Today’s “Worst Olberman In The World” award goes to Keith Olberman.

I’d know that what we’re seeing at the Tea Parties is, at its base, people who are afraid – terribly, painfully, cripplingly, blindingly afraid…

Olberman alone makes Berg’s Seventh Law settled science.

Freedom can be confusing.

We’ll come back to that.

I’ve told this story many, many times.  I think it’s still illustrative.  Back in the nineties and early naughties, you could predict a few things about GOP gatherings.

• At precinct caucuses, you could be assured that there would be an avalanche of pro-life/anti-stem cell/anti-gay-marriage resolutions.  In the former two cases, they would be largely redundant with what was already in the platform.  No matter; they had to be debated and voted up or down, one at a time.
• At legislative district (“BPOU”, in the MNGOP’s curious parlance) conventions, there’d be two big clusters of people in the room.  To stage right, there’d be a group of pro-lifers.  To stage left, there’d be everyone else.  And if one was running for a district office, one could expect a series of questions about one’s commitment to life.  “Are you pro-life?”  “How pro-life are you?”  “Please describe exactly how pro-life you are?”  “If your pro-life-ness were a mountain, which mountain would it be – Denali, K-2 or the Matterhorn?”

And pro-lifers weren’t the only single-issue voters.  During the nineties, after the nadir of the Clinton crime bill and Alan Spears’ various attempts to ratchet up gun control in Minnesota, the shooters came out.  And it could lead to comical results; pro-lifers would occasionally express revulsion at rolling back gun controls, while some of the shooters were visibly bored at the pro-life talk.  They came for their issues, and their issues alone.

That was then.

Now, we have the Tea Parties.  And while the left and media (pardon, as always, the redundancy) likes to try to portray the Tea Parties like Nick Coleman once referred to “peasants beating on the observatory door” with pitchforks and torches, they are actually a whole lot more complex – John Kerry’s word was “nuanced” than that.  You see a lot of people at these rallies who, two years ago, didn’t care about politics, who a year into the Obama administration have taken it upon themselves to educate themselves.

And there are many roads to education; there are as many stories at the Tea Parties are there are participants.  Some reacquainted themselves with Reagan.  Many others in Minnesota arrived via (Minnesota-based syndicated talk show host) Jason Lewis’ long-running Tax Rallies, and Lewis’ heady introduction to the Federalists and Limited Government; Lewis, with his MA in Political Science, gives a pretty compete education in Federalist history.  Others come via other media figures – Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Hugh Hewitt – to a new appreciation iof what limited government means, and how far off from that ideal we currently are.  Another contingent were brought to politics by the Ron Paul campaign.  And you can find others who filtered into the movement from immigration reform, pro-life and other groups, including a few from groups that we can tactfully call “the fringe”.

All of them – the good, the weird and the rhetorically ugly – come together for one reason; they want to put government back in its place.

Which, compared with the anything-goes, single-issue-bound GOP of 2000 and 2004, is pretty exciting stuff.

And as with anything that excites conservatives, the left and media (pardon, as always, the redundancy) must spin it as some sort of potential depravity or another.

Commenter “Master Of None” drew my attention to NYTimes piece on the Tea Party movement yesterday.   I read it.

At first read, it was almost encouraging; it seemed at first blush to pay some service to the most important facet of the Tea Parties; that represents a wave of self-education, an “awakening” if you will, on the part of an awful lot of people.   It almost seemed like the NYTimes might start portraying Tea Partiers as people; actual individuals with their own motivations, each as unique as they are.

I said almost.

The Tea Party movement has become a platform for conservative populist discontent, a force in Republican politics for revival, as it was in the Massachusetts Senate election, or for division. But it is also about the profound private transformation of people like Mrs. Stout, people who not long ago were not especially interested in politics, yet now say they are bracing for tyranny.

I chewed on that last clause for a bit.  A phrase like “bracing for tyranny” has two different meanings in our society.  To a big chunk of “Red” America, it means “being aware that unlimited government can not end well”, with a twist of “so let’s not let it get out of control” on top.

But to an NPR-listening, Times-reading, down-the-nose-at-the-hoi-polloi-looking putative “elite”, it’s a code phrase, for something the “fearful, Jebus-clinging, John Birch-reading gun freaks” do.

In other words, it’s something foreign.  Un-American.  Worthy of fear and, inevitably, fear’s eldest child, hatred.

These people are part of a significant undercurrent within the Tea Party movement that has less in common with the Republican Party than with the Patriot movement, a brand of politics historically associated with libertarians, militia groups, anti-immigration advocates and those who argue for the abolition of the Federal Reserve.

“Militia groups”.  It’s another media code word; the unwashed, insane, depraved, usually racist undercurrent that Blue America sees hiding under every rock between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre.

Urged on by conservative commentators, waves of newly minted activists are turning to once-obscure books and Web sites and discovering a set of ideas long dismissed as the preserve of conspiracy theorists, interviews conducted across the country over several months show. In this view, Mr. Obama and many of his predecessors (including George W. Bush) have deliberately undermined the Constitution and free enterprise for the benefit of a shadowy international network of wealthy elites.

“Shadowy international networks”.

You see some of that at the Tea Parties.  Again, it’s the fringe; the people with the beards and camouflage and the huge potbellies and the pamphlets that gather around the fringe of  the Tea Party rallies, mixing uneasily with the vast majority; the people in dockers and polos, or work boots and embroidered shop jackets, who make up the vast majority of people at the Parties.  People like you and me and, someone tell the Times, your typical Times reader as well.

Oh, the Times gets parts right – enough to make the whole thing worth a read:

The Tea Party movement defies easy definition, largely because there is no single Tea Party.

Defiance of easy definition notwithstanding, the Times wants you to accept their facile definition anyway.

And those facile definitions are always based on fear of the great unwashed unknown:

At the grass-roots level, it consists of hundreds of autonomous Tea Party groups, widely varying in size and priorities, each influenced by the peculiarities of local history.

“Ah”, I thought.  “This could be good!”.   The rural west is a fascinating sociological hodgepodge; my own hometown in North Dakota jumbled college professors with their urbane, sometimes far-left beliefs, together with engineers (from a few local manufacturers) and business people (mostly fiscal conservatives) and agribusiness types (conservatives who loved farm subsidies)  to a few drastically-misplaced hippies, and always, always the farmers – including a few who’d been driven to radical populism by the hard times.

Who do you suppose the Times would be focusing on today?

In the inland Northwest, the Tea Party movement has been shaped by the growing popularity in eastern Washington of Ron Paul, the libertarian congressman from Texas, and by a legacy of anti-government activism in northern Idaho. Outside Sandpoint, federal agents laid siege to Randy Weaver’s compound on Ruby Ridge in 1992, resulting in the deaths of a marshal and Mr. Weaver’s wife and son. To the south, Richard Butler, leader of the Aryan Nations, preached white separatism from a compound near Coeur d’Alene until he was shut down.

Of all the “local peculiarities” to pick, what do you suppose the odds were?

The piece focuses, throughout, on the Tea Parties’ most paranoid lunatic fringe – almost as if to say “pay no attention to the populist awakening behind the curtain, Boston and New York and San Francisco!  They are unclean!  These are the bitter, gun-clinging Jesus freaks we warned you about!”

If they can’t beat the Tea Party on the facts, it’s logical that the next step will be fearmongering.

In my comment section, Jeff Kouba pointed me to a recent “book review” by the Strib’s Kristin Tillotson.

At least, it became a book review, of sorts.  But in the first graf, it was hard to tell (emphasis added):

Wells Tower is a serious wiseacre, the kind who gets away with it not because of his cleverness, but because he cuts to hard truths.

As a clever wiseacre with a thing for hard truths, I sat up and took notice!

 Written with startlingly original voice, careening imagination and an abiding fondness for what Teabaggers would call “the non-elites,” his stories are set in a surreal America we know, but aren’t sure we want to.

I’m trying to wrap my brain around a thought process that prods Ms. Tillotson to swerve that far outside any rational connection to her theme to take a passive-aggressive, blovious swipe at what may have once been half of her newspaper’s audience.

And I’m still trying.

So I sent this email to Ms. Tillotson:

Ms. Tillotson,

I’m trying to figure out the point of the “Teabagger” slur in your review of Wells Tower’s short story collection.  It seems – labored? 

I’d suggest a couple of possibilities, but I’d hate to get written off as one of those with “pursed lips, bloviating and passive-aggression“, so I figured I’d let you put it all in your own words.

Mitch Berg

I don’t expect anyone from the Strib to respond to mere peasants, of course.  And if they do, it’ll be something…well, pursed, blovious and passive-aggressive, usually. 

But I’ll keep you posted.

James Joyner has an excellent piece on the defining-down of slurs in our current discourse:

Views held by pluralities of Americans are now routinely dubbed Fascist, Communist, treason, unpatriotic, or un-American.

Let’s not forget “neocon” – a slur that’s fairly unique, since almost nobody who uses it can define it in any sense – and, most recently, “teabagger”.

Which I bring up for a reason:

It’s an effective tool, at first, just as Saul Alinsky predicted: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” But, as he also warned, “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.”

I think “teabagger” – the favorite of a lot of dimwitted leftyblog shrieking-point recyclers and MSM party hacks – has upped the curve.  I can’t put my finger on it, but I think the slur was starting to backfire on the left.

This next nine months will be interesting; the left’s been hitting the Alinsky playbook so hard it’s starting to get stale.

Remember Berg’s Seventh Law?  “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty, they are projecting.”

Or is the word I’m looking for “transference”?

At any rate – remember when the left insisted the Tea Parties were “astroturf”, or fake grass-roots? 

Oh, what do you think?

A Web site popped up in January dedicated to preventing the tea party’s “radical” and “dangerous” ideas from “gaining legislative traction,” targeting GOP candidates in Illinois for the firing squad.

“This movement is a fad,” proclaims TheTeaPartyIsOver.org, which was established by the American Public Policy Center (APPC), a D.C.-based campaign shop that few people have ever heard of.

But a close look reveals the APPC’s place in a complex network of money flowing from the mountainous coffers of the country’s biggest labor unions into political slush funds for Democratic activists.

