Juan Williams defends Limbaugh by bringing on two other right-wing bigots

-- by Dave

Sure enough, just as Nicole wondered, Juan Williams was pretty bent out of shape over Warren Ballentine's calling him out -- using black cultural lingo -- for being such a willing supplicant to the "Limbaugh is being oppressed by mean black people" meme currently popular in right-wing circles.

So who does he bring on to buttress his claim that liberals are being bigots? Why, none other than Tammy Bruce and ... the Rev. Ken Hutcherson!

Bruce is bad enough. This is the person who called Michelle Obama "trash" and opined that "President Obama has some malevolence toward this country". She's also suggested that torture is no worse than a bad day in West Hollywood. We also remember her classy tweet on learning of Ted Kennedy's death: "[He] left a woman to drown and now he's left us to drown." In other words, hardly an ideal person to be claiming a lack of civility from the left.

But Hutcherson? That's rich.

Folks outside the Seattle area may not know a lot about Hutcherson, so
they just see him as a black conservative. Which is common enough, especially on Fox. It's more genuine than being a fake liberal like Williams, at least.

But he's also one of the most prominent anti-gay bigots in the state, and for that matter on the West Coast.

This is a man who told his flock that "God hates effeminate men".

He also headed up an initiative to legalize anti-gay discrimination in Washington state. (It went down in flames.)

Of even deeper concern is his heavy involvement in promoting a virulent and violent anti-gay organization called Watchmen on the Walls. This is a global evangelical-Christian outfit that, elsewhere in the world (particularly in Eastern Europe) is associated with violent anti-gay hate crimes.

I reported on a Watchmen gathering in nearby Lynnwood a couple of years ago (photos here). I also remember his sermon very clearly:

Hutcherson's talk was similarly soothing, following the "hate the sin but love the sinner" reasoning common among fundamentalists, but clearly belying his own war-oriented rhetoric and the talk of gay "abomination" pervasive among the Watchmen.

"I don't believe all discrimination is wrong," he said. "I discriminate based on what is right. God discriminates too.

"Today, disagreement means hate. If I disagree with you, I hate you. Evidently, God is the biggest hater in the world. The first thing we Christians need to take back is the right to disagree."

Of course, if it were only disagreement -- and not condemnation and eliminationism -- that Hutcherson and the Watchmen on the Walls were proffering this weekend, no one would have minded. But it wasn't.

The odd thing about hearing this kind of lame rationale from Hutcherson is that he is an African American man. As it happens, I've listened to a sermon that used nearly identical logic -- that discrimination isn't about hate if God commands it in the Bible -- at least once before. It was delivered by the late Rev. Richard Butler at an annual Aryan Nations Congress in Hayden Lake, Idaho. And he was talking about black people.

Hutcherson also believes that laws against anti-gay discrimination are different than those against racial discrimination because the latter is "an immutable characteristic" while the former is "a chosen behavior." (The problem with that rationale, of course, is that those same laws cover anti-religious discrimination. Is religion an "immutable characteristic", or a "chosen behavior"?)

In any event, Hutcherson is scorned not because he's a conservative, but because he is a bigot himself. Which is bad enough in any American, but incredibly obtuse for an African American.

Which makes him a perfect complement to Juan Williams.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Limbaugh, conservatives and the 'bloody shirt': The right has a long history of turning bullies into victims

-- by Dave

Bill O'Reilly held an extended whinefest on The O'Reilly Factor Thursday night about how poor Rush Limbaugh was the victim of a "witch hunt" by racial political-correctness police. For a bunch of people of pooh-pooh the "victimology" of minorities, it would be hard to find a bigger bunch of crybabies than American right-wingers these days.

Indeed, that's a key part of what's going on here: In addition to Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity later that evening, O'Reilly -- with Juan Williams chiming in with his usual sycophancy, agreeing wholeheartedly that Limbaugh is being victimized by the conservative Republicans who run the NFL -- is basically claiming that blacks and liberals who are bringing up Limbaugh's long history of racially incendiary rhetoric are "waving the bloody shirt" -- "the demagogic practice of politicians referencing the blood of martyrs or heroes to inspire support or avoid criticism."

Watch how O'Reilly and Williams focus on three apparently bogus quotes attributed to Limbaugh -- while ignoring a mountain of genuine quotes that make the point irrevocable: Limbaugh does like to play the race card with divisive and false claims, and he does it with great frequency.

The one sane commentator O'Reilly brings on -- talk-show host Warren Ballentine -- manages to make this point with a handful of counter-examples, but even that is not really representative.

For every three bogus Limbaugh quotes, it's a very simple matter to provide thirty bona-fide comments that are consistent examples of real race-baiting rhetoric from Limbaugh.

But this is an old tactic of American conservatives: Turn their own foul behavior on its head, and accuse those who would hold them accountable for it. That's what "waving the bloody shirt" has always been about, since the phrase was first coined.

Wikipedia again:

... In American history, it gained popularity with an incident in which Benjamin Franklin Butler of Massachusetts, when making a speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, allegedly held up the shirt of a carpetbagger whipped by the Ku Klux Klan.

That's not the half of it. Stephen Budiansky, in his amazing book The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War, has the rest of the story (excerpted in the New York Times):

The sequel was this—or at least this was the story everyone in Monroe County believed, and in time everyone in Mississippi and the whole South had heard it, too. That a U.S. Army lieutenant who was stationed nearby recovered the bloody night-shirt that Huggins had worn that night, and he carried it to Washington, D.C., and there he presented it to congressman Benjamin F. Butler, and in a fiery speech on the floor of the United States Congress a few weeks later in which he denounced Southern outrages and called for passage of a bill to give the federal government the power to break the Ku Klux terror, Butler had literally waved this blood-stained token of a Northern man’s suffering at the hand of the Ku Klux. And so was born the memorable phrase, “waving the bloody shirt.”

Waving the bloody shirt: it would become the standard retort, the standard expression of dismissive Southern contempt whenever a Northern politician mentioned any of the thousands upon thousands of murders, whippings, mutilations, and rapes that were perpetrated against freedmen and women and white Republicans in the South in those years. The phrase was used over and over during the Reconstruction era. It was a staple of the furious and sarcastic editorials that filled Southern newspapers in those days, of the indignant orations by Southern white political leaders who protested that no people had suffered more, been humiliated more, been punished more than they had. The phrase has since entered the standard American political lexicon, a synonym for any rabble-rousing demagoguery, any below-the-belt appeal aimed at stirring old enmities.

That the Southerners who uttered this phrase were so unconcerned about the obvious implications it carried for their own criminality, however, seems remarkable; for whoever was waving the shirt, there was unavoidably, or so one would think, the matter of just whose blood it was, and how it had got there. That white Southerners would unabashedly trace the origin of this metaphor to a real incident involving an unprovoked attack of savage barbarity carried out by their own most respectable members of Southern white society makes it all the more astonishing.

Most astonishing of all was the fact that the whole business about Allen Huggins’s bloody shirt being carried to Washington and waved on the House floor by Benjamin Butler was a fiction.

