The racist rancher; or, how Cliven Bundy is pretty much exactly what you thought he was

By Michael J.W. Stickings

So right-wing hero (and welfare rancher) Cliven Bundy was revealed by the Times, in an interview, to be, unsurprisingly, an abhorrent racist espousing slavery (and cotton-picking) as the proper place for "the Negro," a revelation he denied, claiming his comments were taken out of context, but then, well, there was the actual video, which is rather hard to deny:


In response, his chief right-wing cheerleader, Fox News's Sean Hannity, said Bundy's comments "are beyond repugnant to me. They are beyond despicable to me. They are beyond ignorant to me," which is really the least he should have said, but, really, what did you expect, you fucking idiot?

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But do not think for a minute that Bundy's views, what with Hannity's distancing himself from them, are somehow beyond the current morass of ugliness that is contemporary American conservatism. As Slate's Jamelle Bouie writes:

In other words, the real problem with African-Americans today is that they’re addicted to welfare and unwilling to work. Sure, slavery wasn’t ideal, but at least the Negroes had skills (cotton picking!), work, and family.

Obviously, Bundy is a crank. But he’s not alone. Not only are these views shared on the survivalist fringe of American life, but they’re fairly common within the conservative movement...

[T]he only difference between Bundy and a whole host of conservatives is that the renegade rancher isn't sophisticated enough to couch his nonsense in soundbites and euphemism. Or, if Bundy has anything to say about "the negro," he learned it from the conservative movement.

This is not to say that all conservatives are Bundy-style racists, or that they all harbor similar views. It is to say, however, that Bundy's abhorrent views are alive and well in today's conservative -- and, yes, Republican -- ranks, and that they are far more comment than you might think, and than Hannity and his odious ilk would have us believe.

Those awful, obnoxious, hateful right-wing Irish-Americans

By Michael J.W. Stickings

With St. Patrick's Day coming tomorrow, this piece by Salon's Andrew O'Hehir -- "How did Irish-Americans get so disgusting?" -- is definitely worth a read. Key point:

[T]he end of the IRA's guerrilla war had a less salubrious effect on the Irish-American population, and I say that in full awareness that on the surface that's an offensive statement. What I mean is that the last connection between Irish-American identity and genuine history was severed, and all we're left with now is a fading and largely bogus afterlife. On one hand, Irishness is a nonspecific global brand of pseudo-old pubs, watered-down Guinness, "Celtic" tattoos and vague New Age spirituality, designed to make white people feel faintly cool without doing any of the hard work of actually learning anything. On the other, it's Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Pat Buchanan and Rep. Peter King, Long Island's longtime Republican congressman (and IRA supporter), consistently representing the most stereotypical grade of racist, xenophobic, small-minded, right-wing Irish-American intolerance. When you think of the face of white rage in America, it belongs to a red-faced Irish dude on Fox News.

Well, yes. Irishness is certainly more than that, but those two sides of it are rather prominent, to say the least, in Irish-American circles. (I say this not as an Irish-American but as an English-Canadian, though with a fair amount of Irishness in me as well.)

Ireland itself is a beautiful place in many ways, and there is of course much to recommend it, along with its inhabitants. (There is even something to recommend Irish republicanism, if not so much its manifestation in terroristic violence, much of it paid for by Irish-Americans.) But as is so often the case, there is a world of difference between the homeland and the diaspora, and it's certainly fair to point to the elements of Irishness that have become the unfortunate realities of its manifestation in America.

And when it comes to the political stereotype, as represented in right-wingers like O'Reilly, Hannity, and so many others, it's just insane. New Irish immigrants were the targets of vicious discrimination and bigotry, after all. They fled famine back in the homeland but also oppression -- a famine created by oppression, oppression that denied them dignity as well as self-governance. In America, as in so many other parts of the "New" World, they found, at long last, freedom, once the discrimination and bigotry ran their course. And yet now a huge swath of Irish-Americanism is very much what O'Hehir describes: racist, xenophobic, small-minded, intolerant. For the likes of O'Reilly and Hannity, it's like they learned nothing, or perhaps learned that what was done to them could be done to others by them. And so they ban gays from their parades when not so long ago they were denied jobs and treated with contempt by the English majority in America.

The tattoos and spirituality, the outward appearance of some mystic Irishness with nothing to back it up, are mostly just banal and silly. It's the vicious right-wing ideology and partisanism that is so much worse, that impacts so horribly on other people's lives, that is such a stain of hypocrisy on those who practise it, that is the stereotype, rooted in reality, that good and decent Irish-Americans should wish to toss in the dustbin of history.

A word from the sponsor

By Mustang Bobby

Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity may be changing channels:

In a major shakeup for the radio industry, Cumulus Media, the second-biggest broadcaster in the country, is planning to drop both Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity from its stations at the end of the year, an industry source told POLITICO on Sunday.

Cumulus has decided that it will not renew its contracts with either host, the source said, a move that would remove the two most highly rated conservative talk personalities from more than 40 Cumulus channels in major markets.

The decision comes after negotiations between Cumulus and Premiere Networks, the division of Clear Channel that distributes Limbaugh and Hannity's shows, broke down due to disagreements over the cost of the distribution rights, the source said. Cumulus is known to drive a hard bargain on costs, and Clear Channel is known to seek top dollar for big names.

