Rep. Peter King, in his opening remarks this morning to kick off his congressional hearings on the "problem" of "Muslim radicalization":
This Committee cannot live in denial which is what some
would have us do when they suggest that this hearing dilute its focus by
investigating threats unrelated to Al Qaeda. The Department of Homeland
Security and this committee were formed in response to the al Qaeda
attacks of 9/11. There is no equivalency of threat between al Qaeda and
neo-Nazis, environmental extremists or other isolated madmen. Only al
Qaeda and its Islamist affiliates in this country are part of an
international threat to our nation. Indeed by the Justice
Department’s own record not one terror related case in the last two
years involved neo-Nazis, environmental extremists, militias or anti-war
groups.
He was reminded in short order by Democrat Bennie Thompson:
[H/t Karoli for the videos]
I want to reiterate, however, my belief that a hearing on the linkage
between extreme ideology and violent action be a broad-based
examination. Yesterday, the FBI made an arrest in a recent Martin Luther
King Day bombing attempt. News reports identify the suspect as a member
of the same white supremacist group that influenced Oklahoma City
bomber Timothy McVeigh. I urge you, Mr. Chairman, to hold a hearing
examining the Homeland Security threat posed by anti-government and
white supremacist groups.
As a committee on Homeland Security, our mission is to examine
threats to this nation's security. A narrow focus that excludes known
threats lacks clarity and may be myopic.
Indeed, as Zaid Jilani at ThinkProgress explains,
not only was King embarrassingly wrong about right-wing domestic
terrorist of recent vintage, he was wrong about the past year as well --
in which there were four terrorism incidents involving neo-Nazis. And
that doesn't begin to count the militia cases, beginning with the
Hutaree folks.
For what it's worth, American neo-Nazis are indeed frequently linked
up with likeminded fascists in Europe and Australia, and yes, they are
all outspoken in their desire to topple the United States government.
Peter King may be living in denial, but the rest of us should know that
neo-Nazism is indeed an international terrorist conspiracy to destroy
America. In case you were wondering.
If you want to see conservatives get all twisted into knots, try
asking them why, if it makes sense for Peter King to hold his
Islamophobic hearings on the supposed threat of domestic terrorism from
Muslim Americans, we shouldn't hold similar hearings examining why we're seeing a real surge in domestic terrorism by right-wing extremists.
MALVEAUX: If you can from your study of tracking radical
groups, potentially hate groups, what do you think of this hearing? Is
al Qaeda radicalizing Muslims? Is that our biggest homegrown terrorism
threat right now?
POTOK: Well, I think it's not our biggest domestic terror threat. I
think that pretty clearly comes from the radical right in this country.
Although I would certainly not minimize the threat of jihadist terrorism
in this country. Obviously, we have seen a fair amount of it.
Of course, O'Reilly deceptively edited out the last two sentences, and then replied:
O'REILLY: Are you kidding me? The radical right? The last
terror act assigned to them was the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. I
mean, think about what the guy just said.
Muslim terrorists have killed
tens of thousands of people all over the world, correct?
How many people have the radical right killed?
Well, Bill, just to get you up to speed: There have been many, many
more right-wing terrorist acts on American soil since 1995 -- including
the bombing of the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, just for starters.
Which not only raises the question, "Why not hold hearings to explore
the growing radicalization of far-right extremists?", but a similarly
pertinent: "Where are the media?"
Potok also had the audacity to point out that if a Muslim lawmaker
were to hold hearings on right-wing fundamentalist Christians' roles in
the radicalization of far-right extremists, the pitchforks would be out
en masse.
Of course, Dana Perino disagrees,
claiming (in the source of this week's biggest belly laugh): "If there
was a hearing on radicalization amongst Christianity, there would have
been no protesters". Yeah, those of us who remember the endless right-wing shrieking
over the Department of Homeland Security's bulletin for law enforcement
about the threat of increasing right-wing extremism -- they were
insulting mainstream conservatives and veterans and calling them
terrorists! -- got a good long laugh over that one.
Exhibit A that Potok was on the money was O'Reilly's outrage -- which
bubbled up beyond his opening Talking Points Memo segment, attacking
both Potok and Ezra Klein for bringing up Christian extremists (though
frankly, Klein's remarks about "Christian kids" supposedly involved in
school shootings as part of the domestic-terrorism picture was in fact
off-base). But O'Reilly thought it was outrageous, just outrageous, that
anyone would think the radical right still posed a significant
terrorist threat to Americans, and had on both Alan Colmes and Monica
Crowley to talk it over some more.
And it's really shameful on O'Reilly's case, because one of the more
vivid terrorist acts of the past couple of years committed by a
right-wing extremist was the assassination of Dr. George Tiller by in
Kansas -- a murder for which O'Reilly bore no small chunk of culpability.
But then, it has since become an article of faith among right-wingers
that domestic terrorists who assassinate abortion providers are not
terrorists at all. Sarah Palin, we recall, refused to acknowledge that abortion-clinic attacks were domestic terrorism.
Along similar lines, there was Palin this weekend, claiming that
Gerald Loughner's lethal attack on Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona in
January was in any way related to terrorism:
PALIN: Why is the administration so naive in assuming the
American public is going to accept a comment like P.J.'s that
essentially equates a crazed maniac in Arizona, shooting Gabbie Giffords
to this terrorist who tried to and was successful in gunning down our
servicemen overseas as he did yell out Allahu Akbar?
O'Reilly and Crowley similarly dismissed such notions. But the reality is that Loughner's act was clearly terrorist in intent,
and it's similarly clear that his twisted worldview came straight out
of the radical right, including most notably the paranoid alternative
universe of Alex Jones.
It seems that conservatives' mania for whitewashing away the
existence of far-right domestic terrorism is reaching a fever pitch just
at the same time that it's actually becoming resurgent -- and it never
seems to occur to them that in doing so, they are creating cover and
giving them implicit permission to proceed apace. Funny how that works.
You all remember that "isolated event" on MLK Day in Spokane,
where someone left a bomb in a backpack along the day's parade route, a
bomb that would have been extremely lethal if it had not been
discovered.
A significant break in Martin Luther King Day backpack
bomb investigation in Spokane occurred this morning when an FBI SWAT
team executed a search warrant and reportedly made one arrest Wednesday
morning in the small northeastern Washington town of Addy.
FBI officials weren’t immediately available for comment, but
indicated the name of the suspect would be forthcoming in a news
release.
The case has been investigated as a case of domestic terrorism.
Addy is a community in Stevens County, in the northeastern corner of
Washington state, bordering Canada. The county has long been a hotbed
of extremist and Christian Identity activity.
Of course, in Spokane, no one was calling this an "isolated event.
An ex soldier with ties to the white supremacist movement has been taken
into custody in connection with the planting of a backpack bomb along
the planned route of the Martin Luther King Jr. March in downtown
Spokane, authorities have confirmed.
Kevin William Harpham, 36, of Colville, could face life imprisonment
on charges of attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and
possession of an unregistered explosive device, according to documents
on file in U.S. District Court. An initial court appearance is scheduled
for this afternoon.
Harpham was arrested this morning during a raid at his home near
Addy, Wash. by dozens of federal agents who had been assembling in
Spokane during the past few days.
The Southern Poverty Law Center confirmed that Harpham in 2004 was a
member of the National Alliance, which is one of the most visible white
supremacist organizations in the nation.
