Year: 2010

How SPLC Hypes the Hate

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Dangerous extremist militias taking over America? The Southern Poverty Law Center reports “an astonishing 363 new Patriot groups appeared in 2009, with the totals going from 149 groups (including 42 militias) to 512 (127 of them militias) – a 244% jump” from 2008.

OK, so let’s ask a question: How does the SPLC get these numbers? Do a “find” search on the their list of “Patriot” groups and you discover:

  • 37 listings of the John Birch Society;
  • 48 listings of We the People;
  • 49 listings of Oath Keepers; and
  • 50 listings of the Constitution Party.

According to the SPLC’s math, then, state-by-state representation of these four organizations count as 184 “Patriot groups” —  36 percent of the SPLC’s total. Let’s ask a few more questions:

  • Are these groups dangerous?
  • Are they criminal?
  • Do they pose a threat to public safety?

After some quick Googling, I picked up the phone:

“We the People” appears to be generally libertarian in orientation: 2004 Libertarian Party candidate Michael Badnarik addressed the group’s 2009 “Constitutional Convention,” and [founder Robert] Schultz himself was a guest (along with libertarian figures like Reason magazine editor Nick Gillespie and Rep. Ron Paul) on an August 2009 broadcast of Judge Andrew Napolitano’s Fox News TV program.
After finding the Web site of the Alabama chapter of “We the People,” I phoned Huntsville resident Lesha Martin, one of the members listed on the site. Is “We the People” some kind of violent militia-type outfit?
“Good heavens, no,” said Ms. Martin, an admirer of Ron Paul who described herself as devoted to individual freedom and “resurrecting the Constitution.”
How many peaceful citizens like Lesha Martin are lumped together to create the “grim and alarming portrait . . . of extremist organizations” presented by the SPLC?

Of course, we cannot rule out the possibility that some of these groups are unwittingly harboring wannabe terrorists — short-wave wackos building pipe-bombs or stockpiling AK-47 ammo in their garages — but the claim of an “astonishing” increase in dangerous extremism looks very much like the kind of irresponsible exaggeration we’ve come to expect from The Church of Morris Dees. And of course, MSNBC books the SPLC’s Mark Potok, who gleefully uses this report to smear the Tea Party movement:

I don’t deny that there are kooks in America or that some of those kooks are dangerous, but the SPLC purposely hypes this kind of hysteria — using dubious statistics to inflate the numbers — for their own lucrative aggrandizement.

UPDATE: Is Rhode Island a Klan stronghold? Professor William Jacobson is skeptical of the SPLC’s claim.

UPDATE II: Jesse Walker of Reason magazine:

The Southern Poverty Law Center . . .would paint a box of Wheaties as an extremist threat if it thought that would help it raise money . . . To illustrate how dangerous these groups are, the Center cites some recent arrests of right-wing figures for planning or carrying out violent attacks. But it doesn’t demonstrate that any of the arrestees were a part of the Patriot milieu, and indeed it includes some cases involving racist skinheads, who are another movement entirely.
As far as the SPLC is concerned . . . skinheads and Birchers and Glenn Beck fans are all tied together in one big ball of scary. The group delights in finding tenuous ties between the tendencies it tracks, then describing its discoveries in as ominous a tone as possible.

A fool and his money are soon parted. Morris Dees was finance director of the George McGovern 1972 presidential campaign and figured out that hyping the “right-wing extremist” threat was a surefire strategy for separating those particular fools from their money.

For nearly 30 years, Dees and his crew have been working the same formula: Send scary letters to rich liberals, suggesting that if they don’t send the SPLC a check today, the brownshirts will be goose-stepping down Main Street tomorrow.

How Doomed Is Charlie Crist?

