Category: Blogging

#FreeKate Lies Rejected by Daily Kos Staffer, and Other New Developments

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Generally speaking, people who care about facts are not liberals, so I was amazed when Donald Douglas pointed this out to me.

McCarter’s original story on Monday, May 20, began with a touching lament about Kaitlyn Hunt’s “young life” being “turned upside down and her future jeopardized simply because . . . she fell in love with a younger girl who has vindictive bigots for parents.”

Right: “She fell in love,” and fingered a 14-year-old in a toilet stall at school. Isn’t it so delightfully romantic?

If you’ve followed the story at all — and my Thursday article at The American Spectator has been widely cited — you know that this “vindictive bigots” angle is crucial to the narrative that the #FreeKate mob has been pushing. And if you saw Jana Eschbach’s WPEC-TV interview with Jim and Laurie Smith, parents of the 14-year-old girl, you know what an evil and dishonest smear that is.

Where did this smear come from? Directly from Kaitlyn’s mother, Kelley Hunt-Smith, who wrote May 17 on Facebook:

“[The younger girl’s parents] are bigoted, religious zeolites [sic] that see being gay as a sin and wrong, and they blame my daughter. . . .
“They are trying to send an innocent young girl to prison because they are full of hate and bigotry. These girls are teenagers in high school, who had ONE mutual consenting sexual experience.”

Lies, lies, lies.

Is it possible, I will dare to ask, that Kelley Hunt-Smith’s dishonesty is somehow related to her daughter’s problems? There seems to be some kind of dysfunctional family situation here. If Kaitlyn’s mom is a pathological liar, isn’t mental illness often hereditary?

The “Free Kate” Facebook community also seems to have been the source for other falsehoods, especially the lie that the sexual activities between Kaitlyn and the younger girl occurred when they were 17 and 15, rather than 18 and 14. Joan McCarter bought that false narrative hook, line and sinker:

[A]ccording to Hunt’s parents, Hunt was 17 when the relationship began, but the other girl’s parents waited until after she turned 18 to go to police.

Anyone can read the arrest affidavit in the case and see that Kaitlyn’s date of birth is Aug. 14, 1994, meaning she turned 18 before she began her senior year at high school year and before she met the younger girl, who was a 14-year-old freshman throughout the period when the two were sexually involved together. Kaitlyn was arrested Feb. 16, and the freshman girl didn’t turn 15 until April.

Joan McCarter of Daily Kos — who had originally posted a petition supporting Kaitlyn Hunt — removed that petition and corrected the story as soon as she learned the truth:

Thu May 23, 2013 at 10:29 AM PT: The public scrutiny of this case has brought to light problems with the initial reporting, and with the original story coming from the Hunt family. Previously, Hunt’s parents said that the younger girl was 15, and Hunt 17 when the relationship began. The release of the arrest warrant made clear, as subsequent news stories report, that the younger girl was 14 and Hunt was indeed 18 when the relationship began.
These corrections, and the initial dishonesty of Hunt’s parents, make this story much more problematic, and our original petition moot.

Wow! If only we could explain to McCarter that Keynesian economics doesn’t work and ObamaCare will bankrupt the county . . .

OK, maybe that would be too much worldview trauma, too soon. But you might be surprised how often a situation like this, where a liberal discovers she’s been misled by her fellow liberals, leads to the kind of second thoughts that slowly unravel a belief system. Remember, I was a lifelong Democrat and voted for Bill Clinton in ’92, only to learn too late what a shameless liar he was (and still is).

Anyway, now that the facts about Kaitlyn’s Jailbait Dildo Deviance are beginning to break through the wall of #FreeKate lies — and Kaitlyn has, probably unwisely, rejected the prosecution’s plea bargain offer — Momma Weirdo is having conniptions:

Liars hate the truth. Therefore tell the truth boldly, because there are few honors more rewarding than to be hated by liars.

