•"This would be a vastly better world to live in if Matt Drudge decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire."
•"Follow-up to one hell of a day: Apparently, the Washington Examiner thought it would be fun to write up an item about my dancing at the wedding of Megan McArdle and Peter Suderman. Said item included the name and job of my girlfriend, who was not even there -- nor in DC at all."
•"I'd politely encourage everyone to think twice about rewarding the Examiner with any traffic or links for a while. I know the temptation is high to follow up hot hot Byron York scoops, but please resist it."
•"It's all very amusing to me. Two hundred screaming Ron Paul fanatics couldn't get their man into the Fox News New Hampshire GOP debate, but Fox News is pumping around the clock to get Paultard Tea Party people on TV."
I've spent some time reading around the web, and the main criticism of Weigel seems to be that he wasn't impartial: not only didn't he like the right wing folks he was covering, he despised them.
This is exactly what is wrong with US journalism. The responsibility of reporters is not to be "impartial", their responsibility is to tell the truth. Should reporters have been unmoved by the fact that that Bush was torturing people? Should that not bother them as people? Should they be unmoved by the fact that Obama is still torturing people? Should they be unmoved by the fact that Bush sold a war based on lies, and millions of people were displaced, killed and injured as a result?
Is that we want? Sociopaths who have no personal opinions?
I don't normally get involved in media inside baseball, because 1) it's even more boring to readers than it is to me and 2) "old" media is so last season's Prada shoes, you know?
Far too often, Beltway journalism resembles nothing so much as a high-school lunchroom. That's why, when Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel turned in his resignation yesterday, the Post eagerly accepted. (Morons.)
Weigel is a really good journalist who, although he's a libertarian, doesn't let ideology get in the way of his work. (Sorry, Dave. You have to know you're unusual, right?)
The Post brought him on to cover the Tea Party movement, and he's done an excellent job. So why is he being shown the door? Did he regurgitate false information and start a war? Plagarize? Make racist or anti-Semitic comments? Heck, no. Those things get you your own cable show!
He did the worst thing of all: He made the conservatives cry.
Remember what I said about high school? Like, omigod!
"Okay, like, there's this email list? Called Journolist? And like, this one girl named Betsy Rothstein, who is like, slaving away in a basement and probably really a little J-E-L of Dave Weigel, pumped up her hit count by posting a bunch of emails where Dave trashed some famous conservatives, including that perv Rush Limbaugh. Which got her a link from that icky Matt Drudge, and got Dave a bunch of hate mail from the right-wing whatevers.
"Okay, so Dave's ticked off and tweets something about how Matt Drudge should handle his personal issues by being more responsible, like maybe by publicly setting himself on fire. I mean, a joke, right? Funny! But okay, Dave apologizes to Drudge and Drudge responds by sending the flying monkeys after him again!
"Tucker Carlson, that smarmy little frat boy who used to wear the bowties? Yeah, I know, right? Short! Anyway, he got mad because that guy Ezra wouldn't let him on JournoList and so he decided to publish Dave's emails on his site. You'd think a grown man would have something better to do. I mean, he reproduced and all, maybe he should be home nurturing his clones, or something.
"Okay, okay, okay. Anyway! So Dave turns in his letter of resignation, and that Poindexter over at the Atlantic, Jeff Goldberg - I think he's that guy who picks his nose and eats it, or was that the kid from The Simpsons? Anyway, he, like, totally disses him.
"How could we destroy our standards by hiring a guy stupid enough to write about people that way in a public forum?" one of my friends at the Post asked me when we spoke earlier today. "I'm not suggesting that many people on the paper don't lean left, but there's leaning left, and then there's behaving like an idiot."
I gave my friend the answer he already knew: The sad truth is that the Washington Post, in its general desperation for page views, now hires people who came up in journalism without much adult supervision, and without the proper amount of toilet-training. This little episode today is proof of this. But it is also proof that some people at the Post (where I worked, briefly, 20 years ago) still know the difference between acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior, and that maybe this episode will lead to the reimposition of some level of standards.
