Category: Blogging

In The Mailbox

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— compiled by Wombat-socho


No Live at Five this morning, since this is the day officially set aside to commemorate the conquest of the New World by Spain. There were some links sent to me in expectation of a Monday morning post, though, and I would be remiss if I didn’t share.


First Street Journal: What’s Going On Here?
Dead Republican Party: Qui Bono? Makers Or Takers
An Ex-Con’s View: Statement Regarding Past Posts
Blackmailers Don’t Shoot: Good Reads – The Book Of Matt
Michelle Malkin: 1-800-TOTALFAIL – One Man’s Obamawreck Nightmare


RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES AT FEEDLY!
American Power: Former EDL Leader Tommy Robinson Joins The Forces Of Global Jihad
American Thinker: Western Civilization Saved From Islam At The Battle Of Tours
The Necropolitan Sentinel: Obamacare Watch – Crappy Exchange Fatigue
Don Surber: In Defense Of Obama’s Hate Speech
Jammie Wearing Fools: Chutzpah – Obama Accuses GOP Of Manufacturing Crises
JustOneMinute: Overtaken By Events (After Being Mugged By Ignorance)
Pat Dollard: Monday Morning Eye Opener – B-1, B-2 And B-52 Doing Heavy Carpet Bombing
Protein Wisdom: GOP Capitulation Watch
Shot In The Dark: Level To Off
The Jawa Report: Obama’s Homeland Security Adviser Says Christian Copts Are Islamophobes
The Lonely Conservative: About That WSJ Poll
Megan McArdle: Ask The Blogger – Why Do Stores Give Receipts?


Live at Five will be back bright and early (or at least early) tomorrow morning.



(too early?)

The #Shutuppery Files: ‘Twitter Gulag’ #StopRush Crew Joined Team Kimberlin

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Remember when North Carolina Democrats were trying to intimidate @LadyLiberty1885 and @sistertoldjah? The headlines:

Who’s a ‘Bully,’ @GregFlynn? Democrat
Operative Targets North Carolina Mom
— The Other McCain

#ShutUppery and the Drums of #WAR
— Lady Liberty

Why The Doxing of LadyLiberty1885 and
Other Conservative Female Bloggers Matters
— The Jawa Report

Noted douche nozzle @GregFlynn wants
Conservative blogger to “shut up”
— Daley Gator

Prominent #NCGA Dem activist using
front group to stalk, dox conservatives
— Sister Toldjah

#ShutUppery: North Carolina Dems wage online
witch hunt against conservative women
— Twitchy

What you may not have realized is that this is part of a continuing pattern of harassment, smears and intimidation waged against conservatives on Twitter for years. Remember in April 2012, liberals got Chris Loesch’s account suspended — sent to the “Twitter gulag” — as a result of their orchestrated harassment. This activity was supported and encouraged by the same people who, under the hashtag #StopRush, were harassing Rush Limbaugh’s advertisers online.

The connection involved an activist named Melissa K. Brewer who, at the time, was using the Twitter handle @subculturestuff, an account that has since been deleted, but which you can see via RTs of existing accounts, (e.g., April 14, 2012, April 20, 2012,  April 22, 2012) and you might notice the overlap between the #StopRush and #Occupy hashtags:

The featured link was to this:

End Hate Radio: Rush Limbaugh
National Sponsor lists, twitter actions and more.
How to take action in the #stoprush campaign, no matter where you are.
Tweet & Send FB Messages to National
Rush Limbaugh Sponsors Directly.

Melissa Brewer’s @subculturestuff account was an outspoken advocate of this unhinged leftist #StopRush attempt to silence Rush Limbaugh, and then she got exposed as targeting Limbaugh’s Twitter defenders, specifically including Sister Toldjah.

Brewer told #StopRush supporters to pre-emptively block a list of conservative Twitter accounts she accused of being “Nazis” and even suggested reporting them to the FBI! 

Accounts on Brewer’s targeted list included Stephanie Janiczek (@SMjaniczek), @fatdaddybulldog, @sevenlayercake, @Serr8d, @Polliwogette and Darleen Click (@darleenclick). So the same people who were trying to shut down Rush Limbaugh, who has a nationwide radio audience of millions, were also trying to shut down these ordinary citizens with a few thousand Twitter followers.

