Remember six weeks ago, when the regional leftyblogosphere tried and convicted Rep. Michele Bachmann for the death of Census worker Bill Sparkman, due to her views on overweening government?

Not so fast, some of us said; law enforcement hadn’t even had a chance to look at the case.

And now that they have…?

(Echo echo echo echo echo)

Two officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case, said no final conclusions have been made in the case. In recent weeks, however, investigators have grown more skeptical that 51-year-old Bill Sparkman died at the hands of someone angry at the federal government.

The officials said investigators continue to look closely at suicide as a possible cause of Sparkman’s death for a number of reasons. There were no defensive wounds on Sparkman’s body, and while his hands were bound with duct-tape, they were still somewhat mobile, suggesting he could have manipulated the rope, the officials said.

So, Matt Hoffman?  Dusty Trice?  Got anything to tell us?

 If there’s a phrase anywhere in the language that fills the supporter of election integrity with less optimism than “Democrat”, it’s “New Jersey”.   They’re a little better than Chicago – or maybe they just hide their crimes better.

At any rate – Chris Christie is giving incumbent Democrat John Corzine a run for his vast amounts of money in the New Jersey gubernatorial race, which is being decided in elections today.  The polls show it as too close to call; the conventional wisdom shows this as a bellwether for the first year of the Obama Ascenscion administration.

And so the Dems will have the whole army of lawyers and professional spin mercenaries – the same crowd that won them the Minnesota Senate race last year – esconced in every Best Western from Fort Lee to Cape May, ready to duke it out over every single vote ballot to try to retain control of a state the Dems regard as marginally less “theirs” than Saint Paul or Berkeley.

And that’s just the good news; John Fund notes that ACORN has taken time off from moonlighting as a real estate agent for pimps to go back to their main mission – debasing our electoral system (emphasis added):

Victor Negron, a campaign adviser for independent mayoral candidate Roberto Feliz, a former director of Camden’s public works department, says he’s shocked that more than fifteen times the normal number of voters are casting absentee ballots in Camden this year. In the 2005, when the city’s voters voted for both governor and mayor on the same day, only 200 absentee ballots were cast. This year, some 3,700 have already been received. At least four voters have approached the Feliz campaign to complain that an absentee ballot was sent to them without their permission or cast for them without their understanding the documents they were signing. I spoke with Uremia Rojas who reports that “a man with a clipboard knocked on my door and had me sign something so I could vote by mail. I was skeptical but signed and got a ballot. I never really wanted one.” Says Mr. Negron: “We believe this to be underhanded and a possibly illegal strategy by the Democratic Party to undermine the civil rights of the residents of Camden.”

 Just a few bad apples? 

Probably not:

Plenty of reasons exist for suspecting absentee fraud may play a significant role in [today’s] Garden State contests. Groups associated with Acorn in neighboring Pennsylvania and New York appear to have moved into the state. An independent candidate for mayor in Camden has already leveled charges that voter fraud is occurring in his city. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party in New Jersey is taking advantage of a new loosely written vote-by-mail law to pressure county clerks not to vigorously use signature checks to evaluate the authenticity of absentee ballots, the only verification procedure allowed.

The grounds?  Making sure the system has integrity “disenfranchises”…

…er, someone.   Not honest people, or people cognizant enough to actually belong at the polling station or anything:

The state has received a flood of 180,000 absentee ballot requests. On some 3,000 forms the signature doesn’t match the one on file with county clerks. Yet citing concerns that voters would be disenfranchised, Democratic Party lawyer Paul Josephson wrote New Jersey’s secretary of state asking her “to instruct County Clerks not to deny applications on the basis of signature comparison alone.” Mr. Josephson maintained that county clerks “may be overworked and are likely not trained in handwriting analysis” and insisted that voters with suspect applications should be allowed to cast provisional ballots.

The shorter Democrat case:  “Integrity is haaaaaaard“.

Fund:

Absentee voter fraud is in danger of becoming a hardy perennial in New Jersey. Atlantic City Councilman Marty Small and 13 campaign workers were indicted in September on charges of conspiring to commit election fraud using absentee ballots. One worker pleaded guilty last month. In Newark, five campaign workers were indicted in August on charges involving absentee ballot fraud…There are additional reports from Camden that Hispanic voters have been misled into voting absentee ballots.

Read the whole, depressing thing.

And then answer this question: if people cease to have faith in their electoral system (where “faith” means “a reasonable belief that the electoral system gives each legal voter one vote, and counts those votes once each”), what future can democracy have?

It’s a rhetorical question: the answer is “none”.   So since debasing our electoral system to gain and hold power kills democracy, then the only real goal of the left is to gain and hold power.  By any means necessary.

Right?

.

It’s the oldest, most manipulative game in the world of rhetoric.

1. Find something an opponent of yours said, wrote or did that, taken by itself, could be seen as embarassing.
2. Carefully pare away anything that’d give the casual consumer any idea of the context of the original saying.
3. Splash it out there as big and bad as you can.
4. Make sure it splatters all over anyone or anything associated with your victim.

It’s a good way to get people who already agree with you to really really agree with you; boy, are your opponents icky!

Of course, it’s not all that honest.  But then, it’s rarely about presenting an honest appraisal of something or someone one disagrees with.

Oh, it happened again; a local leftyblogger made a really, really ugly insinuation about one of the local conservative ‘sphere’s stalwarts.

Let’s walk through it from the top.

Find Something Embarassing

Jeff Fecke, writing at his own blog and at lefty coagublog “Alas A Blog”, writes:

On July 1, over at Minnesota righty superblog True North (”Pointing Minnesota in the Right Direction”), Kevin Ecker decided to use his time to highlight an anti-immigration rally in Austin, Minnesota:

Political activism at it’s [sic] best is honest grassroots efforts by people finally fed up with lying politicians who decide to do something about an issue rather than just complain.

Kevin, like a lot of conservatives, is opposed to illegal immigration.  Unlike most liberals, he distinguishes between legal and illegal immigration – which is a lot more nuance than a lot of the left will credit, as they need to keep the bloody shirt aloft.

Now, remember – in the graf above, Ecker notes that “political activism at its best” is the stuff of the grassroots activist, the one who does it for the love of his/her cause.

Kevin found one of them, and quoted him:

Basically Austin is a town that the residents feel has been devastated by illegal immigration, and a lone resident, Sam Johnson, finally got fed up. He organized the first rally despite being up against professionally organized counter protests by the likes of La Raza, Centro Campesino and various Marxist organizations bussed in from the cities.

And if that’s where we stop – if that’s all you know – then so far so good!

But it’s there that the problems begin.  Sam Johnson was surely out-front on the immigration issue; unfortunately, he’s out-front on something else.  Something Fecke apparently learned about (albeit four months after the fact):

Sam Johnson, honest American, just doing the best he can to make our country free of “illegal immigration.” Or, you know, any immigration. Because this is Sam Johnson:

In case you’re wondering — and I doubt you are, but some people might not be able to view the picture — yes, that’s a guy wearing a neo-Nazi uniform. Because Sam Johnson isn’t just a hard-working white American who’s fed-up with illegal immigration. He’s a neo-Nazi, the head of the National Socialist Movement Southeast Minnesota. He is one of the most vile individuals in my state, and he’s a guy who the world will be better off without.

I’m not personally as ready to demand anyone’s death as Fecke seems to be – but the fact remains, Johnson is an unsavory character – or is at least a guy with some beliefs most people actively shun.

Strip Away All Context

And Johnson deserves some shunning:

Sally Jo Sorensen of the outstanding (sic) Bluestem Prairie blog actually interviewed Johnson (one hopes she took a long, hot shower afterward) [Stop objectifying women!  – Ed.]; you should really read all of part one and bookmark the site for the next two installments, but here’s a brief excerpt:

“Minorities should not be citizens,” Johnson said, “only 100 percent true white Americans.” He outlined his vision of a nation in which all people of color would be stripped of their citizenship, no matter how long their families had lived in the United States, and moved to communities that would be strictly delineated according to race.

People of African descent would live with other people of African descent, Latinos with Latinos, Asians with Asians, American Indians with American Indians, and “real Americans” with other “real Americans. “Real American” and non-citizen status would be determined be having had family living in the country for five generations or 50-70 years.

And it goes on.  It’s pretty putrid stuff.  (And some liberal will no doubt chime in “Putrid?  That’s the most you can say about Nazis?” Look – my anscestors, most likely like yours, spent the best years of their lives bombing, shelling, shooting and bayonetting the Nazis back into their caves.  I’ve gotten anti-semitic death threats; I’ve interviewed, and shredded, Holocaust revisionists.  Question my Nazi-slagging pedigree at your own risk – preferably to my face).  Read it if you want; Fecke and “Blue Stem Prairie” list it at some length.

