The Other McCain

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

Everybody Hates Piers Morgan

Posted on | December 28, 2012 | 27 Comments

The petition to deport Piers Morgan is now nearing 90,000 signatures — which is what I’d call “a good start” — and this groundswell of antipathy to being lectured by a smarmy Brit on CNN has now reached America’s youth, including Michael Butler at The High School Conservative:

Piers Morgan “has a case of the sads” over the deportion petition, tweeting things such as “Ironic U.S. gun rights campaign to deport me for ‘attacking 2nd amendment rights’ – is my opinion not protected under 1st amendment rights?” One witty twitter user responded with “You ignore the Constitution, why shouldn’t they?” For those of you wondering if we really can deport Piers Morgan for being stupid, we can. James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal explains, “Your opinion is protected, your presence in the U.S. is not. See Kleindienst v. Mandel (1972).” . . .
There is also a response petition from British citizens which reads, “We got rid of him once and why should we have to suffer again. The Americans wanted him so they should put up with him. We washed our hands of him a long time ago.”

The Brits don’t want him back and everybody in America hates him. Maybe we should send Piers Morgan to France — or even worse, Canada!

It doesn’t matter, as long as we #DeportPiersMorgan.

Category: CNN, Foreigners, Great Britain, Media Bias

‘A Lucrative But Risky Decision’

Posted on | December 28, 2012 | 9 Comments

That’s what the New York Times calls it when teenagers get good jobs:

The New York Times seems concerned that teens in the fracking belt of eastern Montana are opting to work in the new oil-field economy right after high school rather than going straight on to college. A front-page story warns: Taking a job is “a lucrative but risky decision for any 18-year-old to make, one that could foreclose on his future if the frenzied pace of oil and gas drilling from here to North Dakota to Texas falters and work dries up.”
Let’s see. Where is a teenager more likely to learn the basic and transferable virtue of showing up every day and on time, not to mention how to get along with a boss and fit into an organization — as a communications and binge-drinking double major at Missoula State University, or as a mechanic fixing broken rig equipment?

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) My own children — including my 23-year-old daughter, who graduated summa cum laude and is now in her second year of teaching elementary school — have worked their way through college. Speaking of “basic and transferable” virtues, one of my 20-year-old twin sons will report for Army basic training in a couple of weeks, a work experience that will qualify him for higher education benefits, as well as killing terrorists. (Because he hates terrorists.)

Category: Education, Media Bias

Muslims Now Using Lawfare to Threaten ‘Zionist’ Bloggers in Canada

Posted on | December 28, 2012 | 13 Comments

“Zionist” is becoming a synonym for “Anyone Who Doesn’t Want to Liquidate Israel,” as Kathy Shaidle explains:

As we’ve known for some time, Canadian Muslims have been putting together a lawfare case designed to silence my husband’s blog, BlazingCatFur.
Now they’ve admitted this online at a Khomenist site, asking for donations to support The Man Who Is Suing Us in separate actions related to Canada’s Human Rights Commissions.
They specifically say they are targeting my husband because he is a “Zionist.” . . .

Read the rest at Five Feet of Fury and hit their tip jar — I did.

Category: Canada, Kathy Shaidle

Objectively Worse: Democrats to Blame for the Hyper-Partisanship They Decry

Posted on | December 28, 2012 | 12 Comments

NYPD arrest Occupy Wall Street protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge, Oct. 1, 2011

Commenting on the post-election rancor — e.g., Log Cabin Republicans targeting Chuck Hagel — Professor Glenn Reynolds observes:

You know, somebody — Dave Weigel or Matt Yglesias, I think — was tweeting the other day that the GOP was doing worse post-election than in 2008. Well maybe; at this point, after all, Bush was still in the White House. But Obama is definitely doing worse than in 2008. First the Susan Rice debacle, then the departure of scandal-plagued EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, and now the stalled Hagel nomination. Definitely not as well as in 2008.

Meanwhile, we see gloomy prospects for avoiding the “fiscal cliff,” and the question we ought to be asking is, “How did we get here?”

The problem in trying to answer that question is that the information stream is polluted by the Conventional Wisdom manufactured by the national media, where Democrats out-number Republicans by a factor of no less than 7-to-1. Thus, we must begin the quest for truth by un-learning what our indoctrinators —  the “apparatchik MSM,” as Ed Driscoll calls them — would have us believe, and consider the possibility that something quite nearly opposite is true.

Our liberal friends would have us believe that the problem is that Republicans have been captured by Tea Party extremists and are engaged in politically motivated “obstructionism” because the GOP is captive — “epistemic closure”! — to extreme voices on Fox News and talk radio.