Here’s how it works: What appears like a local groundswell is in fact the creation of two men — Craig Varoga and George Rakis, Democratic Party strategists who have set up a number of so-called 527 groups, the non-profit election organizations that hammer on contentious issues (think Swift Boats, for example).

Lefties would insist that the Tea Parties themselves would be the same.  Notwithstanding the fact that other than Dick Armey’s think tank’s high-level message-mongering and a few approving pieces on Fox news, nobody’s come up with the faintest

Varoga and Rakis keep a central mailing address in Washington, pulling in soft money contributions from unions and other well-padded sources to engage in what amounts to a legal laundering system. The money — tens of millions of dollars — gets circulated around to different states by the 527s, which pay for TV ads, Internet campaigns and lobbyist salaries, all while keeping the hands of the unions clean — for the most part.

The system helps hide the true sources of funding, giving the appearance of locally bred opposition in states from Oklahoma to New Jersey, or in the case of the Tea Party Web site, in Illinois.

And this whitewash is entirely legal, say election law experts, who told FoxNews.com that this arrangement more or less the norm in Washington.

Such a shame that the Supreme Court opened poltics up to big money, huh?

I’ve spent much of the life of this blog – eight years, now – railing against the evils of smearing by association. 

It’s a particularly slimy tactic in the hands of the not-very-bright, on all sides of the putative political aisle.  Being a conservative, I bag on particularly egregiously stupid examples from the left (like this, that, the other thing, this, and of course this), but of course it’s not limited to a party.  Much.

Still, there are those from whom we expect better.  Or like to think we do.

Erik Black at the MinnPost – the dean of Minnesota political reporters (or, I guess, one of a classroom full of deans, once you add in Pat Kessler, Mary LaHammer and Bill Salisbury), makes noises about also rejecting the whole stupid game in this piece about the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which Governor Pawlenty will be attending:

In February, Gov. Tim Pawlenty will take his undeclared campaign for the Republican presidential nomination back to Washington, D.C., for the Conservative Political Action Conference. CPAC, as it is always called, is a  major annual gathering of conservatives and an opportunity for Repub candidates and might-be candidates to strut their stuff before various elements of the party base (although CPAC, which is put on by the American Conservative Union, is technically non-partisan).

Among the co-sponsors of the conference one finds a name one hasn’t heard much since the mid-20th century — the John Birch Society. As a refugee from that century, I can tell you that when your mom and I were kids the “Birchers” (I use the term I grew up using and mean no offense by it) were a leading symbol of right-wing extremism.

Of course, “right wing extremism” is a term that’s more or less lost all meaning, largely because of the efforts of the news media of which Eric Black has been a part for his entire working life.  I joke about it; “if a fiscal-conservative socially-libertarian constitutional originalist orders a pizza in the woods and no liberal is there to hear him, is he still an extremist?”, I ask, constantly, when people refer on the left and in the media (pardon, as always, the redundancy) to everyone from Tom Tancredo to (this makes me mildly dizzy) Tim Pawlenty as “extremists”. 

But Black, being all responsible, rejects the whole stupid game.

Or…does he?

So this is an obvious set-up to play the always popular “dissociate yourself” card. Under the rules of that card game, everyone involved in CPAC (including Pawlenty, as a speaker) has to repudiate the Birchers or be tainted by association with the most extreme thing the group ever said or did. It’s fun and easy to play (see Barack Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright) but also stupid and demeaning (ibid). A letter-writer to the Strib played the card early this week, asserting that Pawlenty’s attendance would amount to an endorsement of Bircher views.

Well, so far, so good – although I think it’s fair to observe that the MinnPost is no better than the rest of the left-leaning mainstream media at focusing attention on the right’s fringe players; the nutcase with the racist sign at the Tea Party, the stars-‘n-bars-flying redneck at the Second Amendment rally, the Tenth Amendment’s long-dead associations with slave-owners-rights.

But Black is better than that.  Isn’t he?

I actually did inquire of the spokester for Pawlenty’s undeclared campaign whether the governor might want to comment on whether his willingness to speak at an event co-sponsored by the John Birch Society implied any association between his views and theirs, but the calls and emails (over several days) received no reply.

And why would that be?  Because Black works for an organization that is pretty up-front about working for the “enemy?”  Or merely because the very question is, to quote Black himself in the context of this very issue, “stupid and demeaning?”

Still, I cannot bring myself to play the card.

Am I overly cynical, or do I detect a silent, implied “when did the Governor stop beating his wife?” in Black’s repudiation of the whole “stupid, demeaning” issue?

Because if there is no story there – if there is no evidence throughout Pawlenty’s career of any sympathy, overt or otherwise, for the Birchers – then why write about it at all?

I was surprised and interested to learn that the John Birch Society was still in business. But, as this recent NYTimes where-are-they-now feature indicates, they are still kicking, based in Grand Chute, Wis., (near Appleton, Oshkosh, Green Bay), still believing in what its leaders call a satanic conspiracy to take over the world.

Right.

So what?

Black gives a brief lesson on the history of the Birchers – they’re anti-UN, anti-Communist, and have espoused some pretty wacky things over the decades – and then cuts to what passes for his chase:

So, back to the present. If Tim Pawlenty wants to be president, he certainly must say what he thinks the U.S. relationship to the U.N. should be, but he doesn’t have to start from any particular that he agrees with the long-standing JBS position just because he spoke at a conference co-sponsored by the JBS.

Right.  Especially since “sponsorship” is a come-one, come-all thing, as opposed to an implication that a “sponsor” has any special ideological traction:

Of course, Pawlenty is no more implicated in JBS’s beliefs than any of the many other speakers, which includes other leading undeclared presidential candidates such as Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Mike Huckabee was scheduled but has canceled. Sarah Palin was invited but has declined. The current list of speakers, co-sponsors and exhibitors is available here.

Right.

So – the story is…what?  That no candidate needs to apologize for being at an event sponsored (in tiny measure) by a splinter group that nobody’s taken seriously since the Johnson Administration?

Why, that’d be like saying that one needn’t discount the opinion of Mark Dayton, Margaret Anderson-Kelliher, Steve Kelley, John Marty and Taryll Clark even though none of them have renounced the activities of International ANSWR (who are involved in much left-wing agitation), since none of them have expressly shown sympathy for America’s last Stalinist fringe group.  It’d be another “why did you stop beating your wife” moment.

Pawlenty needs to improve on that showing more than he needs to repudiate the John Birch Society, but he really needs to return my calls anyway.

To answer a question that Black himself considered “stupid and demaning?”

Just curious.

Last April 15, I was walking around the Capitol grounds during the first Tax Day Tea Party.  There were thousands of people there.  The imponderably vast majority were just plain workadaddy, huggamommy Minnesotans who were upset about the Administration’s gargantuan mortgaging of our great-grandchildrens’ futures – people like me and, I suspect, most of you.

But as I wandered about, pondering what I was going to write about the event, I noticed a few people who I’d charitably call “fringe”.  Including a few people with some anti-immigration signs that I could accurately call “groaningly racist”.

And I thought…:

1. “Great; a dozen people out of 5,000 look like racist buffoons; you know who will get all the news coverage, don’t you?”
2. “I’ll write about the Tea Party, and some leftyblogging wannabee moral watchdog will post one of those pictures, with post that says “Mitch Berg supports anti-hispanic racism”.

Declaring guilt by association – often the faintest, most tendentious assocation possible – is an oldie but goodie among those who’ve been 86ed from the marketplace of ideas.  We saw this in the Twin Cities last year when local leftyblogger Jeff Fecke smeared Kevin Ecker and, by extension, all True North writers, for writing approvingly about a story about an anti-immigration activist who, it turned out much later, was also a neo-nazi.

The point?  Guilt by very tenuous, context-free association is stupid.

And after a year of eating their lunch, it’s perhaps inevitable that James O’Keefe, of the classic ACORN “Pimp” stings, is on the receiving end, this time in a hit piece by Max Blumenthal at Salon.

The first part; set it up so that everyone you disagree with is in the same boat as your victim:

Many of the conservatives who gleefully promoted James O’Keefe’s past political stunts are feigning shock at his arrest on charges that he and three associates planned to tamper with Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu’s phone lines. Once upon a time, right-wing pundits hailed the 25-year-old O’Keefe as a creative genius and model of journalistic ethics. Andrew Breitbart, who has paid O’Keefe, called him one of the all-time “great journalists” and said he deserved a Pulitzer for his undercover ACORN video. Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly declared he should have earned a “congressional medal.”

Now, the whamma-jamma charge:

His right-wing admirers don’t seem to mind that O’Keefe’s short but storied career has been defined by a series of political stunts shot through with racial resentment. Now an activist organization that monitors hate groups has produced a photo of O’Keefe at a 2006 conference on “Race and Conservatism” that featured leading white nationalists. The photo, first published Jan. 30  on the Web site of the anti-racism group One People’s Project, shows O’Keefe at the gathering, which was so controversial even the ultra-right Leadership Institute, which employed O’Keefe at the time, withdrew its backing. But O’Keefe and fellow young conservative provocateur Marcus Epstein soldiered on to give anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism an opportunity to share their grievances and plans to make inroads in the GOP.

Wow. 

That’s a pretty serious charge, if it’s true.

Of course, it’s not.

How do we know?   Onward:

According to One People’s Project founder Daryle Jenkins, O’Keefe was manning the literature table at the gathering that brought together anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism. OPP covered the event at the time, sending a freelance photographer to document the gathering. Jenkins told me the table was filled with tracts from the white supremacist right, including two pseudo-academic publications that have called blacks and Latinos genetically inferior to whites: American Renaissance and the Occidental Quarterly.  The leading speaker was Jared Taylor, founder of the white nationalist group American Renaissance. “We can say for certain that James O’Keefe was at the 2006 meeting with Jared Taylor. He has absolutely no way of denying that,” Jenkins said. O’Keefe’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment on his client’s role in the conference.

But they responded to Larry O’Connor, at Breitbart’s Big Journalism.  Who notes:

We would think that Mr. Blumenthal at Salon or Stephen Thrasher at the Village Voice, as responsible reporters, might have called Mr. O’Keefe to get his response to the allegations made in an obscure blog.  But no.  Instead they ran the story and (in the case of the Voice) actually added new and juicy lies to the myth.