But what actually happened?

This is the guy that True North — a blog that has included Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.; PowerLine’s Scott Johnson; and David Strom, the head of the Minnesota Taxpayers League as contributors — decided to back. A neo-Nazi.

It’s a a lie.  Quoting someone on an issue, even approvingly, without knowing anything about his background, is not an “endorsement”. 

Kevin Ecker, by way of endorsing grassroots activism on an issue that matters to him, latched onto the actions of Sam Johnson, of whose political affiliations he had no knowledge.

No, I mean  no knowledge.  Because I did what Fecke should have done before accusing someone of being in cahoots with Nazis; gotten his side of it.

Here’s what Ecker said, in an email to me shortly after this “story” “broke”:

No I did not know he was a Neo-Nazi and if I had I wouldn’t have run it. I thought he was a small time illegal immigration activist.  I’m not inclined to assume the worst in people, so the thought that he was a Neo-Nazi never occurred.  And googling a name like “Sam Johnson” seemed an act of futility.  My posting was NOT an endorsement, but rather simply a notification of a illegal immigration rally, something I’ve posted dozens of times before, for BOTH sides of the issue.

Of course, if you’ve written a blog for any length of time, you’ve probably done this – quoted someone without knowing the deeper context.

But if you’re smart, you haven’t take that factoid – a mistaken compliment paid to someone who doens’t deserve it – and expanded it into a group smear of everyone you disagree with.

What Fecke has done (to deafening, echoing applause in his comment section) is taken that error, stripped it of context, and…

Splash It Out There, Big And Bad And Far And Wide

…applied it willy-nilly to a shopping list of Big Bad People Jeff Fecke disagrees with.  True North?  Michele Bachmann?  Scott Johnson (who, I should point out, is Jewish, not that the Minnesota left considers bad taste especially declasse when referring to Big Bad Conservatives)?

Of course, the conclusion was written long ago – long before Kevin Ecker started his blog:

But that shouldn’t be surprising — the Republican party has deliberately chosen to throw its lot in with the most extreme elements of the hard-core, fascist-and-no-that’s-not-hyperbole, racist right. It is disgusting. It is despicable.

Well, no.  It’d be charitable to call it “hyperbole”; indeed, it’s worse; it’s the kind of dehumanizing, stereotyped approach to all dissent that managed to find six degrees of separation between anyone you disagree with and the ugliest depravities you can imagine.  It’d be like holding every Democrat today accountable for the Holodomor because of the historic links between the DFL and the Comintern.  At the very least it’s an attempt to make it virtually impossible to stay with an argument on a run-of-the-mill domestic issue; to discuss illegal immigration, you have to not only carry on the argument, but also fight against the whole “Nazi” thing.

Which may strike one as the perfect argument, in an Alinskiite sense, but doesn’t help much when it comes to running a civil society.

Stupid, right?

Someone tell Fecke.

Make Sure It Splatters

Of course, Fecke – and the mass of demented bobbleheads in both of his comment sections – couldn’t let it go at defaming Kevin Ecker.  He had to apply it like rhetorical birdshot, splotching it all over every target of opportunity in the regional right; he tries to infer that every workadaddy, hugamommy conservative that has problems with unfettered illegal immigration is part and party to the  Nuremberg Laws, the Warsaw Ghetto and Majdanek.

We’ve been through this before, of course; it was two years ago the local leftysphere hopped up and down and vented their outrage on cue over the “Dirt Worshipping Heathens” “scandal”.  Of course, that episode was a little different – there was actual intent involved, although not the intent that Karl Bremer imputed to Tracy Eberly’s piece.  But with context carefully and misleadingly excised, Bremer went on to slag the entire “Minnesota Organization of Bloggers” (notwithstanding the fact that the MOB has no, none, zero, zip editorial input, much less control, over any of its member blogs.  We drink.  That’s it).  But that doesn’t matter; in the Alinskiite world of the leftyblogger, actual meaning is of no value.

Anyway – unless…

1. …Ecker actually meant to endorse a Nazi.  Any Nazi.  And…
2. …if Rep. Bachmann, Scott Johnson, the editors and contributors to True North and/or anyone involved with the project endorsed any part of Naziism, and…
3. …any part of current mainstream Republican thought shares anything (beyond the level of the “Hyperbolic Rant”) with actual Naziism, as opposed to the “everyone we disagree with is a Nazi whether they actually goosestep or not” sense of the term…

…then it’s really just defamation, guilt by association, and group slander.

Which, thankfully, is wearing thin with real people.

I invite Mr. Fecke’s response.

UPDATE:  From an email:

“It sure would be interesting to comb through Fecke’s archives looking for approving references to people who turned out to be scumbags, wouldn’t it?”

I bet.

I don’t really care for “gotcha” blogging.  But if you do, by all means, have at it!

There are few icons of La Vida Americana that represent America’s free enterprise system and the freedoms it affords all of us like the automobile.

And so it follows that with a growing number of liberal American apologists, there would be a growing number of “Americans” ditching their wheels.

The recession and a growing awareness of the environment are causing many people to reassess their automobile ownership. After more than a century in which an automobile represented the American dream, car enthusiasm may no longer be a part of Americans’ DNA.

Leave it to The New York Times to count a marginal few as a weighty majority and mark the death of automotive enthusiasm in the name of the environment and a deep but temporary recession – then again, look at their leader – acting on the whims of an ever-more-marginal minority.

Go ahead, ditch the Prius. Better for the rest of us. More road for me; less Obama ’08 stickers to look at.

To:  Jon and Kate Gosselin, tiresome fake celebrities

From: Mitch Berg, blissfully above it all.

Re: The Lowered Bar

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Gosselin,

I’ve never watched Jon And Kate Plus Eight, because I think you are a couple of whores – or worse, pimps, whoring out your children to the pathetic, toothless johns that are our celebrity-stricken, illiterate, slackjawed, drooling media.  I think that the relentless publicity you seek is going to leave you with eight Dana Platos and Todd Bridges(es) one of these days.  I think you have only begun to see a reckoning for your invincible stupidity.

But after the events of this past week, and the whole “balloon boy” media frenzy teed up by a couple of your fellow idiot celebrity-wannabe parents…:

The parents, Richard and Mayumi Heene, met with Larimer County investigators for much of Saturday afternoon amid lingering questions about whether he perpetrated a publicity stunt when his 6-year-old son Falcon vanished into the rafters of his garage while the world thought he was zooming through the sky in a flying saucer-like helium balloon.But Sheriff Jim Alderden didn’t say who would be charged or what the charges would be. His deputies later showed up at the Heene’s Fort Collins home with a search warrant and at least three of them began a search. Sgt. Ian Stewart declined so say what they were after.

Alderden on Saturday didn’t call Thursday’s hours-long drama a hoax, but he expressed disappointment that he couldn’t level more serious charges in the incident, which sent police and the military scrambling to save young Falcon Heene as millions of worried television viewers watched.

…I’ll tell you for the record that you two are no longer the single most stupid, tiresome excuse for a “story” to obsess our media.

No, all is not forgiven, per se; I’m just saying that as much as I despise the two of you, there is at least one couple on this planet I wish were eaten by mice (after being tied in a sack with every single media figure that’s given your pathetic, exploitive saga breathless coverage) even more.

There are grounds for honest disagreement on gay marriage.  The disagreement centers around the definition of what “marriage” actually is; to most proponents of gay marriage, it’s just a contract, a legal agreement enforced by the state.  To most opponents, marriage is a religious institution; indeed, in the exceedingly unlikely event I ever get married again, I believe I’ll join the growing number of people I know who’ve eschewed getting a state marriage license, if only to tell the state “you really have nothing to do with this”.

So if I turn around and fail to support gay marriage (as opposed to civil unions, which I do support), you can accuse me of a lot of things, including of being wrong on the issue.  Wrongly, of course, but that’s your right.

One thing you can not accuse me (and by extension other opponents of gay marriage) of is cowardice and hypocrisy.

Now, the left?

I’ve never forgotten the howls of rage from my various liberal gay acquaintances when Paul Wellstone betrayed them and voted for the Defense of Marriage Act.  Now, bear in mind that in his first Senate race against Rudy Boschwitz, Wellstone got about 155% of the gay vote in Minnesota; they palpably expected big things from him.