The story about Huggins being whipped by the Ku Klux was true enough. Huggins was whipped on that bright moonlit night so ferociously that he could barely walk for a week or two afterward, so ferociously that in a burning anger that overcame any fear of his own death he traveled to Washington to testify before Congress and then returned to Monroe County with a deputy U.S. marshal’s badge and a determination to arrest every man he could lay his hands on who had been a part of the reign of Ku Klux murder and terror in those parts. And Benjamin Butler—“Beast Butler,” as he was invariably called in the Southern press, the man who had committed the unpardonable insult against Southern womanhood as the Union occupation commander in New Orleans during the war with his order that the next Southern woman who insulted his troops on the street would be “regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation”— this nemesis of the South, now a congressman from Massachusetts, did indeed make a long, impassioned speech about the Ku Klux outrages on the House floor that April, and did tell the story of Huggins’s brutal beating in the course of it.

But nowhere in the Congressional Globe’s transcripts of every word that was uttered on the House floor is there any allusion to a bloody shirt; nowhere in the press accounts of the leading papers of the time is there any mention of a crazed congressman waving a blood-stained garment, on the floor or off; nowhere in any reports of Huggins’s appearances before Congress does such a story appear. That part never happened.

What was more, this was not the first time that Southerners had invented the fiction that Northerners were given to making fetishes of blood-stained tokens of their victimhood at Southern hands. The same story had cropped up fifteen years earlier in connection with another Massachusetts politician equally reviled in the South, Senator Charles Sumner.

Once again the beating was a fact, the alleged Northern reaction to it a fantasy. Furious at the insult to Southern honor Sumner had committed in a speech attacking slavery and the morality of the slave owner, South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks had approached Sumner in the Senate chamber, stood over his desk, and beat him on the head thirty times with his gold-headed cane until Sumner crumpled to the floor in a pool of his own blood.

And sure enough, Southerners were soon saying that Sumner’s bloody coat had become a revered “holy relic” in Yankee and abolitionist circles. Sumner, they said, had carried his own blood-encrusted garment to England to show the Duchess of Argyle, when she invited him to dinner; had placed it in the hands of an awe-struck John Brown, before his fateful raid on Harper’s Ferry; had put it on public display in Exeter Hall. “All the abject whines of Mr. Sumner, for being well whipped,” wrote one Southerner in 1856, a few months after the event, “all the exhibitions of his bloody shirt to stale Boston virgins who, in vexation of having failed to secure a man, would now wed a Sumner, have proved futile.” Years later, years after the Civil War, scornful stories about Northerners exhibiting Sumner’s bloody shirt were still being circulated in the South. Not a scrap of it was true.

A footnote, but a telling one: To white conservative Southerners, the outrage was never the acts they committed, only the effrontery of having those acts held against them. The outrage was never the “manly” inflicting of “well-deserved” punishment on poltroons, only the craven and sniveling whines of the recipients of their wrath. And the outrage was never the violent defense of “honor” by the aristocrat, only the vulgar rabble-rousing by his social inferior. “The only article the North can retain for herself is that white feather which she has won in every skirmish,” declared one Southerner, speaking of the Sumner–Brooks affair. Only a coward would revel in a token of his own defeat.

The bloody shirt captured the inversion of truth that would characterize the distorted memories of Reconstruction that the nation would hold for generations after. The way it made a victim of the bully and a bully of the victim, turned the very blood of their African American victims into an affront against Southern white decency, turned the very act of Southern white violence into wounded Southern innocence; the way it suggested that the real story was never the atrocities white Southerners committed but only the attempt by their political enemies to make political hay out of it. The mere suggestion that a partisan motive was behind the telling of these tales was enough to satisfy most white Southerners that the events never happened, or were exaggerated, or even that they had been conspiratorially engineered by the victims themselves to gain sympathy or political advantage.

To Bill O'Reilly and Juan Williams and the rest of the Fox crew, the outrage is never the atrocities they actually uttered, only the effrontery of having those atrocities held against them. They all want to make a victim of the bully and a bully of the victim. Their narrative is that the real story is not the atrocities that Rush Limbaugh utters but only the attempt by his political enemies to make political hay out of it.

But then, they're working out of a long and storied tradition when they do.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Another Glenn Beck weepfest, because Americans need to wake up to the evil Marxist radicals in the White House. Hooboy.

-- by Dave

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Glenn Beck ended his show with another his patented weepfests yesterday. It was special. And not just because it was about as sincere as the last time we saw Beck cry.

No, this one was special because it was accompanied by a loopy rant about how "life was simple" in the Golden Days of America, and then rambled into a weird metaphor comparing the nation to teenagers who innocently get stuck at a party and have to come home to mom and dad and face the music.

No, really. I'm not exaggerating.

Apparently the straying behavior for which we have to face the consequences now has something to do with having elected Barack Obama as President. Because the entire preceding show was a rant attacking the White House as riddled with "radical Marxists" who want to transform America into a communist state.

What got him especially worked up was this video featuring White House Communication Director, Anita Dunn:



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Well, Beck will somewhat rightly get to claim this as a coup -- Dunn reportedly is on her way out anyway, but Beck will get to claim he helped push her -- because it's frankly a pretty dumb statement to say that Mao and Mother Teresa are two of your favorite political philosophers. (Both leave a lot to be desired, frankly.) Per "Revolution," "When you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao ..."

Now, I always thought people who rejected Marxist thought out of hand were playing into their hands, so I have read Mao's "Little Red Book." And there is wisdom to be found there, along with a tyrant's blindness. Still, the line from Mao that Dunn quoted was not only innocuous, it is -- like much of Mao's "philosophy" -- rather generic in nature. Who, after all, can really object to the admonition to persevere in the face of being told to give up? Certainly not Glenn Beck.

No, he just objects because the person who said it was Mao.

Look, Anita Dunn never said she subscribed to Communist ideology; she just said she admired Mao's writings. (At times, even ardent anti-Communists like George W. Bush admitted to being fascinated by Mao.) There is, in fact, a substantial difference.

Still, Beck is all worked up because he thinks radical Marxists have taken over the White House -- even though the best he can come up with is McCarthyite smears like this. We've been bad teenagers, letting these evil radicals into the government.

You have to wonder what he thinks the consequences of that ought to be.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Glenn Beck has a theory on brontosauruses, and it is his, and what it is too

Watching Glenn Beck descend into yet another of his bizarre chalkboard rants earlier this week, it occurred to me I had heard a similar theory once: Miss Anne Elk's Theory on Brontosauruses.

The Wikipedia entry observes:

The skit coined the concept of "Elk Theories" to describe scientific observations that are not theories but merely minimal accounts.

I've also heard the term "Elk Theories" used to describe hypotheses that mean nothing and prove nothing.

Which, you know, is what Beck's bizarre "six degrees" guilt-by-association "theory" comes down to. One can play this game with anyone. It wouldn't take six degrees to connect Glenn Beck to Adolf Hitler or Osama bin Laden or Timoth McVeigh, if he wants to play that game. But it wouldn't prove anything, would it?

Except, of course, that Glenn Beck is becoming so detached from reality that his programs are now unintentional comedy skits. And no, Glenn, we're not laughing with you. We're laughing at you.

Enjoy the mashup.