It was founded by the late William Pierce, who authored The Turner Diaries,
a novel about a future race war. That book was believed to be the blue
print behind the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh.
“What to me this arrest suggests is that the Martin Luther King Day
attack is what it always looked like: A terror-mass murder attempt
directed at black people and their sympathizers,” said Mark Potok, who is the director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project that tracks and investigates hate groups.
So James O'Keefe, the lying criminal scam artist whose deceptively
edited videos -- along with a complicit media who swallowed them whole
-- brought down ACORN has scored another scalp with his latest hit job targeting NPR:
Not only has Ron Schiller, the fool caught on video being way too frank
with strangers, stepped down in advance of his planned departure, but NPR CEO Vivian Schiller (no relation) is out, too.
Not a bad day's work for a lying criminal scam artist.
Naturally, Fox News was all over the story, with every one of its
evening-show hosts -- O'Reilly, Hannity, and Van Susteren -- featuring
segments on the video. Of course, there was only scant mention of the
fact that O'Keefe was a lying criminal scam artist whose track record of
deceptive editing was well-established. As Ellen at Newshounds puts it:
"Who Cares If James O'Keefe Is A Lying Creep With A Criminal History?
He Hates ACORN And NPR, So What's Not To Like If You're Fox News?"
But really, what can you expect from a news organization with such a
sterling record of running like scared sheep whenever conservatives get
out their Full Umbrage schtick and run at them and their federal funding
with it? Sure enough, the first people to toss Schiller under the bus were his colleagues at NPR.
No doubt at Fox this will be spun as a defeat of a "liberal" media
organ, except that NPR is anything but a liberal entity. They specialize
in classic spineless-Beltway-liberal behavior -- hippie-bashing,
conventional-wisdom genuflection, he-said-she-said 'balance' in its
reporting and the-left-does-it-too false equivocation. It's why Juan
Williams managed to hang on as long as he did, and why Mara Liasson is
still there.
And in this case, it's pretty funny. As the WaPo's Stephen Stromberg noted, it's hard to see exactly what it is we're supposed to be outraged about.
After all, what has the Fox folks outraged were his comments about
the Tea Party -- which actually were perfectly defensible renditions of
cold fact. Are Greta and Byron really trying to pretend that there
weren't Tea Partiers bringing loaded weapons out to public rallies?
Really?
All in all, it's a classic one-day non-story. Hope the Fox reporters
enjoy their bit of breathlessness.
Who knows what piece of recycled
propaganda from lying criminal artists they'll treat as legitimate news
next.
"We went from being a privileged group to all of a sudden becoming
whites, the new victims,'' says Charles Gallagher, a sociologist at La
Salle University in Pennsylvania who researches white racial attitudes
and was baffled to find that whites see themselves as a minority.
"You have this perception out there that whites are no longer in control or the majority. Whites are the new minority group."
Call it racial jujitsu: A growing number of white Americans are
acting like a racially oppressed majority. They are adopting the
language and protest tactics of an embattled minority group, scholars
and commentators say.
Considering the racial angst that underlies so much of the Tea Party
movement, this actually might have been an interesting and worthwhile
subject to tackle. And it starts out promisingly, with quotes from smart
people like Tim Wise, discussing the role of economic insecurity in
these fears.
But then it devotes a great deal of space to the views of people like
the Political Cesspool's James Edwards and VDare's Peter Brimelow --
hate-group leaders who are allowed to basically spew their venom as
though their ideas were worth considering in the first place. And
there's not a word devoted to discussing the hatefulness of the core
ideology they promoted.
The most glaring problem with CNN's treatment of Brimelow
and Edwards is that it presents the nature of their views as a he
said/she said matter -- i.e., the Southern Poverty Law Center says they
run hate groups, but they deny that. Any fair-minded look at their
public statements would show that they espouse the view that minorities
are inferior to white people.
Another important point about this treatment of white racial anxiety:
It is completely unfair to white people who don't hold hateful views of
minorities. If you are seeking perspective on "what white people think
about race," you have committed journalistic malpractice by quoting
people like Brimelow and Edwards. They can't be said to be in any way
representative of what white people think.
Treating Brimelow and Edwards this way has the same effect as
treating the New Black Panther Party as representative of black people.
They're not. Plain and simple.
It's one thing to lend space to the views of racial hatemongers. It's
quite another to do so without any kind of countering opinion. Yet the
closes the CNN piece comes to doing that is to simply mention that the
SPLC considers the subjects to be extremists -- as if that bit of proxy
is all that's needed to explain to readers that no, really, white people
are the opposite of being oppressed.
Gregory also observes:
Even if your goal is to accurately report on the views of people who
hold "pro-White" views or sympathize with "white nationalists," setting
up interviews with them and disseminating their message to a wider
audience is the wrong way to go about it. People who are openly bigoted
make plenty of statements about what they think, which could easily be
quoted. Allowing them to offer fresh thoughts through your reporting
presents them an opportunity to promote their views.
This is, of course, always a danger when it comes time to report on
white supremacists of various stripes: In order for your readers to
understand them, you have to present their views. But to do so without
explaining to those same readers why these views are misbegotten and
grounded in misconceptions, lies and pure bigotry is, in fact,
profoundly irresponsible.
It's hard to say why it happened, but all of a sudden Bill O'Reilly decided last night to stop tossing Sarah Palin the usual softball questions and Hannity Jobs
she's become accustomed to during her tenure at Fox News. He asked her
to finally get specific instead of bloviating in vague generalities
about where and how she's achieve the budget cuts she's calling for.
It made for the entertaining sight of the Mama Grizzly growling growling at the Poppa Bear:
O'REILLY: Wait, wait, wait. Wait, wait, wait I just want
to be very clear. So 55, anybody over keeps the social security that
they have coming to them, but younger --
(CROSS TALK)
PALIN: When we --
(CROSS TALK)
O'REILLY: -- or whatever the revision is?
PALIN: -- when we talk about increasing -- when we talk about
increasing the retirement age, there is a good proposal on the table, a
good idea to look at age 55 that all of this does have to be looked at.
But we need to quit assuming that government can, better than we as
individuals, plan our retirement for us than our security they're
stating - -
(CROSS TALK)
O'REILLY: Ok, I got -- I got all that.
(CROSS TALK)
PALIN: -- and we need to --
(CROSS TALK)
O'REILLY: -- but I got to get specific here, Governor. All right, so
what you're saying is instead of 52 it goes to 55. So you can't draw on
it until 55. Some people want mandatory retirement age where you would
have to take it raised up to about 67.
Are you for that? Do you want to raise that mandatory age to 67 retirement? Is that --
(CROSS TALK)
PALIN: Everything -- everything is going to have to change for those
who are enrolled in the program now and will be enrolled in the program
now. But we do not change the pension benefit --
(CROSS TALK)
O'REILLY: I -- I agree. The people who --
(CROSS TALK)
PALIN: -- of those who are receiving it now and that what's people care --
O'REILLY: -- brought in and the people who need it --
(CROSS TALK)
PALIN: And I really apologize that up here in Alaska we have the four second delay. So it's -- it's not an easy exchange --
(CROSS TALK)
O'REILLY: Ok.
PALIN: -- to try to -- to try to get my point across to you if you interrupt.
If there's anything O'Reilly hates, it's being lectured to by his guests -- that's his
job, after all. So after Palin kept spouting meaningless, vague talking
points, he kept going after her. In the end, he finally produced
Palin's acknowledgement that she's in the "So Be It" camp when it comes
to taking care of America's poor and unemployed:
O'REILLY: Ok. That's -- I -- I'm for that private thing and I'm for raising the ages.
