The Latest Attack Of The Wingnut Brigade

Amazingly enough, conservatives weren't satisfied by the resignation of Van Jones and the funding cutoff for ACORN. Seems they are trying to attack the Administration relentlessly, as if that was their singular objective! There have been a few clumsy stabs this week, like the mild song praising the President, or the lame tape of community organizers praying to "O God," not "Obama"; or attacking the President for wanting to bring the Olympics and $22 billion dollars of economic activity to America. But the right thinks they've found a target with a Department of Education official named Kevin Jennings. Sean Hannity has practically jumped on his desk and demanded Jennings' resignation for allegedly "covering up statutory rape." I say allegedly because only Sean Hannity thinks that, and it certainly doesn't meet with the facts of the case.

Despite evidence to the contrary, Fox News -- led by Sean Hannity -- and other right-wing media have claimed that Department of Education official Kevin Jennings "cover[ed] up statutory rape" and violated Massachusetts law by not reporting to authorities a 1988 conversation in which a high school student told Jennings about his relationship with an older man. In fact, Jennings' attorney wrote in a 2004 letter that the student was 16 years old, which is -- and was at the time -- the legal age of consent in Massachusetts.

Jennings' attorney: Conversation was "with a sixteen-year-old student"; "no factual basis" that Jennings was "aware of any sexual victimization of any student." In an August 3, 2004, letter, Constance M. Boland of the law firm Nixon Peabody -- which represented the organization that Jennings ran -- wrote that the "conversation" Jennings had was with "a sixteen-year-old student" and that there "is no factual basis whatsoever for" the "claim that Mr. Jennings engaged in unethical practices, or that he was aware of any sexual victimization of any student, or that he declined to report any sexual victimization at any time." [Boland letter, 8/3/04]

What happened was that Jennings wrote about a conversation he had while a teacher - 21 years ago - where a 16 year-old student told him about a relationship with an older man. Jennings, who is gay, didn't report the kid to the authorities for doing anything illegal, mainly because he... wasn't doing anything illegal.

Nevertheless, Hannity is outraged (but that's redundant) and the trumped-up scandal is seeping into the media. John Aravosis writes:

Allen went on a right-wing TV show this morning and falsely accused Department of Education official Kevin Jennings of a crime. He said - falsely - that Jennings failed to report "an assault" on a young man, twenty years ago, which would be a crime under Massachusetts law at the time. In fact, Jennings was never informed of an assault on anyone. He spoke to a student, of the legal age of consent, who had sex with a man. Ta ta ta dum.

Yes, you guessed - they were g-a-y. And one was older than the other. Ergo, it must have been one of those gay pedophile predator types who always go after young boys, because those gays are such perverts - right?

I'm not surprised that FOX News and the far right hate groups are going after a gay appointee in the Obama administration. Anti-gay bigotry is ripe at FOX, in the religious right, and in the GOP base that now controls the Republican party. So none of this should surprise us. What does surprise me is when real journalists, real reporters, like Mike Allen, swallow the bait from the ilk of Sean Hannity and the Family Research Council, and report their sludge as fact, when it's an outright lie. It really makes you wonder why the media smells a story here. I doubt they'd be as interested if the two legal adults, and the Obama official, were straight.

And another thing. Would Mike Allen, and any other media outlet covering this story, prefer if the kid had killed himself? From the REST of the story, if you bother reading it, the kid didn't exactly sound long for this world. Can you imagine, in the 1980s mind you (which is when this happened), had Jennings outed the kid as gay, not just to his parents, but to the entire state (which would include his school), which is what Allen is proposing? Assuming the kid didn't kill himself, would his parents have kicked him out of their house (which happened, and still happens, to a lot of gay kids)? Gee, I'll bet the media covering this fake story didn't think of that one. No, they had a "sex" story involving a gay guy - three gay guys in fact - and well, how you can top that?

Jennings' real crime in the eyes of his accusers appears to be that he's a gay man. After all, a famous director drugging and raping an underage white girl without consent - that's OK for the establishment, and he shouldn't be punished because he's in their social class. Someone like Jennings not turning in a ghey for his consensual relationanship - that deserves a burning at the stake.

This ticky-tack distractions don't even have to succeed. It's part of an effort to chip away at the legitimacy of the President, so that when the big story breaks, these zombie lies can fit an invented pattern. That's all.

