The Other McCain

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

You Stay Classy, Bill Schmalfeldt!

Posted on | March 9, 2013 | 31 Comments

Bill Schmalfeldt: Proud to be a ‘Brain-Damaged Troll’

It’s been more than a week since we took notice of Brett Kimberlin fanboy Bill Schmalfeldt, who has been charged in Maryland with Internet harassment of Lee Stranahan. Before examining Schmalfeldt’s latest eruption of obscene idiocy, however, I’d like to treat you to an amusing blast from Schmalfeldt’s disreputable past.

Right Wing Scrambles to Reassign
Blame for Tucson Tragedy

That was the headline on Schmalfeldt’s debut as the self-described “Brain-Damaged Troll” columnist at Technorati in January 2011. Bill’s theme was, as usual, completely wrong — the exact opposite of truth. Even as Schmalfeldt was ranting on about the Tea Party, “Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly” as the culprits in the Tucson massacre, actual reporters were quietly working to determine the nature of the madness behind Jared Loughner’s bloody crimes.

Loughner was not a Republican, not a conservative, not a Tea Party activist. He was a paranoid schizophrenic. Once a promising young musician — he had played saxophone in a high-school jazz group — Loughner got involved with drugs:

Some friends have traced the start of his decline to his sophomore year of high school in 2005, when he broke up with a girlfriend. He dropped out of high school after his junior year and thereafter lost touch with many of his former friends, including Caitlyn Parker. On the day of the shooting which targeted Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords, Parker was one of the first of the accused gunman’s acquaintances to push back against speculation that the crime had been perpetrated by a right-winger. No, Parker said in a series of Twitter messages, the Jared Loughner she remembered was “quite liberal,” even “radical” in his politics.

Ah, so the dope-addled crazy was not a Rush Limbaugh listener, not a Glenn Beck fan, not a Fox News viewer. Well, what set him off?

The two-hour video is anti-Christian, anti-American and anti-capitalist, and Jared Lee Loughner became obsessed with it. Zeitgeist, a conspiracy-theory documentary released in 2007, has spawned its own cult following. According to Loughner’s friends, the accused Tucson gunman was one of the cult’s most zealous converts. And many of Loughner’s otherwise inexplicable obsessions — from his fascination with currency to his rantings against illiteracy to his paranoid fears of “mind control” —parallel ideas promoted in Zeitgeist.
The first disclosure of the movie’s influence on the mass murder suspect’s beliefs came in an interview Wednesday with ABC News. “I really think that this Zeitgeist documentary had a profound impact upon Jared Loughner’s mindset and how he views the world that he lives in,” Zach Osler, 22, told ABC’s Ashleigh Banfield. Osler’s father confirmed that influence in an interview published Sunday by the Arizona Republic. “He wanted to watch [Zeitgeist] all the time,” George Osler told the Phoenix newspaper. “It was cool at first. But then it got weird. It was all he wanted to do.”

So, the belief that Bill Schmalfeldt expressed in his Technorati column on Sunday, Jan. 9, 2011 — that the Tea Party and conservative media personalities were directly at fault for the Tucson massacre, and that the Right was dishonestly attempting to “reassign blame” — was 180 degrees opposite of the truth. In fact, insofar as the crimes of a madman can be said to have a political motive, Loughner’s motives were those associated with the radical Left, including 9/11 Trutherism, anti-Christianity and anti-capitalist beliefs not unlike those of the “Occupy” movement.

The account of the Tucson gunman’s madness cited above is my own American Spectator column, “Jared Loughner’s Zeitgeist Obsession” (Jan. 17, 2011), and regular readers will recall how much coverage of the Loughner/Zeitgeist phenomenon I provided here:

So, while I covered Loughner’s actual motive every day for seven consecutive days (Jan. 12-18), Schmalfeldt lost interest in Loughner’s motives as soon as evidence emerged proving Schmalfeldt’s original “pin-the-tail-on-the-famous-right-wingers” smear was false.

