If recent polls have any predictive utility, by midnight Nov. 2, I expect Chris Matthews to be weeping hysterically over the defeat of Alan Grayson. Keith Olbermann “Special Comment” on the evening Nov. 3 will invoke Martin Niemoller (“First, they came for Mary Jo Kilroy . . .”) while Ed Schultz will congratulate Glenn Beck on retaining his eyesight long enough to witness the destruction he has brought about.
You see? A ready-made dystopia for Democrats who don’t vote. This was the project that was being promoted Monday in Kentucky. My latest American Spectator column:
Lauren Valle wanted to create bad publicity for Rand Paul’s Senate campaign by having herself photographed next to the candidate while displaying a sign that mocked him as a tool of corporate interests.
Miss Valle’s stunt didn’t go off as planned, but the 23-year-old MoveOn.org activist certainly succeeded in her larger goal of creating bad publicity for the Kentucky Republican’s campaign. After she shoved her way through a crowd awaiting the candidate’s arrival for a debate at a TV studio Monday in Lexington, some of Paul’s supporters grabbed Miss Valle, pulled off the blonde wig she was wearing as a disguise and wrestled her to the ground. At least two TV news cameras recorded the most outrageous moment of the melee, when a man wearing a “Rand Paul for U.S. Senate” T-shirt stomped his foot on Miss Valle’s shoulder as she lay helpless on the pavement.
The trademark rapidity of news in the Internet Age took it from there. At 11:03 p.m., Atlantic Monthly senior editor Joshua Green posted an article headlined: “MoveOn Supporter Brutally Attacked by Rand Paul Supporter,” complete with a YouTube video from a Kentucky TV station. The video clip was, as Green said, “truly awful.”
Awful as it was, however, that footage didn’t tell the whole story. Yet no one online nowadays waits for the whole story before reaching their conclusions. “Rand Paul Supporter Stomps Head of Female,” said one “progressive” blogger. By midnight, a liberal blogger in Kentucky (who also happens to be a state employee) had pronounced the incident the work of GOP “Brownshirts.” . . .
The management would like to apologize for the lack of dick jokes, homoerotic references – oh, wait, we did a Cowboys link, never mind- and links to the current work of the Untamed She-Beast Of The Right. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe not.
“The Paul for Senate campaign is extremely disappointed in, and condemns the actions of a supporter last night outside the KET debate. Whatever the perceived provocation, any level of aggression or violence is deplorable, and will not be tolerated by our campaign. The Paul campaign has disassociated itself from the volunteer who took part in this incident, and once again urges all activists — on both sides — to remember that their political passions should never manifest themselves in physical altercations of any kind.”
Lexington police are searching for the suspects. Sherelle Roberts, a public information officer with the Lexington police, said they were looking for “at least two men, one who grabbed her and threw her to the ground, and one who stepped on her head.” She said they would be charged with assault. . . . [B]y the time the police got to the site of the incident, Ms. Roberts said, the suspects had slipped away and disappeared into the crowd.
“Our search is focused locally, but if someone in Nebraska or New York knows who these men are, give us a call,” Ms. Roberts said. The number to call, she said, is (859) 425-2006.
The protestor, Lauren Valle, 23, from New York City, is a volunteer for MoveOn.org and was trying to give Mr. Paul a satiric antibusiness “award” and have her picture taken with him when he emerged from his car to go into the debate.
Ms. Valle was described as having pushed her way forward when the two men grabbed her, yanked a blonde wig off her head and then shoved her to the ground. An unidentified man is heard yelling, “Get the police out here! Get the cops.”
In other words, police weren’t in the immediate vicinity where this altercation took place — Valle may have been trying to avoid police scrutiny — but once the melee began, somebody had the good sense to call the cops.
I’m half tempted to drive to Kentucky myself. Wouldn’t be the first time. What do the readers say?
Paul supporter Tim Profitt said video of the scuffle made it appear worse than it was and he chided police for not stepping in. Lauren Valle, the 23-year-old activist with the group MoveOn.org, said her face was swollen and her neck and shoulder were sore after she was wrestled to the ground by Paul supporters Monday night when she tried to give the candidate an “employee of the month” award.
Valle was roughed up before the debate between Paul and Democrat Jack Conway. The race is one of the most closely watched and hotly contested in the midterm elections.
“I’m sorry that it came to that, and I apologize if it appeared overly forceful, but I was concerned about Rand’s safety,” Profitt told The Associated Press.
Paul’s campaign dropped Profitt as campaign coordinator in Bourbon County in central Kentucky and banned him from future events.
Profitt said he was interviewed by a Lexington police detective Tuesday, but that he had not been charged.