No, it doesn't mean either of them are going off the air. The most it will mean is that they will go from one radio station in major markets to another. This has nothing to do with ratings or popularity, and your crazy uncle will still be able to get his fix of racist xenophobia. He'll just have to change the radio pre-set in his 1975 Ford Granada.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

President Obama, leading with maturity and understanding

By Mustang Bobby 

Andrew Sullivan marvels at President Obama's ability to handle a very tense situation with coolness and reflection.

No other president could have said what Obama said on Friday afternoon with similar authority. What was striking to me was the tone of acute sadness – a tone others could have used after what was, under any interpretation, a tragedy. And then there was the fact that this first black president, even after such a polarizing incident, spoke to all Americans, white and black. I cannot fathom how some on the knee-jerk right could have seen this as a divisive set of comments – just as I cannot quite fathom how this president is capable of controlling and channeling his own emotions.

What he tried to do was explain to white America how it must feel like to be perpetually deemed guilty before being proven innocent just because of your age, gender and the color of your skin. He didn’t deny the facts of the Martin case; he didn't dispute the jury's decision; he didn't dismiss legitimate issues like the toll of gun violence within the young black male population – but he did insist that we all understand the context, the history, and the reason, behind the anguish and anger of many African-American men and parents and boys. What he was asking for was some mutual empathy.

To answer his point about the knee-jerk right seeing this as divisive, it was a given; Sean Hannity and the rest of the people at Fox News and other such places would have had the same reaction if the president had come out and given his mother's recipe for beef stew.  Their response to anything he says is programmed far in advance. He speaks like Martin Luther King, they hear Malcolm X.

Read more »

Sarah Palin is not running for Senate. Full stop.

By Michael J.W. Stickings

As she told Hannity yesterday:

I've considered it because people have requested me considering it. But I’m still waiting to see what the lineup will be and hoping that... there will be some new blood, new energy, not just kind of picking from the same old politicians in the state.

Sounds familiar? She spewed the same bullshit in in the lead-up to last year's presidential election, tantalizing her moronic followers, and raking in the dough, with the prospect of a run that was just around the corner.

And it's always the same: "Who, moi? Well, you know, sooooo many people want me to run, and I sooooo believe in serving the people, but I want to wait and see what's going on, and maybe there will be some brilliant candidate we can all get behind, someone just like me, but not me, you know, but yeah, totally, I'm interested, and maybe I'll do it, because I'm sooooo serious about it, if people want me to... so... yeah. America!"

I'll predict now when I predicted then: not gonna happen. Because, you know, running for office -- and then staying in office -- would actually require some hard work, and commitment, and she'd much rather just keep raking in the dough by keeping her moronic followers on the edge of their seats, showing up on Fox to spew her bullshit, and otherwise trying to keep her star shining out on the crazy fringe of the Republican Party.

How Fox News misinforms: 15 minutes with Sean Hannity

Guest post by Ted Leibowitz

Ed. note: Ted's good friends with our former associate editor and co-blogger Creature, and Ted often wrote for Creature's now-on-long-hiatus blog State of the Day. Ted also guest blogged here at The Reaction. Looking back, I found a post from December 2008 in which he was rather critical of then President-elect Obama for choosing Rick Warren, who supported California's anti-gay Prop 8, to give the inaugural invocation. (We love President Obama here, but it's not like we're completely supportive of everything he does.) Well, it's great to welcome Ted back to the fold with a post on the completely unfair and unbalanced coverage of the election by the delusional folks at Fox. -- MJWS

Ted is an award-winning internet radio music director / DJ focused on bringing the best new and interesting indie rock to his worldwide listenership via his 10-year old station BAGeL Radio. He has been featured on panels at music/tech conferences and writes about the exciting new business of music as well as the foot-dragging, entrenched, dinosaur-like old music industry. Ted mainly tends to share his political thoughts around election time as this time of year makes him an insomniac.

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You lost, Sean. Oops.

I turned on the TV Wednesday night. It was tuned to Fox News. Sean Hannity was on. I watched, so you don't have to. For those of you who don't live in the U.S. and don't get the pleasure of tuning into Fox News, perhaps this sampling will help you understand how nearly 58 million Americans this week voted for a guy they didn't even like: they watch Fox News.

Below is what I gleaned from watching about 15-20 minutes of the show.

Sean Hannity is disgusted by President Obama for dirty campaigning.

SH: "One tragedy of this election is that Obama's dirty tactics have now been vindicated, and we're now going to see this [sic] kind of tactics replicated for many years to come. Thanks to Barack Obama, politics is now dirtier than it was, and it will get worse as others try to now perfect this "politics of personal destruction."

Apparently Mr. Hannity was not paying attention when George W. Bush (who is rarely mentioned anymore on Fox News for some reason) mercilessly took down one of his own, Senator John McCain, in the Republican primaries prior to the 2000 presidential election. Nor Dubya's second presidential campaign, during which Karl "Dubya's Brain" Rove invented the Swift Boat campaign smear against his opponent John Kerry, a recipient of the Purple Heart medal.

"If I'm [one of the people who ran Obama's campaign], today, I'm embarrassed," Hannity said, "because they knew no boundaries when it came to lying, and demonizing, slandering, smearing, besmirching, attacking a nice guy."

Hannity referred to the Obama campaign as "dirty and ugly and mean."

Even if this were true, it would be very "pot calling the kettle black" of someone at Fox News to disparage a campaign over such deeds. Fox News has on its payroll the unchallenged modern grand master of campaign dirty tricks, Karl Rove. Karl Rove learned dirty politics in the Nixon administration and went on to run many a smear campaign on behalf of George W. Bush with highlights including hinting that Texas Governor Ann Richards (1994) was a lesbian and suggesting that Senator John McCain (2000) was psychologically unstable due to his time as a POW (and also that McCain's wife was on drugs and that McCain had fathered an African-American love child). And who can forget the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame (2003) and the aforementioned Swift Boaters (2004).

