The Other McCain

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

Memo From the National Affairs Desk: Worldwide Headquarters of Crazy, Inc.

Posted on | September 23, 2012 | 8 Comments

My plans to get to Ohio and cover the three-day Romney-Ryan Buckeye State bus tour that begins tomorrow have thus far been thwarted.

It’s one of those long complicated stories you don’t want to hear, but if there is any conservative in the Mid-Atlantic region willing to make the run, please contact me on Twitter. I’ve offered cash money to friends who tell me, alas, they’ve got more important things to do, and I’m half-tempted to drive this broken-down KIA (in dire need of major repairs) as far as it will take me, abandoning it if it breaks down, then trying to hitchhike my way along the campaign trail. The situation has become that desperate and, as I keep telling myself, Woodward and Bernstein never had to deal with this kind of crap.

Also, Woodward and Bernstein never had to deal with crazy people on Twitter. Without further explanation . . .

Twitter wars with topless starlets and psycho terrorists make it hard to keep in mind that I’m supposed to be covering a presidential election.
 





 

UPDATE: In a comment on yesterday’s post about Kimberlin associate Neal Rauhauser, Bill Hoge cautioned that he is not a psychologist in offering this information:

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fourth edition (DSM IV-TR), defines antisocial personality disorder as follows:

  • A) There is a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others occurring since age 15 years, as indicated by three or more of the following:
    1. failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest;
    2. deception, as indicated by repeatedly lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure;
    3. impulsiveness or failure to plan ahead;
    4. irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults;
    5. reckless disregard for safety of self or others;
    6. consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations;
    7. lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another;
  • B) The individual is at least age 18 years.
  • C) There is evidence of conduct disorder with onset before age 15 years.
  • D) The occurrence of antisocial behavior is not exclusively during the course of schizophrenia or a manic episode.

Yeah, I’m not a psychologist either, but if Crazy-Evil Disorder (otherwise known as Kimberlin-Rauhauser Syndrome) isn’t listed in the DSM-IV, it should be in the next update.

UPDATE II: Trying to get my mind off the craziness and back onto the presidential campaign, my Tweet of this video has been re-Tweeted more than 130 times:

Category: Election 2012, Fear. Loathing., Mitt Romney, Ohio, Paul Ryan, Shoe Leather Fund

Dean: Romney’s Tax Rate “Doesn’t Seem Fair To Ordinary Working People”

Posted on | September 23, 2012 | 11 Comments

by Smitty

Howard Dean is almost admirable, in his twisted way, both for trying to push the Administration’s class warfare rhetoric, and then trying to label himself a moderate:

Dean eats his party’s crap sandwich argument straight up. Hope that’s tasting good to you, Howard.

via Hot Air

Category: Hot Air

Topless @MsAlisonPill? Meh.

Posted on | September 22, 2012 | 13 Comments

In case you didn’t know it, there is an HBO show called The Newsroom, one of the stars of which is a blonde young actress named Alison Pill who, as we might say, “pulled a Weiner.”

That is to say, she had a Twitter accident in which, she explained, she was attempting to delete a topless photo of herself and instead sent the topless photo to her 30,000+ Twitter followers.

Oops.

Also, not impressive

Kate Middleton’s topless photos — blurry, taken with a telephoto lens — were more impressive, and they weren’t all that impressive.

Listen up, celebrity ladies: We’re tired of these unimpressive topless photos. Unless you’ve got something that’s really worth our time to click the link — e.g., a pair of natural D cups with aureolas the circumference of a Moon Pie — don’t bother us. Keep your top on.

Pat Dollard has the (unimpressive) NSFW photo of Alison Pill, and I’ll just say this: She’s no Alyssa Milano. IYKWIMAITYD.

Category: Celebrities

I Blame Pat Condell For The Appropriation Of Obama’s Spine

Posted on | September 22, 2012 | 10 Comments

by Smitty

Poor Barack. I think we know where your vertebrae, and those of a few other world leaders, went:

via Paco

Update: Linked by Catholic Bandita and The Camp of the Saints, and American Power.

