Category: Michelle Malkin

#Metaphor: Academics Sign Their Own Death Warrants by Defending Loomis

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Professor Erik “Head on a Stick” Loomis has established a new precedent in Online Civil Discourse: Any epithet-strewn obscene rant full of violent language against political opponents is acceptable, as long as you explain that it is a Metaphor Right-Wing Morons Can’t Understand.

We thank our enlightened progressive overlords for this blessing.

It has furthermore been established that if you are engaged in metaphor, and sympathizers of your political opponent quote you in such a way as to suggest that your sentiments are deranged, menacing and offensive, this is a “witch hunt,” and anyone who calls attention to this is “orchestrating a campaign” against the user of metaphor.

Such is the essential syllogism of “Statement on Erik Loomis“:

[W]e must stand by Loomis’s side and speak up and out on his behalf, for he has become the target of a witch hunt, and as an untenured professor at the University of Rhode Island, he is vulnerable. Loomis needs our solidarity and support, and we must give it to him. . . .
Glenn Reynolds is now accusing Loomis of using “eliminationist rhetoric.”
Other conservative voices have joined in. The Daily Caller says Loomis “unleashed a flurry of profanity-ridden tweets demanding death for National Rifle Association executive Wayne LaPierre.” Townhall put Loomis’s tweets in the context of NRA members and leaders getting death threats. And just this morning, Michelle Malkin wrote at National Review Online [a column critical of Loomis] . . .
We do not expect any better of the orchestrators of this campaign—this is what they have done for many years, and doubtless will be doing for years to come. We do expect better of university administrators. Rather than standing behind a member of their faculty, the administration has sought to distance the university from Loomis. . . .

In other words, if Professor Wobbly-Gay-Lumberjack Dissertation fails to gain tenure at the University of Rhode Island, the haters win, and the academic right to use fucking bloody hate speech metaphor in Online Civil Discourse will be destroyed.

(Damn it, why did Ace of Spades have to take a vacation this week? How can this douchebag not receive the full-on AOSHQ treatment?)

Nevertheless, in order to show “our solidarity and support” for the unalienable right to employ violent obscene rants metaphor in Online Civil Discourse (and still get tenure at the University of Rhode Island), I will list the signatories to the “Statement on Erik Loomis“:

  1. Chris Bertram, University of Bristol
  2. Michael Bérubé, The Pennsylvania State University
  3. Henry Farrell, George Washington University
  4. Kieran Healy, Duke University
  5. Jon Mandle, SUNY Albany
  6. John Quiggin, University of Queensland
  7. Corey Robin, Brooklyn College
  8. Brian Weatherson, University of Michigan

Perhaps readers can offer appropriate suggestions for what should be done to these subversive Bolshevik intestinal parasites metaphors!

UPDATE: I’ll have to provide the dog-whistle translation for Professor William Jacobson’s eliminationist rhetoric here:

I don’t think Loomis should be fired

Instead, he should be castrated with pruning shears

but that doesn’t mean he should be free from criticism.

And by “criticism,” I mean “Birther lynch mob rage”

And he certainly is not a hero of anything.

Except to the Marxist traitors who voted for the Kenyan usurper!

He’s just a guy who

should have his eyes gouged out with rusty nails because he

wanted to deprive others of the rights he claims for himself.

Right-wing morons don’t understand metaphor, but our ears perk up quick when we hear that secret lynch-mob dog-whistle.





 

PREVIOUSLY:


‘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.




 


“We’ll Fight Again Tomorrow”

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— by Wombat-socho


The post title, of course, is from Michelle Malkin’s morning after column, which was a bright torch amid the gloom of Obama’s victory. Indeed, conservatives must stand tall, resist the siren songs of “moderation” and “compromise” and continue to present America with a choice, not an echo. We must take note of things that went wrong, but keep in mind that there were things that went well; these are both summed up well by Dana Loesch. So, to echo Lenin, what is to be done?


