Feb
9
Posted at 22:35 by HTML Mencken
Brad quotes Jacob Weisberg blaming the American public for the nation’s ills:
[O]pinion polls over the last year reflect… a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems. Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulations of financial institutions. But nearly the same proportion says we’re suffering from too much regulation on business. That kind of illogic—or, if you prefer, susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation—is what locks the status quo in place.
It’s funny when a Villager pretends to dislike the status quo. But let’s take Weisberg at his word. He’s frustrated; what should he do about it to make the situation better? Answer: go Galt, and take all the other Villagers with him. Yes, the public is “suscepti[ble] to rhetorical manipulation;” duh. The public wants stuff that works, which is brought about by leftwing solutions that are often lately promised them by politicians yet are constantly undercut in the media by wingnuts on the one hand and Sensible Liberals like Weisberg on the other, when not totally sabotaged by the politicians themselves. Hence, the public’s apparent schizophrenia.
It’s hard to be more Villager than Weisberg; he was offered Skull and Bones membership, spent many years at The New Republic, and was, until recently, editor of the many “contrarian” douchebags at Slate. The TNR connection is the most salient. Consider the following blurb in which Weisberg praises David Frum (yes, that David Frum):
Jacob Weisberg, editor in chief of the Slate Group and a longtime observer of and participant in the political magazine sphere, said, “I think Frum is the most interesting writer they have. You can’t assume he’ll come down on the side of the party line.”
“I think the problem of conservative magazines is they often follow the party line more than liberal magazines,” he said.
Bear that “party line” thing in mind while considering what Weisberg saw fit to write about Israel’s invasion of Lebannon and Robert Farley’s criticism thereof:
We do know enough, however, to divide responsibility for the current war among these players: Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. This has not stopped many analysts in Europe and the United States from laying blame for the violence squarely at a less obvious doorstep—that of the Bush administration.
[I]t’s interesting to see what Weisberg thinks an important contribution really is… To be sure, Weisberg can write anything he wants… But this is part of a pattern with Weisberg; regardless of the issue, he seems to find a way to attack liberals, rather than bother with conservatives who are making egregious and unsupportable claims.
Weisberg is a graduate of The New Republic school of journalism, which is all about attacking liberals. Therefore, Weisberg’s praise of Frum should actually be seen as self-serving. However, Farley is also imprecise in his criticism: there is nothing wrong with not “follow[ing] the party line” and there is nothing wrong with attacking liberals per se, with whatever frequency.
“You’re using a rightwing talking point/frame/trope” is a common call-out phrase among the netroots. But a political point is not necessarily bad or truly rightwing even if it is first communicated by a wingnut (the question of whether the speaker has a right to say it is something else altogether); just because a wingnut says something doesn’t automatically make it false or evil. What’s crucial, for a liberal, is the direction from which it comes; Weisberg, like pretty much all Villagers who claim to be or are advertised as liberal, always attacks from the right or sides with the right. That’s the TNR way, and pretty much everyone who’s worked at that dump — wherever they end up — will uphold the tradition.
Considering the above, it naturally follows, then, that Weisberg:
Weisberg truly blows, but then that’s the nature of his species. The depressing irony of so many TNR graduates, and their clones, loosed on the landscape is that their “contrary” take on the alleged conventional liberal wisdom of the day actually becomes the conventional “liberal” wisdom of the day. Who will offer a “contrarian” take on Weisberg’s Sensible Liberalism? The glibertarian/Randroids had a hard time with that question, finally forcing themselves to believe that he didn’t really mean:
“Liberals lost the support of the nation not because of their ideals,” argues Weisberg, “but as a result of the flawed way they put them into practice.” To regain the public’s trust, he says, today’s Progressives have to advocate a pragmatic, limited government, guided by what he refers to as “five habits of highly effective liberals”: Accept risk, and steer away from policy prescriptions that treat adults as children, or as helpless victims of their environment. Stop overpromising and offer programs that try to alleviate social ills rather than “solving” them. Sunset federal programs frequently, because a “set expiration date fosters a mission mentality [on an agency] rather than a bureaucratic one.” Stop pushing massive new laws that leave most of the regulatory decision-making in the hands of executive branch bureaucrats. And place a limit–as a percentage of national income–on the ability of federal, state, and local governments to tax and spend.