Well, here at Big Journalism we think it’s a good idea to actually seek the truth.

So we spoke with James O’Keefe today.  This is what he tells us:

1. He was not “manning a table” at the event
2. He was not involved with the organization or operations of the event.
3. He attended the event with many of his Leadership Institute co-workers since it was right across the street from their building in Arlington, Va., and it was organized by other LI associates.
4. The organizer who is being called a “White Supremacist” is half Jewish and half Korean.
5. One of the panelist was an African-American named Kevin Martin.
6. The event was forced to move to a Georgetown University building in Arlington, not at a cross-burning.

We know all this because we called Mr. O’Keefe and asked him.  Which is more than other media outlets have done.

And, to be fair, more than any lefty does when “reporting” on this sort of defamatory character assassination.

We also spoke with Daryle Jenkins of One People’s Project, the man who started this entire legend.  We asked if he had a photograph that actually showed O’Keefe “manning the table” as has been reported, and he said that this cropped photo was all they had.  His claim that Mr. O’Keefe “manned” the table of literature is based on eye-witnesses who were at the event…

…Mr. Jenkins only produced the name of one witness:  David Weigel who, at the time was a reporter with Reason Magazine. 

Weigel is a noted lefty alt-journalist and, as noted in this blog, among the better among the species.

We called Mr. Weigel and he denied ever telling Mr. Jenkins that Mr. O’Keefe was “manning the table.” Indeed, he has already gone on record denying he said that.

So let’s reset:

Here is the story they actually have:

James O’Keefe attended a forum years ago that dealt with race and politics.  The forum was located at a Georgetown University building (that’s right, a 21-year-old man attended an event on a college campus).  The forum had as one of its three speakers a controversial figure, Jared Taylor, with a track record of making racist statements.  He was being debated by two other people including Mr. Martin (taking issue with the racist figure).  Mr. Taylor has also appeared with Phil Donohue, Queen Latifa and Paula Zahn on their TV shows to debate race.  Are the audience members of the Donohue show racist for sitting and watching that debate?

Honestly, that isn’t much of a story.  But… you put Mr. O’Keefe at a table full of racist literature and you say that he was manning the table.  And you say you have a picture proving it.  And you make it sound like he was one of the organizers of this event.  And you call the event a “White Supremacist Conference”.  Well… now you’ve got a story.

Only problem:  It’s all a lie.

And when it comes to lefty character assassination – the only weapon they have against an activist who’s spent the last year eating their lunch in front of them – that’s the best they can do.

Let’s go back to Blumenthal’s piece, and see if we can pick out the code words and manglings of context:

O’Keefe’s racial issues can be seen in many of his prior stunts, of course. The notorious ACORN videos highlighted images of himself dressed as a pimp, deceptively edited through hidden camera footage as he baited African-American office workers into making statements that could be perceived as incriminating.

“Baited African-American office workers”.  So is Blumenthal suggesting O’Keefe avoided baiting white ACORN sleazeballs?  Or is he just trying to create a sense of phony victimhood?

There were also lesser-known but equally inflammatory  spectacles like the “affirmative action bake sale” O’Keefe and his conservative comrades held when they were students at Rutgers University.

 During the event, O’Keefe stood at a table in the center of campus offering baked goods at reduced prices to Latinos and African-Americans while whites were forced to pay exorbitant amounts. (Native Americans, he announced, would eat free.)

In other words, it satirized the insulting, demeaning aspects of affirmative action – the sort of thing that, if done by politically-correct “performance artists” to conservatives would get an NEA grant.

Next, Blumenthal digs back age…18?

By O’Keefe’s own account, his racial troubles became acute when he entered the multicultural atmosphere of Rutgers University’s dormitory system. In an online diary that has since been scrubbed from the Web (but not before being captured on Daily Kos), he wrote that he was forced to live on an all-black dormitory floor after refusing to live with the gay roommate he was initially assigned. O’Keefe claimed his next roommate was “an Indian midget … who smelled like shit.” The roommate left, however, and was replaced by “a greek kid.”

Stop the presses; a teenager saying something stupid. 

Or, should I say, maybe saying somethign stupid, since even Blumenthal’s carefully-cropped context gives itself reasonable doubt:

 The new roommate complained to a residential administrator that O’Keefe had called his neighbors “niggers,” prompting the school to expel him from the dorm. He rejected the accusation as a “complete lie,” writing, “I was lead out of the room crying and screaming at him and my situation, no friends, no one one [sic] to talk to, forced to go in front of a black man, Dean Tolbert, to defend myself and help explain that I did not call anyone any names.”

So – was O’Keefe a hardened 18 year old racist, or a wet-behind-the-ears teenager caught up in a bigoted setup, or something in between? 

We can’t answer the question – but Blumenthal did, anyway.

The following year, despite this record, O’Keefe secured a dream job in the conservative movement, employed by the Leadership Institute, a Northern Virginia-based outfit that serves as the movement’s most prolific youth training operation. There, O’Keefe met Marcus Epstein, a fellow ideologue who as editor of a conservative publication at the College of William and Mary assailed Martin Luther King Jr. for “philandering and plagiarism” and challenged his patriotism and Christianity.

Catch that?  Martin Luther King must not be questioned in any way.  In other words, in Max Blumenthal’s special little world, Political Incorrectness equals racism.

Together, O’Keefe and Epstein planned an event in August 2006 that would wed their extreme views on race with their ambitions. Epstein invited white nationalist  Jared Taylor [see above] and homophobic white-grievance peddler John Derbyshire of the National Review

Um, huh? 

Again – asking politically-incorrect questions is racism?

According to a post on the white supremacist Web site Stormfront, Taylor and Derbyshire debate “the role of race in policy decisions and the racial future of the Republican party.”

And here Blumenthal has descended into pure fantasy.  Republicans are constantly discussing, debating and arguing about racial issues; “how do we get blacks, hispanics and asians, who all should be Republicans due to their interest in, respectively, eduation reform, social conservatism and free markets. 

So what was said at the debate?  Blumenthal doesn’t trouble himself to tell the reader.  Indeed, the only “racist” act in the story seems to be the fact that the story was reported in Stormfront, which is certainly a racist site.   But what did they say?

Some posts practically write themselves.

Jennifer “J-Lo” Lopez, on the fairly unforgiveable “Lopez Tonight” show, calls Sarah Palin a naughty name:

The controversy sprang from her use of a particular word to describe Sarah Palin. She calls Sarah Palin ‘la carbona,’ a Spanish word which means bitch.

J-Lo calling Palin a “crazy bitch”?

Um…

…yeah.

A few weeks ago, someone in Saint Cloud posted a fairly scabrously racist poster, defaming the Somali community.

My friend and radio colleague King Banaian, who is not one to cry “racism” prematurely,  says the poster was pretty bad.  And the “somali community” took, at least at first blush, the course every real American should take; by meeting bad speech with more, better speech.

So far, so good.

Unfortunately, along with the one Somali speaker, they recruited some SCSU faculty.  And university faculty are (King’s company excepted) rarely people to go to for “real American” responses to anything:

Somalis are upset, and rightly so. When the campus announced that its Somali student organization wanted to hold a speak-out, that seemed a very reasonable thing to do. The best way to deal with hateful acts is by speaking about them. But the news report this morning about this event contains two statements that I found deviated from speaking against the cartoon. And, unfortunately not a surprise, it comes from two faculty. First,

Luke Tripp, a professor of community studies, said the same “conservative white” mind-set led to the election of U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Stillwater.

So is it that voting for Rep. Bachmann (as a thin plurality did in the past two elections, which were famously awful for Republicans at large) makes you a racist?  Or that being a racist (as Mr. Tripp apparently believes most “conservative whites” are) make you vote for Michele Bachmann? 

Or both?

King:

This is an outrageous accusation. It says that anyone who voted for Rep. Bachmann has the same mind-set as the scribbler, is capable of being the scribbler, and is a reprobate. By what perverted analysis do you determine the moral principles of tens of thousands of area citizens that voted for this woman, many of them twice?

[Need I remind you – there’s your tax dollars at work!]

What inspires a man to take a speak out against hateful speech of his students as an opportunity to engage in the worst stereotyping of political opponents?

How do we count the ways?

Because academia, especially in lefty bullpens like “Community Studies”, promotes both extremism (and its bedfellow, bigotry) and unaccountability?

Because “Professor” Luke Tripp, who lives a comfy, cushy life as an (I’ll assume) tenured professor in a make-work “discipline” that is essentially a left-wing echo chamber, has developed both a deep sense of the bigotry that acc0mpanies marinading ones’ intellect in comfortable agreement for a whole career, and the tendency of too many such academics to say what they want, and hiding behind “academic freedom” to prevent himself from being held accountable?

Mr. Tripp; I invite you to come on the Northern Alliance Radio Network one of these weekends to defend your defamatory claim; I invite my St. Cloud and SCSU area readers to please forward this challenge to “Professor” Tripp (not that I think he has either the intellectual integrity or the balls to take me up on it).

We in Minnesota have a perspective on Martha Coakley that most states don’t.

It’s been 25-odd years since an overzealous prosecutor in Jordan, MN tripped into a controversy over a pre-school, and pretty much invented the genre of the “entirely fantasy-based sex abuse case”; the conventional wisdom of the day was that children never, ever made up stories about abuse – so pre-schoolers, under questioning, pretty much let their little fantasy lives run amok, destroying not a few lives in the process and serving as the first of a wave of “satanic child abuse” cases that wracked the nation during the early eighties.

Including a similar, and at face value vastly more sickening, case in Massachusetts, involving a daycare run by the Amirault family.  Building on the same wave of suggested memories and childish fantasy that we saw in the Scott County case, the State of Massachusetts sent several of the Amiraults to jail – until it became clear that the procedures used to convict them were fatally flawed.  And so most of them were released.

Except for one of them:

In July 2001, the notoriously tough Massachusetts parole board voted unanimously to grant Gerald Amirault clemency. Although the parole board is not permitted to consider guilt or innocence, its recommendation said: “(I)t is clearly a matter of public knowledge that, at the minimum, real and substantial doubt exists concerning petitioner’s conviction.”

