Before getting into the meat of this post about the batshittery from Stanley Kurtz on the Obama-Ayers connection, I can’t resist commenting that Kurtz sounds exactly like Big Gay Al, which may explain much more than we want to know about Kurtz’s unflagging crusade against teh gays:
Now that we have that out of way, let’s talk about Big Gay Stanley’s batshittery on the Obama-Ayers connection. As you probably know, Stanley’s been running around, telling anyone who would listen, that Obama and Ayers were best buds, that Obama’s political philosophy is therefore absolutely identical to Ayers’s philosophy, and that if we elect Obama, the first thing he’ll do in office is try to blow up the Pentagon.
The basis for this nonsense is the Obama was on the Board of Directors of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge and Bill Ayers was involved in a group that organized the Chicago Challenge and that provided advice and recommendations to the Challenge. So, since being on the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge makes you a terrorist, let’s see who some of the other terrorists on that Board were. Here’s a list of the Board members from the group’s 1998 IRS Form 990.
First we have Edward Bottum, who was head of a Chase Franklin, a venture capital firm, as well as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Underwriters Laboratories. And, probably to throw the FBI off the track of his terrorist leanings, he made all of his political contributions to Republicans.
And don’t forget the philanthropist Nancy Searle, who also has cleverly concealed her terrorist leanings by contributing to Republicans.
Best of all, another Board member is Scott C. Smith, President and Publisher of the Chicago Tribune, which still openly advocates blowing up public monuments and gives recipes for Molotov cocktails in its “Food and Drink” section. Scott gives money to Republican candidates hoping to embarrass them by his connections with Bill Ayers.
Finally, Kurtz and all the other wingnuts screaming about this seem to have forgotten who Walter Annenberg, the guy who started this whole thing, was. To call him a fervent Republican and best buddies with Tricky Dick Nixon and St. Ronnie Reagan is an understatement. Actually, the most damning thing about Obama’s connection to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge is, well, Annenberg himself, but we aren’t going to hear that from Big Gay Stanley and friends.
I am 15 and live in a part of America that is very traditional. My problem that I’m writing to you about is I have thought for a long time that I am gay. My question is what is the right thing to do? I am going to be a junior in high school and last year things got pretty bad with other kids gossiping.
I have a couple good friends though and also have the internet LOL. You look like someone who can understand what it is like to have a secret like this and what to do. So what is your advice?
Signed, “Dr. Frank N. Furter from Transylvania” (hehe)
While Bush obviously offered up his share of bullshit while campaigning in 2000 and 2004, he did have some actual policy positions (i.e., tax cuts for rich people and imperial wars of aggression) that he ran on.
St. BBQ’s campaign, on the other hand, mainly specializes in sneering, nasty attack ads. Other than comparing Obama to Paris Hilton, what does he have? Why would anyone want to vote for him?
Somehow this has something to do with us. We gave this person his ‘marching orders’ or something.
My own view is that mockery is lots of lulz, etc. but stupid mockery like asking someone, ‘Are you a tranny?’ is, well, stupid. And offensive. And anti-lulz. I would personally but strongly advise not doing that kind of shit.
Gavin adds: I’m reading Alkon’s narrative, where she tracks the poor guy down, calls him at work, and bullies him on the phone, and I have truthfully never seen a more sobering example of batshit-crazy, out-of-all-proportion, obsessive-compulsive meanness.
I think if we take her side, even notionally, we lose a bit of our humanity. She was getting back at us through the guy she tracked down — and it would seem that she did it because the rush of campaign-waging that she so enjoys, the center-of-attention thrill of righteously waving her arms and yelling at someone, had started to fade, since we were no longer despicably assaulting her free speech by making fun of her on the Internet. That is, she needed to start it up again somehow. And voila, as so often happens, someone posted a brief, snarky comment on a blog post, giving her an excuse to go screamingly bonkers.
…Against the world, as it were, as represented by some particular person she can take on and ‘win’ against, through sheer force of attention span.
We told Alkon awhile ago that if she went this route, public opinion would be with the poor slob she ‘outed,’ and not with the public figure who went after him. This is the kind of thing that people notice, far outside the little world of political blogs.
Clif adds: Welcome to the upside-down world of Amy Alkon. Posting a snarky comment on her site is an attempt to punish her for her free speech but, of course, tracking down the guy who made the comment and trying to get him fired isn’t an attempt to punish him for his free speech. And he’s punishing her by forcing her to take time away from writing her book to track him down at work, call his superiors and scream at him like a deranged homeless person, which, of course, takes only a fraction of the time it does to push the “delete comment” button.
I swear, every time you nip off to the store for a quart of milk, you come back to find that they’ve whooped up another one.