Now, in your state, a lot of people depended on Medicaid,
particularly people in the sub Arctic region up there and they're
dependent on these government checks. You had to deal with that when you
were the governor of Alaska.
So we're going to have to cut back there. Poor people are going to
get hurt, poor people are going to get hurt, in the Medicare and
Medicaid range. Are they not?
PALIN: Everything is going to have to change. Look, how can Michael
Moore, for instance, as -- as you had said in your introduction, tell
Americans that we're not going broke? We take in $2.2 trillion a year
and yet we're paying out $3.5 trillion a year. What's in the water there
in Hollywood and in DC for people to not want to understand or believe
-- or trust what the reality is --
(CROSS TALK)
O'REILLY: Oh he's just not a truthful -- they are just not truthful people -- they're just not telling the truth.
PALIN: They're not truthful so we have to be truthful. And we have to deal with the reality --
(CROSS TALK)
O'REILLY: Ok but let's get to the poor people.
PALIN: -- and reality is we are going bankrupt and the only way that
we're going to get out of the problem that we face is to cut, is to cut
budgets --
(CROSS TALK)
O'REILLY: But let's --
PALIN: -- is to reform entitlements, and then to start a pro-growth
agenda that's based on cutting taxes and incentivizing production and
tapping our energy sources and again stop assuming that government can
plan our economy for us.
O'REILLY: Ok. But what about the poor people who absolutely need the
entitlements they get? You know in your state there are a lot of people
on the dole, a lot.
(CROSS TALK)
PALIN: There will -- and there will always --
(CROSS TALK)
O'REILLY: So are you going to cut -- are you going to cut the
subsidies going to people earning, say less than $15,000 a year? Is that
going to happen?
PALIN: There is a need -- there is a need for a safety net for those
who are disadvantaged and in some of the rural communities in Alaska
where there's 80 percent unemployment, there is a disadvantage and there
needs to be a safety net.
But you know why there is a disadvantage here in Alaska? Because the
federal government has locked up our lands and not allowed us to tap
into energy sources so that we can create more jobs. Less than one
percent of Alaskan land is in the private sector hands.
Now, we asked the federal government and I've sued the federal
government for allowance to be able to develop more so that people
aren't of this entitlement mentality where they believe that the only
way that they can get out of a disadvantaged stage is to have government
provide for them.
If we had a robust economy here and all across the country, then we
wouldn't have to be looking at these insolvent entitlement programs that
yes, when -- when we start pulling the plug on some of them, there is
going to be a shared burden across our country.
I just love those shared burdens, don't you? Especially when -- as
always seems to be the case when Republicans talk about them --
working-class and poor people are the only ones doing all the sharing.
In the meantime, you have to wonder how much longer Palin is going to
enjoy her free ride at Fox. If O'Reilly is toughening up on her, that
probably means Roger Ailes is getting close to throwing her to the
wolves.
UPDATE: Conservatives4Palin is claiming I "lied" in presenting a slightly faulty transcript. And indeed the transcript is slightly off. However, since it is a Lexis/Nexis transcript, I'm not really sure how this constitutes "lying."
Of course, even more interesting is that they seem to think that Bill
O'Reilly was "destroyed" by Palin. I'm sure O'Reilly and the Fox execs
who pay her will be interested to hear that too.
Might be time for someone's contract to end, I suspect.
Tonight there are new questions about how much the feds
knew about an anti-government activist, accused in the deadly attack
against police officers in West Memphis.
WREG On Your Side Investigators have uncovered the secret FBI files
showing Jerry Kane was the target of a federal investigation five years
before that deadly day last May.
The 19 page file was released this week, following our Freedom of Information Act request last June.
Tonight, West Memphis's police chief believes if his officers had known what was inside last May they'd still be alive today.
"I felt like I let this department down May the 20, 2010 when I
didn't have the information I should have had," said Paudert recalling
the shooting that left his son, Sgt. Brandon Paudert, and Officer Bill
Evans dead.
The chief finds it disturbing to know the FBI knew about Jerry Kane years before that deadly day.
Paudert had no idea what was in the file until we showed him.
"You could become very angry very quickly when you lose your son and a
fine officer like Bill Evans thinking this information was stored away
someplace in someone's file and they didn't want to share it," explained
Paudert.
The incident was yet another reminder that one of the most
significant ongoing threats to law enforcement officers in this country
comes from right-wing extremists of the Patriot/"sovereign citizen"
variety -- people who take Republicans' government-bashing rhetoric to
its illogical extreme and declare themselves free of federal laws and
functionally laws unto themselves. There are constant reminders of this
threat -- from the Hutaree Militia to the Richard Poplawskis out there.
Ironically, Glenn Beck was nattering at length on his Fox News show this week claiming that left-wing extremists are about to start killing police officers en masse, which is why they need to destroy their unions. Right.
The unfortunate reality is that federal officials are almost certainly not
sharing this vital intelligence with police officers because, whenever
they do, they're viciously and loudly attacked by right-wing pundits for
allegedly smearing mainstream conservatives. Amazingly, no one in the
mainstream media seems to have yet cottoned to the fact that this really
is a near-outright confession of complicity.
While I agree that homegrown terrorism and the jihadist
threat deserve continuing attention, a single-minded approach ignores
all other threats.
Today’s terrorists do not share a particular ethnic, educational or
socioeconomic background. Recently, when state law enforcement agencies
were asked to identify terror groups in their states, Muslim extremist
groups ranked 11th on a list of 18.
Law enforcement agencies identified neo-Nazis, environmental
extremists and anti-tax groups as more prevalent than Muslim terrorist
organizations. The sophisticated explosive device found along a parade
route in Washington on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, an act of domestic
terrorism clearly motivated by racist ideology, should prove that other
groups are just as willing and able to carry out horrific attacks on
Americans.
In addition, terrorist groups are not our only threat. According to
the Department of Homeland Security, “lone wolves and small terrorist
cells” may be the single most dangerous threat we face. Attacks are just
as likely to come from lone-wolf extremists — like James Wenneker von
Brunn, the Holocaust Memorial Museum shooter, or Jared Lee Loughner, who
is charged with the tragedy in Tucson, Ariz. — as they are from Muslim
extremist groups.
And what do von Brunn and Loughner have in common with Muslim
extremists like Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, and Colleen LaRose,
also known as Jihad Jane? All allegedly espoused radical views on the
Internet through extremist websites, chat rooms and popular sites like
Facebook.
This starkly illustrates what should be common sense: The most
effective means of identifying terrorists is through their behavior —
not ethnicity, race or religion.
The Department of Homeland Security more than likely
couldn't give a rat's patoot about today's right-wing Tea Tantrums,
because they're mostly exercises in futility and stupidity anyway.
But I'll tell you who they do care about: the people in uniform who
go out every day and put their lives on the line to keep you and I and
our families and neighborhoods safe -- that is, the men and women in law
enforcement. People like those three officers in Pittsburgh, who had no reason to suspect a killer was about to ambush them.
Research led by Dr. Joshua D. Freilich (John Jay College,
CUNY) and Dr. Steven Chermak (Michigan State University) and funded by
the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to
Terrorism (START) has revealed a violent history of fatal attacks
against law enforcement officers in the United States by individuals who
adhere to far-right ideology.