Immediately after the board’s recommendation, The Boston Globe reported that Gov. Jane Swift was leaning toward accepting the board’s recommendation and freeing Amirault.

So far, so good.

Enter Martha Coakley, Middlesex district attorney. Gerald Amirault had already spent 15 years in prison for crimes he no more committed than anyone reading this column did. But Coakley put on a full court press to keep Amirault in prison simply to further her political ambitions.

By then, every sentient person knew that Amirault was innocent. But instead of saying nothing, Coakley frantically lobbied Gov. Jane Swift to keep him in prison to show that she was a take-no-prisoners prosecutor, who stood up for “the children.” As a result of Coakley’s efforts — and her contagious ambition — Gov. Swift denied Amirault’s clemency.

Thanks to Martha Coakley, Gerald Amirault sat in prison for another three years.

There are few things in this world lower than fraudulently destroying another person’s life for your own gain.

Martha Coakley deserves defeat because she’s a tone-deaf political patrician who’s run the worst campaign in recent memory, anywhere.

She deserves ignominy and pointed scrutiny for what she did in the Amirault case.  An emphatic retiredment from public life seems a small price to pay.

For her, anyway.

Remember back in the eighties, when some less-than-articulate conservative commentators lapsed into self-parody by referring to fairly run-of-the-mill fabian statists as “commies”?  The reversion to facile cliche did conservatism no favors, and probably helped you (this kills me) look like the level-headed ones?

I just though I’d thank Chuckles Schumer (P[inhead], NY) for paying the favor back with interest:

New York Sen. Charles Schumer, who famously hammered then-Sen. Alfonse D’Amato for calling him a “putz-head” in their hot 1998 campaign, was accused Thursday of stepping into the gutter himself after he sent out a fundraising e-mail in which he called Massachusetts Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown a “far-right tea-bagger.”

The two-term Democrat, in accusing Brown of being aligned with the conservative “tea party” movement, used a term that every tea party critic knows refers to a sexual act.

DISINGENUOUS LIBERAL: “But nooo! They themselves sent tea-bags to legislators! That’s what me (sknxx) mean!  Honest!”

“Chuck has a way of saying things that I don’t think he really understands or means, and it’s unfortunate,” Brown told Fox News Thursday when asked about the e-mail. “I’m not into name-calling. … so shame on Chuck.”

What was it Gandhi said?  “First they ignore you; then they mock  you; then the mocking turns into a self-parodying cliche that says more about the smugness of their own isolated, cossetted point of view and their tendency to listen to your own press; then your degrading cliche turns into a wry rallying cry for the very opposition you’re trying to mock; then they get angry realizing you’re turned their smug ignorance has been turned against them, and they either say something even dumber (see Martha Coakley vs. Curt Schilling) or they sic your SEIU goons on the opposition; then we win.”

Yeah.  I think that was what Gandhi said.

This is actually a political post.  But you gotta be just a little patient.

Back in my senior year at college, I was sitting in the Philosophy “department” (my college had one philosophy prof; I was waiting for him in his office), reading one of the academic philosophy administration’s trade mags (sorta like Variety or Radio and Records, only advertising job trends for post-structuralists and help wanted ads for Nietscheans).  And I happened upon an article that explored a trend (or “trend”) of people applying to medical school with Bachelors’ in Philosophy (as well as, y’know, degrees in Chemistry and/or Biology, to boot).  The piece touched heavily on the worth of, and need for, doctors who could see beyond the numbers in the test results (as important as they are) to the larger values and ethics of the field.

And in twenty-odd years of dealing with doctors (mostly pediatricians), I’ve seen there’s some merit to this; while medicine is at its core a scientific field, most of them still have to not only deal with people, but with people who are frequently under immense stress, undergoing some of the most miserable traumas in their lives.  The best doctors do it very well; the worst are terrible.

The  Minnpost last week had a post on the subject:

Do you have the personality to be successful in medical school?

A recent study, co-authored by a University of Minnesota psychology professor, has found that certain personality traits may be a better predictor of success in medical school than MCAT scores — particularly during the latter years, when students are out interacting with real patients.

As medical students become “more involved with patients and applied work, personality becomes more and more relevant and predictive” of how well they do in their coursework, said Deniz Ones, professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota and one of the co-authors of the study. I talked with her about the study on Thursday.

In other words, the real predictors of success in medicine are not the grades a student gets in high school, college and med school, or the half-decade of test scores leading up to medical school. 

It’s the personality.

The study, which was published in the November issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology, looked at five personality traits (neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness), each with six different sub-traits.

The one trait that remained consistently important throughout the seven years of medical training was conscientiousness (competence, order, dutifulness, achievement striving, self-discipline, deliberation), said Ones.

“This is the dimension that is particularly found in education achievement because it’s related to effort and hard work,” she said. “It’s been shown to be related to college performance in other graduate settings as well.”

In medical school, however, conscientiousness became doubly important, said Ones, because attention and diligence is not only essential for good study habits, but also for diagnosing and treating patients.

But there’s a surprise; extroversion is the other apparently-dispositive trait for predicting success.

But another personality trait that showed up among successful medical students did surprise Ones and her colleagues: extroversion (warmth, gregariousness, assertiveness, activity, excitement-seeking, positive emotions).

“At the beginning of medical school, this trait was actually negatively related to performance,” said Ones. After all, extroverted students are more likely to spend their time socializing rather than hitting the medical texts.

“But over time, if they managed to hang on, this liability became an asset,” said Ones. “This is the dimension that allows them to talk to patients, to have an interest in them and care about them.”

Of course, we’ve all run into doctors who lacked any human-interaction skills whatsoever.  I’m willing to bet that the resident who presided over the early labor before my daughter’s birth, a dour Hindi woman with the people skills of the west end of an eastbound lawn mower, got really good grades in high school, college and med school.

“Most of education is geared toward the acquisition of knowledge and skills. That’s what MCAT assesses,” she said. That’s OK, she says, but, as this study and other research shows, how smart someone is often fails to predict how successful they’ll be at a specific profession — particularly one like medicine, which requires such strong people skills.

Of course, it goes well beyond doctors.

I read this study, and I’m reminded of the concentrated snootiness that the left – the “party of the people” – focuses on politicans who, for whatever reason, did things with their early lives other than playing the paper chase.  Sarah Palin’s an obvious example – and too current, really.  A much better one – Reagan.  Reagan was an adequate high school student, went to a very obscure college (Eureka), got further adequate grades…

…and pretty much ended his academic career. 

During Reagan’s political career, some razzed him for not having had a more distinguished academic career – as if he’d have done a better job of reviving the economy, restoring America’s mojo and peacefully toppling the Soviet Union if he’d started his adult life as an insufferable Ivy Leaguer.

Indeed – as the survey of medical students shows – he’s have likely not done nearly as well.

Think about it; the people who get into either medical school or the Ivy League based purely on their high school grades (let’s leave out legacy admissions for now) did so because they were among that thin film of high schoolers who were motivated from Junior High onward to do one thing; get grades.  Not develop social skills; not diversify their personalities; not develop all the soft skills that go along with having to deal with people and navigate real life.

What do you get with a doctor or a politician whose highest pre-adult achievement was getting straight A’s, thereby getting into top-ranked schools?  Someone whose entire formative experience is focused on the academic skills – reading, regurgitating facts on command, kissing ass – and who may or may not have the faintest interest in or empathy for you, the patient/voter.

And someone who may have put grades, if not in the back seat, at least in the shotgun position? 

Well, the article above explains the results with doctors.

So do you think things are different for everyone else in the real world?  Say, with the leader of the free world?

While I’ve spent much of the last eight years bagging on former (?) Strib columnist Nick Coleman, it’s not been an unalloyed thing.  When he’s focused on being a city columnist, as opposed to a not-overbright pundit, he writes good stuff; at his best, he’s sort of a “made in Singapore” Studs Terkel. 

Of course, he was rarely at his best; less and less so as the years unwound.  He hit his nadir during the 35W Bridge collapse; he got downsized from the columnist stable shortly thereafter. 

He’s apparently found some sort of work with some sort of think tank.  But I suspect his “downsizing” was more than tad Potemkin; he still appears in the Strib.  Lots.

And it’s just not the same Nick.  I busted him over the summer, parroting MN2020 shrieking points, and not very well at that.  It’s almost like he gets copies of press releases, and just writes in condescending and not very literate insults between the lines.

So what’s Nick up to now?  Well, you be the judge (emphasis added), a week or so ago he turned his keen journalistic senses to what he apparently thought was the key conservative issue of the past few weeks- Obama pre-empting “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving”:

I also heard a “Tea Party” supporter on radio claiming that you can tell Obama hates America just by looking at him. All I can tell by looking at him is that his skin color is different than that of every other president. Maybe that’s what the Tea Party person meant.

Ah.  The old “Wing Nutz Are Teh Racist!, based on the off-handed and ill-considered (at best) remark by one person dragged out of context and immortalized by whomever  controls the edit suite” bit.  I hate to say it, but Coleman is making that whole “parrotting MN2020 without thinking” thing look pretty good in retrospect.  He’s now down to parrotting…Keith Olbermann?  Fast Eddie Schultz?  Rachel Maddow?

I was going to leave it at that.  Because I’ve long since learned that any effort I spend fisking Coleman is effort I could have spent…I dunno, itching my elbow?

But this is rich – where by “rich” I really mean “depressing that someone gets paid for writing the kind of duckspeak that’d get ignored on a fourth-rate leftyblog”.

We’ve heard the socialist slur repeatedly from such brilliant students of history as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann (Minnesota’s Poster Girl for Why We Need High School Civics Classes)

Says the guy who is a case study in how badly our system fails our students at science, logic and empirical reasoning.

and that pinnacle of wit and wisdom, Sean Hannity, who is the kind of Irishman my people used to refer to as “Blueshirts.”

