Category: Twitchy

‘Through a Plate Glass Window’: How Liberal Media De-Legitimize Dissent

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Patterico did a post yesterday about the “Accuse the Accusers” strategy that I meant to link and discuss at length, but I didn’t get around to it because new outrages were piling up quicker than I could keep track. In just the past couple of days:

  1. Stephen Crowder got sucker-punched in the head by Michigan union goon Tony Camargo;
  2. Hot dog vendor Clint Tarver was called the “n-word” when the Americans for Prosperity tent in Lansing was attacked by allies of the same goons who punched Crowder; and
  3. The son of Virginia Democrat Rep. Jim Moran pleaded guilty to an assault charge after police say Patrick Moran broke his girlfriend’s nose and fractured her skull during an argument outside a D.C. bar.

Perhaps you see a pattern here: Democrats and their political allies engaging in thuggish violence which no one could possibly defend or endorse. And in each case, liberals used a variation of the same distracting “Accuse the Accusers” defense: Whatever wrong was done by Democrats was minimized or dismissed as irrelevant in comparison to some greater wrong that liberals alleged had been done by the conservatives involved in calling attention to these incidents.

Call it “Wheelerization,” in tribute to the way Marcy Wheeler deliberately smeared Crowder as having somehow faked his own beating, simply because . . . well, James O’Keefe! Breitbart!

This magic incantation automatically de-legitimizes any story. Also, “selective editing,” as if there is such a thing as non-selective editing.

Today, the Left decided that Patrick Moran’s brutality toward his girlfriend was not a legitimate story because . . . Ace of Spades!

Leftwing Blogs Discover The Real Culprit
Behind Pat Moran’s Woman-Beating: Me

This Wheelerization of the Moran story was expertly performed by the ridiculous Tommy Christopher:

It’s a horrible story that highlights an important, serious issue, but shortly after the news was reported, Michelle Malkin‘s Twitter repository, Twitchy.com, had decided that the real villains were Rachel Maddow, Sandra Fluke, the media, Rep. Moran, and, somehow, me, while using Ms. Hoffman’s injuries as inspiration for pop-culture riffs. . . .
Finally, the folks at Twitchy chose to highlight a series of tweets that featured domestic violence-related riffs on Meadowlark Lemon, Star Wars, and even the headline from one of my columns.

Seriously, notice how this works: The story is not about the heinous brutality of Patrick Moran or the preposterously lenient sentence handed down to the son of a Democrat congressman (who, of course, has his own lengthy history of brutality). Nor is the story about the hypocrisy of liberals who routinely ignore or excuse such misconduct by Democrats while simultaneously accusing Republicans of being anti-woman.

Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.

Because the story can never be about the wrong done by Democrats, when Democrats do wrong, the media need some excuse to ignore it, or some pretext to make Republicans the bad guys: “Ken Starr is on a witch hunt! Everybody lies about sex! McCarthyism!”

And, unfortunately, Fox News functions as a foil for this tactic: As soon as Media Matters, Crooks & Liars, Firedoglake, DailyKos and others in the merry band of disinformation blogs find some connection between a story and Fox News — “Crowder and Malkin are both hired stooges of the Murdoch empire!” — then no journalist at CBS, NBC, ABC or the New York Times can possibly treat the story as serious and important, or else his inbox/Twitter feed will blow up with angry messages accusing him of betraying the cause by repeating right-wing lies.

Did I ever mention that studies have shown journalists vote Democrat by margins of at least 7-to-1? And that most reporters, editors and producers are therefore emotionally predisposed to tell stories that favor Democrats and avoid stories that favor Republicans?

This is why, in the Patrick Moran case as in so many other cases, the Left endeavors to distract from the facts of the story by focusing on the political orientation of those telling the story: “Twitchy is run by Malkin and Malkin works for Fox — not a legitimate story!”

Also, Twitchy quoted Tweets by Ace of Spades in which he made sarcastic reference to Tommy Christopher, and therefore Tommy’s a victim, because conservatives hate Legtimate Journalists.