A Full Wahhhmbulance

Wanda Sykes' comments at the White House Correspondents Dinner actually provoked less of a hissy fit than I expected, but still provided a good amount of hypocritical hilarity. Sean Hannity, who ran hourlong specials comparing Barack Obama to terrorists like Bill Ayers during the election campaign, sits there and gets all offended by Sykes comparing Limbaugh to a terrorist. And so on. Adam Serwer rounds it up pretty nicely.

Wanda Sykes' comedy routine at the White House Correspondent's Dinner was really offensive. In it, Sykes suggested that conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh is supported by Hamas, and that Islamists are "constantly issuing Limbaugh talking points." She joked about terrorists supporting conservatives in general, suggesting that recent violent events in Iraq are attempts by terrorists to swing the upcoming midterm elections in favor of Republicans.

Then she got really personal. She joked that Limbaugh was a racist who doesn't want black people to "escap[e] the underclass." She accused him of being responsible for killing "a million babies a year," and aired her friend's theory that Limbaugh himself was a terrorist attack," a followup to 9/11. She also, most disgustingly, said that if conservatives kept apologizing to Limbaugh, they'd eventually contract "anal poisoning." She wondered when Republicans would finally stop "bending over and grabbing their ankles" for Limbaugh, and finally concluded that Limbaugh was just a "bad guy."

Oh wait. Wanda Sykes didn't say any of these things. These are things Rush Limbaugh has said about Obama or other Democrats in the past year...

Notably, Big Pharma himself had nothing to say about Sykes' act, maybe because he was mindful of his own past statements, but probably because he doesn't want anyone on his radio show to remember his Oxycontin addiction. Helpfully, Chris Hitchens provided the classy quote Limbaugh would have said, if he thought he could get away with it.

By the end of the night, Christopher Hitchens was of course the last man (barely) standing, and he had some choice words for the evening's headlining comedian, Wanda Sykes. "The president should be squirming in his seat. Not smiling," he said. "The black dyke got it wrong. No one told her the rules."

Ahh, the rules. Right.

(This is also hilarious, considering that when Stephen Colbert made George Bush squirm in his seat, the Village universally condemned him.)

I'm officially done with this. Don't hire a comedian if you're so easily offended.

The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight

The politicians in the Republican Party know they have a winning issue. John Boehner put Tim Geithner on notice today, saying "What happens over the next 24 to 48 hours will determine his future." Connie Mack (R-FL) called for his resignation. Chuck Grassley wants an Inspector General review into Treasury's contacts with AIG. Sure, they're being inconsistent, but that never bothered the GOP before.

What's more, they're right. Geithner and the Treasury Department struck the limit on compensation caps because he needed vonutary private partners to pull off his "TALF" plan.

Officials at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department are increasingly worried that the controversy could discourage investors from joining a new government effort to revive consumer lending as well as a separate plan that relies on private money to buy toxic assets from banks, sources familiar with the matter said.(...)

A senior executive at one of the nation's largest banks said he had heard from several hedge funds that they would not partner with the government for fear that lawmakers would impose retroactive conditions on their participation, such as limits on compensation or disclosure requirements.

There are differing arguments about the potential of the TALF plan (personally, I see it as the government putting up most of the risk and outsourcing the profits to hedge funds), but the debate has kind of been rendered moot by the Fed's announcement that they're just going to go ahead and buy up a ton more mortgage-backed securities on their own (along with long-term Treasury securities) without getting approval from Congress. This pushes the bailout numbers up by at least another trillion dollars. So the cunning Geithner plan to make the bailout slightly less costly has not only been made inoperable, but it facilitated these bonus payouts which just directly prove that the banks are bad-faith operators. And this is only going to get worse.

• Item 1: Citibank CEO lied to Congress about his own compensation package, which members of Congress are pursuing.

• Item 2: Generous retention bonuses at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will continue to cement the impression that the banks are taking advantage of the bailout money.

The Administration is becoming susceptible to the argument that they overly trusted banksters who are interested in personal self-aggrandizement and not fixing the economy. And the GOP knows it, and they're sticking the knife in.

Except their spiritual leaders are not being helpful.

GOP Congressional leaders have roundly condemned AIG and its executives, as part of a strategy to position themselves as heroic defenders of the taxpayers and to paint the Obama administration as weak and ineffectual. Mitch McConnell recently blasted AIG’s bonuses as an “outrage.” John Boehner said that the “American people are rightly outraged.” And Eric Cantor bemoaned the “stunning lack of accountability” on AIG’s part.