What followed Brewer’s exposure was familiar to anyone who followed Neal Rauhauser’s 2010 TwitterGate debacle. Brewer deleted her hit list, denied responsibility, and then claimed that she was a victim of online harassment, rather than the perpetrator thereof.

Cowardly lying bullies who hate free speech are predictable that way.

Delete, delete, delete — @subculturestuff is gone, but Brewer’s stuff got screencapped, so that people noticed when Brewer’s @catsrimportant account became involved in harassing Brett Kimberlin’s enemies a few weeks later in June 2012. What was not understood was why Melissa Brewer would support a notorious criminal like Brett Kimberlin, or why she was the source Bill Schmalfeldt contacted (using his since-deleted @LiberalGrouch account) for information on Aaron Walker:

2670. Sun Jun 03 19:55:53 +0000 2012, liberalgrouch, 209372854213558273,
@catsrimportant can someone point me to something written about this Aaron Walker case that was NOT written by some right wing shithead?

Notice the frequent communications between them:

Look again: What did Melissa Brewer say on June 4, 2012?

@liberalgrouch @DavidHogberg Did you see the Anon leak
about people being PAID to blog about Kimberlin?
A story of deflection & #GOP #FAIL

Melissa, I’ll bet you $20 that “the Anon leak” you referenced was, in fact, a conspiracy theory smear written by Brett Kimberlin’s associate Neal Rauhauser, and if you or anyone else can provide me that document, I believe I can prove Neal’s authorship. Rauhauser’s habitual dishonesty, his penchant for using false conspiracy theories to attack his targets, is well-known. (See, for example, “Andrew Breitbart’s ISR Cell?“) For those of us being sued by Brett Kimberlin for $1 million — when the activities of Team Kimberlin (including Schmalfeldt and Rauhauser) are part of the allegations in that lawsuit — this kind of stuff becomes highly relevant.

Go here, do a CTRL+F search for @catsrimportant and you will find Schmalfeldt tweeted to Brewer 293 times between June 3-July 2, 2012.

Highly relevant, as I say.

So, to recap: The same Melissa Brewer who was part of the hateful #StopRush boycott effort to silence Rush Limbaugh, the same Melissa Brewer who was part of the hateful effort to silence @SisterToldjah and other conservatives on Twitter, this was the Melissa Brewer who claimed to have an “Anon leak about people being PAID to blog about Kimberlin,” and this same Melissa Brewer was communicating multiple times daily with Bill Schmalfeldt, who has harassed Aaron Worthing, Ali Akbar, Lee Stranahan, Patrick “Patterico” Frey, John Hoge and others. Lee Stranahan, Feb. 16:

Cease & Desist: Melissa Brewer aka
@CatsRImportant Is Working With Bill Schmalfeldt

That was at the time Stranahan was pursuing harassment charges against Schmalfeldt. It has been alleged by Kimberlin Unmasked that Melissa Brewer is “Xenophon,” who has published multiple attacks on Team Kimberlin targets. And guess what? Kimberlin Unmasked also is a defendant in the Kimberlin v. Walker et al. lawsuit. Now, after all this, Melissa Brewer has posted a long article with this headline:

My Story: PTSD, Survival, and Feminism

Let me quote a few key passages briefly (with comments):

I entered into the world of “political blogging” because I feel my experience benefits women. . . .
I am writing this to reach my online friends, although I’m sure my “political enemies” will also have a field day with it. You see, these political “foes” think that it’s discrediting to find out every miserable thing in my past, every horror I inflicted on myself, and use it against me to humiliate me online.

(It does not “humiliate” anyone to call your enemies Nazis and to urge people to report your enemies to the FBI?)

No matter how hard I tried to suppress it, I had underlying mental illness, and “looking normal” or “acting okay” never erased that desire to destroy myself, cut myself, or take my own life. . . .
Living with a secret mental illness isn’t easy. . . .

(Yeah, tell me about it. Some of us have been unfortunately forced — by you — to live with your mental illness for months. But thanks for admitting what we already knew: You’re psycho.)

