Response to Stogie at Saberpoint and 'Why the Civil War Was Not About Slavery...'

Okay, continuing with the discussion from yesterday, Stogie remarked at my comment that you "should read the article I referred you to ... until you do, you are wasting my time."

My comment at issue was elaborated here, "Response to Stogie at Saberpoint on Southern Heritage and the Confederate Flag."

The article Stogie's referring to is Professor Donald Livingston, "Why the Civil War Was Not About Slavery," which is published in full at Stogie's blog.

There's a couple of ways to respond to Livingston's essay. The first way, and more professional, is to pick apart the essay's historical and logical arguments, highlighting especially Livingston's egregious logical fallacies, historical inaccuracies, and frankly, outright lies.

The second way, more partisan and bloggy, is to attack Livingston as a rank ideological hack, driven by fringe ideological tendencies with about as much mainstream acceptance as Holocaust denial. Purportedly a reputable historian, Professor Livingston's professional biography includes links to some rather steamy Southern revisionist outfits --- the kind of organizations with which I'd never associate and of which I lend very little professional credence. Seriously, the guy comes off as rather a crank.

But more about that later. Let's look at a number of problems with his essay from a straightforward historical and political analysis.

First, Livingston argues that to correctly understand the debate on Southern slavery is to expand the playing field to include the entire United States, and to go back to the Founding of 1787 to grasp the universal acceptance of slavery --- with the concomitant national ideology of white supremacy --- in the Northern states, in New England America especially, shortly after the overthrow of British colonialism. By doing this, one can see that slavery as an ideological system of political, social, and economic racial domination wasn't unique to the American South, but rather was a nationwide phenomenon with uniquely Northern characteristics.

The problem with this argument is that it's an extremely simplistic straw man. I mean, I don't claim to have anything nearing a scholarly familiarity with the historical scholarship on antebellum America, North and South. But just frankly from my wide reading of history and my professional teaching of the Founding, the Constitutional Convention, and the growth of slavery throughout the 19th century, to say that slavery was a "national enormity, an American sin for which every section of the Union bore some responsibility," and to use this as an argument against those who attack the South, is simply irrelevant. Of course slavery was a national institution. Slavery was a thoroughgoing institution in all the 13 colonies by the end of the 17th century. Who argues otherwise? Slavery developed in the colonies and after the Constitution of 1787 for almost 150 years. It did break down into regional varieties, as part of the economic regionalism that took hold in the country. For example, by the early- to mid-1800s, rural agrarianism came to be predominantly associated with the South, and with the invention of the cotton gin, the Southern economy become increasingly the locus of cotton production in the U.S., on the backs of slave laborers.

The debate we're having today is the persistence of racial supremacy symbolism in the present day South, like the Confederate Flag, hardly a sign of Northern white supremacy. But the "national enormity" argument is a logical diversion, a fallacy that's easily exposed.

Second, Livingston argues that in antebellum American "no nation" had developed, in the sense of the national unification seen contemporaneously among the European continental states as Britain and France. Further, he claims that the national government couldn't interfere with slavery in the states, that "Congress simply had no constitutional authority to interfere with slavery in the States." This is just a bunch of ideological hooey. It is true that the U.S. remained a largely agrarian, decentralized nation-state in the early 19th century, but the argument ignores monumental developments in constitutional law that created the foundations for what legal and political analysts identify as national supremacy within the system of political federalism. Crucially, majestic Supreme Court cases such as McCulloch v. Maryland expounded nationalist doctrines that placed federal authority as supreme to conflicting state power. Of course the debate on federalism wasn't (practically) resolved until decades later, perhaps not even until the 20th century. But it's absurd to claim that there was no national ideology or national consensus on federal power in the years before the Civil War. Indeed, why would the Southern states bother developing doctrines of nullification and so forth if no national culture and constitutional power had developed?

Livingston goes on, "Since Congress had no power over slavery, and did not want such power, the only way to abolish slavery would be through individual state action or by an amendment to the Constitution." This makes no sense. While any individual state could abolish slavery within its boundaries, all the 27 amendments to the Constitution have been passed by Congress and ratified by the states, including the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. Further, major congressional action on slavery took place in 1808 with abolition of the international slave trade, in 1820 with the Missouri Compromise,  and in 1854 with the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Frankly, Congress was at the center of regulatory activity involving slavery right up to the Civil War. Maybe from the perspective of radical states rights' theory Congress "had no power over slavery," but in reality Congress did have such power and passed consequential legislation that shaped national events over decades of time.

Third, Livingston makes a number of bizarre arguments regarding President Abraham Lincoln's positions on slavery, and some of these appear to be bald-faced lies. He argues, for example, that "Lin­coln did not object to slavery as long as it was confined to the South." This is again a red herring, for it's widely recognized that Lincoln was no abolitionist and that even at the time of secession in 1861, Lincoln's fundamental war aims were the preservation of union. Livingston goes on with a number of selective quotations in an attempt to paint Lincoln as pro-slavery as any Southern rebel. The reality is way more complicated, as any historical review of Lincoln political career would recognize. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates, for example, Lincoln made a clear distinction between his acquiescence to slavery in the North and his clearly foundational belief that the Declaration of Independence made all men equal in the eyes of God, and that in the long run the U.S. could not survive with slavery as an institution. When he said a "house divided upon itself cannot stand" it wasn't a political program of abolition as much as a recognition that at some point one side would prevail over the other, either the pro-slavery forces would prevail and slavery would win out over the land or the abolitionists would prevail and slavery would die out altogether.

Livingston in fact lies about the meaning of Lincoln's statement that the United States as "the last best hope of earth." He claims that Lincoln supported colonization of American blacks back to Africa, and that "The 'last best hope of earth' referred to a purely white European polity free of racial strife, and not to a land of freedom for all as it is absurdly interpreted today." Actually, voluntary colonization of slaves and compensated emancipation were just policy alternatives that Lincoln included in his message to Congress in December 1862. A simple reading of the conclusion of his address reveals Lincoln's exceptionalism and his faith in Jefferson's ideals in the Declaration:

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.

I don't know why Livingston would so blatantly distort what Lincoln actually said, other than to chalk it up to dishonesty. Lincoln's views were complicated and developed along with the political necessities of his day.

And it's important to remember that we can't read present-day moral sentiments into history. That is, we cannot apply 21st century normative commitments to the political mores of the mid-19th century. Livingston in fact attacks his critics as adopting a presentist ideological agenda, but much of his essay employs the exact type of presentist commitments that he so decries.

Finally, Livingston breaks down "the main anti-slavery episodes in the antebellum period," from the Constitutional Convention to the Kansas-Ne­braska Act of 1854. Again, there's a lot of arguments against straw men and even more tendentious connections to the historical record. I'm going to eschew a longer analysis simply to avoid repetition. Suffice it to say that Livingston provides completely decontextualized and selective interpretations of historical events, spurts of analysis that really add up to more of an ideological screed than a dispassionate historical critique.

And that brings me to my second, more partisan and bloggy criticism of Professor Livingston. He is indeed a genuine scholar and is Professor Emeritus at Emory University and an expert on the writings of Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume.

But he's a lot more than that. Livingston's a radical libertarian whose ideas place him at the fringes of respectable historical scholarship. The Ludwig von Mises Institute, which originally published "Why the Civil War Was Not About Slavery," is a radical libertarian outfit co-founded by the bona fide crackpot Lew Rockwell. Another co-founder, Murray Rothbard, has the dubious distinction of holding down the lunatic wing of the far-right ideological fringe. (See Jamie Kirchick's discussion of Rothbard's associations with former GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul, at the New Republic, "TNR Exclusive: A Collection of Ron Paul’s Most Incendiary Newsletters," and "TNR Exclusive: More Selections From Ron Paul’s Newsletters." Also, an interesting anonymous online article, "Is it possible for a Jew to also be anti-Semitic? The case of Murray Rothbard.")

