— A Utopia, of sorts, where “unity” prevails — even if in order to do so free speech is (like some bad Disney project) “re-imagined” as a right that is heavily policed by the state, with the upshot being that only the speech that doesn’t hurt or offend or cause a rift in the progressive unity continuum is protected, with the rest relegated to a growing repository for what is termed “hate speech.”
The argument goes something like this: in order to have free speech, everyone must be able to have his say. But one is not able to have his say if one’s say is not respected, or is met with “intolerant” counter speech — such that intolerance is equated with a refusal to allow the speech of others equal intellectual standing, regardless of its flaws, inconsistencies, lies, etc.
To point out such things is to engage in a “tyranny of facts” — and as we all know, “tyranny” is bad and ugly and wrong. Thus, in a country increasingly unmoored from Enlightenment thinking and the founders’ animating ideological principles, best captured in classical liberalism and some soft forms of libertarianism, “free speech” has become, perversely, a means by which to grant speech the kind of enforced moral relativism favored by — and in fact demanded by — the totalitarian underpinnings of “progressivism.” As with its sociological counterparts, multiculturalism and the “diversity movement,” acceptable speech is increasingly determined by how little it offends.
Or, to put it another way, free speech — which was conceived as a way to protect unpopular speech from majoritarian tyranny and governmental intimidation — is now, in a perfect Orwellian flip, being re-imagined as a way toward “unity,” by factoring out as hateful those bits of speech that move us further away from a leftist Utopia, where we all stand as one, honoring the state and it charismatic secular godhead.
This is fascism — though it is a fascism less of soaring national pride than one of repressive collective national guilt. It is, to put a name to it, the fascism of Oprah.
And — remarkably — this movement has become so brazen that we have the least vetted presidential candidate in history, before his party’s convention has even reached its surreal, almost Caligula-like climax, attempting to intimidate the media (this, even though they have been in the bag for Obama since they first nudged one another and noted that he was clean and articulate and black).
Which is why it is no surprise to see a man who has not yet won the presidency presuming to take his premature media coronation to heart, and attempt to wield his perceived “power” like some tinpot dictator. Case in point? Obamalot vs. Stanley Kurtz.
From the editors at NRO, and worth quoting at great lenght:
While the Obama coronation proceeds apace in Denver, it is in Chicago that Americans are getting a disturbing demonstration of his thuggish methods of stifling criticism.
Stanley Kurtz, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Harvard-educated social anthropologist and frequent contributor to National Review, among other publications. He is widely respected for his meticulous research and measured commentary. For months, he has been doing the job the mainstream media refuses to do: examining the background and public record of Barack Obama, the first-term senator Democrats are about to make their nominee for president […]
Kurtz has written extensively, and with characteristic attention to factual detail, about Obama’s early career as a “community organizer,†his cultivation of benefactors in the most radical cauldrons of Chicago politics, his long-time pastor’s immersion in Black Liberation Theology, his ties to anti-American zealots, and the years in the Illinois state legislature this self-styled agent of change spent practicing the by-the-numbers left-wing politics of redistribution and race-consciousness, remaining soft on crime and extreme on abortion.
This has led Kurtz, naturally, to scrutinize the relationship between Obama and one of his early political sponsors, William Ayers. Ayers, as we have previously detailed, is a confessed terrorist who, having escaped prosecution due to surveillance violations that came to light during his decade on the lam after a bombing spree, landed an influential professorship in education at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). As he has made clear several times before and after helping to launch Obama’s political career, Ayers remains defiantly proud of bombing the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, and other targets. He expresses regret only that he didn’t do more. Far from abandoning his radical politics, he has simply changed methods: the classroom, rather than the detonator, is now his instrument for campaigning against an America he portrays as racist and imperialist.
Obama supporters risibly complain that shining a light on the Obama/Ayers relationship is a “smear†and smacks of “guilt by association.†A presidential candidate’s choice to associate himself with an unrepentant terrorist would be highly relevant in any event  does anyone think the Obamedia would keep mum if John McCain had a long-standing relationship with David Duke or an abortion-clinic bomber?
