Category Archives: Slander Files

Catalogueing the ongoing, systematic slander of conservatives, individually and as a group, by the Big Left and its minions.

The NRA Is The Mainstream

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Wonder why Obama’s gun grab legislation tanked – and, beyond that, why Obama quietly tried to appropriate the “guards in schools” idea for himself?

Because the American public – the part west of the Hudson and east of the Sierra Madre, anyway – is closer to the NRA than they are to Obama:

After the NRA school-guard strategy was roundly denounced as outright crazy by the pundits, — the editors of theNew York Times called it “delusional, almost deranged” — President Obama came out with … aproposal for armed guards in schools. It is no small feat for an out-of-touch, on-the-ropes organization to get the president to basically endorse its signature policy proposal at a time of national debate.

But, then again, it turned out that 55% of Americans supported the NRA proposal. Turns out, it was the people calling it crazy — like the editors of the New York Times— who were out of the mainstream.

Meanwhile, pundits denounced gun-rights activists who said that the right to bear arms is in part a protection against government tyranny. Only a crazed militia type could possibly believe that, right? Except that — go figure — 65% of Americans see gun rights as a protection against tyranny. And only 17% say they disagree. Once again, it’s the critics who appear to be out of the mainstream.

We Second Amendment Human Rights activists have always known this, of course.

We just have to keep coming back and proving it every few years.

And I suspect we always will.

Chanting Points Memo: Only The Master Gets To Write Gun Control Laws

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Over the years on this blog, I’ve made certain observations about human behavior as manifested through online media, like blogs and Twitter.

I’ve captured and codifed some of these observations as “Berg’s Law“, a series of common observations that I’m pretty sure are universal.

One of the most commonly-invoked Laws is “Berg’s Seventh Law”, which states “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds”.

I’ve rung up quite a number of occurrences of Berg’s 7th over the years. And I’ve found another.

Big-time.

Continue reading →

All The Facts That The Agenda And Narrative Demand

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Sean Higgins at the WashEx finds yet another case of a major-media “fact-checker” burying inconvenient facts to slander gun owners.

Washington Post Fact Check columnist Glenn Kessler gives Rep. Louis Gohmert, R-Texas, “three pinocchios” for claiming, as he did yesterday on Fox News Sunday, that so-called right-to-carry laws reduce crime. So, that’s settled then? There’s no evidence that the laws do that? Err, no … as Kessler’s own column indicates.

“When right-to-carry laws had a surge in popularity in the 1990s, a common liberal argument against them was that this would lead to an increase in gun violence. Stands to reason, right? More guns means more gun crime.”

“Except it didn’t happen. Gun violence overall has declined, horrible incidents like Friday’s notwithstanding. Economist John Lott has argued in his book, More Guns, Less Crime (written with David Mustard) that the concealed carry laws actually reduce crime. It was his work that Gohmert was presumably referencing.”

Well, among others.

Read the whole thing.  Sean Higgins at the WashEx shows where the WaPo left the whole “fact” thing behind.  It seems they find facts that conflict with a tidy narrative to be just too confusing.

Y’know, as the mainstream media slowly dies off, you’d think one of them might figure out that a feature that checks the facts of the MSM’s legions of biased, narrative-driven “fact-checkers” would be good business.

Unless the media, like the Democrats they support, are banking their entire future on the “low-information consumer”.

Trolling For Ringers

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The media is having its usual bout of victorian vapours over this picture.

This would fool MPR, the AP, or any leftyblogger.

But as Stacey McCain notes, there is just not a chance in hell this isn’t a false-flag:

I can pretty much guarantee that this man photographed at a Romney rally in Lancaster, Ohio, is not in fact a Republican, but rather is a plant sent out by the Democrats as a dirty trick.

  • Clue #1: Wearing a “Romney/Ryan” sticker on the back of his T-shirt. Nobody does this. Nobody.
  • Clue #2: It’s kind of chilly in Ohio this time of year, and the guy’s wearing only a T-shirt, while those around him are wearing coats.

What’s the old saying?  ”If something is too good to be true, it probably is”?

That’s true for photographs too, isn t it?

My guess is that this guy also wore a coat when he entered the rally, then stationed himself toward the back of the crowd (in front of the riser where the press photographers are stationed) and then removed his coat to expose the T-shirt, with the explicit purpose of having it photographed.

  • . . . aaanndd, Clue #3: No name? A press photographer is going to take a picture like this and make no effort to ID the guy? Nuh-uh.

Fearless prediction:  This will turn out to be a bit of false-flag slander.  This is what the Democrats, nationally and here in Minnesota, do when they’re in trouble.

Second fearless prediction:  given the way it’s disappeared from the media, they are probably on the brink of finding that the shooting at the Obama headquarters in Denver was a false-flag, too – just like the one four years ago.

The Progressive Provincials

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It’s been my theory for a long time that liberals in Minnesota are incapable of carrying on an informed civil debate because in places like the Twin Cities – and in some careers, all of Minnesota – liberals can, or at least could until recently, go an entire lifetime without encountering a conservative thought.

From the left-safe, feminized public school system, through the eliminationist “progressive” ghetto of the university system, a young person can spend the first 20-odd years of their life without ever encountering a conservative opinion on a level deeper than a progressive’s cliche.  If they go into a career dominated by the left – teaching, academia, journalism, civil service work – and/or live in a place dominated by the left, like New York, Minneapolis or Madison, they can carry that ignorance well into middle age.

David French at The Corner has a similar, complementary observation; his thesis, that liberals in major liberal centers are much more prone to speaking and acting out of incivility and hatred, comes from the lack of diversity in these liberal centers:

The heartland of American leftism is less intellectually diverse than any large conservative community in the United States. The entire cities of New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. are less politically diverse than your average Evangelical megachurch.