And here’s the thing: Bill Schmalfeldt never owned up to the falseness of his accusation. He continued being published at Technorati until November 2011 without ever once acknowledging that his very first column for Technorati was a big, fat, evil lie.

There are many faults and personal shortcomings that can be tolerated in journalism. Deliberate malicious dishonesty is not one of them.

All that is necessary to discredit Bill Schmalfeldt is to quote Bill Schmalfeldt. The vile creep got banned from Daily Kos for his grossly offensive writings about anal sodomy. Schmalfeldt’s penchant for obscene defamation, as Lee Stranahan pointed out last week, includes describing his own ex-wife — the mother of his children, whom Schmalfeldt divorced in 1988 — as a “meth-abusing serial adultress.”

You may ask, how would such a person choose to honor the memory of his recently deceased mother? By accusing his ex-wife of “sucking Stranny Balls” and “sucking Stranny dick,” calling her an “adulterous slut” and a “lower form of life,” and also describing one of Lee Stranahan’s female friends as a “throbbing hemorrhoid” and a “cunt.”

You stay classy, Bill Schmalfeldt!




 

 

PREVIOUSLY:

 


 

Category: Bill Schmalfeldt, Zeitgeist

Truth in Humor: Ashley Judd Edition

Posted on | March 9, 2013 | 61 Comments

Ashley Judd (D-Scotland)

“If and when Judd actually tosses her hat into the ring, the race would automatically become the marquee political story of 2014.”
— Alan Schroeder, Huffington Post

One of the important things about appreciating sarcasm is that it helps to understand intent: What is being mocked, and why? Otherwise, the cruel jests may seem entirely pointless and personal.

Here are three facts about Ashley Judd:

  1. She has been a spokeswoman for the abortion-industry lobbying group, NARAL. You can look it up.
  2. She is childless, and the failure of her fertility treatments was widely reported. You can look that up, too.
  3. After pro-life Republican Rick Santorum ended his 2012 presidential campaign, Ashley Judd starred in a “humorous” video that mocked Santorum by comparing his campaign to an abortion.

If you know that I am a pro-life father of six who supported Santorum’s candidacy, it is not necessary to explain why I’m so (ironically) excited by news that Ashley Judd is reportedly moving forward with plans to run for the Senate in Kentucky. A long season of mockery, ending ultimately in the “abortion” of Judd’s own campaign, offers ample opportunity for sweet, sweet payback. So . . .

Ms. Shriveled Lifeless Womb, who disparages motherhood and Ronald Reagan, and has compared coal mining to rape, thinks she’s going to get herself elected Senator in Kentucky. Need I mention she wrote a whole self-dramatizing feminist essay about her puffy face?

This — this — is “the marquee political story of 2014”?

Please, dear God, let this happen. The National Republican Senatorial Committee shares a mock Judd-for-Senate fundraising e-mail:

It’s time for Kentuckians to stand up and be counted.
We need someone representing us in Washington who was a Tennessee delegate for Barack Obama in 2012.
We need someone who believes it is “unconscionable to breed.”
Someone who has compared mountaintop removal mining to Rwandan genocide and has criticized Christianity as a religion that “legitimizes and seals male power.”
Someone who has called the tradition of fathers “giving away” their daughters at weddings “a common vestige of male dominion over a woman’s reproductive status.”
Finally somebody had the courage to say it!

 The jokes just write themselves, don’t they? And did anyone ever deserve it more than this Cheerleader for Baby-Killing?

Also, her face is so . . . puffy.

Yet my sarcasm should not be interpreted as meaning that I lack sympathy for the shameful human tragedy that is Ashley Judd.