But increasingly, leading conservative media figures are moving in a different direction: Defending AIG.

Rush Limbaugh recently said: “I am all for the AIG bonuses” and attacked the Obama administration for trying to undo them. He also blasted Dem efforts to get the names of the AIG bonus recipients as “McCarthyism.”

Fox News followed suit, also comparing Dems to “Joe McCarthy.” And Sean Hannity has now derided efforts to tax the execs by saying: “In other words, we’re going to just steal their money.”

Hilarious. The White House tosses a softball right over the plate, and half the GOP wants to swing at it and the other half wants to take it.

Is There Anyone Worse Than Alan Colmes?

Here Robert Gibbs is going along with the perfect response to Sean Hannity's Ayers obsession, asking if Hannity is an anti-Semite because he had a known anti-Semite as the centerpiece of his smear job show on Barack Obama, and Alan Colmes throws the lifeline:



Hannity is bobbing and weaving, knowing that he's caught, hiding behind this idea that he's a "journalist" and he talks to a lot of people with whom he disagrees, which is completely besides the point because he made this Andy Martin guy the centerpiece of the show and completely agrees with his thoughts about Obama... and along comes Colmes, saying "Sean is not an anti-Semite."

That's not the point, Alan. The point is how guilt by association is simply idiotic. And the thing is, I've heard Colmes use the same kind of logic on his radio show. But I guess Hannity was feeling too much heat, and somebody in the booth zapped Colmes and told him to do his duty as the Fox News "liberal" lickspittle.

Pathetic.

Wrong About Everything

Boy, the wingnuts really don't know what to do about this North Korea situation. It's really a foreign concept based on "diplomacy" and "incentives for compliance" and other fantasyland hippie stuff they must have come up with on the pot-smokers lawn in the Haight-Ashbury. Real men know that such multilateralism is excessively dangerous and will cause all of us to be blown to bits.

HEWITT: By the way, I -- I'm still trying to find two tickets to the Ohio State-USC game. And none of the USC people will give up their tickets to me. I'd pay fair price. They -- they know Ohio State's gonna slaughter the Trojans. They know that they're gonna slaughter the Trojans, and therefore they do not want me there at the bloodbath, since it's probably the last football game we'll ever get to see before the United States gets blown up by the Islamists under Obama.

But this foreign policy decision was made by the Dear Leader himself - W., with a big assist from envoy Christopher Hill - and they just don't know what to make of that. Leading to the most amusing 30 seconds of Sean Hannity's career.

HANNITY: North Korea has finally handed over a long awaited accounting of its nuclear program to Chinese officials, fulfilling a key step in the denuclearization process. Although North Korea’s declaration is six months later than their deadline, the news today brings a clear foreign policy victory for the Bush administration. But will the press report it that way? Joining us now for analysis, former ambassador to the U.N. and a Fox News contributor, John Bolton. What do you think this means?

BOLTON: I think it's actually a clear victory for North Korea. They gain enormous political legitimacy....In return, we get precious little. I think this is North Korea demonstrating again that they can out-negotiate the U.S. without raising a sweat.

HANNITY: Boy I tell you they've done it time and time again, and I'm sorta perplexed, Mr. Ambassador, to understand why we keep going back to the well knowing that they haven't kept the agreements in the past. Whatever happened to Reagan's "trust but verify"?

That's fair and balanced all from the same guy.

Not even Fourthbranch, the Barnacle himself, could outmaneuver the State Department on this one, and he's not happy:

WASHINGTON — Two days ago, during an off-the-record session with a group of foreign policy experts, Vice President Dick Cheney got a question he did not want to answer. “Mr. Vice President,” asked one of them, “I understand that on Wednesday or Thursday, we are going to de-list North Korea from the terrorism blacklist. Could you please set the context for this decision?”

Mr. Cheney froze, according to four participants at the Old Executive Office Building meeting. For more than 30 minutes he had been taking and answering questions, without missing a beat. But now, for several long seconds, he stared, unsmilingly, at his questioner, Steven Clemons of the New America Foundation, a public policy institution. Finally, he spoke:

“I’m not going to be the one to announce this decision,” the other participants recalled Mr. Cheney saying, pointing at himself. “You need to address your interest in this to the State Department.” He then declared that he was done taking questions, and left the room.