Don’t believe me? In 2008, McCain/Palin won 73 percent of the Evangelical/born-again vote. By contrast, San Francisco gave Obama/Biden 84 percent of its votes. All the boroughs of New York City (except Staten Island) went for Obama by wider margins than 73 percent, with Manhattan giving Obama 85 percent of its votes. There were similar numbers for Philadelphia and Washington D.C. In other words, these major American cultural centers are less diverse than churches entirely filled with self-selecting populations of Bible-believing Christians. Leftists have greater group solidarity than Christians.

French quotes that noted liberal tool Cass Sunstein, in a Harvard Law Review article called “The Law of Group Polarization”:

 In a striking empirical regularity, deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation judgments. For example, people who are opposed to the minimum wage are likely, after talking to each other, to be still more opposed; people who tend to support gun control are likely, after discussion, to support gun control with considerable enthusiasm; people who believe that global warming is a serious problem are likely, after discussion, to insist on severe measures to prevent global warming. This general phenomenon — group polarization – has many implications for economic, political, and legal institutions. It helps to explain extremism, “radicalization,” cultural shifts, and the behavior of political parties and religious organizations; it is closely connected to current concerns about the consequences of the Internet; it also helps account for feuds, ethnic antagonism, and tribalism.

Which explains everything from Pauline Kael to Mike Malloy.

This next graf deserves to be a quote of the day somewhere:

 It is a truism of American life that unless a conservative turns off all technology, grabs a gun and a dog, and heads for the hills, he will be exposed to an avalanche of liberal thought and ideas — in education, television, movies, and the Internet. Liberals, by contrast, can and often do live lives isolated from conservative thought, and their ignorance of our ideas is starting to show.

I was very left-of-center when I was a kid; chalk it up to my family.  But it was in a place where, once I got out of the house, conservatism was everywhere.  I never had the luxury of thinking that my point of view was the only point of view – indeed, I converted to conservatism in college, largely due to the efforts of an English professor, of all things.

I was apparently lucky:

 I was first exposed to liberal ignorance of conservatism way back in 1991. I was a new law student and had just walked out of a class with my ears still ringing from the boos, hisses, and jeers at my conservative arguments. A classmate came up to me and said, “I wish they’d let you speak. I’d never heard anything like what you were saying and wanted to hear more.”

I was shocked. I was merely making a standard conservative argument — breaking no new ideological ground. “You’ve never heard an argument like that? Where did you go to college?”

“Princeton.”

Some liberal once told me: “Ignorance breeds hate.” I couldn’t agree more.

And if you’re a conservative in a place like, well, Wisconsin, you don’t need this explained.

Compare And Contrast

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I’m not going to get into the politics of the shooting at the Family Research Council headquarters.

Neither are the leftymedia.  In stark contrast to…

  • the Aurora shooting, where NBC’s Brian Ross falsely identified shooter Holmes as a Tea Party organizer
  • the Tucson massacre, where the blood hadn’t dried before the leftymedia gravely blamed it all on Sarah Palin’s rhetoric
  • The Discovery Network incident, in which a nutcase with a gun and a bomb took over the network’s lobby.  It was blamed on conservatives, until it turned out James Jay Lee was a Zero Population Growth advocate inspired by Obama’s “Science Czar” John Holgren (at which point the story disappeared)
  • the Pentagon Subway shooting, which the left and media (ptr) blamed on the Tea Party until it turned out John Patrick Bedell was a lefty (at which point the story disappeared)
  • the Austin, TX airplane crash, in which a lone pilot crashed a light plane into the skyscraper housing the Austin, Texas IRS office.  Blamed, naturally, on the Tea Party, until it got out that Joseph Stack was an anti-Bush zealot (at which point the story disappeared)
  • The death of Bill Sparkman, which the media hurried to pin on Michele Bachmann, until it turned out he was a lefty too (at which point the story disappeared)

…the media are being very circumspect about politicizing the incident.

Why, maybe they’ve learned their lesson!

Or maybe they are, as always, serving the narrative, if they bothered to note the incident at all.

There’s A There, There

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A couple of stipulations up front before we cut to the chase:

  1. I’m not going to say Michele Bachmann hasn’t occasionally observed a “Ready! Fire! Aim!” approach to some of the things she’s commented on over the years.  She’s tightened up her messaging a lot, of course, since deciding to run for President – but whenever I see a chorus of leftybloggers bleating “did you see what teh crazee Mishele Bachmannn said?”, I still occasionally take a deep breath and brace myself.  Of course, it’s more and more an automatic rather than a reasoned thing.  But we’ll come back to that.
  2. I do think many American conservatives are way too exercised about the Muslim Brotherhood.  They are a big, loosely-knit movement with a lot of different histories in a lot of different nations. Some parts were radicalized by being pushed underground – think the IRA.  Other parts, in other nations, less so, or at least in different ways.  It remains to be seen what their majority in Egypt will turn out like – and they are far from the only force in Egypt that could drag that mess into the toilet – but they’ve been a broadly good influence in Libya, and neutral at worst in Tunisia.
  3. Some decry the fact that some Muslim Brotherhood national parties would re-institute Sharia law if they get their way in their various nations.  So don’t move there!   They’re sovereign countries and making – for the moment – democratic decisions.  They get to do that.  At best, the Brotherhood will bring Islam, and Sharia, out into the open, where it can bump up against the 21st century and, with a little luck, the motives and desires and political demands of people with more exposure to the modern world than, say, Afghans.  Am I being a pollyanna?  Perhaps.  Or maybe just tired of fighting unneeded battles.

With that out of the way, it’s hard to miss the cascade of caterwauling that’s greeted Michele Bachmann’s statements (along with those of four other House Republicans – Louie Gohmert (TX), Trent Franks (AZ), Tom Rooney (FL), and Lynn Westmorland (GA).  ”Why, even John McCain is bagging on her!”, the liberals, and not a few Republicans, phumpher – as if that were news.  McCain even throws out the dreaded “M” word, “McCarthy”, which Democrats have turned into a rhetorical nuclear option over the decades (ignorant of the irony; McCarthy was right, there were communist infiltrators, although as his hunt went on it became both too broad and way too easily caricatured.

