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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or…does he?

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

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

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

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

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

Still, I cannot bring myself to play the card.

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

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

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

Right.

So what?

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

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

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

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

Right.

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

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

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

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

Just curious.

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

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

And I thought…:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, the whamma-jamma charge:

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

Wow. 

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

Of course, it’s not.

How do we know?   Onward:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So let’s reset:

Here is the story they actually have:

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

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

Only problem:  It’s all a lie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next, Blumenthal digs back age…18?

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

Stop the presses; a teenager saying something stupid. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Um, huh? 

Again – asking politically-incorrect questions is racism?

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

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

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

Some posts practically write themselves.

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

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

J-Lo calling Palin a “crazy bitch”?

Um…

…yeah.

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

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

So far, so good.

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

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

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

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

Or both?

King:

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

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

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

How do we count the ways?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah.  I think that was what Gandhi said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“…my people…”

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

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

Blueshirt this.

Here’s one for the Hall of Shame.

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

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

The Sorosphere leapt into action.  To pick three examples:

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

“Inflammatory rhetoric”.  Heh. 

Heh.  Heh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Matt?  Dusty?  “Think?” 

All of you leftyblog hamsters?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disavowing?

Repudiating?

Chiding?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…has gotten so very conscientious…

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

…for moronic political effect.

Well played, Left!

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

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

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

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

 Yadda yadda.

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

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

Bachmann backs off from Holocaust images

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

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

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

Deal?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mindemann:

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

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

Who might that be?

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

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

Who, pray tell?

Joe McCarthy.

{{facepalm}}

Wow.  Never heard that one before.

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

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

Wow.  Speaking of paranoia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mindemann comes oh-so-close to an answer…

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

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

…but swerves away.

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

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

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

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

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

Hold that thought for another year.

But at this moment, that seems nearly impossible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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!

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.