UPDATE: Ann Althouse blogged about the story and some of the most interesting bits are her remarks in the comments:

Based on the video [i.e., the WPEC-TV interview with Jim and Laurie Smith, parents of the younger girl], it seems that kids at school are putting a lot of pressure on their daughter to reject her parents.
Now, the parents did report her girlfriend in to the police. They did this, they say, as a last resort after their daughter had already run away (without telling them). That was not a good strategy for getting their daughter back, as it’s alienated her further, so that she may feel that her entire social life depends on rejecting her parents.
So, do you think that was very savvy of the parents?
I don’t think so, but the question is what can they do once the other girl has shifted the rhetoric?
The younger girl’s parents made one drastic decision: to report behavior that is, under the law, a felony.
The accused girl got control of the narrative, with much support, making it about homophobia.
There’s really no way back for the younger girl’s parents. They can present their point of view and make it somewhat better, but they must regret going to the police.

What happened, Professor Althouse, was that Kaitlyn Hunt’s parents lied. And why should lying — “shift[ing] the rhetoric” to gain “control of the narrative,” as you say — be rewarded? It seems important to me that liars should never prevail in a situation like this, or else the rule of law will be subverted by dishonesty.

Then again, that seemed important to me when Bill Clinton lied about having sex with Monica Lewinsky, too.

As to the decision of the younger girl’s parents to report Kaitlyn Hunt to the police, both the arrest affidavit and the WPEC-TV interview suggest that this was the only remedy they had left, if their purpose was to protect their daughter against Hunt’s selfish predation.

From studying this story, a picture of Kaitlyn Hunt emerges that is far from flattering: She is reckless and arrogant, and feels entitled to do whatever she wants, without any criticism, any opposition or any consequences — the Veruca Salt Syndrome, as it were. Had she been willing to take “no” for an answer, had she been amenable to reason, had she thought twice of the potential consequences of continuing to pursue this 14-year-old even after repeated warnings from the parents, it never would have come to this.

Kaitlyn Hunt at all times had agency over her fate, and by her selfish impetuosity she has done dreadful damage to everyone involved here. To criticize the “drastic” action of the younger girl’s parents, or to suggest they “must regret” having gone to the police is to overlook their duty as citizens: Kaitlyn Hunt is a menace to the safety of the community. How many others has she victimized, exploited or corrupted? All this yammering about what a popular and successful student she was — is it true? Is it relevant?

She seems to be a dishonest, selfish, impudent whelp, and however “popular” she may have been, her attempt to evade responsibility by playing the victim — and enlisting a mob to pressure the prosecutor on her behalf — looks an awful lot like pathological narcissism.

The more I examine the arguments made in support of Kaitlyn Hunt, the more I’m of the opinion that she should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, if only to provide an example to any other young fool who might be tempted to emulate her.

Think of it this way: #FreeKate = “Occupy 14-Year-Old Vagina!”

Damn her, and damn her lying supporters, too.

 


LGF Auto-Beclownment Update

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Really, I should feel guilty for so thoroughly enjoying these predictable outbreaks of Johnsonian idiocy. In case you didn’t notice, the terrorist attack in London this week was not committed by radical Belgians or militant creationists or any of the other overblown right-wing bogeymen that occupy the demented mind of Jazzy McPonytail.

No, it was Michael Olumide Adebolajo.

Damn that Pamela Geller!

UK JIHAD MURDERERS WERE
PREVIOUSLY INVESTIGATED BY TERROR PROBE

It’s so unfair for her to be right and popular and successful, while CJ is a wrong, unpopular failure. But nevertheless, his downward spiral into humilation and obscurity continues.

It was reported that Adebolajo, who is not Belgian, was associated with radical leader Anjem Choudary, but before this connection could be fully confirmed, Charles Johnson got into a hilarious dispute with his henchperson Killgore Trout over the definition of “affiliated.”

CHARLES JOHNSON IS NEVER WRONG!

Except when he is, which is pretty much every day now, and I almost feel guilty for enjoying it so much.

Almost, I said . . .