But we are talking about more than a mere “association.â€Â
Bluntly, Obama has lied about his relationship with Ayers, whom he now dismisses as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.†Ayers and Obama have made joint appearances together; they have argued together for “reforms†of the criminal justice system to make it more criminal-friendly; Obama gushed with praise for Ayers’ 1997 polemical book on the Chicago courts; and they sat together for three years on the board of the Woods Fund, a left-wing enterprise that distributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to their ideological allies. Most significant, they worked closely together on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC).
The CAC was a major education reform project, proposed by Ayers, which was underwritten by a $49.2 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation, complemented by another $100 million in private and public funding. The project ran for about five years, beginning in 1995. As the liberal researcher Steve Diamond has recounted, Ayers ran its operational arm, the “Chicago School Reform Collaborative.†Obama, then a 33-year-old, third-year associate at a small law firm, having no executive experience, was brought in to chair the board of directors, which oversaw all “fiscal matters.â€Â
By the time the CAC’s operations were wound down in 2001 it had doled out more than $100 million in grants but had failed to achieve any improvement in the Chicago schools. What little is known about the grants Obama oversaw is troubling. As Diamond relates, one of the first CAC awards in 1995 was $175,000 for the “Small Schools Workshop,†which had been founded by Ayers and was then headed by Mike Klonsky. It was only the beginning of the CAC’s generous funding of Klonsky  a committed Maoist who had been an Ayers comrade in the radical Students for a Democratic Society (the forerunner of Ayers’ Weatherman terrorist organization), and who hosted a “social justice†blog on the Obama campaign website until his writings were hastily purged in June after Diamond called attention to them.
The CAC records, said to comprise 70 linear feet of files, have long been maintained at the library of the UIC, the public university where Ayers teaches. This summer, Kurtz made an appointment to review them and, after being assured access, was blocked from seeing them by library administrators, who stammered about needing permission from the “donor† whom they declined to identify. Kurtz energetically raised public awareness to the stonewalling, and the library finally relented this week. That is, as Barack Obama prepares to accept the Democrats’ nomination tonight, the records of his only significant executive experience just became available for review on Tuesday.
Kurtz began his review, and on Wednesday was invited on Milt Rosenberg’s radio program to discuss it. Rosenberg is a Chicago institution. His program, “Extension 720,†has aired for more than 30 years  a civil forum where knowledgeable guests from across the political spectrum discuss important issues in revealing two-hour interviews. What happened Wednesday night was stunning, as even the normally unflappable Rosenberg observed.
The Obama campaign  which has emissaries appearing everywhere  declined Rosenberg’s invitation to have a representative appear on the program and respond to Kurtz’s factual assertions. The campaign did, however, issue an “Obama Action Wire†that encouraged supporters to contact the program (telephone information was provided) and use scripted “talking points†to disrupt Kurtz’s appearance, which it deemed “unacceptable.†As the Politico’s Ben Smith reported, the campaign also urged supporters to demand that Rosenberg scrap the appearance of Kurtz, whom the campaign libeled as a “smear-merchant†and a “slimy character assassin.†The rant was reminiscent of the work of the left-wing media “watch-dog†Media Matters for America.
Other than denigrating Kurtz for being conservative, Obama’s operatives have provided no response to the substance of his claims. In their only pretense of engaging him, they accuse him of telling “a flat out lie†that Ayers recruited Obama for the CAC. Though it is a reasonable inference that Ayers recruited Obama, the careful Kurtz has stopped short of making it  observing only that Obama offers no explanation of how he was recruited if not through Ayers, his friend and the CAC’s driving force.
The station, WGN, has made a stream of the broadcast available online, here, […]. Remarkably, as Obama sympathizers raced through their script, they echoed the campaign’s insistence that it was Rosenberg who was “lowering the standards of political discourse†by having Kurtz on, rather than the campaign by shouting him down.
