Whiskey Fire

Always Good Faith

You know, I've long thought Bob Somerby is a dick, and here's why.

CAPTURING A WEEK THAT WAS (permalink): Pretty much everyone agrees that Shirley Sherrod is a good, decent person. For ourselves, we’ll throw in a very strong “admirable.” We strongly suggest that you review the part of her speech we posted on Tuesday, the part which deals with her family history from the 1960s. Just take in her mother’s life story! (See THE DAILY HOWLER, 7/27/10.)

Pretty much everyone agrees about Sherrod. For that reason, we’ll start by saying we thought she was pretty much wrong in what she said, in the highlighted statements below, about Andrew Breitbart. Sherrod spoke with Anderson Cooper, three days after Breitbart’s “edited” video clip led to Sherrod’s dismissal:

COOPER (7/22/10): I want to ask you about the man who first posted this edited clip of you, Andrew Breitbart. He said today—and I'm quoting him—he said, quote: “If anybody reads the sainted, martyred Sherrod’s entire speech, this person has not gotten past black vs. white.” Do you think you have gotten past black vs. white?

SHERROD: I know I have gotten past black vs. white. He's probably the person who has never gotten past it and never attempted to get past it. So, he can't see—because he has never tried and because he hasn't, he can't see what I have done to get past it. And he's not interested in what I have done to get past it. I don't think he's interested in seeing anyone get past it, because I think he would like to get us stuck back in the times of slavery. That's where I think he would like to see all black people end up again. And that's why I think he's so vicious.

COOPER: You think—you think he's racist?

SHERROD: Yes, I do. And I think that's why he's so vicious against a black president, you know. He wouldn’t go after me. I don't think it was even the NAACP he was totally after. I think he was after a black president.

Is Breitbart racist? We have no idea, nor can we imagine how Sherrod could know. At which point, of course, some white pseudo-liberals, gripping their catechisms, will rise indignantly from their chairs, trembling with indignation and insisting: But black people can just tell!

This brand of hapless white pseudo-liberalism has never helped anyone much.

Shirley Sherrod (checking) is black. (Re-confirming. Yep, black.)

What she is offering here is the perspective of a black person who has lived through horrible racism as to how Andrew Breitbart's behavior is bound to be perceived by, you know, a black person who has lived through horrible racism. This point may be essential.

What fascinates here is Somerby's jump to whatever the hell "hapless white psuedo-liberalism" is. Which is, uh, weird, as in, who cares?

Can we just pause for a moment and consider what black people feel, or if that makes anyone uncomfy, what Shirley Sherrod is likely to be feeling here? "I grew up with members of my family murdered by white people and their system, and this made me distrust white people and their system, and then I had an epiphany about how some white people need help through the system, and because I said that, I got called a racist, my reputation got pissed on, I got fired, and now if I dare to say white people and their system are unfair, I'm the oppressor?" 

It is absolutely astounding to me how morally grotesque this whole situation is. Shirley Sherrod is grudgingly allowed to have a grievance, but we must never ever concede that she might, just might, have some experiential basis for her perceptions.

To put this another way, that the "conversation," such at is is, is all about how white people might feel about how Shirley Sherrod might not like them, and not about the behavior of Andrew Breitbart, is pretty fucked up.

Or to put it another way, in answer to Somerby, I think Sherrod might have suspicions about Breitbart being a racist because he race-baited her and got her fired. Just a hunch.

Winner of the Day

Anthony Weiner.

Thank you, sir.

A Confident Prediction

Many stupid things have already been said about Shirley Sherrod's decision to sue Andrew Breitbart, and many stupid things will continue to be said about it, but anyone contemplating entering the stupid-Olympics in this particular event ought to be daunted by the astounding stupidity of this post by "Confederate Yankee" Bob Owens, because even by his goobery standards, it's colossally stupid. See if you can detect the Logical Flaw in his analysis:

I suspect that this will end badly. For Sherrod.

Note the creative writing in the AP story (my bold):

Ousted USDA employee Shirley Sherrod says she will sue conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, the Associated Press reports.

Sherrod made the announcement Thursday in San Diego at the National Association of Black Journalists annual convention.

Breitbart posted a heavily edited [emphasis Gomer's] video of Sherrod speaking to an NAACP group and appearing to admit that she had deliberately refrained from giving full assistance to a farmer because he was white.

The political fallout from the posting eventually prompted the Agricultural Department to fire Sherrod to resign.

First a few words about the narrative that the AP writer is trying to further.

The video was not heavily edited... it wasn't edited at all. It was merely an excerpt proved to Breitbart from a much longer speech.
[Emphasis mine]

See, it wasn't edited at all! Someone just selected a particular excerpt and cut out the rest!