And they got them – albeit not the “big things” they expected.  They learned the hard way; Paul Wellstone could do math.  Wellstone could see that for all the thousands of gays and gay supporters who turned out at gay marriage rallies, many many times as many people opposed changing marriage – including the imponderably vast majority of blacks and hispanics who, reliably Democrat though their votes are, broadly oppose gay marriage with a vehemence that’d make a Southern Baptist blanche, and without whom no Democrat can win a normal election.

And I, and many other conservatives, asked “so, gays?  Here’s palpable evidence; the left views you, as a group, as such a reliable bunch of votes that they can regularly betray  you (and remember, while roughly 125% of gays voted for Bill Clinton, he also backed down on gays in the military – for exactly the same reason that Wellstone did on DOMA); how long are you going to sit and take this?”

Apparently for all eternity:

Rainbow flags fluttered above the crowds near the White House as tens of thousands of gay rights supporters rallied to demand that President Barack Obama keep his promises to end discrimination against gays and also let them serve openly in the military.

“Hey, Obama, let mama marry mama” some chanted Sunday. Others cried out, “We’re out, we’re proud, we won’t back down.”

Gays:  the Democrats see you like a spousal thumper sees a spouse; as someone they say and do anything they want to, without fear of anything ever changing.
Does anyone out there, gay or straight, for or against gay marriage, doubt that Obama can do the math, too?

To: Paid “independent” “alternative” water-carriers for George Soros (et. al)

From: Mitch Berg, actual independent

Re:  Your Latest Meme

So first, we had “truther” – people, usually Democrats (including, during the 2004 election, as many as a third of Democrats, according to one survey which, to be fair, didn’t distinguish between respondents with questions and the real true believers), who believe that George W. Bush and the US government were behind 9/11.

Then came the “birthers” – people, usually Republicans (including, during the past election, as many as a quarter of Republicans, according to one survey which, to be fair once again, didn’t distinguish between true believers and those who are merely curious about the flap about Obama’s birth certificate), who question President Obama’s constitutional qualification to be President.

The meme is thus set; taking an oddball conspiracy, tacking “-er” onto the end to connote a sense of unthinking, unreasoning credulity, even insanity.

Which brings us to the latest manifestation of this meme – the “Tenther“.

Of course, while 9/11 and Birth Certificate conspiracies are easily and often hilariously debunked, the Tenth Amendment of the US Constitution has the inconvenient properties of being both part of the United States Constitution and, as it happens, an inconvenient hurdle (for those who see the Constitution as “hurdles” to big government) to the current Administration’s more gigantistic plans (i.e., most of them).
Which explains, I suspect, the Alinskier and Soroser fingerprints on the whole meme.  Otherwise, the left’s most-considered response is “States Rights?  Why, that means you favor slavery!”

That is all-er.

I’d say “I’m not hungry right now”, but then someone on the left would try to link me to the murder of any waitresses that turned up dead in the next few weeks.

Oh, speaking of which – someone named “MNBearBud” over at Minnesota Tragedy of Spirochaetal Paresis “Progressive” Project apparently apparently believes that conservatives should answer on command, like puppies, even the most demented accsations:

Michele can talk about being opposed to gay rights, but when it comes to questions about the murdered census worker, she avoids an answer.

No, MNBearBud.  She ignores a stupid question. 

She quotes from “ThinkProgress”, a leftyblog that is to blogs what Rachel Maddow is to cable TV or M”P”P is to Minnesota – a screeching, simple-minded, demented production that even lowest common denominators with a modicum of self-respect find insulting:

The Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel attended the conference and attempted to catch up with Bachmann to ask her about the murdered Census worker in Kentucky, but she evaded his question:

   “After the speech, Bachmann had only a few minutes to sign autographs and collect a stack of CDs and books from fans who’d followed her into the lobby. I caught up to her as she headed outside and asked if she had any response to the murder of a Kentucky census worker, having noticed that the Census, a constant target for Bachmann, did not figure into her speech. Bachmann recoiled a little at the question and turned to enter her limo. “

   “Thank you so much!” she said. “

As I noted last week, Weigel is usually a pretty intelligent commentator on the right. But asking her about her feelings about a murder with whom her only association is the slanderous free-association of a pack of (I’ll be charitable) hacks, and which is increasingly unlikely to have been a political statement at all,  is like asking the M”P”P’s Grace Kelly what she’s going to do with her MacArthur grant.  It’s just not relevant, and frankly nothing she needs to comment about at all.

Over the summer, Bachmann waged a high-profile, wildly-dishonest campaign against the Census, going so far as to claim that the data collected had been used to round up and intern Japanese-Americans in the 1940s.

Er, really, MNBearBud/”Think”Progress?

Um, how do you “think” the government found the Japanese-American citizens?

Do you think they drove down the street in a truck, looking for people with high math scores?

Question, MNBearBud:  how does government gather demographic data? 

Question for the M”P”P at large;  How many tests did you have to flunk to get accepted as writers for Minnesota’s most embarassing blog – history and IQ, both, or either one of them?

UPDATE:  I got a bit of feedback from a rather overwrought, solipsistic and confused person who, despite himself, did make one valid point.  My original take on this story mixed a serious point about the census and the myopia of Rep. Bachmann’s detractors with a rather childish jibe at the M”P”P writer involved.  I’ll cop to it. I’ve fixed the latter, to better focus on the former.

Earlier today, I wrote a piece in which I noted that the leftymedia – specifically, the City Pages’ generic hypstr drone of the month Matt Hoffman, and DFL tabloidblogger Dusty Trice, had beaten the FBI to solving the Sparkman murder in Kentucky; Sparkman, the reports when, was found hanged from a tree with the word “Fed” supposedly scrawled across his chest.

Hoffman:

 Now a census worker has been found in what appears to be an anti-government lynching. Does [conservative MN Representative Michele] Bachmann own some responsibility?

Trice:

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. 

As I noted in my piece – the biggest violence was against fact and journalism.  As of the time Trice and Hoffman wrote their pieces, investigators weren’t even sure it was a murder, much less politically motivated.

And six hours later, they still aren’t!:

A spokesman for the Kentucky police told TPMmuckraker last night that police were still looking into death, that an autopsy has been scheduled, and no cause of death has yet been listed.

And the commander of the state police post handling the case told the Lexington Herald-Leader today that the police hadn’t confirmed it was a homicide. “There are too many unanswered questions for us to lean one way or the other,” she said. “Every scenario is still on the table. We have not ruled this is a hate crime against a federal employee.”

And an ABC News report suggests there could be more in play than raw anti-government feeling:

[S]ome people wonder if his death in the remote part of southeastern Kentucky known for its meth labs and hidden marijuana fields had less to do with his job than simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

If that speculation were accurate, the “Fed” that may have been scrawled on Sparkman’s chest could be intended as a warning by criminals to law enforcement to stay away, rather than as a pure expression of opposition to government — though it may be hard to separate those two motivations entirely.

Still, it’d be ironic; if Sparkman were murdered by criminals, that’d make his death the responsibility of a key Democratic constituency. 

Was that unfair?  Oh, I’m sorry.  I just find myself driven to say unfair things from the endless stupidity of the left, trying to link violence to dissent from The One’s (pbuh) vision. 

Indeed:

It’s not even entirely clear what Sparkman was doing in the remote area.

The left’s current meme is that conservative dissent is provoking violence; the local leftymedia has all but indicted (in their own minds) Rep. Bachmann of complicity in Mr. Sparkman’s death. 

And yet it seems the only violence is against fact, and against any sort of ethics.  Trice and Hoffman – among many, many others – jumped to a conclusion that was not only unwarranted, but that slanders each and every conservative that voices any level of caution about big government.

To paraphrase Matt Hoffman:  do people who leap to slander dissent deserve to “own some responsibility?” 

Other than being regarded as factual laughingstocks, I mean?

I had a little flashback yesterday.  One of the obnoxious lefties in my neighborhood still has his “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” sticker on his rusty, oil-belching Subaru. 

Of course it is.  Unless you’re a limited-government conservative. 

Matt Hoffmann at the ever-less-interesting City Pages marinades in the slander:

Crazy Michele Bachmann [Uh, Lazy, Cliche-addicted “Writer” Matt Hoffman?  That’s “Representative Michele Bachmann, to you] has said many foolish things as of late, but who can forget her crusade against the census?

Bachmann proclaimed that she wouldn’t fill out the census form because she was worried about being rounded up and put into Japanese internment camps (sorry folks, there’s no making sense of it).

Of course there is.  Giving information to the government is always a two-edged sword at best – as the law-abiding gun owners of Morton Grove, Illinois. 

Now a census worker has been found in what appears to be an anti-government lynching. Does Bachmann own some responsibility?