The Greek Temple thing has been wafting around the blogs for a little while, and it’s so far beyond the usual, day-to-day right-wing flapdoodle that it seems to have rendered John Hinderaker almost funny.* Now the GOP, apparently running low on ideas and messages or something, has taken it up as an actual complaint.
What is the proper method for such a presumptuous man as this to accept the nomination of his party? It’s obviously not in any way that a Republican would accept it, because the very acts of hubris that make a man like Obama a foppish dandy dippily doodling his way along to the Oval Office are tamed and converted into powerfully heterosexual normality by the sheer pulsating power of Reaganism. Shall Obama accept the nomination on an upscaled corner stoop, James Clyburn and Maxine Waters shuffling by with a curt, respectful head nod? Should the nomination of the first major party black candidate in America’s history happen in a gloriously reimagined welfare line, where a dolled-up John Kerry dressed as Uncle Sam hands him the welfare check of the $400,000 a year Presidential salary?
Please, you heartland patriots, design the Black Liberal’s Acceptance Speech. And don’t skimp on the Black Power salutes, either.
Above: The moment we’ve all been waiting for
* Oops, we spoke too soon — Hindy copied it from the zany jokesters in the McCain campaign. [Hanx! Doctorb]
ZOMG teh Great Orange Satan himself is, like, standing right across the table from me, talking with Jane and Pach. Hillary’s yakkin’ on the big screen. Ok, I shouldn’t say that — she’s very magnanimous and gracious. Oh, classy. God, I swear I can feel Kos’s Orangeness from here; I’m getting an Orangetan. I think I hate America and want an abortion. There’s free beer around here somewhere……
Holy shit there’s Atrios! I’m going to introduce myself as Adam Yoshida. BRB.
Update: Dude is so smooth. He’s all like, ‘Hi, Adam, how are you?’ Then I go, “Blargh! Put teh Muslims in human-sized microwaves!!!” And then I got a beer.
Update Crowd is beginning to thin. Jane and Pach have left. Spencer’s out partying. Most people have a beer in their hand; I, like a moron, got an IPA on accident. Ptooie! Big cheer here for Maxine Waters, and rightly so. OH, WANT: Athenae from First Draft has a ‘DFH’ sticker on her laptop. She’s so awesome. Okay, dude at the end of the table, from Flprogressive, made them. Now Jon Tester just showed up and got immediately surrounded or perhaps mobbed is a better way of putting it. His flattop is impressive in person.
Update For Jay in comments : Even more pathetic than milquetoast leftwing bloggers, you’re trolling that leftwing blogger, Jay. Fuck off.
Speaking of asshole Jays, a few people at the neighboring table led a raucous chant of “Jello Jay Sucks,” to great applause and approval. Ok, Jay Rockefeller, right. Terrible speaker.
Welp, I’m on the phone trying to get Mencken, at long last, into the DNC Big Tent (population: 400 bloggers and blog-related people). Apparently, there’s simply no more room for a single other person, along with their having him down as Josh Marshall — and not being able to correct the name on the credential because what if Josh Marshall shows up unannounced?
In short, it hasn’t reached the vodka and sobbing stage yet, but it’s still early in the afternoon.
Anyway, we know for a fact that there’s room for one more in the Big Tent, because what about this guy?
This is a credential that will get you into the what’s called the perimeter. You’ll be able to move around the entire pepsi center but not actually inside the pepsi. You will have access to the media pavilions and get into all events the press has been invited to
Classy move, Yglesias. Like you really needed the extra hundred bucks.
h/t to Raw Story for covering this. Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, and A-list bloggers Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher were all shut out of a Blue Dog Democrat party sponsored by AT & T. All three of them had press credentials. Here’s how Amy Goodman covered the event [link]. Welcome to the Dems version of Dick Cheney’s energy council.
Because, you know, for awhile there we were thinking it was something against us personally.
ABOVE: Jim “Gateway Pundit” Hoft tries to look like Jeff Gannon* — fortunately while
fully-clothed.
Jim Hoft, who probably hasn’t read a book not published by Regnery since he read the first four pages of Tom Sawyer in high school, has decided that he is a literary sleuth. So Jim recently performed a careful hermeneutic analysis of Michelle Obama’s DNC speech to determine if there were secret clues that would prove that Michelle is a fist-bumping, Allah-worshipping, lesbian-loving, socialist-leaning, terrorist-sympathizing radical anarchist. Not surprisingly, he found such evidence and then started jumping up and down, high-fiving himself in the mirror, and asking when he was going to get his new pony.
Here’s what the most awesomest sleuth (ever!) has found:
In last night’s speech, Michelle Obama said something that peeked [sic] my curiousity [sic]. She said:
“Barack stood up that day,” talking about a visit to Chicago neighborhoods, “and spoke words that have stayed with me ever since. He talked about “The world as it is” and “The world as it should be…”
And, “All of us driven by a simple belief that the world as it is just won’t do – that we have an obligation to fight for the world as it should be.“
Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Saul Alinsky’s book, Rules for Radicals:
“The means-and-ends moralists, constantly obsessed with the ethics of the means used by the Have-Nots against the Haves, should search themselves as to their real political position. In fact, they are passive — but real — allies of the Haves…The most unethical of all means is the non-use of any means… The standards of judgment must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be.”
