The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

UC-Irvine English Lecturer Kaufman Demonstrates His Psychic Powers

Posted on | April 12, 2013 | 54 Comments

Scott Eric Kaufman lectures at UC-Irvine, 2007

“As the sarcastic title and tone of ‘Homophobic Bigotry Update’ indicates, McCain knows that for him and his audience this is a ‘Dog Bites Man’ story. He’s just not honest enough to admit that he wants to call attention to what he believes to be an epidemic of gay child-rearing perfidy, because he knows that expressing his homophobic beliefs will out him as a homophobe and is just this side of smart-enough not to want that to happen.”
— Scott Eric Kaufman, University of California-Irvine, “Robert Stacy McCain, a homophobe, doesn’t even understand what he calls ‘a basic rule of journalism,'” April 11, 2013

Kaufman clearly missed his calling: Given his amazing ability to read minds — his certainty about what other people “know,” “believe” and “want” — Kaufman could make a fortune as a psychic, or at least a carnival sideshow act.

Kaufman the Magnificent: He Sees All! He Knows All!

Kaufman is one of those people who expect to succeed on the basis of having the Officially Approved Opinions, and who are outraged to discover that anyone can succeed on any other basis.

It’s the Hall Monitor Syndrome — Ferris Bueller’s sister.

Nobody ever cared about my opinion on the subject of “gay child-rearing” (perhaps an inconvenient choice of words in this context, but never mind) until I started writing about politics.

In the world of politics, having the Officially Approved Opinions seems to be the entirety of virtue, which explains how Ted Kennedy could be celebrated as a courageous champion of women’s rights, and Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.

Well, if I’d written anything about Scott Eric Kaufman before today, I don’t remember it, but others know him well: Three years ago, he appeared as a “moby” false-flag troll at Ann Althouse’s blog.

About the same time, Donald Douglas observed, Kaufman was “apparently teaching courses on ‘Manga’ and the literary origins of films like The Last Airbender.”

It’s a busy life for Scott Kaufman, Ph.D.: Blog-trolling, lecturing about cartoons and vigilantly monitoring the Internet to detect homophobia with his clairvoyant mind-radar. Perhaps this explains why Scott Kaufman, Ph.D., has so much difficulty finishing other projects:

He is currently under contract with Fountainhead Press to produce a book on visual rhetoric called, appropriately enough, Seeing Rhetoric. It will be published in 2011 if it kills him.

Hmmm. Checking Fountainhead Press — “a conscientious, eco-friendly publisher that provides innovative yet inexpensive products to the higher education market” — and I don’t see Kaufman’s Seeing Rhetoric there, and if he’s published it anywhere else, I can’t find it.

What else has Scott Kaufman, Ph.D. published? Well, for a while, he had a blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education, where on Sept. 10, 2009, he published a post with this title:

Be nice, now. The English language is not
Ed Morrissey’s strong suit, and he at least
makes a show of reining in the racist comments
he knowingly baits from his audience.

Ed Morrissey’s a racist and I’m a homophobe and Scott Kaufman, Ph.D. is one mightier than either of us, the latchet of whose shoes we are not worthy to stoop down and unloose. Meanwhile, in July 2009, Scott Kaufman, Ph.D., began a blog post with this pompous preamble:

Before I get started, I want to acknowledge that I know Ann Althouse is an attention fiend, and as such revels in any that comes her way. Furthermore, I know that giving her the attention she craves will only embolden her to spout even more outrageous nonsense in the future. However, the white-hotness of her intellectual dishonesty here compels me to consider it a vacuity of historical import.

The subject of this lecture on “intellectual dishonesty”? Whether Obama had looked at Mayara Rodrigues Tavares’s butt.

No, I’m not kidding.

Between his examinations of these lofty academic matters — and being a “moby” and lecturing about cartoons — Scott Kaufman, Ph.D., applies his keen forensic skill to diagnosing those who suffer irrational fear of homosexuals, because he is not just an arrogant know-it-all, but also selflessly devoted to eliminating all haters, everywhere.

SCOTT ERIC KAUFMAN
 You Don’t Need a Ph.D. in English from UC-Irvine
to Become a Laughable Douchebag — But It Sure Helps!