* In the United States, 42 law enforcement officers have been killed
in 32 incidents in which at least one of the suspects was a far-rightist
since 1990.
* 94% of these incidents involved local or state law enforcement.
Only two events—high-profile attacks at Ruby Ridge and at the Murrah
Building in Oklahoma City—involved federal agents. Much more common are
events like the tragic Pittsburgh triple slayings.
* Attacks on police by far-rightists tend to occur during routine law
enforcement activities. 34% of the officers killed by far-rightists
were slain during a traffic stop, and a number of law enforcement
officers have been killed while responding to calls for service similar
to the domestic violence call that precipitated the Pittsburgh murders.
* Firearms were the most common type of weapon used during these
fatal anti-police attacks. 88% of the incidents involved guns, while
only 6% involved explosives and 6% involved knives. 81% of the victims
were killed by guns.
* Only 12% of the suspects in these attacks were members of formal
groups with far-right ideologies. The vast majority—like Poplawski—acted
alone. This greatly complicates law-enforcement efforts to anticipate
which individuals might pose a threat to police officers.
* Beyond these law enforcement murders, far-right violence presents a
broader threat to national security and American citizens. Since 1990,
far-rightists have been linked to more than 275 homicide incidents in 36
states. These crimes have resulted in the more than 530 fatalities,
including the 168 victims murdered by Timothy McVeigh when he bombed the
Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The vast majority
of these suspects are white and male, with almost 70% being 30 years old
or younger.
This is where I wonder about the grotesquely skewed
priorities of the conservative movement and its leading pundits. Because
all the yammering has been fearmongering about the DHS potentially
targeting ordinary conservatives -- especially VETERANS!!!! -- when in
fact there is not a scintilla of evidence they have done so or are
considering it.
Yet in the meantime, as we just pointed out, these right-wing
extremists who are the subject and the raison d'etre of this bulletin
are also known lethal threats for the men and women who work in law
enforcement ...
So while the folks at Faux News fearmonger for the sake of
yet-unharmed veterans and conservatives, they're completely turning
their backs on the interests of the men and women who risk their lives
each day serving as law-enforcement officers.
But if you can convince them instead that the real threat
they face is the fact that they belong to those creatures of
progressivism, the unions -- well, that would be right-wing nirvana
right there.
The folks at Fox News were all worked up yesterday about an excerpt that slipped out from Kenneth Walsh's new book, Family of Freedom:
...But Obama, in his most candid moments, acknowledged
that race was still a problem. In May 2010, he told guests at a private
White House dinner that race was probably a key component in the rising
opposition to his presidency from conservatives, especially right-wing
activists in the anti-incumbent "Tea Party" movement that was then
surging across the country. Many middle-class and working-class whites
felt aggrieved and resentful that the federal government was helping
other groups, including bankers, automakers, irresponsible people who
had defaulted on their mortgages, and the poor, but wasn't helping them
nearly enough, he said.
A guest suggested that when Tea Party activists said they wanted to
"take back" their country, their real motivation was to stir up anger
and anxiety at having a black president, and Obama didn't dispute the
idea. He agreed that there was a "subterranean agenda" in the anti-Obama
movement-a racially biased one-that was unfortunate. But he sadly
conceded that there was little he could do about it.
Everyone from Hannity to Bret Baier ran segment expressing shock and
horror that, in private, Obama recognizes what he's declined to say in
public -- namely, the stone cold truth that a large chunk of the Tea
Parties' ranks are filled with people who despise the idea of having a
black man as their president.
The funniest was Megyn Kelly's segment with Michael Reagan, who
adopted the standard storyline at Fox -- namely, that the Tea Parties
are filled with nothing but Real Americans, and therefore dissing them
is tantamount to attacking sacred Americanhood itself.
Of course, they never really explain why Obama should pay any respect
whatsoever to a fake "movement" ginned up for the sole purpose of
opposing every single policy he intends to try enacting. The Tea Parties
were expressly anti-Obama affairs from the start, and indeed their earliest organizers were outfits like Our Country Deserves Better PAC, set up explicitly with the purpose of stopping Obama and his agenda.
Yet Reagan even tried pretending that the Tea Parties were full of people who voted for Obama:
REAGAN: Now it's interesting, that same Tea Party went
out there and elected Allan West in Florida, the same Tea Party goes to
Herman Cain to speak at so many of their events across this country.
Many of those people in the Tea Party probably voted for Barack Obama
back in 2008 -- not knowing that when he went into office he was going
to take over General Motors, he was going to destroy the economy of the
United States of America and make the government the big grand poobah,
if you will, of creating jobs, not the public sector.
Some quick factual points:
-- Only 5 percent of the Tea Partiers polled in 2009
identified as former Democrats. The rest identified as Republicans or
Independents. (No one seems to have ever polled Tea Partiers to ask them
how they voted in 2008, but having attended many Tea Party events, I
would guess that the 5 percent who identified as Democrats in those
polls are probably the sole Obama voters at best -- since a number of
them include disgruntled Hillary supporters.)
-- George W. Bush and the Republicans who ran Congress from 2001 to
2006 destroyed the economy. It collapsed in September 2008, two months
before Barack Obama was elected president.
Not that facts matter much to propagandists like Michael Reagan and
Megyn Kelly, or for that matter the ignorant and frequently racist boobs
who largely populate the Tea Parties. But we thought you might find
them handy.
Bill O'Reilly had on Mike Huckabee last night to explain his bizarre gaffe in which he described President Obama as having grown up in Kenya.
As he has been ever since the gaffe, Huckabee explained that this was
a simple slip of the tongue -- that he simply meant to reference the
president's four childhood years spent in Indonesia.
And of course, O'Reilly gave him plenty of slack with which to make this claim:
HUCKABEE: Well, honestly, it was about the 40th media
interview of the day -- you've done these things. Uh, if I'd read from
my own text, page 183 of my book, I clearly said he grew up in
Indonesia. It was a verbal gaffe. I immediately apologized. But that's
not enough for the left-wing media --
The reason it's not enough for any sentient being is that it doesn't jibe with what Huckabee originally said, to wit:
HUCKABEE: I would love to know more. What I know is
troubling enough. And one thing that I do know is his having grown up in
Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the
average American. When he gave the bust back to the Brits --
MALZBERG: Of Winston Churchill.
HUCKABEE: The bust of Winston Churchill, a great insult to
the British. But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing
up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau
Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably
grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who
persecuted his grandfather.
How could Huckabee have been referencing Obama's Indonesian childhood
while nattering at length about his grandfather and father and the Mau
Maus, who lived half a world away in Kenya? And the bust of Winston
Churchill? How does that have anything to do with Indonesia?
Ah, but Bill O'Reilly can explain all:
O'REILLY: You actually made a point about his outlook on the world because his father and grandfather are
from Kenya and they have a very different view of the British and Kenya
because of the Mau Mau uprising against the British colonists there who
were running the government. And so, I mean, that's legitimate. It's
just that he wasn't in Kenya.
HUCKABEE: And my point, really, about talking about him being raised
in a different country -- actually, Indonesia, not Kenya -- as I do
understand, again, it's right there in the book for me to read and
everybody else, if they care to -- but, but the point that I do want to
make is that creates a different worldview. This is not a kid who grew
up going to Boy Scout meetings and playing Little League Baseball in a
small town.