Kurtz has obviously hit a nerve. It is the same nerve hit by the American Issues Project, whose television ad calling for examination of the Obama/Ayers relationship has prompted the Obama campaign to demand that the Justice Department begin a criminal investigation. Obama fancies himself as “post-partisan.†He is that only in the sense that he apparently brooks no criticism. This episode could be an alarming preview of what life will be like for the media should the party of the Fairness Doctrine gain unified control of the federal government next year.
What is stunning in all this is that there is really nothing stunning about it.
For all Obama’s talk of hope and change and post-partisanship and post-racialism, his campaign — whose very call for “unity” is presupposes a mechanism that suppresses unfavorable speech — is proving itself to be an enemy of the very heteroglossia progressives always ostensibly champion.
But, as is the case with even the best postmodern novelists, the appearance of openness is one that needs to be carefully constructed and maintained, with the narrative always controlled by an abiding intent — even if that intent is something so seemingly open-ended as a desire not to intend.
In that sense, Obama is a “post” candidate — a postmodern candidate. His reliance on calculated pragmatism, problematizing contexts, deconstructing and “re-imaging” classically liberal tenets — all to give the appearance of an organic movement that has been carefully inscribed since his first deliberate steps toward a political career — gives away the game.
Or as Pynchon once expressed it:
It’s been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home — only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.
—Gravity’s Rainbow, V148
A paean to openness, carefully crafted by an intentional agent.
There’s is a lesson in there, somewhere.
****
Related. Oh, and also.
****
update: mentioned elsehwere, but deserving of its own link: “The Weatherman tried to kill my family”.
My only regret is that I didn’t do more.
****
update 2: Bonus: During the Kurtz radio interview, left-labor advocate Steve Diamond phones in and calls the “new left’s” Bill Ayers a bureaucrat and an authoritarian — not a real “lefty.” Other “new leftists” — whose followers and heirs apparent represent the voice of the “progressive” movement — get mentioned in this light, as well.
Somewhere, Jonah Goldberg is smiling. Lord knows I got a chuckle out it. But a sad chuckle.
I’m a crying-on-the-inside-type clown, I guess.
Yeah, but if he wins, I get $1,290.
If McCain wins, I’d only get $1,009.
So, you know, there’s that.
Excellent post, Jeff, as always.
I suspect that it is racist.
In case I forget, sugartits. And Kyoto.
Hi, Lisa.
BJ – Have you oppressed your quota today?
Obama learned his politics in Chicago. It’s not surprising that he’s using the same sort of tactics in the big-leagues. The Daley-esque machine is no less disgusting when seen on the macro (national) stage instead of the micro (Chicago/ IL) stage that spawned it.
Now it’s out there for everybody to see. The blinder suppliers, much like the tire pressure gauge industry, is making a killing!
Train wrecks ARE interesting, no?
Thanks Jeff. This is why I read PW.
Thing is, lots of us saw multiculturalism as the road to balkanization, but not necessarily tyranny. Strange times.
I will comment with an illustration from here on the 16th Street Mall yesterday. Two guys were on the corner of 16th and Court (the Sheraton there is housing the NY and Calif delegations). They were definitely religious fundamentalists of some degree as one of them had a sign that said “Homo sex is sin” and the other one a similar sized sign saying I can’t remember what. Anyway, there they are, exercising their right of free speech. It’s not what I would say on a street corner but what the heck. In front of them some guy with dreds and the rest of the uniform of change is almost screaming about how the two guys are, get this, violating the First Amendment and why won’t anybody do anything about it. A true product of the our current educational/cultural system of orientation where the First Amendment is believed to be something designed to guarantee that we will hear only what is deemed acceptable by, well, I really don’t know who.
Salt Lick, if society loses cohesion, that opens the way for would-be tyrants to take power, and also gives them the excuse to do so.
He’s black?
Last year here, someone wondered why revolutions often ended up with firing squads. Psycho answered, more or less, the purpose of the revolution is the firing squad. In other words, to take control, with mobs in the streets or mobs on the phone lines, who will happily support the government whose forces shoot at the other side.