 

As You Can Perhaps Imagine, This Has Been a Rough Week for Charles Johnson

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The World’s Least Credible Blogger™ has been tying himself into laughable knots of hilarious self-contradiction lately, attempting to defend President Wiretap Benghazi Failure against . . . Well, facts.

Facts have always been optional with Obama, who has relied on his media-generated force field to survive all previous encounters with unfortunate reality. Obama’s fawning fanboy Charles Johnson fancies himself an apostle of Scientific Truth (and imagines his antagonists are all ignorant bigots), but the relentless drip, drip, drip of scandalous facts the past few days have been quite hard on CJ’s self-image.

Case in point: Diary of Daedalus catches CJ attempting to redefine the word “bogus” as “vastly overblown,” so as to dismiss as false or exaggerated the accounts of how Tea Party groups and other conservatives were targeted by the IRS.

Why, in a span of 38 minutes Tuesday afternoon, would Charles feel the need to attempt this redefinition? Maybe that’s when he got a look at “Inappropriate Criteria Were Used to Identify Tax-Exempt Applications for Review,” by Michael E. McKenny.

Once you read that, you realize this isn’t a “claim” made by conservatives, or something “alleged” to have happened: It’s a straight-up fact, and one that doesn’t fit within CJ’s worldview.

And man, it’s just been a cruel, cruel week for CJ’s worldview.

Scroll down Diary of Daedalus and enjoy the ridiculous failures. That is to say, if you still remember who Charles Johnson is. Or rather, was.

 

Chip Gerdes, Remembered

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Chip Gerdes (left) with Dana Loesch and Andrew Breitbart

The first rule of Chip Gerdes was, nobody talked about Chip Gerdes. In a world of political fame-junkies, nobody was so deliberately anonymous as the man whose Twitter handle was @TookieW.

That handle was, of course, an inside joke about Tookie Williams, one of the Left’s cop-killer heroes, and Chip Gerdes was in a sense a sort of inside joke: A shadowy behind-the-scenes operative who was well-known to all the people who really knew what was going on, but who made a point of being completely unknown to the larger world.

Today Chip is being fondly remembered by his friends who would never have dared to write his name in public while he was alive, lest they accidentally let slip the closely-guarded secret of his existence.

Chip was a “black ops” guy, a disciple of the legendary Republican operative Roger Stone. He was adept at research and organizing, but his specialty was the kind of no-fingerprints political trickery that some people have termed “ratfucking.” Knowing how Chip worked, you never trusted that any “coincidence” in politics was actually coincidental, because you realized that whatever mischief Chip did on the GOP side, there were professional ratfuckers doing the same kind of thing (and probably worse) on the Democrat side.

When the WeinerGate scandal broke, one of the first phone calls I made was to Chip Gerdes: “Did you do this?”

“No, swear to God, man — this is legit,” Chip said. “I mean, yeah, we all knew Anthony had this problem weeks ago, but it’s the real deal. Dude hit the wrong button trying to DM a meat-Tweet to this girl. I’d love to tell you it was us, but it wasn’t.”

The first time I remember meeting Chip was in California when I went to see Alabama play in the BCS title game in January 2010. Chip was hanging out with Breitbart’s colleague Mike Flynn and I actually crashed that night in their motel room near the beach. About a week later, I went to Massachusetts to cover the Scott Brown campaign and, while I was there, actually reported on something that (unknown to me) was one of Chip’s black-ops stunts.

That’s how good Chip was — he fooled me. Now that he’s gone, I suppose it might even be possible to believe in coincidences again.

You had to know the guy to really appreciate him. Jim Hoft pays tribute to a loyal friend, and Dana Loesch attempts to convey a sense of who Chip was and what Chip did:

Most people couldn’t fathom all that he contributed to our movement. They simply don’t know. They don’t know how many victories he helped win for conservatives. They don’t know how he pitched in with fundraising behind the scenes. How he worked to turn blue districts red. How he encouraged and supported the next generation of conservatives. He always answered his phone. He always had a plan. He always had advice, most often given in his fast pitch with a cigarette perched on his lip. . . . He was the biggest Bama fan I knew. He was a family man. He was a diabolical genius.