That was 1996. In the years since, thanks to Sensible Liberals like Weisberg, the Overton Window’s moved even farther right. Now it’s 2010, and he can be found at about where one would expect: Yes, he — like his Villager colleagues — is an Obamaton, and will continue to be until the President does something decently radical, which is highly unlikely even though the hopeyness that he would do so was the source of his massive political capital. Now that capital’s worth about as much as AIG stock, but such is the predictable result when you behave in a way of which Jacob Weisberg approves.
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Feb
9
Posted at 3:48 by HTML Mencken
Instaputz catches Rich Lowry in flagrant defapo:
That’ll teach Ana Marie Cox to shut up about assfucking.
Anyway, Instaputz reports (I’m not gonna watch) that Lowry was denouncing Markos Moulitsas as an extremist. That’s rich, Lowry!
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Feb
8
Posted at 23:46 by Gavin M.
Glenn Reynolds, The Washington so-called Examiner:
Glenn Reynolds: Nashville Shows Tea Party Is America’s Third Great Awakening
- Taco Bell Chihuahua: Deliciousness of Gordita Supreme Liberates America to Think Outside Bun.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
Notes:
Title cf. and/or cf.
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Feb
8
Posted at 21:01 by HTML Mencken
Shorter John Yoo
The Weekly Standard
“Getting it Backwards: Obama Misunderstands his Constitutional Role”
- Great Presidents don’t bother with domestic issues; great Presidents exercise their prerogative to blow shit up and have people tortured all over the world. Barack Obama is not a great President.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
MOAR: Sez Yoo:
When Thomas Jefferson entered office 210 years ago, Chief Justice John Marshall warned that Jefferson would “embody himself in the House of Representatives.” This would “increase his personal power,” Marshall predicted, but it would lead to the “weakening of the office of the President.” The chief justice meant that his political rival (and distant cousin) would gain power by joining forces with his party’s legislative majorities. But the combination would realize the Framers’ fear that Congress would come to dominate the executive branch.
Funny, I was just reading a bit on Marshall’s opinion of his cousin last night. “The Democrats are divided into speculative theorists and absolute terrorists. With the latter I am disposed to class Mr. Jefferson.” Many things never change; one is the fear and loathing of the reactionary (Marshall, Yoo) for the perceived left-radical (Jefferson, Obama), another is that perceived left-radicals are never all that radical except to further rightwing interests. Witness, Obama’s extension of most of Bush’s programs and Jefferson’s corrupt when not illegal Western policies.
Anyway, since Yoo constantly invokes the Framers, they reserved for Congress alone the most powerful responsibility over foreign policy: the right to declare war — a fact Yoo omits to mention but then he and people like him have done much to usurp that power for the Executive branch.
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Feb
7
Posted at 16:45 by Brad
Jacob Weisberg, who is apparently working overtime to give Sarah Palin a lifetime’s worth of material for examples of liberal elitism, lashes out at the American public:
In trying to explain why our political paralysis seems to have gotten so much worse over the past year, analysts have rounded up a plausible collection of reasons including: President Obama’s tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, the blustering idiocracy of the cable-news stations, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for any important legislation. These are all large factors, to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit in our current predicament: the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.
Anybody who says you can’t have it both ways clearly hasn’t been spending much time reading opinion polls lately. One year ago, 59 percent of the American public liked the stimulus plan, according to Gallup. A few months later, with the economy still deeply mired in recession, a majority of the same size said Obama was spending too much money on it. There’s nothing wrong with changing your mind, of course, but opinion polls over the last year reflect something altogether more troubling: a country that simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems. Sixty percent of Americans want stricter regulations of financial institutions. But nearly the same proportion says we’re suffering from too much regulation on business. That kind of illogic—or, if you prefer, susceptibility to rhetorical manipulation—is what locks the status quo in place.
Weisberg is, of course, a man of superior judgment. That’s why he helped Bob Rubin write a self-serving autobiography informing us of Rubin’s measured method of probabilistic decision making that gave him exception wisdom in both the business and the political world. And look at how well that’s turned out for him!
Now, I’ve been known to fume and rant about the fickleness of the American voter. They basically want you to balance the budget while cutting taxes and keeping the military, Medicare and Social Security fully funded. That’s, like, insane and so forth and also impossible.
So, OK, the typical American voter won’t ever win awards for deep understanding of policy issues. But I also don’t think Americans are particularly ideological in the sense that most of them either read the Nation or the National Review. Rather, they vote based on a key metric that I like to call the “Is This Guy’s Shit Working for Me?” quotient.