Speaking of McCarthy, the National Review’s Andrew McCarthy – presumably no relation – unloads on McCain, and Bachmann’s critics, with an excellent, moderately lengthy piece that documents both Huma Abedin’s real, honest-to-pete links to the Muslim Brotherhood (read the article), and shreds the notion that Bachmann et al were “witchhunting”, but rather…:

The five House conservatives, instead, are asking questions that adults responsible for national security should feel obliged to ask: In light of Ms. Abedin’s family history, is she someone who ought to have a security clearance, particularly one that would give her access to top-secret information about the Brotherhood? Is she, furthermore, someone who may be sympathetic to aspects of the Brotherhood’s agenda, such that Americans ought to be concerned that she is helping shape American foreign policy?

Now, Senator McCain is no stranger to smear. No need to confirm that with Mr. ElBaradei; we’ve watched for years as he has slandered, for example, critics of his advocacy for illegal aliens as “nativists” seeking to reprise Jim Crow laws. Nevertheless, since McCain purports to be a tireless guardian of our security, one would think he’d appreciate the distinction between a smear, on the one hand, and a routine application of security-clearance standards, on the other

…as well as illuminates some of McCain’s own flip-floppery on the issue:

So, the reporter asked him, does Obama’s tolerance of the Muslim Brotherhood “concern you”?

 

Senator Maverick shot back without hesitation: “It concerns me so much that I am unalterably opposed to it. I think it would be a mistake of historic proportions.”

 

Senator McCain elaborated that he was “deeply, deeply concerned that this whole movement [toward democracy] could be hijacked by radical Islamic extremists.” And what, he was specifically asked, “is your assessment of the Muslim Brotherhood”? McCain pulled no punches:

 

“I think they are a radical group that, first of all, supports sharia law; that in itself is anti-democratic — at least as far as women are concerned. They have been involved with other terrorist organizations and I believe that they should be specifically excluded from any transition government”

 

In fact, so apprehensive was he over the Brotherhood and its sharia agenda that McCain was quick to brand Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate, as a Brotherhood tool.

By the way, Rep. Bachmann has claimed – with some considerable justification – that her words have been distorted and wrenched out of context, and she’s released all her communications on the subject to prove it.  You be the judge.

So the flap isn’t about “witchhunting” Muslims in government.  It’s about transparency and honesty about influence at the highest levels (as Rep. Bachmann’s letter to Rep. Ellison, whose has denied any knowledge of the Muslim Brotherhood, although his 2008 trip to Mecca was largely bankrolled by a group that, court documents indicate, is affiliated with the Brotherhood) makes clear.  It’s about transparency.

Lessons from this incident?  Simple:  When the media sounds off on conservatives, distrust, verify, and almost always distrust some more.

Personally?  I’m not sure that the Brotherhood is the suffocating danger that some conservatives claim, and even if it were, those are sovereign nations.  And I suspect Huma Abedin’s connections to the Georgetown Political Science Elite and Keith Ellison’s membership in the DFL are of more immediate danger to this nation and state, to be honest.

But since the subject is honesty – the flap about Bachmann seems to be little more than Dems trying to draw attention away from the real issue; Hillary Clinton and Keith Ellison’s disingenuity.

There Was A Time I’d Have Called It “Casualty #14″

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That casualty would be “any sense that the media is not working an agenda against conservatives, especially organized conservatives like the Tea Party”.

But that time was many years and at least one set of ideals ago.

During the confusion over the identity of the shooter in Aurora, ABC’s Brian Ross went on the air and reported…

“There’s a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado Tea party site as well, talking about him joining the Tea Party last year. Now, we don’t know if this is the same Jim Holmes. But it’s Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado.”

Which has been, by the way, the leftymedia’s process for reporting on the Tea Party since the very beginning; find the slenderest reed of possible allowing the assumption of guilt, and work back from there (because there will be no consequences).

Brian Moran at Pajamas Media remembers that time as well:

There used to be a time when journalists had a rough integrity about what they said over the air and took pride in striving for accuracy. Who could ever forget ABC’s Frank Reynolds, ABC News anchorman, who, after receiving and announcing word that James Brady had been killed in the Reagan assassination attempt only to discover the press secretary was still alive, got visibly angry and to no one in particular barked on air, “Let’s get this right. Let’s nail this down.”

Today, Stephanopoulos thanked Brian Ross for smearing the Tea Party by reporting a lie. Ross should be suspended or lose his job for this attempt to inject politics into a national tragedy.

I noted the phenomenon years ago; in their unquenchable hunger to demonize the Tea Party – literally, to rhetorically turn them into demons – the media was bending over backwards to find the slenderest reed of association with the Tea Party first, and worry about attribution and proof later.  It was so pervasive, it launched an entire category on this blog, “The Slander Files“, chronicling the left’s demented quest to make the facts, such as they were, fit their narrative.   It’s been a busy category.  Do you remember when…:

Slandering the Tea Party is an exemption from whatever still passes for “Journalistic Ethics”.

Race to the Bottom

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Ebony & Irony

The media begins to chum the political waters for race-baiting.

There was little doubt that race was one of the larger underlying narratives of the 2008 presidential campaign.  The election of the country’s first African-American president, by the largest popular vote margin in twenty years, was widely hailed by Barack Obama’s supporters as a sign that racial relations had truly improved.

And now, what of the electorate that gave Obama 69 million votes, 365 electoral votes, and an 8% margin of victory?  According to the polling analyst du jour, America has not only returned to being a land of racist voters but, in fact, always was:

Though many people believe that our first African-American president won the election thanks in part to increased turnout by African-American voters, Stephens-Davidowitz’s research shows that those votes only added about 1 percentage point to Obama’s totals. “In the general election, this effect was comparatively minor,” he concludes. But in areas with high racial search rates, the fact that Obama is African American worked against him, sometimes significantly.