“The biggest Bama fan I knew”? My feelings are slightly hurt, but I’m not in a mood to argue. Not today. #RollTide. #RMFT.

Chip Gerdes, R.I.P.

 

You Disagree With @Instapundit At Your Peril, But I’m Going With Nicolaitanism Over Oikophobia

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by Smitty

Pondering why we can’t talk about guns, Insty quotes Barry Snell

. . .we can’t have a rational gun debate is because the anti-gun side pre-supposes that their pro-gun opponents must first accept that guns are bad in order to have a discussion about guns in the first place. . .

and concludes:

As with most lefty causes, the key driver is a craving for moral superiority, usually driven by oikophobia.

Now, I’ve only been pondering modern political evil for a few years, but I’ll opt for Nicolaitanism as an explanation:

Nico-, combinatory form of n?k?, “victory” in Greek, and laos means people, or more specifically, the laity; hence, the word may be taken to mean “lay conquerors” or “conquerors of the lay people”. However, “Nicolaitan” is the name ostensibly given to followers of the heretic Nicolas —the name itself meaning “victorious over people,” or “victory of the people,” which he would have been given at birth.

An informal definition of Nicolaitanism could be: “Bossy little power-monger”. That is, somebody who’s life’s quest is to acquire and exert as much authority over others as possible. Impediments to amassing power, such as freedom of speech and the right self-defense, must be obliterated.

The exact meaning of Nicolaitanism in the Revelation isn’t known. But it’s always been a mind-blower that Christianity, which was born in an atmosphere of heavy Roman/Pharisaic oppression, replicates that oppressiveness in so many instances.

So it’s not clear to what degree our modern, elite, liberal, lefty, Socialist, Postmodern, Politically Correct, Godless, Commie, blue state, critical theorist, Democrat, Alinskyite, union, baby boomer, polysexual, abortion-on-demand, #Occupy-loving, group-thinking, anti-Enlightenment, crypto-Marxist overlords conform to the original Nicolaitan heresy. Probably not much at all.

Nevertheless, I submit that recreational overlording has more explanatory power than a simple fear-based label.

Liberal Media Bias and Self-Selection

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Some years ago — when our daughter, now 23, was in kindergarten, to be specific — I gave up on the public school system. It’s doomed beyond all hope of redemption, and conservatives who think otherwise are deluding themselves. Paul Weyrich explained this in 1999, and yet you occasionally hear conservatives talk about the need to “take back our schools.” To this, my answer is two-fold:

  1. What do you mean, “our schools”? They’re the government’s schools, not our schools, and if you still think the government is “us,” you need to seek psychiatric help immediately.
  2. With whom do you propose to “take back” the schools? Where do you plan to find the conservative teachers and principals and superintendents and textbook writers with whom to replace the liberals who now dominate those positions within the system? What colleges of education will train these conservative teachers, and what agencies will credential them?

That is to say, the reason we do not have conservative public schools is because the people who run the schools are not conservative.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

It’s a problem of personnel, and the idiots babbling about “taking back” the schools never have any proposal to solve the actual problem, which is that liberals enjoy teaching school, whereas conservatives prefer private-sector jobs where they can make money.

Something quite similar is true in regard to the problem of liberal bias in the media. Journalism is the only career field typically requiring a college diploma in which the average salary is lower than the average salary of school teachers. People talk about the “media elite” as if the average reporter was making network TV megabucks, when in fact most journalists earn less than a long-haul trucker.

Conservatives don’t become journalists because most conservatives are smart enough to pay attention to their high-school guidance counselors who advise any student who will listen to stay the hell away from this miserable low-paying racket. (My excuse? I was stoned most of the time in high school, and stayed drunk  half the time in college, besides which, I was a Democrat back then anyway.) So young conservatives generally don’t become reporters, and instead go to law school or get MBAs or do something else where they might actually hope to make a living. And liberals become journalists because they want to Make a Difference and Change the World.