We can start with Bill Quick’s angry post-mortem. As much as I respect Ed Morrissey, Bill is absolutely correct to savage him for the “messaging” nonsense he’s spouting, which is no different from the kind of crap we used to mock Thomas Frank for pooting forth. We’re dealing with people that would rather be hip than smart, and “fairness” has always been an easier sell than the fable of the Little Red Hen, especially if you’re one of the hipsters who wants their bread and circuses for free. Bill also makes the point that we were wrong about the polls and Nate Silver was right; our desire to believe that America was still a center-right nation blinded us to the ugly reality of the polls, and as happens every time you wish away bad news or unpleasant facts, they come back to bite you.


We can then look to Mark Levin, who called for Karl Rove to get off the stage, and linked to this Bloomberg article that openly mocked Rove as “Biggest Super-PAC Loser”. Stacy and others have been saying for years that the Establishment GOP and their consultant pilot fish need to be forcibly retired, and this massive failure on the part of the Establishment calls for not just retirement, but a wholesale application of wooden stakes and decapitations. This is the second Presidential election in a row that we have lost thanks to The Powers That Be anointing a “moderate, electable” candidate who was promptly painted as a soulless monster by the Democrats and the press (BIRM); in the end, they turned out not to be so electable after all. Worse, their much-vaunted ad spending didn’t buy us victory in the places we needed it the most, while Obama’s Operation Narwhal identified marginal voters and got them to the polls.


I think the conflict between the Washington Establishment and the TEA Party needs to come to a head, and we need to make sure the TEA Party wins. We need to build on those populist networks and rebuild local GOP party organizations from the ground up, allying with the Ron Paul libertarians to take power away from Washington and return it to Richmond, Austin, Nashville, Raleigh, Salt Lake City and the rest of the state capitals. We need conservative precinct captains and volunteer cadres who know the territory (and their neighbors) far better than any last-minute PAC-sponsored crew of door-knockers ever could. For too long, we’ve allowed the party of Main Street to be run from K Street, and now in this moment of defeat, we have a chance to reach out to the Stewart Adelsons and Bob Perrys and convince them that they can get more bang for their buck by supporting the little grassroots platoons instead of the big, plush headquarters that spent so much and accomplished so little.


This local emphasis also addresses the problem of culture change. We have a Kulturkampf on our hands and have had for decades, but we’re beginning to fight back effectively. This is another area where we have an advantage over liberals. On balance, we tend to be more polite and friendly, less snarky and prone to hectoring and preaching. We can use those advantages to reach out one on one to disaffected minorities and other people who are getting hosed by the seemingly endless misery of the Obama Depression. We may not change enough minds in two years, or even four, but we have to remember we’re playing the long game. It took the progressives most of the last century to get their hooks into education, entertainment, and news media, and it may take us just as long to take them back or (more likely) supplant them with schools and media of our own. That doesn’t mean we should give up; this is a #WAR, and we are all Breitbart’s soldiers in it.


Once we control the local parties, from townships to state committees, WE will be the ones deciding who the candidates are. We will have the ability to block another “moderate” like Mitt Romney or Stacy’s Crazy Cousin John from the nomination. We will take our government back at every level. It all starts with us, in our precincts and wards, building a political force of extraordinary magnitude, purging the Karl Roves and any other talking head who thinks they can control the party from a K Street office. It starts with you. It starts today.

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.

Fake Celebrity Account Fools Drudge, Crashes Twitter With Endorsement

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If you were on Twitter last night, you might have noticed that the notorious “fail whale” made its unwelcome appearance for a while: Twitter was over capacity, and now we know why:

Drudge Report posted a headline that would likely perplex anyone who has followed the politics of various Hollywood celebrities.
Actor Jake Gyllenhaal, the news site read, has officially endorsed Republican candidate Mitt Romney for president.
The proof? Well, the outspoken liberal celebrity tweeted it . . .
Except one thing. That’s not Gyllenhaal’s actual Twitter account.
As others have documented before, the Twitter handle @Jake_Gyllenhaal is a fake account made by a fan.

The traffic surge from the mistaken headline — which appeared atop the left-side column at Drudge — was enough to push Twitter past capacity until the headline was removed later in the evening.