O'REILLY: He's not a traditional -- he is not a traditional guy, he
is a guy who's had a lot of life experience that is different from the,
you know, Mom and apple pie offering.
Yeah, he's like a freak alien from another planet, ya know? He's FOREIGN!!!
Except, of course, that Obama in fact did belong to a Scout troop (in Indonesia) and played basketball and soccer in Hawaii.
And moreover, he in fact wrote an entire book dedicated to the fact
that he barely knew his father or grandfather, was little influenced by
either of them, and hardly knew anything about them -- because he didn't
even visit Kenya until the late 1980s.
On page 183 of his book, Huckabee references the Churchill bust and the
Mau Mau rebellion, but does not say that Obama grew up in Indonesia. In
fact, neither that page (nor the rest of the chapter) references Obama's
childhood in Indonesia. And based on a search of the Kindle version of
his book, Huckabee makes no mention of Indonesia (or Indonesian,
Jakarta, and Menteng).
Perhaps the most comical part of all this is that Huckabee's source
of misinformation is clearly none other than Fox News itself. Their
employer is the chief purveyor of the very same false "facts" that
Huckabee so faithfully (if convolutedly) regurgitated on the radio.
First of all, Obama never met his paternal grandfather,
and met his father only once, when the president was ten. The idea that
Obama's grandfather's torture 60 years ago would have triggered a
deep-seated hatred of the British just doesn't make a lot of sense.
Second, Beck's evidence that Obama hates Britain is mind-numbingly
weak -- all he points to is that Obama supposedly returned the Churchill
bust after he became president. If Obama really hated Great Britain,
shouldn't he be, I don't know, declaring war on them or something?
What's more, Obama reportedly keeps on his desk a wooden penholder given
to him by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown; the penholder is
"crafted from wood taken from the HMS Gannet, the sister ship to the
Resolute, a British naval vessel whose wood was used to make the
presidential desk."
Third, Beck's sole piece of evidence that Obama hates Britain doesn't
add up: Both the British Embassy and the White House have said that the
Churchill bust had not been a gift, but rather a loan that expired with
Bush's presidency.
It's a classic example of how pull-it-out-of-your-butt theories
cooked up by yobs like Glenn Beck, even when laughed out of the room,
manage to have a long half-life, bobbing up whenever right-wingers open
their mouths and start gushing out the things Fox fills their brains
with.
Probably the greatest blunder of the Obama White House over the past
two years has been its abject failure to make certain the public
understood that it was conservative misgovernance
that was at the root of the great economic meltdown of 2008 --
especially because it was that very downturn that propelled him into
office.
That failure has functionally given conservatives -- the architects
of the disaster -- the ability to cover their tracks by erecting a
narrative in which the blame was instead laid at the doorstep of Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac and minority-lending programs. And that narrative is
now widely believed by over half the country.
Now the Washington Times is trying to muddy the water even further,
running a bizarre and thinly sourced piece claiming that perhaps
terrorism -- maybe even Chinese terrorists, colluding with radical Islamists, perhaps? -- were actually behind the meltdown. Here's the piece.
Evidence outlined in a Pentagon contractor report suggests that
financial subversion carried out by unknown parties, such as terrorists
or hostile nations, contributed to the 2008 economic crash by covertly
using vulnerabilities in the U.S. financial system.
The unclassified 2009 report “Economic Warfare: Risks and Responses”
by financial analyst Kevin D. Freeman, a copy of which was obtained by
The Washington Times, states that “a three-phased attack was planned and
is in the process against the United States economy.”
But as you can see from reading the piece, Freeman presents no
evidence other than the economic catastrophes themselves that these were
terrorist attacks. Indeed, it's nothing but unadulterated wild
speculation from start to finish.
Nonetheless, Megyn Kelly invited Freeman onto her Fox News yesterday
and treated it as if it were potentially the biggest story in the whole
wide world. She was duly wowed -- even though, as you can see, Freeman
couldn't even tell her whether these were Chinese terrorists or Islamic
radicals, or mebbe they were working in collusion! (As if!)
Then, of course, Kelly capped it all off with the classic "minority
lending programs did it" narrative as the safe story everyone believes:
KELLY: But how could they have done it? Because, you know, I think the
conventional wisdom in this country is, uh, you know, you had Fannie and
Freddie giving out tons of mortgages that never should have been given
out, then you had the Wall Street folks trading these so-called credit
default swaps, basically doubling down on the bad investments, and
ultimately things just started to implode in a way where, you know, we
had to step in, the government bailed out those banks, and we all know
the history that happened after there.
That's a pretty remarkably dense thicket of lies that have little or
no relationship to reality whatsoever.
Let's try to unpack it a little:
-- Fannie and Freddie's role in the economic crash was so minor as to be nearly farcical. As McClatchy explained at the time:
As the economy worsens and Election Day approaches, a
conservative campaign that blames the global financial crisis on a
government push to make housing more affordable to lower-class Americans
has taken off on talk radio and e-mail.
Commentators say that's what triggered the stock market meltdown and
the freeze on credit. They've specifically targeted the mortgage finance
giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which the federal government seized
on Sept. 6, contending that lending to poor and minority Americans
caused Fannie's and Freddie's financial problems.
Federal housing data reveal that the charges aren't true, and that
the private sector, not the government or government-backed companies,
was behind the soaring subprime lending at the core of the crisis.
Subprime lending offered high-cost loans to the weakest borrowers
during the housing boom that lasted from 2001 to 2007. Subprime lending
was at its height from 2004 to 2006.
Federal Reserve Board data show that:
* More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions.
* Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.
* Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly
subject to the housing law that's being lambasted by conservative
critics.
The "turmoil in financial markets clearly was triggered by a dramatic
weakening of underwriting standards for U.S. subprime mortgages,
beginning in late 2004 and extending into 2007," the President's Working
Group on Financial Markets reported Friday.
Conservative critics claim that the Clinton administration pushed
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make home ownership more available to
riskier borrowers with little concern for their ability to pay the
mortgages.
"I don't remember a clarion call that said Fannie and Freddie are a
disaster. Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster," said
Neil Cavuto of Fox News.
Fannie, the Federal National Mortgage Association, and Freddie, the
Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp., don't lend money, to minorities or
anyone else, however. They purchase loans from the private lenders who
actually underwrite the loans.
It's a process called securitization, and by passing on the loans, banks have more capital on hand so they can lend even more.
This much is true. In an effort to promote affordable home ownership
for minorities and rural whites, the Department of Housing and Urban
Development set targets for Fannie and Freddie in 1992 to purchase
low-income loans for sale into the secondary market that eventually
reached this number: 52 percent of loans given to low-to moderate-income
families.
To be sure, encouraging lower-income Americans to become homeowners
gave unsophisticated borrowers and unscrupulous lenders and mortgage
brokers more chances to turn dreams of homeownership in nightmares.
But these loans, and those to low- and moderate-income families
represent a small portion of overall lending. And at the height of the
housing boom in 2005 and 2006, Republicans and their party's standard
bearer, President Bush, didn't criticize any sort of lending, frequently
boasting that they were presiding over the highest-ever rates of U.S.
homeownership.
Some people (especially the political hacks) are focusing their
energies in the wrong places. According to a recent investigation by
Barron’s, Fannie’s biggest problem was not the subprime mortgages they
bought — it was the better quality Alt A mortgages that caused their
demise ...
