A sinister plot-Operation Yellow Elephant

Jesus General has sent a new email to the Four Horsemen of the Spokane Young Republicans.

Check out their responses.

The moistened lips of victory

Jesus General's newest letter to the Nathan Taylor, Chairman of Young Republicans National Committee is priceless.

Dear Mr. Taylor, I was shocked by the news that dangerous leftists are planning to infiltrate your convention and attack your veterans exhibit. Kudos to you for discovering their despicable plot...read on"

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You have to read Taylor's response to the leftists attacks. "The e-mails label the Convention attendees as “repuglicans” and “Wingnuts” and call upon fellow leftists to focus their protests on “a panel discussion with recently returned Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.”

Notice how Taylor lies and tries to say that the lefties are attacking the panel because our troops are there. Again this is priceless. The Special Ops are working.

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Yesterday on his Fox News show, Glenn Beck tried to tell us the noble tale of intrepid citizens who are now taking on the mantle of real journalism.

Of course, for those of us in the blogosphere, this is something of an old story. But for Beck, apparently, it's a brand spanking new concept!

But then, his idea of what constitutes such a citizen journalist is a little bit skewed ...

First, take Charlie Rangel — the perfect example of sleazy government. He's the head of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, yet he has allegedly failed to pay some taxes and is also part of an open ethics investigation.

Watch what happened when a citizen, not a journalist, approached with some questions:

[Plays video]

OK, granted, that may have been a little uncomfortable because Rangel was ambushed. But the bigger issue is that we now have citizens doing the job that the media just won't do.

Remember when the media was known as the "fourth branch of government" because they actually served as a check against the government's power? Ah, the good old days. Now we actually need to have citizens roaming the halls of Congress to ask questions the media should've been asking months ago!

Since the year started, the mainstream media Web sites — ABC, CBS and NBC — didn't cover the Rangel controversy once, even though there was a vote to try to strip him of his chairmanship last month. For comparison, those same sites covered "Octomom" dozens of times; NBC alone had 30 references to her.

Beck then hosted an appearance by the young man who accosted Rangel, Jason Mattera, during which they proceeded to bash both Rangel and the traditional press.

Now, Beck has never been a journalist, so no doubt his idea of what kinds of questions journalists are supposed to ask are probably formed by a combination of watching bad movies and reading Bernie Goldberg. But in case he's wondering, no one has covered the Rangel story because there's no there there; the only thing any reporter could ask would involve wild speculation based on right-wing propaganda. And since journalists are not paid propagandists, they have a professional ethical obligation to avoid that kind of questioning.

However, paid propagandists have no such compunction, of course, and are free to ambush whoever they like -- though they shouldn't be surprised to get a hostile reception to such nonsense.

And a paid propagandist and political hack operative is exactly what Jason Mattera is:

Jason Mattera is a spokesman for the Young America's Foundation and has been described as "one of the top young conservative activists in the entire country."

This clown has pulled other, even more notorious stunts, such as viciously attacking Mathew Shepard's mother, helping create a whites-only scholarship at Roger Williams University, and half-assedly attacking Al Gore over global warming. He's also not very keen on press rights for progressive reporters.

You may remember Mattera best, though, from 2005, when he became known as one of the country's most prominent chickenhawks:

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I think citizen journalists are great, since I kinda are one. But Jason Mattera is not a citizen journalist. That's evident not just in his background, but in the dumbass, purely propagandistic "when did you stop beating your wife?" questions he tried throwing at Rangel, too.

But then, on Planet Wingnuttia, only hacks are deemed "journalists."

From those wacky guys at The Full Ginsburg. Open Thread below...

Perhaps smarting from how bad they came across in the Max Blumenthal videos of CPAC and the Young Republicans convention (and even they are minimally self-aware enough to have figured out that they looked really, really bad), there were some conservatives looking to make the netroots look equally hack-y at the YearlyKos convention.