 

“The results imply that, relative to the most racially tolerant areas in the United States, prejudice cost Obama between 3.1 percentage points and 5.0 percentage points of the national popular vote,” Stephens-Davidowitz points out in his study. “This implies racial animus gave Obama’s opponent roughly the equivalent of a home-state advantage country-wide.”

Apparently Obama was supposed to have won by 11% or even 15%.  Or maybe simply by acclamation.

Where is this thesis of latent racism coming from?  Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a doctoral candidate in economics at Harvard University, who gleaned his insight from that fount of all wisdom – the Internet.

Stephens-Davidowitz coupled internet search histories with racially charged words with searches for “Obama”, compared them to results for the 2004 election, and faster than you can google “the Bradley effect,” surmmerized that Americans are actually super secret racists.  And if you believe the liberal-leaning polling outfit, Public Policy Polling, you may need to add roughly one-quarter of African-American voters to the ranks of the racists since they’ve soured on Obama in North Carolina.  Perhaps Stephens-Davidowitz is saving that study for after he get his doctorate in an unrelated major.

There are a few issues within Stephens-Davidowitz’s thesis that most people wouldn’t contest.  Racists still do exist in some places in America and the electorate’s view on the condition of race relations has plummeted since Barack Obama’s election:

A new Newsweek poll puts this remarkable shift in stark relief for the first time. Back in 2008, 52 percent of Americans told Pew Research Center that they expected race relations to get better as a result of Obama’s election; only 9 percent anticipated a decline. But today that 43-point gap has vanished. According to the Newsweek survey, only 32 percent of Americans now think that race relations have improved since the president’s inauguration; roughly the same number (30 percent) believe they have gotten worse. Factor in those who say nothing has changed and the result is staggering: nearly 60 percent of Americans are now convinced that race relations have either deteriorated or stagnated under Obama.

 

Whites are especially critical of Obama’s approach: a majority (51 percent) actually believe he’s been unhelpful in bridging the country’s racial divide. Even blacks have concluded, by a 20-point margin, that race relations have not improved on Obama’s watch.

A myriad of reasons explain such stark polling data, but it doesn’t help that the media consistently attempts to propagate stories that seek to find racists around every corner.  Especially in political coverage which implies that to oppose President Obama is to oppose him based on the color of his skin.  It’s false and deeply insulting.

It’s also an attempt to prepare the battlefield post November.  As Stephens-Davidowitz concludes:

The state with the highest racially charged search rate was West Virginia, where 41 percent of voters chose Keith Judd, a white man who is also a convicted felon currently in prison in Texas, over Obama just this May. Louisiana, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, Alabama, and New Jersey rounded out the top 10 most-racist areas, according to the search queries used.

…

 

What does this mean for this year’s contest? “Losing even two percentage points lowers the probability of a candidate’s winning the popular vote by a third,” Stephens-Davidowitz explains. “Prejudice could cost Mr. Obama crucial states like Ohio, Florida and even Pennsylvania.”

 

The narrative is set.  If Barack Obama loses re-election, the nation of progressive, racially-harmonious voters will have suddenly become extras in a remake of “Deliverance.”  But is this exactly a wise political strategy?  It’s bad enough when one party blames their defeat on the electorate being stupid enough to fall for the rhetoric of the opposition, but what is there to be gained from inferring that voters are racists?

Do Republicans need to counter that if you vote for Barack Obama, you’re secretly a religious bigot who hates Mormons?  Sheesh.

Intellectual Snake Oil

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Illuminating: See Andrew Ferguson’s The New Phrenology, in the Weekly Standard. It digs through the history (long), motivations (predictable) and methodology (laughable) of the constant dribble of “social science” that claims liberals are genetically/chemically/socially wired to be good-hearted, open-minded, whole human beings, while conservatives are clenched little demi-humans:

It is a principle of psychopunditry that the political differences between right and left—the differences, in Mooney’s scheme, between those who would fearfully deny reality and those who embrace it unafraid—originate in two personality types. As it happens, the liberal personality, as psychopunditry describes it, is a perfect representation of those traits that liberals say they most admire. Liberals are “more open, flexible, curious, nuanced.” Conservatives are “more closed, fixed, and certain in their views.” But don’t get the wrong idea: Mooney insists he is not saying “conservatives are somehow worse people than liberals.” That would be judgmental, and Science is clear: Liberals aren’t judgmental. “The groups are just different,” he goes on amiably. Indeed, he warns that the truths he reveals in his book “will discomfort both sides.” Fairness requires him to be evenhanded. On the one hand, conservatives won’t like the scientific fact that they tend to deny reality and treat their errors as dogma. On the other hand, liberals won’t like the scientific fact that all their well-meaning attempts to reason with conservatives are doomed.

Depressing:  Googling the list of psychopundits and setting how many leftybloggers take the word of the likes of Theodor Adorno seriously.  Or how many NYTimes columnists – Thomas Edsall in this case – cite the infamous ““Power, Distress, and Compassion: Turning a Blind Eye to the Suffering of Others” study as actual hard science.  Or the number of leftybloggers that think Chris Mooney is an actual scientist:

A young psychopundit called Chris Mooney has just published a book entitled The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality, which seeks to explain the Republican “assault on reality.” He is a very earnest fellow, and an ambitious one. He glances over an array of conservative political beliefs and sets himself a goal: “to understand how these false claims (and rationalizations) could exist and persist in human minds.”

His list of false claims is instructive. Along with the usual hillbilly denials of evolution and global warming, they include these, to grab a quick sample: that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2009 will increase the deficit, cut Medicare benefits, and lead to the death panels that Sarah Palin hypothesized; that tax cuts increase revenue and that the president’s stimulus didn’t create jobs; that Congress banned incandescent light bulbs; and that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation.”