The folks who want to place the entire crisis at FNM/FRE ‘s doorstep
miss the point — and let me hasten to add that I was never a fan of the
company, and we were short FNM from over a year ago, at $42+ — these
people seem to miss all of the big picture issues, and are focsing on
minor factor and outright irrelevancies.
... While I understand that reducing the complexities of economic
history into bumper sticker phrases is politically expedient, it does
not help us understand the root cause of the problems. And, it gets in
the way of helping us fashion a solution for the future. Hence, why I
hold the weasels who are attempting to obscure reality and rewrite
history in such disdain.
For the non-partisan, non hacks amongst you, for the policy makers
and academics and economists who are truly interested in how this came
to pass, and what we can do to fix it, the bottom line remains: The CRA
was irrelevant to the current crisis, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
were mere cogs in a very complex financial machine, with many moving
parts.
But the primary cause of the mess? Not even close . . .
Ritholtz -- like hundreds of other economists and market
experts who understand what happened -- says the primary cause, in fact,
were "a nonfeasant Fed, that ignored lending standards, and ultra-low
rates."
This nonfeasance under Greenspan allowed banks, thrifts,
and mortgage originators to engage in all manner of lending standard
abrogations. We have detailed many times the I/O, 2/28, Piggy back, and
Ninja type loans here. These never should have been permitted to
proliferate the way they did.
The fact that they did proliferate as they did, in fact, can
be laid directly at the doorstep of conservative ideologues, whose
mania for deregulation -- particularly in the financial-services sector
-- is what led directly to the policies creating, condoning and even
encouraging such dubious financial instruments.
Though one might argue, in fact, that this kind of depredation
committed by the oligarchical class, with working-class people taking
the hit, and with little if any consequence whatsoever to the wealthy,
is a kind of terrorism -- economic terrorism against working Americans.
But don't expect the experts and anchors at Fox News to ever let you
hear that.
We always knew that Mike Huckabee is prone to occasional lapses in which he reveals his real, deeply ignorant self. But this one takes the cake:
MALZBERG: Don't you think it's fair also to ask him, I
know your stance on this. How come we don't have a health record, we
don't have a college record, we don't have a birth cer - why Mr. Obama
did you spend millions of dollars in courts all over this country to
defend against having to present a birth certificate. It's one thing to
say, I've -- you've seen it, goodbye. But why go to court and send
lawyers to defend against having to show it? Don't you think we deserve
to know more about this man?
HUCKABEE: I would love to know more. What I know is troubling
enough. And one thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya,
his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average
American. When he gave the bust back to the Brits --
MALZBERG: Of Winston Churchill.
HUCKABEE: The bust of Winston Churchill, a great insult to the
British. But then if you think about it, his perspective as growing up
in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau
Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably
grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who
persecuted his grandfather.
Contrary to Huckabee's claims, Obama did not grow up in
Kenya. Obama spends significant portions of his book Dreams From My
Father describing his first visit to Kenya in the late 1980s. On page
304, Obama writes of his arrival at Kenyatta International Airport
(emphasis added):
Kenyatta International Airport was almost empty.
Officials sipped at their morning tea as they checked over passports; in
the baggage area, a creaky conveyor belt slowly disgorged luggage. Auma
was nowhere in sight, so I took a seat on my carry-on bag and lit a
cigarette. After a few minutes, a security guard with a wooden club
started to walk toward me. I looked around for an ashtray, thinking I
must be in a no-smoking area, but instead of scolding me, the guard
smiled and asked if I had another cigarette to spare.
"This is your first trip to Kenya, yes?" he asked as I gave him a light.
"That's right."
"I see." He squatted down beside me. "You are from America. You know
my brother's son, perhaps. Samson Otieno. He is studying engineering in
Texas."
I told him that I'd never been to Texas and so hadn't had the
opportunity to meet his nephew. This seemed to disappoint him, and he
took several puffs from his cigarette in quick succession.
The BBC noted in a 2008 article that "Barack Obama has never lived in Kenya and he has visited the country just three times."
Additionally, Obama did not grow up "with a Kenyan father and
grandfather." Indeed, Dreams From My Father is largely about Obama's
struggles with the absence of his father. The AP noted in 2006 that
Obama "was mostly raised in Hawaii and did not know his Kenyan father
well."
Maybe Huckabee is thinking of Indonesia, where in fact Obama lived
between the ages of 6 and 10. I think the Dutch were bigger subject
there than the British, though. And it's a looooooooong way from Kenya.
Either Huckabee is a secret Birther, or he's as ignorant of his geography as the Shrilla From Wasilla.
Bill O'Reilly already laid down the law at
Fox -- namely, that protesters chanting "Fox News Lies" are obviously a
bunch of hatemongers trying to shut down other voices. And so that was
the storyline all weekend whenever Fox reporters tried to do live
broadcasts from the Madison protests.
This mainly involved correspondent Mike Tobin and weekend lamestain
anchor Gregg Jarrett, who could barely contain themselves over the
supposed "incivility" of the Madison protests. When the chant went up
Saturday, Tobin tried to minimize them:
TOBIN: Now, once again, they're chanting about Fox News
-- which as we all know is really a diversion from what's going on here.
Jarrett then went on to cite a phony Rasmussen poll supposedly
showing most respondents disapproving of the legislators staying out of
town to fight Gov. Scott Walker's union-busting schemes -- without
mentioning, of course, the polls showing strong public disapproval for
Walker's actions as well.
Gee, we wonder why the crowds were chanting as they were.
It continued Sunday:
TOBIN: And you can still hear the passion of the crowds.
The heckling is starting up again, the hate that you get from these
demonstrators. You can see it in their faces. You can see the passion.
But they all come back to the same thing every time.
I was getting the business from a teacher yesterday -- there he goes,
he wants to shut down the communication. A teacher was giving me the
business yesterday, and the teacher told me she hates me, because it
makes her feel good. That's the situation out here, Gregg.
JARRETT: You know, Mike, I hate to put you into this situation,
because you're being surrounded there, and yeah, you're being heckled,
and there is profanity and vulgarity.
TOBIN: That guy just hit me.
JARRETT: Go ahead.
TOBIN: Ah, that guy just hit me. So to just let you know.
JARRETT: All right. But -- but -- you know -- why do they express such vitriol toward the media?
Memo to Jarrett: Fox News is neither synonymous with nor really even
representative of "the media", especially as far as this crowd is
concerned. Because the folks in Madison know -- and are giving voice to
-- an important truth: Fox News is not a news organization, it is a propaganda organ.
That truth is embodied, in fact, by the way Fox has consistently
tried to smear the crowds in Wisconsin as "hate-filled" and violent --
when in fact the opposite has been largely true, particularly compared
to the vitriol we saw at Tea Party rallies against health-care reform
that were whipped up by Fox News the year before. Digby has a fine sample of this, but you can see it just in these segments as well.
And then Fox expects the very crowds that it is smearing before
national audiences to sit still and let them smear them freely on-air?
Sorry, fellas, but the real world doesn't work that way -- though you'd
like it otherwise in your alternative universe, no doubt.
Moreover, this isn't a diversionary issue: The crowds understand the
importance of Fox's relentless propaganda in advancing the war against
the nation's unions that the Right is undertaking. Indeed, they know
that Fox is a major cornerstone of this war, because it entails
convincing working-class people -- much of Fox's audience -- to take
sides against their own best interests. The Madison protesters
understand that the messaging war is being won because the Right has a
powerful propaganda organ whose success is dragging not just the
national dialogue but the rest of the media (the Beltway Villagers
especially) rightward with them.