The same Karl Rove who wouldn't concede Obama's victory on election night even after CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, and his own Fox News had already called it. Perhaps he thought if he kept barking he could pull James Baker out of a hat, like in 2000. But enough about Rove.

Next, Hannity had Ann Coulter on the show.

Coulter: "Recent immigrants are more likely to be on government assistance. The Democrats lure them in, get them on government assistance... recent immigrants are for more likely to be on government assistance than native-born Americans..." (I doubt she gets the irony of her poor word choice with "native... American")... get them on welfare, and they vote Democratic."

She continued, "Teddy Kennedy's 1965 immigration act was specifically designed to change the demographics of this nation."

Suddenly, 47 years after the fact, Ann Coulter woke up and realized that the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act was a liberal conspiracy to change the demographics of the U.S. by luring immigrants to our shores in order to get them addicted to government assistance so that they would some day vote Democratic.

Mr. Kennedy, if Ms. Coulter is right, you were an even more incredibly forward-thinking political genius than anyone knew.

Coulter then said, "I think Mitt Romney would have won if he'd had the same demographics that Ronald Reagan had."

Yes, Ann, in an alternate reality, Mitt Romney could have won the Presidency of the United States this week. Unfortunately for Mitt, and you, and Sean, and Karl, and Fox News, we live in this reality.

Coulter went on to refer, in passing, to Bush's wars as "wars that help America." Off-handed remarks like that get bandied about without explanation all the time on Fox News, implanting unsubstantiated falsehoods in viewers' minds.

Then there was this exchange:

AC: "Simpson-Bowles [a commission set up by President Obama to address growing U.S. debt] would be better than anything Obama could come up with."

SH: "Tax reform is a sneaky way of basically raising taxes..."

AC: "...raising taxes, which produces less revenue to the government."

Wait a second... raising taxes is a way to produce less revenue for the government?!?! What?!?!

Then a favorite Fox News straw man came up: the Liberal Media, which is apparently a monolithic entity that works in concert against the interests of conservatives and America.

SH: "The Liberal Media put all it's resources behind re-electing Barack Obama."

He then had Bob Woodward of The Washington Post on to talk about how the Liberal Media worked to get Obama re-elected. Problem was, Woodward brought up three examples of how the "mainstream media" (which Fox always refers to as the Liberal Media) hammered Obama in recent months.

Hannity's response was (paraphrasing), "Well, you may have some [valid] points, but I don't think the Liberal Media covered the scandals* to my satisfaction." Before I get to just what those "scandals" were, here is what Hannity actually meant:

"Well, you may have some [valid] points, but I'm not going to let the facts which you just stated, Bob Woodward, and which I, Sean Hannity, just acknowledged the validity of, get in the way of me reiterating the false narrative we here at Fox News have created and are ramming down our viewers throats."

After that I could take no more.

*The "scandals" were "The Beghazi Cover Up" (a non-story that Media Matters thoroughly debunked); "The Fast & Furious" (which has been debunked by such liberal rags as Fortune and the NY Daily News); and something about high unemployment numbers, which Woodward had just stated had been pretty well covered by that demon, the Liberal Media.

Are Herman Cain's right-wing defenders exempt from the journalism code of ethics?

By Nicholas Wilbur

Sharon Bialek, the fourth woman to come forward alleging that Cain sexually harassed her (and the first to report what sounds like assault) is not only the latest "alleged" victim of Cain, she's the latest victim of Cain's conservative apologists.

To be fair to Cain, it's possible that this sexual harassment scandal (or four) is nothing more than the usual blowback any politically powerful man should expect from a disgruntled former co-worker (or four), and that the claims (all four of them) are indeed, as Cain believes, nothing more than the political handiwork of a disgruntled fellow presidential candidate – Rick Perry.

At this point, it doesn't really matter. Cain has no intentions of admitting publicly that any of this took place. It does not appear likely that he will apologize to these women, let alone acknowledge their claims. (And why should he? It was the '90s, after all. Everybody was doing it!)

The media circus surrounding this scandal isn't likely to fade. More women are likely to come forward, and Cain will likely continue to protest how journalists do their jobs. But Cain and the (four) victims of his extra-marital sexual proclivities, his advances, harassment, and apparent assault, are not the only story.

As disgusting as these accusations are (that is, what Cain "allegedly" did), the conservative media's response is almost worse.

The card-carrying character assassins of the Republican sound machine are already jumping into their expected roles as contract-obligated defenders of the misogynists within the Republican Party, and they're hard at work painting the "alleged" victims as nothing more than two-dollar whores looking to make a name for themselves and to get their picture in National Enquirer.

The counter-assault is now in full swing.

Sean Hannity said after the news story broke (in Politico) that it is "baseless," a "hit piece," and a "smear." Dick Morris, himself no virgin to sex scandals, called Bialek "a gold-digger" who's looking for a book deal, a film deal or "a spread in Playboy" magazine. And Cal Thomas seems convinced this is part of a larger Democratic Party conspiracy to "drive a stake" through the hearts of anyone who challenges President Obama.