"And like, clearly what the Carlton Banks-wannabe means is, oh, Mr. Washington Post, sir, I would never disrespect my elders or color outside the lines. Why would you hire him instead of rehiring MEEEEE???
"Um, everyone knows Jeff's, like, a total tool? Who's more of a stenographer than a journalist, and like, a lot of Iraqi civilians are dead because of his total d-baggery. Like, dead babies and stuff.
"Which you might think would bother him, but apparently not.
"But omigod, they keep wondering why we don't want to read them! Duh!
"Oh hey, what are you wearing to the party tonight?"
"As a result of National Review’s above-the-fray philosophizing," wrote Edwards, "and Barry Goldwater’s vote, on constitutional grounds, against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the albatross of racism was hung around the neck of American conservatism and remained there for decades and even to the present."
This, like so much conservative and libertarian mythologizing, is a large load of bunk.
Conservatives have been associated with racism and white supremacy since at least the days of Dred Scot and John J. Calhoun. It was Southern conservatives who defended slavery, who led the South into secession and civil war and ruin, and who led the resistance to Reconstruction that overturned the verdict of the war and produced a century of Jim Crow and segregation that followed. It was conservatives who authored Plessy v. Ferguson, and it was conservatives who successfully led the fight to prevent Congress from ever passing an anti-lynching law. It was racist Southern conservatives who opposed the civil-rights movement at every turn -- well before Barry Goldwater ever tipped his vote in 1964.
But this kind of mythologizing serves a useful function: By idealizing the actual role of right-wing ideologies in history, it severs them from the historical realities they produced. Trotted out here, it lets us pretend that somehow the racist outcome of Rand Paul's ideology -- he at least told Rachel he wouldn't force private business to not discriminate racially -- are simply an accidental byproduct of his intellectually rigorous and consistent approach. As Blue Texan says, that's pretty pathetic.
Bruce Bartlett, a non-libertarian conservative, sagely observes:
As we know from history, the free market did not lead to a breakdown of segregation. Indeed, it got much worse, not just because it was enforced by law but because it was mandated by self-reinforcing societal pressure. Any store owner in the South who chose to serve blacks would certainly have lost far more business among whites than he gained. There is no reason to believe that this system wouldn't have perpetuated itself absent outside pressure for change.
In short, the libertarian philosophy of Rand Paul and the Supreme Court of the 1880s and 1890s gave us almost 100 years of segregation, white supremacy, lynchings, chain gangs, the KKK, and discrimination of African Americans for no other reason except their skin color. The gains made by the former slaves in the years after the Civil War were completely reversed once the Supreme Court effectively prevented the federal government from protecting them. Thus we have a perfect test of the libertarian philosophy and an indisputable conclusion: it didn't work. Freedom did not lead to a decline in racism; it only got worse.
This is a rhetorical game with very real stakes. It is a game Rand Paul knows well, and obviously plays well -- because it's a game his father, Ron Paul has mastered over his several decades in Congress: camouflaging real extremism with a pleasant facade of mellow libertarian reasonableness.
Indeed, this whole fight is over a facet of Rand Paul's ideology that is nearly identical to his father's. As Josh Marshall observes:
I fear though that that's not the whole story with Paul -- father or son. The truth is that there's a long and hard to explain history of both Pauls being associated with a lot of people who are avowed or crypto-racists. There's the well-known story of Ron Paul's early 1990s era newsletter which was rife with racist and homophobic commentary. Paul later distanced himself from the newsletter, claiming that items written under his name were penned by a ghost-writer and that he wasn't familiar with what had appeared there. And then there was the case back in December in which Rand's Senate campaign spokesman Chris Hightower had to resign because of racist posts on his Myspace page. Looked at in broad terms you've got a couple of guys who apparently aren't racist in any way but happen to stumble their way into close associations with racists with an astonishing frequency. It's almost like a painful race version of that classic Onion headline: "Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My ----." There is of course the fact that Ron Paul became the darling of numerous skinhead and white supremacist groups -- but that's in a very different category because you're not responsible for who supports you but what you yourself support.