Mr. Saint-Gaudens, your model is here. He wonders whether you can convert the sculpture into 350 million dashboard figures.
After this post, I feel the need to have a smoke. And I have never smoked… Yes, I’ve looked.
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”— Saul Alinsky
A page from “Rules for Radicals.
…if society loses cohesion…
Yeah, I know. I just got too focused on why it was important for Maria Carey to be “black.”
Hi, JD! Over quota on brown people economic oppression, I am!
It remains to be seen if this particular tactic is responsive or strategic but I suspect the latter. Let’s not forget that some Obama political hot mob in California is using public information to attempt to intimidate voters into eschewing support for conservative causes or candidates, with threats of contacting their employers or the IRS or whatever.
This needs to be beaten like a drum: No intimidation, whether it’s an attempt to mainstream “Swift boating” as a denigration phrase or to intimidate investigative reporters (and this does time nicely with the ABC Producer kerfuffle yesterday) or Political PACs trying to tell a story.
Debate is not a sword but a plow. If Obama is going to encourage or even allow this sort of totalitarian behavior then he needs to be exposed and beaten in the polls. Decisively!
Psycho answered, more or less, the purpose of the revolution is the firing squad.
And he’s right. As Lenin put it, “One does not create the dictatorship to protect the revolution, one makes a revolution to establish a dictatorship.”
You make a revolution to change things quickly. Changing things quickly requires unrestricted power. QED.
There’s only one revolution that didn’t end with dictatorship, and it wasn’t for lack of men wanting it.
Oh. I meant Mariah Carey. That’s how they spell it.
“…What is stunning in all this is that there is really nothing stunning about it. …”
What, however, would happen if one were to predict precisely this behavior on the part of the Obama campaign (much as the Obama campaign itself has done over and again with regard to the McCain campaign, saying: “So what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, he’s not patriotic enough, he’s got a funny name, you know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”)? Wouldn’t the howls of injury ring back from the hills?
Fashion statement:
http://www.t-shirts.com/t-shirts/Entering-a-World-of-Pain-T-Shirt.html
The proggs are driving one scary machine. They have marginalized the truth, history, and the Constitution in the minds of almost half of this country.
Thank God O! is such an airhead egomaniac, because I am really beginning to believe that he is going to be buried in the GE.
But, unfortunatelty, these fascists are not incapable of learning. I fear that it is only a matter of time until the phenomena that Jeff speaks of will overwhelm those with any grasp of history and reality. Logic and critical thinking are soon to be consigned to the scrap heap, at the point of a government sword.
The first amendmaent is effectively dead, or at best, on it’s last legs. The founding father’s ideas are slowly being eaten away by a bunch of fascist liars who care nothing for individual freedom. And once our freedoms are gone, they are gone.
The America that I grew up in is unrecognizable, and if O! wins and the Dems keep control of Congress, America as it has always existed will cease to be. The Proggs see this country as a beehive, and they are the “Queen Bees”.
I used to think that I was being melodramatic when this thought came into my mind, but it is with fear in my heart that I can say this now and not think I am being a “chicken little”.
Fascism, here we come! We only need about three or four million more people to jump the “stupid divide” to lose the freedoms we have grown up with.
Just one of those days, I guess.
I am very concerned about this, and I think it is only going to get worse if enough people don’t speak out about it. I’m sure we can count on the legacy media to do their part in shoving this under the rug.
ordinary citizen: Hey, that rug is really getting lumpy. I wonder what’s under there.
progressive: Leave that rug alone. There are no lumps. Besides, it looks good that way.
E pluribus the One
Jeff,
I can’t find my Mme. Defarge stripey socks, but I’ll denounce you just the same. I like being ahead of the curve.
That Kurtz interview ought to be rebroadcast on every network, with commercials showing the MSNBC staff, less Scarborough (sp?), being eaten by alligators.
Chicago rules work in Chicago. Nationally… well, if Ted Koeppel is any indication, media may be getting some disturbing signals across their jaded neural networks.