Put it to you like this: FDR was economically farther to the left than just about any president in American history — hell, can you imagine what Glenn Beck would do if Obama ordered the confiscation of all privately held gold as FDR did?
And yet, the American voters elected him to a record four terms as their president. Why? Because his shit was working for them. He took steps through the Works Progress Administration and other initiatives to significantly lower the nation’s horrendous employment situation. He set up Social Security to help ease older workers into retirement to make room for younger workers. The Wagner Act helped make organizing unions easier, which in turn helped people negotiate for better wages.
In other words, he decided that the best course of action during the Depression was to directly help people. Obama and his team of economic wizards so far have settled for a strategy of doing just enough to ensure the economy doesn’t collapse and nothing else. To put it politely, most people are correctly concluding that this shit isn’t working for them. 10% unemployment and a whopping 16% U6 are catastrophically high numbers that are causing immense psychological damage to millions of families across the country. The American people may not be policy wonks, but they know when they’re getting the shaft.
UPDATE: Here’s some classic stuff from Rubin, sounding just like Lord Weisberg:
[T]he economic problems that he did acknowledge were blamed on just about everyone but the major U.S. financial players.
Rubin said part of the problem is that we need a “more educated electorate” to hold politicians accountable. Without that, the U.S. won’t be able to overcome long-term economic challenges, like the troubles surrounding social security and budget deficits, or the new problems created by globalization.
Actually, what we need are more educated elites who know how to run a company without crashing it into the ground.
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Feb
6
Posted at 16:51 by Tintin
ABOVE: Troy Nelson(?) (left); improved American Thinker
Logo (left and right).
Shorter Troy Nelson, The American “Thinker”
The Super Bowl – It’s All About the “Sympathy” Vote
- Barry’s statement that he is rooting for the Saints is further proof that he is a socialist who wants to confiscate white wealth and give it to black “victims.” Me, I’m rooting for the white team. And, no matter how much the Superbowl broadcast begs for money for Haiti, I’m not giving a nickel to those “victims” either.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
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Feb
6
Posted at 11:44 by Sadly, No!
A reader draws our attention to Mark Steyn’s fondness for the writings of Mark Steyn. No sense in quoting all the quotes, but awareness of all internet traditions requires that you read the whole thing.
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Feb
5
Posted at 21:13 by HTML Mencken
Shorter Robert Wright
The New York Times
“The Internet vs. Obama”
- Talk about lobbyists! The internet, which is a rancorous aggregate of special interest groups, loudmouth rabble, and permanently outraged idiots, has basically destroyed the President’s ability to govern. By the way, I host a site called bloggingheads.tv where tepid, Village-approved near-liberals reasonably debate troglodyte reactionaries with an aim of reaching consensus, which is how the internet ought to be.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
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Feb
5
Posted at 17:46 by Brad
So a Republican caller just dialed into NPR and asked, “Why are the Democrats complaining about Republican obstructionism when they control the White House, the House and have 59 senate votes?”
I spontaneously shouted out at my radio:
I’m not sure if it helped anything. But it sure felt good.
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Feb
5
Posted at 15:48 by HTML Mencken
Perhaps the worst music video ever made.
HAZMAT disclaimer: “Starring Pat Boone, Directed by Roger L. Simon”. Cliff May gives it a thumbs up.
I watched it all the way through. My retinas are bleeding, and I just know my DNA has already begun to mutate. Tell my girlfriend I love her. Goodbye, Sadly, No.
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Feb
5
Posted at 9:47 by D. Aristophanes
Was Paul Kirk planning a one-man coup for a Senate seat? Thank goodness BigGovernment’s SusanAnne Hiller was on the case!
Senator Paul Kirk Must Resign His Seat This Morning
by SusanAnne Hiller
Reporting yesterday on Big Government, I reiterated the fact that interim Senator Paul Kirk should have resigned his Senate seat after the election.
Should have resigned his Senate seat. Got it.
However, Kirk certainly has no option but to vacate the MA Senate seat once Brown’s election is certified–all based on Massachusetts state law and Senate rules.
Certainly no option but to vacate the seat. Just so we’re clear. Loopholes? Not a one.
In following-up the story it is being reported by The Hill that Senator-elect Brown will be sworn in about 5PM Thursday, February 4th. …
In learning this information, I wanted to confirm when Senator Kirk was going to resign his interim Senate seat. Staff at Kirk’s office said that he would step down once Brown was sworn in.
OMFG! Constitutional crisis!