Dunno, Matt.  If someone shoots Michele Bachmann (hint: don’t), will all of you leftymedia lemmings who’ve been dutifully parrotting the “Bachmann is Crazy” meme for the past ten years “own some responsibilty?”

The answer, of course, is “no”, partly because “lefties never believe they’re responsible for the consquences of their words and deeds” – and partly because we have no idea what motivated the killer (and kudos to Matt Hoffman for being the Eff Bee Friggin Eye to figuring out the motivation!), and partly because it’s an incredible stretch to think that anybody outside of Karl Bremer and Bill Pendergast would ever be motivated to violence by Rep. Bachmann’s sometimes-hyperbolic, sometimes malapropic, but always benign statements (not that facts mean anything to trained meme-repetition labradoodles like Hoffman).  

But mostly because most people know that it’s stupid to blame free speech, even dissent, even heated, sometimes hyperbolic dissent, for the occasional, isolated action of (someone we can fairly assume is) an insane person.

Dusty Trice makes the case:

Bachmann went after the census workers, [er – actually, she went after the Census – Ed.] saying she was worried that the information they collected might be used to put Americans in concentration camps. Then on 9/12/09 a census worker is found hanged near a cemetary in Kentucky, his corpse desecrated with what appears to be anti-government language carved into his chest.

Right. 

In similar news, in 1969 the Beatles released “Helter Skelter”; the Manson family shortly went on a crime spree for which John Lennon is rightly blamed.  Ditto Jodie Foster and the attempted murder of Ronald Reagan…

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. 

This, of course, is Dusty Trice,  the Walter Winchell of the Twin Cities blogosphere; the guy who conjured an “angry mob” and a “speech ban” apparently from pronto-pup fumes. 

And so in a world where fact is subordinate to agenda, of course every act of violence is going to be tied to Bachmann’s “inflammatory rhetoric”.  And Glenn Beck’s, and Rush Limbaugh’s, and for that matter Tim Pawlenty’s and mine.  Because the left doesn’t like the way the public discourse is going for them; things have taken a sharp, unexpected swerve since The One took office.  And the only response they know, indeed the only tool they have in the toolbox, is to defame, demonize and slander dissent; to try to get “the faithful” to feel like they’re the white hats surrounded by the benighted and icky.

The data is hammered into place to fit the conclusion.

Which seems to be why we still have a City Pages.  That and the ads.

Walter Mondale, who spent four years as background scenery in the worst entire Presidential administration of my life so far, barks on command and echoes his worthless former boss:

Former Vice President Walter Mondale joined his old boss Jimmy Carter Wednesday, arguing that some of the opposition to President Obama’s agenda is fueled by racial animus.

Asked at an event in Washington whether he agreed with former President Carter that racism was behind some criticism of Obama, Mondale took a long pause before answering: “Yeah.”

“I don’t like saying it,” Mondale continued. “Having lived through those years, when civil rights was such a bitter issue, and when we argued those things for years … I know that some of that must still be around.”

“I know it must be there.  Somewhere.  Maybe next to my keys?”

“I don’t want to pick a person, say, he’s a racist, but I do think the way they’re piling on Obama, the harshness, you kind of feel it,” he said. “I think I see an edge in them that’s a little bit different and a little harsher than I’ve seen in other times.”

Riiiight, Fritz.  Eight years of “Smirking Chimp” and Stewart and Colbert (comedy is borne of anger, as is whatever it is that Colbert does) and Randy Rhodes (among many others) openly joking about killing the President – with not a whiff of pique, much less self-righteous outrage from irrelevant lefties like Mondale – but now the climate is bothering you?

At a screening of a new documentary on his life, “Fritz,” at the George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, the 1984 Democratic nominee for president lamented what he called a coarse tone in political life today, telling the audience: “It’s been discouraging to watch this health care debate.”

Patricians like Mondale pine for the days when starchambers of DFL powerbrokers (and a few pseudo-Republican castrati who’d been selected for their mute compliance) made all those calls for all the dumb peasants.

So Walter – when a lot of people, myself included, voted emphatically against your nannystatism and tax mania and America-last-ism 25 years ago, in history’s biggest landslide, were we just a bunch of anti-Norwegian bigots?

I finally got to meet KTLK-FM’s Chris Baker at the Tea Party last night.

And when he was addressing the crowd, he came up with a spiel about the Dem’s pro-forma “you oppose Obama because you’re a racist” slur, that I have been slapping myself upside the head for the past 18 hours for not thinking of myself.

I’m going to paraphrase as closely as I can…

Yes; I’d love to support nationalizing healthcare and destroying our healthcare system – if only the President were a white guy.

I’d jump to jack taxes through the roof, destroy the economy and pass trillions in deficits on to my grandkids – if the President were white!

I’d beg to have the UN run our foreign policy – if only the Prez were a cracker!

Not bad for an FM guy.

Yesterday, we responded to Eric Ostermeier’s collective slur against conservatives from Wednesday (“Red States have Higher Crime than Blue States“) by factoring in an overarching, non-partisan sociological issue – the propensity toward violence and crime in the states of the Old South, the former Confederacy; there is a social dynamic in the Old South that makes the whole place a lot more angry and violent, no matter who people vote for for President, governor or the state legislature.

It’s a real, current factor that predates and transcends modern politics – but it’s not strictly tied to America’s current partisan divide.

So what about statistics around an issue that is fully tied to modern politics, and the sociology and pathology that’s sprung from it?

———-

Eric Ostermeier’s statistics were calculated on a state by state basis. 

But are head-to-head comparisons of states especially meaningful?  Most states, especially most larger states, are diverse political microcosms in their own right.  New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Michigan and California are dominated by huge, vastly powerful liberal machines – but their outstate, non-metro areas are quite conservative by contrast.  Other states – Minnesota, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Virginia – are deeply split, with small but intense clusters of urban liberals surrounded by a suburban/rural expanse that votes reliably Republican (and which usually carries the rest of the state financially). 

But if there’s one thing that’s true across the country, it’s this:  major metropolitan areas are almost universally governed by Democrats (or liberal Republicans, like Michael Bloomberg); even in cases like Giuliani’s New York, Brett Schundler’s Jersey City or Norm Coleman’s Saint Paul, the dominant political culture was sharply to the left, with the mayor fighting a David Vs. Goliath insurgency.  And while it’s by no means as uniform, the outlying areas in all these examples are much more likely to be center to right-leaning.

And statistically, it’s a blowout; nationwide, violent crime in Metropolitan areas is 58% higher than in non-metropolitan areas  (459 to 290/100,000).  In states that voted for Obama, it’s drastic; violent crime in metro areas is 86% higher than outside them (448 to 240); in McCain states, metro areas are 32% more violent (465 to 350/100,000)…

…and that’s if we forget about yesterday’s issue with traditional southern violence.  In the states of the former Confederacy, violent crime in metro areas is 20% higher than the national average (553 to 459/100,000), while in non-metro areas it’s a whopping 48% higher than in non-metro areas nationwide (429 to 290/100,000); indeed, non-metro crime in the former Old South (less Virginia) is only about 6% lower than crime in metropolitan areas nationwide (429 to 459/100,000).  Wanna see some danger?  Non-metro crime in South Carolina is 65% higher than the national average for metropolitan areas (760 to 459/100,000); Louisiana isn’t far behind. 

Indeed – Obama’s metro areas are eight percent more violent than Mac’s states overall (448 to 411/100,000); that ratio climbs to 38% when counting McCain’s non-Southern states (337/100,000), and 52% higher than McCain’s non-southern, non-metro areas (with 294 violent crimes per 100,000).

States – most states – seesaw slowly back and forth across the political divide; California used to vote GOP; the South was once reliably Democratic, and backed the New Deal.

But for generations, now, America’s major metropolitan areas have been the province of the left; the bigger the metro areas (New York, LA, Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit, Philly), the further to the left they are. 

And while Ostermeier noted that “Blue” state income is 11% higher than “Red” states (without citing cost of living variances, naturally), he missed another point; the poorest cities in America are the ones that have been the longest strangled by the left, of the ten poorest cities in the US, the record is clear:

• #”1″ Detroit has been GOP-free for the past 48 years.
• #2 Buffalo?  55 years.
• #3 Cincinnati?  25 years.
• #4 Cleveland – it’s been 20 years
• #5 Miami and #7 El Paso have never had Republican mayors;
• #6 St. Louis – sixty years.
• #8 Milwaukee?  101 years!
• #9 Philadelphia – 57 years!
• #10 Newark – not only has it been 102 years since Newark, “America’s Vacationland”, had a Republican mayor, but it’s been almost a generation since they had a mayor that wasn’t indicted or jailed for some kind of corruption or another; Newark’s mayors and mayoral staff may actually impact New Jersey’s property crime figures. 