Plus, Livingston at one time served as the Director of the League of the South Institute for the Study of Southern Culture and History. Make what you want of this --- and Stogie and Robert Stacy McCain are former members of the League of the South --- but certainly some of the positions of this organization are at the least unsavory and at most completely crackpot, for example, in the group's February celebration of the assassination of President Lincoln (see, "Honoring John Wilkes Booth").

Livingston was profiled at the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2009, "Scholars Nostalgic for the Old South Study the Virtues of Secession, Quietly." According to the piece, in 2003, Livingston founded "the Abbeville Institute, named after the South Carolina birthplace of John C. Calhoun, seventh vice president of the United States and a forceful advocate of slavery and states' rights." And it continues:

On his own campus, Abbe­ville's founder is anything but a pariah. "Mr. Livingston has a great reputation as a professor among his students," says John J. Stuhr, chair of the philosophy department at Emory. "His connection with this institute has not impacted his teaching, research, or campus service by any standard professional measure."

The other Abbeville scholars teach history, philosophy, economics, and literature at institutions including Emory, the University of South Carolina, the University of Georgia, and the University of Virginia. They write books with titles like Defending Dixie: Essays in Southern History and Culture (published by the Foundation for American Education, a nonprofit group "dedicated to the preservation of American culture and learning") and The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, his Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (Prima). They say the institute's work, although academic in nature, is ­really about values. Its members study the South in search of a history of piety, humility, and manners. The scholars acknowledge a history of bigotry and slavery, but they focus primarily on what they say are the positive aspects of Southern history and culture.

To do so, they have created their own guarded society, something of a secession in its own right. Mr. Livingston will not provide Abbeville's entire list of scholars and participants, because he fears "academics who claim to find something valuable in the Southern tradition are sure to suffer abuse." Institute members say they rarely submit work in the field to mainstream journals. Now they are creating a Web periodical, called Arator, as an outlet. The title is taken from an 1813 book by a Virginia planter and senator named John Taylor, who defended "the socioeconomic and political order of an agrarian republic," according to one description.

Still, the outsiders who have heard of Abbeville tend not to like what they hear. One historian, whose research includes the cultural history of racism and white supremacy in the United States, and who asked for anonymity to avoid becoming a target of "Southern identity groups," says the lectures he has listened to on the Abbeville Web site (http://www.abbevilleinstitute.org) are dominated by racialism and are "ideological, through and through." There is the condemnation from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil-rights group. In 2005, Time magazine pegged Abbeville as a group of "Lincoln loathers." Mr. Livingston initially declined to be interviewed for this article, citing bad experiences with the news media. But he eventually agreed to talk, as did a handful of scholars and students involved with the institute...

I want to discount the article's allegations of racism and its reference to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization to which I have nothing but disdain. I do not know if Professor Livingston is racist. I think it's noteworthy, though, that Livingston's work through the Abbeville Institute is considered way outside the mainstream of historical scholarship and the members of his groups are in fact self-cloistered into an extreme isolation that goes dramatically against the ideal of a universal community of scholars.

In any case, I know Stogie will take exception to the discussion of Livinston's fringe associations, and I've heard it before. Mostly, the point is Livingston's "Why the Civil War Was Not About Slavery" is the product of a programmatic ideological commitment that is so far outside of the mainstream it's literally ridiculous. Thus, on grounds of both shoddy historical analysis and fringe ideological foundations, the case that the Civil War was not in fact about slavery is preposterous. The notion of "national enormity" is a pathetic straw man and Livingston's substantive historical narratives are either red herrings, inaccurate, or outright falsehoods. The man's as fervent an ideologue as anyone writing on the far-left of the ideological spectrum, at outlets such as Rolling Stone or the Nation, to say nothing of the Jacobin or the New Left Review. In any of these examples, you're going to get partisan advocacy rather than scholarship. Unfortunately in Livingston's case his agenda is to disguise radical libertarian screeds under the nominal institutional respectability of a scholarly think tank.

Finally, as noted above, all this debate on the origins and ideologies of the Confederacy distracts from the fact of the matter: the post-Civil War regime of racial segregation, oppression, and terrorism was a product and foundation of the Democrat Party. I mean jeez, President Wilson showcased "Birth of a Nation" at the White House and President Lyndon Johnson bragged, upon passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that he'd have them "niggers" voting Democratic for the next 200 years.

And as I've pointed out in a number of posts this past couple of days, the Democrats did not abandon their racist ideologies after the 1960s. Indeed, as recently as 2008 the Clinton-Gore campaign trafficked in all kinds of Southern segregationist sentiments and Confederate Flag sensibilities. Hillary Clinton, in fact, still has much for which to answer (see, "Hillary Clinton’s History With the Confederate Flag").

I doubt that I'll have much success in changing Stogie's mind about things with this essay. I understand the cultural heritage argument, and as I've said, I respect it. And in fact, I've been learning a lot from Stogie these last few years and I'm thankful. Writing this piece as been further edification for me, and I'm open to further information to help me refine my views. But as it is, the national GOP has read the writing on the wall and it's clear that expressions of public support for the Confederate Flag are out. In fact, it now looks as though all the recrimination over the flag is in fact a liability for the Democrats, and if Republican candidates rightly point out the Democrat Party's ugly racist history then leftists will be eating crow on all their "blame-righty" demonizations.

Until then, check back for further iterations of the discussion.

Debunking the Left's Latest Blame-Righty Smear Campaign

Inveterate propaganda pimps and shameless liars.

At Michelle Malkin's, "Debunking the Blame Righty propagandists…again":

Here we go again. Liberal media outlets CNN and MSNBC have joined forces with the biased, numbers-cooking Southern Poverty Law Center and New America Foundation to foment renewed fear and hatred of conservative Americans.

Their latest talking point: “Right-wing” terrorists have caused more American deaths than Islamic jihadists since 9/11.

CNN ran with the “story” first. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow hopped on the bandwagon tonight and the Blame Righty echo chamber is whipping up another witch-hunt frenzy.

According to these divisive and demagogic fear-mongers, “right-wingers” have killed 34 people since 9/11 for “political reasons,” including the three innocent victims of last week’s Kansas City Jewish community center shootings, while jihadists have killed 21. MSNBC and CNN viewers are eating it all up with ghoulish enthusiasm. It’s the Obama DHS right-wing terrorism report all over again.

A closer look at the rigging of this latest phony factoid simply confirms the malevolent intention of so-called objective journalists to marginalize conservative political speech and dissent. And it confirms once again the corruption of purportedly objective “hate watch” groups, which are staffed and supported by progressives bent on criminalizing their opponents out of the public square.

Let’s start with the terror toll count date. Carving out the 2,997-person death toll from the 9/11 jihadist attacks is a rather convenient way to rig the scales, isn’t it? Only if we close our eyes and pretend away the bloodiest terrorist attack on American soil perpetrated by Islamic murderers is it possible to promote the Left’s moral equivalency on who our real enemies are.

Once you whitewash 9/11 out of your calculations, the rest of the smear job is easy-peasy. As usual, it involves dishonest inflating of “right-wing” incidents and dishonest deflating of left-wing and jihadist incidents.

The conservatives-are-worse-than-jihadists casualty data, for example, counts Holocaust Museum shooter James Von Brunn, who killed a heroic security guard, as a “right-winger.” As I’ve pointed out before, Von Brunn was neither “left” nor “right.” He was a rage-filled maniac and 9/11 truther who hated Fox News and Rupert Murdoch.