This was why last year I offered therapeutic suggestions to help her cope with what appears to be a case of post-abortion trauma:

ASHLEY JUDD: A CASE STUDY?
The actress Ashley Judd’s outspoken support of NARAL, and her use of cruel jokes about abortion to mock Rick Santorum, suggest the possibility that Judd is herself post-abortive. Certainly, there is reason to believe that Judd’s strident pro-abortion statements are at least partly motivated by her own personal problems. She has described herself as a survivor of sexual abuse and recounted her history of depression and, in 2006, told Glamour magazine she spent 47 days being treated in a Texas facility for her mental-health issues. According to at least one tabloid account, Judd’s marriage to Indy-car racer Dino Franchitti nearly broke up because of her inability to have children, despite undergoing years of treatment for infertility. Given this background, we cannot dismiss the likelihood that Judd’s pro-abortion politics represent an expression of psychological disturbances, perhaps an attempt to cope by rationalizing her emotional trauma through attacks on scapegoats.

You can read the rest at, “Five Academy Award-Winning Beauties Who Are Moms (Unlike Ashley Judd).”

A woman who spent 47 days being treated for mental-health problems — who is probably on a daily regimen of prescription anti-depressant medications — is certainly deserving of sympathy. This is especially problematic as Judd enters the menopausal phase where she is likely afflicted with a profound sense of grief about the loss of her sexual attractiveness. Remember, she once posed nude while portraying famed sex symbol Marilyn Monroe.

So we must be understanding of the complex psychiatric issues with which Ashley Judd is coping, the severe chronic mental problem of which her “politics” are merely symptoms.

We’re here to help. #Caring

UPDATE: To address criticism in the comments below, a new post: “Clean-Up on Aisle Nine!”

 


Category: Abortion, Celebrities, Election, Kentucky, Senate

Peter Paul & Ashley

Posted on | March 9, 2013 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

Fear the Midnight Poet. Fear.

Category: humor, Kentucky

The Unstoppable Progressive Juggernaut of Future Kentucky Senator Puffy Face

Posted on | March 8, 2013 | 23 Comments

Barren middle-aged actress Ashley Judd hates babies

Fox News headline:

Source: Ashley Judd moving forward
with run for Mitch McConnell’s
Senate seat in Kentucky

Could this possibly happen? Could someone this far left possibly win in Kentucky? I dunno.  Ace of Spades headline:

Puffy Faced Woman Who Hates Coal and
Childbirth to Run for Senate In Kentucky

Yeah, being a fanatical baby-hater — cracking cruel and tasteless abortion jokes — probably won’t go over too well statewide, although she might be popular in Barren County.

You can’t really blame Ms. Shriveled Lifeless Womb for being resentful of women who, unlike her, didn’t kill all their babies. But when she compared coal mining to rape . . .

 

WE ENDORSE THIS CANDIDATE
IN THE DEMOCRAT PRIMARY!

 

Category: Abortion, Celebrities, Election, Feminism, Kentucky, Mitch McConnell, Senate

World’s Youngest Blogger: Won’t Someone In SC Run Against/Over Graham?

Posted on | March 8, 2013 | 19 Comments

Please, Lord, send someone to deliver the Palmetto state from that wretched squish.

via Todd Kincannon, who is strangely coy about this business:

http://primarygraham.com

Category: World's Youngest Blogger

I Got Nothing

Posted on | March 8, 2013 | 18 Comments

Sometimes you see an item and instantly think, “Wow, I gotta blog that, because this will be hilarious.” And so it was when I saw a weird bit of news from HuffPo, but then . . . blank.

Zilch. Zero. Nada. And I think the problem is that, once you’d read the item, there really isn’t anything you can add to it that would make it any funnier than it already is — that is to say, if you’re the kind of person who thinks it’s funny when a guy has to go to the hospital because he got a dildo wedged up inside his bunghole, then live-Tweets the process of having it extracted.

Did I mention there’s an X-ray?

UPDATE: OK, while I was caught jokeless, Ace of Spades was running a whole riff on Mister Bunghole’s Very Bad Day.