The Barnacle froze because it's one of the few things that could be considered a foreign policy triumph in the history of the Bush Administration, and it happened because mindless warhawks like him were finally sidelined. Bush's North Korea policy began with a series of mishaps and belligerence, just as the neocons wished, and it led to Kim Jong-Il getting the bomb. Precisely when the State Department started guiding the policy and Christopher Hill was given leeway to negotiate in the six-party talks, the situation changes, leading to today's destruction of their nuclear facility at Yongbon. The world is still a more dangerous place because of all of the delays, and the DPRK still has about a dozen poorly-designed nuclear weapons as a result.

But the facts are that as soon as the neocon "my way or the highway" approach was abandoned, progress was made. And that's because the neocons have been wrong about every single foreign policy decision for well over 50 years, and their attitude with respect to North Korea made no dent in that unbroken record. I don't have to tell you the position John McCain has held on this issue since 1999, do I?

McCain repeated this trope throughout the speech, drawing on his personal history and adopting the rhetoric of moral seriousness about the consequences of committing American forces. But awareness of the consequences was, for McCain, no reason to avoid starting a war [...] In his view, efforts at conflict prevention are fundamentally misguided. He told the Kansas State audience that notwithstanding the Clinton administration's efforts, Korea's leaders "remain quite capable of launching in their country's death throes one final, glorious war. But now, they are much, much better armed." In short -- war is inevitable, so better to get it over with as soon as possible.

I hope I'm not surprising anyone by saying that on foreign policy, John McCain is basically to the right of George W. Bush.

The 11th Day Of September Happened On 9-11!

I think the most despicable moment in last night's debate was Boy George Stephanopoulos' Hannity-fed question about William Ayers, and particularly the "look what he wrote in the New York Times on 9-11" remark. Please. I know you can't read, Boy George, but the thing is that newspapers come out early in the morning, meaning that Ayers wrote what he wrote on 9-10, and the correlation is nothing more than incidental.

That Clinton parroted this, referencing 9-11 with an alacrity that would rival Rudy 9iu11iani, is quite disgusting. She's really crossed over into a full Republican campaign mode. Her TV ads are almost totally negative, and her justification is that "The Republicans will bring it up in the fall," apparently allowing her to... campaign like a Republican. This has an impact. I had a discussion with my Hillary-supporting dad last night and I might as well have been talking to Bill O'Reilly.

It's I guess comforting to know that if Hillary is behind in the fall she'll fight dirty, but of course this campaign in ensuring that if Hillary does pull out the nomination by a miracle, she'll be well behind in the fall.

UPDATE: I don't want to leave Charlie Gibson off the hook, his believe that $200,000 is a middle-class salary and that the most important challenge facing the nation is THE CAPITAL GAINS TAX just portrays how out of touch these stufed shirt media types are.

UPDATE II: This is pretty damn funny.

Portrait of a Meltdown

When people into politics attack other people into politics:





See my comments from over the weekend.

Avalanche of Dumb

Juan Williams can't understand why Markos Moulitsas would be given his own column in Newsweek (ideologically balanced out by Karl Rove, by the way) because he's not a "real journalist." This is the traditional media conceit, of course, that you're not one of them unless you came up through the struggle the way they did. Steve Benen demolishes this nonsense:

Juan Williams said this while answering questions from Sean Hannity, during an interview on Fox News.

The irony was apparently lost on the host, the guest, and the audience. What a shame.

Indeed, I’d just add that the closer one looks at Williams’ complaint, the stranger it seems.

* “[T]he fact is that he’s not a journalist in terms of someone who knows how to do reporting.” — I’m obviously not in a position to speak for Markos, but I don’t think he’s ever claimed to be a journalist, and as far as I can tell, Newsweek didn’t hire him to be a journalist. He’ll be an occasional contributor. As a prominent political player, that hardly seems like an unreasonable move for a magazine like Newsweek to make.

Also, the fact that he studied journalism in college, ran the student newspaper, worked for the Guardian two years ago covering British elections and interned at a major paper certainly makes him more of a journalist than Sean Friggin' Hannity:

Hannity attended St. Pius X Preparatory Seminary in Uniondale in Long Island, graduating in 1980 with a high school diploma... He dropped out of New York University because of financial issues, and decided to pursue a radio career.Hannity hosted his first talk radio show in 1989 at the volunteer college station at UC Santa Barbara, KCSB-FM, while working as a general contractor The show aired for 40 hours of air time and, according to Hannity, he was terrible.Hannity's weekly show was cancelled after less than a year when KCSB management charged him with "discriminating against gays and lesbians" after two shows featuring the book The AIDS Coverup: The Real and Alarming Facts about AIDS by Gene Antonio. The station reversed its decision to dismiss Hannity due in part to a campaign conducted by the Santa Barbara Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. Hannity decided against returning to KCSB.