The list of errors is instructive because they aren’t properly considered errors, though the misattribution is in keeping with the modern ideologue’s custom of pretending that differences of opinion or interpretation are contests between truth and falsehood. It’s perfectly reasonable for conservatives to assume that offering health insurance to 43 million people will cost a lot of money, and thereby increase the deficit; and it’s perfectly reasonable to distrust notoriously mistaken budget forecasters who say it won’t. The act redirects vast sums away from Medicare, which should require cuts in service. Palin’s “death panel” was a bumper-sticker summary of a rational expectation—that the act will transfer the unavoidable rationing of health care from insurance companies, where most of it rests now, to the government, which will be forced to bureaucratically reshuffle the vast sums spent on end-of-life care. Mooney is right that Congress did not ban the incandescent light bulbs that most of us are used to; but it did ban their manufacture—a distinction without a difference. As for the Christian nation: The country was founded by Christians who nevertheless resolutely declined to create a Christian government. Mooney’s conflation of the American government with the American nation is an error that conservatives are less likely to make. Studies show.

It is a principle of psychopunditry that the political differences between right and left—the differences, in Mooney’s scheme, between those who would fearfully deny reality and those who embrace it unafraid—originate in two personality types.

Someone needs to do a “study” on why liberals are so insecure that they need to constantly puff up their own sense of intellectual entitlement with hack “science”.

Let’s See If I Can Follow This

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According to the Twin Cities’ leftysphere and mainstream media:

  • Writing thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of abusive and harassing tweets about people you disagree with, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including over “work” hours?  Not stalking.
  • Claiming on a large conversation thread on Twitter that someone has been convicted of driving while intoxicated?  Not Stalking.  (OK, it’s legally more like defamation, but it’s part of the previous bullet).
  • Leaving dozens, maybe hundreds, of Google-turds all around the web under a transparent sock-puppet ID (whose source is trivially easy to trace), and setting up a sock-puppet website about an embarassing incident (naturally, with the parts that aren’t embarassing carefully excised away for the perp’s enjoyment) under a false but drearily transparent sock-puppet ID,  with the help of a “source” who should have known better (and does, today), and engaging in this behavior against many, many people under many, many monkers and doing that and much, much more with such demented abandon that when something bad did finally happen, he felt the need to make sure people knew it really really wasn’t him who was responsible, this time:  Good heavens, no – not Stalking, silly wingnut.
  • Going to a public building, with intentions publicly displayed under one’s own name, with a clearly-stated express intent well within the bounds of free speech, and obeying the rules – including the ones about “threatening people” – and doing it while carrying a baby and hauling a stroller:  “Stalking”

I’ve always tried to treat people the way I’d like to be treated.  Seriously, I do – I mean, a good chunk of the Twin Cities left think that “Expressing any sort of conservative opinion” is a form of assault, but beyond that I do try to keep things on the up and up.

But I have had about enough.

Association

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The media is all abuzz over Ted Nugent’s  rather inflammatory commentary at the NRA convention.

I was struck my Andrea Mitchell’s comments on the Today show this morning – every line of the story included a carefully-enunchated to Nugent being a “Mitt ROMney supporter…”

I guess it’s a good thing that I can still be amazed by anything; after my decades of pointing out the bias and perfidy of the mainstream media, it’s probably a good thing I can still be this outraged.

Dear mainstream media (and idiot leftybloggers); if I say I “support” Mark Dayton, and then go rob a bank, it doesn’t make Mark Dayton complicit in the crime.

Further proof that the Democrats’ main constituency is the stupid.

Democrats: Continuing To Elevate The Dialog

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A Maine state Democrat legislator urges Dick Cheney’s execution:

Rep. Chuck Kruger (D-Thomaston)…used his Twitter account to express his view that former Vice President Dick Cheney should be executed…Kruger made the statement through his Twitter account this past summer, saying, “Cheney deserves same final end he gave Saddam. Hope there are cell cams,” a reference to technology that would allow Kruger to watch the proposed execution of the former Vice President of the United States.

But at least there were no crosshairs involved.  And he didn’t mention the word “reloading”.  So it must be OK.

The funny part?  Kruger is the chair of the Maine Legislature’s “Moderate Caucus”:

This comment has led some to question the validity of Kruger’s moderate credentials.

Lori Sturdevant and Brian Lambert will vouch for him.

“Did He Say The Media Is Disingenuous, Or Disgusting?”

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Hot on the heels of yesterday’s revelation that NBC altnered the tape of George Zimmerman’s 911 call to bump up the “Racist” factor comes the news that Zimmerman didn’t say “It’s a f****ng coon”, but rather “It’s f***ng cold“.

CNN cleaned up the audio from the 911 call.  I took a listen to it.  While some quibble, it seemed pretty clear to me that Zimmerman was saying it was “f****ng cold”.  You be the judge.

If that’s the case – and I believe it is – then what we have here is a case of the media (aka “Obama’s Praetorian Guard”) committing a series of calculated lies, or at least making a curiously congruent set of unwarranted assumptions, that might not have been carefully designed to whip up racial tensions on the part of blacks (to draw their attention away from their catastrophic unemployment rate under Obama) and against civilian gun ownership (so as to make white liberals like “Spotty“, among many others, care about just another dead black kid) – but it’s hard to see how events and news would have unfolded differently if they had been trying.

We saw all of this here in the Twin Cities last fall with the Evanovich case; until Mike Freeman, the Henco prosecutor, exonerated the shooter, the local media was doing its absolute level best to whip up exactly the same combination of racial and anti-gun frenzy.

I was going to invoke Berg’s Seventh Law: “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.”  But it doesn’t completely appliy.  It’s actually a contender to be a corollary to Berg Seven, if not a law unto itself:

“Any time the liberal media (to say nothing of leftyblogs) “reports” on guns or race, they should be distrusted but verified.  And then, almost invariably, distrusted some more“.