The MA law is very clear and Scott Brown will have met the requirements necessary; therefore, Kirk must step down as the senator from Massachusetts tomorrow morning, the moment Brown’s election is certified.
Don’t be coy with us, SusanAnneJoAnneMaryAnn — are you saying that Kirk has to step down from the Senate seat when Scott Brown is cleared to step into it? Because we didn’t get it the first 15 times you said it.
Brown complied with the MA law, won the election, qualified, and has a certified election. All he is asking, at this point, is to rightly and legally take his seat as the Senator from Massachusetts of which Kirk must vacate immediately on the morning of February 4th.
Alas, this never happened, the Eastern Seaboard fell into the ocean, our beloved country was extinguished by an enormous fireball and the terrorists won. DAMN YOU, KIRK!
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Feb
4
Posted at 23:03 by Gavin M.
Above: “…Erick is idle/ Pam’s found a bone…”
Don Surber, the Charleston (WV) Daily Mail:
The peace blimp
- Michael Moore is fat.1 Lookit the dumb liberals.2 Ha-ha, imagine them blown up by terrorists.3
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
Notes:
1 Once nonpareil among conservative witticisms, the ‘Michael Moore is fat’ line is rarely encountered anymore due to the heaps of scorn, the scorncobs and indeed heaping bowls of scornflakes heaped upon it by liberals. The line was in fact a ticism. Because it had no wit to begin with. And no, that’s not funny either, but it seems like a reasonably smart person could labor the kinks out of it somehow, or that Noël Coward might have gotten away with it on an evening of dull company. Cf. ‘stuck on stupid.’
2 Whoopsie, it’s actually Ron Paul’s campaign director. Mr. Surber, we see you there, and please click the play button below.
3 ‘Blown up’ is just an inference, for what he actually says is this:
“Here is what I imagine: The Peace Blimp being hijacked. Ka-boom.”
Since this is Surber, he might in fact be imagining a hijacked Peace Blimp flown into a building and exploding with all the blimp gas ker-fooshing out, like with that one blimp, The Zeppelin, and the radio guy was all “Oh my God,” heh-heh, and you always see the old film footage of it on the History Channel. Radio guy got fired for that too, true fact, and his name was Orson Welles.
Oh, let’s have that trombone again.
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Feb
4
Posted at 21:37 by Brad
Per my item below, it seems that many in the Tea Party crowd are excited to see Colorado Springs descend into a Mad Max-style state of anarchy and chaos:
About time some taxpayers said enough is enough! Bloated salaries and benefits of public employees have to be stopped and REVERSED. Simply let them go and hire private contractors at less than half the price and everything will be fine again.
All uneconomic activity has to stop sometime. And NOW is the time to stop the ludicrous situation of overpaid public employees.
And:
The ratepayers of Colorado Springs are my new heroes.
Congratulations on taking a stand to send a firm message to the politicians. Reduce the services to just the essentials. Get rid of the union jobs and start with a zero-based budget using contractors. Arm the citizens and you will need a lot fewer cops.
And of course, the obligatory racist post:
It all depends on the population. The more “diversity” they have, the worse the prospects of maintaining peace and order. But a racially homogeneous and traditionally American population will probably fare quite well with less cops and will benefit economically from a smaller tax burden.
Last week I entered into my, “Man, WHAT-ever” stage in trying to reason with people. But if you really want to live in a country where you have to hoard guns and stay in a constant state of fear to guard your belongings from roving packs of bandits, hey, I can’t do nothin’ for ya, man, except to say, “Stay the hell outta my neighborhood.” I kind of like the fact that I don’t have to regularly kill people, but if you want to mow down any stranger who steps on your lawn, be my guest.
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Feb
4
Posted at 19:02 by Brad
Get ready, friends. Colorado Springs is just a trial run for what awaits us all:
Colorado Springs cuts into services considered basic by many
This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric.
More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.
The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.
Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.
Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.
City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won’t pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.
This is just awesome. And here’s the best part:
• Though officials and citizens put public safety above all in the budget, police and firefighting still lost more than $5.5 million this year. Positions that will go empty range from a domestic violence specialist to a deputy chief to juvenile offender officers. Fire squad 108 loses three firefighters. Putting the helicopters up for sale and eliminating the officers and a mechanic banked $877,000.
Attention drug dealers! You now have a city where you can practice your trade without hindrance from pesky local authorities!
The bitch of this is that a good chunk of Colorado Springs’ economy rests on tourism. Good luck drawing people to a city that is totally dark at night, that has acres of dead brown grass across its public spaces and that is overrun by criminals due to police cuts. I doubt that even the most dedicated Randroid would have the stomach for crap like this.
