly about my experiences, without fear of reprisal. Unfortunately, my pseudonym has caused confusion."

Private Beauchamp recounted some grotesque incidents in his columns, including his own mocking of a woman disfigured by the war and accounts of a soldier who took joy in running over a dog in a Bradley fighting vehicle and another who found the top of a child's skull and wore it on his head as a joke.

After all my time here at C&L, I admit to being a little jaded when it comes to media coverage. I expect things to be partisan and tend to look at it as post fodder more often than not. But every once in a while, some moment will seep past my cynical shell and frankly, make me want to throw something at my TV. I caught Matthew Continetti from the Weekly Standard on C-Span this week and that was one of those moments.

Luckily, uniongal at dKos also saw the show and got video of it. Watch the arrogance of this Bill Kristol protégé and see if you don't feel the same impulse.

Adventus: This is what the pursuit of power over our enemies has wrought: we aren't even arguing anymore about whether or not we should be torturing people, but about who should be involved.

skippy the bush kangaroo: The Weekly Standard obfuscates, twists and ignores facts to try to prove that the left side of blogtopia (yes! we coined that phrase!) is losing readership, and therefore influence. Luckily, skippy doesn't let them off easily...

King of Zembla: An amusing acccount of UN Ambassador, John "Revoltin'" Bolton's recent visit to Oxford...

Politics in the Zeros : Gnomedex, the upcoming geek and blog fest in Seattle the end of this month, will feature Sen. John Edwards. This isn't as odd a choice as it may seem, considering Edwards is an active blogger and podcaster, and was an early adopter to boot.

The Week's Cartoons

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: News From Underground...JAZZ from HELL... Assimilated Press...The Memory Hole

What Did The President Know and When Did He Know It?

Ezra Klein:

"Remember those trailers, the Bushies went on and on about post-invasion? The ones that gave Stephen Hayes and The Weekly Standard kids such throbbing hard-ons? The mobile death labs filled with killer biological cocktails whipped up by villainous Iraqi scientists? Yeah?

They were for hydrogen balloons. As for what the president knew and when he knew it; he knew he was lying and he knew it two days before he lied to the American people....read on"