When I look back at it, it all feels like some surreal nightmare to me. My psychiatrist once told me that people with PTSD walk around with a feeling of “unreality” . . .

(Thanks for reminding us again that you’re crazy.)

By the time I was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, I had attempted suicide three times. . . .

(But heroically survived, so you could courageously inflict your misery on the rest of the world because — social justice!)

In 2008, a small group of residents from N Street walked to the Metropolitan Church on 16th Street as a small group, and placed our vote for President Obama. That was the most political thing I’d done in my whole life. It was actually one of the happiest moments I’d had in a very long time. . . .

(Inflicting your misery on the rest of the world. Q.E.D.)

Because I suffer from PTSD, my writing career is part-time, and I’m fine with that. Sometimes I take a part-time job or temp work, when the going gets tough. But again, I’m fortunate, and I tend to get by on the residual royalties that I make from online publishing.
I’m not brilliant, rich, or famous. I’m good at social media, and I am sometimes a really good writer.

(And you say so yourself.)

The only reason I have ever written on politics was to have a voice. . . .
Nobody has ever paid me to blog or Tweet anything political. I only write under my own name, because I want to own my words, because I find it empowering-especially now that the ex that I had a restraining order against is now in jail, and probably going away for a significant amount of time.

If it is true, however, that you have never written except under your own name, why were you suspected of being “Xenophon”? Why were you assisting deranged cyberstalker Bill Schmalfeldt in his unconscionable harassment of Lee Stranahan and his family?

Why, Melissa Brewer, did you join Team Kimberlin? Why would anyone defend a criminal monster like Brett Kimberlin?

So now, denying that you ever wrote about politics for money, and denying that you ever wrote under a pseudonym, you tell this long tale of what a pitiful victim you are, soliciting sympathy for yourself, so that anybody who now suspects you of lying can be accused of lacking sympathy for victims of violence and abuse.

Because . . . feminism.

Well, I’m getting sued by Brett Kimberlin for $1 million, so perhaps you’ll excuse me if I’m a little short on sympathy just now.

You tried to silence Rush Limbaugh.

You accused Sister Toldjah and her friends of being Nazis.

You told your friends to report conservatives to the FBI.

You sought to destroy innocent people on behalf of Brett Kimberlin.

And yet after doing all this evil, you are the victim? Let me check . . .

Nope. Sorry. My give-a-damn’s busted.

What’s a synonym for “prostitute,” Melissa?

Andrew Klepper, 19 of Bethesda, has been charged in conjunction with an alleged act of prostitution.
On May 15, a Montgomery County police officer saw an advertisement in the Erotic section of Craigslist.com. He contacted the woman in the advertisement, Melissa Brewer of Reston, Va., and arranged to meet, according to charging documents.
The documents further state that Brewer quoted a price of $200 per hour for a “full service” appointment. The term “full service” is understood to mean sexual intercourse, according to the documents.

Yeah, $200 for “full service,” and you were advertising yourself on Craigslist under the name “Lisa,” but you’ve never been paid to write about politics and never written under a pseudonym?

We should trust you, because you’re mentally ill. And a prostitute.

Liars hate the truth.

And the truth they hate most is the truth about themselves.

 

The Weapon of Unlimited Victimhood: Pigford and Shirley Sherrod’s Vengeance

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Heads are still shaking about the unspeakable cruelty of Shirley Sherrod suing Susie Breitbart, a widow with four kids, as a substitute defendant for her late husband, because Sherrod blames Andrew Breitbart for her ouster from the Department of Agriculture.

Tom Vilsack demanded Sherrod’s resignation in July 2010 because Democrat political operatives at the White House panicked after Breitbart released the video of an NAACP audience’s enthusiastic approval of Sherrod’s story about how she denied assistance to a white farmer. The political panic occurred after that video got played in edited form on a Fox News broadcast, but Breitbart was not responsible for how Fox News depicted the story, nor was he responsible for Tom Vilsack acting as a political hatchet-man:

White House officials were in close contact with the Agriculture Department in the hours leading up to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s decision to fire USDA employee Shirley Sherrod in 2010, according to nearly 2,000 pages of internal emails released by the administration.
[T]he White House and Agriculture Department officials were sharing information and advice from the first minutes after the scandal began to emerge until Sherrod submitted a resignation hours later at the request of a senior USDA official.