 

Category: Intellectuals

‘Democrat Ethics’

Posted on | April 11, 2013 | 23 Comments

You seldom see those two words in the same sentence, except when a Democrat is convicted of ethics violations or — as occasionally happens — pleads guilty to felonies. The Democratic Party is the most successful criminal organization in American history, and the amazing thing is that they haven’t yet stolen everything that’s not nailed down.

But have patience, they’re trying as hard as they can.

Anyway, the bungling dimwits thought they’d uncovered a Republican scandal, namely Mitch McConnell’s discussion of the fact that Ashley Judd is as nutty as a Snickers bar, information they obtained by means of electronic eavesdropping by a couple of “progressive activists,” which phrase is apparently a Kentucky synonym for criminals:

According to the version of the story now being told by local Democrat official Jacob Conway, two activists with Progress Kentucky “bragged to him about how they recorded the meeting” at McConnell’s campaign headquarters, using an iPhone to record it from the hallway.
A Democrat National Committee official LOLed at calls to denounce the secret recording, and accused McConnell of “trying to distract” from the fact that Republicans considered making an issue of ”a woman’s decades old mental health issues.” Except that it wasn’t “decades old.” Judd sought help for her mental illness as recently 2006 . . .

Read the whole thing. You can’t make this stuff up.

UPDATE: Didn’t I say you can’t make this stuff up?

UPDATE II: The rats are fleeing the sinking ship:

Jacob Conway, the Jefferson County Democratic Party’s executive committee member who originally accused Progress Kentucky of making the recording, told NBC News he was on his way to talk to the FBI about the allegations. And the group’s treasurer confirmed he had quit his position after the audio was published.
“At this time based on advice of both friends and counsel, I will be not be making a public statement available until everything has been reviewed by an attorney at this time,” Douglas L. Davis told NBC News. “I have resigned my position as treasurer and did not and do not condone any allegations of illegal activity that might have taken place.”

Remember: This started when David Corn of Mother Jones thought he was exposing a Republican scandal.

Oh, those awful, awful “secret recordings”!

 


Category: Crime, Democrats, Kentucky, Scandal, Senate

Why Don’t We Just Go Ahead and Nuke Those Vicious Communist Bastards?

Posted on | April 11, 2013 | 49 Comments

When you write headlines like that, you don’t expect any offers of “senior fellowships” at leading think tanks or book offers from prestigious New York publishers, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a valid policy proposal. I woke up this morning and checked the Drudge headlines:

 
NKOREA: 'Powerful striking means' on standby...
WATCHCON 2: Missile spotted in strike position...
US intelligence reveals launch zone...

 

As a Neutral Objective Journalist, I was able to write a brief news summary of this story without sharing my personal opinion of the Commie dictatorship in Pyongyang, but speaking as a God-Fearing Red-Blooded American, there can be no doubt. If it were up to me, North Korea would be reduced to radioactive vapor and smoldering cinders, and if you disagree with that policy, I question your patriotism.

Of course, nuking Pyongyang to Kingdom Come would be just the start of The McCain Doctrine — if those Reds in Havana don’t take the hint, I say we send a couple of carrier task forces and a divison or two of Marines to finish the job that should have been finished in April 1961.

And once we’re done killing all the foreign communists, then we’ll take care of Marxist university professors . . . .

UPDATE: A valid criticism:

 

Category: Education, History, North Korea

Dog Bites Man; Man Rapes Girl: Journalism and Other Crimes

Posted on | April 11, 2013 | 21 Comments

Just a couple of innocent victims of homophobic bigotry?

There is a basic rule of journalism — a rule that has nothing to do with politics whatsoever — that if a dog bites a man, that’s not news. News is when a man bites a dog. That is to say, newsworthy events are by definition unusual.

Some crimes capture widespread attention from the media and other crimes don’t, and this is not because editors have passed judgment that one crime victim is less deserving of sympathy than another, or that one perpetrator is more worthy of condemnation than another.

Usually, at least.

For example, I’ve never quite understood (and there was a lot of questioning among media-watchers at the time) why Matthew Shepard’s death became a nationwide cause célèbre, with nationally televised vigils and so forth. As murders go, Shepard’s murder wasn’t particularly unusual: Privileged college kid goes to a local pub, meets up with a couple of local two-bit hoodlums who decide to rip him off and, instead, the rip-off escalates into murder.