It sucks to kill a man by mistake. To kill a country by willfully foisting a campus commie AND HIS CREW on that country… you’ld have to be without a shred of conscience to feel good about that. MSM hasn’t really thought through that whole “fairness” doctrine, obviously. Fellas, watch Kurtz. Now maybe you know what that word means in the Obama context…?
Putin (in between planning sessions for his spring offensive into the Ukraine and the Baltic States) has to be reading the reports on our election and getting quite the chuckle.
But I tell you there is no such message, no such home  only the millions of last moments./>
You mean … We’re not stardust? We’re not golden? We’re not gonna get back to the garden?
Oh man… What a bummer.
You mean I can’t do HTML?
What a bummer.
This was a HUGE fuck up on black jesus’s end. His “Night of the Long Knives.”
You know, if you gave long knives to slobbering, brainwashed retards.
Trashing Milt Rosenberg? He’s like the Paul Harvey of Chicago. And Milt couldn’t believe it (“Not in 30 years of broadcasting have I seen”…). And Kurtz is no “conservative Alex Jones.” He’s a highly respected, affable, well spoken, conservative scholar who only uses his inside voice and researches the hell out of everything before he opens his mouth. Black jesus and his Jonestown possey have now catapulted Stanley Kurtz and the Ayers coverup to (at least) mainstream blogs, FoxNews, and national drive-time radio (complete with podcast clips from Rosenberg’s show).
Black jesus better have a ‘shit back in the horse/un-fuck myself’ miracle handy.
And a superfly toga for tonight.
Hey! Associating with father-rapers, commie college profs, drug dealers, psychotic preachers, aldermen and other assorted sub-human scum is de rigeur in Chi-town politics! Give the man a break, you racist honky motherfuckers! Or I’ll come over there and feed you your teeth!
This message brought to you by Scumbags for Obama
Suggested adjectives for anti-Obamanites who want to describe what kind of terrorist Ayers is, in a way that hasn’t, like “unrepentant,” been pre-erased from readers’ minds by its own repetition: shameless, impenitent, remorseless.
Banger: unreconstructed.
Pynchon would.
“Milt Rosenberg? He’s like the Paul Harvey of Chicago.”
Paul Harvey lives in and broadcasts from Chicago.
LL
See also: http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2008/08/youthful-indisc.html
On WGN the Obamabots abused their freedom by shouting down Dr. Kurtz (who was attempting to exercise his own right to free expression) using scripted slogans provided by the Obama campaign. The campaign chose this tactic in preference to debating Dr. Kurtz. I suspect that this is a preview of how an Obama administration would operate.
The Obamabots are attempting to defend these tactics at the LAT blog this morning. One commenter compared Ms. Dohrn, who applauded when the Manson family stabbed pregnant Sharon Tate in the belly with a fork, and nail-bomb designer Bill Ayers, to Gandhi, and asserted that Dohrn and Ayers never advocated violence. I’m not sure how many of the Obamabots are drinking this Kool-Aid, but it is scary to think that they may soon be in power.
If Obama captures the Presidency the Democrats will control the Executive, Congress, and the press. It will be left to individuals like Dr. Kurtz to brave the raving mob in order to question authority.
“Paul Harvey lives in and broadcasts from Chicago.”
…did not know that.
Gooooood day.
MSM hasn’t really thought through that whole “fairness” doctrine, obviously.
Oh yes they have. They know exactly what the effect is and that’s why they support it. The original Fairness Doctrine ensured that there was no political content whatsoever on the radio because of the bureaucratic headache it gave station owners.
Why no one challenged the doctrine in the courts is beyond me. It puts the federal government in the position of evaluating the content of political speech, which the First Amendment was specifically written to prohibit. I don’t care if the airways are public domain: the government has no business saying ANYTHING about political speech, let alone regulating it.
And that right there is spot on the problem with McCain, dicentra.