And here’s the key fact:

Vilsack apologized and asked her to return to the department — an offer she declined. President Barack Obama also offered an apology after her ouster created a racial firestorm.

In other words, Vilsack and Obama admitted they wronged Sherrod.

It wasn’t Andrew Breitbart who did her wrong, it was two Democrats, and she would still be employed at the Department of Agriculture if she wanted a job. Instead, she’s suing Susie Breitbart.

Because getting $13 million in Pigford lawsuit cash isn’t enough:

Georgia Farmer Eddie Slaughter . . . says he knows Mrs. Sherrod well and that she knew all about the Pigford fraud and that the people behind Pigford actually view it as reparations. . . .
The biggest claimant by far in the Pigford Settlement was the $13,000,000 that went to Shirley & Charles Sherrod and their former New Communities farm and land development project in Georgia.
It bears repeating: Shirley and Charles Sherrod and New Communities got thirteen million dollars from the Pigford settlement. That’s about double what the second largest winning Pigford claim was.
And then just days after New Communities won that huge claim, Mrs. Sherrod was offered a job with the USDA.

Yeah, you hit the Federal Tax Money Giveaway Powerball, but becoming an overnight millionaire isn’t enough to satisfy your infinite greed, and once you learn that victimhood can be lucrative, it is your natural instinct to continue playing the victim, even if it means pushing a self-evidently bogus lawsuit against a widow and her orphaned children.

(Unnecessary Legal Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and my estimate of Shirley Sherrod’s tort claim as “bogus” is no more defamatory than my estimate of her character as selfish, cruel and dishonest.)

The Culture of Victimhood encourages people to turn every grievance into a license to inflict harm on others. Flimsy accusations rooted in dishonesty or self-pity (or both) are applauded as “courageous,” and exploitation of the system is hailed as “social justice.” A sex offender turns her crime into a fable about homophobia, a notorious convicted felon claims to be a victim of “malicious prosecution, conspiracy to abuse process, defamation, false light invasion of privacy, harassment, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and stalking,” and we have become so accustomed to this evidence of pervasive moral decadence that we are not even outraged by it.

I’m past the point of being angry at the people who do this stuff.

I’m angry at everybody who is not as angry about it as I am.

Forget about the endless budget kabuki theater in D.C., you idiots.

Stop letting cable TV producers tell you what news is really important.

Shirley Sherrod is suing Andrew Breitbart’s widow.

Let that sink in. Think about what Andrew Breitbart meant. Think about what Andrew Breitbart did. Ask yourself, what Andrew Breitbart would ask his friends to do for his widow and children now?

Is there any story more urgent — is there any story that better illustrates how the leftist worldview has warped our nation’s culture in the Obama Age — than this story? Wake the hell up, people.

Shirley Sherrod’s Malicious Pro-Bono Suit
Against Andrew Breitbart’s Widow

That’s Aaron Walker’s headline on the incredible news that Kirkland & Ellis, the big-money law firm that has now made Susie Breitbart the defendant in Sherrod’s bogus lawsuit, is actually representing her for free — pro bono, as the lawyers say. Aaron is a lawyer, not a reporter, and so he “buries the lead,” as editors say. He also buries the news of a connection between Kirkland & Ellis and George Soros:

You will have to pay to read this entire article, but here is the relevant passage:

“We almost converted the debt into an acquisition finance structure,” says Erik Dahl, a partner at Kirkland & Ellis, legal advisers to Soros Capital Partners.

That could be a coincidence. Or perhaps not.

Please read Aaron’s entire article carefully and remind me (once we’re finished “conspiring” to put the sociopathic creep Brett Kimberlin back in prison where he belongs) to talk with Aaron Walker about the “inverted pyramid” lead. Once he’s mastered that, perhaps, Walker will be ready to attempt The Total Gonzo Trip.