Also counted as “right-wing” in the CNN/MSNBC/SPLC data: Andrew Joseph Stack. He’s the lunatic who flew a small plane into an Austin, Texas, office complex that contained an Internal Revenue Service office in 2010. He injured several people and killed himself. Within minutes of the story breaking, a furious left-wing blogger at the popular Daily Kos website — where countless Democratic leaders have guest-posted — fumed: “Teabagger terrorist attack on IRS building.” The article immediately cast blame on the anti-tax Tea Party movement: “After months of threats on the United States government, and government institutions, the Anti-Government forces known as the teabaggers have struck with their first 911 (sic) inspired terrorist attack.” But as I reported at the time, Stack’s ranting suicide manifesto:

…targeted “puppet” George W. Bush, murderous health care insurers and the pharmaceutical industry.

The “manifesto” ended:

The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.

*****

The dishonesty of violence-politicizing leftists — once again forcing Americans of good will to defend themselves against conniving “hate watch” haters — is beyond sickening. It’s evil.

Read it all at that top link.

And yes, they're evil, to the core.

RELATED: "The Democrat Party's Racial Regression."

Never forget: the Democrats are the party of hate.

Anti-Marriage Extremist Walter James Casper III and the Unitarian Push for Polyamorous Sexual Licentiousness

The disgusting Occupy-endorsing, anti-Semitic hate-bagging progressive Walter James Casper III writes:

Marriage law is not primarily about continuing the species or the optimal raising of children, especially to the detriment of any family situation other than the supposed optimal one for raising children. If it were, we would hear all of the results of these studies that say "mommy and daddy in committed marriage is best," and perhaps outlaw more of what is less than optimal... poverty, single parenthood, divorce, ...

Legal marriage can and often does include children, but it isn't -- and shouldn't be -- defined by children or the possibility of creating them. To my knowledge, it never has been -- except of course, as an argument against marriage equality....

I know? How could anyone be this dishonest? Folks can Google the post, titled "We Just Disagree (Marriage Equality)." I won't link the lies, because that's all this guy has --- lies, deceit and the destruction of decency and moral regeneration of family, faith and country. This is progressive radicalism and licentiousness at its most disgusting.

Hatesac is a pathological liar. Marriage is and has always been at base about the union of man and woman for the biological regeneration of society. To brutally rip the centrality of the marriage union from procreation and family is to adopt nothing less than the cultural Marxist ideological program of destruction of decency in the name of state power. Marx and Engels specifically called for the obliteration of the family in furtherance of the Utopian communist state. Walter James "Hatesac" knows all of this. He simply will not acknowledge the truth of the millennium. He's a disgusting, anti-God prick. A hateful degenerate who's out to destroy the moral fiber of the nation.

As David Blankenhorn has written:

Marriage as a human institution is constantly evolving, and many of its features vary across groups and cultures. But there is one constant. In all societies, marriage shapes the rights and obligations of parenthood. Among us humans, the scholars report, marriage is not primarily a license to have sex. Nor is it primarily a license to receive benefits or social recognition. It is primarily a license to have children.

And Hatesac lies about this alleged dearth of "studies that say 'mommy and daddy in committed marriage is best'." Unbelievable dishonesty. Or, it'd be unbelievable for a normal person, but hate-bagging Repsac3 is not a normal person. If he was, if he was honest, he'd cite the wealth of research arguing that indeed kids do best in the biological mom/dad family unit. I just wrote about this the other day, and given Hatesac's obsession with this blog, he certainly knew the truth but choose to lie anyways. See, "Amicus Brief in Hollingsworth v. Perry Demonstrates Children Fare Better With Biological Parents in Traditional 'Opposite Sex' Marriage." And this bullshit about "banning" other situations like "poverty" and "divorce" is just straw man stupidity. Poverty is worsened by current progressive social policies and divorce --- especially "no fault" --- is a product of radical left-wing social disorganization. But liar Hatesac won't discuss these truths. He's just making shit up as he goes along. A truly bad person. Evil incarnate. Seriously, it's people like this who're dragging this country to the depths of perdition. Horrible.

Of course, longtime readers will recall that Walter James "Hatesac" Casper is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church --- a religious organization that is outside all mainstream denominations, and has been likened to a faith of cultural nihilists and radical collectivists. Gven Hatesac's perverted views on the institution of marriage, it's clear that his Unitarianism is busting out in all of its disgusting, orgiastic licentiousness. See the Washington Post, "Many Unitarians would prefer that their polyamory activists keep quiet":

The joke about Unitarians is that they’re where you go when you don’t know where to go. Theirs is the religion of last resort for the intermarried, the ambivalent, the folks who want a faith community without too many rules. It is perhaps no surprise that the Unitarian Universalist Association is one of the fastest-growing denominations in the country, ballooning 15 percent over the past decade, when other established churches were shrinking. Politically progressive to its core, it draws from the pool of people who might otherwise be “nones” – unaffiliated with any church at all.

But within the ranks of the UUA over the past few years, there has been some quiet unrest concerning a small but activist group that vociferously supports polyamory. That is to say “the practice of loving and relating intimately to more than one other person at a time,” according to a mission statement by Unitarian Universalists for Polyamory Awareness (UUPA). The UUPA “encourages spiritual wholeness regarding polyamory,” including the right of polyamorous people to have their unions blessed by a minister.

UUA headquarters says it has no official position on polyamory. “Official positions are established at general assembly and never has this issue been brought to general assembly,” a spokeswoman says.

But as the issue of same-sex marriage heads to the Supreme Court, many committed Unitarians think the denomination should have a position, which is that polyamory activists should just sit down and be quiet. For one thing, poly activists are seen as undermining the fight for same-sex marriage. The UUA has officially supported same-sex marriage, the spokeswoman says, “since 1979, with tons of resolutions from the general assembly.”

More:

In 2007, a Unitarian congregation in Chestertown, Md., heard a sermon by a poly activist named Kenneth Haslam, arguing that polyamory is the next frontier in the fight for sexual and marriage freedom. “Poly folks are strong believers that each of us should choose our own path in forming our families, forming relationships, and being authentic in our sexuality.”

Right.

That's exactly what the putrid Hatesac argues at his scummy, morally depraved essay, "We Just Disagree (Marriage Equality)." Again, it's too sick to even link. Folks can Google it if they can stomach Hatesac's "cutting-edge" views about how Americans should "choose their own path" on abandoning the historic conception of marriage as the foundation of healthy children and the survival of decency in society.

But this is radical progressivism we're talking about, which seeks the cultural Marxist overthrow of basic goodness and moral clarity in society. The genuine evil here is literally astonishing.

Reality Crashing Down on Obama and the Obama-Cult Media

From Andrew Klavin, at City Journal, "A Fantasy Election, an Imaginary Man":

Even before his inauguration, Barack Obama was an imaginary man, the creation of his admirers. Think back to the 2008 Time magazine cover depicting him as FDR, the Newsweek cover of the same year on which he was shown casting Lincoln’s shadow, or the $1.4 million Nobel Peace Prize awarded to him “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”—this in 2009, less than a year after he had taken office. It was not that Obama had done nothing to deserve these outsized comparisons and honors—it was not just that he had done nothing—it was that he seemed for all the world to be a blank screen on which such hysterical fantasies could too easily be projected, a two-dimensional paper doll just waiting to be dressed in leftist dreams.