Why, what do you think "edited" means, college boy with your fancy word-definition understanding?

Anyhow, it's just possible that the fact that "it was merely an excerpt proved [very sic] to Breitbart from a much longer speech" is perhaps in some way central to Sherrod's point. Somehow I suspect that this may be the case.

Owens goes on to speculate that if this lawsuit goes forward it will prove once and for all in a court of law that Black People Are the Real Racists, which just goes to show once more the high-quality ultra-nuanced sort of racial commentary you can expect from a chinless halfwit who calls himself "Confederate Yankee" and has the Stars n' Bars in his banner.

News Worth Oaf

My attitude towards the immensely tedious Journo-List Scandal is that this general topic is minimal -- it's fuss for profit. (Ezra Klein as Dark Liberal Overlord? The hell? ) Though, strangely, as Greater Wingnuttia has dug in with the make believe about having discovered a there there, they have genuinely come up with some fascinating nonsense. Take for instance this open sewer wound letter from degenerate half-ape (and not the better half, the half that has all the reprocessed badly-digested termite husks stuck to the fur) Brent Bozell:

The following is an open letter sent by MRC President Brent Bozell to Washington Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli on July 28, 2010, regarding the scandal surrounding JournoList, a private listserve group created by blogger Ezra Klein when he worked at The American Prospect and maintained by him after he joined the Washington Post in 2009.

Dear Mr. Brauchli:

The JournoList scandal is getting worse every day and The Washington Post is at the center of it. Blogger Ezra Klein ran the operation and at least three other staffers were members. (Blogger Greg Sargent claims he wasn’t a member after he joined the Post.) In addition, at least one member of Slate and two from Newsweek, also owned by Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, were members.

The almost constant revelations of political activism and journalistic conspiracy raise an enormous number of questions about Post policies, professionalism and ethics. As a conservative, and therefore a member of the movement JournoListers sought to demonize, I feel Post readers are owed full disclosure.

Any understanding of the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics makes clear this list and the Post’s involvement violate a number of ethical guidelines. In fact, much of the code seems to have been ignored. Here are just a few examples from the code.

“Journalists should:

·    “Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting,”
·    “Recognize a special obligation to ensure that the public's business is conducted in the open and that government records are open to inspection,”
·    “Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived,”
·    “Deny favored treatment to advertisers and special interests and resist their pressure to influence news coverage.”

There is only one way for the Post to move forward from this fiasco – through transparency. You need to be forthright about the Post’s failings and give readers enough information so that we know just how serious this really was and what can be done to restore your paper’s credibility.

Fun!

Klein of course was hired though not as a reporter but rather as someone with an Opinion, and the WaPo, dim as the people who run it admittedly are, was presumably aware that he was at the time and has been ever since somewhere basically indistinguishable, ideologically, from Chairman Mao, if by "Chairman Mao" you mean "someone not in fact Chairman Mao who would only look especially far left to the smug dingbats at the WaPo editorial board who have placidly laid their heads on Overton's Sill so as to readily facilitate getting their empty skulls brutally smashed by wingnut ape-men repeatedly slamming shut Overton's Window." 

The revelation that Mr. Ezra communicated via email with similar hippie fellow travelers like the notorious radical bomb-heaver Joe Klein (whose name is an anagram for either "Stalin" or "William Ayres") are certainly not shocking, but nevertheless -- and this is the key bit -- at the same time and simultaneously they are utterly meaningless in regards to the Journamalism Codes Bozell cites, for reasons that involve reading them and thinking about them in a cursory fashion and then desultorily chuckling.

BUT -- and this is the key bit, forget what I said about the other bit being the key bit, this is the key bit -- by Bozell's logic, we are now entitled to Ask Probing Questions regarding the private correspondence of every other writer for the Washington Post who expresses a particular ideology. 

I, obviously, support this.

Do we know that Charles Krauthammer does not correspond with, say, Kathryn Jean Lopez in order to Coordinate Coverage? HOLY SHIT! WE HAVE EVERY REASON TO SUSPECT HE PROBABLY DOES!

Release the emails! Transparency! Rule of law! 

The public demands maximum exposure to the very likely highly intimate personal private emails between Charles Krauthammer and Kathryn Jean Lopez!

... actually, the public just probably threw up in their mouths there a little. But you catch my drift, I'm sure. Grab some antibiotics stat and maybe you can keep from catching anything more lingering.

MAS. Wank Hard. (Fox news, you know, exists. As does, God help us, Politico...)