“In the context of journalism, here, we are dealing with a new kind of ‘lead’ — the Symbiotic Trapezoid Quote. The Columbia Journalism Review will never sanction it; at least not until the current editor dies of brain syphilis, and probably not even then.
“What?
“Do we have a libel suit on our hands?
“Probably not, I think, because nobody in his right mind would take a thing like that seriously — and especially not that gang of senile hags who run the Columbia Journalism Review, who have gone to great lengths in every issue during the past year or so to stress, very heavily, that nothing I say should be taken seriously.”
— Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing in Washington: The Boys in the Bag,” Rolling Stone, July 4, 1974 (collected in The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time)

What the hell? Why did I quote Hunter Thompson’s bitter sarcasm, nearly 900 words into a rant about Shirley Sherrod and the vicious gang of serial killers bad lawyers at Kirkland & Ellis?

Two of the people in that lineup are immoral monsters whose infamous names are forever synonymous with cruelty and evil.

And two of them are serial killers.

 

Busy Day on the Kook Beat

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When you specialize in writing about criminals, perverts, weirdos and kooks, sometimes it’s hard to keep them all sorted out. My Twitter timeline and e-mail inbox fill up with tips, from all over. Here’s the World’s Most Famous Sex Offender Kaitlyn Hunt talking about the nude photos and masturbation video she sent her underage victim:

Looking back on it, that contact is one mistake Hunt readily regrets, as she told WPTV. “Yeah I do regret it because I trusted her as not only my friend but my girlfriend, too. I felt I got set up in multiple ways and I got hurt by her,” Hunt said. She says she still cares about the younger teen, just not the same way. “I don’t love her the way I did before,” she said.

“I got set up in multiple ways” = “I got caught, because I’m stupid.”

“I don’t love her the way I did before” = “Now that I’m in jail, I can’t finger her in the school restroom toilet stall.”

Kaitlyn’s mother Kelley Hunt Smith . . . words fail:

Bill Schmalfeldt? Yeah, words fail there, too:

Meanwhile, I spent more than a half-hour on the phone today with an Indiana source, getting helpful additional background on the pro se plaintiff in Kimberlin v. Walker, et al.

Also, via others sources, I obtained some important documents I hope to post later. If these Team Kimberlin weirdos imagine that, by any lack of diligent preparation, I’m going to lose a defamation lawsuit to a convicted bomber and perjurer, they’re crazy.

But of course, they’re crazy anyway. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Speaking of self-evidently crazy people, Amanda Marcotte is angry at Twitter because . . . well, she’s just angry a lot, isn’t she?

 

Pure Evil: Sherrod Sues Susie Breitbart; Wickedness in the Age of Dishonor

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As if to demonstrate the deliberate cruelty of “lawfare,” former federal official Shirley Sherrod, who filed a meritless lawsuit against Andrew Breitbart, is continuing her vindictive litigation even after his death by suing his widow. J. Christian Adams of the Election Law Center wonders who is paying the steep fees at Kirkland & Ellis:

There are plenty of leftist Sugar Daddies who would relish harassing Andrew Breitbart. Some of them are wicked enough even to harass his widow. . . . If a Sugar Daddy is funding Sherrod’s case, then Sherrod ought to say so. She ought to confess that the lawsuit is a crusade funded by outsiders, and not about justice. . . .
They might take the matter on a contingency fee. When you are finished laughing, consider the other means they can fund the lawsuit. Big Law has become notorious for helping left wing causes for free. They use the money from paying clients, like AOL, Boeing, Walgreens, Avis and others in other matters to subsidize left wing litigation. That’s how the attacks on voter ID are funded. That’s how GITMO terrorists got free representation at Covington and Burling.

Read the whole thing. Last night, while researching my defense against the Kimberlin v. Walker, et al., lawsuit — in which a convicted felon is suing me and four others for $1 million — I was studying the recent case in which Patterico was sued by Nadia Naffe, a frivolous lawsuit incited by Brett Kimberlin’s associate Neal Rauhauser that was subsequently dismissed. Who paid the attorney’s fees in that case?