But perhaps even more offensive than that, if that's possible, was Rush Limbaugh, who instantly turned the accuser into a porn star simply based on his chosen pronunciation of her name: "Gloria Allred says her name is Bialek, as in (slurp, slurp) – buy a lick. There's no 'R' in the name so you can't say it's 'Rent-a-lick'... I don't know if Ms. Buy-a-lick likes scented candles or not. I don't know. How's that relevant? That hasn't been mentioned. We don't know if she's been to Happy Valley…we're still waiting for all of these details to be forthcoming."

If a little girl comes forward and tells school administrators that she was grabbed and groped on several occasions in inappropriate places by a boy in her class; if she says, in a voice so soft and so quiet it's almost inaudible, that she only recently came forward to report it because she was scared and embarrassed, and because she thought she would get into trouble, should the school administrators brush it off, make fun of the little girl, mock her name, tell her she dresses too provocatively (at 11 years old), and defend the "alleged" perpetrator as the victim of some liberal feminist smear campaign? Should this girl be called a gold-digger, a publicity whore? 

 

Would it at all be appropriate if the media, upon reporting this story, were to make any of these claims?

I ask only because the story of the little girl is true. It's true every day in every city across the country. Sexual harassment, sexual assault, rape, molestation... these things actually happen, daily. In this girl's case, she's a minor, and therefore safe from the punditry wolves.

But isn't it nice to know that if the same thing were to happen to her as an adult, she would be mocked, undermined, and attacked in the media, on television and the radio as a con artist and a liar without a shred of evidence to disprove anything she said.

On Sunday, Cain's campaign sent out passages from the Society of Professional Journalists's Code of Ethics. I wonder, did he send it to Limbaugh and Morris, Hannity and Fox News? Particularly the parts about showing good taste and compassion for those adversely affected by news coverage? 

(Cross-posted at Muddy Politics.)

Rick Perry isn't just a secessionist, he's a revisionist as well

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The other night, Rick Perry told Sean Hannity -- who treated Perry the way he treats Sarah Palin, which is to say, the way Sasha Grey, in her former professional capacity, used to treat an erect penis -- that he is not, in fact, a secessionist:

HANNITY: Some people said, well, you used the term once "secession." That's not anything -- is that something you believe?

PERRY: No, and I never used that term, at all.

HANNITY: Then why was it reported so heavily?

PERRY: I have no idea to be real honest with you, because it was never a really factual piece of reporting. It was shouted out by an individual at an event -- at a Tea Party, actually -- and I said "listen, America is a great country. We have no reason why we would ever dissolve this union."

Oh, okay then. End of story, right? Well, not so fast.

As ThinkProgress notes, he didn't technically use the word "secession" the one time in question, in March 2009. (Who knows, he may have used it at other times.) But he did say this:

You know, when we came into the nation in 1845, we were a republic, we were a stand-alone nation. And one of the deals was, we can leave anytime we want. So we're kind of thinking about that again.

Now, it's not clear just how serious he was being -- TP has the clip and, at the end, you can hear laughter. But at a Tea Party event a month later, he said this:

Texas is a unique place. When we came into the Union in 1845, one of the issues was that we would be able to leave if we decided to do that.

We got a great Union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it, but if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what may come out of that.

FactCheck.org concludes that Parry never advocated secession: "Perry has carelessly commented that Texas has a unique right to secede from the union, having once been an independent republic. That's a myth, historians say. But Perry never advocated secession."

But that's not really the point. No one is accusing Perry of being an ardent advocate for secession -- obviously, he considers himself an American patriot. But he's clearly wrong about Texas's supposed right to secede, a case he has made on more than one occasion, and, as Steve Benen points out, "it's entirely fair to say Perry dabbled in secessionist rhetoric, which in itself should be considered scandalous in the 21st century."

Yes, but certainly not to the anti-government radicals so prevalent in the GOP, and clearly, before he became a national sensation, Perry was more than willing to engage in such dabbling. Now that he's running for president, he's just trying to whitewash himself, cleansing his past of embarrassing facts, but the record is the record. He can dabble in revisionism all he wants, but there's no escaping it.

The Sesame Manifesto

By Capt. Fogg

(Ed. note: This is a follow-up to Fogg's post from yesterday. See the Fox News clip there or below. It's certainly enraging, but Hannity et al. are also massively stupid. It's hard to know whether to laugh or shudder. -- MJWS)

It's impossible for me to watch a Fox "panel" chew on a story without thinking of an alligator feeding frenzy or a bunch of mean dogs fighting for possession of a bit of rawhide. Actually, it's impossible for me to watch Fox News at all, but for those of a tougher breed, here's a prime example of that ruthless war on reality called Fox.

Listen carefully and you'll spot the message that Sesame Street aims at lower income, urban kids and you'll smell the racism and you'll hear the Republican anthem that the fraction of a cent per taxpayer that this show costs is "on principle" too much and especially because it tries to elevate the underclasses in direct contravention of Divine Law and Ayn Rand, whichever is the more powerful.

Does anyone really believe that Big Bird is a Communist or that Sesame Street is ruining America and the morals of its children? (Perhaps Doctor Spock fans can sigh with relief now that they've moved on to a new chew toy.)

Perhaps you do, perhaps you watch Fox anyway. Perhaps you're a malicious idiot with delusions of persecution, but here it is again:


(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Only on Fox

By Capt. Fogg 

Did you know that not only is Sesame Street "liberal," not only is Big Bird a bigot, watching it could lead to a totalitarian state and undermines morality and the destruction of the American family. It sets up an appetite for "governmental largesse" and prompts high schoolers to nominate homosexuals to host the junior prom. 