What if that MSM-produced narrative is, in fact, the mirror-reverse of the truth? This relates to a comment I made about Barrett Brown, the “Anonymous” spokesman arrested in September:

The specific object of my critique is the outlaw “civil disobedience” vigilante protest mentality involved in the “Anonymous” and “Occupy” movements, an attitude that excuses crime so long as it is committed against enemies of The Cause.
This attitude was revived and popularized by anti-war protesters during the Bush era, where the information-warfare aspect of their propaganda was clearly displayed: President Bush himself was de-legitimized as an election-stealer, the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job,” and the U.S. military response to those attacks was “war for oil,” allegedly undertaken on behalf of Halliburton, etc. There is a narrative that justifies Barrett Brown’s demonization of the FBI, you see. The fact that this left-wing rationalization has passed its sell-by date — like the fragments of the Weather Underground that continued their “revolutionary” violence long after the Vietnam War ended — does not prevent people from continuing to carry the radical torch as if it were still 2005.

As Rodgers and Hammerstein might say, you have to be carefully taught to think the way Barrett Brown and his comrades think, and what Andrew Breitbart called the “Democrat-Media Complex” never bothers to expose and debunk the counterfactual beliefs of the radical Left. Why? Because liberals believe that having a loud, militant left-wing fringe — angry shock troops to assault the GOP-allied institutions of bourgeois society — is good for the Democrat Party.

Whatever you may think of the Republican Party, it is not (as the MSM would have you believe) controlled by “Birthers” and other kooks, and the GOP is not pursuing any kind of extremist agenda. It is actually the Democrats who embraced a dangerous anarchist fringe movement, “Occupy Wall Street,” and in fact it is Democrats who are even now pursuing the radical OWS agenda against “the 1%”: Taxes must be increased on “the rich,” Democrats keep telling us, and they are willing to take us over the “fiscal cliff” if they don’t get their way.

 

Category: #Occupy, Budget, Democrats, Instapundit, Media Bias, Taxes

Civility, He Says: Steny Hoyer Compares Republicans to Hostage-Takers

Posted on | December 28, 2012 | 8 Comments

You stay classy, Democrats!

Less than two weeks after one of the nation’s deadliest school shootings, the No.2 Democrat in the U.S. House, Steny Hoyer, compared Republican tactics for dealing with the nation’s debt limit to someone threatening to shoot a child hostage.
“It’s somewhat like taking your child hostage and saying to somebody else, ‘I’m going to shoot my child if you don’t do what I want done.’ You don’t want to shoot your child. There’s no Republican leader that wants to default on our debt, that I’ve talked to,” Hoyer said at a Capitol Hill press conference.

(Via Memeorandum.)

Category: Budget

Needed: HR 824–House Select Committee On Benghazi

Posted on | December 28, 2012 | 3 Comments

by Smitty

Tonight at the Northern Virginia Tea Party meeting, there was discussion of a group scheduling a meeting in the near future with Rep. Frank Wolf, to make sure that minor event a few months back doesn’t slip the gentleman’s mind, and find out how to help advance the cause for HR 824, to get a select committee appointed that can hopefully figure out Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

Helping keep the butchered Ambassador, employee, and two immortal heroes on the front burner couldn’t be easier. Patriot Journalist Network has a handy page to tap HR 824’s 32 sponsors directly on Twitter. You should light up their lives with encouragement. If the people demand justice, even that sad excuse for a smut shop mannequin, Harry Reid, can’t deny justice.

Category: Libya, Virginia

Further Tales of ‘Heroic Hatred’: Down the Rabbit Hole With Neal Rauhauser

Posted on | December 27, 2012 | 11 Comments

Neal Rauhauser was a speaker at the 2010 Netroots Nation conference

“I’ve been all over Patterico for the last several weeks, as he looks to be a pretty good candidate for the planner/operator behind Weinergate . . .”
— Neal Rauhauser (“Stranded Wind”), Daily Kos, “Weinergate Perps Pay Dearly,”July 27, 2011

Patterico comments on the habits of sociopathic monsters: “I have seen this exact pattern play itself out, again and again.” One of his commenters offers a helpful comparison:

Like Richard Dawkin’s attacks on religion — completely irrational and hateful but he justifies it by claiming that he’s opposing something hateful and irrational.

Is the hatred of religion a coincidental aspect of this problem? Let us recall that Barrett Brown, the former “Anonymous” spokesman who was arrested in September after an online video meltdown, was once the communication director of the atheist group Enlighten the Vote (a/k/a, Godless Americans Political Action Committee). Brown’s atheism and his insuperable arrogance were hand and glove: Assuming that religious people are ignorant bigots, to whom he was infinitely superior, Barrett then proceeded to a series of assumptions that seemed to him equally plausible, ultimately including the erroneous assumption that he could get away with threatening to “destroy” an FBI agent’s life.