___

For the Python fans who find it sacrilegious to run the "Miss Anne Elk" skit alongside Glenn Beck, here's the original version from Monty Python's Flying Circus, Episode 31 (1972):



And for the true aficionados, here's the audio file of the original version of the skit, which first appeared on Monty Python's Previous Record (1972). It's actually much, much funnier:



Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Sean Hannity helps Jerome Corsi promote his black-helicopter 'New World Order' conspiracy theories

-- by Dave

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Sean Hannity hosted not one but two whole segments last night devoted promoting the new book by Jerome Corsi -- godfather of the Swift-Boating of John Kerry -- titled America For Sale, which is basically an extended black-helicopter-style conspiracy tome straight out of the Patriot movement of the 1990s, updated for the new century.

This is a classic case of conservatives mainstreaming extremist ideas. I haven't read all of Corsi's book yet, but it differs very little in ideas and content and overall thesis from the kinds of books you could buy at militia-meeting tables in the '90s.

I haven't yet found whether Corsi decided to include his recent reportage for WorldNetDaily detailing the nefarious Obama conspiracy to round up conservatives and imprison them in concentration camps. Hannity managed to not bring up that point last night.

But yes, that's what Corsi wrote:



Text:

The proposed bill, which has received little mainstream media attention, appears designed to create the type of detention center that those concerned about use of the military in domestic affairs fear could be used as concentration camps for political dissidents, such as occurred in Nazi Germany.

Funny, I still have a Militia of Montana book that outlines this very same nefarious plot being concocted by Bill Clinton.

As Steven Thomma explained for McClatchy:

In truth, Rep. Alcee Hastings, D-Fla., has proposed a bill that would order the Homeland Security Department to prepare national emergency centers — to provide temporary housing and medical facilities in national emergencies such as hurricanes. The bill also would allow the centers to be used to train first responders, and for "other appropriate needs, as determined by the Secretary of Homeland Security."

Of course, Corsi and Hannity aren't the only ostensibly mainstream conservatives peddling this paranoiac fearmongering: So is Michelle Bachmann, among others:

"There is a very strong chance that we will see that young people will be put into mandatory service," Bachmann told a Minnesota radio station.

"And the real concern is that there are provisions for what I would call re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums."

It's also cropping up quite a bit at Tea Party gatherings. That's where you find outfits like the "Oath Keepers," whose organization is built around resisting citizen roundups.

Why, exactly, does Sean Hannity so avidly promote Jerome Corsi and his conspiracy theories anyway? Look at his record:

Corsi is also a frequent participant in FreeRepublic.com's online forums, posting under the pseudonym "jrlc" since 2001. (Click here to read a full set of Corsi's posts; click here to read the post in which "jrlc" admits to being Jerome Corsi.)

On FreeRepublic.com, Corsi has, among other things, said that "ragheads" are "boy buggers"; referred to "John F*ing Kerry"; called Senator Hillary Clinton a "Fat Hog"; referred to her daughter as "Chubby Chelsie" Clinton; referred to Janet Reno as "Janet Rhino"; called Katie Couric "Little Katie Communist"; suggested Kerry was "practicing Judaism"; and expressed the wish that a small plane that had crashed into a building in Los Angeles had instead crashed into the set of NBC'S The West Wing, thereby killing actor Martin Sheen.

After penning the Swift Boat book, Corsi co-authored a book with Jim Gilchrist about the wonderful Minuteman movement. It included a chapter devoted to extolling the virtues of then-Orange County Sheriff Mike Carona, who wanted to run Orange County the way Joe Arpaio runs Maricopa County. Except that Mike Carona was actually a corrupt cop who wound up resigning.

Then he wrote his first outright conspiracy tome: The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger With Mexico and Canada which ostensibly exposed secret plans to form a "North American Union" by combining the three countries into one. He evidently folds that theory into his latest book.

Then he wrote last year's The Obama Nation (get it? Abomination/Obama Nation?) which was the usual farrago of distortions, fabrications, and outright falsehoods we've come to expect from him. In between, he helped drum up media interest in the phony Ramos/Compean case.

There are mainstream conservatives who have spoken out about how badly this kind of embrace of extremism by movement leaders reflects on their ideology. But as we pointed out then, it's much more deeply entrenched than they realize.

And it's a large part of the reason we're now seeing militias come crawling out of the woodwork. For that, we can thank not just Corsi but Hannity too.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Memo to Glenn Beck: As long as you're making corrections ...

-- by Dave

Dear Glenn Beck:

You like to regularly tell your audience -- often during one of those faux-humility schticks -- that you only report the truth, that your credibility is "everything" to you, and that your material is rigorously fact-checked, and by golly that if you get something wrong, folks just have to let you know and you'll correct it right there on that program.

Thing is, you produce such a torrent of falsehoods it's hard to keep up. And you routinely ignore it when it's pointed out to you.

Apparently the only time you'll acknowledge a factual falsehood is when it's pointed out by the White House. Yesterday, responding Anita Dunn's criticisms of Fox -- which included some specifics about your various errors of fact -- you finally admitted to a correction:

Beck: They are more worried about the war on Fox than the actual war in Afghanistan. And boy, there are some zingers. They say that we are completely irresponsible. Like when I said -- this is one they pointed out -- when I said that Major Garrett was never called on. Let me -- let me just correct that huge error right up front. He has been called on. Yeah.

Another one they point out is when I called Van Jones a radical, communist, anarchist czar. The White House would like me to remind you that, uh, he wasn't really a czar. ... I didn't think that was really the problem with that, but maybe I don't understand how this game works anymore.

I am so busted! I'm glad the White House has cleared up that very, very important fact for the future of America.

That's good, Glenn. Now maybe you can issue some corrections on other things -- including, the other things you called Van Jones (since calling him a "radical communist anarchist" is so self-evidently nonsensical, not to mention a McCarthyite smear, it's likely the White House chose not to debunk that because it's not worth dignifying). For starters, how about the time you falsely called Van Jones a "convicted felon"?

BECK: We've spent some time over here. There is so much more to cover, but I want to talk to you about the green movement root. I couldn't figure out why the green movement -- here is Van Jones. This is a convicted felon, a guy who spent, I think, six months in prison after the Rodney King beating.

And while you're at it, here are some other corrections you need to make for your audience:

-- Those "bombs" being set off by nefarious eco-terrorists? There were no bombs -- just a land excavator.

-- Those scary black militants doing a team martial-arts routine? They were actually a dance troupe.

-- That nefarious Diego Rivera painting in the Rockefeller Center? It was removed on Rockefeller's orders. (Heck, just watch Cradle Will Rock sometime; the painting figures prominently in the plot.)

-- Those 1.7 million protesters who showed up for the 9-12 event? Um, dude, it was closer to 60,000. Little bitta difference there.

-- Just like Van Jones, Peter Orszag isn't a "czar." He passed congressional approval.

-- UAW workers do not make $154 an hour.

-- Unions do not, as you've claimed, need only 30 percent approval from employees in order to be established. It's still the usual 51 percent.

-- Those "doors replaced with stimulus funds? They were hangar doors. And they didn't cost "$1.4 million." More like $256,100. Again, bitta difference.

-- Contrary to your claim that "only 3 percent" of the stimulus plan would be spent in its first year, the actual plan calls for closer to 21 percent of the plan spent in the first seven-and-a-half months alone.