No, not only could you not make this up, you couldn't be paid millions to rave like a lunatic. It's getting to the point where you couldn't pay me to admit I'm American.

Congressman Anthony Weiner, my kind of politician

By R.K. Barry

I'm a big fan of Anthony Weiner, the Democrat who represents New York's 9th Congressional District. Crooks and Liars posted a clip of Congressman Weiner taking on both Sean Hannity and Michele Bachmann on Hannity's show on Fox. It was a debate about the budget and spending cuts and who is responsible for the debt and what we should do about it. We've heard this discussion before, so it wasn't the content as much as the style that impressed me.

For a long time I have felt that Democrats were not being tough enough in their squabbles with the right. The other side makes stuff up and Democrats all too often seem to nod politely and take it. But not Congressman Weiner. No, he gives as good as he gets, and I would suggest that other Democrats, if they expect to take these goons on with any degree of success, should go to school on the Congressman from NY's 9th.

Sad to say that politics is not a particularly civilized game. It never has been and that's not going to change any time soon.

Funny that Anthony Weiner and Jon Stewart were college roommates because Weiner seems to have missed the message that we should all be more civil in our debates. I'm not counseling rudeness. But I am suggesting that progressives not take any shit from the likes of Hannity and Bachmann. Make no mistake, it takes an immense amount of toughness and skill to stand in against the kind of nonsense that this radical right tag team is spewing here. And do note that all the rudeness was coming from Hannity.

I found it ironic and vaguely Freudian that Hannity suggested at one point in their exchange that Weiner "man up." It seems to me that this is exactly what Weiner was doing, and it pissed Hannity off to no end.

The clip says it all for me.

 

(Cross-posted from Lippmann's Ghost.)

Sharron Angle, Fox News, and the corrosive influence of money in American politics

By Michael J.W. Stickings

This doesn't belong in our "Just how crazy is Sharron Angle?" series. If anything, this shows her to be a rather shrewd political player and media manipulator who even knows how to get the most out of conservatives like Limbaugh, Hannity, and O'Reilly (who may be supportive of her candidacy but who may not like to be taken advantage of like this, not when she evidently sees them primarily as cogs in her money-making machine and doesn't even care if they're "friendly").

At the Las Vegas Sun, Jon Ralston quotes "some audio of Angle at a house party this month, bragging about how profitable FOX can be":

Guest: Sharron, how are you doing as far as the fundraising?

Sharron Angle: It's going really well. If you're interested in just the Internet part of that -- and of course I've been criticized for saying that I like to be friends with the [press] -- but here's the deal: when I get a friendly press outlet -- not so much the guy that's interviewing me -- it's their audience that I'm trying to reach. So, if I can get on Rush Limbaugh, and I can say, "Harry Reid needs $25 million. I need a million people to send twenty five dollars to SharronAngle.com." The day I was able to say that [even], he made $236,000 dollars. That's why it's so important. Somebody... I'm going on Bill O'Reilly the 16th. They say, "Bill O'Reilly, you better watch out for that guy, he's not necessarily a friendly"... Doesn't matter, his audience is friendly, and if I can get an opportunity to say that at least once on his show -- when I said it on Sean Hannity's television show we made $40,000 before we even got out of the studio in New York. It was just [great]. So that's what I'm really reaching out to is that audience that's had it with Harry, and you can watch that happen when I go on those shows. Go on my website, it starts coming in. We have an automatic... when you put your name in there and it doesn't tell how much you gave, but it tells your name and where you're from. And so you can just watch it; it just rolls like this. In fact, with Rush Limbaugh we put it all down. We couldn't take the ticker going fast enough. And we've pulled in over [3,000,000] dollars just from that kind of a message going out.

Priceless.

If anything's crazy here, it's not just Angle herself but the entire political system, one in which money plays such a significant and corrosive role, one in which campaigning and fundraising are essentially one and the same, in which success has a price, in which victory can be bought, if only you have enough money to spend, spend, spend your way to the top.

It doesn't always work, of course, but there's no denying the supremacy of money in American politics. And at that house party, Angle, unwittingly or not, got right to the heart of the matter.

Have a little tea with Ted

By Capt. Fogg 

Ted Nugent -- Where do I begin? Where does it end?

Obama is not only spitting on the Constitution, but the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule. It's hard to see the evidence and it's hard to know why he was silent about the unprecedented abuses during the Bush administration, unless we conclude that he's either psychotic, or a lying son of a bitch. The former seems certain, but of course much of it could also be attributable to ignorance. That he believes all Americans are commanded to worship Yahweh alone and keep a Kosher household and that the government is remiss in not enforcing this, can only be attributed to insanity - if indeed he believes or is even aware of anything he says.

I confess that I can't find any way to fit that old Golden Rule thing into the equation but for the fact that he's treating our basic institutions with extreme contempt while asking for something different than a government of laws and not of mobs for himself and his fellow tea heads. He certainly can't be saying that we shouldn't invade other countries or bomb civilians or overthrow elected governments because we don't want it done to us, because his favorite presidents are as famous for it as he is in being silent about them. Again, only rank insanity balances that equation.

With the Mao Zedong fan club in the White House, a clueless, rookie president hellbent on spending like a maniac as unprecedented debt piles up all around him, and every other imaginable indicator of an America turned upside-down, it comes as no surprise that this insane level of madness has metastasized into a Supreme Court where the Bill of Rights is being trashed by clueless, dangerously insulated old people intentionally disconnected from the real world, 

he says to Insanity Hannity about the dissenting vote on the Chicago handgun ban. I suppose he thinks Obama appointed those judges and that this hasn't been a contentious issue for a lifetime or two. But who knows what he thinks or if he thinks when he wraps himself in the flag and spews his tea at us. Surely it isn't often or deeply since he claims that Martin Luther King is his mentor and yet he's fond of shooting machine guns in his back yard.