“A friend of mine went up to three policeman before Rand got there, and told them about the girl who was standing there with that wig on and that she was getting ready to do something,” Profitt said. “The policemen looked at him and said that’s not our job.”
Great: Preventing a potentially violent incident is “not our job,” say the police, thus permitting a situation where the Left now gets to hurl “Brownshirt” slurs at libertarians.
Make a joke. Relieve the tension with humor. Many people find this habit of mine obnoxious. Neverthless, Shakespeare always included at least one comic scene in his tragedies.
Find a source. I linked Lisa Graas, who is (a) in Kentucky, and (b) fought her own battles with the Paulistas during the GOP primary campaign.
Acknowledge ambiguity. “I’m hesitant to jump to conclusions about what actually happened in this kind of made-for-TV publicity stunt.” When such an event is first reported, it can be very tempting to make an instantaneous judgment based on partial information. But I was not even sure that the Rand Paul supporters were legit. Still less did I presume to know what led up to the incident.
And once the story was updated to report that police were investigating, I said: “OK, so a police report has been filed, and the people involved in the incident are now suspects in an assault case. . . . Louisville police are now investigating the incident. The man who stomped Valle will be identified, and we’ll see how the story develops in coming days.”
It is not my habit to explain why I do what I do or why I write what I write. But Eric Boehlert of Media Matters and certain other left-wing nuisances have tried to portray me as somehow inciting or endorsing the actions of The Kentucky Stomper.
Once you get past my sarcastic humor, however, you see that my treatment of the incident was responsible, especially in urging that we wait to “see how the story develops.” Perhaps I should try harder to resist my instinctive sarcasm.
Look: I accept complete responsibility for my jokes. Nobody forced me to write obnoxious sarcasm, and I sincerely apologize for anyone injured by my tasteless humor. So if you can offer evidence that you suffered injury due to my joke, please let me know.
Reader contributions to the Sarcasm Defense Fund are sincerely appreciated, and I wish to express gratitude to Angela T. in Mississippi, Michael B. in Pennsylvania, Robert M. in Texas, Michael M. in New York and Jeff in Walla Walla for their recent contributions. Also, thanks to the “secret foreign donor” — in Canada! — who mailed a check while I was in Massachusetts.
Mr. President, how did you lose control of the economic message? Only months earlier, the administration had announced a push to remind the public of the positive impact of the stimulus. But the “Recovery Summer” campaign — press releases, big road signs, presidential and vice-presidential events — barely registered, and the “ground zero mosque” controversy dominated the summer’s silly season instead. . . .
The “original sin of the Obama administration,” says former labor secretary Robert Reich, “was to make the stimulus too small while giving out too much of it as tax breaks to businesses.” By most estimates, the stimulus saved or created about 3 million jobs, but it did not keep the unemployment rate below 8 percent, as the White House had projected . . .
So this, from David Corn of Mother Jones, gives us a clear idea of how the Left will interpret the expected drubbing on Nov. 2. The one thing that is ruled out in advance is the possibility that neo-Keynesian “stimulus” simply doesn’t work.
Liberals simply refuse to accept that their economic theory is wrong, or to examine evidence that interventionism produces more harm than good.
Ergo, if $787 billion in “stimulus” did not stimulate, then the Left concocts a “what-if” scenario of a $1.5 trillion stimulus that would have worked. The imagined benefits of this hypothetical super-stimulus have the advantage of being non-falsifiable, permitting them to believe that their theory is still viable.
Even the most phenomenal omens — negative yields on Treasury bonds? — are explained away as irrelevant or, if necessary, the liberals whip out their all-purpose response: Blame Bush!
No matter how much misery and failure their policies produce, liberals will never admit that their ideas are wrong.
Meanwhile, quite predictably, I find myself accused by the Left of being pro-head-stomping or, to borrow a phrase coined by my Twitter friend Ken Gardner, I’m guilty of “headstomperism.”
My initial reaction to this Political Theater of the Absurd incident in Lexington was to make a joke. I joke about everything. Ask anyone. Joking is a lifelong habit with me. I joke about cancer. That doesn’t make me pro-cancer.
A very clever guilt-by-association tactic, you see? In point of fact, Andrew Breitbart immediately condemned the Kentucky head-stomping via Twitter and yet Boehlert, with this insinuation that Breitbart “must be so proud,” tries to implicate Breitbart with words and deeds he neither authorized nor endorsed.