I lost count of the cases in point decades ago.

Fake But Accurate, Chapter MMMCXXXIX

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NBC’s editing of George Zimmerman’s 911 call just happened to make his statement sound frothingly racist.

Here’s what Today show listeners heard:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.

Here’s what he actually said:

Zimmerman: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.

Dispatcher: OK, and this guy — is he black, white or Hispanic?

Zimmerman: He looks black.

Got that?

The editing changed Zimmerman’s statement from an answer to a dispather’s request for information  into an affirmatively racist statement.

Erik Wemple at the WaPo:

No matter how you feel about Zimmerman, that bit of tape editing was unfair to the truth and to Zimmerman’s reputation, such as it is. Reaction on Twitter and elsewhere to my previous post on this matter, was brutal toward NBC, with many comments suggesting the worst about the network’s motivations, reliability and so on.

And why might that be?

Because every editing “flub”, every “fake but accurate” story that gets past the “layers and layers of gatekeepers”, just happens to defame someone liberals want defamed?

Nah, it must be us.

NBC “apologized”:

During our investigation it became evident that there was an error made in the production process that we deeply regret. We will be taking the necessary steps to prevent this from happening in the future and apologize to our viewers.

Read: “The damage we wanted done is done; the Democrat / media (ptr) narrative was served.  We’ll try to be more artful in our slander next time, so as not to get caught”.

Bias?  What bias?

Remedial Bonehead Legal Education

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As we grind on through the ongoing morass of the Martin case in Florida, it occurs to me that there’s an article I should have written a month ago, when the “Stand Your Ground” bill was wending its way toward Governor “I’ve Got Two .357 Magnums” Dayton’s dim-witted veto.

It turns out a lot of liberals – in Minnesota and nationwide – are really unclear on basic logic, to say nothing of how the law works.

So as mu public service to the left, to try to educate them to a point where they might be able to participate literately in discussing the issue, I’m here out of pure unvarnished compassion to help them out.

Well, Freaking Duh! – I’ve brought this one up before – but as long as liberals say it, I’m going to have to repeat it. Lefties like to refer to “Stand Your Ground” bills as “Shoot First” bills. And I have to ask – have any of you hamsters ever thought about what happens in a legitimate self-defense situation when you shoot second?

No, I guess not. I’ll give you a subtle hint; you get kidnapped, raped, strangled, stabbed and shot.

“Shooting Second” is a really lousy idea.

(I know, I know – they’re trying to “frame” the term. And I’m just doing my best to have the frame blow up in their faces).

More Of That There Fancy Law Talk – When trying to explain what’s wrong with “Stand Your Ground” laws, liberals will get hushed, snd solemnly intone that “they mean people can shoot in self-defense if they feel they’re being threatened”. They usually follow up with one of those Jon Stewart smirks.

And I’m forced to slow waaaaay down – not so much “theatrically” as out of hope that exaggeraged emphasis will help me cut through the sludgy wall of intellectually-entitled smugness – and ask “what do you think people claim when it comes to “self-defense” in any state, regardless of whether it’s a “Stand Your Ground” state like Florida, or a place that actively persecutes the law-abiding gun owner, like the District of Columbia?”

“It is ALWAYS based on someone’s “Feeling” that they are in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm.. Always, always, always.”

“I mean, what do you think – that in Minnesota, there’s a Predator drone up aloft carrying out surveillance over dark alleys and trailer parks, so that there’s a photographic, objective trail of empmrrical third-party evidence as to which shootings are or are not self-defense?\  Flying up there with the unicorns that have all the money for your governlment spending plans?”

“No – in all 50 states and the D of C, self-defense is always, always, always, no exceptions about a party claiming to have felt in imminent danger of death or great harm. The difference is in how state law treats it; in Minnesota, the shooter has to prove the shooting was justified; in about half the states, the county attorney has to prove they weren’t”.

They usually run crying to their TV to see what Bill Maher tells them around this point.

Guess They’re Gonna Have To Get Themselves Some New Sinister Villains

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Remember those hazy, crazy days three years ago? When Americans were just starting to rebel against Barack Obama’s encroaching socialism? And the Administration responded by starting its endless search for that elusive conservative hate group that would justify all the paranoia that Janet Napolitano was channeling through the media?  When Homeland Security started distributing “watch lists” including tax protesters, pro-life groups and everyone who’d ever gone skeet shooting?

And how the left tittered with glee when they finally found their “right wing bitter gun-clinging extremist militia group” all chock-a-block with “weapons of mass destruction” that were ready to launch their holy war against all that was enlightened?

No?

Well, then the Administration will be happy.

But I remember “the Hutaree”, the hapless MIchigan “militia” group that coudln’t shoot straight…

…or, apparently, actually justify any of the federal charges heaped upon them:

DETROIT — A federal judge on Tuesday gutted the government’s case against seven members of a Michigan militia, dismissing the most serious charges in an extraordinary defeat for federal authorities who insisted they had captured homegrown rural extremists poised for war.

U.S. District Judge Victoria Roberts said the members’ expressed hatred of law enforcement didn’t amount to a conspiracy to rebel against the government. The FBI had secretly planted an informant and an FBI agent inside the Hutaree militia starting in 2008 to collect hours of anti-government audio and video that became the cornerstone of the case.

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“The court is aware that protected speech and mere words can be sufficient to show a conspiracy. In this case, however, they do not rise to that level,” the judge said on the second anniversary of raids and arrests that broke up the group.

Roberts granted requests for acquittal on the most serious charges: conspiring to commit sedition, or rebellion, against the U.S. and conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction. Other weapons crimes tied to the alleged conspiracies also were dismissed.

But all that Tea Party violene is out there, somewhere!

Maybe that “cut propane line” at the brother0-in-law of an obscure Democrat operative will pan out into something yet!

Someone Got Shot

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One dark, ambiguous evening, a black youth was shot under circumstances that, to the local media, were confusing. Not much information was available; the youth was shot by a citizen with a legal handgun.  The citizen claimed self-defense.