The Left’s entitlement mentality — Shirley Sherrod seems to imagine she had a right to be employed by the federal government, and that Andrew Breitbart unjustly deprived her of that right — is at the root of this trend toward “lawfare” harassment.

Over and over during the past 17 months, while I have been repeatedly harassed and defamed by Brett Kimberlin and his supporters, my friends have often asked me why I never sued or filed criminal charges. It is one part pragmatism and one part principle.

From the pragmatic standpoint, as a journalist, it is very difficult (and certainly inadvisable) to write about a civil case in which one is a plaintiff or a criminal case in which one is a victim. In the latter case, cops will tell you not to discuss an ongoing investigation, and in the former case, no wise lawyer wishes to represent a plaintiff who won’t shut up about his litigation. (See “Nadia Naffe Won’t Shut Up, But She’ll Threaten You To Make You Shut Up,” by Ken White.)

In point of fact, I have been careful in writing about my status as a defendant in the Kimberlin v. Walker, et al., lawsuit, even though the whole point of Kimberlin’s lawsuit is to silence me, an unrighteous purpose he cannot lawfully achieve, neither by means of his own harassment, nor by proxy through the actions of his supporters, nor by his vindictive (and laughably flawed) pro se litigation.

Even as such evil and deranged personalities as Neal Rauhauser and Bill Schmalfeldt continue lying about me, I must balance my concern for counteracting the deliberate harm they intend to inflict through their falsehoods, and my determination not to be intimidated, with a rational concern for my interests as a defendant.

Yet it is a self-evident truth that Brett Kimberlin falsely accuses me of having done to him what he is now in fact doing to me:

“Defendants . . . have conspired to engage in a pattern
of filing abusive civil suits, peace orders and
criminal charges against Plaintiff. . . . These filings have
been done with malice and without probable cause.”

I never sued Brett Kimberlin. I never filed criminal charges nor have I ever sought a restraining order against Brett Kimberlin. All I have done is to tell the truth about Brett Kimberlin, and there is nothing Brett Kimberlin hates as much as he hates the truth.

The dishonest pro se litigant Brett Kimberlin, whose false assault charge against Aaron Walker was the subject of Walker’s own 28,000-word opus that first attracted my interest as a journalist, has never cared what harm his wickedness causes to others. Nor is Brett Kimberlin guided by any principle of honor, whereas I have  striven to heed the wisdom of Andrew Jackson’s mother:

“Never tell a lie, nor take what is not your own, nor sue anybody for slander, assault and battery. Always settle them cases yourself.”

Brett Kimberlin has covered his own name in dishonor, and the Kimberlin v. Walker, et al., lawsuit is part of his ongoing attempt to evade responsibility for his crimes, something that was evident to another of Kimberlin’s targets, progressive blogger Seth Allen:

This whole lawsuit in and of itself was libel. I proved that in court. The only reason Kimberlin received [a $100 judgment] was because of the default judgement.
I believe Kimberlin actually believes a lot of the things he says.
But not all. I think a long time ago he wrote a script in his mind in order to explain away what happened all those years ago in Speedway, Indiana.

So said Seth Allen in December 2011, six months before I had ever even heard the name “Brett Kimberlin” and, while Seth is wrong about many things, but he was certainly correct about that. No one on the Left — not a single liberal blogger of note — would stand up for their fellow progressive Seth Allen’s First Amendment rights, and the Left’s continued silence about Kimberlin’s wickedness is consistent with their tacit support for Shirley Sherrod’s vindictive “lawfare” against Susie Breitbart, the widowed mother of four children.

Shirley Sherrod resigned. She is not suing Tom Vilsack, nor is Shirley Sherrod suing Vilsack’s boss, Barack Obama. Somebody should ask the President what he thinks about this, but there is not one honest reporter in the White House press corps.

We live in an age of wickedness, injustice and dishonor. You can do something genuinely good by mailing a check today:

Breitbart Children’s Trust
149 S. Barrington Ave, #735
Los Angeles, CA 90049.

UPDATE: Linked by my alleged co-conspirator John Hoge — thanks! — and also by Doug at Daley Gator:

Simply awful. Going after the families of those who you disagree with? Really?