Logic so sharp it could split atoms.

We are watching the Spencer Ackerman idea of smashing conservatives “through a plate glass window” — never mind the truth, just win.

This brute-force approach to Narrative Management is astonishingly successful. Allahpundit is in such a fugue of despair about it that he has resorted to linking me to prove his case:

If you’re a reporter and you’re taking conservatives seriously, you’re doing it wrong. [Chris] Matthews goes so far as to identify Romney’s utterly benign aside in the second debate about “binders full of women” as one of the reasons the media should move, en masse, even further to the left. That’s not a serious critique; it’s a fig leaf of outrage designed to apply pressure towards the desired political outcome. And it works.

You should read the whole thing because, after all, it’s not every day year I get linked by Allahpundit. Meanwhile, returning to the original model of Wheelerization, Patterico recounts this colloquy:

Wheeler: You said Crowder shouldn’t report the assault!
Me: Except I didn’t say that. Prove I did!
Wheeler: Incredible that an ADA doesn’t think crimes should be reported!
Me: Except I didn’t say that. Prove I did!
Wheeler: Wow. I think I’ll tell your boss that you don’t believe in reporting crimes.
Me: Except I didn’t say that. Prove I did.
Wheeler: Sheesh. A law enforcement officer saying crimes shouldn’t be reported. Can you believe it?
Me: Except I didn’t say that. Prove I did.
Wheeler: Looks like it’s time to ask your boss why their ADA thinks crimes should not be reported.
Me: Except I didn’t say that. Prove I did.
Wheeler: [more of the same, ad infinitum]

Marcy Wheeler’s narrative involved the argument that Crowder should have filed an assault charge against his attacker before reporting it as news, and she got it in her mind — an idée fixe — that Patterico had somehow discouraged Crowder from filing charges. Because he is by trade a prosecuting attorney, it might somehow be construed as wrongful for him to be “saying crimes shouldn’t be reported,” and so Wheeler began repeating this allegation as if the repetition proved it was true, and as if Patterico had an obligation to prove himself innocent.

“Accuse the accusers,” see?

As for Marcy Wheeler’s absurd claim, let me offer this example: Hunter S. Thompson was once brutally stomped by the Hell’s Angels, and never reported it to the police. Thompson was a journalist writing a book about the Hell’s Angels, and it might not have been altogether ethical for him to be trying to put several of them in jail for assault as a complainant while he was also being paid to tell their story.

And let’s face it, Thompson was on shaky ground from a legal standpoint, because he witnessed a good deal of other criminal behavior by the Angels that he never bothered reporting to police.

The story you’re covering is more important than whatever hassles you suffer as a consequence, and if those hassles involve getting your head bashed in — well, hey, that’s part of the coverage, too. In that sense, Crowder’s big day in Lansing was totally gonzo.

Speaking of hassles and important gonzo stories, I was intrigued yesterday by that Pastebin file in which Ron Brynaert mentioned Marcy Wheeler in connection with Neal Rauhauser and Patterico and SWATting and the Anthony Weiner scandal. Just happened to find that when, on a crazy hunch, I Googled “Marcy + Wheeler + Rauhauser.”

Maybe just a coincidence. Maybe not.




 


Obscure Ex-Starlet @SophiaBush Sticks Her #LadyParts Out on Twitter, With Hilariously Predictable Results

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Civility™ is getting so complicated, I just can’t keep up with all the new rules, in the same way I have trouble keeping track of which former starlets actually count as “celebrities.”

Last night, after I filed my American Spectator column about the debate — strategically, a win for Romney — I was kind of randomly browsing Twitter and saw Michelle Malkin having a war with someone named Sophia Bush:

It went on for a while, raising the obvious question: “Who is Sophia Bush?” I mean, Malkin’s a New York Times bestselling author, a syndicated columnist, New Media entrepreneur, Fox News contributor — a genuine somebody — so why is she arguing with this person I never heard of?