Aaaaannnnnd: First-person narrative (via Ace)
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon0430jm.html
But gravity does calls OUR rocket back home, though maybe we never reach that last, infinitesimal delta-t or maybe we pass through the zero — who knows? At least there’s still time to . . .
Sorry, but you triggered a Pynchon flashback. And thank you, by the way.
Wow! Pynchon! That certainly elevates the discourse. The implication here is that the progs can actually read and I’m not sure that’s a given.
Voltaire just called. He’s not feeling well and will have to miss the Messiah’s Descension tonight.
“Gravity’s Rainbow? What the fuck does that mean?”
— Freeman Dyson (attributed)
Aldous Huxley also phoned in. Says he prophecied THE ONE after taking some killer blotter tabs in ’59. Says he also just missed calling Biden’s Male Pattern Baldness by that much.
I suspect that this is a preview of how an Obama administration would operate.
“Censorship came to Harvard Law School (HLS) just as Barack Obama was graduating from both the school and from his position as President of The Harvard Law Review.</a
Thing is, lots of us saw multiculturalism as the road to balkanization, but not necessarily tyranny. Strange times.
The USSR kept control over their tyrannical empire by fomenting ethnic tensions and strife. It is of a peice with how todays Progressives operate.
The Proggs see this country as a beehive, and they are the “Queen Beesâ€Â.
HOMOPHOBE!!!1!!ONE!!
NPR is publishing transcripts they get from the Baracky campaign on their blog. They feel perfectly comfortable doing this.
Here is another typical post:
Obama’s Morning: Basketball
Filed under: Conventions
From the pool report, c/o NPR’s Don Gonyea:
Denver Athletic Club.
Downtown.
Obama in dark athletic pants.
Brown t-shirt.
Baseball cap.
Walks from SUV to club entrance and disappears inside.
Pool kept far away on sidewalk.
He did not say anything to pool.
Leaving the club:
Obama waves to crowd. No interaction or comment. Motorcade rolling.
– Sean Bowditch
I just receive my ObamActionAlert for tonight and so-called Thomas Pynchon is a smearing, lying, lying smear on McCain’s shorts!
We are stardust and we are golden and as soon as we elect the One we are gonna get back to the garden!
So it’s disgusting and disgraceful that you let this lying liar smear merchant attempt to thrushboat the great one on your so-called blog!
Baracky is not having his campaign protest NPR. They are being very good is why.
“Tyranny of Facts.”
That is the most effective problematization of a text that I’ve ever read. I have a real problem with it.
I’m listening to the Kurtz interview, and they highlight that part of Saul “Rules for
Community OrganizersRadicals” Alinsky’s tactic is to obscure the true degree of Leftism that one truly embraces. Alinsky started the “Community Organizer” role in Chicago, you know.See, someone on the Left needs to explain to me why it’s bad for Obama to be connected with Ayers. If Obama was not doing anything wrong — and if there’s nothing wrong with Ayers — then why all the denial and suppression tactics?
What? Because people won’t like it? Because they won’t understand?
May I suggest that if you have to hide your true agenda from the voters, then perhaps you have no business running for office. To sneak in under a different agenda than what you really believe, so that you can get in to office and Set Things Right, is the hallmark of aristocratic elitism and monarchical aspiration.
Government by the consent of the governed, remember? Don’t you DARE try to subvert that.
I like Pynchon. He’s one of my favorite authors. I bought Against The Day when it first came out, but I haven’t read it yet.
Where is Algore when you need a good “digital brown shirts” quote?
“Tyranny of facts” is one of those things so stupid only an intellectual would utter in a serious manner.
Nice suggestion you got there. Be a shame if something happened to it.
If I feel better later, I’m going to write an original poem titled “Saul Alinsky stole my Chapstick”.
Or not.
#20, TLD
I hear you man, but listening to the WGN podcast I realized that even if the Fairness Doctrine would rise from the dead, it can never work. As long as the internet is open(I guess these days, that could be a big if), there is an unlimited capacity to get your message across. Radio shows will just move online. Like someone around here likes to say from time to time, markets exist.
