Grasping At Straws

As Brian Maloney notes, the left's backlash against his story that Air America founder Evan Cohen might have pilfered nearly half a million dollars in government grant money from the Gloria Wise Boys and Girls Clubs in the Bronx is in full, curiously-coordinated swing.

Like a depressing amount of lefty commentary, it's mostly namecalling and context-wrangling. The giggly fratboys say "Basically, it's a Washington Times editorial based off of an unsourced story in a community newspaper", they say, assuming their audience will not bother to check that the story in the Bronx News on which Maloney based his story used un-named sources, rather than no sources at all. This is not unusual - and the fact that un-named sources are used is someone one can certainly use when ascribing credibility to a story or not. We'll come back to this.

Barbara O'Brien at Mahablog has a piece that purports to gut Maloney's story. Read it yourself, draw your own conclusions. But her two major points as I see it are, first, that Maloney bases his story on a piece in a newspaper, the Bronx News, whose existence she can't seem to prove, even though she lives "ten minutes from the Bronx", whatever that means. The Commissar from Politiburo Diktat, however, took care of that for her.

Second: one of her piece's cruxes was the graf "The Gloria Wise Boys & Girls Club is being investigated, yes. I infer that Progress Media is involved. But no authoritative source has said that Air America is being investigated."

Er, right.

In 1974, a burglary investigation started. They were investigating burglars. No authoritative source said the Nixon Administration was involved.

O'Brien's statement is an interesting parsing of facts. Yes, the NY Department of Investigation is investigating the collapse of Gloria Wise; it was a large non-profit ($17 million dollar budget) that used a lot of government money, some of which was diverted under circumstances that would seem to warrant investigation. Evan Cohen was a Gloria Wise board member, and CEO of Air America. So it's true, the NYDOI is probing Gloria Wise. Will that probe lead them across the East River? Time will, as they say, tell - but Maloney and Michelle Malkin and Hewitt are turning up a story that might eventually draw the investigators from the Bronx to Manhattan's Air America offices.

The apologists also keep trying to separate Progress Media from Air America; remember, over a year ago Cohen and Progress Media were expunged from Air America (a company named Piquant took over). To the apologists, the fact that ownership changed clears the current incarnation of Air America of any involvement.

But unless Evan Cohen left his corner office with a suitcase full of small bills labelled "From Gloria Wise" (or otherwise completely insulated the money in question from being spent by the network), Air America is a beneficiary of the scam - an accomplice, if you will, although I'm sure corporate law has a more direct term.

The simple facts are these; the New York Department of Investigation is looking into the collapse of Gloria Wise. Signs point to Evan Cohen. There is smoke - enough smoke to bring state authorities onto the Wise case. Will the trail lead to Air America's offices? Time will tell. (But the mainstream media won't).

But at least O'Brien tries to address the issue. A leftyblogger, "Mobjectivist", wrote a curiously fact-free and bile-filled tirade, titled with presumably-unintended irony "Baloney and Spew", in which he - well, spews baloney:

Basically the "gotcha" issue involves early fraud by the initial startup player in the network, Evan Cohen. I have not seen the film, but the guy evidently gets slammed hard in the HBO documentary Left of the Dial which focusses on the birthing of AAR.

The "slamming" of Cohen in the movie could be best described as "ninety seconds of hate for Goldstein!" Bad vibes with the staff left the new owners to boot his butt out long ago."Bad Vibes" like inflating the startup capital by 500%.

However, the repercussions have just started hitting the right-wing blovatars (see Brian Baloney, stage right). Maloney and others spin it as stealing $500K from a minority summer boys&girls camp and Alzheimers patients.

"Spin"? The money, earmarked for childrens' and Alzheimers programs, disappeared; the programs followed suit (or were rescued by other government grant-supported organizations); Wise collapsed. What's the "spin"? (The underlying fever-current involves fear that the liberal network has gained traction and innovation in the Limbaugh-ruled world of talk-radio. Um, not on this planet in this lifetime.

Not too puzzling that the right wing talkers lack anything by way of innovations such as show-based message boards, blog comment sections, streaming radio, Democracy Now! podcasts, archives, and satellite radio that the fledgling upstarts have pioneered.

I refute you thus.

By the way - right-wing radio worked out all the legal issues that needed to be dealt with before things like streaming and podcasts could happen. FrankenNet exploited it with modest competence - although their "show-based message boards" and "blog comment sections" are intellectually-impassable wastelands of kool-aid-addled echo-chamberites.

"Mobjectivist" closes with this:

The whole brouhaha over AAR will eventually come down to conspiracies.

I wonder if Mr. Mobjectivist (can I call you "Mob?") realizes that that may literally be both literally true and completely damning to Air America. I mean, Watergate "came down to conspiracies", too - and once investigators proved the conspiracies' existences, people went to jail and the president fell.

Mark Riley of AAR's Morning Sedition has a long history as a community voice in NYC. He provides the link to the flagship station's WLIB roots on AAR.

WLIB, of course, served the Caribbean-American community, until Air America's comfy-white-middle-class programming took over

He pushed the Air America Camp because he likely wanted to give back to the community. He and his cohost Marc Maron, told people on-air several weeks ago that donors could request a refund. I do not intend to ask for my money back.

Maloney, shame on you.

Let me get this straight - Mark Riley supported a summer camp (Yay, Mark), so we should keep hands off the pilfering of half a million government dollars?

Did I read that right?It takes a nation of millions of us AAR listeners to make a difference.And yet all you do is listen to Mike Malloy.

We've had about enough fun, haven't we? But when dealing with the fantasy-based community, one truth stands out above all; the viler the names they call you, the closer to the truth you've gotten.

Yesterday, Spew Spewitt [Ah. Cicero weeps.] ranted up and down over this on his radio show; vile [???] coming out of every pore. He raised lots of conspiracies concerning AAR funding.

I base all I know on trust.

Aaaah. That explains a lot.

Posted by Mitch at July 31, 2005 10:27 AM | TrackBack