(But then again, I’m sure things will get better once the town contracts all public safety functions out to Blackwater.)
HTML adds: Megan McDepratmentle is angry!
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Feb
4
Posted at 17:48 by HTML Mencken
Reviewing, in the NYRB, a new biography of Arthur Koestler, Anne Applebaum quotes her
favorite Koestler moment—in a book full of amazing Koestler moments—is Michael Scammell’s description of an evening in 1946, during which Koestler and his then girlfriend (and later wife) Mamaine Paget went out drinking with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Camus’s wife, Francine.
Needless to say, the evening was full of drunken attention-whoring, in the postwar French style. So they were overwrought; so what?
So, intellectuals don’t behave that way anymore, is Applebaum’s brilliant point:
Leaving aside its entertainment value, that particular passage raises some interesting questions. We are not so many years removed from 1946, in the grand scheme of things. Yet much has changed since then, starting with the rules of acceptable public behavior. It is simply not possible to imagine any three prominent contemporary American public intellectuals—say, Malcolm Gladwell, Niall Ferguson, and David Brooks—indulging in a night on the town such as that one[.]
I think I just puked in my mouth. The first is a glib popularizer at best, the second a garden-variety Tory historian (Thatcherite division) who happens to be both telegenic and have at his command a legion of grad student researchers, the third is a fucking idiot. Finally, the only thing “intellectual” about them is their gift for PR; unlike the 1946 crowd, who were intellectuals in the true and traditional sense of the word, none of these propagandists have made anything close to resembling art, by which I mean here, something brilliant.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Feb
4
Posted at 16:52 by Brad
The two biggest mistakes the Democrats made during the health care reform process were:
a.) Trying to pay for it with cuts to Medicare
b.) Trying to pay for it with a tax that screwed union members
In other words, the Democrats forgot the first rule of smart politics, which is DON’T PISS OFF LARGE NUMBERS OF PEOPLE WHO VOTE FOR YOU.
Now their only hope in the entire world of salvaging things will be if the GOP really decides to pull the trigger on the following “strategy”:
House Republicans don’t have an official budget yet. But they have what amounts to a first draft. The official budget will be released in March or April and will be authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the ranking member of the House Budget Committee in consultation with the other Republicans on the Committee. But Ryan has released a budget he’d like. And it’s actually fairly detailed. And if you read it, which we have, you start to wonder why Democrats aren’t making a bigger deal out of it.
What’s in it? A few interesting things.
First, it calls for big cuts in Social Security benefits for everyone currently under 55 years of age. On top of the cuts it also calls for privatizing Social Security.
Basically the exact plan President Bush tried in 2005. Next, it calls for the full privatization and phasing out of Medicare. It’ll be replaced by a system of vouchers in which instead of getting Medicare you get a voucher to buy un-reformed private insurance.
This budget plan is basically the wingnut id unfiltered by Frank Luntz-approved talking points.
I say to the Republicans: go for it. This plan of yours will raise medical expenses for the elderly by astronomical sums and will lead to many of them going completely bankrupt trying to pay for their care. And then maybe, just maybe, the sight of old people dying in the streets will help Americans to understand that paying taxes for social insurance programs isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
UPDATE: On the other hand!
I think old people could still find a way to get affordable medical care even if they were tossed onto private insurance. And that way is… drum roll… enlisting in the armed forces!
“But the elderly aren’t fit to serve in combat!” you howl in protest.
But that’s the best part! We don’t send them into combat. Rather, we train them to perform the functions of bomb-sniffing dogs and send them out into the field to hunt for IEDs! If you old folks want free health care, it’s time for you to earn your keep!
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Feb
4
Posted at 14:55 by Tintin
ABOVE: Bob Owens demonstrates his own patented method of
self-defense
We briefly interrupt our extended coverage of wingnut wunderkind James “Great White Hope” O’Keefe to bring you breaking news from the backwoods of North Carolina where Bob “Confederate Wanker” Owens has improvidently waded into the “fucking retarded” brouhaha involving Rahm Emanuel. Apparently Rahm referred to some fellow Democrats as “fucking retarded,” and now Owens, the newly-minted defender of the dignity of the developmentally disabled everywhere, has penned a goober-splattered post calling for Rahm Emanuel to be fired, dragged on a rope behind Owens’s pickup for a few miles, and then tied to a fence somewhere until he comes to his senses and apologizes to Trig Palin.