So the Koch Brothers are reportedly thinking about buying the Los Angeles Times, liberals are predictably having hissy fits about it, and Megan McArdle wrote about it at The Daily Beast:

Garance Franke-Ruta, writes that the Kochs effort is doomed. Newspapers are liberal because their audience is liberal, she says.  And they’re staffed by the people who live in cities, who are also liberal.

Well, the woman whom Ace calls “Something Faranze-Gupta or whatever” may be right about most of that. With the education system in the iron grip of  liberals (which we’ve already demonstrated), it is probably true that the mass readership is also largely liberal. And no one can doubt that major cities like New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., are crammed full of liberals.

Ask yourself this: Why don’t conservatives live in cities?

Answer: Because conservatives want to get married and have children, and cities are horrible places to raise children.

This is why cities are occupied by single people, gay people and poor people who can’t afford to move to the suburbs. All of these demographic groups are reliable constituencies of the Democratic Party — as are journalists, about 90 percent of whom would never vote for a Republican under any circumstances whatsoever.

As in most situations involving what social scientists call “selection effects,” there is a complex causation issue at work, and once any institution becomes truly dominated by liberalism, it’s difficult to say how much of this dominance is natural and organic, and how much of it is the result of conservatives getting blackballed or other forms of deliberate viewpoint discrimination.

Obviously, both factors are at work to some extent, but the point I’m trying to make is that the hegemony of liberalism in journalism — as in academia and in Hollywood — is so complete that it’s probably useless to argue about it. And the liberals who are worrying themselves sick about the Koch brothers buying the L.A. Times can relax, because the Kochs couldn’t possibly find enough conservative newspaper editors and reporters in the entire state of California with which to staff the paper.

Notice something, incidentally: Ace of Spades links and quotes Megan McArdle, but Megan McArdle — who links and quotes her former Atlantic colleague “Something Faranze-Gupta or whatever” — never links and quotes Ace.

Why is Megan link-starving Ace? And it’s not just Ace, either. I’ve noticed this for years about Megan: Although a professed libertarian, and a frequent recipient of linky-love from the Right side of the Web, she’s never linked any conservative blogger, as far as I can recall.

Don’t know what it means, but I do notice things like that.

UPDATE: It is important, I think, to distinguish between (a) liberal bias, and (b) journalism per se. A few years ago, I risked angering Melissa Clouthier to make that point: Some conservatives have spent so many years complaining about The Media that their rhetoric is no longer aimed at unfair political bias and instead seems to be an expression of hostility toward an entire profession. If “journalism” is considered a dirty word among conservatives, we should scarcely be surprised that “conservative” is considered a dirty word among journalists.

“I hate you back twice as much” may be an emotionally satisfying response to prejudice, but it is unlikely to remedy the problem.

 

The Internet Never Forgets

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And by “the Internet,” of course, I mean, Ed Driscoll:

Politico has numerous journalists who during the campaign in 2008 were on the infamous “JournoList,” which dubbed itself the “non-official campaign” for Obama’s election bid. The JournoList was created by Ezra Klein, who is now with the Washington Post. . . .
Another self-admitted member of the JournoList is Ben Smith, who is now with Buzzfeed; there’s a reason why John Nolte has singlehandedly made “BenSmithing” a verb to describe new media doing Obama’s bidding. . . .
The terrorist attack on Benghazi on September 11th 2012, and the eventual feckless “What difference does it make?” response to the Senate by Obama’s Secretary of State — the same Hillary Clinton his election campaign repeated denigrated would eventually turn the message of Obama’s earlier Orwell-inspired video in on itself. Not the least of which because the man responsible for the piece of social media that the Obama administration initially tried to pin the attack on, during their initial modified limited hangout, is still rotting in jail. . . .

Read the whole thing.