Yes, really. Remember when Bill Schmalfeldt threatened my wife? Remember all the evil Schmalfeldt did to Lee Stranahan’s family? And the Lonely Conservative speaks the gospel truth:

More and more I’m beginning to believe that there are very few people on the left who are decent. . . .
I really don’t know these rotten leftists sleep at night. They really are evil.

Amen, sister! Preach it!

 

Why Is @Allahpundit Surprised?

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“Unbelievable,” he says, that the White House press corps is so servile:

[Obama’s press conference] ran for one hour and six minutes, with 12 different reporters being called on 00 although, notably, not Ed Henry of Fox News — and between them they couldn’t muster one question about the catastrophe that is Healthcare.gov or the spectacle of National Park Rangers locking senior-citizen tourists out of war memorials and/or inside their hotels.

Try this, Allah: Watch MSNBC all day long and keep in mind that, for the vast majority of the reporters covering politics in Washington, MSNBC is the Gospel Truth. Realize that the ambitious younger journalists in the White House press corps dream of the day when they’ll have their own regular spot on MSNBC or, perhaps, they will be appointed to a job in the Obama administration itself, like their hero and mentor, Jay Carney.

All of these reporters are Democrats. They hate and despise Republicans, and consider it their most important duty as journalists to help elect more Democrats and then to help the Democrats to advance their political and legislative agenda. To these reporters, the superiority of the Democrats is an objective fact, and anyone who says a word in favor of Republicans is therefore a liar or a fool or both.

No reporter in the White House press corps watches Fox News, except for amusement, to laugh at it as crude sport. Nor, for that matter, does any reporter in the White House press corps read conservative blogs or Web sites. Insofar as the Internet has any influence on them, the sites that are most influential among D.C. journalists are such venues as Think Progress, Media Matters, Mother Jones and Salon.

Go read Brian Beutler’s savagery toward Republicans and realize that Beutler therein expresses the sentiments of the White House correspondents for ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times, USA Today and the Associated Press.

Was it “unbelievable” that Obama faced no tough questions at the press conference? It would have been unbelievable if he had.

The press corps is a constituency of the Democrat Party in the same way that the AFL-CIO, the NAACP and Planned Parenthood are constituencies of the Democrat Party. If any of them have any criticism of Obama, it arises from the feeling that he is not liberal enough.

Our nation’s “mainstream” media are, actually, Democrat Party propagandists. Let’s stop pretending that they are interested in truth.

 

The Problem Is, You’re Losing

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Why are you losing? Because you are a loser:

Matt [Lewis] made his regular appearance on Morning Joe to discuss his column. Are the hardball tactics pushed as an answer to the tactics of the Left pushing idealistic young Christians out of politics altogether?

You can read the whole thing and watch the video at Hot Air, where Ed Morrissey’s take on the situation is closer to the reality than is Matt’s, but still not right. If “young Christians” are not excited about Republicans, it’s for the same basic reason that nobody else is excited about Republicans now: They’re looking and sounding like a bunch of demoralized losers afflicted with a horrible burden of psychological guilt: “Vote Republican, maybe? Because, like, whatever?”

A party which, in successive presidential elections, nominated the vicious backstabbing crapweasel John McCain and the Massachusetts moderate Mitt Romney, is not a party that is confident in the rightness of its own principles and which is communicating to its own constituents, “We are ashamed to have to represent you trash.”

Democrats are Satan’s own party. Maybe someone should mention that.

 

Virtue by Proxy, and Thoughts About Books That Liberals Have Never Read

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Republicans “can’t stand the fact that a black man is in the White House!”

That’s what a studid liberal shouted at Joel Pollak, and I could name, off the top of my head, two dozen books that liberal has never read.

Ronald Reagan once said that the problem with liberals is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t true. They are prejudiced, and they have never had their prejudices challenged.

Most liberals, “progressives,” or whatever else they may choose to call themselves, are really just partisan Democrats who hate Republicans.

It’s that simple.

The pretensions of liberalism to being a coherent, rational political philosophy are absurd. The core of the Democrat Party is a collection of interest groups, organized with the aim of assembling a majority coalition by two means (a) promising the sun, the moon and the stars to these interest groups, and (b) demonizing Republicans.