Speaking of Drudge and Twitter, I noticed this from Michelle Malkin:

What’s up with that? Why would Drudge be linking articles from 9/11 Truther Alex Jones’s InfoWars site — a Friday article by Michael Snyder and a Monday article by Paul Joseph Watson were both headlined by Drudge — rather than linking Malkin’s Twitchy site?

Considering how much traffic a Drudge link throws, why encourage an obnoxious conspiracy theorist who (and I remember it well) sicced a mob on Malkin at the 2008 Democratic convention?

Desperate to salvage the fizzled demonstration, 9/11 nutball Alex Jones started barking at me and attempting to make a scene and incite a riot.

Here’s the video in which you’ll see Charlie Martin of PJ Media acting as ad hoc bodyguard for Malkin while Alex Jones calls them “neocons” who “help destroy this country” and “sell it out to the New World Order,” declares that 9/11 was “an inside job,” then begins whipping up the anarchist mob that shouts, “Kill Michelle Malkin!”

Well, it’s a free country, but exactly why the hell would Matt Drudge want to throw traffic at someone like that?

Will Ryan Hold Biden Accountable?

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Michelle Malkin reminds us of something:

Remember when President Obama bragged about Joe Biden’s fiscal discipline cred in 2009? “To you, he’s Mr. Vice President, but around the White House, we call him the Sheriff,” Obama warned government employees. “Because if you’re misusing taxpayer money, you’ll have to answer to him.”
Fast-forward to 2012. Call in the search teams. Since being appointed the nation’s stimulus spending cop, Sheriff Joe has taken a permanent donut break. He’s AWOL on oversight. In fact, he’s been bubble-wrapped, boxed and kept completely out of sight. The garrulous gaffe machine hasn’t sat down for a national media interview in five months.
The Democrats’ trillion-dollar “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act,” however, keeps piling up waste, failure, fraud and debt. Who benefited most? Big government cronies. . . .

Read the whole thing. Malkin makes an excellent point: If Biden was supposed to have been the enforcers of fiscal discipline, he’s been an abject failure and the scandals surrounding, for example, “nearly 4,000 stimulus recipients who received $24 billion in Recovery Act funds — while owing more than $750 million in unpaid corporate, payroll and other taxes.”

Maybe Paul Ryan will bring this up Thursday night.

UPDATE: Speaking of “big government cronies,” did you know that Barack Obama was a guest at the wedding of ABC’s Martha Raddatz, who will moderate Thursday’s debate. No bias there!

Why, David Frum?

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This is just embarrassing. Grant that he’s already burnt a lot of bridges behind him in an apparent quest to become the Most Famous Republican Who Hates Everything About Republicans — a tough competition with Peggy Noonan these days — but did David Frum really have to go after Michelle Malkin?

As Ace of Spades points out, Frum makes reference to his recent novel, and his novel was brutally panned by Mark Judge.

Having expended much energy lately in an attempt to prevent a thermonuclear blogwar meltdown — evidently with no luck, given the latest ugly incident — I feel a need to emphasize once again just how much I hate this kind of stuff.

There is no rule that every conservative must like (or agree with) every other conservative, but why permit mere dislike or disagreement to become the basis for an all-or-nothing vendetta?

Why push it to the point that your friends feel so embarrassed — indeed, mortified — by your purposeful insults to their other friends?

David, you’re wrong, and I don’t mean incorrect, I mean wrong.

You ought to apologize and re-think whatever the hell you were thinking that got you so far down this road, or else you’ll finish your career guest-blogging at Little Green Footballs.

Update (Smitty): thanks, Instapundit and Daily Pundit!

Tamara Holder: Should Malkin Get Laid In The Marital, Or Amb. Stevens Sense?

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by Smitty

The Lefties just keep it classy, but we should press for elaboration: does Tamara Holder think that Michelle Malkin’s spouse is inattentive, or, alternatively, does Holder mean ‘laid in a grave’?

Video below the fold for auto-play reasons.
Continue reading Tamara Holder: Should Malkin Get Laid In The Marital, Or Amb. Stevens Sense? →