-- Just because we can breathe it doesn't disqualify carbon dioxide from consideration as a pollutant -- particularly at high levels. You breathe carbon monoxide in nontoxic quantities all the time, too.

-- Contrary to your sneering claim, Paul Krugman not only didn't miss the housing bubble, he was one of the few to be warning about it long in advance.

Those are just some of the more recent falsehoods you've broadcast, entirely since you've come aboard at Fox.

But somehow -- considering how non-seriously you took your obligations to correct the false facts already pointed out to you -- we really don't expect you to actually correct them. Because it would take a long time and would be really embarrassing, and you don't do embarrassing -- except when it's time to spring a gusher.

No, it's much easier to rant that the White House -- in calling you out for your relentless, paranoid, fact-deprived attacks on the Obama administration as an enclave of scary militant black radicals who want to remake the USA into a communist/anarchist/fascist/whatever state -- is "trying to shut this network down." Surround Fox headquarters on a map with toy tanks. Whatever.

Of course, no one's trying to shut Fox down. That would be absurd and futile. But it would be nice if, eventually, you all would live up to the claim to be a "news" operation instead of the vicious propaganda machine you have become -- especially with the likes of you aboard.

Sincerely, Dave

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Fox whines that White House 'attacks' confuse news with opinion -- in a 'news story' that gives only one side

-- by Dave

As we mentioned elsewhere, the folks at Fox News were all up in arms Monday about Anita Dunn's scathing commentary in which she pointed out the cold truth: Fox News has become a propaganda arm of the Republican Party. In fact, the outraged howls could be heard on every Fox program yesterday (except Shep Smith's).

Fox's chief defense is that the White House is confusing its opinion shows with its news coverage. It ran one such "news story" outlining the "attacks" by the White House on Fox, which included the following fine whine from Fox News Senior Vice President Michael Clemente:

"It's astounding the White House cannot distinguish between news and opinion programming. It seems self-serving on their part."

Actually, the White House is not alone. Indeed, anyone watching Fox News throughout the day will suffer much of the same confusion.

Fox is trying to pretend that only on its "opinion shows" such as Glenn Beck, The O'Reilly Factor, and Hannity is there free-ranging criticism of President Obama and his administration. But that's a load of hooey.

If you watch Fox's daytime "news" programs -- from Fox & Friends to Happening Now to Special Report with Bret Baier (where this report aired) -- you'll find that, while they lack the viciousness of the "opinion" programs, they nonetheless are heavily slanted with an anti-administration bias. "Reporters" like Carl Cameron and James Rosen constantly bring on Republican spokespeople and reliably transmit GOP talking points as though they represent fact (when in reality they usually have an estranged relationship with the truth). Anchors like Gretchen Carlson and Trace Gallagher regularly comment on the news they're reporting with an unmistakable right-wing slant.

A classic case, in fact, is this very "news" story that ran both on Baier's segment and earlier on Happening Now: It is wholly a defensive piece of propaganda that reliably gives the Fox News line -- comparing Obama's recognition of cold reality with Richard Nixon's paranoid "enemies list" -- with no attempt whatsoever to explain the White House's point of view.

If you wanted to see why the White House might confuse Fox's "news" programming with its "opinion" shows, one need look no further than this "news report" itself. Speaking of "self-serving."

Of course, there is a mountain of such examples already plunked in the middle of our national discourse. The most notorious recent such case was Fox's ardent promotion of the anti-Obama Tea Parties, beginning back in April and continuing through the "Tea Party Express, which produced such "news" segments as the one where Griff Jenkins was openly cheerleading the tea parties, and a Fox producer was caught working up the crowd to cheer. Then, of course, there was the whole 9-12 event, which Fox not only avidly promoted (it was, after all, wholly the creation of Fox's Glenn Beck) but actually attacked other networks for ostensibly failing to cover it as avidly as they did.

But that's just scratching the surface. Everyone knows it -- and Fox just wants to pretend it all away.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Delusions of grandeur: Militia video warns President Obama to leave the country by Oct. 15

-- by Dave

Rob Waters at Hatewatch happened to catch the above short-lived video the other day:

It advises President Obama and other prominent people (“Our Dear Leader and co.”) to “leave now and give us our country back” and to do so by next week.

“If you stay,” the silent video message continues, “ ‘We, The People’ will systematically dismantle you, destroy you and reclaim what is rightfully ours. …

“We are angry and we are ready to take back the rights of the people. We will fight and We will win. …

“Dead line [sic] for your national response: October 15, 2009

“Thank you to all patriots who support our cause. … Be prepared for when the fateful day of the declaration of war is nationally announced.”

As the post notes in an update, the video was taken down shortly after it appeared on the SPLC site with no explanation. However, we managed to capture it before then and have reproduced it here in its original form, with a C&L tag at the end.

The "National Militia, Soldiers of Freedom" is not a known organization of any kind. Most likely it is some guy sitting in his basement.

This is about 99.99999999 percent certain to be just so much hot air from the "Patriot" movement and its attendant lunatic fringe. It reminds me of the threat to organize a "Million Man Militia" march back in July that never came close to materializing.

These kinds of delusions of grandeur are endemic to the Patriot movement, and are part and parcel of the grand paranoia about a looming New World Order planning to imprison conservatives and the radical communist regime of Barack Obama. That is, not only do they wildly imagine the nefarious conspiracy out to destroy America, but their imaginations similarly run riot when assessing their own breadth and strength -- not mention their abilities to act on their fantasies.

Still, the spread of this kind of rhetoric underscores the violent mindset of the militia units we now see forming at various locales around the country. Eventually, someone competent is going to act on it. And it's clearly being abetted by the wild fearmongering being promulgated by the likes of Glenn Beck and other right-wing pundits.

Indeed, you have to wonder if this is the kind of thing Glenn Beck had in mind in his recent interview with Newsmax:

"I fear a Reichstag moment," he said, referring to the 1933 burning of Germany's parliament building in Berlin that the Nazis blamed on communists and Hitler used as an excuse to suspend constitutional liberties and consolidate power.

"God forbid, another 9/11. Something that will turn this machine on, and power will be seized and voices will be silenced."

Of course, I think we can predict now that if there is another Oklahoma City -- rather than a 9/11 -- Glenn Beck will also be calling it a "Reichstag moment" and claiming it's the product of a government conspiracy to clamp down on civil rights.

This is why he and the rest of the right-wing chorus have been so eager to dismiss the existence of right-wing extremists -- even in the face of obvious evidence that the violent crazies are coming out of the woodwork. We can thank the tea parties for providing the fertile ground for much of this rhetoric.

If you want a sampling of how bad it's getting, check out the video below, which I captured from the same YouTube site as the one that hosted the "warning" video. The owner stocks it up with Alex Jones conspiracy videos, but this profile of the militias caught my eye:



The main militiaman featured in this is a fellow, evidently from Oklahoma, who calls himself "July4Patriot" and is one of the key players in an outfit of veterans who call themselves the "Oath Keepers". They're organized around a batch of wild conspiracy theories involving supposed plans to use the military to begin rounding up American citizens and placing them in concentration camps.