…
Figures.
Okay, without getting all elitist and educated and stuff, I can’t help but point out that anyone who’s read a single page of philosophy, ethics or theology has run across the comparison of the “world as it should be” to the “world as it is.” Thousands of writers, all of whom knew how to spell “piqued” and “curiosity,” have used this formulation, and it isn’t any more original to Alinsky than the words “and” and “the.”
But the stupid never stops with Mr. Hoft, who apparently didn’t even read or understand the two passages he cited. He saw the same two phrases in the speech and was so busy whooping and hollering about his groundbreaking discovery and his literary prowess that he didn’t notice that Michelle and Alinsky use the two phrases in exactly opposite ways — Alinsky calls the “world as it should be” a “fantasy,” whereas Michelle sees it as an ideal to be fought for.
Maybe you’ve noticed the narrative that’s being pounded into our heads by the *gasp* MSM: Americans don’t know Barack Obama. And at this DNC it is crucial for the Dems to get the American people to know Obama, who is a a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a shit moat.
I was reading the umpteenth op-ed iteration of this purposefully ambiguous line in the morning paper when it struck me:
WTF?
Obama’s been a national figure since his 2004 DNC keynote. He’s a best-selling author and a prominent senator. He was showcased in the longest, most covered nomination process in recent memory. Apparently, he’s even bigger than Bono and Britney Spears.
Except when he isn’t, which is when gasbags are following the meme herd.
I’d argue that other than sitting presidents running for re-election, vice presidents following on from sitting presidents, and Hillary Clinton, who’s a special case, he’s the most known presidential candidate we’ve ever seen. Compare him to Clinton at the 1992 DNC, Dole at the 1996 RNC, Kerry at the 2004 DNC or even the fairly well-known McCain at the upcoming Minneapolis RNC.
Did we know more or less about those guys then, than we know about Obama now? The answer to that rhetorical question is another question. Wait, no it’s not. The answer is that I know way too fucking much about Obama already. I know stupid shit about Obama, like his propensity to leave the butter out and how he blows at bowling but can knock down threes under pressure.
I know that his wife’s name is Michelle and I knew that before her big speech. I knew about her professional career and law degree and two daughters. I know McCain’s wife’s name, but I forget if it’s spelled Cindy or Cindi, with a little heart or without. I know that Cindi/Cindy is a beer heiress … and I don’t even know what beer. And I really, really like beer. I like it even more than law degrees and cute daughters, so it’s odd that I don’t know this thing.
I know stuff about Obama’s pastor and his mom and his dad. I don’t know shit about McCain’s dad, other than that he fought in the War of 1812. I do know that McCain’s mom thinks he’s a total fucking cunt.
I know that Obama doesn’t like Cheez Whiz (like 7/4ths of every last fucking everybody over the age of 12 on the planet) and is aware there is a thing called arugula (like every last Heartlander with the Food Channel on their basic cable plan and a fascination with eating, which is to say, every last one of them). I don’t know if McCain is still gnawing on a piece of hard tack from his days in the Pony Express.
Maybe I know all this stuff about Obama because I’m an Obama supporter and a moonbat and all that good stuff. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just totally teh ghey for him.
But I wonder what the media crowd mean by ‘get to know him’. (And I include not just the Fox douchebags and assholes like David Brooks, but people like Olbermann and Dionne, who I’ve heard parrot this ‘Americans don’t know Barack Obama’ line of horseshit.) I wonder what ‘getting to know Barack Obama’ would entail, beyond the 24/7 presentation of the guy and his ideas for the past year.
Maybe he’s supposed to couch surf at every single American’s apartment before the convention ends. Maybe he should have totally been our BFF since kindergarten or something. Or maybe he should just turn into an old white guy.
Because I just can’t help but suspect that this endless repetition of the ‘get to know him’ line is an oblique and possibly even unconscious reference to race. That in the media’s view, ‘getting to know’ a black guy with a somewhat exotic upbringing requires a whole hell of a lot more ‘getting to knowing’ than doing the same with a typical white pol. One look at Whitey McWhite (R-Whiteness) and you ‘know’ all there is to know, whereas Obama’s own pubic hair is still reserving judgement on the guy (told you I was gay for him).
So, it turns out I don’t really have credentials. A case of mistaken identity. It’s my own fault, though. Like Spencer Ackerman just told me, when someone asks you if you’re Josh Marshall, you say yes!
I said no. I know, right? Where’s my sense of adventure?