Certainly it's more than hyperbole and more than just ignorance to call the administration a Mao Zedong fan club, certainly it's more than mere hypocrisy to blame Obama for trying to do what FDR did to ease the Depression and to ignore the fact that each and every Republican administration, at least from Reagan onwards, has set new levels of government size, expense, corruption, spending and borrowing while the Democrats haven't. But this is Ted speaking: Ted the flag waving teabagger who claimed to have been clean and sober all his life when talking to the Fox mob but to have dodged the draft by smoking Meth when talking to Rolling Stone -- and then tells us that he was lying to them but telling us the truth.

This is Ted blaming Obama for going after his massive arsenal of weapons when he didn't and the Court for banning them when it didn't. This is Ted telling us he is the will of the people, free elections and a majority vote to the contrary. This is the devil in a cowboy hat. This is horseshit wrapped up in a flag like some foul taco. This is just the failure they warned our founding fathers about.

Indeed, where do we begin with the Ted Nugent story when Ted Nugent himself says he's a liar and an addict and doesn't know MLK from Chuck Manson or Mao Zedong from a wishy-washy middle of the road conservative? I don't know. I don't know where the teabag story ends either but it certainly doesn't end in a free, democratic country.



(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Believing is seeing.

By Capt. Fogg

"I'm not in politics, I'm in ratings. We're winning"

-Roger Ailes, Chairman, Fox Television Stations Group -


It's remarkable and a bit sad that media outlets like MSNBC or NPR or the New York Times are so easily dismissed by the very people their job it is to expose as charlatans, liars, thieves, hypocrites and enemies of Democracy. There are so many possibilities to disembowel the people who are in turn disemboweling our values and our history and our nationhood and the very stability of our country, but bundled into a package like bad loans and labeled as Liberally biased, the non-Fox media simply give in, and afraid to do what anyone who knows how to use Youtube can do: they ignore the lies and emulate the deceivers or turn to celebrity gossip.

But of course in a different way, it's just as sad to see people like Newt Gingrich and Sean Hannity shown as naked and pathetic as the newly clothed emperor by one of the only news programs with nothing to lose by telling the truth: The Daily Show. I had tears in my eyes Thursday night as the scrolling text of President Obama's Nuclear Position Report was followed by the Foxed up report clothed as a conversation between the very god of hypocrisy and America's own Rasputin. Using someone's own recorded words against him makes it very hard, in theory, to drown out the truth with the usual brass band of Obamahate or to simply continue to lie and deny with the usual brass balls. why sad? because it doesn't matter, because the people who want to believe won't willingly leave their fantasy faith and view the real, sad world and because there are a lot of them and because they're angry as hell that Democracy overturned their perceived entitlement and will to power. As with evolution deniers, no amount of proof is enough even to raise the terrible spectre of doubt. For reasonable people seeing is believing, for Teabaggers, Fox Folk and the vermin who write viral e-mails, it's the other way around.

Yes, indeed, according to the NPR, The United States pledges never to make or threaten a nuclear attack against a non-nuclear enemy save for the provision that a chemical or biological attack could exempt an enemy from that pledge, but within seconds we see Gingrich saying that we're endangered because a chemical or biological attack could not provoke a nuclear response. Within seconds we hear Hannity affirm "yes, that's what he said." Of course, it wasn't and they both knew it. It's always quite an experience to see someone look you in the face and lie when you have proof positive that's just what it is. One feels betrayed, embarrassed, angry: one never wants to trust or listen to that person again. But not if you need that lie. Not if your entire life, your career, your personality revolves around that lie.

Will MSNBC or CNN or the networks address the Fox crew's responsibility to report the truth? Would they risk running such dramatic proof that their competition is no more honest or reliable than the Legendary Iraqi Defense Minister? What will they say about Fox's assertions that our widely radical president will put us all in danger by reducing our huge stockpile of nukes, some over 40 years old, by a third, or by looking forward to a world without them? Will they, like Jon Stewart simply run clips of Ronald Reagan telling the world that he looks forward to a world without nuclear weapons and that we should reduce the count by one third as a first step? No, they won't. Reagan will remain right and Obama will, by being exactly the same be irrevocably wrong -- and a far left radical liberal trying to weaken our defenses. Truth is irrelevant.

According to Newt Gingrich, President Obama believes that words are a substitute for reality: he's referring to words the President never said, or words that the Hero Reagan also said. His smirking riff, only meant to perfume a pointless smear and to deflect notice that this is precisely what Newt is doing: knowingly lying about the President, creating a false substitute for reality and knowingly trying to enrage people against the elected government. As Roger Ailes said, they're about ratings.

Who in the "Liberal Media" is going to expose him as a seditious insurgent? Who on CNN is going to put together clips of McCain calling himself a Maverick and denying he ever called himself a Maverick? Clips of McCain telling us to avoid extremists like Jerry Falwell and then praising Jerry Falwell? McCain espousing views and then calling Obama an extremist for agreeing? Only an entertainment show, a fake news show. You won't often see such stunning journalism on a real news program or in a real paper or magazine, because it's quick, because it doesn't allow the concocted "balance" of dignifying a baseless lie as "another point of view," because you can't speculate and expatiate ad absurdum and flap your jaws hysterically about it all day and all night. That's not what journalism is any more. Truth isn't even what truth is any more and Journalism isn't journalism, it's entertainment, it's ratings and profit. It's a Roman circus and we're not the lions.