“…my people…”

“Your people”, Mr. Coleman, came to America so that they could at long last leave their squalid anscestral squabbling back in the Old Country.  Like most of “our people”, they came to this country so they could escape, transcend and eventually forget the bigotries, hatreds and jealousies of their caste-ridden, incompetent homelands.

So do “your people” proud, and leave your callow IRA references at Ellis Island; “your people” are now a bunch of plush-bottom yahoos who have been “the man” in this country for generations; Among “his people” his father, the former Speaker of the Minnesota House; his little brother Chris is the King George III of Saint Paul; Nick himself is the very Charles Townsend-esque embodiment of “the status quo” in the Twin Cities media.

Blueshirt this.

I don’t have a lot of tolerance for stupid.

Part of it is that I am a conservative; I believe that society and its members should strive to be worthy of the best of its legacy.

Part of it is that I spent some of the best worst years of my life working in bars, among the drunks and the idiots.  This was at the same time I was dealing with a famously-addled roommate, “Wyatt”, a child of boundless privilege with uncountable advantages, whose stated mission in life was to stay high all the time and “f[ornicate with] every woman in the world”.

Which brings us to “Jersey Shore”, another vapid MTV “reality” series chronicling the “lives” of a bunch of meatheads who could well be, I kid you not, “Wyatt”‘s younger siblings.  I saw about ten minutes of it, more or less by accident.

I almost puked.  I’ve thought about writing something about that wretched waste of time focused on wretched wastes of flesh.  And then I almost puked again.

So I’ll leave it to Jonah Goldberg to A suck it up and actually address what Jersey Shore and reality TV in general really mean:

Don’t get me wrong; it’s great television. But gladiatorial games would be great TV, too.

Orwell noted that in 1984.  But I digress:

The Los Angeles Times reported the other day that the reality-show industry is suddenly having a crisis of conscience about its impact on the culture. That’s nice to hear, but it’s not nearly enough.

British historian Arnold Toynbee argued that civilizations thrive when the lower classes aspire to be like the upper classes, and they decay when the upper classes try to be like the lower classes. Looked at through this prism, it’s hard not to see America in a prolonged period of decay.

It’s not all bad news, to be sure. The elite minority’s general acceptance of racial and sexual equality as important values has been a moral triumph. But not without costs. As part of this transformation, society has embraced what social scientist Charles Murray calls “ecumenical niceness.” A core tenet of ecumenical niceness is that harsh judgments of the underclass — or people with underclass values — are forbidden.

Meaning that I’d be considered declasse to say that “The Kardashians are not just vapid dimbulb tramps, but in fact signs that our society is basically screwed”, or that “Jon and Kate Plus Eight the show was a vacuous waste of time, but the two “parents” themselves should make every parent in America hang their head in shame that we collectively allow child abuse to become an entertainment sport”, or “the “people” on Jersey Shore are fit only to be used as compost”.

A corollary: People with old-fashioned notions of decency are fair game.

Paging Carrie Prejean.

Long before the rise of reality shows, ecumenical niceness created a moral vacuum. Out-of-wedlock birth was once a great shame; now it’s something of a happy lifestyle choice. The cavalier use of profanity was once crude; now it’s increasingly conversational. Self-discipline was once a virtue; now self-expression is king.

Not just “king” – but a form of “art” along the lines of “music criticism”; people with nothing useful (much less ennobling) to say, saying it without any constraint.

Whatever you think of what Toynbee and Murray would call the “proletarianization of the elites,” one point is beyond dispute: The rich can afford moral lassitude more than the poor can. [Paris] Hilton, heir to a hotel fortune, has life as simple as she wants it to be. Tiger Woods is surely a cad, but as a pure matter of economics, he can afford to be one.

The question is: Can the rest of us afford to live in a society constantly auditioning to make an ass of itself on TV?

Read the whole thing.

As for me?  I’m going to throw darts at the picture of the latest cast of Real World.

Kids today have it tough.

Not so much on “life is difficult” front, of course; compared to life in the Depression, for kids who were going to grow up and go off to World War II and spend Christmas of 1944 in weather more or less like this sitting in foxholes in the Ardennes, kids today have it pretty OK.

But on the “adults are scary and stupid” front?  Kids today have it rough.

School counselors have been reporting a wave of…timidity?  Kids don’t socialize as much today as they used to; school counselors note the amazing, depressing numbers of children that head directly home after school, watch television/do homework, and rarely if ever get outside without direct adult supervision.  Part of the problem is the epidemic of single-parent homes, most of whom are headed by single mothers.  Parents’ styles are as individual as they are, of course – but one of the reason God, biology, remorseless fate or whatever you do or don’t believe in made families with mixed-gender parents is because different genders bring different traits to the table; mothers are stereotypically “nurterers”, and more risk-averse; fathers are, again stereotypically, the ones that imprint adventure and risk-taking on the kids (and no, feel free not to flood my comment section with stories of what an exception your mother was; I know, already). And so, with no male in the house to model behavior from, the kids become…nurtured.  And overnurtured, as the case may be.  It’s not the only explanation – but then, this post isn’t about explaining things.

Lenore Skenazy at Free Range Kids – a blog that is going on my blogroll today – writes about a letter to the editor she got:

Dear Free-Range Kids: My name is Shaylene Haswarey, and I want to share a story with you today.

This morning, my doorbell rang, and two police officers were present.  They asked me if I am the mother of my children, and I said yes.  They said someone called them because my three oldest kids (ages 9, 7, and 6) were walking around our GATED town-house complex, unattended. I said, “They found a cat, and I let them go out and feed it.”…

…I told the officer I am from Idaho, and kids play outside like this all the time.  He said my kids are too young to be out,  because we do not have a yard, and this is a complex.  He also told me there are predators around here.  He finally told me if I let my kids out again he will have to call social services because I am endangering my children! What is wrong with this picture???

Mitch’s answer – which is one reason why I don’t do a blog on parenting – is “they’re prepping your kids for the hyper-feminized school system, where uncontrolled risk-taking is actively squelched”. 

Back to Skenazy’s letter:

1.  Is it against the law to go out in the rain in your pajamas?
2.  My kids know how to watch for cars.  They were following the cat and feeding it.
3.  There are NO predators in my neighborhood. I looked on Megan’s Law, and there are only 6 in our whole city, and none are in my neighborhood.  I live in Aliso Viejo, CA.  Aliso Viejo is a small city in between Irvine and Mission Viejo.  These cities rank #1 by the FBI for the safest cities in America with a pop. of 100,000+.  Therefore, Aliso Viejo is safer than the city I grew up in in Idaho!

After the police officer asked for me and my husband’s name and birthdates, I freaked out!  I am NOT going to let my kids go outside without me again!  I don’t want social services knocking on my door.  What do you think I should do if anything, about this?  My husband’s family is from India.  They have a big house there.  I am thinking of going to their village this September and staying there for a few months, so my kids can be normal kids. — Shaylene

Lenore writes back (emphasis added by yours truly):

Dear Shaylene: Isn’t it incredible that you are living the “American Dream” — a house, four kids, nice town — and longing for the kind of childhood a kid can get in a much less affluent country? Meantime, I put this question to readers: What can this mom do to prove to the cop that she’s not off base? How can we she convince him (and other cops and other neighbors) that being outside is normal and healthy for kids? Should we all call the police department there? Start a petition? Any ideas? — Lenore

Well, you heard the lady ladies.  Let’s cough up some answers!

Talking Points Memo on why lefties hate Michele Bachmann:

Michele Bachmann (R-MN) sat down for an interview with MinnPost, and among other things was asked why she is the object of so much loathing among liberals.

“I don’t know. I’m a lovable little fuzz ball!” said Bachmann.

I am starting to get the impresison that Bachmann has the one thing any conservative woman must need to stay in the game without going nuts; the ability to keep her most deranged detractors firmly in perspective.

Which is a nice way of saying “mocking them”.

 “I have no idea what they would have to fear. I guess you would have to ask them; they would have the better answer to your question. I am doing my job. That’s what I was elected to do. I don’t fear the left, and maybe that’s part of the loathing that they feel toward me. I’m not afraid to speak out on conservative positions and on issues.

Which is, of course, the problem for the left; wimmins are supposed to be barefoot, pregnant and dewy-eyed over Obama.

Eric Kleefeld, the writer, tries to answer Bachmann’s question – sort of:

Bachmann has previously wondered why Democrats don’t like her. We’ve collected some of the reasons — such as her having called for revolution against President Obama’s Marxist tyranny, and calling upon conservatives to slit their wrists and become blood brothers in the fight against the Democrats on health care, and many other examples.

I”m always fascinated that the party of “nuance” gets so flatly literal when a conservative woman talks. 

But here’s a serious question:  whenever a woman “comes out” as a conservative, she is instantly branded “teh crazee”, “extremist”, “stupid”, and the whole range of petty defamations.  For Bachmann, of course, it’s old hat – her detractors date back to before her time in the State Senate, when she started the Maple River Education Coalition; the regional left has been sputtering over Bachmann for over a decade.  The contradiction is grating; Bachmann is vastly more accomplished than Betty McCollum, and no more “extreme” to the right than McCollum is to the left.

But I am assured by various liberal friends out there that “there are consevative women that we can respect”.

And I disagree.  Until we reach some critical mass of conservative women in this country, I suspect that every single woman who comes to prominence as a conservative will draw the attentions of the liberal machine.  I can not thing of a single woman of any prominence as a conservative at any level, from local through national, that doesn’t draw the same exact response.

So prove me wrong.  Name a conservative woman of any prominence that hasn’t gotten smeared beyond reason.  And by “conservative”,  I mean conservative; not Christine Todd Whitman or Olympia Snowe.

Ready?  Go.

I don’t follow golf much; good lord, who cares?  I mean, if I played, it’d be one thing – I am my family’s only male non-golfer, so far – but I don’t. And so while I know Tiger Woods is the shiznit when it comes to golfers, I can’t say as I much care. 

And so my reactions to his domestic travails ranged from “gee, a superstar with no sense of consequences, how friggin’ shocking” to “Oh, no, crazy billionaires with cars”.

But there was one other angle; the bit about Elin Nordegren allegedly attacking Woods, and eventually beating his car with a golf club.