You may not have heard of Lance Baxter, aka D.C. Douglas, but you have heard him. Baxter is the voice-over announcer on Geico commercials who tells you you could save money with Geico. To be clear, he is NOT the voice of the gecko or one of the cavemen. And now, he is unemployed.
Actor Lance Baxter, otherwise known as "D.C. Douglas," currently known as the man who informs you how much GEICO can save you on car insurance, left a message last month with FreedomWorks in which he asked the group how many "mentally retarded" people it had on staff and what it would do when a tea partyer "killed someone." On April 14, FreedomWorks put his voicemail online.
Today, Douglas reports he's been dropped from GEICO's campaign.
Dave is being too kind to FreedomWorks. Not only did they put his voicemail online, they put his cell phone number online and encouraged others to call both him and his employer. Breitbart (and you know he would manage to slime his way into this story) has both Douglas's original phone call, but the return call he got from FreedomWorks. I'm not clear how they managed to tie that phone call from Douglas to him and with his gig for Geico, but they did. PRWeb:
Matt Kibbe, President and CEO of FreedomWorks, posted Mr. Douglas' cell phone number in a blog post on biggovernment.com, instructing readers to "Feel free to contact (him)… call his employer too. Let them know that you…are now in the market for car insurance." The next day, GEICO held auditions to replace Mr. Douglas' voice on the campaign.
Mr. Douglas' message hardly warranted the mobilization of the Tea Party Movement. Upset by the recent gay and racial slurs slung by Tea Party members at Congressman Barney Frank and Representative John Lewis during the Health Care Reform Weekend, Mr. Douglas left his opinion of FreedomWorks' staff and followers on their company voicemail and included his phone number.
"I called as a private citizen to make a complaint," explains Mr. Douglas. "Racism and homophobia are my Achilles heal, but unfortunately my message included inappropriate words and I am sorry for that. However, telling their members to harass my employer to get me fired is an egregiously disproportionate response to my actions."
Mr. Douglas believes his connection to GEICO, a company already on FreedomWorks' boycott list for pulling their ads from Glenn Beck's show, is the main reason he was targeted so forcefully. "Even though I left the message during the week of March 23, the harassing calls didn't hit until April 14, the morning after I posted about my GEICO campaign on my Facebook page."
Aha! They were smarting already and decided to go with a campaign of personal destruction. I can see that moving the country in a better direction...not.
So consequence-free Free Speech for me but not for thee, you FreedomWorks teabaggers? Chalk up yet another notch for incredible hypocrisy.
His website, Big Government, is similarly developing a reputation for running blatantly dishonest commentary, often in the cause of defending the videos and their makers or likewise attacking ACORN. The latest example was pointed out by Matt Tatum at AmSpec and Dave Weigel, who both called out this atrocity from "historian" Michael Zak at Andrew Breitbart's "Big Government" blog:
Democrats used the Klan to suppress their political opposition, with vote fraud and intimidation and violence. Klansmen aimed at African-Americans, nearly all Republicans in those days, and at white Republicans who tried to help them. Once threatened by the KKK, Republicans could in many cases save their lives only by publicly swearing allegiance to the Democratic Party. According to a southern governor, "Few Republicans dare sleep in their houses at night."
"The suppression of enough GOP votes could ensure a Democratic victory," wrote one historian. "There's no question that Klansmen closely watched the polls" - easy to do before the secret ballot was introduced in the United States in the 1880s. All too often, Republican ballots were not even counted.
Like ACORN, the Ku Klux Klan operated with impunity until Republican politicians and journalists sounded an alarm. In 1869, Nathan Bedford Forrest, the KKK's Grand Dragon, ordered the Klan disbanded. Why? The national organization was getting too much attention, so Klansmen would have to soldier on in state-level organizations, such as the Red Shirts in South Carolina and the Men of Justice in Alabama. Nonetheless, most members of these spin-off groups considered themselves to be Klansmen.
Good God. It's hard to know where to begin. Let's try with Weigel's observation:
The fact that the KKK suppressed and terrorized black voters while ACORN, well, doesn’t — sort of left out here.