After leaving KCSB, Hannity placed an ad in radio publications presenting himself as "the most talked about college radio host in America," and WVNN in Athens, Alabama (part of the Huntsville market) hired him to be the afternoon talk show host. From Huntsville, he moved to WGST in Atlanta in 1992, filling the slot vacated by Neal Boortz, who had moved to competing station WSB. In September 1996, Fox News founder Roger Ailes hired the then relatively unknown Hannity to co-host the television program Hannity & Colmes with Alan Colmes.

Juan Williams doesn't like Kos because he doesn't know his address. He doesn't live in the Village.

Resignation

That Denny Hastert is possibly about to resign is pretty much expected; a Speaker of the House suddenly pushed to the back bench is a shock to the system that quickly leads to the backbencher seeking to find another line of work.

But I didn't expect Senator Diaper to lose the Republican Party so quickly. Isn't EVERYONE in that party a hypocrite? Why does this one rankle everyone so much? I mean, he lost Hannity? HANNITY? That's like God losing Pat Robertson.

Of course, Vitter is up for a criminal violation, but again, this isn't unique to the GOP. I guess I have major scandal fatigue.

UPDATE: John Kerry didn't botch this joke...

"There once was a man named Vitter/Who vowed that he wasn't a quitter," Kerry began. "But with stories of women/And all of his sinnin'/He knows his career's in the — oh, never mind."

Tweety Loses It

Chris Matthews went off on right-wing Rep. Jack Kingston on Hardball today. Crooks and Liars has the video. I've been confronted with this particularly ludicrous talking point, that we were in South Korea and Germany for 60 years, so what's wrong with being in Iraq a little while? The difference is that those weren't hot shooting wars where multiple bomb attacks kill dozens, and photographers have to be banned from violent areas lest they actually report on what's happening. Matthews unloaded on Kingston:

Matthews: Will the people of Georgia support ten more years of American involvement, military involvement in Iraq?

Kingston: Well, people know we're still in Germany and in South Korea…

Matthews: Yea, but..no no no no no. I won't let you get away with that. That's not a fair comparison. We do not have a war in South Korea. There's no German that's fired on an American since 1945. That's not a fair comparison…That is not an acceptable argument! These comparisons to previous eras…it's lazy thinking, Congressman. It's the kind of propaganda that does not help this country understand the situation. You stepped into a dishonest comparison. Some people come on this show over and over again saying things that-JUST-aren't-true.

The only thing I disagree with there are the words "some people."

And as long as we're chronicling talking-head shouting matches, I just saw Sean Hannity go after Christopher Hitchens because Hitch refused to say that he was sorry for Jerry Falwell and his family. I don't understand why we make a fetish out of that "I'm sorry for his family" phrase, even if it is to be directed at someone as contemptible and hateful as Jerry Falwell. Steve Benen has the goods on who this man really was. I wonder, would he have been sorry for, say, Isaac Mizrahi's family? Harvey Firestein? Matthew Shepard? Maybe in words, but certainly not in deed. So what do the words really matter? Also, NOBODY needs a lesson in courtesy from Sean "some things are worth dying for, like keeping Nancy Pelosi out of the Speaker's chair" Hannity.

My Kingdom for a Junta

Thomas Sowell at NRO has a "Whoops, did I say that out loud?" moment.

When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can't help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.

This is the problem with the rage generated by the authoritarian element on the other side of the aisle. They've been told for a couple decades now that having a Democrat in charge of the country would basically be the end of civilization as we know it. That doesn't breed the kind of thinking that leads to a peaceful transition of power. It breeds the kind of thinking that leaves bombs in front of an abortion clinic. Sowell is just musing, but the conservative movement has engendered such hate and bile, that it's not a giant leap from thought to deed.

This is not unique to modern conservatism, but they have more shrieking commentators who whip up their supporters into a frenzy, it's just the truth. Remember Sean Hannity saying that "there are things in life worth fighting and dying for and one of 'em is making sure Nancy Pelosi doesn't become the Speaker"? Nobody acted on that one.

Yet.