This weird quality of emptiness incited the imaginations of his opponents as well. Among the more paranoid on the right, he’s been called several kinds of Manchurian Candidate: a radical disguised as a moderate, a Muslim disguised as a Christian, a foreigner disguised as an American, and so on. The idea was that his hollow identity was his own insidious creation, the result of sealed college records, votes of “present” in the Illinois state senate, and a supra-partisan persona carefully crafted after a scuttled lifetime of revolutionary ferocity.

To be sure, Obama has disowned the depth of his past associations with such fire-breathing America-haters as William Ayers (“A guy who lives in my neighborhood”) and Jeremiah Wright (“He was never my spiritual mentor”) with startling insouciance. And such previous Obamas as the race-baiting, black-talking demagogue of a 2007 video recently covered in full for the first time by The Daily Caller’s Tucker Carlson are not at all apparent in the Obama of the Oval Office or the campaign trail—whom he himself describes as a “non-threatening” statesman. But I think the real Obama has been more or less plain to see. Norman Podhoretz described him best in a 2011 Wall Street Journal op-ed: a typical product of the anti-American academic left, committed to transforming U.S. capitalism into a social-democratic system like Sweden’s.

The mystery Obama—the hollow receptacle of out-sized fantasies left and right—is not a creation of his own making, political chameleon though he may well be. It emanates instead from a journalistic community that no longer in any way fulfills its designated function, that no longer even attempts the fair presentation of facts and current events aimed at helping the American electorate make up its mind according to its own lights. Rather, left-wing outlets like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News, and the like have now devoted themselves to fashioning an image of the world they think their audiences ought to believe in—that they may guide us toward voting as they think we should. They have fallen prey to that ideological corruption that sees lies as a kind of virtue, as a noble deception in service to a greater good.

Theirs are largely passive lies and lies of omission. The active frauds—NBC’s dishonest editing of videos to reflect a leftist worldview, ABC’s allowing Democratic operative George Stephanopoulos to masquerade as a newsman, the Los Angeles Times’ suppressing even the transcript of the video in their possession that shows candidate Barack Obama at a meeting with a PLO-supporting sheik—these are only egregious salients of the more consistent, underlying dishonesty. The real steady-state corruption is revealed in the way Obama scandals like Fast and Furious, Benghazi-gate, and the repeated breaking of federal campaign laws have been wildly underplayed, while George W. Bush’s non-scandals, like the naming of Valerie Plame and the firings of several U.S. attorneys at the start of his second term, were blown out of all proportion.

And it is revealed in Obama’s blankness, his make-believe greatness, and the suppression, ridicule, and dismissal of any evidence that he is not the man this powerful media faction once wanted so badly for him to be...

VIDEO CREDIT: iOWNTHEWORLD.

Repsac3, Hate-Addled Internet Predator, Screams 'Liar' at Virtually Entire World on Politicization of Colorado Shooting

For all of hate-blogger Walter James Casper III's embarrassing, over-the-top bleating, he's in fact never shown that Brain Ross's premature speculation wasn't political. In fact, that Ross sought to tie suspect James Holmes to the tea party was nothing but political, because his statement couldn't be farther from a routine mistake of fact. Ross "investigated" the suspect's name, found out there was a "James Holmes" in Colorado who belonged to tea party groups, and then went on the air with it. He didn't wrongly report the suspect's age or occupation, or some other descriptive non-political fact. He instinctively went with the same well-worn blood libel smear against the allegedly "violent" tea party movement. He was comfortable smearing the tea party for mass murder because that's what network elites do. Simple as that. And of course it was entirely wrong and Ross has been universally condemned for "politicizing" the reporting. Not "misreporting" the story, "politicizing" it in the most disgusting way imaginable. Regina Thomson, President of the Colorado Tea Party Patriots, repudiated Ross's smear as "shameless and reprehensible." This happens every time there's some kind of horrible massacre, for example last year in Tucson. Left-wing journalists, pundits, and bloggers jumped to exploit the bloodshed to destroy conservatives. And that Repsac3 is now so blindingly enraged to be called out on his dishonesty--- when even far-left "Wonkette" called Ross's smear a reprehensible move --- is just, well, pathetic.

And note now that the epic hate blogger didn't think it enough to attack Michelle Malkin, who had written a perfectly reasonable and well-documented report, as a "whiney wingnut victim." No, in his insane descent to dangerous incoherence, he's now basically calling virtually everyone who's responded to the Colorado politicization a "liar":

Politicizing the CO Shootings bit.ly/LEojKb A lie every time @ampowerblog repeats it. ABC ran w/ bad TParty link 2b first, not bias.
— J. Casper (@repsac3) July 22, 2012

Actually, it's Repsac3 who's lying. As I've reported throughout, the condemnation has been virtually universal, left and right, attacking Ross's initial report as disgustingly political. Here's IBD's editorial from Friday, for example, "ABC News' Tea Party Apology Isn't Good Enough":

ABC News quickly apologized after one of its reporters tried to tie the Colorado massacre to the Tea Party. When will the network apologize for the blatant media bias that led to this monumental screw-up?

Less than eight hours after the movie theater shooting spree left 13 dead, "Good Morning America" host George Stephanopoulos turned to reporter Brian Ross who, he said, had "found something that might be significant."

Ross' finding? There's a guy named Jim Holmes who joined the Colorado Tea Party last year.

Stop the presses!

Never mind that a simple online search of the Denver area turns up more than a dozen Jim Holmeses, any one of whom was just as likely to be the shooter as the guy Ross found on the Tea Party site. And never mind that Ross had zip, zero, nada information on the Jim Holmes whose name he did find.

Why bother taking such elemental journalistic steps when you can possibly be the first to tag a right-wing group with a mass shooting?

There's also the question of why Ross' first instinct was to go trolling around Tea Party sites. That, as much as Stephanopoulos and Ross' decision to go on the air with the bogus information, reveals the enormity of the media bias at work here.

This is the same bias that was on glaring display after the Gabby Giffords shooting, when reporters tried — falsely and based on no evidence whatsoever — to pin the shooting on heated Tea Party rhetoric.

It's the same bias that pushed the mainstream press to trumpet unfounded claims that Tea Partyers hurled a racial epithet at a black congressman. And that propelled these same reporters to cover up actual crimes — rapes, murders, destruction of property — perpetrated by their "Occupy Wall Street" friends.

Shortly after Ross' report, ABC News apologized "for the mistake, and for disseminating that information before it was properly vetted."

Sorry, but that's not good enough. If ABC News was genuinely sorry, it would take a hard look at how such a fantastically biased report could have made it on the air in the first place.

Exactly right.

And this is the same basic point that Michelle made in her post on Friday, "Blame Righty impulse blows up in media faces…again." And tea party groups are still indignant that they get blood libeled every time there's a national tragedy. See Jennifer Stefano, the Pennsylvania State Director of AFP, at Fox News, "Media must stop falsely accusing the Tea Party every time tragedy strikes."

And here's John Kass, at far-left Chicago Tribune, "ABC makes a wrong — and biased — snap judgment: Colorado massacre quickly becomes political":

How long does it take for a major American television news network to politicize mass murder and blame conservatives for the blood of innocents?

Not long.

It happened on ABC's "Good Morning America" on Friday morning, as the country woke to the news of the mass murder during the midnight showing of the new Batman movie: A heavily armed man named James Eagan Holmes allegedly killed 12 and injured 58 others in a suburban theater outside Denver.

ABC's George Stephanopoulos, once a top aide to former President Bill Clinton, and ABC reporter Brian Ross teamed up to quickly place the horror at the feet of American conservatives.

Stephanopoulos: I'm going to go to Brian Ross. You've been investigating the background of Jim Holmes here. You found something that might be significant.