Nasty crimes like that are unfortunately not man-bites-dog news and, except for the fact that Shepard was gay, his death might never have made headlines outside of Wyoming. But of course, Shepard was gay, and so his death became a symbol of America’s Rampant Homophobia and — if you didn’t pay much attention to the details — you might have thought Shepard’s killers were right-wing fundamentalist Christians, rather than a couple of small-town petty criminals, both of whom had prior records for minor offenses including burglary and marijuana possession.

“True crime” has always been one of my favorite genres of literature. When I was in high school, one of the popular paperbacks was Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter. When I was a freshman in college, our reading list included Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. And the first book I ever read by Hunter S. Thompson was Hell’s Angels.

So I’m sort of an amateur authority on this kind of writing, to say nothing of my own adolescent experience hanging out with hoodlums, dealing dope and being in the vicinity of other criminal behavior of a type usually dismissed as “juvenile delinquency.”

The problem with such a dismissive attitude, however, is that juvenile delinquency is for too many youth the apprenticeship to a life of crime, and all three of the true-crime classics I cite — Helter Skelter, In Cold Blood and Hell’s Angels — focus on petty criminals who kept at it until they committed atrocities that became national news.

Charles Manson had been in and out of custody since he was a teenager until he was turned loose amid the “Summer of Love” in San Francisco and became a hippie guru whose followers eventually committed the Tate-LaBianca murders. Perry Smith and Dick Hickock both had lengthy criminal records before they met in prison and hatched the scheme that became the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas. And the Hell’s Angels were just one of several California-based motorcycle gangs until the 1964 Labor Day weekend in Monterey when they gang-raped two teenage girls.

Some crimes just lend themselves to sensational coverage, and others don’t. The question of political correctness in the selection of Big Headline Crimes nowadays is something that interests me and a lot of other people who believe that too many in the media nowadays are shaping coverage of news events in order to serve some kind of crusading do-gooder “make a difference” agenda.

Damn these wannabe humanitarians and philanthropists. If you want to work at the Ford Foundation or some other kind of charity, do it. If you want to change the world, run for Congress or join the Peace Corps. But stop bringing your missionary zeal into journalism, turning your pet “social justice” causes into crusades, and then trying to bully everybody else into supporting your cause.

So . . . rape.

Now, there is a basic rule of true-crime journalism: Crimes stories are not about victims, they’re about criminals.

Charles Manson is the protagonist of Helter Skelter. It’s not a story about Wojciech Frykowski, OK? Likewise, In Cold Blood is not “The Herb Clutter Story,” and we don’t even know the names of the two girls whose 1964 gang-rape by the Hell’s Angels turned into a magazine assignment for Hunter S. Thompson and eventually became his first book.

Rape stories are about rapists. The victim is usually never even named, unless she is also murdered, and rape-murders are actually common enough that you can’t even get a magazine assignment to cover a story like that unless the perpetrator turns out to be a psycho serial killer.

OK, so what if the rape-murder victim is a 13-year-old boy? That’s kind of a rare crime, and if the victim suffocated — bound and gagged — during an hours-long torture ordeal in which he was repeatedly sodomized, you might think a crime like that would be considered newsworthy.

But most people have never heard of Jesse Dirkhising, and there are those of us who suspect that maybe Jesse Dirkising is nearly unknown for pretty much the same reason that Matthew Shepard became famous: There’s an agenda.

Never mind whether it’s a good agenda or a bad agenda, it’s an agenda, and everybody knows what it is.

The point, from my perspective, is that news coverage is being influenced by a sort of consensus opinion among the influential elite of the journalism industry that some crime victims are more equal than others.

I don’t raise this topic randomly today, but because I’ve been called a “homophobic bigot” by a liberal blogger after I wrote about a case where a gay couple were accused of raping their adopted boys.

This might be a fair accusation if I’d never written about — to cite some examples — the rape and murder of Donna Willing, or the University of Massachusetts gang-rape, or the gang-rape of an 11-year-old girl in Texas, or the rape of an 8-year-old girl in Fairfax County,  Virginia, or the rape-gangs in England, or the 10-year-old girl recently kidnapped and raped in Northridge, California. These are just a few examples of heterosexual crimes I’ve occasionally written about, so I certainly don’t need any lectures from liberal bloggers about how common such crimes are.