You have to drill waaaay down in the stats before you can find a metro area with even a centrist governing tradition outside the Old South (which, as we noted yesterday, is problematic for different reasons).   Phoenix used to be a decent example – but the influx of violent narcotraficantes has screwed up a good thing.  But again, that’s not a partisan issue.

So why are the crime numbers so bad in the cities?  Ostermeier invoked the “Chicken Vs. Egg” simile in his piece on Wednesday; to try to unpack urban crime, it’s more of a chicken/egg/farmer/omelet thing.  Which came first? 

Do Democrats control cities because they’re so relatively poor (and especially because they pack so much poverty in next to so much wealth)?  Or are cities poor because Democrats have spent the past couple of generations using them as warehouses for welfare clients and as social engineering laboratories?  And on the other hand do the cities serve as social labs and welfare warehouses because the Dems know that clients make good, multigenerational voters?

I’lll take “C”…

———–

Well, I would – if I thought that it was civil or responsible to try to use stats like this to try to impugn my opposition. 

Of course, just as the tradition and stats about southern crime added crucial context to Ostermeier’s original claims, there is reams of other context behind any specific claims that one tries to tie to politics.

Which leads to the other two questions I mentioned in my original post on the subject last Wednesday.

Question 2: Knowing this (and Ostermeier is a smart guy – he has to be, since he’s involved with the Humphrey Institute and all, right?), why would Ostermeier write this?  I’m accepting theories.

Question 3: Smart Politics is a product of the Humphey Institute.   How much taxpayer money was put into this piece of – let’s be honest – group slander?

Nancy Pelosi is  projecting again:

I have concerns about some of the language that is being used because I saw … I saw this myself in the late ’70s in San Francisco,” Pelosi said, choking up and with tears forming in her eyes. “This kind of rhetoric is just, is really frightening and it created a climate in which we, violence took place and … I wish that we would all, again, curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements that are made.”

Funny thing about Republican enthusiasm; it may be boistrous, but nobody gets hurt.

It’s Pelosi’s team that is behind every single act of political violence in America today.

In a posting on the Hubert Humphrey Institute’s “Smart Politics” blog yesterday, Eric Ostermeier took a whack at trying to analyze the 2008 Uniform Crime Report along partisan lines.

And the results he found, at least up front, were shocking:

The average violent crime rate (murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault) in 2008 for the 28 states that voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 Presidential election was 389 incidents per 100,000 residents. The average violent crime rate for the 22 states that voted for John McCain was 412 incidents per 100,000 residents – or a 5.8 percent higher incidence of violent crime...The difference was even more pronounced for property crimes (burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft). Obama states had an average property crime rate of 2,989 incidents per 100,000 residents, with McCain states averaging a rate of 3,228 – or an 8.0 percent higher incidence of property crime.

I ran the numbers in the UCR through a spreadsheet last night; Ostermeier’s numbers were well within the range of any niggling data entry errors on my part – a point here, a point there.

Ostermeier made a game attempt at analyzing the various partisan divides several different ways…:

These crime rate findings hold despite the fact that blue states have a higher population of residents in urban areas, which tend to have higher crime rates than rural areas. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2000 Census of Population and Housing, Population and Housing Unit Counts, the average statewide percentage of residents living in urban areas in the Obama states was 78.0 percent, compared to a statewide average of just 64.6 percent in the McCain states.

Ostermeier broke out his numbers across a number of different scenarios; by the party in control in the state legislatures, by the party with the governor in office, and by the vote in the much-closer, arguably more long-term representative 2004 Bush/Kerry contest.

Indeed – Eric Ostermeier broke out the numbers every which way except the way that’d give the numbers any meaningful, apples-vs.-apples context.

I thought of two divides in the numbers that Ostermeier didn’t do that are much more meaningful.

———-

Ostermeier took a brief nod at one of them, anyway.

When you look at the problems facing urban America, there has for a hundred years been one brutal conundrum; the African-American population.  Victims of centuries of racism, first as slaves and then under Jim Crow, the African-American population has never had a reason to worry excessively hard about achievement or working within the system to get ahead; until very recently, it was impossible.  While the legal and most of the external social impediments were removed a generation ago, it’s harder than that to reverse centuries of social conditioning; Norwegians will stay stoic, Italians will be demonstrative, and Afro-Americans have a huge, heavy social albatross on their collective backs.  This –  social conditioning of an entire socio-ethnic group – is generally accepted as a reason for many of the ills facing black America.

What gets overlooked is that for a fair part of southern White society, the real life effects of antebellum Southern life weren’t all that much better in the long run.

Southern society up until the Civil War was an anomaly by American standards; much of the antebellum South was in fact run by a hereditary aristocracy, not a whole lot different than Europe.  At the top were the plantation owners, with immesnse wealth and power and noblesse oblige to match.  At the bottom, of course, were the slaves.

And just above them were the legions of white sharecroppers – “peasants” in all but name.  If the slave was the fuel of the southern economy, the white peasants were the cogs and sprockets and levers in the machine.  And like peasants the world over from Japan to Russia to England, “their place” in society was a matter of social conditioning less brutal and immoral than that of the slaves, but which still left ones’ options very, very constrained.

On top of that, most southern “peasants” were of Scots-Irish descient; the Scots Irish were near descendents of the clansmen expelled from Scotland after their various rebellions.  They brought with them many of the worst aspects of Scots and Irish life; the clannishness (the Hatfields and the McCoys were not an American aberration), and the emphasis on personal rather than legal justice which led to the southern tradions of duelling, honor-killing and all manner of other violence.  The tradition also bred the martial culture, honor and tradition that allowed the Southern Army, outnumbered and out-equipped, to beat back the North for many long years during the Civil War, and today sees southerners of Scots-Irish descent represented in four times their demographic proportion in the military (and even more than that in the officer corps and in elite units like US Special Forces); a Texan is nine times as likely to serve in the military as a Bostonian.

And so there’s a big part of this nation that has two interwoven traditions of cultural hopelessness on the one hand, and violence on the other.  And they come together in America’s traditional Deep South, the former Confederate states.

Ostermeier hints at the pathology, without really taking it into consideration:

For example, 2 of the top 3 states with the highest violent crime rates in the nation in 2008 voted for McCain: South Carolina (#1) and Tennessee (#3). (Nevada was #2)…Eight of the top 11 states with the highest property crime rates voted for McCain: Arizona (#1), South Carolina (#2), Alabama (#4), Tennessee (#6), Georgia (#7), Texas (#8), Arkansas (#10), and Louisiana (#11).

The fact is, this cultural propensity to hopelessness and violence is not a partisan trait; it predates the Old South’s Republican and it’s Democratic voting traditions, and indeed predates the United States of America.

But does it skew the crime numbers as compared via current partisan trends?

As Ostermeier notes, states that voted for John McCain have about a 4% higher level of violent crime than the national average, and 8% higher than states that voted for Obama.

However – if you leave the states of the old Confederacy out of the numbers, things change pretty drastically.  Non-“Confederate” states that voted for McCain had a violent crime average almost 15% below the national average (337 vs 396 per 100,000) – and that’s leaving Virginia, which voted for Obama, in the mix (Virginia’s violent crime rates, at 256/100,000, seem to have grown beyond the Scots-Irish tradition, and are well below the national average).

How drastic is the Confederate State effect on the statistics? Violent crime averages in the former Confederate states (less Virginia) averaged 31% higher than national averages, 37% higher than the Obama states, and 55% higher than in the McCain states without the old South.

The same ratios hold basically true throughout the other comparisons – except when counting state governors.  Violent crime rates in GOP-governed non-Confederate states came in 19 points below states with Democratic Governors in terms of violent crime per 100,000 (332/1000), and 16 points below the national average.

In terms of property crime rates?  While Ostermeier was right about overall statistics, when you leave out the Old South, McCain’s states come in seven points below the national average (2861 to 3089/100,000), and four points below the Obama states (2982/100,000); property crime per 100,000 in the former Confederacy is 22% above the national average (3878 to 3089/100,000), and 32% higher than McCain’s non-Confederate states.

———-

“Er, Berg?” you might ask, “who cares about the old Confederacy?”

Well, generations of sociologists and criminologists, for starters.  You can clamp your fingers over your ears and stomp and scream and try to drown it out, but the fact remains that the social roots of violence and crime in the Old South are different than they are in any other part of the country – and the crime numbers still show it.  Violent crime stats in places like Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida are off the clock compared to most of the country – and, as I noted above, it’s a factor that long predates any current political dynamics.