Ross: There's a Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado, page on the Colorado tea party site as well, talking about him joining the tea party last year. Now, we don't know if this is the same Jim Holmes. But it's Jim Holmes of Aurora, Colorado. Stephanopoulos: OK, we'll keep looking at that. Brian Ross, thanks very much. And that's all it took, a mention, a name, a possible connection about a Jim Holmes joining the tea party movement that is reviled by establishment Democrats and (though not often reported) establishment Republicans. The connection was made. It was artfully done.

But there was one thing wrong with the ABC report.

It was the wrong Holmes.

The Holmes ABC referred to was a middle-aged man. The one arrested with the guns and the gas bombs and the mask and the booby-trapped apartment is James Eagan Holmes, a 24-year-old graduate student who was in the process of dropping out of school.

After an onslaught by bloggers over the Internet on Friday, ABC news issued a correction.

"An earlier ABC News broadcast report suggested that a Jim Holmes of a Colorado tea party organization might be the suspect, but that report was incorrect," said ABC News in a statement. "ABC News and Brian Ross apologize for the mistake, and for disseminating that information before it was properly vetted."

We all make mistakes. But this one smacks of political bias. And when you add political bias to the rush of breaking news, as seems to have happened here, things get stinky.

It could have been an honest mistake, perhaps. It might have come across as a mistake if Stephanopoulos had interjected and said, "No, Brian, we don't have enough evidence to make that connection to the tea party." Instead, the former aide to Bill Clinton thanked Ross for his reporting. It's no wonder that virtually the entire political establishment reacted the way it did. ABC News was out there on a limb, as James Taranto reported at the Wall Street Journal --- and for someone to come along and then essentially call all these people "liars" is simply beneath contempt. But that's Walter James Casper for you. He's been working the Internet for years, attempting to undermine and destroy conservatives.

I could keep going, because the examples are all over the web. But in fact there's no need to keep going. The facts are out there, but those blinded by ideological bigotry refuse to see them.

Walter James Casper is now back to stalking this blog and sending me unsolicited tweets. He's even kicked back up the old "American Nihilist" hate-site after I reported it to the Irvine Police Department previously. But it's all of a piece, I guess, as a conservative on the web shining truth on progressive evil. The left tries to shut folks down with stalking and intimidation, but you have to shine a light on the hate and defeat them. It takes a lot of time, but Repsac3 is a particularly resistant form of progressive pestilence. He never went away after being reported to the police, despite announcing that I'd "won the Internet." He just shifted gears a bit, and is now back in the hunt for his next political kill.

PREVIOUSLY: "When Even Sick Left-Wing Sites Like 'Wonkette' Want Brian Ross Fired, Despicable Hate-Blogger Repsac3 Attacks Michelle Malkin as 'Whiney Wingnut Victim'."

BACKGROUND: "Intent to Annoy and the Fascist Hate-Blogging Campaign of Walter James Casper III."

The Left's Climate of Hate and Libel

Awesome essay from Glenn Reynolds, at WSJ, "The Arizona Tragedy and the Politics of Blood Libel" (at Memeorandum):

Shortly after November's electoral defeat for the Democrats, pollster Mark Penn appeared on Chris Matthews's TV show and remarked that what President Obama needed to reconnect with the American people was another Oklahoma City bombing. To judge from the reaction to Saturday's tragic shootings in Arizona, many on the left (and in the press) agree, and for a while hoped that Jared Lee Loughner's killing spree might fill the bill.

With only the barest outline of events available, pundits and reporters seemed to agree that the massacre had to be the fault of the tea party movement in general, and of Sarah Palin in particular. Why? Because they had created, in New York Times columnist Paul Krugman's words, a "climate of hate."

The critics were a bit short on particulars as to what that meant. Mrs. Palin has used some martial metaphors—"lock and load"—and talked about "targeting" opponents. But as media writer Howard Kurtz noted in The Daily Beast, such metaphors are common in politics. Palin critic Markos Moulitsas, on his Daily Kos blog, had even included Rep. Gabrielle Giffords's district on a list of congressional districts "bullseyed" for primary challenges. When Democrats use language like this—or even harsher language like Mr. Obama's famous remark, in Philadelphia during the 2008 campaign, "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun"—it's just evidence of high spirits, apparently. But if Republicans do it, it somehow creates a climate of hate.

There's a climate of hate out there, all right, but it doesn't derive from the innocuous use of political clichés. And former Gov. Palin and the tea party movement are more the targets than the source ....

To paraphrase Justice Cardozo ("proof of negligence in the air, so to speak, will not do"), there is no such thing as responsibility in the air. Those who try to connect Sarah Palin and other political figures with whom they disagree to the shootings in Arizona use attacks on "rhetoric" and a "climate of hate" to obscure their own dishonesty in trying to imply responsibility where none exists. But the dishonesty remains.

To be clear, if you're using this event to criticize the "rhetoric" of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you're either: (a) asserting a connection between the "rhetoric" and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you're not, in which case you're just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it?

It's either/or for the progressives, but RTWT.

BooMan responds, for example, repeating the same old line that Loughner was most likely clinically deranged, but it's the rights fault anyway, or it's the right's fault that they're getting blamed, false or not. Got that? Freakin' asshat.

PREVIOUSLY: "Jared Loughner Fixated on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, Attended 'Congress On Your Corner' Event in 2007."

And the Megyn Kelly clip is available here as well, in case this one gets pulled down before I'm back online tomorrow morning.

RELATED: Doug Ross, "Which Democrats objected to the use of mass murder as a vehicle for disseminating propaganda?", and "Breaking: Sarah Palin responsible for mass bird kills, genocide in the Sudan, and AT&T's loss of exclusive rights to the iPhone."

Plus, at Gay Patriot, "Why no theories of left-wing responsibility for Reagan’s shooting?", and The Rhetorican, "Alinsky: Original Sin In the Glass House of Eden."

WikiLeaks' Dishonesty and Hypocrisy

The latest WikiLeaks dump could be breaking a record for provoking debate. I've said a lot already. But I'm thinking back to how badly the MFM and progressive manchild bloggers got beat on the Apache video last April. Jawa Report was doing yeoman's work, for example, "For The Idiots Who Still Say There Was no RPG -- UPDATED: Wiki Leak as Left Wing Propaganda."

Liars and hypocrites. And lots more in the news. For example, at The Guardian's reader-response interview, Julian Assange refused to answer this question:

Julian.

I am a former British diplomat. In the course of my former duties I helped to coordinate multilateral action against a brutal regime in the Balkans, impose sanctions on a renegade state threatening ethnic cleansing, and negotiate a debt relief programme for an impoverished nation. None of this would have been possible without the security and secrecy of diplomatic correspondence, and the protection of that correspondence from publication under the laws of the UK and many other liberal and democratic states. An embassy which cannot securely offer advice or pass messages back to London is an embassy which cannot operate. Diplomacy cannot operate without discretion and theprotection of sources. This applies to the UK and the UN as much as the US.

In publishing this massive volume of correspondence, Wikileaks is not highlighting specific cases of wrongdoing but undermining the entire process of diplomacy. If you can publish US cables then you can publish UK telegrams and UN emails.

My question to you is: why should we not hold you personally responsible when next an international crisis goes unresolved because diplomats cannot function.

Julian ASS-ange

More later ...

PREVIOUSLY: "Progressive Manchildren and WikiLeaks."

Progressives and WikiLeaks

I've had intermittent engagement with Professor Charli Carpenter on the utility of WikiLeaks. She's written much in favor of WikiLeaks, very little that's critical. She wrote earlier, in an August essay at Foreign Policy, regarding the Afghanistan document dump:

Assange's indiscriminate approach may have caused undue collateral damage this time around, the extent of which might never be known. But this doesn't mean that the weapons of his trade should be banned or written off altogether. A more targeted whistle-blowing architecture of this type could save civilian lives in warfare -- which is the whole point, after all.