No one could fairly accuse me of ignoring or minimizing heterosexual crime, including the case of Elizabeth Leigh Garner, the former Tennessee Titans cheerleader who tried to molest a 12-year-old boy — allegedly, I hasten to add, because Ms. Garner is presumed innocent until proven guilty. The same is true of George Harasz and Douglas Wirth of Glastonbury, Connecticut. For all I know, this couple may be the innocent victims of a homophobic witch-hunt, but nonetheless they are accused of raping boys as young as 6.

Look, if you want to call me names and deliver lectures about what an awful person I am in order to demonstrate (by the obverse, as it were) what a wonderful person you are for denouncing me as a “bigot,” OK. That’s your hustle, and if you’ve got a bunch of readers too stupid to see it as the hustle it is — “Admire me! I hate homophobes!” — then I congratulate you on your good fortune. A sucker is born every minute and, in 18 years, they can vote Democrat, too.

All the speculation and theory and research about this subject, as to whether homosexuals or heterosexuals are more likely to commit crimes against children, is immaterial to the news value of this crime in Connecticut, and if you want to see me get really angry about something, just try telling me I don’t know what is or is not newsworthy.

“They took turns raping me over and over”? If you don’t think that’s news, you need to find another line of work.





 

Category: Crime, Gays, Neutral Objective Journalism

Senate Slouching Toward Compromise

Posted on | April 11, 2013 | 18 Comments

is there anything more disgusting than a Republican senator in bipartisan compromise mode? Bloomberg’s anti-gun group starts running ads in Pennsylvania and Pat Toomey folds like a cheap suit. Say the magic words: Bipartisan compromise!

Senators struck a bipartisan deal Wednesday to expand background checks in gun transactions, inflaming the National Rifle Association while drawing support from a growing number of lawmakers. The proposal, drafted by Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), calls for an incremental expansion of NICS background checks for sales at gun shows and over the Internet.

I could think of another magic word, denoting a person who performs fellatio, that would describe Pat Toomey. I mean, we were on the verge of winning this thing — that is to say, the endless anti-gun drumbeat of media noise was becoming tiresome and people were losing interest — and suddenly, because of some TV ads, Toomey crumples. Meanwhile, more bipartisan compromise news:

A bipartisan group of senators has largely agreed on a broad immigration bill that would require tough border measures to be in place before illegal immigrants could take the first steps to become American citizens.

Persons performing fellatio!

And did I mention that a bunch of these Republican fellatio performers had dinner at the White House last night?

Please, somebody, tell me again how important it is to help elect Republicans to the Senate. Because I’m kind of having trouble right now seeing any point in it at all.

 


Category: Senate

LIVE AT SIX: 04.11.13

Posted on | April 11, 2013 | Comments Off on LIVE AT SIX: 04.11.13

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Georgia Gunman Holding Firefighters Hostage Killed BY SWAT Team

All over now

All over now

Man took hostages to get power and cable turned back on at foreclosed home

Jewish Prayer At Western Wall Ready To Go Co-Ed?

Sharansky’s proposal could anger haredim, Muslims

Ron Paul At Howard U.: Give GOP A Second Chance

Senator pitches libertarian agenda to predominantly black crowd



POLITICS

REI’s Jewell Wins Confirmation As Interior Secretary

jewell

New Interior Secretary Sally Jewell

Former CEO approved 87-11 by Senate

Like GOP Outreach Plans, Delegate Rules Divide Party

Bin Laden Raid Member Cleared To Testify In Wikileaker’s Court-Martial

White House Starts Sending Furlough Notices

Docs Show CIA Drone Strikes Killed Few Al-Qaeda Leaders

Obama Budget Would Pinch IRAs Of Wealthy With $3 Million Cap

Zombies Chasing Me, Alleged Big-Rig Thief Explains

Obama Calls For 94-Cent Cigarette Tax Hike



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
Asian Oil Prices Mixed On Increased U.S. Inventory: NYMEX $94.38, Brent $105.62
Japanese Automakers Recall Millions Of Vehicles For Defective Airbags
Fed Sends Minutes Early To Staffers, Trade Groups
Foreclosures Dropping To Pre-Bust Levels
Wall Street Futures Struggle For Direction
Fewer Employers Offering Health Care
Roche 1Q Revenue Up On U.S. Tamiflu Sales
Deutsche Telekom Sweetens Metro PCS Bid By Cutting Debt
PC Quarterly Sales Plummet In Sharpest Drop On Record
Microsoft Plans Seven-Inch Tablet To Compete With Google, Apple
Google Glass Explorer Edition Shipping To Developers Next Month
No Office For iOS Or Android Until 2014?
After Public Dumping Of Social Network, GM Returns To Facebook
Malaysia Adopts Google Apps, Chromebooks For Education