Indeed, you can see "July4Patriot" -- whose real name is Marine Sgt. Charles Dyer -- in action at a July 4 "Tea Party" in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, in the video we snagged earlier this summer. At that event, Dyer ranted at length about the supposed roundup conspiracy.

There's a growing contingent of people out there on the fringes who not only really believe Glenn Beck when he warns that the government wants to destroy America, but think he's being too tame. And of course, the crazier his claims become, the farther out to sea they all go.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Glenn Beck thinks non-citizens shouldn't be counted in the Census

-- by Dave

Glenn Beck devoted a long rant last night to his contention that the U.S. Census Bureau shouldn't be counting what he blithely calls "illegal aliens" -- i.e., undocumented immigrants.

But his argument -- that we shouldn't be counting people who can't vote -- doesn't merely cut against the undocumented. It cuts against all immigrants -- who, by definition, are also already non-citizens.

Moreover, the Census Bureau isn't charged with accurately counting the number of citizens living within the United States -- it's charged with counting the entire population.

What Beck wants Census to do -- that is, to exclude non-citizens from its count -- is in direct violation of its charter, which is to count the population whole:

The Census Bureau does not ask about legal (migrant) status of respondents in any of its survey and census programs. As examples, in the decennial census, the American Community Survey, and Current Population Survey as there is no legislative mandate to collect this information. Given the success of Census 2000 in counting nearly every person residing in the United States, we expect that unauthorized migrants were included among people who indicated that the United States was their usual place of residence on the survey date. The foreign-born population includes naturalized U.S. citizens, lawful permanent residents, temporary migrants (e.g., foreign students), humanitarian migrants (e.g., refugees), and unauthorized migrants (people illegally present in the United States).

Beck would have the Census omit not just unauthorized migrants, but also lawful permanent residents, humanitarian migrants, and foreign-born residents here legally.

Of course, he's arguing for this because he believes counting the undocumented will give the eeeeevil SEIU more power in its quest for total global domination or something like that. You have to watch the video to get it all, and even then it never quite holds together, much less make sense.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Michael Moore makes mincemeat out of Hannity's fake 'hospital' video footage from Cuba

-- by Dave

Someone really should have thought twice before letting Sean Hannity embarrass himself with the failed stunt he tried in his interview with Michael Moore, the second half of which aired last night on Fox.

Hannity wanted to make a point about how health care in Cuba is so much worse than it is in the YooEssAy -- in contradistinction to Moore's own reportage -- so he offered what he called special video footage he had been provided of a "hospital" in Cuba.

What we then see is a rattletrap mess with old beds and rotting toilets, etc. But Moore notices what should be obvious: There are no patients, either.

Ah, but wait! We shortly see footage of patients in a hospital. But they're in an obviously different building (or at least wing), because this room is clean and the beds and equipment sanitary and well-tended. But we only get to see them for a few seconds before -- swoop! -- off we go back to the rat's nest.

Which is obviously an abandoned hospital or wing, which is certainly not unheard of, even in the YooEssAy.

Moore, of course, laughs at all of this with glee. Hannity quickly changes the subject, since his oh-so-convincing video evidence just makes him look as bad as he has recently in his Jennings Jihad.

You'd think Hannity & Co. would know better than to try to run such hamhandedly edited footage past an experienced filmmaker like Moore. This was so amateurish that they all should just be embarrassed.

But they're too arrogant and too stupid to be so.


Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Disturbing explosives case: Family ran a day care with bomb-making material and neo-Nazi lit in the back

-- by Dave

Fox News' Trace Gallagher got all excited Thursday reporting some news out of California:

Gallagher: We're told that a man has been injured in an explosion. Reportedly he injured his hand. Now here's the key: You'd think a guy injuring his hand in an explosion -- this is in Lake Elsinore, which is about 45 miles northeast of San Diego -- the man apparently was handling explosives including, ah, triacetone triperoxide. The FBI is now involved in this. This is the same type of explosive that Najibulah Zazi is accused of trying to build. It is highly unstable and highly powerful. And remember those chemicals that Najibulah Zazi is accused of having? They're still missing. So now in San Diego, or just north of San Diego, someone blows up his hand, using similar chemicals in a powerful, highly unstable bomb. The FBI is now on it. We'll bring you more information on that as it comes in here to the Live Desk. This could be key.

Yep, they were hoping it would be part of their favorite new storyline about radical Islamists hiding out in American suburbs and preparing to strike with a fresh round of terrorist acts.

But then the next day, Jane Skinner had the follow-up on Happening Now: It had nothing to do with Najibullah Zazi or his terrorist cells. This was a project undertaken by a young white man, working out of the garage of his mother's place there in Lake Elsinore.

Oh, and his mother's place was a licensed day-care facility. So while Mom was taking care of a houseful of kids, Junior was in the garage whipping up a fresh batch of bombs. From the L.A. Times:

Benjamin Kuzelka allegedly was making an explosive device when it accidentally detonated about 11:30 p.m. Wednesday, deputies said. He suffered an injury to one hand. About 20 minutes later, deputies said, he showed up at a local hospital saying that he had accidentally shot himself with a gun.

"His injuries were inconsistent with a gunshot wound and doctors called the police," said Deputy Melissa Nieburger, a Sheriff's Department spokeswoman.

Deputies went to the Kuzelka home on a cul-de-sac in the 30500 block of Audelo Street. Property records list Rebecca Kuzelka as the sole owner of the house, which was built in 1983.

Inside the home, Nieburger said, deputies found materials used to make explosives, as well as a sophisticated indoor marijuana growing room.

Authorities did not say how many marijuana plants allegedly were found in the home or disclose the type of explosive materials that were uncovered. A law enforcement source told The Times that substances found at the home were similar to acetone peroxide, or TATP, the same type of powerful explosive used in the 2007 London subway terrorist bombings. There was no evidence that the Lake Elsinore incident was related to terrorism, the source said.

Nieburger said deputies had not determined how many children Rebecca Kuzelka cared for at her home. No children were present at the time of the explosion, authorities said.

And that wasn't all. According to a couple of local reports:

Nazi paraphenalia was also found inside the home.

Everyone's mum about the possibility that the explosives were connected to terrorist activity. But with that kind of background and given the nature of TATP manufacture -- it tends to be a project only for people serious about blowing things up -- that shouldn't be ruled out.

All of which puts some perspective on Gallagher's speculation of the day before. Yes, it was connected to terrorism -- just not the kind of terrorism he was thinking about.

Which likewise underscores the nature of the terrorist beast: He's not always a brown-skinned guy from another country. Sometimes he's the strange right-wing white family that lives next door. But then, Fox never concerns itself with that kind of terrorism.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Obama's Nobel makes wingnut heads explode. So why do right-wingers hate America?

-- by Dave

You all remember how the wingnuts exploded in joy at the news that Chicago had been denied its bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics. Rather typically, our RedState pal Erick Erickson crowed:

So much for improving America’s standing in the world, Barry O. Maybe now perhaps we can hope he will mature a bit on the issues of foreign affairs. But I doubt it.

Well, now their heads are exploding at the news that President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Here's what Erickson tweeted in response:



(Via ThinkProgress.)