Oops, wait, apparently now even an apology from Emanuel won’t satisfy the Confederate Wankee. Emanuel’s only hope for absolution from the Wankee is for Emanuel to commit ritual disembowelment on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Of course, when Bob Owens done got hisself all het up cause somebody called Democrats “retarded” it doesn’t take Woodward and Bernstein to figure out that there’s a story here somewhere: either Owens has switched parties (about as likely as Pam Geller taking on the hijab) or he’s pooped his own pants before he could grab a gun and run out to his privy in his backyard. Thanks to the miracle of Google, where wondrous things can be found without the need of dressing up as Verizon technician and sneaking into a federal government office building, your faithful Tintin seached the Confederate Wanker website and — lord have mercy I think I’m going to faint now — found this:
I’ve long thought that the mental acuity of the average leftist was highly retarded … .
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.
UPDATE: It is absolutely amazing the things you can learn at Confederate Wanker. Today we learn, in an update to the original post, that when Rahm Emanuel says “retarded’ it’s a noun but when Gomer Owens uses “retarded” it’s a verb. And here I always thought it was neither a noun or a verb but a participial adjective.
SECOND UPDATE: Confederate Wanker is now deleting comments that suggest that his noun-verb distinction is fucking retarded.
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Feb
4
Posted at 4:32 by D. Aristophanes
Andrew Breitbart is giving Tila Tequila a run for the money with an epic, ongoing trainwreck on Twitter. Some highlights:
Permalink
Feb
4
Posted at 2:19 by D. Aristophanes
The Washington Independent’s Dave Wiegel points us to Andrew Breitbart’s first tweets on the breaking story about his boy ward James O’Keefe’s allegedly racist past:
Desperate Salon, Max Blumenthal, Gawker, Village Voice (usual smear artists) lying through teeth over James O’Keefe. Details to come…
Curiously, Breitbart seems to have skipped Phase Two in our predictive model for how he and his cohort would handle this burgeoning scandal, going straight to Phase Three (Sputterings About ‘Hatchet Job’/’Character Assassination’/’Partisan Agenda’).
Breitbart is now tweeting that ‘Weigel DENIES’ that O’Keefe manned a table selling Neo-Nazi claptrap during a White-Man-Negro-Haters Club meet-and-greet held at Georgetown University in 2006.
Odd, because here’s what Weigel says about this:
I was at the 2006 event that leads Blumenthal’s story and can confirm all the details about it.
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Feb
3
Posted at 20:43 by D. Aristophanes
It appears that ACORN-scourge and Andrew Breitbart boy ward James O’Keefe ran into some trouble at college over his alleged use of racial slurs and Stormfront-esque attitude towards non-whites and gays who had the effrontery to be assigned to live on his dormitory floor. Oh, and he also has a pretty nasty habit of palling around with racists, including American Renaissance founder Jared Taylor and random-black-woman-karate-chopper Marcus Epstein.
Hardly shocking to followers of his work, but it’s nice to see O’Keefe’s skeletons displayed for all to see, courtesy of Max Blumenthal and the One People’s Project.
Now the ball is in the court of Breitbart and his apologists (Patterico, we’re looking at you). Having seen this sort of thing play out before, we’ve put together a handy-dandy flow chart for how the ‘James O’Keefe: Total Fucking Racist’ scandal is likely to play out in the wingnutosphere over the coming days:
PHASE ONE: Ignore, Ignore, Ignore ->
PHASE TWO: Demand Nobody Speak Until ‘All The Facts Are In’ ->
PHASE THREE: Sputterings About ‘Hatchet Job’/'Character Assassination’/'Partisan Agenda’ ->
PHASE FOUR: Float ‘Youthful Indiscretions’ and/or ‘Obama-Rev. Wright=Lefty Hypocrisy’ Angles ->
PHASE FIVE: Kerners Are Go! Mission: Discredit Blumenthal, OPP ->
PHASE SIX: ‘Real Scandal’ Is Minor Clerical Error In MSNBC’s Follow-up On Blumenthal/OPP Reporting ->
PHASE SEVEN: Declare Victory ->
PHASE EIGHT: Diligently Scrub Wikipedia Of References To Scandal ->
PHASE NINE: Prefer Simple Reboot Of PHASE ONE In Face Of Future Challenges To PHASE SEVEN Dogma, But If Absolutely Necessary Cite PHASE SIX Findings With Patronizing Sneer
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