SPORTS
Surging Nyets Win Season Series From Celtics

Deron Williams scores 28 FTW

Deron Williams scores 28 FTW

Williams more than Boston could handle; leads Brooklyn to 101-93 win

Mariners Lose Series To Houston After Saunders Injures Shoulder

League-Worst Avs Upset Ducks

Hefner Shelled As Phillies Roll 7-3

Cavs’ Foul Strategy Backfires Against Pistons

Luongo Saves 40 As Canucks Extinguish Flames

Clippers Rout Timbermutts 111-95

Jordan Zimmermann Leads Nats To 5-2 Win Against White Sox



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Upton And Combs Heating Up As She Leaves Verlander Behind?

Kate Upton. Duh.

Kate Upton. Duh.

Diddy denies banging supermodel

Jenna Jameson Accuser: “She Beat Me With A Brass-Knuckled iPhone”

Miranda Kerr Out As Victoria’s Secret Angel?

Michelle Williams Debuts New Punk Haircut

Miley Cyrus/Liam Hemsworth Wedding On Hold

Farrah Abraham Wants Millions For Her Sex Tape

Liza Minnelli Confirms She Was Recruited For Intervention On Lohan

Ryan Seacrest Gets SWATted

“Buckwild” Producer Rips MTV: “This Will Get Ugly”

Ben Affleck’s Next Leading Role: Mr. Mom

Are Breastaurants Better Than Breasts And Restaurants?

Taylor Momsen Puts Her Best Face Forward On Set



FOREIGNERS
Human Rights Group Claims At Least 4300 Syrians Killed By Regime Air Strikes
Hong Kong Ferryboat Captains Charged In Fatal Crash
Putin Promises 100% Support For Buddhists In Visit To Buryatia
Women Detained For Violating Western Wall Prayer Ban
Uruguay Votes To Legalize Gay Marriage
Denouncing Serbian Tilt, U.S. Boycotts UN Meeting
Hamas, Fatah Renew Efforts For Palestinian Unity



BLOGS & STUFF
First Street Journal: We Have Seen This Fail Before
Michelle Malkin: No Tears For Lynne Stewart
NRO Corner: Ryan Open To Chained CPI
NewsBusters: WaPo, NYT, WSJ, LA Times All Omit Middle Class Tax Hike Admission By White House
Valley Of The Shadow: The Battle Over Rule 16
Mary Katherine Ham: Rand Paul Goes To Howard
Clayton Cramer: The Manchin/Toomey Compromise On Background Checks
JustOneMinute: Flood The Zone
Weasel Zippers: Mooch’s Gun Control Speech Repeats Obama’s Criticism Of GOP filibuster Plans
Senator Chuck Grassley: On The Sri Srinivasan Nomination And Court Efficiency Act
Jennifer Rubin: What Is Harry Reid Doing On Guns?
NOMBlog: Washington State AG Sues Florist For Not Supplying Flowers To Gay Marriage
Lonely Conservative: How The NYT Is Helping Anthony Weiner Revive His Political Career
Power Line: Philosopher King For The Nanny State
Maggie’s Farm: If We The People Need Coercive Paternalism…
Gateway Pundit: IRS Says We Don’t Need A Warrant To Read Your E-Mail


Category: Live at Five

Formerly Relevant Celebrity News

Posted on | April 10, 2013 | 48 Comments

You know how there are some people who seem really important or popular for a while, and then their 15 minutes of fame expires? And then, in a desperate bid to recapture their former glory, they engage in some kind of cheap publicity stunt? “Pay attention to me!”

So, anyway,  I guess there was actual important stuff happening last week when the “news” broke that Meghan McCain is going to become a grown-up Honey Boo-Boo, and I missed an opportunity to make fun of that shallow narcissistic bitch.

Meghan, I mean, not Honey Boo-Boo, although the resemblance is kind of remarkable, if you think about it.

Speaking of remarkable resemblances to Meghan McCain, Michael Moore says only right-wingers think he’s fat.