Then there was Fox News. As you can see from the video above, it was like Scanners on steroids on Fox & Friends this morning, with Brian Kilmeade noting that this was the third honoree whose name was not George W. Bush. (Maybe those Swedes' "pure genes" got the better of them, eh?)

Even Michael Steele and the Republican National Committee got into the act:

“The real question Americans are asking is, ‘What has President Obama actually accomplished?’ It is unfortunate that the president’s star power has outshined tireless advocates who have made real achievements working towards peace and human rights. One thing is certain – President Obama won’t be receiving any awards from Americans for job creation, fiscal responsibility, or backing up rhetoric with concrete action.”

Congratulations? Perish the thought!

Blue Texan at Firedoglake has a nice roundup from around the wingnutosphere.

Meanwhile, Media Matters has compiled a handy video of the early reaction:



Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Gun show dealers caught on video selling to people who tell them they'd fail a background check

-- by Dave

Right-wingers have been having fun in recent weeks with the ACORN "gotcha" videos supposedly showing community organizers indulging in illicit behavior. But they're about to discover that the undercover video can be a two-edged sword.

Over the past year, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been sending out private investigators to gun shows around the country, focusing on locales where NYPD and other local law enforcement are seeing guns arriving from. And what they showed was incredibly revealing.

It shows the dirty little secret that everyone who attends gun shows with any kind of discerning eye can tell you: There are a lot of illegitimate transactions taking place at them -- and particularly a lot of sales of guns to people who could never pass a background check.

The videos are now available for public viewing. We've provided a couple of them here, but go see the full set of them -- along with the accompanying report -- visit the NYC.gov website Gun Show Undercover.

There seems to be some confusion whether they're watching something illegal. They are. As the mayor's office explained in its press release:

Even though private unlicensed sellers are not required to run background checks using the FBI National Instant Criminal Background Check system, it is a federal felony for them to sell guns to people they have reason to believe are prohibited purchasers (such as felons or the mentally ill). In purchases attempted on 30 private sellers, the undercover investigator showed interest in buying a gun by asking about stopping power or by dry-firing the weapon. After agreeing on a price, the undercover would indicate that he probably couldn’t pass a background check. At that point, the seller is required by law to refuse the sale – but only 11 out of 30 sellers did so. Investigators found private dealers who failed these integrity tests at every show, including two sellers who failed at multiple shows. In total, 19 of the 30 private sellers approached failed the integrity test.

The 11 sellers who terminated the sale confirmed that private sellers know the law. As one seller in Columbus, Ohio, explained “I mean even as a private citizen, I’m kind of allowed a certain latitude, but once you say that [you can’t pass the background check], I’m kind of obligated not to….I think that’s what the rules are.”

The investigation also revealed that some private sellers are in fact apparently “engaged in the business” of selling firearms without a federal license, in violation of the law. For example, one seller sold to investigators at three different gun shows and acknowledged selling 348 assault rifles in less than one year.

So when you see characters like this, you're seeing the kind of people who willingly, knowingly, and intentionally flout the law because there's no way -- outside of investigations like this -- they'll ever get caught:

"I don't need your address."

"No background check?"

"Nothing. Just show me that you're from Ohio."

"That's good about the background check because I probably couldn’t pass one."

"I don't care. All's I got to do is demand you show me your license."

"You don’t care about the background check, right?"

"Nope. Nope. I wouldn't pass either, bud." [grin]

The NRA likes to claim that "the gun show loophole is a myth." These videos -- and the broader results of the investigation -- pretty definitively demonstrate that it does indeed exist.

Americans For Gun Safety has a complete rundown on the gun-show loophole and why it needs to be closed.

The NRA and its enablers will claim this is a radical-left agenda item. But the legislation to close this loophole is sponsored by those radical leftists John McCain and Joe Lieberman. The office conducting this investigation is the Republican New York Mayor's. That's some radical left agenda indeed.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Jonah Goldberg is a very sad case who thinks that ignoring an argument makes you smarter

That heavyweight intellectual, Jonah Goldberg, loves to tell his audiences that no one on the left took his masterpiece, Liberal Fascism, seriously -- they just made fun of it!

So this is how Goldberg responds to an actually serious critique.

Evidently, Goldberg thinks that ignoring a sound argument lets you declare victory over it.

Now, just to be clear: Goldberg has never responded to the core of my critique. He's tossed off side issues, but what I have said about Liberal Fascism from the get-go is that its central thesis -- that "properly understood, fascism is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left" -- simply does not have any grounding in, and is indeed refuted by, the actual historical facts about the "political space" which fascism historically occupied.

I laid it all out again not too long ago:

This is, in fact, the argument that Goldberg attempts to make in his book as well: That the fascists occupied the "political space" on the Left, and thus were simply out to compete against their fellow leftists. But this is where Goldberg most deeply portrays a lack of respect for the historical material available to him, because any careful study of the actual details of how the fascists came to power in both Italy and Germany makes abundantly clear that they were occupying the available political space on the right -- and had charged hard in that direction from early on in their drive to power.

I discussed this in some detail, citing particularly Robert O. Paxton's work in The Anatomy of Fascism. Paxton, for instance, debunks the fascists' ostensible "anticapitalism":

It turned out in practice that fascists' anticapitalism was highly selective. Even at their most radical, the socialism that the fascists wanted was a "national socialism": one that denied only foreign or enemy property rights (including that of internal enemies). They cherished national producers. Above all, it was by offering an effective remedy against socialist revolution that fascism turned out in practice to find a space. If Mussolini retained some lingering hopes in 1919 of founding an alternative socialism rather than an antisocialism, he was soon disabused of those notions by observing what worked and what didn't work in Italian politics. His dismal electoral results with a Left-nationalist program in Milan in November 1919 surely hammered that lesson home.

The pragmatic choices of Mussolini and Hitler were driven by their urge for success and power. Not all fascist leaders had such ambitions. Some of them preferred to keep their movements "pure," even at the cost of remaining marginal.

Paxton makes abundantly clear that the political space the fascists, in obtaining power, chose to occupy was clearly on the right. Goldberg, in contrast, insists that "fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all" because, he explains, fascism and communism "are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents, seeking to dominate and control the same social space." He claims throughout the book and elsewhere that fascists didn't seek out their political space on the right -- rather, they were doing so on the left.

He actually addresses Paxton's characterization with what can most kindly be characterized as a lame rebuttal (p. 47):

In November the newly named explicitly left-wing Fascists ran a slate of candidates in the national elections. They got trounced at the hands of the Socialists. Most historians claim this is what taught Mussolini to move to the "right." Robert O. Paxton writes that Mussolini realized "there was no space in Italian politics for a party that was both nationalist and Left."

This, I think, distorts the picture. Mussolini did not move fascism from left to right; he moved it from socialist to populist.

Yet if Goldberg had actually bothered to read Paxton's account of how the move occurred -- or for that matter, any other historical account of these events -- he would know that the ideological shift by Mussolini had not even the remotest thing to do with populism. Rather, it all occurred in the defense of wealthy landowners and the established economic and cultural powers, and it entailed a wave of murderous violence against socialists, leftists, and any form of progressive.