PJ,
That’s a nice little market you got there, it’d be shame if we had to tear up the sidewalk in front of it.
“Facts are stubborn things.”
— John Adams
“I’m a crying-on-the-inside-type clown, I guess.”
Thanks for that one Jeff. Bill Murray was always my favorite bank-robbing clown.
P.J.: “I hear you man, but listening to the WGN podcast I realized that even if the Fairness Doctrine would rise from the dead, it can never work. As long as the internet is open(I guess these days, that could be a big if), there is an unlimited capacity to get your message across. Radio shows will just move online. Like someone around here likes to say from time to time, markets exist.”
Unless, of course, in their ultimate meglomania, these yahoos think they can push this onto the net as well…
…and never misunderestimate the meglomania requisitein becoming a politician, let alone what they think they can do once they get into office.
Clint and Dread, good points.
My fiancee and I often talk about where else in the world we could go once the shit hits the fan. I always think that there is no other place, and that a last stand of sorts might have to made here. She suggests that maybe some former Eastern bloc state might actually be hungry for true freedom these days. I just don’t see it.
May I introduce you to Mr. Feingold? I believe you’ve already met Mr. McCain.
I can’t believe The One put a Stanley Kurtz Must Be Silenced!!! page on his freaking website, just in time for the presentation of The New Clothes. Sean Hannity must be drooling.
Kelly:
You think I’m going to defend McCain for his moronic “reform”? Think again.
Here’s an eyewitness account of the Kurtz interview at WGN last night by Guy Benson at NRO MediaBlog.
The longer I listen to this thing, the sadder I get. Where’s the pie?
“Comment by Jeff G. on 8/28 @ 3:04 pm #
If I feel better later, I’m going to write an original poem titled “Saul Alinsky stole my Chapstickâ€Â.”
No he just hid it at the end of Gravity’s Rainbow.
From “A Man For All Seasons”.
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!
Robespierre went to the guillotine also. Too bad so many ‘revolutionaries’ and ‘activists’ are so narcissistic that they cannot see that what they wish to do to others can easily be done to them.
I support intentionalism – for my own safty’s sake.
I support freedom of speech – for my own safety’s sake.
I support the right to counsel – for my own safety’s sake.
I support the right to bear arms – for my own safety’s sake.
I support the rights of those I disagree with – for my own safety’s sake.
For the only thing that supports my own safety is the willingness of others to do so, and that compact can be damaged so very easily.
Rosenburg and GilderKurtz are dead.
Kurtz is getting attacked on his Wiki page, also. Although in a rather ham-fisted manner.
In August 2008 Kurtz attempted to obtain the publication of the University of Chicago’s Annenberg records detailing the professional relationship between Obama and Ayers. Kurtz’s efforts to explore the association between the two men has been met with considerable controversy and has sparked a considerable amount of debate. According to most sources, the relationship between the two men has been largely exaggerated by Kurtz[4].
They also attempt to debunk some of his scientific studies with material sourced to Media Matters.
Kind of funny, really.
#68 Sdferr:
Heh, indeed.(c)
They know they need to try to control the narrative, because their beliefs cannot survive the harsh light of truth.
Well, there are no true Scotsmen, after all.
I wasn’t expecting you to defend him, dicentra. McCain-Feingold isn’t defensible.
Still not sure if I can get drunk enough to vote for the old coot come Nov. But Barry’s Southside Chicago strong arm tactics on Kurtz pisses me off mightily.
Hurray! I wish to contribute to that pac
Showed the NRO article to a republican co-worker whom I’ve spoken to before regarding Ayers. He wasn’t really aware of who he was or what the WU was about, but he was like, “This guy is a professor?!”
Of course I told him the WU was more of a resume enhancer than anything else.
Whats interesting about it, though – this guy is the son of a local, and senior, judge with a lot of political connections. And he had no idea.
Darn, and here I went and spoiled it all…..
Kurtz was on Hugh Hewitt’s show today. Transcripts not posted yet but can be found here:
http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/talkradio/transcripts/
“Hurray! I wish to contribute to that pac”
They are a subsidiary or the National “Thugs is Us” group. A Chicago faction.
of not or, arrrggghhh.