And presenting crime stats that don’t adjust for this social dynamic – an external dynamic that dramatically skews the results – is utterly dishonest on its face.

So what about a social dynamic that is linked to modern partisan politics?

We’ll hit that one tomorrow.

I have three questions for Eric Ostermeier of the “Humphrey Center”, a U of M “think tank” and public policy (*) program that publishes the “Smart Politics” blog, in re his post earlier today claiming that “Red States” have higher crime rates than “Blue” states.

Question 1: I know the Humphrey Institute is a bunch of graduate students and academics and whatnot, but do you honestly think everybody else is stupid? 

It’s a dumb question of course; being academics, of course they think the hoi-polloi are too dim to read.

But this is downright insulting…

A Smart Politics analysis of the recently released 2008 Uniform Crime Reports finds that red states across the nation have both higher violent and property crime rates than blue states, across several measures of partisanship.

So I went to the UCR Website.  And before the DOJ lets you get to the data, it posts this on a popup:

Each year when Crime in the United States is published, some entities use reported figures to compile rankings of cities and counties. These rough rankings provide no insight into the numerous variables that mold crime in a particular town, city, county, state, or region. Consequently, they lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting communities and their residents. Valid assessments are possible only with careful study and analysis of the range of unique conditions affecting each local law enforcement jurisdiction. The data user is, therefore, cautioned against comparing statistical data of individual reporting units from cities, metropolitan areas, states, or colleges or universities solely on the basis of their population coverage or student enrollment.

But Eric Ostermeier is on a mission from (the “progressive” version of) God; caution is for peasants. 

Back to Ostermeier:

The average violent crime rate (murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault) in 2008 for the 28 states that voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 Presidential election was 389 incidents per 100,000 residents. The average violent crime rate for the 22 states that voted for John McCain was 412 incidents per 100,000 residents – or a 5.8 percent higher incidence of violent crime.

Gotta hand it to Ostermeier; that does sound bad.   

For example, 2 of the top 3 states with the highest violent crime rates in the nation in 2008 voted for McCain: South Carolina (#1) and Tennessee (#3). (Nevada was #2).

Oof.  Yuck-o.

But wait – two of those states have something in common.  What could that be?

We’ll come back to that.

The difference was even more pronounced for property crimes (burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft). Obama states had an average property crime rate of 2,989 incidents per 100,000 residents, with McCain states averaging a rate of 3,228 – or an 8.0 percent higher incidence of property crime.

Eight of the top 11 states with the highest property crime rates voted for McCain: Arizona (#1), South Carolina (#2), Alabama (#4), Tennessee (#6), Georgia (#7), Texas (#8), Arkansas (#10), and Louisiana (#11).

It’s touching that Mr. Ostermeier is so concered about property crime – until you realize that like everyone on the left and especially the Humphrey Institute, he just wants to make sure it can be taxed before it’s stolen.

But again, let’s wait – those states all have something in common!

And we’ll touch on another theme in the next bit:

These crime rate findings hold despite the fact that blue states have a higher population of residents in urban areas, which tend to have higher crime rates than rural areas. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2000 Census of Population and Housing, Population and Housing Unit Counts, the average statewide percentage of residents living in urban areas in the Obama states was 78.0 percent, compared to a statewide average of just 64.6 percent in the McCain states.

And we’ll get back to that, too.

The red state/blue state crime data split also holds true across other measures of statewide partisan groupings.

For example, a Smart Politics analysis of partisan control of state legislatures finds the 27 states with Democratic-controlled legislatures with an average violent crime rate of 390 incidents per 100,000 residents. The average violent crime rate for the 14 states with Republican-controlled legislatures was 11.1 percent higher, at 433 incidents per 100,000 residents. (The rate was lowest among eight states with split partisan control – at 382).

There was also a double-digit percentage difference for property crime rates among the states with Democratic and Republican controlled legislatures. For Democratic-controlled states, the property crime rate was 3,044 incidents per 100,000 residents compared to 3,351 incidents per 100,000 residents for Republican-controlled states – or a 10.1 percent higher rate under GOP legislative control.

The differences in the rate of violent and property crimes between states along partisan lines by control of the governor’s office were less stark, but still pointed in the same direction. The 22 states with Republican governors had a 0.4 percent higher violent crime rate in 2008 (400 incidents per 100,000 residents) than the 28 states with Democratic governors (398) as well as a 6.0 percent higher property crime rate (3,196 for GOP states and 3,014 for Democratic states).

So here is the chicken and egg question: are states with high crime rates electing Republicans because the GOP is perceived to be tougher on crime and thus are more likely to take action to fix the state’s crime problems, or are Republican policies to combat crime proving less effective than Democratic policies and thus resulting in higher crime rates?

Let’s be accurate, here; it’s not a “chicken and egg” question so much as an “apple and axle” question.

This sort of “analysis” goes on and on and on…

One thing is for certain: 2008 is not an aberration.

Looking back to the 2004 Presidential election, the 19 states that voted for Democrat John Kerry had an average violent crime rate in 2004 of 361 incidents per 100,000 residents. The 31 states that voted for George W. Bush had an average violent crime rate that year of 419 incidents per 100,000 residents – or a 16.3 percent higher rate. Bush states also had an 18.6 percent higher rate of property crimes in 2004 (3,648 incidents per 100,000 residents) than the Kerry states (3,077).

…and ends with an ever-so-brisk cautionary note: 

There are, to be sure, many other variables to be considered other than partisanship when examining the different rates of crime between states. For example, red states tend to be less affluent than blue states. The average statewide per capita income in 2008 for the 28 states voting for Obama was 19.4 percent higher ($45,752) than in the 22 states voting for McCain ($38,333).

The per capita income difference was still present, although less pronounced, when grouping states by partisan control of the legislature and the governor’s office. States with Democratic-controlled legislatures have an 11.1 percent higher per capita income ($44,470) than states with Republican-controlled legislatures ($40,018). States with Democratic governors had a 2.5 percent higher per capita income in 2008 ($42,955) than those with Republican governors ($41,892).

Now, I’m not going to look up the specific numbers – but I’m going to go waaaay out on a limb and say that the cost of living in Democrat states is somewhere within spitting distance of 11.1 percent higher than it is in GOP states.

But fair enough.  Tomorrow, we’ll fight numbers with numbers.  And we’ll take at least one liberty that Mr. Ostermeier didn’t think was important; we’ll put the numbers into some meaningful social context.

Oh, yeah – and address Questions 2 and 3, too.

(more…)

According to the Administration (via it’s biggest media fan club, MSNBC, which is to Barack Obama what Lori Sturdevant is to the DFL), yelling “You Lie” isn’t merely rude (but accurate); it’s racist:

According to MSNBC’s David Shuster on Friday, South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson shouting ‘you lie’ to President Obama was racism on display: “The fact that Joe Wilson is from South Carolina…it strikes a lot of people as awfully close to the idea that maybe there was some sort of racist or bigoted element there.”

Shuster went on to add: “And especially then when you look up at the picture and you see older white men, all Republicans, sitting there. Just it gives off a strange vibe.”

So – according to the Administration (and I think it’s fair to say MSNBC channels the administration on all particulars), dissent isn’t just (putatively) wrong; it’s depraved.  You’re a “teabagger”, you’re a “racist”, you’re a “militiaman”, you’re a loose cannon waiting to go off and kill a bunch of gentle liberals (like the big “pro-choice” he-man who shot a 63-year-old guy with an oxygen tank yesterday, of course).

Love that new openness, Mr. President.

Picture this:  You’re at the Hiawatha Avenue railroad yards.  It’s 5AM.  Trucks – which have been busy rounding up dissidents all night long – line up and unload their cargoes, to be stuffed onto boxcars by gangs of SEIU thugs with attack dogs.  At 8AM, the trains pull out, hauling thousands of dissidents off to “re-education” camps in Idaho and eastern Wyoming.  Their only crime?  Speaking out against the Obama Administration; winding up on Janet Napolitano’s enemies list; getting denounced by their DFLer neighbors to the DFL “Hope and Change” tribunals.

At the camps in Idaho, they live in unheated barracks, eat potatoes (albeit Idaho potatoes), and learn proper thought by hauling wheelbarrows full of dirt from one pile to the other.

This is the vision of Jeff Rosenberg, of MNPublius.  This is the world he wants.

Well, no – he doesn’t specifically say so.  But he doesn’t speak out against it!

Oh – he’s talking about Rep. Michele Bachmann:

Well if I thought her rhetoric was overheated before, that’s nothing compared to a speech she recently made to a group of Denver conservatives:

“This cannot pass,” the Minnesota Republican told a crowd at a Denver gathering sponsored by the Independence Institute. “What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn’t pass.”