So the local media did what they always do on big stories – shootings! – when not much information is available, as they waited for the details of the investigation to go public.  They found stuff  to write about.

They interviewed the deceased’s mother and family – who, stricken with grief, demanded justice.  They talked with friends of the deceased, and community leaders, many of whom wondered why the law allowed mere citizens to use lethal force, or to be able to claim “self-defense” with such seeming impunity.

Some of the media’s learned observers scratched their furrowed brows and pondered aloud (or in print) whether the changes the legislature had made in 2005 to the state’s laws regarding self-defense were wise – repeating things many of them had written at the time.

I am of course, not talking about the Trayvon Martin case.  I’m talking the Evanovich case in Minneapolis last fall.  You had the family.  You had the friends and community leaders.  Furrowed learned brows?  Check .

You had everything you have today in the Martin case, with one exception; a resolution.  Media caterwauling notwithstanding, it was a legitimate enough case of self-defense to prompt the frothingly anti-gun, anti-Second-Amendment, anti-law-abiding-citizens-with-guns Hennepin County attorney Mike Freeman to praise the shooter.

The point of this post is not to try to compare the Evanovich and  Martin cases; in terms of the factual and legal specifics, it’d be stupid to try, since we, the non-investigators, know nothing about the facts of the case.

Well, almost nothing; we know what the local Florida and national media have told us about the case.

And if there are any lessons from the Evanovich shooting to apply to the Martin case, they are…:

  1. When it comes to emotionally-charged cases, the media is no better off at getting the facts than we are.  And that’s a best case.  Because…
  2. …whether they will admit it or not, the media has a narrative; the higher up the media food chain you go, the worse it gets.  The law-abiding gun owner, the bitter, gun-clinging Jebus freak, is a powder keg just waiting to blow.  They’ve been saying it, one way or another – if not in their editorial stances, then via their editorial selection bias – since 1983, when Florida passed its “Shall Issue” law.  They did it with each of the 30+ states that have passed similar laws in the past 29 years.  They did it when Florida passed “Stand Your Ground” seven years ago, and in each of the dozens of states that have some combination of “Stand Your Ground” and “Castle” laws.   They’re still predicting it.  We’re still waiting for it to happen.  But hey, it’s only been almost thirty years; one of these days, the powder keg’s just gotta blow, right?

On gun issues even more than most others when it comes to the mainstream media; distrust, then verify.  Then, almost invariably, distrust some more.

That’s not to say the Martin case might very well not be a legitimate shooting.

We don’t know.

And when I say “we”, I mean “especially those of you who get your information on the case from the mainstream media”.

More later.

Nobody Expects The Chicago Inquisition

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You’ve probably seen this story in the past day or so - Bristol Palin calling out the President’s and, especially, liberals’ hypocrisy in re the “war on women”:

You don’t know my telephone number, but I hope your staff is busy trying to find it. Ever since you called Sandra Fluke after Rush Limbaugh called her a slut, I figured I might be next. You explained to reporters you called her because you were thinking of your two daughters, Malia and Sasha. After all, you didn’t want them to think it was okay for men to treat them that way:

“One of the things I want them to do as they get older is engage in issues they care about, even ones I may not agree with them on,” you said. “I want them to be able to speak their mind in a civil and thoughtful way. And I don’t want them attacked or called horrible names because they’re being good citizens.”

And I totally agree your kids should be able to speak their minds and engage the culture. I look forward to seeing what good things Malia and Sasha end up doing with their lives.

All very, very true.

But here’s why I’m a little surprised my phone hasn’t rung. Your $1,000,000 donor Bill Maher has said reprehensible things about my family. He’s made fun of my brother because of his Down’s Syndrome. He’s said I was “f—-d so hard a baby fell out.” (In a classy move, he did this while his producers put up the cover of my book, which tells about the forgiveness and redemption I’ve found in God after my past – very public — mistakes.)

If Maher talked about Malia and Sasha that way, you’d return his dirty money and the Secret Service would probably have to restrain you. After all, I’ve always felt you understood my plight more than most because your mom was a teenager. That’s why you stood up for me when you were campaigning against Sen. McCain and my mom — you said vicious attacks on me should be off limits.

It didn’t work, of course; the hog trough that is the lefty “alternative” media spawned an entire movement of “Triggers”.

Yet I wonder if the Presidency has changed you. Now that you’re in office, it seems you’re only willing to defend certain women. You’re only willing to take a moral stand when you know your liberal supporters will stand behind you.

But…

What if you did something radical and wildly unpopular with your base and took a stand against the denigration of all women… even if they’re just single moms? Even if they’re Republicans?

Y’see, that’s the thing; the President could do it.  He’s got his Daily Koses and Bill Mahers and NPR and a herd of George Stephanopouli to do the actual dirty work for him; the Prez  could take the high road!

But he won’t!

Because Bristol Palin, and Alan West, and 4th CD candidate Tony Hernandez, and every black, hispanic, asian, gay or female Republican conservative that you see is the single biggest threat the Democrats face; they’re the apostates.

As the Democrat parts of this country shrink – mostly due to the pathologies that come from Democrat mismanagement – the Dems big long-term hope is “demographic shift” – the idea that as “minorities” become the majority, the Dems will eventually be unstoppable.

That is, of course, entirely predicated on minorities staying on the plantation. and voting in lock step for Democrats forevermore.  And those that don’t – the apostates – are the greatest threat that exists to that vision.

Centuries ago, as the Catholic Church’s struggling and corrupt bureaucracy struggled with change, they sent out the various Inquisitions to find and convince the various heretics and apostates to get back in line – by killing them for their own good, if necessary.

It didn’t prevent half a billion unforced turnovers as the Protestant movement established itself – but it wasn’t for lack of trying.