From Paxton, pp. 60-64:

Above all Mussolini bested D'Annunzio by serving economic and social interests as well as nationalist sentiment. He made his Blackshirts available for action against socialists as well as against the South Slavs of Fiume and Trieste. War veterans had hated the socialists since 1915 for their "antinational" stance during the war. Big planters in the Po Valley, Tuscany, Apulia, and other regions of large estates hated and feared the socialists for their success at the end of the war in organizing the bracianti, or landless laborers, to press for higher wages and better working conditions. Squadrismo was the conjunction of these two hatreds.

Following their victory in the first postwar election (November 1919) the Italian socialists had used their new power in local government to establish de facto control over the agricultural wage-labor market. In the Po Valley in 1920, every farmer who needed workmen for planting or harvesting had to visit the socialist Labor Exchange. The Labor Exchanges made the most of their new leverage. They forced the farmers to hire workers year-round rather than only seasonally, and with better wages and working conditions. The farmers were financially squeezed. They had invested considerable sums in transforming Po Valley marshlands in cultivable farms; their cash crops earned little money in the difficult conditions of the Italian postwar economy. The socialist unions also undermined the farmers' personal status as masters of their domains.

Frightened and humiliated, the Po Valley landowners looked frantically for help. They did not find it in the Italian state. Local officials were either socialists themselves, or little inclined to do battle with them. Prime Minister Giolitti, a true practitioner of laissez-faire liberalism, declined to use national forces to break strikes. The big farmers felt abandoned by the Italian liberal state.

In the absence of help from the public authorities, the large landowners of the Po Valley turned to the Blackshirts for protection. Glad for an excuse to attack their old pacifist enemies, fascist squadristi invaded the city hall in Bologna, where socialist officials had hung up a red banner, on November 21, 1920. Six were killed. From there, the movement quickly spread through the rich agricultural country in the lower Po River delta. Black-shirted squadristi mounted nightly expeditions to sack and burn Labor Exchanges and local socialist offices, and beat and intimidate socialist organizers. Their favorite forms of humiliation were administering uncontainable doses of castor oil and shaving off half of a proud Latin moustache. In the first six months of 1921, the squads destroyed 17 newspapers and printing works, 59 Peoples' Houses (socialist headquarters), 119 Chambers of Labor (socialist employment offices), 107 cooperatives, 83 Peasants' Leagues, 151 socialist clubs, and 151 cultural organizations. Between January 1 and April 7, 1921, 102 people were killed: 25 fascists, 41 socialists, 20 police, and 16 others.

... Long after his regime had settled into routine, Mussolini still liked to refer to the "Fascist revolution." But he meant a revolution against socialism and flabby liberalism, a new way of uniting and motivating Italians, and a new kind of governmental authority capable of subordinating private liberties to the needs of the national community and of organizing mass assent while leaving property intact. The major point is that the Fascist movement was reshaped in the process of growing into the available space. The antisocialism already present in the initial movement became central, and many antibourgeois idealists left or were pushed out. The radical anticapitalist idealism of early Fascism was watered down, and we must not let its conspicuous presence in early texts confuse us about what Fascism later became in action.

Paxton, p. 83:

The Italian Fascist Party, having discovered that in its first identity as a Left-nationalist movement the space it coveted was already occupied by the Left, underwent the necessary transformations to become a local power in the Po Valley. The Nazi Party broadened its appeal after 1928 to court farmers desperate over going broke and losing their farms. Both Mussolini and Hitler could perceive the space available, and were willing to trim their movements to fit.

The space was partly symbolic. The Nazi Party early shaped its identity by staking a claim to the street and fought with communist gangs for control of working-class neighborhoods of Berlin. At issue was not merely a few meters of urban "turf." The Nazis sought to portray themselves as the most vigorous and effective force against the communists -- and, at the same time, to portray the liberal state as incapable of preserving public security. The communists, at the same time, were showing that the Social Democrats were unequipped to deal with an incipient revolutionary situation that needed a fighting vanguard. Polarization was in the interest of both.

Fascist violence was neither random nor indiscriminate. It carried a well-calculated set of coded messages: that communist violence was rising, that the democratic state was responding to it ineptly, and that only the fascists were tough enough to save the nation from antinational terrorists. An essential step in the fascist march to acceptance and power was to persuade law-and-order conservatives and members of the middle class to tolerate fascist violence as a harsh necessity in the face of Left provocation. It helped, of course, that many ordinary citizens never feared fascist violence against themselves, because they were reassured that it was reserved for national enemies and "terrorists" who deserved it.

The path to power for both Italian Fascists and German Nazis was essentially the same: They presented themselves as "revolutionary socialists" in their initial appeals but, finding the political space for such a movement already well occupied on the left by socialists and communists, shifted their appeals and their alliances to the right and center, particularly with business capitalists who financed them, sponsored their activities, and essentially contracted with them to engage in systematic violence against the Left. For the Nazis, Fritz Thyssen, head of the nation's largest steel producer, was only the most prominent example of business capitalists who funneled money to the Nazis both as they rose to power and once they gained it.

Now, going simply from Goldberg's own inadequate definition above -- which stipulates that the Right is "respectful of religion and tradition" (in fact, a more accurate definition would stipulate that the Right "ardently defends traditional values, mores, and institutions") -- the fascists in their rise to power clearly fit the definition of being "a phenomenon of the Right" -- and not the Left.

Of course, we can also rest assured that Goldberg will never even noddingly acknowledge that the chief leg of his argument has in fact been thoroughly knocked down. Because who knows how that might affect book sales.

Now, if you look at Goldberg's actual responses to my critiques -- you can see them here, here, here and here -- you will find that he has not even attempted to address these issues. Instead, he's chosen to indulge side issues (was the Klan proto-fascist? Actually, it was.), including a feeble attack on my own work on fascism that did not address a single point that I had raised in my critique. My final smackdown of this nonsense can be read here. Jonah has never responded to it nor acknowledged it.

So Goldberg thinks he can sneer his way around historical fact with clever putdowns. Well, we'll see about that. There's more coming down the pike from serious historians who are finally ready to take seriously the toxic effects of Goldberg's fraud. We'll have more info on that soon, I hope.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Sean Hannity's scalp-hunting desperation descends into fabricating NAMBLA connections to Jennings

-- by Dave

Sean Hannity still wants Kevin Jennings' scalp so he can keep up with Glenn Beck.

But since his smear has been debunked about as thoroughly as a right-wing smear job ever can be, he's getting a bit, ah, desperate.

Last night he not only was still clinging desperately to the false notion that Jennings should have reported a teenager's sexual affair to authorities, but he came up with a new line of attack -- borrowed directly from the fine fools at Powerline -- claiming that Jennings, in "a 1977 speech," had praised "one of the founders of NAMBLA," a gay-rights pioneer named Harry Hay. Hannity calls him a "big supporter of NAMBLA."

As usual, the fine researchers at Media Matters have the whole story:

Power Line's Hinderaker cited Jennings' speech, NAMBLA. In an October 1 post, Power Line's John Hinderaker noted Jennings' 1997 speech and wrote: "Obama nominee Kevin Jennings actually said that the founder of NAMBLA -- the North American Man-Boy Love Association -- Harry Hay, is '[o]ne of the people that's always inspired me,' " ... Hinderaker's claim that Hay founded NAMBLA is false. As the Associated Press noted in 2002, Hay "in 1950 founded the secret network of support groups for gays known as the Mattachine Society." Hay wrote in the Gay Community News (retrieved from Nexis) in 1994, "I am not a member of NAMBLA, nor would it ever have been my inclination to be one."