I’m gonna go out on a limb here; Bachmann grabbed the wrong metaphor in the heat of a rhetorical moment; you don’t slit your wrist, you poke your finger or thumb.  It’s a guy thing anyway; nobody expects a chick to have a command of it.

Does “whatever it takes” include violent, armed revolution? Because her rhetoric over the past year doesn’t seem to rule that out in any way.

I just sat slack-jawed for a while when I read that.

I still am.

Let me be absolutely clear for our conservative readers. Free speech is protected, and Bachmann has the right to voice her opposition to health reform. However, sedition and fomenting violent rebellion are most definitely not protected.

Well – problem solved! 

By the way – while Bachmann said nothing about armed revolt of any kind, it’s good to see lefties suddenly getting upset about violent opposition and anti-American sedition.

Bachmann needs to cool it before the birthers-with-guns movement turns into something even more insidious.

Perhaps Rosenberg means “before the “birtherns with guns “movement” turns into a movement”.  There’ve been three incidents, none involving illegal activity, much less violence.

Indeed, every single incident of violence at every town hall meeting was precipitated by a Democrat or one of their sympathizers.  Every one. 

Who is it we have to worry about, here? 

 I, for one, would hold her partly responsible.

Like there was a lot of doubt about that.

I try – oh, Lord, I try – to be civil.  To exercise the better me.  To disagree without being disagreeable.  I try to let the better me shine through as much as I can. I truly do.

But when the subject is The Minnesota Tragedy of Spyrchaetal Paresis “Progressive” Project, it’s truly difficult.  Because the MToSPPP writers whose entire oeuvre isn’t dim-witted lying or disingeuous babble…

…are just so very, very, very, very dumb.  A writer called “Mark My Words” wrote this piece, about a bit of anti-gay graffiti in Washington County:

Imagine getting up in the morning, grabbing your coffee thermos and heading for the garage ready for work.  You hit the door-opener, and you back your sedan out and mindlessly hit the clicker to close the garage-door.  And while you’re in reverse, aiming your trunk-lid into traffic on your country-lane, you realize that this has been spray-painted in giant-sized green letter across 13 feet on the front of your house:

 

HIV AIDS gay help

Right?!  

Welcome to Ross Sveback’s world.

I’d say “read the whole thing”, but I’m not sure if your next of kin might not sue me for endangering your sanity.

No, it’s not the piece itself, which is a fairly rote recitation of the facts of a case the WashCo Sheriff is looking into.

No.  It’s the title.  “Homophobic Vandalism hits in Bachmann Country“.

Not one word connecting the vandalism (which, incidentally, I condemn) to Minnesota’s most conservative representative.

Not one bit of evidence that indicates the graffiti was politically-related at all. 

Bachmann’s opponents are to derangement what Nicole Ritchie is to “vacuous”.

UPDATE: I’m going to recap what commenter Thorley Winston said; the correct response to this crime is to condemn the act of vandalism without qualification. And I do. I hope they catch the little twerp – and I’d suspect Rep. Bachmann does, too.

Just a hunch, but I’m comfortable with it.

The other day, I wrote a piece about regional DFL activists and media figures trafficking in what I perceive (correctly, I think) to be Administration talking points.

Pat Kessler – WCCO’s long-time Capitol correspondent and one of Minnesota’s foremost political journalists – notes that he’s been sending the following clarification to emailers asking about the appearance on KFAN that started the brouhaha:

You need to know I did not call health care opponents racists.

What I said Saturday was that some of the tension around the debate over President Obama’s policies is ‘about race’- some; not all or even most, but some.

I also referred to ‘code words’ and phrases, and I could have been clearer.  I did not mean that everyone who uses such language intends it to frighten or disparage black people.  However, it is a matter of historical fact that certain rhetoric has had that impact in the past, and that some black people might — and do– interpret it that way today.

Well, fair enough, as far as it goes.

But – and I’m not aiming this at Kessler, specifically – there’s another set of code words and phrases at play here.  There’s a solid case to be made that the biggest divide Obama brings out in America is class, not race.

Class is all over the place these days.  From Obama’s two-tiered healthcare plan and the privately-educated elites’ assault on vouchers and school choice to Elizabeth Gates’ snarks about Sgt. Crowley’s eye liner, the Obama Administration is all about class divides; the nation’s self-appointed brain trust has gotten the hoi-polloi to anoint one of them (of a conveniently PR-worthy race) as president, and now they’re getting their due, exorcising their white liberal guilt at the wheel of the biggest spending machine in history.

And the campaign against dissent is dredging up – and creating – all kinds of code words to keep the peasants down and in their place.  Dissent from Obamacare, from Porkulus and the Eternal Deficit is compared with a regime that murdered tens of millions and made toothbrush mustaches forever out; gigglingly linked with a mild but lurid sex act generally associated with homosexual relations; lumped with a hare-brained “birther” conspiracy that every significant dissenter has repudiated; put on watch lists and impugned with the slander that it is sympathetic with likes of Timothy McVeigh and Gordon Kahl, even with the idea of killing the President.

In short – dissent is called the province of the ignorant, depraved and, let’s face it, “racist” masses that the government needs to protect the rest of America from.

America has a racist past, it’s true.  Unlike every other significant nation on earth, America has spent the past 150 years wrestling with that past, in its own imperfect way.

Maybe all that prejudice and hate need to go somewhere; the people who dare to dissent while middle-class and unconnected with clout are the unlucky, and absolutely permissible, targets.

For eight years during the Bush Administration, we saw an endless parade of left-leaning pundits decrying the “incivility” in American politics – especially the “hate” hiding in the rhetorical bushes on talk radio. 

Now, I am not, nor have I ever been, one of those people who whinges about how “politics is the nastiest it’s ever been”; the 1824 election pretty well takes that cake, and 1928 and 1932 were no walks in the park.

And it’s not like casual defamation has never cropped up its ugly head; Hillary Clinton famously wrote all opposition to her husband off to a shadowy “vast, right wing conspiracy”.  It was a dumb, clumsy, incoherent effort that ended up backfiring, albeit not in a big way. 

But I’m not aware of a sitting administration that has ever tried to systematically portray its entire opposition as depraved and anti-American – indeed, anti-human – ever.

And for a movement that spent eight years wetting its pants about “civility”, it’s an interesting switch.

It’s a predictable one, of course.  The Obama Campaign, trained as it was in the Saul Alinsky “Rules for Radicals” school of campaigning, has absorbed most of the biggest, ugliest lessons from its radical forebears:  make it personal, do whatever it takes to separate the target from their supporters, and don’t let little things like facts get in the way of sliming the opposition.  And I certainly don’t recall a conservative doing any such thing to a Democrat.

(“But wait!  What about Limbaugh?  He makes everything personal!”  Well, no – Limbaugh’s an entertainer, not the voice of the GOP.  And I have a hard time taking anyone seriously who claims to get the vapors over Limbaugh but is fine with Keith Olbermann or James Carville).

(“But what about the Swiftboaters!”  Look – you can believe them or you can disbelieve them – I happen to believe them, obviously, and for good reason – but if you can’t see the difference between attackign a candidate over a point of fact, rightly or wrongly, and attacking an entire class of people, then you truly belong in the Dem party).

Still, over this past week it sorta came home here in the Twin Cities.

• On Sunday’s At Issue, DFL operative Blois Olson said that Tea Partiers were “Birthers” – people who believe that Barack Obama doesn’t meet the citizenship requirements to be President.  To kype a line from Walt Whitman, I refute Olson thus; I attended a Tea Party, and I spoke at another one, and I’ll be speaking at at least one more – and I’m not a birther.  Not at all.  I don’t suspect more than one in ten people at these rallies gives the “Birther” conspiracy the faintest credence.
• On Ron Rosenbaum’s show over the weekend, Pat Kessler, the (media cliche alert) Dean of Minnesota Political Reporters, claimed that opponents of the President’s healthcare proposal are motivated by “racism”.

If you believe that the Obama campaign administration, and especially its tactical brain trust, are taking their cues from Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals”, it makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense is that they seem to believe people are going to sit still and take that kind of mass defamation lying down.

Do they believe that people are going to sit back and let the “elites” call all of us racists?  That we’re going to take “swastika” and “nazi” references in exchange for exercising our God-given right to participate in Democracy?  That we’re all going to get labelled with the dumbest conspiracy meme since “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy?”