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Even Salon.com has noticed that Charlie is toast:

In February 2009, Crist embraced, both figuratively and literally, President Barack Obama when Obama came to Florida to tout the economic stimulus package that had not yet become law.
At the time, both Obama’s and Crist’s favorability ratings were high in Florida. . . .
Crist’s opponents have seized on every opportunity to remind voters of The Hug, and Obama’s and Crist’s poll ratings in the state have declined almost in lockstep — in part because the state’s residents see little evidence that the stimulus has worked. Florida’s unemployment rate is much higher than the national average, at almost 12 percent . . . .
At the rally with Obama, Crist said: “We know that it’s important that we pass a stimulus package.” By last November, he was telling CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “I didn’t endorse it … I didn’t even have a vote on the darned thing.”
Some see the price Crist has paid for his Obama embrace as a fitting reward for a man whose career has been defined by political expediency.
“He miscalculated a changing political environment in Florida,” Rick Wilson says. “Charlie has always had a nose for the populist issue of the moment, and has been able to chase those things with success. This time, his instincts failed him.”

They didn’t even bother to mention the closet-gay rumors about Charlie. You know a Republican is completely hopeless when a liberal reporter passes up such a juicy smear.

Coffee Party: Yeah, We Can Backronym The Beaners

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by Smitty

Fishersville Mike, fellow Virginian and backronym fetishist, starts the festivities, and has quite a serviceable outing.

My offering is slightly less charitable:
Can
Only
Find
Festivity in
Effete
Emuluation

I can’t add much to Legal Insurrection and American Power’s floggings of the Coffee Party. It rather makes sense that the slack-jawed left would complement the Tea Party through emulation. They, like Imperial Japan, have every reason to wet themselves with dread at the thought of the sleeping giant that has awakened, after a century of political slumber, to the Progressive threat.

Bring it on, all y’all crypto-Marxist mike foxtrots: We The People shall grind you and your morally bankrupt ideology right down.

If those on the right are the Teabaggers, then surely we can dub the mentally roasted members of the Coffee party “the Beaners”, can we not?

Update: Over at Pajamas Media, courtesy of  Little Miss Attila, comes news of the Cocoa Party.

These beverage-based organizations are spilling out all over the place.

Next thing you know, W will come out with “De Cider” party.

Update II: VA Right has a good one.

Update III: Mike LaChance mentioned the Coffee Party and a few other current topics. Excellent summary.

Fake Hate Update: ‘Minority’ Student Confesses to UCSD Noose Hoax

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An increasingly familiar type of liberal campus activism:

The UC San Diego student reportedly responsible for hanging a noose last week in a campus library issued a public, but anonymous, apology Monday and said she had no racist motivation.
The noose’s discovery set off protests at a school that is already tense from recent racially charged episodes and triggered condemnations from UC leaders and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
In a letter published Monday on the front page of the UC San Diego student newspaper, the Guardian, the student wrote that the incident was “a mindless act and stupid mistake” and was not meant to recall the lynching of blacks.
“As a minority student who sympathizes with the students that have been affected by the recent issues on campus, I am distraught to know that I have unintentionally added to their pain,” the student wrote. She was suspended Friday and remains under investigation for a possible hate crime.

Notice that both the university administration and the student newspaper are protecting the hoaxer’s identity. The “recent issues on campus” meme is always a favorite excuse for these campus fake-hate stunts, with the perpetrators claiming that their intention was to call attention to the racist/sexist/homophobic oppression at their (predictably liberal) universities.

As a general rule, the self-indulgent sense of entitled victimhood is directly proportional to the intensity of political correctness on campus. Thus, it was at ultra-PC Harvard that tenured professors (i.e., the most privileged and protected creatures in the campus hierarchy) claimed to have been victimized by a few inconvenient comments by Larry Summers.

MSM Promoting Parasite Annabel Park

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A former New York Times “strategy analyst” attempts to create a left-wing clone of the Tea Party movement and — surprise! — gets gushy write-ups from both the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Professor William Jacobson exposes Annabel Park for the deceptive phony she is.

Remind me of this the next time Nancy Pelosi starts slinging around her “Astroturf” accusations. You can bet Annabel Park will never be smeared by Frank Rich.