So predictably, Malkin, Drudge and the NRO (I won't link to them because they deserve your scorn, not your hits) trumpeted that a soldier was censored by Kossacks trying to speak in defense of the military. Because, you know, liberals don't support the troops like the right does. (/snark) Such a tired and vastly unsubstantiated meme. Here's the exchange in question:

So technically, what the right wingers said is what happened.  However, here is where they are fundamentally dishonest (*gasp!* Malkin, Drudge and PajamasMedia, dishonest?  Shocking, I know): the sergeant in question was told repeatedly that he would be in violation of the UCMJ if he made any kind of political speech in uniform.  You can't hear it from the video here, but according to witnesses, the sergeant ADMITTED HE KNEW HE WAS BREAKING THE RULES:

Soltz, who is still a Captain in the Reserves, at that point had heard all he wanted to hear.  As an officer, he took it upon himself to reprimand the sergeant for breaking the Uniform Code of Military Justice, left the stage, and went to confront the soldier.  In fact, if he hadn't reprimanded the soldier, he could have been seen as condoning the act-and none of us wanted to do that. [..]

The bottom line is this: The sergeant in uniform was completely out of line as far as the military is concerned.  The fact that he did what he did reflected on the entire Army and I think that's what upset Jon the most.

In the Pajamas Media video of the scene, even the sergeant readily admits that he was breaking the rules.  And that's not what the Army is about.  So this wasn't about stifling dissent.  It was about an intruder who had no respect for the Kossacks who'd paid to attend, as well as no desire maintain military bearing while in uniform.

The whole account is here.  So for the right-wingers who want to crow about this...let it be known what really happened.

I was wondering if Duncan Hunter would enlist the "xenophobic" Minutemen and the Young Republicans to help build the "Great wall of Hunter?"

Wrong Brothers

I hope MTV puts them on. Then I'd like a show that focused on the reactions of their target audience responding to them. We can make a reality show out of it. Of course, we'd have to carefully screen the participants for Young Republicans and paid operatives.

Nico:RightMarch.com, a conservative online advocacy group, has launched a campaign trying to get a right-wing musical duo, The Right Brothers, onto MTV...read on for the lyrics...

Keith Olbermann supplies a much needed video to the ridiculous audio.

Download | play -WMP- Download | play -QT

Rush Limbaugh leads this new campaign for all Young Republicans and reaches out to the likes of Ben Shapiro and Nathan Tabor. -(link fixed)

Ex Cathedra

Don’t pretend you support the military. You don’t. You just support the war…. [S]ave the lectures on patriotism and who wants us to lose the war. You do. You aren’t serving. — Steve Gilliard
I wonder how many young Republicans realize that their personal decision to support the war, but stay home themselves, is stacking up to bury them under an avalanche of public contempt? Probably none of them. We criticize this Republican President as living in a bubble, but I think the pampering and attention and money and connections YRs are getting from Republican insiders is building an even thicker bubble around them.

They’ll be casualties themselves — not in the sense of joining the 1,800 dead and 13,000 wounded Americans they sent to fight for them. But they’ll discover that even their own despicable definition of “combat” has casualties. They’ll find themselves dumped, on the outside, irrelevant and shunned.

The “Yellow Elephant” meme started as a prank, but lately it seems to have touched some deeper feelings about the kind of people who get us into wars. And as soon as the Republican elites get wind of this, they’ll drop these YRs like a live grenade. They’ll be casualties without blood, without risk, and without honor.

NCLB Unpopular        Pacific Views:

I wonder how many young Republicans realize that their personal decision to support the war, but stay home themselves, is stacking up to bury them under an avalanche of public contempt? Probably none of them. We criticize this Republican President as living in a bubble, but I think the pampering and attention and money and connections YRs are getting from Republican insiders is building an even thicker bubble around them.

They’ll be casualties themselves — not in the sense of joining the 1,800 dead and 13,000 wounded Americans they sent to fight for them. But they’ll discover that even their own despicable definition of “combat” has casualties. They’ll find themselves dumped, on the outside, irrelevant and shunned.

The “Yellow Elephant” meme started as a prank, but lately it seems to have touched some deeper feelings about the kind of people who get us into wars. And as soon as the Republican elites get wind of this, they’ll drop these YRs like a live grenade. They’ll be casualties without blood, without risk, and without honor.