Good on them. And the less whining we hear from Fox reporters, the better.You made your beds -- now sleep in it.
Their chief means of dismissing the story was to compare the Buffalo
Beast's revealing hoax call as "not journalistic" while comparing it to
the treatment given the hoax ACORN videos of 2009:
HOLMES: Right. Well, I think because it fits their ideological
framework. And I looked at this, and he was hailed as "Most Intriguing
Person of the Day" by CNN. And you didn't see the hand-wringing over
journalistic ethics like you did, say, in the ACORN case, when those two
young people used the same sorts of tactics of being an impostor and
sort of -- some people would say tricking people into participating in
this. And there, there was a huge discussion about journalism and is
this fair, is this right?
In this, it was, like, he's a hero. He accomplished a feat, as you just heard.
...
KURTZ: And as Amy points out though, when the ACORN sting happened --
you remember James O'Keefe and the pimp and the prostitute -- liberal
commentators all attacked them, but Fox News played them up and that
story up in a way that was much more favorable.
So how much of this is ideological.
HOLMES: Right. And the ACORN folks, they said that they were
activists. They were very explicit about their point of view, where, in
this case, oh, well, maybe he's a blogger, maybe he's a journalist. It
doesn't really matter and he doesn't get any kind of criticism for his
methods.
But how did Kurtz and Co. -- including Holmes -- treat the ACORN videos back in 2009? Well, as it happens, they attacked other media outlets for their reluctance to treat the videos as legitimate!
KURTZ: But much of the mainstream media was well behind
on this story. CNN also jumped on the budding scandal 10 days ago,
though not with anything approaching Fox's intensity.
But it took five days to hit the CBS "Evening News" and six days to
be reported by ABC's "World News," NBC "Nightly News" and MSNBC.
Chris, there was two conservative activists, James O'Keefe and Hannah
Giles, posing as a pimp and a ho, get this footage with a hidden
camera. Is that journalism?
CILLIZZA: I think there is a blurry line of what journalism is now,
Howie, with video on demand, with blogs. I will go back to a somewhat
less controversial example. Mayhill Fowler, a Democratic donor, wound up
in a San Francisco fund-raiser for Barack Obama in which he said some
voters in Pennsylvania are "embittered and cling to their guns."
...
HOLMES: If -- if liberal activist had walked into the Heritage
Foundation, for example, and conducted the same sort of sting operation,
it would have been on the front page of The Washington Post in a day. I
think that what we're seeing here was -- is this just a right- wing,
sort of, fringe story that the mainstream media didn't want to touch
with a 10-foot pole, or this a real story about corruption at this
organization?
And I think the mainstream media, because it was conservative
activists going into a liberal organization, were a little bit wary, I
would say, of the story.
Nearly everyone dismissed Beck's charge that the
president is a racist, but the ACORN videos he and Hannity trumpeted on
Fox proved to be a legitimate story.
But as the folks at FAIR detailed at the time,
not only did the mainstream media lap it all up avidly, there was
almost nothing legitimate at all in the ACORN videos -- beginning with
the methods used to obtain the videos, but even more significantly, in
the faked conclusions they were intended to lead observers to reach. The
hoax in those videos was not only perpetrated on the videos' subject,
but on their intended audience as well. (Media Matters has the definitive details of the scope of the hoax.)
So it was the theme of Sunday's show that there was nothing, NOTHING
worth legitimately reporting on in the case of the Walker hoax, too --
as Jim Warren tried to emphasize:
WARREN: Yes. I mean, on one hand, I thought it was
fascinating and revealing, what was going on in the governor's mind in a
certain sort of cynical pragmatism that was playing out on his side.
At the same time, I didn't see this guy as performing any vaguely
legitimate form of journalism. He was perpetuating an absolute hoax,
starting with misidentifying himself.
Although I think there are times
when mainstream legitimate journalists can misidentify themselves. But,
boy, it has to be for higher causes -- maybe saving lives or actually
revealing some huge systemic government fraud. In a case like this, just
to embarrass, no.
The problem for Warren, Kurtz, and Holmes et. al. is that the hoax
wasn't simply an attempt to embarrass Walker -- it legitimately laid
bare, through well-known means of trickery, the cozy relationship
between Walker and his financial beneficiaries. As the WaPo's Greg Sargent put it at the time:
UPDATE, 11:54 a.m.: In a key detail, Walker reveals that he is, in
effect, laying a trap for Wisconsin Dems. He says he is mulling inviting
the Senate and Assembly Dem and GOP leaders to sit down and talk, but
only if all the missing Senate Dems return to work.
Then, tellingly, he
reveals that the real game plan here is that if they do return,
Republicans might be able to use a procedural move to move forward with
their proposal. "If they're actually in session for that day and they
take a recess, this 19 Senate Republicans could then go into action and
they'd have a quorum because they started out that way," he says. "If
you heard that I was going to talk to them that would be the only reason
why." Then the fake Koch says this: "Bring a baseball bat. That's what
I'd do." Walker doesn't bat an eye, and responds: "I have one in my
office, you'd be happy with that. I've got a slugger with my name on
it."
12:09 p.m.: Another key exchange: FAKE KOCH: What we were
thinking about the crowds was, planting some troublemakers. WALKER: We
thought about that. My only gut reaction to that would be, right now,
the lawmakers I talk to have just completely had it with them. The
public is not really fond of this.The teachers union did some polling
and focus groups... It's unclear what Walker means when he says he
"thought" about planting some troublemakers, but it seems fair to ask
him for clarification.
Indeed, it was amusing watching Walker try to lie his way past the gaffe. Amusing, that is, except for the subsequent eagerness of the mainstream press to help him cover it all up.
UPDATE: John Amato:
Even the Washington Post bought into the ACORN atrocity video
perpetrated by O'Keefe; their ombudsman, Andrew Alexander, also wrote
that it was a legitimate story and promised to take conservative pundits
more seriously in the future: Wrongly Deaf to Right-Wing Media?
It's tempting to dismiss such gimmicks. Fox News, joined
by right-leaning talk radio and bloggers, often hypes stories to
apocalyptic proportions while casting competitors as too liberal or too
lazy to report the truth.
But they're also occasionally pumping legitimate stories. I thought
that was the case with ACORN and, before it, the Fox-fueled controversy
that led to the resignation of White House environmental adviser Van
Jones.
[...]
With ACORN, The Post wrote about it two days after the first of
several explosive hidden-camera videos were aired showing the group's
employees giving tax advice to young conservative activists posing as a
prostitute and her pimp. Three days passed before The Post ran a short
Associated Press story about the Senate halting Housing and Urban
Development grants to ACORN, which operates in 110 cities. But by that
time, the Census Bureau had severed ties with ACORN. State and city
investigations had been launched. It wasn't until late in the week that
The Post weighed in with two solid pieces.
Why the tardiness?
One explanation may be that traditional news outlets like The Post
simply don't pay sufficient attention to conservative media or
viewpoints. It "can't be discounted," said Tom Rosenstiel, director
of the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
"Complaints by conservatives are slower to be picked up by
non-ideological media because there are not enough conservatives and too
many liberals in most newsrooms."
I criticized Alexander for his insanity in my 2009 piece: The Washington Post bows down to Conservatives!
So as I watched the above segment from Reliable Sources yesterday, my
blood began to boil because they make believe like their glowing
coverage of the ACORN story previously never happened.