The radical feminist Title IX has crippled our competitiveness in macho sports such as men’s gymnastics — and men’s freestyle wrestling, except for that, uh, son of illegal immigrants who so-called “won a gold medal” in men’s freestyle wrestling.
One can’t cast one’s eyes toward Iraq, or read of the still-struggling Gulf Cost, or greet another infuriating 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court, or hear about a family who lost their home because of the catastrophic combination of a healthcare crisis and no health insurance, or a crumbling infrastructure, or American students falling behind their global peers, or American scientists falling behind theirs, or any one of dozens of issues that have Rove’s grubby fingerprints and Bush’s crummy signature all over them, and fail to think about the scheming that has changed our country and our lives, not for the better by almost any estimation.
And the pot of shit behind it all has the temerity to suggest that Michelle Obama doesn’t love her country—the proof of her insufficient affection being, evidently, that she hasn’t endeavored for the past four decades to destroy it.
Fuck you, Rove. Fuck. You.
What’s been generally amazing to me about this convention is how much the talking heads focused on personality-based elements: “Have Barack and Hillary made up yet? Is Michelle Obama a scary, angry black woman, or is she a phony pretending not to be a scary, angry black woman? What do the Democrats have to do to prove that they don’t hate America?”
Absolutely nothing about policy, absolutely nothing about the disaster that the past eight years of right-wing rule have wrought upon the country and the world. It’s all one big soap opera for these assholes, and as long as they’re entertained, Rome can burn.
Gee, I wish Michelle Obama had given a fiery speech on race so I could have trashed her as an angry, bitter black woman; instead, I’ll just have to make do with trashing her as an insincere phony who hides all of her black rage for the sake of political correctness.
I cannot think of an event that more amply demonstrates the Left’s paranoid delusions, and indeed perverse longing, regarding the assassination of Barack Obama, than the arrest of four white supremacists with sniper rifles who claimed they were planning to assassinate Barack Obama.
As you may recall, several months ago it looked as if one of America’s two major political parties was going to have a serious “party unity” problem. [...]
And yet, these tensions were overcome! And not overcome, primarily, by endless hand-holding sessions in which the various aggrieved parties recited their complaints from one side of their mouth while talking of their admiration for each other out of the other side. And they certainly weren’t overcome by speaking in more detail about a policy agenda. Rather, though there was of course some hand-holding, unity was primarily achieved by shifting attention off the internally controversial of their nominee and his relationship to other party figures and on to the internally uncontroversial subject of how awful the other political party is.
Yep.
It’s been long obvious to anyone who has been following politics for more than the past week that the Republican base really does not like the guy they nominated for president this year and that the only way he can win will be to focus them on how much they hate the other guy.
It’s time for the Dems’ dirty tricks team (does one even exist?) to start ratfucking operations, my friends. Ideally, you’d want to exploit St. BBQ’s divisions with the anti-immigrant wingnuts and the religious wingnuts, and McCain’s warm embrace of Daddy Yankee has created an opening to do just that. I’m picturing a new 527 group called Values Voters Against McCain. Their first ad would be something like this:
For years, the Republican Party has promised values voters that it would stand up for morality in Washington. But after years of Republican rule, abortion is still legal, activist judges are redefining marriage and our airwaves are still being polluted with sex and violence. And now, the Republican Party has put up a candidate who admits that he doesn’t care about social issues and who mocks our morality by appearing in raunchy Hollywood comedies. Isn’t it time that we sent the Republican Party a message that if they want our votes, they have to respect our values?
The GOP base really doesn’t like St. BBQ, and a few well-funded and targeted ad campaigns to remind them of this fact could make a difference come November. As the Editors is fond of saying, “These rats ain’t gonna fuck themselves.”
Gavin adds: It seems a bit late in the season to start a new 527 group, but a good ratfuck is timeless, so here’s the relevant section of the tax code. Note that organizations with revenues under $25,000 are exempt from certain requirements. If you’re like us, and just spent $10,000 on a jade-inlayed three-finger ring (Beijing 2008, suckas!), you can appreciate how quickly that kind of money can fall out of your pocket. Indeed, ‘well-funded’ is generally the tricky part in these things.
Then again, there’s a whole wide world of ill-funded shenanigans to consider. If anyone wants to spring for a micro-targeted ‘John McCain, Por La Raza!’ banner ad campaign, that stuff costs, like, high two figures and up. Because naturally, we’ll donate the artwork.
I made it to Denver — or, precisely, Boulder. And thanks to the kindness of strangers, I have a Big Tent pass; thanks to the kindness of an old friend, I have a place to stay. More later after I sort out computer and logistics issues.
In his speech on Saturday, Biden talked about sitting at his kitchen table and talking after he put his kids to bed. But his kids are all grown up now and don’t need to be put to bed! Liar, liar, pants on fire!!! Typical.