(Cross posted from Human Voices)

So I went to America yesterday...

By Michael J.W. Stickings

More specifically, down to Buffalo, which is just a couple of hours' drive from Toronto. Why did I go? Oh, for something to do. Not that there isn't a lot to do in Toronto, of course, but we wanted to get out of town, and it was a lovely day for a drive down to Niagara, then over the border, first to East Amherst, out past the airport, where we found a great road-side drive-in restaurant, then to a bookstore of a major national chain.

As for the bookstore, right next to the Walden Galleria, let's call it... Borders.

Now, it's a decent bookstore, but it used to be a lot better -- I've been going there on my Buffalo trips ever since I moved to Toronto in '95. I thought it was even better than Barnes & Noble. It had a fantastic book selection, especially Fiction, History, and Politics, with a lot that I couldn't find here in Canada, including from American academic presses, as well as a similarly fantastic music (including small and independent artists) and movie (including foreign/Criterion) selection. But even the in-store cafe, now a Seattle's Best (i.e., Starbucks), isn't what it once was.

Maybe Borders has been cutting back, or maybe it's just the unfortunate reality of the brick-and-mortar trade now, what with so many of us buying their books and DVDs online, and with iTunes changing the way we buy music. Whatever the case, it's been a disappointment my last few trips there, and yesterday was no exception.

But here's my point: When I walked in, the first thing I saw, right in front of me, was a display that prominently featured Sean Hannity's Conservative Victory: Defeating Obama's Radical Agenda. Putting aside the fact that conservatism has been a bankrupt and losing ideology for many years now, and that Obama's agenda is hardly radical -- while I'm still a fairly enthusiastic Obama supporter, I and many others on the left, including the moderate left, have been extremely critical of his generally right-leaning agenda (the moderate Republican health-care plan, the Wall Street bailout, the Afghan War escalation, the continuation of some of the worst aspects of Bush's national security state, etc.) -- what struck me was the fact that a major bookstore in what is a fairly Democratic state (if not the most Democratic part of that state) decided to feature a member of the right-wing insanitarium (and Fox News propaganda machine). Okay, he was right next to Giada De Laurentiis, the (overrated and irritating) Food Network star with the prominent rack, but still.

Now, you might say, so what? Hannity's books are popular, and Borders just wants to make money. Fine. I get that, even if I don't like it. But, as I discovered later, the Politics section prominently featured the work of Glenn Beck, with two shelves reserved for his books. Yes, yes, Beck is extremely popular, too, but it struck me as something other than a coincidence that Borders' customers, myself included, had right-wing extremism shoved down our throats as we browsed. Okay, there really is no left-wing equivalent to Hannity and Beck, Limbaugh and Coulter, but still.

So who's to blame? Corporate Borders? This one Borders in Cheektowaga, New York? Who knows? But suffice it to say that it reminded me that while I used to live in the U.S. for many years, and while I write about the U.S., have a blog that focuses on the U.S., and generally focus a great deal of my attention on the U.S., I take so much comfort in being Canadian and in living in Canada, where our bookstores and our culture and our politics and our very way of life are not polluted with such right-wing inanity and insanity. We may have a Conservative government in Ottawa and our share of conservative public figures (many of whom, like David Frum and Mark Steyn, head south), but it's just not the same -- at its worst, it's more like being governed by moderate Democrats, along with a few moderate Republians, within generally liberal parameters, as we are, more or less, a solidly liberal, if not always Liberal, country.

I love America. I really do. That's why I spend so much of my time in virtual America, watching it, blogging about it, immersed in it. But there's an awful lot I don't like about it, as I make clear here over and over, and it's when I'm face-to-face with that awfulness, with Hannity and Beck and those like them, with conservative ideology and the extremist theocratic-libertarian views that are so prevalent down there, that at times seem to dominate the political landscape, when I think, you know, this is what you have to deal with when you live in America, that I recoil, repulsed, and take such pride in my own country.

We Canadians are very American in very many ways, you see, but in the ways that perhaps matter most, we are very much ourselves.

God is great. Bill O'Reilly? Not so much.

By Capt. Fogg

Blurry words and fuzzy logic are the tools of the deceiver. Take the word "terrorist." We're still trying to fit it into the Procrustean bed, or should we call it the Republican Bunk? In fact we can no longer distinguish between terror, the emotion or terrorism; the acts designed to produce terror. We're always arguing about who is a criminal and who is a terrorist but, always willing to help us find our balance, Fox News and Sean O'Reilly are on the job.

In order to keep the terror, angst, and anger flowing and the ratings high, it's important to keep the supply of terrorists visible and to keep them ethnic -- and here comes Sean Hannity to tell us that what makes a terrorist a terrorist is that he praises God before he terrorizes. It's not all that simple, though. He has to do that in Arabic, otherwise every foxhole would be full of terrorists of many faiths.

It's simple enough, however, to say that because Major Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly said Allahu Akhbar before shooting up Fort Hood. On the other hand, attacks from the bombing of Guernica to the Rape of Nanjing to the shocking and awing of Baghdad are not. Simple haters like simple rules for hating. They like simple things that can be used to create convenient groups: tropes like "political correctness" of which O'Reilly accused The Washington Post's Sally Quinn Wednesday night. It's much easier to condemn a group fabricated for the purpose than to address her reluctance to call the man a "Muslim terrorist":

You have a hard time saying the words "Muslim terrorist." I don't know why.