The Washington Post even falsely reported about the events that
actually took place. You see, O'Keefe was never dressed up as a pimp
when he went into ACORN's offices, a point which drove the story on FOX,
but the WaPo never bothered to correct its own error.
[A portrait of Brisenia Flores at the Community Center near her home, where she played daily.]
-- by Dave
I drove out to Arivaca, Arizona, on Tuesday, the day after a jury convicted Shawna Forde of two counts of first-degree murder in the home-invasion shooting deaths of 9-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father, Raul Junior Flores. I went to take some pictures, look around, and get a feel for the landscape, both physical and cultural.
Mostly, I wanted to see how the murders had rippled through the community, because distant rural places like this are always tight-knit communities where everyone knows everyone else. Everyone I talked to used the same word: "Devastating."
A woman at the community center just down the street knew Brisenia and her mother -- who did volunteer work at the center -- very well. She pointed to a picture of Brisenia hanging on a main beam inside the center, a black flower attached to a corner, and explained, "She came here every day." Brisenia, she said, was bright and sweet and devoted to her parents, as they were to her.
The murders, she told me, took place only two days before the start of the community center's annual summer camp, where Brisenia always enrolled, and where all the kids in the camp knew her too. The center brought in grief counselors to try to help the kids understand what had happened to their classmate and friend. She said she kept trying to explain to them that they were never going to see her again, and they couldn't grasp it. Finally, she said, she had to simply tell them straight out that she was dead. And then everyone cried.
"It was horrible," she said.
Arivaca is a little ranching community where the main activity is at the feed store during work hours and at the mercantile and bar the rest of the day. It mainly exists for services to ranchers in the Arizona desert. And it is only 28 miles, by the road to Sasabe (and slightly shorter as the crow flies) from the Mexico border.
Thus, it used to be quite a popular thoroughfare for border-crossing immigrants, but everyone in town told me that most of that had gone away in the past couple of years, thanks to an intense increase in the presence of the Border Patrol in the area. And it was true: I passed a Border Patrol checkpoint going to and from Arivaca, and encountered probably 20 different BP vehicles in different locales along the 23-mile drive between the town and I-19.
The immigrant traffic also drew people like Shawna Forde -- people who hated immigrants crossing the border from Mexico and were determined to stop it. And so a little girl whose parents, and grandparents, and their whole extended family, had grown up American in Arivaca wound up becoming a victim of the radicalism and hatemongering turned to violence that always, inevitably accompanies the Nativist mindset.
The Flores' home was just down the dirt road from the community center about a mile, part of a rural neighborhood that northeast of the town itself, a bunch of small homes spread out on large tracts.
The place had been mostly cleaned up since the tragedy, but there were little signs outside: plastic roses placed on the door the killers had come through; a child's lamp, and a sign for a garden, and a teeter-totter. All the signs of a normal, simple, sweet life suddenly ripped away by something monstrous from out of nowhere.
When a sweet, innocent life is cut short like this -- especially by an act as monstrous as this one -- it always horrifies us, just as the case of another Arizona 9-year-old slain by a madman, Christina Green, has resonated deeply with the public. And so often in such cases, the monstrousness and the tragedy simply overwhelm us, leaving us to throw up our hands and decide that it's beyond our understanding, that there's no explaining such events.
But there's no such mystery about what killed Brisenia. We know. We can see it clearly. And we need to be talking about it.
The people who broke into her home late at night while she was sleeping with her new puppy on the living-room couch and cold-bloodedly shot her in the face while she pleaded for her life were people who did not see her, or her father or mother, as human beings. They were people who had become so accustomed to dehumanizing Latinos that they didn't care about the devastation they brought to Arivaca and the lives of this family. They were so consumed by hate that they had no humanity left themselves.
The dehumanizing language of scapegoating and eliminationism -- the naming and targeting of other humans for the supposed social ills they incur, followed as always by words urging their excision from society, if not the world -- is endemic on the American Right. And among right-wing extremists, it intensifies, grows and metastasizes into something lethal and monstrous.
Cerna: Shawna, let me ask you about the issue of economics. You've heard constraints from growers, you know, that the apple harvest is very important in this state, particularly in this region. What do you say to the growers?
Forde: We've got a prison system. Let's utilize it.
....
Forde: I'd like to see two things on there. Not just about the people who came here legally, and are here legally, but how about the Americans who have been affected and died because of the illegal invasion in our country? How about our sovereignty?
And securing our borders and protecting our nation is extremely important. And I know the Minutemen and many organizations will not stop -- we will start at the local level and work our way up -- we will not stop until we get the results that we need to have.
This kind of language is not particularly rare -- indeed, it is common on the American Right, particularly the Nativists who are eager to deport all of the nation's undocumented immigrants, and it's endemic to the Minuteman movement in general, where you can find similar eliminationism at every corner, including people like Chris Simcox:
I feel that the people that are coming across, invading this country, I think that they should be treated as enemies of the state. We need to putting them in work camps. Anyone could walk through these borders of this country bringing bombs, chemicals, weapons of mass destruction. I think they should be shot on sight, personally.
And their many followers:
No, we ought to be able to shoot the Mexicans on sight, and that would end the problem. After two or three Mexicans are shot, they'll stop crossing the border and they'll take their cows home, too.
The mainstream media, particularly the folks at Fox News, have refused to recognize that this is what's occurring. Indeed, even at CNN, the only cable network to adequately report on the murder of Brisenia Flores, it's completely ignored and glossed over. As C&L commenter Karen noted:
No one is bothering to expose the actual ideology of this woman or her splinter group, or how they don't care about Mexican life.
.... The reporter calls this a "tragic and strange story." Tragic yes. Strange? Why? It's actually (sadly) banal. This shit goes on all the time. Murders like this happen every day. The only strange part is the involvement of splinter Minutemen, but that angle isn't pushed. It's the only angle that makes this a socially relevant story, and it's glossed over like a tangential fact. Like the real story is the heartless shooting.
As the folks at Presente observed after the verdict:
Though we received a verdict that condemned these atrocious murders, we also recognize that the Brisenia Flores’ case is not the isolated incident that some media reports make it out to be. Rather, it has galvanized the attention of the entire Latino community across the country as it reflects the anti-immigrant, anti-Latino hatred organized by extremist groups. Latinos – the fastest-growing and largest ethnic minority group in the U.S. – understand and experience the phenomenon of hatred that has rapidly expanded in the nation. In fact, Latinos are closely watching media outlets that provide a platform for hatred promoted by extremist groups like MAD and the Federation for American Immigration Reform – a group Forde represented on a PBS show, for instance. Latinos are closely watching those media outlets that irresponsibly allow hateful groups attack to Latinos and immigrants, fanning the flames of fear and violence in our communities.
The details revealed in the murder trial have touched us all in a deep and unique way. These important details reflect the deepening and mainstreaming of the most noxious and dangerous strands of hatred in the United States. They move us to continue efforts to make sure there are no more hate-crimes and to take action in condemning media outlets that help disseminate hatred.
In life, Brisenia Flores was ordinary and happy little girl living in the Arizona desert. In her tragic death, she has become a powerful symbol of our own lost humanity.
The bitter fruits of dehumanization always strike at our hearts. If we choose to turn away, we can easily focus on the pain and not on the meaning. But if little Brisenia's death can transcend that choice -- if we look it in the face and understand how this happened, and why -- then it will not be nearly so meaningless.