Category: The Flemish Menace

If The Sitting President Says Michelle Obama Is Qualified For POTUS, Then @SarahPalinUSA Surely Rates

Posted on | September 22, 2012 | 8 Comments

by Smitty

The Blaze:

President Barack Obama offered a boost for his wife on Friday, saying first lady Michelle Obama could “definitely” win the presidency but that she has “too much sense” to run for office.
“She definitely could be the president but she will never run for the presidency ’cause she’s got too much sense,” Obama said Friday in an interview on Washington, D.C. hip hop radio station WKYS.

Category: Barack Obama, Sarah Palin

Conor, You Lost Me At ‘Fix’

Posted on | September 22, 2012 | 33 Comments

by Smitty

Friedersdorf is normally Dan Riehl’s favorite target of derision, but one of our readers emailed a URL to article #74,325 in the “Until Republicans Fix [The Signal-To-Noise-Ratio], They Can’t Fix Any Problems” series.

The inability to judge arguments on their merits and separate fact from fantasy is what ails the conservative movement.

Later,

The right needs to value robust argument more highly. And to denigrate those who subvert it more forcefully. For public discourse is all it has to test ideas and formulate an evolving agenda.

Three replies:

  1. This is not a ‘fixable’ situation, Conor. The list of people involving themselves in the public discourse vary continuously. Also, the people themselves vary continuously, growing, learning, and retiring in various ways. It is abject foolishness to bemoan the unfixability of the situation. If you follow that foppish line of reasoning long enough, you’ll decide that it is ‘unfair’ that the situation cannot be ‘fixed’, and appeal to some authority to redistribute the attentino paid to speakers more ‘equitably’.
  2. This is a capitalism of ideas, Conor. You can produce sentences with flower prose, e.g.:

    But respect for empiricism and reasoned, intellectually honest debate could ensure that the best critiques would be aired; the best ideas attempted; and the very worst rejected, whatever their provenance. At minimum, it’s possible to imagine a coalition where sound argument was valued enough to render the most vile ad hominem and the most hair-trigger heretic-shaming beyond the pale. Instead Rush Limbaugh and Erick Erickson remain among the right’s most influential voices.

    However, if no one buys what you’re selling, you have to admit that maybe your product is inferior. Rush Limbaugh is not immortal. How are you sharpening your rhetoric, even now, to rescue Rush’s beleaguered audience, sadly led astray these decades, mistaking bombast for basis, passion for principle, volume for veracity? Do you brush aside riff-raff like Mark Steyn* and start out as a sub for Rush when he’s away? Or do you take baby steps, and out-Erickson Erick, and build a redder Red State?

  3. We are watching the traditional media crater in the marketplace because they do suck, Conor. They know that they are on the RMS Progressive Titanic, and striking that iceberg called ‘math’ has us all taking on far too much water. And to read you whinging on about reasoned argument, and then see you collide with this drivel:

    National Review’s readers have been exposed to the argument that President Obama is allied with our Islamist enemy in a “Grand Jihad” against America; in Forbes, Dinesh D’Souza set forth the thesis that Obama’s every action is explained by a Kenyan anti-colonial ideology that overwhelms all else. I mention those magazines not because they’re worthless, but because both publish good stuff, and employ a lot of talented people who are more than smart enough to see through this nonsense. An ideological movement that prided itself on openness to all ideas could be forgiven for the most laughable that made it onto the pages of marquee magazines, but on the right, this madness gets published in venues where David Frum is deemed beyond the pale.
    A bit farther toward the fringes you’ve got the birthers.
    Just now, the GOP nominee was exposed as believing, or pandering to donors who believe, that the 47 percent of Americans who vote Democratic are the same 47 percent of Americans who pay no income taxes. That is demonstrably false, but many on the right have lined up behind his remarks, and started to shame co-ideologues who dared to criticize the Republican standard-bearer.

    One sees what you did there, Conor. You’ve juxtaposed some serious theories about what’s going on in the mind of BHO with birtherism. Nice discrediting by proximity. But don’t you think, even if wrong, the ideas of Andrew McCarthy and D’Souza are theories that have substantial explanatory power? Doesn’t the resonance of 2016 with Americans mean something? (Catch a great D’Sousa interview here.)
    And then the whole 47% ‘controversy’. Could you at least, speaking of intellectual honesty, balance a (perhaps cleverly) edited excerpt of Romney’s remarks against the corpus of what the man’s said?