No news flash here; domestic abuse is a bad thing…

…unless it’s aimed at a guy, when it apparently turns into comedy gold:

On Saturday night’s episode, the NBC sketch comedy show made light of Tiger Woods’ scandalous week, satirizing reports – denied by the golfer – that his wife, Elin Nordegren, attacked him prior to his early-morning car accident on November 27 with a sketch featuring Keenan Thomson and host Blake Lively.

So what was the controversy? 

However, the show’s musical guest was Rihanna – a victim of domestic violence earlier this year from then-boyfriend Chris Brown — prompting concerns from several media outlets that the show’s humor was insensitive from some corners.

Insensitive to Rihanna?  Perhaps – although the incident opened a can of legal whoopass on Brown that his career might not survive, not that that’ll make anyone but Brown especially upset.

But what about Woods? 

“It was another sketch that gave us pause,” noted PopEater in an article titled “‘SNL’ Lampoons Alleged Violence in Tiger Woods’ Marriage,” on Sunday. “We think, had the genders been reversed, ‘SNL’ wouldn’t make light of the potentially violent situation.”

Er, d’ya think?

Society observes a cancerous double standard; domestic violence against women is a serious crime – while violence against men is treated with all the solemnity of Ma Kettle whacking Pa Kettle with a rolling pin. If Nordegren had, for whatever reason, had an affair – or even alleged affairs with (ahem) six people, it would have been equally narcissistic – and if Woods had scratched up her ace, or attacked her car with a golf club, that would have been the story, and everyone from the local cops to all the morning zoo idiots around the country who’ve been tittering at Woods’ predicament (and social life) would be singing a much more serious tune.  Saturday Night Live would find nothing funny about a putter bent around Elin Nordegren’s head.

It’s politically incorrect to observe that women are just as violent as men are – but it’s the truth:

Several studies of domestic violence have suggested that males and females in relationships have an equal likelihood of acting out physical aggression, although differing in tactics and potential for causing injury (e.g., women assailants will more likely throw something, slap, kick, bite, or punch their partner, or hit them with an object, while males will more likely beat up their partners, and choke or strangle them).

Of course, men are considered guilty until proven innocent when it comes to domestic violence – and while I don’t know whether there are grounds to accuse Elin Nordegren of violence, it wouldn’t matter; violence against men is devalued so systematically as to be a freebie.

Here’s one for the Hall of Shame.

A few months ago, US Census worker Bill Sparkman was found dead.  The death was suspicious – he was found hanging, with anti-government graffiti scrawled on his chest.

This happened not long after Rep. Michele Bachmann spoke about her ambivalence about cooperating with a census that, at the time, the Obama Administration was overtly politicizing.

The Sorosphere leapt into action.  To pick three examples:

• The direly-misnamed “Thinkprogress” took all of a day to conjure up a mythical right-wing terror movement  based on the death.
• City Pages generic angst-filled hYpStR Matt Hoffman went all CSI on us before the police were even done at the crime scene:  “Now a census worker has been found in what appears to be an anti-government lynching. Does Bachmann own some responsibility?
• Dusty “The Michael Brodkorb Of Snark” Trice delivered a verdict before they’d actually cut Sparkman’s body down: “I’m going to say it again because sadly I feel it bears repeating. I strongly believe that the inflammatory rhetoric Rep. Michele Bachmann thinks passes for policy debate is going to end in violence. “

“Inflammatory rhetoric”.  Heh. 

Heh.  Heh.

Oh, yeah.  It’s official; they were full of s**t (emphases added by me):

A part-time U.S. Census worker found dead near a secluded Clay County cemetery killed himself but tried to make the death look like a murder, authorities have concluded.

Bill Sparkman, 51, of London, apparently was trying to preserve payments under life insurance policies he had taken out, one as recently as May, which paid benefits if he died as a result of murder or accident, but not suicide or natural causes, police said.

Sparkman had survived a bout with cancer a few years ago, but he told a friend he believed the cancer had returned and that he would die, police said.

In a two-month investigation, police marshaled a number of reasons to conclude Sparkman ended his own life. Among other things, only Sparkman’s DNA was found on evidence at the scene, and he had told a friend details of his plan that matched what happened, police said at a news conference Tuesday.

And when, not if, some leftyblogging hamster tries to equivocate on this result, let it be repeated:

Police interviewed potential homicide suspects but ruled them out and found no evidence pointing to any conclusion except that Sparkman killed himself.

Matt?  Dusty?  “Think?” 

All of you leftyblog hamsters?

Do you have something to tell all the sane, responsible people?

Followup question:  Sparkman could have chosen many, many ways to cover up his suicide.  But as his last act on this earth, Sparkman apparently chose to go out in a way that, he would seem to have known, would implicate in his death a whole lot of peaceable, law-abiding people whose only “crime” is distrusting government; people like Rep. Bachmann and, incidentally, me (in addition to committing fraud).  Question:  Whose rhetoric is really doing the harm, here?

Before I get started, let me just start by saying how very, very much I hate Andy Birkey of the Minnesota Independent.

Part of it is the gay thing, sure.  But for the most part, it’s because like most sentient people I hate liberals; their attitudes, their smug self-centered perspective on all things, their beliefs themselves.

I don’t think “hate” is too strong a word; they differ from me – so “hate” would seem to be perfectly appropriate.  No?

Well, of course “no”.

Hating someone for what they believe – presuming it’s a legal belief that harms nobody – to say nothing of what they are, genetically or through whatever means beyond their control, is not just wrong; it’s one of those things that society has branded as “evil or pretty darn close to it” in the past 70-odd years.

So did Jeff Fecke never get that message?

First off, let me note that I hate Carrie Prejean as much as the next sentient human.

Sentient humans as a rule don’t hate, at least not over things that are within the rational realm.

And what did Ms. Prejean do that warranted this “hatred?”

Held a view on gay marriage that echoes that of the vast majority of our society, including the voting majorities of the 31 states that have held elections on the subject and, at least in terms of public pronouncements, the President that Mr. Fecke supports.

Disagree?  Sure.  It’s what people in a democracy do; disagree without, ideally, being disagreeable.

But to all too many on the left, “difference of opinion” is grounds for hatred.  And hate they do.

And while Fecke does go on to make plenty of sense…:

It’s sick and wrong. And it’s nothing to laugh about, even if the victim in this case has been moralizing about other things. For all her wrongness, I don’t recall Prejean arguing that LGBTQQ individuals should have their nude, intimate photos and videos released to the world.

…I just have to point out another thing that nobody, Fecke included, can recall Ms. Prejean doing; hating gays.  You might be one of those who believes that denying the rectitude of gay marriage equals hatred; that’s the sort of reductionist argument that boils every difference of opinion down to instant blacks and whites that leave no room for anything but yelling, screaming and, well, hatred; every disagreement requires a level of emotional commitment most people can not sustain for long enough to try to drag it back to sanity; every disagreement becomes a choice between “Hate as well” or “walk away and stay away”.

I’d like to think we could do better.

I had two very different things to say about this particular Jeff Fecke post. In their own way, they rated two separate posts:

That out of the way, it’s time for me to defend Carrie Prejean.

As you may have heard, former Miss California USA-slash-anti-gay activist Carrie Prejean

“Anti-gay activist”?

Well, no.  She’s a beauty pageant contestant who was asked her views about gay marriage.  She answered – honestly, and with view she shares with the majority of the American people.  The only thing for which she’s an “activist” (I’d prefer “accidental celebrity”) is being targeted by “gay activists”.  Unless simply believeing something makes one an “activist”, anyway.  I’d say she’s more of a “quit bashing people for differing with the showbiz majority” activist – but nobody asked me.

She was attacked at first by a “gay activist”, irritating celebrity snarkblogger Perez Hilton.

But I digress. Sorta.

…has a sex tape that’s gotten loose, and perhaps “several more” in the hopper. (No, I’m not linking to stories; keep reading, you’ll see why.) This is, of course, totes hilarious, as Prejean was trying to build a career around moralizing while still being a normal human with feet of clay.

I’m always amused by liberals who say with great assurance that “kids’ll have sex, there’s nothing we can do about it!”, and then become deeply moral about the subject when someone who gets uppity about religious Christian faith actually does it.

Nothing about “preaching morality”, and especially about professing Christian faith, implies belief that one is “perfect”.  Most of us believe there’s only been one perfect Christian so far.

But – mirabile dictu, and almost alone among leftybloggers I’ve grown ever-more depressed to read – Fecke gets it:

Now, yes, Prejean has been involved in moralizing. And here’s where I’m supposed to say that she has this coming, having the temerity to be a sexual being while criticizing others for their sexuality [which, of course, she’s not – she’s opposed to gay marriage as a political issue, not to gay people being,  y’know, gay.  A minor point, but words do matter – Ed.]. But you know what? I’m having trouble believing that. Because while Prejean’s opinions on same-sex marriage may be wrong, it doesn’t therefore follow that it’s okay for someone she trusted to break that trust by sharing private videos with the public…You see, it’s like sex. If you and your girlfriend are having consensual sex, that’s fine. If you invite your buddy in unannounced to start having sex with your girlfriend too, without clearing it with her? That’s rape. No, selling smutty pictures of your ex-girlfriend to TMZ isn’t rape. But it’s rape’s evil, less-reviled cousin, and it’s in the same moral ballpark.

The sun turned blue tomorrow, gravity is lifting me up, and I’m agreeing with Fecke.

But don’t summon the dogs of the apocalypse; all it takes is to be a human with some modestly sane priorities.

“When you’re taking flak, you know you’re over the target”
     — Mike Huckabee

“When they call you crazy, you’re scaring the p**s out of them”
    — Mitch Berg

“Most frequently, ideas about a struggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure,”
   — Vladimir Bukovsky

Note to Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Laura Ingraham, Pat Anderson, Katherine Kersten, Laura Brod, and every other conservative woman who is taking an avalanche of the kind of abuse (including an Avogadro’s number of variations on “She is teh crazee”) that’d leave the left writhing in fits of PC disgust  if it were directed at someone whose politics didn’t make them Untouchable; keep up the good work. 

That noise you’re hearing is the sound of the left scraping the ground below the bottom of the barrel.