Having been born and raised a Democrat — I never even met a Republican until I went to college — I once shared that mentality.

Dude, I voted for Walter Mondale in 1984.

The same year I voted for Mondale, David Horowitz, a Marxist radical who had been a “red diaper baby” raised by Communist parents, joined his longtime friend Peter Collier in voting for Reagan:

When we tell our old radical friends that we voted for Ronald Reagan last November, the response is usually one of annoyed incredulity. After making sure that we are not putting them on, our old friends make nervous jokes about Jerry Falwell and Phyllis Schlafly, about gods that have failed, about aging yuppies ascending to consumer heaven in their BMWs. We remind them of an old adage: “Anyone under 40 who isn’t a socialist has no heart; anyone over 40 who is a socialist has no brain.”
Inevitably the talk becomes bitter. One old comrade, after a tirade in which she had denounced us as reactionaries and crypto-fascists, finally sputtered, “And the worst thing is that you’ve turned your back on the Sixties!” That was exactly right: casting our ballots for Ronald Reagan was indeed a way of finally saying goodbye to all that — to the self-aggrandizing romance with corrupt Third Worldism; to the casual indulgence of Soviet totalitarianism; to the hypocritical and self-dramatizing anti-Americanism which is the New Left’s bequest to mainstream politics. . . .

You should read the whole thing. My point is that if a guy as far left as David Horowitz could change his mind, no one else has an excuse. Collier and Horowitz, who had been editors of the radical journal Ramparts, subsequently published a book no liberal has ever read, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties.

When I say no liberal has read that book, I mean it is powerful enough that, if you were a liberal when you started reading it, you wouldn’t be when you were finished with it. And I think the same could be said of Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.

A Ph.D. economist, Sowell describes the moral narcissism at the root of the liberal worldview — they support bad policies because doing so makes them feel good about themselves. Do these policies actually help the people they’re supposed to help? It doesn’t matter, Sowell explains in Chapter 4, “The Irrelevance of Evidence.”

What matters to liberals is the sense of virtue by proxy they derive by espousing the cause of helpless victims allegedly oppressed by evil greedy Republicans. What matters to liberals is their feeling that they’re “doing something” to advance their own good intentions.

Of course, there is really nothing good about their good intentions.

That is to say, if the only reason you want to help people — those poor downtrodden “masses” — is to flatter your sense of yourself as a generous, tolerant bien-pensant, your motives aren’t truly philanthropic. And this is especially true when, (a) your allegedly charitable activity involves spending other people’s money; (b) you don’t bother to examine whether anyone is actually helped; and/or (c) the only effort required of you is to spew liberal platitudes and vote for Democrats.

Wrecking the country and ruining people’s lives just so you can think of yourself as enlightened? No, those are not “good intentions.”

Once you wake up to the reality of what wretched messes liberals create through their supposedly “progressive” policies, you will be far less indulgent of their pretenses of enlightened tolerance. Perhaps no book I’ve ever read makes this point more clearly than Fred Seigel’s The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities. Where else have Democrat politicians and liberal policies been given more opportunity to succeed than in our nation’s major cities? And yet where else have liberal Democrats created more poverty, misery, crime and corruption?

If liberalism worked, Detroit would be a booming hub of prosperity and Texas would be mired in hopeless poverty.

Instead, Detroit is bankrupt and Texas is booming.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

Is Latin racist? Are facts “hate”? Is basic logic unfair?

Should we permit liberal Democrats to wallow in their own ignorance while they impose policies that are harmful to the country? Or should we inform them that their ignorance could be remedied and their errors corrected by these books they’ve never read?

As I said, I could name two dozen such books, but have here named only three, and I can guarantee that the stupid liberal who shouted at Joel Pollak hasn’t read any of them. If Joel Pollak were to send that liberal this 900-word column, he wouldn’t read it, either.

Because liberals refuse to spend the time, energy or effort necessary to remediate their own ignorance, it is usually best to be brief in your replies to them. In fact, you can summarize it in three words.

“Fuck you. #War.”