 

Category: humor

Shorter Juan Williams: I’m Sorry My Underpaid Assistant Plagiarized That Column With My Byline I Didn’t Write

Posted on | March 8, 2013 | 36 Comments

Who am I to judge, huh? Hasn’t it been my lifelong ambition to get paid big bucks without actually doing any work? But the rock star dream didn’t happen, so I was forced to resort to journalism, which requires me to sit in front of a laptop computer and at least pretend that this is “work.” Still, I cling to the hope that someday I might be successful enough to have an assistant — preferably one with ginormous boobies — who can take care of all the drudgery like transcribing audio, fetching coffee and booking my flights to conferences where I collect a couple thousand bucks for giving a 45-minute speech about whatever.

Nevertheless, I would require that my large-breasted assistant actually be competent, because otherwise bad things might happen:

A column by Fox News talking head Juan Williams published last month by the Hill was quietly updated last week to fix some pesky instances of plagiarism. The article, it turned out, featured entire paragraphs from a Center for American Progress report on immigration, with a few words changed here and there, as detailed by Salon. “I was writing a column about the immigration debate and had my researcher look around to see what data existed to pump up this argument and he sent back what I thought were his words and summaries of the data,” Williams told Alex Seitz-Wald without apologizing.

Wait — Juan Williams’s “researcher” is a he? What’s the point of having an incompetent assistant plagiarizing stuff for your ghost-written column, without titties?

Juan: You’re killing the dream here, buddy.

UPDATE: Oops. I fixed a typo — actually, I misspelled “incompetent” — which is why I need an assistant with keen eyes (and a nice rack) to spot typographical errors.

UPDATE II: Ace of Spades HQ:

I wonder how widespread this practice is. I wonder how many of these “writers” and “thinkers” have actually stopped writing and instead are now “Producers” of writing, the way a producer on a film hires the team and oversees the team but doesn’t actually take the concrete steps we usually think of in making a movie.

The problem is that there is a vast reserve army of underemployed writers who are happy to get paid to put words under the byline of some Famous Name. It’s a buyer’s market, really, which is why I insist on a competent assistant, with really massive yabbos.

UPDATE III: Just in case anyone thinks that I am being sexist in requiring my assistant to be stacked like the Great Pyramid of Giza, I’ll remind you of Instapundit’s discovery of scientific proof that larger-breasted women are more intelligent. And he’s a Yale-educated law professor, y’know. Certainly he wouldn’t dream of engaging in unfair discrimination.

 

Category: Journalism, Scandal

OK, Let’s Make This Quick

Posted on | March 8, 2013 | 11 Comments

Jimmie Bise Jr. called to my attention an article that Jon Ward of the Huffington Post had Tweeted out, in which Mark Judge complains about the lamentable dearth of writerly journalism by conservatives, under this provocative headline:

Standing Athwart Breitbart, Yelling Stop

Judge’s complaint is valid, so far as it goes. Conservative journalism was born fighting, and as the movement it spawned has increasingly become a day-to-day fight to control The Narrative — to win each day’s political battles — it has largely lost the high tone of intellectualism that marked the works of Richard Weaver, Friedrich Hayek, Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley Jr. back in the day. This problem is aggravated by the remorseless quest for Internet traffic as journalism (of all kinds) adapts to the inexorable economic exigencies of the New Media age. One might also point to an incentive structure that encourages conservatives to write Stuff That Moves the Needle, whereas regular journalists get to relax, have fun, and just cover whatever assignments they get.

Stipulating all that — and resisting the temptation to write another tedious essay about it, having recently held forth on the meaning of MalaysiaGate —  I detect in Judge’s complaint a distinct whiff of a recrudescent problem I call Dreherism.

In case you’ve forgotten who Rod Dreher is, back during the Bush years, he wrote a cover article for National Review that got turned into a book called Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, Gun-Loving Organic Gardeners, Evangelical Free-Range Farmers, Hip Homeschooling Mamas, Right-Wing Nature Lovers, and Their Diverse Tribe of Countercultural Conservatives Plan to Save America (or at Least the Republican Party).