It began, evidently, when the actress read a satirical article mocking Ann Romney and Tweeted it out, apparently not recognizing that the stupid quotes attributed to Mrs. Romney were not anything the GOP candidate’s wife had actually ever said. Republican women then started arguing back at Ms. Bush on Twitter, causing her to get all huffy and defensive, finally issuing this intensely stupid retort:

Her idiocy earned Ms. Bush a post at Malkin’s Twitchy site, but she apparently failed to study the First Law of Holes, and began digging again Monday during the debate:

With that, I think, Sophia went from the ridiculous to the sublime. It’s like political haiku or something. Transcendent gibberish. And of course, Twitchy blew her up again.

Let us pause, readers, to contemplate the sequence: Sophia apparently cannot make any political statement without invoking her vagina, but if you object to argumentum ab vagina, this proves you’re some kind of insensitive misogynistic cretin. She just talks, talks, talks about her genitals, and we’re suppose to act like this is enlightened, sophisticated, praiseworthy, courageous.

Well, no, it’s weird and offensive.

Imagine you’re at the shopping mall and some woman you never met walks up to you and starts blabbering about her vagina.

Call 911, right? This woman’s either a crack whore or some kind of mental case, but either way, her behavior is so profoundly abnormal she must be a danger to herself or others.

Yet, thanks to Eve Ensler and the feminist movement, women like Sophia Bush have been persuaded that constantly talking about their vaginas in public is not only healthy and normal, but that anyone who is offended is a crazy right-wing extremist. The world has been turned upside down, so that the values are exactly reversed, and the crazy vagina-talkers think themselves fit to lecture others about “respect” and “civility.”

Although tempted to invoke my scrotum to settle the argument — “How dare you disrespect the First Amendment rights of my scrotum?” — this is unnecessary, as my point is simply this: The Left routinely defies all traditional norms and societal values, while reserving to themselves the right to be as indignant as a Victorian prude should anyone speak to them discourteously. It’s really just a crude totalitarian power-game, an expression of Marcusean radicalism, “liberating tolerance,” and it takes a strong mind to resist being lured into that Humpty-Dumpty alternative universe where words mean whatever the Left says they mean.

Well, to hell with the niceties, you see: Raw mockery is what they deserve, and I’ll make damned sure they get all they deserve. So I went right to work on Sophia Bush:

Let’s see here: Thirty years old, was queen of the 1999 Rose Bowl Parade, made her acting debut in 2002, best known for a cable TV show (One Tree Hill) you never heard of before, as well as a couple of movies John Tucker Must Die (2006) and The Hitcher (2007) you likewise never heard of before. Won a few “Teen Choice Awards” when she was, in fact, in her mid-20s.

Sophia can’t seem to keep a man. She was briefly married to her TV co-star Chad Michael Murray in 2005, but that didn’t last six months. She dated another co-star, James Lafferty, and then another, Austin Nichols, only to be returned to the reject pile each time. Basically, it looks like any male actor cast in One Tree Hill was contractually obligated to bang Sophia Bush for a while.

Is it cruel to mock her like this? Yes, purposefully so. Yet there’s nothing personal about it — heck, I never even heard of her until last night — and it’s not really political, either.

There are plenty of women every bit as liberal as Sophia Bush who don’t make themselves obnoxious by lashing out at Republicans, blabbering about their vaginas and acting as if they were courageous First Amendment heroes deserving of admiration and praise. If she’s going to get up in Michelle Malkin’s face with that kind of crude act, she’s practically handing us an engraved invitation to mock her politics, her miserable B-list career and her pathetic vagina, too.

Shut your pie-hole, woman, or I’ll start talking about my scrotum again.

#EmptyChairDay : Angry?

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by Smitty

The European Desk is surfing the jet lag at 0300 and catching up on the RSS feed. I’ll see if I can find some piece of European furniture and some free WiFi to support Empty Chair Day. In case of furniture failure, how about some Alice in Chains? “Saw my reflection and cried / So little hope that I died” seems apropos the Obama campaign. Does BHO feel like the man in the box?