Moreover, as the piece explains, Jennings' speech was part of a eulogy to Hay upon the occasion of his death, and specifically praised him for his work in the 1950s in organizing gay activists -- not for any of his later views.

Hannity must really be looking over his shoulder these days to be getting this desperate. Hey Sean, how are those ratings looking these days?


Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Gee, we wonder why Glenn Beck is so touchy about examinations of his past

-- by Dave

Glenn Beck seems to be irked at the people digging into his past. But then, that's because his past is truly a disgusting thing to behold. I wouldn't want people looking at it either, if mine were anything remotely like Beck's.

He ranted about it last night on his Fox News show. He thinks we should be paying more attention to his phony "scandals" than to just what kind of character we're watching implore us to seek greater moral goods (as he sees them) every night.

He's no doubt thinking of Alexander Zaitchik's impressive three part series in Salon, the first of which does indeed point out that his mother's death remains a mystery -- and that Beck's own later assertion that it was a suicide was a peculiar event.

It was an incredibly revealing series -- particularly this nugget from the second part, describing Beck's antics when he had a falling out with a former radio-show partner named Bruce Kelly, who became a competitor in the Phoenix market. Beck was known as "the king of dirty tricks," including an invasion of Kelly's wedding.

The animosity between Beck and Kelly continued to deepen. When Beck and Hattrick produced a local version of Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" for Halloween -- a recurring motif in Beck's life and career -- Kelly told a local reporter that the bit was a stupid rip-off of a syndicated gag. The slight outraged Beck, who got his revenge with what may rank as one of the cruelest bits in the history of morning radio. "A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce [Kelly] apparently can't do anything right -- about he can't even have a baby."

You have to wonder if Kelly contemplated returning the favor when Beck's second daughter was born with cerebral palsy.

But then, he'd have been forced to sink to the level of Glenn Beck to have done something like that.


Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

'Is Conservatism Brain Dead?' If Jonah and Glenn are the best they've got, the answer is yes

-- by Dave

Steven Hayward asked a key question this weekend: "Is Conservatism Brain Dead?" The key paragraph was this:

About the only recent successful title that harkens back to the older intellectual style is Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism," which argues that modern liberalism has much more in common with European fascism than conservatism has ever had. But because it deployed the incendiary f-word, the book was perceived as a mood-of-the-moment populist work, even though I predict that it will have a long shelf life as a serious work. Had Goldberg called the book "Aspects of Illiberal Policymaking: 1914 to the Present," it might have been received differently by its critics. And sold about 200 copies.

There's one little problem with this: The entire thesis of Goldberg's book is a fraud. Goldberg not only deployed the F-word, he built the entire book on a false, historically untenable, claim: that "fascism, properly understood," is not a right-wing phenomenon but a left-wing one.

Indeed, the spread of Goldberg's thesis into conventional wisdom on the right is one of the main drivers in the transformation of conservatism into a pack of mouth-foaming pseudo-populists:

One of the most persistent components of this is the right's ardent embrace of the fraudulent thesis of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism -- to wit, that "properly understood, fascism is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left." The embrace of this fraud as somehow truthful has produced those teabaggers' signs bearing swastikas (suggesting that health-care reform is fascist) and signs showing Barack Obama as Hitler and, moreover, the claims that Obama is marching the nation down the road to fascism.

It's been particularly embraced by movement conservatives in their efforts to whitewash from public view the existence of right-wing extremists among their ranks.

The impact of this embrace on our national discourse has been deeper than probably anyone suspected when the book was first published last year. Not only is Goldberg's thesis now taken as an article of faith by such right-wing talkers as Rush Limbaugh (who probably helped inspire Goldberg's thesis in any event), Glenn Beck, Michael Savage,, but also among the teabagging protesters whose ranks are increasingly filled by real right-wing extremists.

What's most noteworthy, perhaps, is that Goldberg's thesis is being used to attack anyone who points out the frequently violent and intimidating behavior of these extremists. It's not the right-wing protesters carrying open weapons, Obama=Hitler signs, and openly disrupting the discussion of health-care reform at town-hall sessions who are behaving like Brownshirts, they insist -- it's the liberals who show enough nerve to stand up to them!

You can trace a lot of the popularization of Goldberg's thesis to Beck's open promotion of it, as in the video above from earlier this year. And when you're talking about brain-dead conservatives, Beck is safely Subject No. 1.

Oddly enough, though, Hayward then goes on to suggest that perhaps Beck himself is the chief hope for ending conservatism's intellectual drought. Oy.

If Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Beck are the leading intellectual lights of this generation of conservatives, there can be no other answer to Hayward's question than an affirmative one.

[H/t to Mitch.]

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.

Glenn Beck's sobbing secrets revealed: A little Vicks Vaporub gets the tears flowing

-- by Dave

[media=10144 embeddl]

[YouTube here, via MisterMovies.]

This was too funny to pass up. We've known all along that Glenn Beck is a two-bit phony. Now we see how Glenn Beck gets himself properly weepy for the cameras: A little Vicks Vaporub.

One might dismiss this as merely a one-off for this shoot. But you can hear Beck himself say:

Beck: I think it's getting used to it -- my eyes are getting used to it.

From regular and continuous use, mayhaps?

The whole scene reminds us that Beck practices his schtick over and over before he performs. Which means he's gotten real good at working up those tears and choking up to say, "I love my country -- but I fear for it!"

This may be what Sen. Lindsey Graham had in mind the other day:



Via Sam Stein:

"Only in America can you make that much money crying," Graham said of Beck. "Glenn Beck is not aligned with any party. He is aligned with cynicism and there has always been a market for cynics. But we became a great nation not because we are a nation of cynics. We became a great nation because we are a nation of believers."

In other Beck news:

-- Media Matters has an excellent followup to the Salon piece about Beck's disciplehood at the feet of W. Cleon Skousen -- which in turn illustrated Beck's long history of promoting extremist beliefs -- pointing out that Skousen was not exactly what you would call ... enlightened on matters of race:

Fox News' Glenn Beck has heavily promoted the writings of far-right activist W. Cleon Skousen, even making Skousen's book, The 5000 Year Leap, a central part of his 9-12 Project. Skousen is the author of several controversial works, including The Making of America: The Substance and Meaning of the Constitution, which presented as "the story of slavery in America" a passage from a book that attacked abolitionists for delaying emancipation; cast slave owners as "the worst victims of the system"; claimed white schoolchildren "were likely to envy the freedom of their colored playmates"; and claimed that "[s]lavery did not make white labor unrespectable, but merely inefficient," because "the slave had a deliberateness of motion which no amount of supervision could quicken."

This continues to remind me of last week's interview with Katie Couric, when he refused to explain what he meant by white culture.



[Via ThinkProgress.]

-- Beck is having a little difficulty dealing with Internet memes. Especially when dealing with charges that, by golly, we haven't been able to disprove yet!

-- Finally, has anyone else noticed that, on the cover of his new book, Beck looks exactly like the illegitimate love child of Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz? Just wondering.

Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.