And speaking of people who have been failing predictably since the early years of the Bush administration, Jim Carrey.

Do you realize that it’s been nearly 20 years since Carrey starred in Ace Venture: Pet Detective, arguably the only really funny movie he ever made? And I say “arguably” because some people didn’t think it was very funny at all. But it was certifiably popular at least, grossing $72 million in 1994, when $72 million was pretty good money.  It was considered successful enough that the next year they made a sequel — not as funny — that grossed more than $100  million.

Carrey’s career since then has been erratic, and by “erratic,” I mean he’s been stinking it up for the past 10 years, playing cartoon characters in Seuss-themed kiddie flicks and bombing like the RAF over Dresden every time he tries to do anything aimed at an audience old enough to drive.

Who remembers Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004), The Number 23 (2007), I Love You Phillip Morris (2009) or The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (2013)? Nobody.

Heck, Burt Wonderstone has only been out four weeks and to say it has been forgotten would be a misstatement because it disappeared like a fart in a hurricane. It made back about two-thirds of the $30 million it cost to make it, and everybody who saw it — that is to say, a total audience measured in the thousands — left the theater telling all their friends to stay away from this cinematic turd. This is obviously why, in a desperate bid to seem relevant, Jim Carrey lashed out at the gun industry, which created a brief bubble of attention and — we might assume — signaled to liberal directors in Hollywood, “Hey, I’m one of you guys, so please consider casting me in your next movie.”

This is sad, because it’s not as if Carrey were Warren Beatty or Sean Penn or some other Hollywood guy who’s been doing the celebrity-leftist trip for decades. Just out of the blue one day, he decides to grab himself some “Courage Points” on the cheap by Standing Up to the NRA, as if that were some kind of rare and risky move in Hollywood.

Carrey’s celebrity-politics blip has come and gone, but for some reason (I don’t know why) Ace of Spades decided today to give Carrey a few punches on Twitter:

Nobody really noticed this, of course, because Jim Carrey isn’t really much of a celebrity any more. He’s actually on the verge of becoming more like Farrah Abraham. And I’m sure you’re like me: “Farrah Who?”

What the reality-TV industry has spawned is the phenomenon of micro-celebrities, people who are “famous” to a comparatively small audience of people who are fans of one or another series on one of those cable channels that are lucky to get a half-million viewers for one of their “hit” shows. I honestly don’t know how many people watch MTV any more,  but watching the petty misadventures of a bunch of trashy knocked-up high-school girls and their baby-daddies isn’t really my idea of entertainment. So I kind of get annoyed when a “celebrity” site puts Farrah Abraham’s name in a headline as if everybody knows who Farrah Abraham is, which we don’t.

It’s the “famous for being famous” syndrome, except that we’ve devalued “fame” to the point that it applies to people who aren’t actually famous in any sense other than “they used to be on a cable TV show watched by less than 1 percent of the U.S. population.” In a nation of 300 million people, 3 million isn’t a lot of TV viewers and I don’t think more than 3 million people know who Farrah Abraham is.

Maybe she should make a sex tape with Jim Carrey.

 

Category: Celebrities, Culture

‘It’s Really Astonishing. It’s Just a Deliberate Lie From Start to Finish.’

Posted on | April 10, 2013 | 18 Comments

So says Ace of Spades about the way the New York Times re-writes the history of the Anthony Weiner cybersex scandal.

In a just world, Jonathan Van Meter of the New York Times — and every editor who signed off on this thoroughly dishonest article — would be fired, and effectively blackballed from the industry like Jason Blair and Stephen Glass, for engaging in such a vicious distortion of facts.

Everyone who knows what actually happened must be outraged by Van Meter’s underhanded attempt to revive the Weiner-Truther “hack” theory, by quoting Weiner’s wife Huma Abedin: “Anthony had told me in the past that there were these sort of trolls on the Internet who were trying to damage him, take him down.” And then this hateful lie:

It wasn’t such an implausible theory; after all, it was the not entirely reputable right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart who broke the story.

“Here Mr. Disgraced Democrat, let me help you blame this on your enemies by smearing the dead man who exposed you.”