More to the point, the entire raison d'etre of the Klan was to disenfranchise black voters, to terrorize them into submission and to ensure that they could not participate as full citizens. According to historians, they killed an estimated 20,000 people in the years 1866-1870 alone (see Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, p. 49). Indeed, the Klansmen of the postwar period essentially negated the war's outcome by destroying Reconstruction through a campaign of terrorist violence that encompassed massacres, white citizen militias destroying black townships, and the complete destruction of the voting franchise for black people, thereby ensuring white rule for the next century and beyond. (For more on this, be sure to read Stephen Budiansky's riveting account, The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War, which was excerpted in the New York Times.)
ACORN's very raison d'etre, in blazing contradistinction from the KKK, is to enfranchise minority voters and bring them into the American democratic system. That is to say, its very existence is about repairing the damage created by the Klan and its legacy of Jim Crow and segregation -- damage that remains with us to this day. Moreover, its established means of doing so are peaceful and democratic: voter-enrollment drives and education work, empowering minority communities to achieve economic and politic equity. That was what the Klan was devoted to preventing.
"Our tax dollars should go to weapons to defeat [terrorists] not lawyers to defend them."
"Raising taxes and giving new rights to terrorists is the wrong agenda for our country."
And his crowd is chanting "yes we can."
Scott Brown is trying to make believe he's a change agent, but really he's just another teabagger, as you can see. The Democratic firing squad is under way on the left, and what we're hearing is that it's either Coakley's fault or President Obama's fault or both for the clusterf&!k that led to Brown's victory, but pundits and readers are overlooking the role conservatives and their media infrastructure played in the process. To me, that's something that can't be ignored. I mean, Scott Brown did have help.
Dave Weigel followed the teabaggers in MA and explains that the right has something the left just doesn't have: An incredible media machine that is able to transmit their message faster and more powerfully than anything the Democrats have. Brown was able to turn to a bunch of conservative media outlets immediately, and ultimately that got his campaign off and running.
Brown’s short campaign–he announced for the seat on September 12, 2009, the very day that many Tea Party activists participated in a “taxpayer march on Washington”–masterfully wove together traditional campaign strategy and outreach to old and new conservative media. The arc of his victory demonstrated just how the modern conservative movement can boost a campaign without generating a backlash from voters. His online campaign strategist, Rob Willington, explained to TWI that Brown focused early on outreach to conservative media and built on that with technology that let local and out-of-state activists grab a piece of the campaign.
“I concentrated on specific conservative opinion leaders here in Massachusetts for the first part of the campaign,” said Willington. “Right around Christmas, I started targeting some national political leaders, using certain hashtags, and using video.”
There's going to be an amusing showdown someday between the teabaggers and the old-line conservatives in the Republican Party. And it's looking like Sarah Palin is going to be the bone of contention:
A poll of GOP insiders suggests that ex-AK Gov. Sarah Palin (R) has little support among the party's professional class -- and maybe that's just how she wants it.
In a survey of 109 party leaders, political professionals and pundits, Palin finished 5th on the list of candidates most likely to win the party's '12 WH nomination. Ex-MA Gov. Mitt Romney (R) was the overwhelming choice of the
Voters were asked to rank 5 candidates in the order of likeliness to capture the GOP nod. The results:
Likely To Win WH'12 Nomination (First place votes)
Ex-MA Gov. Mitt Romney 81 points (62%)
MN Gov. Tim Pawlenty 46 (9%)
Sen. John Thune 38 (12%)
MS Gov. Haley Barbour 28 (6%)
IN Gov. Mitch Daniels 25
Ex-AK Gov. Sarah Palin 25
And it's clear that Palin is aligning herself with the Tea Partiers, eschewing the annual CPAC convention and instead lining herself up to speak at the Tea Party convention instead. Of course, as Dave Weigel reports, it doesn't hurt that the latter is a much better-paying gig:
“I’d speculate that Palin’s making at least $35,000 or $50,000, with $50,000 being more likely” said Eric Odom, executive director of the American Liberty Alliance, which is doing a promotional exchange for the convention. “I mean, Glenn Beck charges $60,000, $70,000 and a private jet.” He wasn’t planning this part of the convention, but he supported the Palin booking and argued that the convention was “as grassroots as it gets.”