That we’ll not spend a few years showing the American people about the real, abiding racism that drives the Dems’ approach to education and social welfare?  Or the whole “Royalty Vs. Peasants” nature of Obamacare, the Education system and so many of the left’s other sacred cows?  How the left systematically attacks things like charter schools and vouchers – minority parents’ only escape valves from the current, broken system?  The number of Dems who believe that 9/11 was an inside job?  The ones who still furtively grump that Bill Burkett was right, and Dan Rather wronged?

The number of Democrats who put their kids in private schools while voting against school choice?  The Democrats’ custom-built escape hatch from socialized medicine for them and their union benefactors?

Are you sure you wanna tie your politics to casual group defamation?

Good grief, I hope not. It’s getting old.

Just a quick note:  Jeff Horwich interviewed me for last week’s installment of In The Loop, which has evolved into one of the flagship productions of MPR’s web presence.  Jeff and I talked about conservatives’ reticence about participating in the census, following on Rep. Bachmanns’ rather famous declaration that she plans on not participating in the next one.

I’m  near the beginning – the “Big Brother is Watching” segment on the really slick little graphic episode navigator (note to self…).  Give the whole broadcast a listen.

About a week ago, the left was all-atwitter at the thought that Sarah and Todd Palin – evangelical fundamentalist “Family Values” conservatives – were getting divorced.  These were largely the same people who found it delightfully ironic that the Palins – being pro-lifers – would have a daughter who’d get pregnant while 17.

Of course, there’s dead silence now that Dan Riehl and Stacy McCain blew the lid completely off the entire fabricated hatchet-job story:

Just in case anyone has arrived late at this news, here are links to major items, arranged in chronological order, in the development of the “Gryphen”/Griffin story:

• Aug. 1: “Palin Divorce Gossip ‘Completely False'” — American Spectator
• Aug. 1: “Quote From Sarah Palin” — The Other McCain
• Aug. 1: “If Your Mother Says She Loves You, Check It Out” — American Spectator
• Aug. 2: ‘Mommy, Why Does My Kindergarten Teacher Lie About Sarah Palin?’ — The Other McCain
• Aug. 2: “Is This Sarah Palin’s Gryphen?” — Riehl World View
• Aug. 3: “Don’t Threaten Dan, Griffin” — The Other McCain
• Aug. 4: “E-Mail to Jesse Griffin” — The Other McCain
• Aug. 4: “Jesse Griffin: Troubling Revelations” — Riehl World View
• Aug. 5: “Jesse Griffin’s Been Lying to His Friends, Too?” — Riehl World View
• Aug. 5: “Jesse Griffin Explained” — Riehl World View
• Aug. 5: “Jesse Griffin Just Keeps Lying” — Riehl World View
• Aug. 5: “Give Jesse Enough Rope” — The Other McCain
• Aug. 5: “Jesse Griffin: Latest Developments” — Riehl World View
• Aug. 5: “Real Facts, Riehl Theory” — The Other McCain
• Aug. 6: “Exit, Lying: School’s Out for Anti-Palin Blogger Jesse Griffin” — The Other McCain
• Aug. 6: “Of Moonbats and ‘Minions'” — The Other McCain
• Aug. 6: “What Is Jesse Griffin Telling Us?” — Riehl World View
• Aug. 7: “Why Did Jesse Quit the Kindergarten?” — Riehl World View

Of course, when it comes to media attacks on conservatives, truth isn’t realy a requisite.
Any of you “Yaaay, the HIPPOCRETS are getting divorced!” folks out there have a comment?

To: Service Employees Internation Union

CC: President Barack Obama

From:  Mitch Berg Nazi  mobster  part of immense conspiracy   insurance company hack  Citizen

Dear SEIU:

I’ll be attending quite a number of events related to “Obamacare” for the duration of this administration.  I will be speaking out.

I dare you to try to mix it up with me.

Just so you have no excuse, I’m this guy:

Try to get in my face.

I dare you.

That is all.
With no due respect,

Mitch Berg

Twelve years ago, Clinton Derangement Syndrone swept many reaches of the American right.  Fringe-y conservative pundits claimed Clinton had done everything from murdering Vince Foster to giving prisoners AIDS-tainted blood to (I’m getting a little foggy on the story) make money from the hike in blood prices (?).

Over the past eight or so years, the debt was repaid with loan-shark interest; Bush Derangement Syndrome (he brought down the Twin Towers, doncha know) spawned at least two broadast radio networks and most of MSNBC’s current lineup.

But this pathology is evolving into an uglier, more virulent pathology.  Because while distrusting the government is normal (and to a certain degree healthy), when the government and its attendant “elites” start assuming the people are some sort of mass of depraved animals, it’s a very bad thing.

Paul Krugman, Nobel prize winner, is shocked – shocked – that people are upset about Obamacare.

And he just can’t find a historical precedent for the anger he thinks he’s seeing:

That’s a far cry from what has been happening at recent town halls, where angry protesters — some of them, with no apparent sense of irony, shouting “This is America!” — have been drowning out, and in some cases threatening, members of Congress trying to talk about health reform.

(Because members of Congress, especially those who support Obama, just can’t get heard in this day and age, can they?)

Some commentators have tried to play down the mob aspect of these scenes, likening the campaign against health reform to the campaign against Social Security privatization back in 2005. But there’s no comparison. I’ve gone through many news reports from 2005, and while anti-privatization activists were sometimes raucous and rude, I can’t find any examples of congressmen shouted down, congressmen hanged in effigy, congressmen surrounded and followed by taunting crowds.

And, Paul Krugman, you can’t find any examples of union goons beating up dissenters in 2005, either, can you?

What possible difference is there between now and then?  Between the Social Security debate and Obamacare? I’ll let you take a moment and turn that keen, Princeton-trained mind on solving that little riddle as we move on?

And I can’t find any counterpart to the death threats at least one congressman has received.

Paul Krugman:  you seriously claim you can’t find any expression of anger in the past, say, eight and a half years, any expression of rage that overtopped the banks of sanity?

OK – that’s two jobs for that keen, Nobel-prize-winning intellect to tackle.

We’ll take a detour through crummy journalism…:

So this is something new and ugly. What’s behind it?

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, has compared the scenes at health care town halls to the “Brooks Brothers riot” in 2000 — the demonstration that disrupted the vote count in Miami and arguably helped send George W. Bush to the White House. Portrayed at the time as local protesters, many of the rioters were actually G.O.P. staffers flown in from Washington.

But Mr. Gibbs is probably only half right. Yes, well-heeled interest groups are helping to organize the town hall mobs. Key organizers include two Astroturf (fake grass-roots) organizations: FreedomWorks, run by the former House majority leader Dick Armey, and a new organization called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights.

…because goodness knows a movement like Krugman’s, which depends on MoveOn.org, ACORN, the NEA and the SEIU to get crowds out for events can’t stand the thought of political action groups actually…organizing politics!

But with that out of the way, let’s move on to the casual class defamation:

That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.

Michael Savage told me that the only way Paul Krugman could win a Nobel Prize was by providing sexual favors to Nobel committee members. I think he just might be right.

“Wow”, you might say – “That’s defamatory”.

It would be, if I meant it.  It’d take a bit of scabrous (and in this case fictional) libel from a “source” whose only motivation is hatred for Paul Krugman, and waters it down with just enough weasel words (“he just might be right”) to give myself some ethical wiggle room.
So let’s unpack Krugman’s last paragraph – which is easily the most cynical, stupid paragraph I have ever read in the Old, Gray, Increasingly Demented Lady.

• So Paul Krugman – do the “Birther” “movement” – a paranoid conspiracy theory rejected by the vast majority of Obama’s opponents – and opposition to Obamacare – which is based on an empirical reading of the supply and demand for healthcare, as well as the real-life experiences of healthcare consumers in Canada and the UK – actually share a “driving force”, or do they only “probably” share one?   Because when you say…
• “…we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers”, and you “wouldn’t be surprised” if it was plenty?  That’s called “weasel words”.  You don’t know.  And worse, your only “source” is…
• …Dick “Turban” Durbin, who is one of the weasels being pummeled in public, and whose contempt for the opinion of the American Peasant is summed up by his support for reintroducing the “Fairness” Doctrine, and whose hostility to dissent is famous.

What is the difference, precisely, between Krugman’s real paragraph and my made-up one?

Does this sound familiar? It should: it’s a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites…But right now Mr. Obama’s backers seem to lack all conviction, perhaps because the prosaic reality of his administration isn’t living up to their dreams of transformation. Meanwhile, the angry right is filled with a passionate intensity.

And in Paul Krugman’s special little world, “right wing intensity” can only come from some depraved, immoral motive.

That is the legacy of the Obama administration, so far; dissent is worse than unpaatriotic; it is depraved.

They hate you.

(Via Mr. D @ TvM)