Beyond this, Van Meter deliberately misstates the chronology of revelations, denying Breitbart credit for the impact of his reporting on the Texas woman who had also received Weiner’s dirty pictures, a key development that Breitbart gave as an exclusive to ABC News to break the story first. Ace of Spades nails it:

What they’re doing is mixing up the timing of Breitbart’s scoop — that there were other women, and one was talking on the record with ABCNews, and that the case was now entirely proven– by mentioning Breitbart’s scoop and then June 1, as if June 1st followed Breitbart’s scoop.
Nope! Breitbart’s scoop came later — just before Weiner admitted it, hours before he admitted it. The scoop forced Weiner to admit it — but only because he had no other options left to him.
This fact is obscured by the Times’ deliberate misstatement of the chronology because they’re now going to pretend that Weiner chose the honorable course of admitting the cybersex, when in fact Breitbart’s scoop left this as the only remaining option, after all lies were rubbished.

Read the whole thing at AOSHQ, because this is simply heinous: The New York Times smearing a dead man, in a transparent effort to revive the career of this perverted self-destructive disgrace.

UPDATE: To explain why this angers me so much, I remember quite clearly what it was like during the first four or five days of the WeinerGate scandal, which broke over the Memorial Day weekend when Andrew Breitbart had promised his wife and family they’d get a vacation from the news. Instead, of course, he found himself up to his eyeballs in arguably the biggest story of his career.

Breitbart was the first news organization to report it, and Weiner’s office then used the hostility toward Breitbart as a defensive weapon to convince reporters that the infamous meat-tweet was a “distraction” fabricated by a hacker.

For the first 36 hours of this bizarre story, a lot of us — including right-wingers like myself — were treating this as essentially a technology story: Was it possible that Weiner’s account was hacked? Or, as I thought at the time, was it possible that a staffer who had access to Weiner’s Twitter account might have accidentally sent that picture to the Seattle coed? The first thing I was trying to do, in other words, was to figure out if there could be an innocent explanation, simply because the idea of a member of Congress sending dick-pics to a college girl seemed so wildly implausible.

I was scratching my head over this stuff on the afternoon of Sunday, May 30, when I thought, “Hey, I’ll call Andrew.”

Now, calling Breitbart was like using the Bat-signal. Andrew was totally accessible — he actually once gave out his personal cellphone number during a speech at a Tea Party rally — but you didn’t want to waste his time or make a nuisance of yourself by calling him unless it was really important. Over the five years I knew him, I probably only called him about two-dozen times. And on this Sunday before Memorial Day when I called Breitbart, he was supposed to be spending time with his family and we only talked for about three minutes.

So I was trying to figure out if there could be any innocent explanation for Weiner’s meat-tweet and tried to suggest such a possibility when Andrew cut me off: “No, Stacy, trust me — there’s more.”

Well, I didn’t know the backstory at that point, and Breitbart didn’t want to discuss the details, but it was that assurance — Breitbart already had the goods and was just biding his time to let the story play out — that made me understand it was only a matter of time before Weiner would be forced to confess and resign in disgrace.

That’s why, during all the crazy drama that ensued — the press conferences, the silly “Betty and Veronica” nonsense — my own coverage of WeinerGate was based on a confident knowledge of how the story would eventually end.

And now this lying swine, Jonathan Van Meter, is trying to deprive Andrew Breitbart of his due credit.

Like the man said: “Fuck you! War!”

UPDATE II: To help you remember how the deal went down, here’s the Fox News WeinerGate timeline, which is not exhaustive, but which does make clear what it was that led Weiner (who spent the first 10 days of the scandal telling lies) to finally confess the truth on Monday, June 6:

The scandal escalates as Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com website publishes photos purportedly from a second woman who said she received shirtless shots of the congressman. The site says the pictures were in a cache of intimate online photographs, chats and email exchanges the woman claimed to have. The website does not identify the woman.
Responding, a tearful Weiner makes a profuse public apology at a Manhattan news conference. He admits sending a photo of his underwear-clad crotch to a young woman over Twitter and then lying repeatedly to protect himself. . . .
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi calls for a House ethics investigation into whether he broke the rules. Democratic leaders voice disappointment and embarrassment, reflecting an erosion of support for Weiner.
Weiner insists he did nothing wrong, and begins making calls to Democratic colleagues to apologize. He says he has no plans to resign.

Well, Weiner may have had “no plans to resign,” but just as Andrew Breitbart had told me: “There’s more!”

 

 


Category: Ace of Spades, Andrew Breitbart, Media Bias, New York Times, Scandal, Sex
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