Via Memeorandum, more at  Hot Air, Commentary, Left Coast Rebel, The Lonely Conservative,  JustOneMinute, American Power, The Jawa Report and Another Black Conservative.

Unemployed? Either Get Used to It — or Get Smart and Get Going!

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Megan McArdle points out something about our “jobless recovery” that should be obvious, but isn’t:

Programmer jobs that once demanded anyone with a pulse and a C++ manual now require that you also have at least three years of experience designing websites for a fast food multinational, speak fluent Tajik, and be proficient in hacky sack. So just as employees are flooding the market from industries that need to permanently downsize, it becomes harder to transition into a new industry or job description. . . .
The result: long term unemployment. What is the government supposed to do about that? . . .
The answer is, nothing. We can, and should, ease the pain of those who lose jobs. But the government can’t find you a job any more than it can find you a spouse or a hobby. The process of matching individuals to employers can only be done by individuals.

Megan echoes points made by Joseph Lawler in discussing this problem in the December-January issue of The American Spectator.

Boiling down a complex discussion to its essence, we must understand the difference between cyclical unemployment — a temporary situation caused by short-term downward trends in the business cycle — and structural unemployment, which is the result of fundamental changes in the economic structure of society.

Take, for example, coal mining. Continue reading Unemployed? Either Get Used to It — or Get Smart and Get Going! →

Is ‘Whore’ Too Strong a Word for Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington?

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Not according to Sissy Willis, who dubs Arianna “George Soros’s whore” based on an American Thinker column by Kyle-Ann Shiver:

In the lead-up to the Shadow Conventions, Time magazine did a piece on Ms. Huffington’s newfound love for liberal politics which hinted at Soros’s shadow influence, naming him as the convention’s largest individual donor and noting the extreme liberal tone of the events in spite of their bipartisan billing. Time’s author noted that only three Republicans (John McCain was a keynoter) were slated to speak, and that one of those was having second thoughts, evidently due to Soros’ backing. This was in sharp contrast to the image Ms. Huffington was attempting to project as the voice of a new ‘grassroots’ and ‘bipartisan’ political coalition.

Arianna, George Soros and John McCain: The three people who did the most to ensure the election of Barack Obama. Coincidence?

Dennis Prager, Charles Johnson and Understanding the Left’s Smear Tactics

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While I responded jocularly when Dennis Prager’s column was first published, a reader e-mailed today to suggest that maybe Prager would actually like to discuss this at greater length, so I sent this e-mail to Prager’s producer, Allen Estrin:

Dear Mr. Estrin:

In his Jan. 26 syndicated column, Dennis Prager responded to Charles Johnson (Little Green Footballs), mentioning me – “in 28 years as a talk show host and columnist, I had never heard of Robert Stacy McCain” – as having been one of the reasons that Johnson claimed drove him out of the conservative movement.
While I am not exactly famous, neither am I utterly unknown, having spent more than 10 years as a news editor and reporter for The Washington Times and co-authored the 2006 book, Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime and Corruption in the Democratic Party with my longtime friend, Lynn Vincent (who subsequently collaborated with Sarah Palin on her recent bestselling biography).
Now a successful independent blogger at TheOtherMcCain.com, I am a frequent contributor to The American Spectator and also to the Green Room blog at HotAir.com. In the past year, I have provided extensive coverage of the Tea Party movement. This week, for example, my American Spectator column addressed Frank Rich’s smear of the Tea Party movement. 
Because of my own experiences with Charles Johnson – who responded to my coverage of the 9/12 March on DC by smearing me as a “white supremacist blogger,” inciting a rather notorious two-week blog war – I think Mr. Prager might be interested in my perspective on the smear tactics used against conservatives. These may be summarized briefly:

  • Bad Faith – The accusation that conservatives are motivated by bad faith (mala fides) is essential to the Left’s attacks. Stigmatizing and marginalizing conservatives is much easier than debating them. Cogent arguments about policy become unnecessary to advancing the Left’s political agenda if they can dismiss its opponents as racist, sexist, homophobic, etc.
  • The Ransom Note Method – By carefully selecting “evidence” of bad faith, the Left is able to present a distorted image of its conservative targets. Out-of-context quotes and controversial biographical data are cherry-picked and re-assembled (in the manner of a kidnapper assembling a ransom note) to present the target in the most damning possible light. This method is particularly effective against conservative talk-radio personalities who engage in polemic battle with leftists. This is why Media Matters devotes such enormous resources to monitoring talk radio in hopes of grabbing a 40-second “gotcha” sound-bite.
  • The ‘Links and Ties’ Method – More than simple guilt-by-association, the Links-and-Ties Method involves presenting a chain of incidental connections to suggest a sympathy of views that does not actually exist. To wit: Target A once spoke at Event B which was sponsored by Group C, co-founded by Person D who once made controversial statement E. By this method, it is implied that Target A actually endorses Statement E.
  • Telescoping and Telepathy – The actions, statements and associations of a conservative target acquire a trans-temporal permanence in the smear attacks of the Left. Once a target is associated (however incidentally) with controversy, this association can be repeated endlessly as evidence of bad faith, no matter how many years intervene. Furthermore, if the target is associated in Year X with a respectable person or organization that becomes controversial in Year X+5, that association can be cited in Year X+10 as evidence against the target – even if the target had no involvement in the cause of controversy. Finally, all evidence of bad faith accumulated by these methods is presented as indicative of the target’s deepest and unwavering personal convictions, as if the accuser were possessed of telepathic mind-reading abilities.
  • Deny, Denounce, Repudiate – The key to these attack methods is the presumption of the target’s guilt. The accuser, having carefully selected the evidence to be discussed in the manner of a prosecutor making an indictment, demands that the target deny the accusation, denounce the bad-faith views involved, and repudiate the persons and organizations to whom he has been connected by the links-and-ties method. As anyone who has been targeted by such attacks can attest, it’s rather like being accused in one of Stalin’s infamous Moscow “show trials.”

Repeated successful use of these tactics is tremendously advantageous to the Left, tending to prevent conservatives from cooperating effectively in their opposition to the Left’s agenda. If a target (e.g., Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Andrew Breitbart, et al.) can be isolated and rendered sufficiently “controversial,” other conservatives understandably will become reluctant to associate with that person. Conservatives are made to feel defensive and as a result may become suspicious of their colleagues, overly cautious in their activism, and hesitant to speak out on behalf of fellow conservatives targeted by the Left.
It is important to understand that the Left’s use of these methods is systematic and progressive. Once a targeted group or individual has been rendered sufficiently “toxic” by smear tactics, the Left then moves on to other targets, gradually expanding the list of those who have been delegitimized as too controversial for participation in the political mainstream. Conservatives who fail to fight back against these smears are thereby granting the Left the ability to decide who is or is not “mainstream.”
There is ultimately no safety in silence. Those who hesitate to defend the Left’s targets today – whether those targets are Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin or James O’Keefe – will regret their caution when they themselves become targets tomorrow. I hope that Mr. Prager will be interested in discussing this subject on his radio program. If not, I hope at least you will forward to him this e-mail from someone he never heard of before.

Robert Stacy McCain

C’mon, Dennis: Join the Flemish Menace!

UPDATE: Thanks to our Kansas commenter for the tip that this post seems to have excited the ever-excitable Charles Johnson and his dwindling band of unbanned minions.

Here’s a helpful hint for happiness in the blogosphere: Don’t ever get a Google alert for your own name.

The very fact that you would consider getting a Google alert for your own name probably indicates a tendency toward personal vanity. All that is then necessary for your enemies to goad your fragile ego is occasionally to write a sentence like, “Charles Johnson is a sociopathic narcissist,” and it will ruin your entire day.

If there are bloggers out there tempted to include the sentence “Charles Johnson is a sociopathic narcissist” as an auto-tag in every future post — well, far be it from me to impede your First Amendment right to free expression.