If, say, Ed Morrissey – my friend, radio colleague and longtime fellow Northern Alliance blogger – were to write something in incredibly dubious taste, and I wanted to do something to say “I’m not with him on this”, what would it be called?

Disavowing?

Repudiating?

Chiding?

You have a wide variety of English verbs to use for the purpose.

One of them would not be “Back Off”.  To back off of something implies you’ve done something in the first place to “back off” from.

Kevin Diaz, writing at the Strib’s “Hot Dish Politics” blog, notes that Rep. Bachmann has repudiated/chided some of the people who brought some fairly inappropriate placards to her demonstration on Capitol Hill last week:

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, who’s been getting a lot of media attention since her starring role at a D.C. rally against the House health reform bill last week, has been distancing herself from the Holocaust imagery displayed by some of the participants in the event.

“Sadly, some individuals chose to marginalize tragic events in human history, such as the Holocaust, by invoking imagery and labels which have no purpose in a policy debate about health care,” the Minnesota Republican said in a statement she has been sending out to reporters in recent days.

Of course, whenever you go to a demonstration that is open to the general public, you’re going to draw a thin film of nutters.  They turned out to all three of the Minnesota Tea Parties – a tiny few of them, anyway (although the leftymedia coverering the event did in fact focus on them to the exclusion of the 99% majority of pretty regular workadaddy hugamommy people who showed up – a dishonesty far worse than Fox News’ inflation of the Bachmann rally’s numbers in its own way).   And if you’re a conservative, you get used to having to drag liberals back to the real conversation; to too many of them, the odd nutter at a conservative rally is like a shiny piece of tinfoil to a kitten.

The placard in question, the leftymedia bleated, was one showing piles of bodies at a concentration camp after World War II; it equated Obamacare to the Nazi healthcare plan applied to Jews.  As I noted in this blog last week, it was pretty stupid, partly for its historical ignorance, and more for the opening it gave the leftymedia to portray the event as if every protester and Rep. Bachmann was carrying one. 

(I also noted that it’s great, absolutely fabulous in fact, that the left…

…has gotten so very conscientious…

…about not wanting to cheapen the horror of the Holocaust and the Nazi regime…

…for moronic political effect.

Well played, Left!

At any rate, it was a stupid placard.  And Rep. Bachmann repudiated/chided it:

“These regrettable actions negatively shift the focus of the current discussion on this issue,” her statement continues. “The American people deserve an open and honest debate to ensure the best possible solution to our health care problems, and I agree that these unfortunate instances are wholly inappropriate.”

Of course, Bachmann’s demonstration drew blood, and the left realizes it needs to marginalize it as much as possible – in this case, by trying to convince the world that a duck is not a duck, or in this case that a moron with an inappropriate placard is really an official statement by Rep. Bachmann (in the same way that the right ascribed the many, many trivializations of Naziism that became such a cottage industry on the left, to the left):

Bachmann’s statement comes after U.S. Rep. Steve Israel, a Jewish Democrat from Long Island, called on her to apologize for the offending images at the Capitol Hill rally, which she’s been largely credited with inspiring and organizing.

 Yadda yadda.

At any rate, this is all background to the real point of this post.  Now, with newspaper headlines in print editions, headlines are usually not the responsibility of the writer/reporter who does the actual story.  It’s a copy editor who writes those.

I’m not sure who writes the headlines on the Strib’s online publications – if it was Kevin Diaz, or some minion in the copy or web department.  But someone put a title on Diaz’ post:

Bachmann backs off from Holocaust images

Er, yeah.  But Bachmann didn’t use any Holocaust images.  She never mentioned the Holocaust, to my knowledge, in the history of the healthcare debate, much less at her demonstration.  It was someone in the audience.

How can Bachmann “back off” something she, herself, never did, said or implied?

And if your answer is “the leader is responsible for the actions of even his/her most demented follower”, then I’ll await your collective apology, from President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer and Howard Dean on down, for the repeated, slanderous “Nazi” references that conservatism and conservatives have endured this past nine years.

Deal?

I joke, constantly, with liberal commenters and critics – the few that are worth engaging, anyway – “If a princpled conservative orders a pizza in the woods, and no liberal is there to hear it, is he/she still crazy?”

It’s a joke that covers a very serious reality; for a big chunk of the left, individually and as an institution, “insanity” is the only possible reason for dissent.  You encounter is from lefties small (“Suddenly John McCain got crazy!”) to big (the Soviets considered dissent a psychiatric condition, and filled psychiatric prisons to prove it).  To altogether too much of the American left, not being part of the American left is (to paraphrase Michael Savage) a mental disorder.

I saw that Dave Mindeman had written a piece entitled Bachmann has close to “Unsinkable” status” and thought briefly that perhaps Mindeman – who is one of the more estimable regional leftybloggers – was going to try something we’d not seen before; a sober, responsible, dispassionate look from the left at the success of one of the most drearily, rotely, predictably maligned figures in Minnesota politics.

If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, or know anything about Minnesota politics, you already know not to take any action on that bet.

Any post that starts with a Paul Krugman quote is off to a bad start, of course:

The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America.– Paul Krugman (NY Times)

So sit down with someone like  Paul Krugman, a Lori Sturdevant or, I’ll take a wild flyer here, a Dave Mindemann and ask them “what would the “rational right” look like?”.  If they get past the stumbling and the phumphering (I give you about one-to-four odds), they’ll describe something that looks, talks and votes indistinguishably from a Democrat.

Because, to these people, everything to the right of Dave Durenberger or Chuck Hagel is not just putatively wrong; it’s “crazy”.

Mindemann:

Outside of Bill Prendergast at MN Progressive Project (as well as some of the local 6th District bloggers like Hal Kimball and Political Muse), a lot of left leaning writers and activists (including myself) have considered Michele Bachmann to be a kook or extremist. [Really?  The hell you say. I’d put it more like “every regional leftyblogger has “Bachmann is teh crazee” on a hotkey – Ed.] Someone to make a caricature of, but not somebody to accept as a spokesperson for the right on the scale that she has nurtured.

That has to change, because Michele Bachmann is beginning to remind me of someone else….someone much more sinister….

Who might that be?

Margaret Thatcher, who presaged Ronald Reagan by fighting against not only a blinkered, ossified liberal leadership with immense success, but countered countless scabrous insults about her state of mine – because the British left was no less prone to see dissent as a mental illess as our own left?

Sarah Palin, whose own struggle with media/left (pardon the redundancy) orthodoxy has so completely paralleled that of Bachman (and Thatcher!)?

Who, pray tell?

Joe McCarthy.

{{facepalm}}

Wow.  Never heard that one before.

McCarthy rose to prominence because of fear. Fear of communism, the red menace. He turned those fears into an irrational paranoia. It ruined lives and paralyzed the US government. For a time, everyone had to tread carefully around the potential accusations that came out of McCarthy’s committee.

Bachmann is becoming the icon that the paranoid right is turning to now. She equates their fears into a “fight for freedom” or a “war against tyranny”. This new paranoia is not about real fears but about a loss of power that eight years of President Bush and 6 years of a Republican Congress kept in check.

Wow.  Speaking of paranoia.

Mindemann’s piece is marinaded in a crock-put full of the modern left’s most durable, and durably predictable, memes:

• To a liberal, a conservative never, ever fights the culture war because they have concerns and they wanna take their shot at correcting what they see as a problem in society.  It’s always about “fear”.
• No matter how carefully, even punctiliously, a cultural or social (or, these days, even a fiscal or security) conservative spells out a case, they are without exception “paranoid”.
• It is impossible for a conservative to speak on any issue, in any rhetorical terms, without it being considered “hate” on one level or another.
• Any conservative thought is assumed to immediately link to the most ludicrously extreme possible end results – and the most ludicrious fringe is inevitably concatenated with the most mainstream conservative thought.  This is not just intellectual laziness (although in the case of most lefty pundits, it certainly is the path of least resistance); this is part of a concerted pattern on the part of the left to frame all disagreement as one form of depravity or amother.

This is the lens through which the left – not even the extreme left, mind you, but the mainstream left that got Barack Obama elected – sees all dissent, and into which they want to frame all dissent for everyone else.  Too much of the media accepts it as the baseline; much of the American left can’t be bothered to question it.

That’s gone, and now their paranoia has a face and its quite different from the faces they have been used to.

Michele Bachmann has become the rallying point for this new paranoia. She listens to them…she understands them….she IS one of them. When she calls them to Washington to stand against health care, they come. Never mind that a lot of that crowd was paid for by astroturf front groups. The fact that deep pocket astroturf groups are willing to bankroll a Bachmann rally makes her all the more dangerous.

Mindemann is shocked, shocked, that right-leaning groups spend money to get across right-leaning messages and support right-leaning causes.  Because goodness knows the entire left-wing slander machine is funded through bake sales.

She has an entire news channel (Fox News) at her disposal.

Because goodness knows the left gets short shrift on ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, the NYTimes, WaPo, LATimes, the AP, Reuters…

Her message can reach the people it needs to anytime she chooses. She is also recognized as an “official” opposition voice by other media as well. And she loves the attention, doesn’t care about “facts”, and makes it all personal.

Tangent alert:  I was at a town hall meeting in Saint Paul before the ’08 election featuring Elwyn “E-Tink” Tinklenberg and Bachmann.  E-Tink spoke in vague blandishments, and seemed about as sincere and connected to the moment as the moaning in a porn video.   Bachmann, on the other hand, did something I’ve never seen a pol do; she grabbed a whiteboard and a marker, and she started putting up the numbers; the amount of Porkulus; the morgage bailout; the upcoming, inevitable bailouts of other industries; the amount this’d add to our per-capita deficit figure, and what that meant not only to our paychecks, but to our children’s futures…

…in short, the facts. She not only waded through the numbers, but she made them – the facts – accessible to everyone in the room.  It was the most affecting explanation of the gravity of our current fiscal situation that I had seen to date, and just about the most effective I’ve ever seen, period. From anyone, in or out of politics.  Ever.

As to anyone on the left – the party of Saul Alinski – carping about a politician “making it personal?”  I’ll hold my tongue, so that my contempt doesn’t overtake me.