Bristol Pallin may not have expected the Chicago Inquisition.  But her mother, and Alan West, and Laura Ingraham and every Asian and Latino conservative that showed up at caucuses this year certainly should.

Because they are the visible signs of the Democratic party bleeding to death.

Trading Mexican Lives For Public Relations

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Via Breitbart, video of Eric Holder in 1995 claiming we need to “Brainwash” the citizenry when it comes to guns:

Holder was addressing the Woman’s National Democratic Club. In his remarks, broadcast by CSPAN 2, he explained that he intended to use anti-smoking campaigns as his model to “change the hearts and minds of people in Washington, DC” about guns.

“What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we changed our attitudes about cigarettes.”

Holder went on, of course, to run one of the most egregiously, disastrously corrupt programs in the history of American government, “Fast and Furious”, a program hatched entirely to trade Mexican (and American) lives for points against the dreaded “gun lobby”.

Local political leaders and celebrities, Holder said, including Mayor Marion Barry and Jesse Jackson, had been asked to help. In addition, he reported, he had asked the local school board to make the anti-gun message a part of “every day, every school, and every level.”

Despite strict gun control efforts, Washington, DC was and remains one of the nation’s most dangerous cities for gun violence, though crime has abated somewhat since the 1990s.

Note to Attorney General Holder:

I shot about 300 rounds over the weekend.

It was cool.

Spread the word!

 

All The News That Can Be Squeedged Into Fitting The Narrative

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Always, always, always – when you see stories in the mainstream media about conservatives’ moral crimes and misdemeanors, remember two things:

  • Berg’s Seventh Law of Liberal Projection – “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds” – has never been challenged, much less repealed.
  • It’s the liberal press.  If’s most likely either painstakingly stripped of context, if it’s not an outright lie.

With that in mindThe Gateway Pundit notes an example of the media jumping all over the story of a “Tea Party Leader” accused of rape.

 

Untrue?  Naturally.  The guy had no connection with any Tea Party organization that anyone with the Tea Party could identify.

We have, of course, run into this before in Minnesota – during the 2010 campaign, Andy Birkey at the Minnesoros “Independent” ran a piece claiming that some schlub who left a profane and insulting message on the AFSCME voice mail was a “Tea Party Organizer”, notwithstanding the fact that not a single actual Tea Party organizer had ever heard of the guy.

If Charles Manson called himself a Tea Partier, the media would run with it.

Making Power Out Of Nothing At All

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Gotta hand it to the DFL.

They’re playing a pair of “fours” this election.   But they’re playing them for all they’re worth.

Intellectually and politically, the DFL is running on fumes this year.  The closest thing they had to a legislative agenda – “tax the rich!” – stalled and died in the legislature.  The regional economy is slowly (sloooooowly) obsoleting their “We have to tax our way out of deficits!” meme.  They’re looking at Obama’s eroding popularity and hoping that the President’s coat tails are like the ones on a tank top.   And redistricting, for all of the partisan media’s backing and filling, looks to be mostly a wash in the near term, and reflects long-term demographic changes that can not bode well for the DFL (other than the progressives’ great long-term fairy tale, “lots of potential liberals are immigrating to the US”, which is of course true provided that we allow generations of new Americans to stay ignorant about what this country’s about – which is, of course, Democrat policy).

In response, the DFL really has only a few points to run on:

“Aren’t Those Republicans Awful People?”  In 1998, when the Democrats had a skirt-seeking missile in the White House, they responded by teaching a generation of American teens that oral sex wasn’t really sex at all, and demanding that we all just Mooooove On.  The French were laughing at us after all.

Now, after a low-grade “sex scandal”, Mary Fransion’s manufactured gaffe and a few other minor incidents, expect the Party of Infanticide to plead “family values”, making me wonder if all those teenagers from the Clinton era – now pushing thirty – will need years of therapy to sort out the mixed messages.

“Just Look At The Economy!” Minnesota’s economy is doing better than most.  Not North Dakota-good, but not bad.  The DFL and media (ptr) will work overtime to convince Minnesotans that correlation – Mark Dayton is governor and the economy sucks less than the rest of the US – equals causation, scrupulously ignoring that it’s the GOP majority in the Legislature that have done all the positive work this past few years (and, likely as not, eight years of Pawlenty’s leadership and four years of his stymying of the DFL that set the stage for the relative level of health we have).

“We Saved The Vikings!”  And they’ll save snowmobiling and binge-drinking, too, if they have to!

The mainstream media – especially the Strib, which profits from the current Dayton/Bakk plan – spun this as a partisan issue (and part of it was; principled conservatives joined a few principled liberals, like John Marty, in rejecting Wilfare), playing up Dayton and Senate Majority Leader Bakk’s “leadership”, and only incidentally scratching the surface of their plan, which seemed to rely on money borne down from heaven on the backs of unicorns. (You can go to MPR to read what I was reporting on two weeks ago, if you’d like).

Of course, with the Senate tabling the bill, that’s looking a little dodgy.  But no worries – the Dems still have the big daddy of them all:

“It’s Inevitable!”  One of my favorite aphorisms is an old Hungarian saying: “the best way to become wealthy is to appear as if you already are”.

The DFL apparently read it too.

The DFL and the media – and on this, as few other issues, when I say “pardon the redundancy”, it rings truer than usual – are doing their best to portray this next election as an inevitable winner for the DFL, for…well, whatever reason.  Redistricting favored them (more on that probably later today), or people are sick of GOP squabbling and want the government to “get things done”, or demographics make it inevitable, or the economy is racing back so fast that Obama’s coattails are going to lift them up, or Minnesotans just loooooooove keeping their beloved government fat and happy…

…or all of the above.  Because the best way to win an election may not in fact be to appear as if you already have – but it doesn’t hurt to add it in there, either.

So this blog will spend a good chunk of the next seven and a half months covering the DFL Ministry of Truth’s attempts at psychological warfare.  There’ll be no shortage of material.