Still, no one disputes that Palin is getting a healthy fee for appearing at the conference — and that’s a big difference between this and CPAC.
“We don’t pay honorarium, travel or hotel expenses for any speakers, past or future,” said Lisa de Pasquale, the director of CPAC.
While the cheapest ticket to the Tea Party Convention–one that doesn’t include the final banquet and dinner speech from Palin–costs $349, a basic CPAC ticket costs $175.
In other Palin news, we also learn from Politico that her debate coaches feared they were headed for an "epic debacle." It wasn't, of course, so "not a debacle" is now the standard for a successful GOP performance.
David Weigel at the Washington Independent dug up this photo of Dale Robertson, who heads up the would-be national Tea Party website TeaParty.org, with the sign he was carrying at the February 27, 2009 Tea Party in Houston.
According to Weigel, Robertson was eventually kicked out of the event for carrying the sign. But as with most right-wing populist movements, the most extreme elements are very determined to shape the movement in their direction, and will inevitably find ways to float to the top. Especially when the supposed mainstream "just folks" who populate much of the movement turn a willing blind eye to the extremists who increasingly are leading them.
As Weigel notes, Robertson has arranged a series of "Liberty Concerts" to help promote the Tea Party movement. An e-mail sent out to subscribers to news from ResistNet -- one of the major clearinghouses of Tea Party activist information -- described Robertson's plans:
Robertson is molding the Tea Party events to empower Citizens so they will make a difference in the November 2010 elections. The ongoing tactics are to prioritize States, creating a durable model for ballot access, voter eligibility, precinct chair/county chairs, and candidate awareness. The Tea Party is actively seeking candidates that represent Conservative Constitutional Values. It appears the Major Parties can’t get in step with such a complex idea as Conservative Constitutional Values; therefore, the Tea Party will make it easy for the Independent Parties to break the glass ceiling and get on the ballot.
The ‘Liberty Concerts’ event taking place in Stafford, Texas is a developing prototype, which when successful, will allow the Tea Party to create a thriving event not in months but days. We will be quick on the draw, sure fired and ready to rock in a matter of only a few days. This Tea Party formula will work against incredible odds and will be nothing short of a miracle, but Robertson believes with all his heart all the pieces will fall into place.
Does the Tea Party really believe it can make a difference in November? “Some say, “talk is cheap” but 2 years ago when I started the modern day Tea Party no one believed it could work now 7 million strong, the world is listening and America is hoping, we will not fail.” Dale Robertson – TeaParty.org
As Tars Tarkas notes, the folks at ResistNet put out a disclaimer of sorts:
This is in response to the blast mail you received regarding the Liberty Concert being promoted by the National Tea Party group. The purpose of the email was to share an opportunity for you to experience the fellowship and company of other conservatives, as we kick off the election season and strive to take back America, restoring it to the Constitutional Republic it is meant to be. While they are a separate group from us, we share many of the same goals, a free, conservative America, and fiscal responsibility within our government. We are not necessarily promoting their complete ideology.
It's hard to say why ResistNet is even bothering to distance itself; it is, after all, a site riddled throughout with extremists of various stripes, as suggested by its reference to "the Constitutional Republic" in its disclaimer. After all, this is a site that hosts a copy of Louis Beam's essay, "Leaderless Resistance," which was nothing less than the basic blueprint for forming cells of "citizen militias" and "lone wolf" domestic terrorists as the blueprint for action of the white-nationalist far right. Beam, you may recall, was a leader in the Aryan Nations.
This is a movement that is not only riddled throughout with far-right extremists, but is increasingly being led by them. And no doubt they'll keep producing reminders of that for us.
Nothing surprises me with Michelle. She tries so hard to be Ann Coulter. I started her fall from grace when the UC Santa Cruz students contacted me because she had printed their personal information on her website and they received numerous threats. Unfortunately, UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Denise Denton, commited suicide and she still has to smear the lady.