Sporting fellow that I am, Conor, let me buy you a cup of coffee at CPAC next year. It would be instructive to figure out if you’re playing the mercenary Dave Weigel game, where you’re writing for a paycheck and serving an editorial overlord, while not necessarily being evil, the Rick Moran game, where you’re quietly statist, bookish, and keen on making theoretical arguments, or merely an oaf.

*Steyn deletes better prose than I write. Take that remark in context, please.

Category: Barack Obama, Blogging

FMJRA 2.0: Classical Interlude

Posted on | September 22, 2012 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Why Liberals Hate You

The Disgrace That Is Susan Rice

The ‘Accuse the Accusers’ Strategy: Attempting to Explain Social Engineering

‘Anonymous’ Spokesman Barrett Brown Arrested After Bizarre Video Meltdown

Allen West Drops the D-Word

FMJRA 2.0: How It’s Gonna Be

Binding Future Congresses

Shhh, Breitbart: Let The Studio Squeeze Out ‘Zero Dark Thirty’

Nakoula Arrest Quickmeme

Rule 5 Sunday: No-Frills Edition

Netanyahu Rates Brains Of Those Saying Nuclear Iran Would Stabilize The M.E.

LIVE AT FIVE: 09.17.12

Spot the Error

‘There Has Been a Campaign of Disinformation and Smears’

MUSIC VIDEO: ‘You Didn’t Build That’

Walker v. Kimberlin Case Moves Forward

VIDEO: ‘A Prairie Fire of Debt’

DOJ + MMFA: Ministry of Truth

Hyperbole Help For The Telegraph: ‘Romney Singularity Threatens Space-Time Continuum’

Barack Obama At Loyola In 1998: ‘I Actually Believe In Redistribution’

My Ill-Gotten Gains

$105,000 Worth of Champagne

Obama: An Authentic Phony

OMG! I Thought The Obama Flag & Blood On The Wall A Tasteless Joke. . .

OMG! @ParisHilton Gets Wrongly Tagged ‘H8R’ for Talking About Gay Sex

You Go, Pamela Geller!

Fast and Furious — in Libya?

LIVE AT FIVEEIGHT: 09.21.12 (NATIONALS PLAYOFF HANGOVER EDITION)

It’s Only Lying If You Subscribe To Some Notion Of Truth

Raaaaacist Furniture

VIDEO: David Horowitz Slams Obama’s Attack on Islam Film, First Amendment

WHOREGATE!

Exit, Lying: Smear Site Quits After Being Named Walker v. Kimberlin Defendant

Oh, That’ll Go Over Like The Vagina Monologues In Quantico

In Which I Admit To An Abiding E.W. Jackson Affection, With A Side Of Mia Love

Top linkers this week:

  1. Hogewash (11)
  2. Lonely Conservative (9)
  3. Jackie Wellfonder (7)
  4. Daily Pundit (6)
  5. The Camp of the Saints (5)

Thanks to everyone for their linkagery! Deadline to submit links for next week’s FMJRA is Friday, September 28.

Category: FMJRA Award

Neal Rauhauser’s Crazy-Evil Obsession

Posted on | September 22, 2012 | 30 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

“Frey is often at the center of questionable activity, lending undue legitimacy to things that border on criminality . . . I have long felt that he was misusing his position and abusing the public’s trust, and these logs presented me a chance to file a formal complaint.”
— Neal Rauhauser, “Pat Frey – Safe, At Least For Now,” Sept. 21, 2012

Why did Neal Rauhauser become obsessed with Patrick “Patterico” Frey? Well, Patterico had done valuable work writing about the Anthony Weiner cybersex scandal, but you see that he assumed an inordinately large significance in Rauhauser’s mind. Why?

Long story short: It’s the day job, stupid.

It seems that once Rauhauser learned that Patterico works for the L.A. County District Attorney’s office — which was not a secret, by the way — this offered what must have seemed to Neal a chance at an easy “win”: He would get Patterico fired, and this scalp on his belt would then become the symbolic trophy that certified Rauhauser’s vindication.

Neal was Patient Zero in the epidemic of Weiner Truther madness on the kook fringe of the Left. Rauhauser had convinced himself (and staked his credibility on the claim) that Weiner was the victim of a heinous conspiracy.

“Congressman Weiner was stalked and set up by a Christian Infowar Militia cell based largely in Oklahoma City,” Rauhauser wrote at Daily Kos under his “Stranded Wind” alias on June 4, 2011.