I responded to Charli at "Bloody WikiLeaks." And to repeat:

Charli Carpenter wants to save lives, particularly civilians who are killed or injured in what is otherwise the lawful exercise of military power. The problem is that's not what Julian Assange wants, nor is it what his worldwide backers want. Frankly, I don't think these people care about "human rights" except as a vehicle to chain the United States to supranational norms and to limit America's international power. Thus, I don't think Assange and WikiLeaks should be the agents of the kind of military transparency that Charli proposes.

That opinion still stands.

Charli hasn't written much on the latest release, although she suggests there's nothing new under the sun. I linked her post at Right Wing News earlier: "WikiLeaks U.S. Embassy Cables Release." And my key line, "I continue to be amazed at the fawning credibility Assange gets on the progressive," is getting picked up by some ideological enemies on the left. Poor Barbara O'Brien thinks she's pwned me: "Donald Douglas is too stupid to recognize obvious sarcasm, mistaking it for 'fawning'."

Actually, I'm not mistaking anything with respect to Charli's commentary on WikiLeaks. Yeah, I've posted my share of stupidity, but WikiLeaks commentary is not it. Stupid is as stupid does, in any case. Besides, more bothersome is willful dishonesty, which is what Scott Lemieux is all about: "Did You Know That Charli Was An Uncritical Defender of Wikileaks?" Frankly, that's what all of these progressives are all about, especially since the latest doc dump is making mincemeat of progressive foreign policy. And to that effect, folks should check out Spree at Wake Up America, "Examples of Progressive Liberal Wikileak 'Fawners'." This is an awesome post. Spree captures the absolute glee among some of the left's top bloggers. WikiLeaks is just peachy according to:

Attaturk from Firedoglake.

AmericaBlog.

Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars.

Digby.

BradBlog.

Robert Farley of Lawyers, Gays and Marriage.

Paul Rosenberg from Open Left.

John Cole from Balloon Juice.

That's a roundup from Memeorandum, although I could add a few more to Spree's list. For example, at Newshoggers, "Wikileaks Cablegate: Nothing New But The Truth," and Matthew Rothschild, "Wikileaks and the Reactionary Impulse to Repress."

Leftists love WikiLeaks, which is no surprise, since it's essentially a neo-communist information warfare operation against the U.S. I've written much on this, for example, "How Communists Exploit WikiLeaks," and "Daniel Ellsberg Works to Give Radical Imprimatur to Latest WikiLeaks Disclosures."

What's key this time is that WikiLeaks is making progressives look bad, really bad. Barbara O'Brien's too stupid to break from the pack to call it what it is: a disaster. Sure there's some pushback, from Heather Hurlburt, for example: "Why Wikileaks Is Bad for Progressive Foreign Policy." But on balance leftists are responding to the latest release with equanimity. WikiLeaks is out to destroy establishment institutions, governments and business. And Julian Assange makes no attempt to hide his enmity of the United States. As with all the previous releases, the damage to American interests is enormous. It's no wonder leftists are thrilled, like the neo-communists at Democracy Now!

RELATED: "Whack WikiLeaks."

Leftist Hypocrisy All the Way Down

The great bulk of recent blogging has covered the virtually unlimited examples of radical left-wing hypocrisy.

Last week's "One Nation" showcased not only the widespread radicalism at the base of the Democrat Party, but also the longstanding official party ties between top Democrat Party organizers and key left-wing movement activists who put together the October 2nd event. But of course neo-commies continue to whine: "But there's no such thing as the monolithic 'left'." We've also had the news of Barack Obama's gangsta rap playlist, which shows how the president has endorsed the racial stereotypes and "pathologies that still haunt and cripple far too many in the black underclass." Where's the outrage against President Obama's racist iPod? We've also had yet another round of classic leftist misogyny with Jerry Brown's "whore" slur of Meg Whitman, but not only has the response been muted (or even buried, in the case of MSNBC), but a purported "women's rights" umbrella group came out to endorse the Democrat candidate within 24 hours of alienating any woman who resents being called a whore. And as I reported today, we saw that Ted Rall, the well-known and award-winning leftist editorial cartoonist, openly proclaimed his call for a revolution against the United States and the installment of a communist dictatorship of the proletariat in its place. On top of that we've got the New York Times and its leftist minions once again distorting the record on Pamela Geller and the opposition to the Ground Zero Cordoba Center. Of course, the great majority of Americans see the mosque project as an affront to the families of the fallen, but the leftists have pushed a false "anti-Muslim" meme that has done nothing except further polarize that nation. (And the left's endorsement of the "Muslim backlash" myth is understandable, since from the academy to the mainstream press and beyond, there's been an open embrace of romanticism and self-denial surrounding radical jihad).

It's all of a piece, as I've said many times. Another one of the hypocrisies of modern times is the deification of Che Guevara to communist sainthood. Humberto Fontova has more on that, "Che Guevara: Guerrilla Doofus and Murdering Coward":

Forty three years ago this week, Ernesto "Che" Guevara got a major dose of his own medicine. Without trial he was declared a murderer, stood against a wall and shot. Historically speaking, justice has rarely been better served. If the saying "What goes around comes around" ever fit, it's here.

"When you saw the beaming look on Che's face as the victims were tied to the stake and blasted apart by the firing squad," said a former Cuban political prisoner Roberto Martin-Perez, to your humble servant here, "you saw there was something seriously, seriously wrong with Che Guevara." As commander of the La Cabana execution yard, Che often shattered the skull of the condemned man (or boy) by firing the coup de grace himself. When other duties tore him away from his beloved execution yard, he consoled himself by viewing the slaughter. Che's second-story office in Havana’s La Cabana prison had a section of wall torn out so he could watch his darling firing-squads at work.

Even as a youth, Ernesto Guevara's writings revealed a serious mental illness. "My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood. Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any vencido that falls in my hands!” This passage is from Ernesto Guevara's famous Motorcycle Diaries, though Robert Redford somehow overlooked it while directing his heart-warming movie.

More at the link.

I'll have more on all of this later. No doubt much of the electorate's repudiation of the Democrats lies in the party's rank dishonesty and hypocrisy, from the president all the way down to the lowest neo-commie netroots bloggers. Meanwhile, previously at American Power: "Progressives Are Communists (If You Didn't Know)."

Sleaze-Blogger E.D. Kain Interviews Despicable Libel-Blogger Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs

E.D. Kain, the dirtbag blogger who once giddily published my work at his now defunct "hardline" neoconservative portal, Neo-Constant, has an interview with Charles Johnson at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, "The Evolution of Blogging: An Interview with Charles Johnson."

With the exception of perhaps the harebrained Conor Friedersdorf, I can't think of more perfectly suitable blogger to interview the Mad King of LGF (Charles pumps up the interview here). It turns out E.D.'s now a featured contributor at True Slant. It notes there, at his bio-blurb, that he's also a "writer at David Frum's site, New Majority" (now called the "Frum Forum," and circling the drain as I write this). Beyond his abject dishonesty and spinelessness (discussed here), E.D.'s made a name for himself with his incoherent ramblings at the Ordinary Gentlemen. He's a stream-of-consciousness smear-master who's never learned the meaning of terms like "concision" and "parsimonious." Not only that, he's an Andrew Sullivan myrmidon, which raises obvious questions of integrity (if not sanity) all by itself.