I do know why. If the only difference between Charles Manson, Timothy McVeigh, David, Son of Sam, Berkowitz, and Major Hasan is religion, it becomes awfully hard to launch the Fox Crusade against Muslims alone. So one hates along with Bill, or one is politically correct which means unwilling to hate along with Bill. One jumps to convenient conclusions with him or one refuses in that politically correct way, thus defining PC as smart and honest and responsible for people more logically adept than the Fox Fools.

One must be a hater of Muslims or a terrorist supporter, and without that assertion O'Reilly melts on the floor like the Wicked Witch. A nice binary, Good v. Evil choice to replace the kind of reasoning stupid people hate and fear and are incapable of, the kind of choice Lyin' Bill peddles like crack in the high school parking lot.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Millions, billions, trillions...

By Capt. Fogg

I'm pretty new to Twitter, but the place sounds like an aviary today with all the giggling about Sean Hannity's statement that Acorn, the subject of much hilarity this week, is slated to receive eight and a half TRILLION dollars from the government. I'm not sure that Sean is aware that the Census Bureau dropped ACORN a week ago, as Fox reported. Even so -- $8,500,000,000,000.00? Sean, thousands, millions, billions, trillions -- there's a difference!

So I'm wondering if maybe the next time I call him Insanity Hannity y'all won't say I'm over the top. I mean, I'm just sayin'.



(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Craziest Conservative of the Day: Sean Hannity

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Along the lines of James Inhofe, Sean Hannity gets the award today for arguing that Obama, with his Cairo speech, "decided to give 9/11 sympathizers a voice on the world stage."

Umm... what?

Steve Benen: "The point, which even someone of Hannity's limited skills could understand, was to address the persistent conspiracy theories in some parts of the region (9/11 was not a real terrorist attack, was not launched by al Qaeda, etc.). Obama was not giving "9/11 sympathizers a voice on the world stage," he was setting the record straight, characterizing terrorists as bloodthirsty monsters, and encouraging Muslims to reject outrageous lies."

Actually, I think that is beyond Hannity's (ridiculously) limited skills.

Hannity's "a sad joke," yes, and seemingly "incapable of shame," but he's also extraordinarily crazy.

Dishonesty is strength

By Capt Fogg

Dick Cheney is a man of short declarative sentences. He packs a lot of venom and a lot of mendacity into each one.

"What I find disturbing is the extent to which he’s gone to Europe and seemed to apologize profusely, been to Mexico and seemed to apologize there,” said Cheney to Raw Story's David Edwards. “The world out there, both our friends and foes, will be quick to take advantage of that… I don’t think we’ve got much to apologize for."

"Seemed to" shouldn't slip past the reader unnoticed, since it's an attempt to elevate a convenient assumption to the point where his baseless argument can pivot on it. To be equally as curt and declarative: Cheney lies. It didn't seem so to me or to those who listened to all the words, rather than the tendentious extracts wrapped in tactical opinion we got from Republican sources.

It doesn't seem beyond the pale to recognize that swaggering "kiss my ass you dirty wogs -- I'm AMERICA" foreign policy that has been the joy of the thundering classes who see the world as ungrateful and arrogant for wanting some measure of independence. It doesn't seem like an unqualified, abject and grovelling approach when Obama says we haven't been fair to the world all the time either. It sounds, in fact, like honesty and of course to the man of the perpetually undisclosed location, who keeps his lunch and shopping list in a vault, that's a sign of "weakness."

It's "weak" to disclose that we tortured people to death and lied about it. It's weak to shake hands with Chavez, says Cheney -- but only if a Democrat does it -- and of course any sign of honesty, humanity or willingness to promote peace that does not depend on unqualified, abject and grovelling acceptance of American Empire can be a fatal weakness.

I have trouble understanding the level of fear Cheney lives with; the kind of fear that drove him and his puppets to military aggression, pathological secrecy and a domestic paranoia that led him to think the suppression of civil rights and constitutional law is "nothing to apologize for." It's harder to understand than starting a war on false pretenses for his own profit.

Paranoia: the feeling that even our friends will take advantage of us if we're not unrelenting in our refusal to admit mistakes and uncompromising in our rage for dominion; law, morality, truth and justice notwithstanding. Quite an opinion and what better place to discuss it than with Sean Hannity and what better audience than the people who still watch Fox News and who are sure to fail to notice just how Cheney and his party equate ganging up on a new administration in time of extreme crisis as patriotism, but of course these are the people who accused the Democrats of caving in to terrorism in 2001 even after they voted unanimously to support George W. Bush.

Accepting the consequences of your actions is so unmanly.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Colmes leaves Hannity, tears flow

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Well, I don't know about the tears, but it's true that the Colmes-Hannity team on Fox News is splitting up.

And it's so, so sad... or perhaps it would be if I cared. I don't watch the show, and rarely the network, and, to me, Colmes was little more than an overwhelmed punching bag with no punch of his own, the perfect "liberal" for Hannity and Fox. In a certain other culture, Colmes's dishonourable behaviour would have required him to commit hara-kiri a long time ago.

(Of course, I suppose there's some appeal to being the co-host, even in name only, of a top-rated show. I doubt I'd ever turn such an opportunity down, but, then, I also wouldn't shy away from telling Hannity where to stick it.)

(Photo from here. Yeah, that's Colmes posing with McCain.)