“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”

Along his path to destruction, Barrett Brown let himself fall under the sway of Neal Rauhauser (a/k/a, “Carlito2000”) and was drawn into Rauhauser’s paranoid fantasies involving HB Gary, Jennifer Emick, Tom Ryan, et al. This brings us back around to something that will surely be of further interest to Patterico. Mike Stack today posted a message to someone who is engaged in a feud with Emick:

Neal Rauhauser is the reason I was SWAT-ted.
Your girlfriend is friends with Neal. . . .
You have a long-standing war with Jen Emick and the only reason that she was thrown into the mix was because again of what Neal Rauhauser did with the Michigan Police Department.

Stack was the first victim of SWATting in the wake of the WeinerGate scandal. Rauhauser became obsessed with the idea that Weiner was the victim of a hoax, eventually focusing on Patterico as the alleged mastermind of the (wholly imaginary) conspiracy against Weiner. In the comments of Stack’s post today, someone linked to a Pastebin document from August, transcribing an online chat in which Rauhauser (using the alias “BangoSkank”) was trying to gather information on his enemies. A few key excerpts:

20:59 you want a Maltego graph of this stuff? . . .
21:00 yer smack in the middle, I started with nachash dox
21:00 and melded it into my other stuff . . .
21:11 This Maltego graph is sort of the top level map
21:11 for the last two years, for me
21:12 There is a federal grand jury in D.C. and I presume one attached to the cyber task force in Chicago . . .
21:12 this graph contains what I know about the subjects, and I have left a number of their associates who appear only due to social media link analysis . . .
21:23 New York grand jury, too. Forgot that one.
21:23 So that’s a map of those I think may be culpable, their close associates, and then a ring of Twitter accounts that are well connected enough that they are interesting for comparison’s sake when I get new information . . .
22:19 I did this in an iterative fashion for the cluster of groups I watch
22:19 and then one day one of those connected eggs
22:19 matched a twitter account that pulled up when I brought a mailing list into Gist
22:20 and then the light came on, because it was the third time a specific funding source had popped up on the graph . . .
22:21 NY grand jury, DC grand jury, Chicago cyber task force
22:21 and it all come back around to the same central place

OK, you’re asking, “What the heck is Rauhauser talking about?” And I can’t fully answer that question, however (a) Rauhauser has repeatedly claimed to have high-level law enforcement contacts, (b) Rauhauser has routinely asserted that his enemies, including Patterico and others, are the targets of federal investigations, and (c) this particular online chat took place just a few weeks before Barrett Brown’s meltdown.

What Rauhauser seemed to be focused on in that particular chat were a number of enemies of “Anonymous,” including Emick, William Welna and various of their supposed associates. At one point, Rauhauser made this comment about “White Hat” hacker Thomas Ryan:

22:50 I catch Ryan from behind, he gets a skull fracture with something good and heavy

Hey, why the hate, Neal? Oh, maybe it’s because in October 2011, Ryan obtained “Occupy Wall Street” leadership planning e-mails that were published by Andrew Breitbart! And we remember that Rauhauser was involved (representing himself as an agent of Brett Kimberlin’s “Velvet Revolution” non-profit) in the “Occupy” movement.

So whereas Neal Rauhauser was allied with the “Occupy” thugs, Ryan was allied with Andrew Breitbart and opponents of “Occupy.”

In August, Neal was claiming that his enemies were under investigation by federal grand juries and a Chicago-based federal “cyber task force.” What happened instead? Within a matter of weeks, after Rauhauser tried to sic Barrett Brown onto his enemies, Brown melted down and was arrested on federal charges. At one point during his 13-minute video rant, Brown accused Thomas Ryan of being an “FBI informant.”

Think about this for a minute: In Barrett Brown’s perverse worldview, being an FBI informant — i.e., helping law enforcement investigate crime — makes someone an agent of evil.

Similarly, in Rauhauser’s worldview, Thomas Ryan deserves a “skull fracture,” while Patterico (who is himself an agent of law enforcement) can be falsely accused by Rauhauser of criminal wrongdoing — a “perp“! — and yet Rauhauser, having shown himself willing to lie to accomplish his purposes, expects his political allies to view him sympathetically as the victim of a “wingnut” conspiracy.

People like Brown and Rauhauser inhabit an inverted moral universe, where those who obey and uphold the law are the villains, while criminals — including Rauhauser’s associate, “Speedway Bomber” Brett Kimberlin — are noble and heroic warriors against “wingnuts.”

At any rate, the commenter at Mike Stack’s blog who linked the Pastebin document asks of Rauhauser, “Can you just see this wanker in court trying to sell his ever-changing conspiracy theories?” Read it for a laugh. We have not heard the last of Neal.

 

Category: #Occupy, Andrew Breitbart, Barrett Brown, Patterico, The Kimberlin Files

Ironic Headline of the Day

Posted on | December 27, 2012 | 23 Comments

NARAL President Quitting, Cites
Lack of Young Abortion Activists
— LifeNews.com

Category: Abortion
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