So now, with the interview of C.J. at Ordinary Gentleman, E.D.'s now gone all in, breathlessly and irreversibly, with the weasely so-called postmodern conservatives who are increasingly being revealed as mindlessly useful idiots for the radical left. A quick case in point is Andrew Sullivan, who gleefully links the interview (off a hat-tip from airhead Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum).

And you know what? All of these folks have unsurprisingly found a consensus focal point on this gem of a libel-quote from the interview with King Charles (compete with the softball lead-in question):

At that point in time you were fairly well aligned with much of the conservative blogosphere which unified behind the war on terror. Lately that seems to have changed. More and more LGF seems to be distancing itself from the right. What’s changed? Has national security become secondary to economic issues, or does it run deeper than that?

National security is still an important issue. But the main reason I can’t march along with the right wing blogosphere any more, not to put too fine a point on it, is that most of them have succumbed to Obama Derangement Syndrome. One “nontroversy” after another, followed by the outrage of the day, followed by conspiracy theory after conspiracy theory, all delivered in breathless, angry prose that’s just wearying and depressing to read.

It’s not just the economic issues either. I’ve never been on board with the anti-science, anti-Enlightenment radical religious right. Once I began making my opinions known on issues like creationism and abortion, I realized that there just wasn’t very much in common with many of the bloggers on the right. And then, when most of them decided to fall in and support a blogger like Robert Stacy McCain, who has neo-Nazi friends, has written articles for the openly white supremacist website American Renaissance, and has made numerous openly racist statements on the record … well, I was extremely disappointed to see it, but unfortunately not surprised.

I’ve always written the truth about my opinions, and I have no intention of changing that policy now, just to fit in with a “movement” that has gone completely off the rails.

Robert Stacy McCain is currently in Orlando, Florida. He texted me today to give me the heads up on his son Jim's scuba-diva lessons at their fabulous hotel. Robert hasn't responded at his blog to the Ordinary Gentlmen smears. He's busy, mostly likely, having a fun-filled business trip, although it's possible he's not aware of the latest salvo in Charles Johnson's campaign of libel smears. Of course, Robert's replied numerous times to these scurrilous attacks before (see, "Charles Johnson's Quantum Physics"). What's interesting here is how E.D.'s essentially given Johnson's ravings the patina of credibility outside the fetid fever swamps of the LGF commentariat and of the dungeons of a few hangers-on across the neo-communist blogosphere.

For the truth is that this campaign of fabrications of Robert Stacy McCains' "racism" is actually unintelligible except among those trolling the narrow ideological confines of the radical, unhinged postmodern left. No serious writer on the right today gives these allegations credibility. (No offense, but A.J. Strata recently proved, in his attack on Robert, that he doesn't know WTF is going on, so cross him off the list of right-wing respectables).

Interestingly, the first comment at the Ordinary Gentlmen post -- no doubt from a friendly but brainless "post-mod" -- sums up perfectly the non-conservative bone fides of Charles Johnson's leftist sycophants:

My theory on LGF ... is that he was never really a conservative at all. His original understanding was that the War that began on 9/11 was ultimately a LIBERAL war, i.e., a defense of those Enlightenment values he mentions above.

There's more of that (classic) comment at the post; and notice how it's a essentially an attack on the "evil" neocons as "illiberal" -- with the added bonus of smearing the reputation of former President George W. Bush. No doubt we'd find similar rants in the totally fubar comment threads at Daily Kos.

It's worth noting that Serr8d showed his mettle with a comment there as well, where he suggested that:

Charles Johnson is a hateful, spiteful little man who uses his ‘custom-designed software’ to form and shape his hand-picked commentariat to echo his own thoughts. It’s a classic methodology to assauge his desire for positive feedback. He’s selected Robert Stacy McCain as his target du jour, and in fairness, Ordinary Gentlemen, you should give RSM an interview as well.

Indeed, in fairness, by all means.

James Webb, Atheist Hypocrite, Loves teh Gays

James Webb, of Brain Rage, was creepily interested in my post last night, "Democratic Values! Left-Wing Alaska Operative 'Ghoulshops' Trig Palin!"

In his entry, "American Power and Trig Palin 'Ghoulshopping', James agrees radical Linda Biegel's Photoshop of Trig Palin was indeed "ghoulish." But then he attempts to walk it back because it wasn't really Trig. It was "just" the "evil" Eddie Burke:

Now while I wouldn't go so far as Don in saying that he's a grotesque ridicule of Down Syndrome I will say that he does indeed look a bit ghoulish ...

Hunh ... (gasping here, eyes bulging out of sockets) ... WTF!! It's ghoulish or it ain't! Help me out, yo!

Oh, you know what? It's not ghoulish if it's Palin's baby, because the Palins are Wasilla hillbillies and Eddie Burke's ... well, he's a "Homophobic, Red Shirt, Bible-Thumping Nazi, Gay Bashing, Tea-Bagging Racist, White Guy Bigot!

Okay, gotcha! That makes it a-okay!

Actually, full snark stop here for a second ... it's not okay!

Weasel Zippers nails it: "Something this vile, mean spirited and vitriolic is the sole property of the left..."

And Texas for Palin adds this, "Shocked? Don't be. These are Democrats. It's what they do. It's who they are."

Conservatives for Sarah Palin have been updating their original post all day, for example, this shocker! "Dr. Chill: Liar, Liar; Now They're Claiming That We Made the Photo Ugly."

But that's just the typical dishonesty and hypocrisy you get from the radical leftists.

Another quick example is James Webb's policy of tracking hit pieces on American Power back to ... wait for it ... American Power!

That's right! Can you believe it?!! This freak, James Webb, writes a post hammering me as representing "everyday stupidity of right-wing religious neoconservatives." And then he tracks-back, twice, like a MOFO LINK WHORE - FREAKING A!!

I am not even kidding! Dude! You can't make this sh** up! Check the track-back links, here and here! It's like, yo, he thinks I'm a bro or something!

And guess what? What's so wierd about it is that, yeah, I'm like totally cool with folks leaving their hits in my comments section. I'm a link whore myself, frankly. No shame in it, IMHO, as long as everyone reciprocates.

BUT JAMES WEBB FLIPPED A WIG WHEN I DROPPED MY BLACK FLAG PUNK POST IN HIS COMMENTS A WHILE BACK -or some such bunk, who knows WTF is up with this guy's hysterics??!!

It turns out that James Webb sent me a whacked, totally pissed-off HOLY HELL INDIGNANT e-mail to show it:

I warned you once before Don when you shamelessly linked some post about your skateboarding youth on a completely unrelated comment thread at my site. I left that link up and made it clear that I would delete any future comments not at least tangentially relevant to their posts ...

Okay, okay, what was it? Maybe my post wasn't "tangentially related." It's not like I was trying to rip the guy a new one with, well, stuff like:

The term 'sore losers' seems a bit simplistic and trite to explain this apparent derangement and never ending persecution complex but at this point I can't think of any other rational explanation for this type of behavior.

Sheesh, that's what I get for trying to be a homie! Man, remind me never to try to drop off an old punk rock post at some WANNABE-HIP dude's freaking blog! Forget about, ah ... you know, trying to be, like, friendly!!

But wait!!

That's not all!

James Webb hearts him teh gays, but he doesn't like it one bit when you call him out on it! Remember my post on "How to Get a Blogger Content Warning"? That's where you can find some gay homo-sex blogs by clicking through James's OUT Campaign link. Alexander the Gay's blog pops right up (but wait, don't go there ... unless you're looking to see James' phat-hung Asian dudes!).

It's like I told folks: "Shoot, if you need a happening online portal to teh well-hung gays, James Webb is your man!"

But, boy, did the dude flip his stack at that one! James was steaming hotter than a spooge-soaked hunk of throbbing gristle!!