 

Gleefully mooched from Nice Deb:

And Insty notes that even Politico notices.

Update: ouch:

Update II: More ouch from Power Line, including a Winston Churchill ref.

Update III: Linked at American Power, though I think all your furniture are belong to Ed Driscoll:

When Trolls Attack: Marcusean Mob Gets @ChrisLoesch Bounced from Twitter

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“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.”
— Herbert Marcuse, “Repressive Tolerance,” 1965

Sunday night, I was a guest on “BlogMock Radio,” the weekly online podcast hosted by Blogmocracy and Diary of Daedalus, and a caller asked, “Did you hear what happened to Chris Loesch?”

Chris Loesch is a musician who joined forces with Steven Crowder to perform as Powdered Zombies for the viral rap hit “Mr. America.”

Chris is also, not coincidentally, the husband of blogger/talk-radio host/CNN contributor Dana Loesch. Chris was arguing with some left-wingers on Twitter who had attacked his wife when the enlightened tolerant progressives decided — to borrow a phrase from Spencer Ackerman — to smash him through a plate-glass window. Chris explained to Twitchy what happened:

I was suspended 20 minutes after I was done debating a few liberals. Twitter’s suspension message to me stated that I had used “Abusive Language” I never cursed, threatened or belittled anyone. . . .
I stumbled upon a few tweets between the liberals I was debating, discussing getting groups together to block conservative twitter accounts in mass. I am certain that @OccupiedMuslim got her entire OWS rally in NYC to report me for spam. I wish I would have taken a screen shot because those tweets were deleted as soon as I started making noise about it. . . .
This is clearly a tactic being used by the left and Twitter is either ignorant or allowing it to occur.

Got it? Any conservative active on Twitter is familiar with how left-wing trolls — many of them associated with the Occupy movement — like to get up “in your face,” hurling abusive language and dishonest smears. The best response usually is to ignore them.

Most people don’t have time to waste on such vermin, but ignoring the troll attacks will sometimes give them the idea that they are “winning” (Charlie Sheen-style), so that the trolls start congratulating each other on their success, and claiming that the objects of their attacks are too stupid or too cowardly to engage them in arguments. You’ll never guess who wrote this:

Right wingers harass, abuse, insult & attack people constantly on Twitter, then act outraged and whine when their accounts are suspended.

OK, maybe you did guess, huh? This is what happens when the target responds to the trolls: The enlightened tolerant progressives deliberately mischaracterize the response as an “attack,” or “whining,” as if the targets of their vicious dishonest online aggression had no right to answer them back. And now, as the case of Chris Loesch dramatizes, the Left has begun organizing stalker mobs to falsely report conservatives for “spam”/”abuse,” in order to silence the Right on Twitter. Why?

Silencing opposition is the Left’s only hope for success.

If conservatives are permitted a fair chance to critique the Left’s agenda, to expose the Left’s tactics and demonstrate the failure of the Left’s policies, the Left loses. Not content to dominate academia, public schools, the entertainment industry, book publishing and the mainstream news media — all of which cultural institutions are characterized by an overwhelming liberal hegemony — the Left is now determined to silence conservative opposition in the few bastions of freedom that remain: Talk radio, cable TV and the Internet.

Nearly half a century has passed since Marxist theoretician Herbert Marcuse proposed a “liberating tolerance” — in fact, progressive intolerance — that would silence the Left’s opposition. Many old-fashioned liberals at that time recognized the totalitarian nature of Marcuse’s formula. Leszek Kolakowski observed that the ultimate object of Marcuse’s ideology was “Marxism as a Totalitarian Utopia. . . . the freedom he advocates is non-freedom.”