Sheriff Craig Webre and Harbor Police Chief John Callais announced the arrest of seven Greenpeace activists in Port Fourchon. A complaint came in at approximately 12:45 PM stating the seven had boarded a vessel at Port Fourchon and painted messages with an unknown substance on different areas of the ship. The messages were directed to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. A representative for Salazar was at Port Fourchon this morning while other dignitaries congregated in Galliano with Secretary Salazar and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano regarding the ongoing oil spill impacting the Louisiana coastline. . . .
The seven had been seen in the area for the past week and had been repeatedly warned by law enforcement not to hamper clean up operations and not to trespass. Greenpeace is known for pre-planning and coordinating similar protests to bring attention to environmental issues. Pictures of the vandalism appeared on the Greenpeace website within minutes of the arrest of the activists.
UPDATE III: Lisa Graas: “Unconfirmed report that KSP have apprehended the assailants.” Good. Then we can expect to have a complete official account of the incident.
Given the nature of the May vandalism in Louisiana — which seems to have aroused security concerns for two Cabinet secretaries — Valle’s actions in Kentucky take on a completely different cast. Environmentalists have been known to commit acts of violence and, in the mob scene outside the Lexington debate, some of Paul’s supporters might have feared that this wild-eyed person shoving her way through the crowd was trying to do some kind of weird Squeaky Fromme thing.
“I will tell you that when we arrived, there was enormous passion on both sides . . . people yelling and screaming . . . It was a bit of a crowd control problem.”
Look, as a reporter who’s been out on the campaign trail — in 2008, I sat just a few feet from Hillary Clinton at a press conference and actually talked to Chelsea in West Virginia — I have enormous sympathy for the kind of “crowd control” issues surrounding these events.
When I was covering the big rally in Searchlight, Nevada, I remember Sarah Palin being hustled through a phalanx of security without time to say “hello” or shake hands with her supporters. Even with a press pass dangling around my neck on a lanyard, I was careful not to make any move that Palin’s security might interpret as potentially threatening.
Now imagine if some crazy woman at Searchlight had come shoving through the crowd wearing a blonde wig and carrying a sign mocking Palin.
You see what I’m talking about? I’m not advocating, endorsing or defending the stomping of heads. I’m just saying that this mob scene in Lexington was exactly the sort of situation where these kinds of incidents happen. It’s unfortunate and wrong, but it is ridiculously misleading to politicize this incident as if it were somehow typical of those “crazy right-wingers,” which is what Boehlert, et al., are attempting to do.
With few exceptions, what brought reporters to Saturday’s rally was the opportunity to do what they have been doing in their Tea Party coverage for more than a year: Highlight negative “gotcha” moments to discredit the movement as a dangerous collection of hate-filled, misinformed lunatics, meanwhile asking attendees questions along the lines of, “Who do you consider to be the leader of your movement?”
In that sense, Saturday was a two-for-one press-corps special, providing the media a chance to play “gotcha” with Palin, the GOP’s 2008 vice-presidential candidate who is widely presumed by reporters to be a Tea Party leader, if not in fact the leader. Palin did not disappoint either fans or detractors at Searchlight, using her speech to assail the media for promoting Democratic claims that the movement is . . . well, a dangerous collection of hate-filled, misinformed lunatics. “We’re not inciting violence,” Palin proclaimed from the windswept stage that organizers had erected on the back of a flatbed truck. “Don’t get sucked into the lame-stream media lies.”
If you don’t want to be stereotyped, don’t act like a stereotype. Being aware that Democrats wish to depict Tea Party activists as violent yahoos, it is therefore incumbent on Tea Party activists to strive to avoid behaving like violent yahoos. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air:
Absolutely indefensible. Regardless of the woman’s intent, she has as much right to be in that public venue as Paul’s supporters. They have no right to assault her just because she’s holding a ridiculous MoveOn sign or even approaching the candidate. . . .
Paul has his own security with him, as the video seems to show, and they knew better than to react to an obvious provocation, and especially not to overreact to it.
Permit me a mild protest at an attempt to view this incident through the lens of “rights.” (George Donnelly takes it from a Randian perspective.) It is absolutely correct to say that the people who accosted Valle should (and by the time of my next update, almost certainly will) be facing criminal charges. So there is no question as to the legal rights involved here.
Yet human nature often causes otherwise sane and peaceful people to react in fight-or-flight mode to perceived threats. Once that adrenaline rush hits the neural system, autonomic reflexes take hold and people do things in the heat of the moment that they would not attempt to justify, except as an unthinking reflex.
We may expect when this case is processed through the legal system, the Paul supporters will offer just such a defense: Acknowledging the wrongness of their violence, yet pointing to the extenuating circumstance that they were reacting to a sudden provocation — a provocation which, unlike their own reactions, was premeditated.