Barrage of Little Lines

Easy enough to make fun of the preposterous Jeffrey Lord, who if you thought had lost his mind already, has decided to pee on its memory.

You can read about his gibberish at that last Media Matters link, but here is what fascinates me strangely, precisely because of its ubiquity to the point of banality for anyone who has been paying even glancing attention at right wing thought or what passes for same as it pertains to race lately, an observatory group that includes myself, a fact that is in no small part what has kept me from posting much in recent days, because it is all so inexpressibly wearying, dreadful, insipid, hateful, and fucked up, is this especial snippet of squalor squirted by Mr. Lord, a specimen whose credentials include a gig as a former assistant political fluffer for Zombie Ronald Reagan and assorted dusty, unattractive Pennsylvanian electoral fossils, and who is currently non-gainfully employed as a right-wing-crazy welfare recipient, and whose contemporary written work reveals him as an all-around unpleasant opinion-pustule so virulent that he roundly deserves to be sent to Hell with the task of diagramming this sentence and explaining precisely why it is grammatically correct to a gang of glue-huffing eighth-grade Republican byblows whose parents never loved them and who are also stupid and ugly, or else just Tucker Carlson.

Oh yes. The quote I meant:

The larger point. My colleagues seem not to understand the connection between what they are seeing in the headlines everyday -- and history.  There is, I'm sorry to say, a direct connection between Southern racists of yore and, say, the Obama Administration policy in Arizona..  The Black Panther case. And what Ms. Sherrod was doing in her speech when she ever so casually linked criticism of health care  to racism, which is to say not supporting a (her words) "black President."

This is all of a piece. Intimately connected by philosophy, party, time, heritage and party culture.

So when Ms. Sherrod uses the highly inflammatory word "lynching" -- when it is quite specifically not so because of the above reasons -- what is she doing? Why is she doing it?  She was factually wrong. She was legally wrong. She did it anyway.

Right.

Steve M is as usual on the ball about this, though it is more than worth pointing out, it is the essential point, that what conservatives really really rilly rilly don't like about liberals is that we were right and they were wrong about the whole "racism is bad" shebang. They are also uncomfortable with the sexism and gay-hating stuff, also as one into the same bargain. But that is the selfsame pancake.

Not that they are mad about being morally shitheaded, golly no.

What they don't like is losing.

Look, to be as close to the bone as may be sliced, "conservatives" have detected in their typical brutally nonsensical thud-thud-hack-chomp-burp fashion that there is a certain power, a certain magic, a certain force to the capacity to call someone a "racist" and make it stick, and as they can dully discern that the "call you racist" Ring is a One Ring to Rule them All, rhetorically related to the "Support this Stupid War Or You Hate America Ring," which they already collected from the slack-jowled Dwarf-Lord twerps in their fucking Halls of Stone or Connecticut, namely a beardless and quite smackable Joe Lieberman, they covets it, this racism-detecting precious, they covets it, yesss; and while nobody likes Gollum, he's more presentable than Dan Riehl, but what's the essential difference, I axe you? 

Asking the American right wing to be thoughtful and self-reflective about its use of race is like if you went back in time and pointed out to Nixon why the tape recorders might someday backfire. That old Southern Strategy sings a powerful seductive melody. Old Man Why-Can't-I-Say-Nigger....

(Oh, Lord, Lord compares himself to Atticus Finch; I suppose I'll have to get back to that...)

MORE. Forgot how much the thing below pissed off my racist grandfather, just stumbled upon it by accident. Someday I'll give you the Rest of the Story.

Always in the Undertow

The 4-Year-Old has been gleefully indulging in his idiosyncratic version of potty training (omigod), the 10-Year-Old has by some gruesome mistake been allowed to learn about chemistry and physics as applied to an otherwise uneventful summer vacation, and the 5-Year-Old -- she has discovered how to be fearless in the water without the intervening step of "learning how to swim."

Pissed off about a few things, though. Hang on.

Let's roll it around in our mouths like a bunch of naughty knickerlickers

by Ripley

Hey, kids!  [Hey, Rip!]

While Thers is off supporting his wife's professional endeavors (like that's a real thing) and doing Zeus knows what to his 83 Catholic(!) children with a Super Soaker full of Jameson's, I was wondering if any of you (or YOU PEOPLE! as we're know in Teabagistan) were up for some discussions on some different topics.  Shit, we can only point out Andrew Breitbart's overt racism so many times before our zzzzzzzz...  What?  I'm awake!  Tucson!  Miter Box!  Freedom!