Here we are now in 2012, and we see mobs of left-wingers still pursuing the Marcusean totalitarian formula: Smash the opponent “through a plate glass window,” as Spencer Ackerman infamously said, and do not scruple about the means to the end. If one imagines that the Right is Evil by definition, then defeat the Right “by any means necessary,” to employ a favorite slogan of the Left.

Ten days ago, Daniel Vergara committed libel against me — and Twitter has still done nothing about Vergara’s defamation.

Yesterday, a left-wing online mob attacked Chris Loesch, and Twitter suspended Loesch’s account. When conservatives rallied under  Ben Howe’s #FreeChrisLoesch banner, Loesch was briefly reinstated, but continued agitation from the left-wing Twitter trolls resulted in a second suspension. If this could happen to such a prominent person, whose wife is a paid contributor to CNN, what do you suppose happens to smaller, less influential figures online?

As Twitchy documents, these attacks have happened to many conservatives, and Twitter has done nothing to stop it.

Anneke Green reports the story at The Washington Times. Now a Memeorandum thread, with commentary from Hot Air and Nice Deb.

Conservatives must defend free speech now, before the Left uses Marcusean “liberating tolerance” to silence all opposition.

UPDATE: Darleen Click on the Twitter troll tactics:

They even believe they “own” certain hashtags and target conservatives who engage, mockingly or seriously, in “their” space.
Sister Toldjah was able to uncover one of the “hit lists” and, scroll down and you’ll find me and Serr8d on the list.

She’s exactly right: The Left wanted to “own” the #OWS and #Occupy Twitter hashtags, and when conservatives began using those tags to promote stories documenting the criminal violence of the Occupy movement, the Left became enraged. Well, they were enraged already, I guess, but they went into an especially demented sort of frenzy at being unable to control the “narrative” of the Occupy movement.

UPDATE II: Da Tech Guy sees Soviet tactics by the Left, while Dan Collins discusses the possibility that the White House is orchestrating such attacks. One need not believe that to understand that Our President has done nothing to discourage the Left’s venomous hatefulness and has, indeed, in many ways fomented it.

 


‘Cashiered Over Creative Differences’

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Thus does Dan Collins explain his departure from Team Twitchy, saying that he “was let go for not grokking the comprehensive vision.”

OK, it happens. Sometimes things don’t work out, and the fault is neither the employer’s nor the employee’s, but simply a mismatch or disagreement for which no one is really to blame.

A free economy permits this trial-and-error approach to employment. Just as the employee reserves the right to seek employment where he wishes — to quit a job with which he is unhappy and seek employment elsewhere — so too does the employer reserve the right to hire or fire at will.

What makes people many people miserable at work is the entitlement mentality, the concept of worker “rights” whereby an implicit demand is made of the employer: “Make me happy or I’ll sue you!”

Conservatives should never think that way and, in whatever sense Dan’s departure from Team Twitchy is unfortunate, it’s good that when they got to the point where things obviously weren’t working out, they recognized the intractable mismatch and cut bait.

This reminds me of when I finally quit The Washington Times after more than 10 years. Had I stayed just another four months, I would have received a gold watch in recognition of my decade of service, but when they replaced Wes Pruden with John Solomon, it was as if God said, “Go” — and I went.

All that has transpired since then, for good or ill, has convinced me I did what was right. Just yesterday I was telling one of my former bosses about my campaign-trail adventures — including my Louisiana adventure with Lisa Graas — and remarked that I never would have gotten to do stuff like that if I had stayed at The Washington Times. I’d been pigeonholed as a section editor and news/feature writer and, no matter how often I asked for other jobs, my value in my assigned role was alway considered greater than whatever I might have added in whatever other assignment I sought.

It was a mismatch. The company’s needs were at odds with my own interests and ambitions, so that ultimately I was faced with a choice: Either make myself miserable by continuing in a job I didn’t want to do anymore, or else walk away and do what I wanted.

At any rate, Dan’s just gone through a similar experience, and you should go hit the tip jar at The Conservatory to cheer him up, even while continuing to follow Twitchy, which is awesome.