Looking at the elements of that accusation — “Christian,” “Militia” and “Oklahoma City” — you have a tight cluster of right-wing demons, calculated to inspire Fear and Loathing in the hearts of the type of liberal who, as soon as Gabby Giffords was shot, leaped to the conclusion that her killer must have been a deranged Tea Party extremist. (Jared Lee Loughner was, in fact, a psychotic 9/11 Truther obsessed with the cult conspiracy film Zeitgeist.) This is where we arrive at a basic point of debate about Neal Rauhauser: Crazy or Evil?

That is to say, in examining his behavior, we are forced to consider two alternative explanations:

A. He’s crazy. Rauhauser seriously believes the lunatic conspiracy theories he promulgates online.

or

B. He’s evil. Rauhauser is a vicious cynic, who creates elaborate fictions carefully calculated to appeal to the kook-fringe types, thus enabling him to manipulate them for his own selfish and malevolent purposes.

Of course, we cannot rule out the hybrid theory:

C. He’s both crazy and evil.

At some basic cognitive level, Rauhauser appears aware that his conspiracy theories are ludicrously false. There are times when the cynicism is so apparent — e.g., Neal’s manipulation of his gullible Twitter defender (and devoted Weiner Truther) “Occupy Rebellion” — that it seems obvious that he knows it’s all nonsense.

So that would seem to support the “evil” theory, but the “crazy” explanation is bolstered by Rauhauser’s strange persistence in his obsessive pursuit of certain targets. More than two years after the 2010 TwitterGate scandal, for example, Rauhauser still continues to lash out compulsively at “Zapem,” the woman whose research did so much to expose Rauhauser’s role in that bizarre episode.

No rational person would continue pursuing her in the same mad way Don Quixote pursued windmills, as Rauhauser has done. And I think that Ladd Ehlinger Jr. came closest to identifying the exact nature of Rauhauser’s madness:

[Rauahsuer’s behavior] displays a breathtaking lack of human empathy. He thinks of people as playthings to be toyed with. By categorizing them as “trolls” he can do to them whatever he wishes, and creates all sorts of elaborate games to entrap them. His revelry in their misery is quite apparent, justified by dehumanizing those he manipulates.

In other words, Neal Rauhauser is a sadistic sociopath who enjoys inflicting suffering on others, for whom he is incapable of feeling empathy. Furthermore — and I’ll ask readers with psychological training to tell me how common this is — Rauhauser’s sociopathic tendencies are closely associated with narcissistic grandiosity and paranoia.

He is a sort of cyber-serial killer, stalking prey on the Internet, seeking to inflict on them virtual torture and destruction.

Rauhauser thinks of his evil acts as heroic, avenging the wrongs he alleges have been done by the dehumanized scapegoats whom he alternately diminishes (as insignificant “trolls,” etc.) and magnifies as dangerous enemies, as suits his selfish purposes. And so we go back to the WeinerGate scandal and the beginnings of Neal’s obsession with Patrick Frey. Patterico was targeted in multiple July 2011 posts by Rauhauser (“Stranded Wind”) on Daily Kos:

Unlike some other of Rauhauser’s targets, Patterico has the kind of day job where such defamatory accusations can cause him real harm. Although his supervisors seem to understand that the false accusations against Patterico are just psychological side-effects of Rauhauser’s conspiratorial fixation — Patterico is never going to get fired because of this crap — being the target of an obsessive cyberstalker’s repeated attacks is nonetheless harmful and annoying.

Furthermore, the rational (evil, not crazy) side of Rauhauser’s mind functions well enough to inform him that his target’s ability to retaliate is impeded by the very fact that Patterico has a day job with serious responsibilities.

Whereas Neal can spend all day every day smearing Patterico, Patterico cannot turn around and do the same to Rauhauser. And while Neal has been able to incite his own basement-dwelling troll army (including “Occupy Rebellion,” among others) to parrot his smears against Patterico and other targets, Patterico’s potential allies are for the most part responsible job-holding professionals who would think it unseemly to spend time refuting the crazy-evil lies of such an odious and obscure person as Neal Rauhauser.

The advantages enjoyed by Rauhauser in such a situation — what we might term assymetric online warfare — are not neglible, and his sadistic personality delights in nothing so much as the cruel exploitation of such an advantage. Crazy evil is like that.

 

Category: Anthony Weiner, Patterico, The Kimberlin Files
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