See what I mean?  Anyhoo - just wondering if anyone's up for some in-depth discussions about... I don't know, whateverthefuck that's not the story of the day.  It doesn't have to be prurient or Lohan-esque or particularly snarky, but let's talk about some stuff that's right (yay!) or wrong (boo!) with whatever is going on in the world.  What grinds your gears, that no one talks about?  What fills your heart with Puccini arias or puppy breath, but no one has a clue?  OK, that was a really awkward sentence, but I'll just edit it out before I post this.

I'll start.

1 - What the Hell do these nozzles in Congress do with all that lobbyist money?  C'mon, the lobbyists are spending the money, so what, pre-God-damned-cisely, are our Congress Whores getting for this money?  I'd just like to see a balance sheet,that's all.  Is it boats?  Strippers?  Breadbags full of Morel mushrooms?  I'd just like to know where the money's going.  

2 - Does anyone have any tips for taking indoor photos with a flash?  I can't find the right setting on my camera to prevent blurry pictures.  I've heard "set the ap and let the shutter ride" and I've heard "set the shutter and the ap will follow the flash".  Fuck, I don't even know what my Congress Whores are spending their lobbyist money on, how the hell am I supposed to figure out all these DSLR settings?

So, what in the everlasting holy fuck is on your minds?  Also, too.  Also, Fuck. 

Rip - 

BREAKING: NPR Journalist Naked Lesbian Sex Scandal Proves Obama Secret Commie Lesbian

I just found out via sources -- TOP SOURCES -- that Daniel Schorr was a robot Stalin lesbian FROM THE FUTURE.

And my Politico link is where...?

Noseload of Prophesies

If you thought even for a minute that getting caught winging out indiscriminate racist bullshit would be bad for one's reputation, well, hello, Breitbart!

“Let me think about that,” he said. “You’ll have to ask me (later). I am right now about to get out of the car to go to the airport, and I’ll think about this for another time, because I’m being inundated with falsehoods left and right that are making it impossible for me to have a 40,000-feet-above-it-all perspective of what’s going on. All I’m seeing is people right now seeing blood in the water and coming after me. And the amount of half-truths and falsehoods that are out there in the pursuit of taking me down because they perceive that I’m a threat, it’s astounding.”

He did say “I believe that I’m held to a higher standard. If this video showed a picture of a Caucasian talking in the exact same way but talking about a black person with an audience affirming and clapping that behavior, the reporter would be getting a Pulitzer Prize right now.”

Fer sher. Keep talking! Every word is a golden sermon, a joy to behold and a lesson for the masses.

It really sucks for you, Andrew, how you're white and rich.

Please whine more.

Microscopically chromed lining

by flory

By sacred tradition, everytime Breitbart or Drudge has instigated one of wingnuttia's patented flying monkey flashmobs, the story arc has followed a well trod path:

Early morning, Day 1: Completely made up "scandal" is posted to Drudge or Breitbart.

Late morning, Day 1: Faux News reports on "breaking news" of the scandal.

Evening, Day 1: CNN et al inform us that "there are reports" of the breaking scandal.

Morning, Day 2: Reports of the reports allow entire media universe to obsess over scandal.

Afternoon, Day 2: Democratic administration (because these attacks, curiously, never happen to Republican administrations) issues explanation/apology/retraction regarding scandal.

Following 2 weeks: Media and administration dance the dance. 24/7 back and forth on scandal until the entire spiral arm of the milky way galaxy is sick of the subject.

Week 4: Enterprising reporter (Clinton administration) or blogger (Obama administration) discovers that scandal is complete bullshit. CNN et al have long since moved on to the latest runaway white woman story and nobody pays attention. Scandal is fixed in the public mind as gospel truth.

Something curious happened on the way to the Shirley Sherrod tarantella. The enterprising blogger (or somebody, I'm not really sure who broke the story of the edited video) moved the timeline way the hell forward. What normally isn't discovered until people have long since moved on -- the video was complete edited bullshit -- was discovered the next day.  People were still paying attention. The administration was still paying attention. The administration overreacted, was called on their overreaction and had to do something about it. Yes, Breitbart got what he wanted, a Democratic administration looking about as inept as humanly possible, but he also got called on his bullshit and has been making excuses ever since.

Those "real americans" we're always hearing about have been told that Breitbart made the whole fucking thing up. And they're still paying attention. I don't think this has ever happened before. Equally important, the administration was forced to face the fact that they got played, and played badly, and played publicly. And it all happened when people were still paying attention. Do you think even this slow learner white house is inept enough that they'll let the flying monkeys get away with this again? I'm cautiously optimistic that they won't.

The wingnut noise machine may've finally jumped the shark. Or a girl can dream anyway......