(Oh yeah, snark's back on here, just in case anyone takes this too seriously.)

I'm surprised too! James is down with the homosexuals, so you wouldn't think he'd get so pissed about giving folks the heads up on his gay-supporting atheism. I mean, really, James is totally down on the e-mails to his bro Andrew Sullivan, and the Atlantic's barebacker even links to James blog! Now that is inside baseball! Switch-hitting too!

NTTAWWT!!

Come out, come out, wherever you are!!

Just be careful dude! With the support of Linda Biegel, James is practically getting over there into Trig-Truther territory! And even more importantly, you've got to look out for that AIDS-related dementia! Pretty soon, we'll have to get Christopher Badeaux to put up a huge bio-piece nailing down James' descent into anti-neocon (anti-Semitic) madness!

But hey, everything's cool, alright?

I'm not going to delete James' spam links in my comments section. Just as long as he stays the f*** back, okay? I like teh gays ... really, some of my best friends ... But frankly, I don't do the flip-floppy on the side!

Redefining Individualism

One of the reasons that I've hammered the folks at Ordinary Gentlemen so much is not just because of their fundamental cowardice and dishonesty, but because they're extremely easy targets as well. It makes for interesting blogging, in any case, and the much-needed clarification of ideas.

E.D. Kain provides us with another opportunity this afternoon, in "Redefining Prosperity." E.D. is of course defending the dramatic Democratic expansion of government under Obama's fiscal policy, but he's also trying to justify this power grab by offering a new model of public purpose, an all-American revisionist philosophy of statism that's offered as if it's so self-evident that we should look upon those clinging to "archaic" conceptions of individualism and liberty as literally less biologically-evolved.

Check this out:

Individualism ties in well with the Republican Party’s superficial promise of small government through lower taxation. Democrats, on the other hand, believe that to some degree the State needs to intervene, to provide social safety nets in a society that obviously merits them. They have more faith in the power and beneficence of the government. Republicans are equally bound to the State, but believe in a broader partnership between it and private institutions. Both place an enormous amount of faith and emphasis on the individual. The irony, of course, is that individualism and the size of the State are bound inextricably, the one to the other. The more Americans become boxed into their “liberating” roles as individuals, the more detached we become from our communities and families. These antiquated institutions become accidentally irrelevant. Once upon a time, our family was our social safety net, and the community an even broader one. Yet, as we’ve been increasingly driven into our roles as individuals - through political and economic policies as well as through rapid technological development - and as our faith in community and family has dwindled, we have become ever more reliant on the State to provide for our needs.

Read the whole thing, here.

But let's note right away that E.D. might have set his essay up with some kind of definition of "individualism." Most scholars working in political culture don't use the necessarily popularized version of "rugged individualism," for the manifest reason that it's a term that easily abused, "John Wayned" into some kind of caricature of a phenomenon that should really be thought of as a more complex ideational identity of self-reliance and freedom from interference by the state (lower case for "state," as it's not a proper noun).

When we refer to "individualism" we're not latching onto some snazzy catch-word that's hip with the inside-the-Beltway conservative class - although certainly Rush Limbaugh and others take advantage of the powerful imagery associated with the historically-undeniable notion that people are better off to grow and prosper when LEFT ALONE. Indeed, the development of the democracy in many respects has been driven by individualism. The sense here is of a classically liberal orientation between the citizen and the state, WITHIN a constitutionally-limited polity based on respect for freedom of conscience and property rights.

Note something here as well: We think of individualism as a central component of our American ETHNIC identity, and especially as a psychology of values encompassing our mythic ideals as an immigration society. Over the centuries the immigrants to our shores who helped build and grow this nation have been glued together by a shared dream of acceptance, egalitarianism, and opportunity. And by egalitarianism I mean specifically equality of opportunity, the chance for average people prosper in the absence of hierarchical categories of aristicratic or ecclesiastic privilege. To read works like Gordon Wood's, Radicalism of the American Revolution, and Louis Hartz's, The Liberal Tradition in America, is to be regaled in the powerful moving force of an anti-feudal culture that has been unmatched as a developmental model in the history of the world.

Notice what Robert Bellah says about the power of this classic American political culture in today's day and age:

I believe I can safely borrow terminology from Habits of the Heart and say that a dominant element of the common culture is what we called utilitarian individualism. In terms of historical roots this orientation can be traced to a powerful Anglo-American utilitarian tradition going back at least as far as Hobbes and Locke, although it operates today quite autonomously, without any necessary reference to intellectual history. Utilitarian individualism has always been moderated by what we called expressive individualism, which has its roots in Anglo-American Romanticism, but which has picked up many influences along the way from European ethnic, African-American, Hispanic and Asian influences.

What's interesting in Bellah's piece is how he agrees with E.D. Kain's basic point on the power of the state, but the RESULT of the power is not to create greater DEPENDENCY on government, as E.D. avers (and desires). No, the state works to reinforce, with a world-historical enmority, the power of markets. And markets in turn unleash the productive capacity of individuals to create and produce and innovate, which advances society through wealth creation and the consolidation of entrepreneurial social capital.

Note that Bellah's writing twenty years ago. He's lamenting at that time the shift toward radical muliticultualism, which we know now is even more pronounced today. Bellah sees individualism and robust civic identity as the bulwarks against the more fissiparous tendencies of multiculturalism; the individualistic and civic levels form the social glue of communities that E.D. Kain has written off as "irrelevant."

This is to say that people are not "boxed in" by our historically individualistic culture. Our overwhelming norms and practices as a people are DRIVEN and SHAPED by it. Individualism is what creates a natural aversion to the power of the state. And this is not new. It's not as if the state itself is coterminous with large welfare-policy provision, as E.D. implies. The ORIGINAL state was the medieval actor that arose following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Modern democratic societies emerges as a specific reaction to the absolutism of the national monarchies in Europe. Does it really make any sense in the American context that people today are abandoning "communities" and families" in favor of hegemonic state structures that are alleged to be atomizing them out of their natural social elements?

Indeed, the argument's absurd. One of the most talked about phenomena in the last couple of decades has been an extreme form of suburbanization found in "gate-guarded" master-planned communities. California's well known for this form of hyper-individualism. People who are successul in their businesses or professional careers need very little from the state other than a system of legal order of rights and contracts, and the public goods of community safety (police). Following the race-riots and social welfare liberalism of the 1960s and 1970s, increasing numbers of middle class Americans withdrew from the macrosociety to affluent enclaves away from the danger and decay of the inner cities. These communities of choice allowed for the preservation of a radical individualism that finds not a greater reliance of the state but an increasing flight from it.

Perhaps this is the version of contemporary self-sufficiency that E.D. should be excoriating. While it may be true, as E.D. says, that this type of individualism works at cross-purposes to community, it's of the larger macrosocial community, not that of the family and family-neighborhood enclaves. In turn, it's fundamentally illogical that growing the state will work to solve whatever "crisis of individualism" E.D.'s trying to elucidate. Big goverment kills liberty. If people feel threatened by creeping socialism and unescapable high taxes to pay for the entitlements of the ever-increasing left-wing hordes, they'll flee to where freedom's to be found. It's no wonder that many radical nihilists today are mocking and demonizing those like Glenn Beck or Glenn Reynolds for offering scenarios of American anarchy or of an emerging "John Galt" revolt of the productive classes.

E.D. Kain's groping for some ideological-philosophical justifcation for a left-libertarian consensus. But as Matt Welch noted the other day, this left-classical liberal alliance is dead on arrival. E.D. and his allies keep hammering the point because they want to be "progressive" without being hammered for their ideological capriciousness (if not outright cowardice). So far, these guys are striking out badly.