And dare I say it, she has a certain charisma that convinces her supporters she can do no wrong.

No.  She has a charisma that convinces her supporters – and even a few intellectually honest detractors – that she’s right.

The Democrats chance to defeat her was in 2008. They had the right candidate [um, no – E-Tink was a disaster – Ed.] and the right opportunity [True – Ed.] — it just all came together too late.

(Also incorrect, if  you’ll indulge the tangent; “it”, in the form of a Keith Olbermann interview about not much that got its context carefully doctored and blown up into a much-ado-about-not-much-ado  event by an uncritical all-too-compliant media – “came together” too early; Bachmann was able to get The Real Michele back in front of the voters in enough time to stanch the bleeding.  Thank God.

Tarryl Clark is an excellent candidate [Hah! – Ed.]. So is Maureen Reed. Clark could be a consistent winner for the DFL…..just not in the 6th District. I doubt Reed or Clark is prepared for the type of war they are about to embark on. The DFL candidate, whomever it is, is taking on an incumbant that now has an unlimited national war chest of funding…An incumbant who can call on high profile names to support her campaign.

Which is apparently only a bad thing when the  “high profile names” don’t come from Hollywood and the  “unlimited war chest” isn’t from George Soros.

An incumbant who will be protected by a national party that has become dependent on her followers.

Which is a pejorative way of saying “found its conservative voice and unifying principles” – the only voice and principles since the Great Depression that has led the party to any sustained success and impact on politics, in 1980 and 1994.

Which, frankly, terrifies the crap out of the Democrat establishment.  This is why the left and media (pardon the redundancy) push the meme of the “responsble” (inevitably “moderate”) Republican – in their world, Dede Scozzafava and Arne Carlson are the voice of the GOP! – to divide and then to conquer the party, to marginalize conservatism and conservatives.

Because we not only win, but we win against all odds and conventional wisdom.

Mindemann comes oh-so-close to an answer…

Is the state DFL prepared to meet that kind of challenge? I have my doubts. They can treat MB as a buffoon, but it will only enhance her appeal. Their candidates have shown an ability to raise some money but nowhere near the amounts needed to compete with Bachmann.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope that the 6th District has enough discerning voters that she can be defeated.

…but swerves away.

The worst thing you can do in any form of public life is to “believe your own press”.  Likewise with memes about ones opponents.  When conservatives start to write their opponents off as a bunch of gutless entitlement symps and lumpen government employees – and all too many conservatives fall into that trap, too – then it takes ones’ edge off.  You should never underestimate your opponent.

But the only real arrow in the left’s quiver in the Sixth District is underestimation to the point of collective slander, not only of Representative Bachmann.  The left’s entire point of view about Rep. Bachmann is framed by a years-long propaganda campaign waged by some of her most, let’s just say, “focused” destractors, people who find her social conservatism anathema to the point they lose their faculties of reasoning.  This has framed the entire 6th CD DFL’s thought on Rep. Bachmann – a myopia that can only have helped send Rep. Bachmann to Washington twice now.

Dave Mindemann – do you honestly think that Rep. Bachmman’s successive victories, in two of the most anti-Republican elections in 35 years, was the result of “undiscerning voters”?

Voters of the Sixth – to Dave Mindemann (oh, I’ll be fair – to the Institutional Left), you are nothing but half-trained lab animals in a pavlovian experiment designed by that most devious mind-warper, Karl Rove.

Not people who arrive at intelligent conclusions for reasons of your own.

Hold that thought for another year.

But at this moment, that seems nearly impossible.

And one is torn between hoping Mindemann, and the rest of the state and 6CD DFL, do and/or do not figure why.

I was thinking the other day that, in the Twin Cities’ leftymedia, many of the same people who last month were ready to indict Rep. Michele Bachmann for “aiding and abetting” in the death of census worker Bill Sparkman are the exact same people who are demanding absolute forbearance in the case of Maj. Nidal Hasan; one tried to conclude on Sunday that the investigators had determined terrorism wasn’t involved at all.

Jeff Goldberg notes that it’s not just a local thing:

Remember when Andrew Sullivan fretted about “Southern populist terrorism” in the death of Kentucky census worker Bill Sparkman? (Investigators now believe it to have been suicide.) Remember how Frank Rich interpreted the NY23 special election as “nothing less than a riotous and bloody national G.O.P. civil war,” demonstrating how “the right has devolved into a wacky, paranoid cult”?

The tendency of elites to leap to hysterical, far-fetched interpretations when dealing with phenomena associated (rightly or wrongly) with the Right is counterbalanced by their “nothing to see here” reaction when confronted with events that implicate pet causes of the Left.

The nature of elite reaction is not strictly a matter of the potential political ramifications of events. There is also the matter of complexity and nuance, which are specialties of the intelligentsia. When events seem to teach a simplistic liberal lesson, there is no need to seek out any mitigating factors. Yet when the simple lesson would seem to favor a conservative argument, there is a frantic search for mitigation, or else the event is dismissed as meaningless.

See:  all of the hoax “hate crimes” that swept college campuses, the Duke Rape Case, the implication of talk radio in the Oklahoma City bombing…

The murder of Matthew Shepard was interpreted as evidence of mass homophobia induced by Christian conservatism, even though the murderers were a couple of two-bit hoodlums with no known ties to the Religious Right. Yet here we have Nidal Malik Hasan reportedly screaming “Allahu Akbar” while gunning down U.S. troops and . . . well, this means nothing.

On Twitter yesterday, I watched, somewhat slack-jawed, as a couple of reporters argued about how many angels could fit on the head of a pin debated exactly how unconfirmed the “Allahu Akbar” rumors really were.  Neither had heard anything about Hasan’s alleged links to radical clerics who’ s been linked with Al Quaeda, or had at least neither had opted to address them.  We’ll see if that ever fits into the template.

There is no person in the Twin Cities media that inspires more unreasoning derangement than Katherine Kersten.  When it was announced, several years ago, that she’d be joining the columnist staff at the Strib, the “journalist” community acted like management had proposed mandatory sodomy during work breaks.

The Twin Cities’ “journalist” community – which has tolerated all manner of abuses of contact, fact and selective omission and mangling of context with scarcely a peep – was concerned about the “journalistic integrity” of the Strib’s famously biased, fact-challenged editorial pages.

But for these many years, I’ve been trying to press these people for details.

Here’s a typical exchange (*) from a local chat room frequented by media and near-media:

[Writer A]: Katherine Kersten is teh suck.

Mitchberg: Er, why do you say that?

[Writer A]: Have you read her latest article in the Strib?

Mitchberg: Yeah.  What about it?

[Writer A]: She says that marriage is about having kids.

Mitchberg: Yeah.  And…?

[Writer A]: That And she says that people who don’t have kids should get married!

[Editor B]: Hah!  She is teh crazee! LOLZ!  Can I haz baybee?

Mitchberg: Y Er, OK, both of you – I read the whole article.  She says no such thing.  Merely that the institution of marriage, traditionally and historically, throughout the world’s many, impossibly diverse cultures, is pretty universally about bringing men and women together to have children.  And that the dissolution of this tradition has caused lots of problems in our society.

[Writer A]: Marriage is about kids?  What?  What about adults?

Mitchberg: You’ve never been married, have you?

[Writer A]: No, and what does that have to do with it?

Mitchberg: Er, never mind.  Look, her main point is that marriage has always been how societies see to the upbringing and protection of children.  It goes back to prehistory.

[Writer A]: Marriage was always about property.

Mitchberg: Well, yeah, managing property, sure…

[Writer A]: No, because women were property.

Mitchberg: Er, yeah.  Put down the Womyn’s Studies textbook.  There are a zillion societies on earth, and their treatment of women varied widely.  In some, they were chattel.  In others, they were second-class citizens at best. In sub-saharan Africa, most societies were matriarchal, and in much of Asia many societies had a stealth matriarchy.  The treatment of women varies, historically, as widely as possible.  Others were not a whole lot different than we see ourselves today.  And some societies detested homosexuality with a homicidal passion, and others tolerated it with no major issues.  The variations were almost infinite.  And yet every single one of these societies had one thing in common; they were an institution in which man/men came together with woman/women to have, protect and raise children.  What do you suppose the odds were, given the vast number of permutations in every other facet of male-female relationships, that pretty much every one would see marriage as a union of males and females to raise kids?

Mitchberg: Hello?

[Writer A]: So people who don’t have kids shouldn’t marry?

[Editor B]: LOLZ!  ShE Iz tha CrayXEE, Beeyotch!

Mitchberg: Ed, yeah, got it.  A, I didn’t say that.  Could you show me where she does?  Of course you can’t.  Kersten neither prescribes nor proscribes.  She merely points out that the institution of marriage exists for a reason, and that reason isn’t sharing employee benefits.  Do I believe having kids is the only justification for marriage?  I dunno.  In the extremely unlikely event I marry again, I’m sure not having any more.  I’ve done my time.

[Writer A]: So you agree with her.

Mitchberg: Er, that’s kinda NOT what I said.

[Producer C]: I would think as a conservative you’d want the Strib to hire a smart conservative to represent your side.

Mitchberg: Let’s stay, hypothetically, that Katherine Kersten really is a poor writer, and that, as you also say, everyone always knew it.  Given the panic the Strib’s editorial board and columnists went into over hiring the putatively sub-par Kersten, do you honestly think they’d go and hire an even better conservative?  I mean, even as things are and/or putatively are, Kersten give them aneurysms.  Can you imagine if they had a bigger, badder one in the newsroom?

[Writer A]: So  you think marriage is about kids.  Isn’t it about adults?

Mitchberg: You may have perfectly summed up the crux of the Culture War.  Some believe marriage is about benefits, status and adult concerns.  Some of us believe it’s about raising kidst.  It seems the twain will never meet.

[Writer A]: This is futile.  She is teh dumb.

[Editor B]: And she a looser.

(*) Of course it’s satire.  Any resemblance to conversations I’ve had with people in the Twin Cities media and sorta-media in past – especially in the past 48 hours – is purely coincidental.  All celebrity written voices are impersonated – badly .

Mitchberg: Yeah.  And…?