Notice that I don’t link to the Amazon page of the book, because I don’t want to risk anyone accidentally being influenced by Dreher’s awful ideas, even if it would make me a profit. Jonah Goldberg famously ripped the wretched thing to tatters and flung the bits back in Dreher’s face, leaving me little to do except clean-up work in my Reason magazine review of that Very Bad Book. And in that controversy, I recognized a conflict that wasn’t really about politics, but about career ambition.

Dreher was (and is) what the magazine trade calls a “back of the book” writer — book reviews and so forth — rather than a guy who specialized in actual reporting, and his Moment of Glory on the cover of the National Review was the life’s dream of a thousand literary types who are forced to slum it in journalism.

This is not a problem unique to conservative journalism or political journalism. Hunter S. Thompson dreamed of being Fitzgerald or Hemingway. Instead, he went to South America as freelancer for the (now defunct) National Observer and, through a fluke of fate, was the guy The Nation assigned to do an article about the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang. From there, the trip to Gonzo legend began.

In much of the world of journalism, the feature writer with an eye for color and an aptitude for elegant prose is a king among men. This is not true in Washington, D.C., where the top of Page A1 is always Urgent Updates of the Latest Crisis: Hard news with a short shelf life, extremely important today, but sure to be obsolete within 24 hours.

Get us the Big Facts now, damn it!

You’re never going to get a Drudge link on a book review, and of the six or seven stories that qualify for the front page of a newspaper, exactly one — and never more than that — is likely to be something you might call a “feature” that won’t be out of date tomorrow.

This was why, when it was my job to supervise interns at The Washington Times, I would sometimes caution the young women writers against any tendency toward writing “soft” stuff (as is all too common). No, you want to seek out a hard-news beat, and avoid getting stereotyped as a features writer, or else you’ll spend your career covering silly stuff like arts-and-crafts festivals.

The minute a newspaper editor finds out you can write a feature lead, you’re on the fast train to the Society section, ladies, and you can’t blame it on “sexism,” because it damned near happened to me, too. When our bosses at The Washington Times decided to re-assign Julia Duin from the Culture page to be strictly our religion reporter, I fought like hell against being assigned to that Culture page gig, although I did manage to make the most of it until it damned near drove me crazy.  But I digress . . .

Crunchy Cons was Dreher’s attempted escape from “back of the book” status, but it was a cul-de-sac as far as real politics was concerned — a gooey mess of stuff that did not amount to a fighting creed — and Goldberg saw that as clearly as did I. And so now we encounter the complaint of Mark Judge that conservative journalism does not give enough work to literary types:

Conservative journalism, which in many ways is stronger and better than it has ever been, is nonetheless missing something crucial. It is missing a literary voice.

Hey, fuck you, Mark Judge. You think you’re the only guy on the Right who knows how to write stylish prose? That you’re the only guy who might like a nice trip to some exotic locale to write colorful feature coverage that isn’t all about Moving the Needle?

It happens that I agree with Judge’s basic point, but nobody listens to a guy who’s Not Good Enough for BlogCon, so what I do is just write what I write — a critique by counter-example, you might say — and hope somebody appreciates it.

Ultimately, Judge is doing a variation of “Dougherty’s Law,” the habitual lament of disgruntled Republicans first described by Michael Brendan Dougherty: “If it were more like me, the Republican Party would be better off. It’s failing because it’s like you.”

Judge is saying to the rest of us, “Conservative journalism would succeed if it was like me. It’s failing because it’s like you.”

What part of “fuck you” do I need to explain, Mark?

 

 

Category: Journalism
« go back — keep looking »

    About

    This is an area on your website where you can add text. This will serve as an informative location on your website, where you can talk about your site.

    Subscribe to our feed

    Search

    Admin