“What is stunning in all this is that there is really nothing stunning about it.”
Scratch a leftsit find, the fascist beast underneath.
“If it’s not Scottish, it’s crap!”
I think Baracky is milking his pigment. I really do.
Funny how half the GOP’s “associates” in Latin America were either death squad leaders or terrorists and no one gives a shit about that. But Obama was in the same room with some hippie who blew up pipebombs and it’s the MOST IMPORTANT THING EVAH!!
AJB, who’s running for office again?
Latin America is where my bananas come from a lot. Also, papaya. I got those cactus fruit things too – these ones were called tuna, but they were cactus fruit, so I peeled them and threw them in the blender with banana and green tea and a grapefruit. It was really good but what I didn’t know was that tuna have really a lot of seeds I guess in the middle, so I had to drink it standing over the sink so I could spit the seeds out. Don’t let this happen to you.
I was just wondering what happened to all the left fascist retards on this thread, seemingly not one of them wants to defends O!’s brownshirt tactics.
Sure enough, heeeerrrressssss AJB!
dah dah dah daa dah, da da da da dah daaaaaa!
As I recall, Jamie Lee Curtis and Jeffrey Rush and that previous Bond guy also did a movie in Latin America, ‘feets. Kinda made me want to go experience it myself because of all the greenery. Robert Duvall made that cool “Assassination Tango” flick, but that was probably in South America so I guess it’s not the same thing.
#82 AJB:
Che Guevara didn’t run death squads? The ‘Shining Path’ in Peru didn’t run death squads?
I did not know that. I guess one man’s ‘death squad’ must be another man’s…I don’t know…light workers?
Well, it’s the same thing just not the same term. I musta been thinking Central America, what with AJB’s comment.
All I can think of is The Mosquito Coast cause River Phoenix filmed that while he was still alive but I never saw it. Never read the book either.
“Comment by AJB on 8/28 @ 5:19 pm #
Funny how half the GOP’s “associates†in Latin America were either death squad leaders or terrorists and no one gives a shit about that”
Yo prog Iran Contra wasn’t a dance.
Baracky hangs with terrorists and it’s ok cause it just shows how understanding he is. It’s racist to question it cause black progressives can’t always just pick and choose which white progressives they want to hang out with cause white progressives are into white progressive things and they’re not as mingle mingle as you think.
A handful of South and Central Americans versus Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Che, Fidel, Ho Chi Minh, and Pol Pot…
But, hey, those folks weren’t really leftists — they were “authoritarians”. Right?
oh hey! is that a bunny over there?
And how many conservatives are basing policies on the recommendations of those fellows?
well, Rob, we are kinda anti-Castro.
I miss it when people could criticize a presidential candidate without someone threatening a criminal investigation where they might could end up losing their freedom.
I see it! I see the bunny! He’s so cuuuute.
What were we talking about again?
I do like the title of the NRO editorial:
“Barack Obama, Aspiring Commissar”
We were talking about how cause of the Sandanistas it’s okay for Baracky to throw people in jail what talk shit about him.
*Sandinistas* … or maybe the Contras. Or whoever killed those missionaries, whoever that was.
There is Apocalypto which is Central America based I believe.
I got nothin, except this quote:
“America’s foundational myths – from our civilizing mission at the start through our pure motive and selfless sacrifices during World War II and beyond – are authorized amnesia. The U.S.A. — the United States of America, full of sham innocence and counterfeit virtue. Official history is choked with lies, a suppression of memory…†— Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days, 2001, Pg. 213
Well, there’s something else, too – Obama lived in New York City when the worst of the Brinks robberies went down (1981 – a security guard and two policemen killed, and Dohrn went to jail for a short time in ’83 for refusing to cooperate), and the WU, Ayers and Dohrn – hey, Obama’s neighbors in the Columbia area – were plastered all over the NY media for quite a while. But, of course, Obama didn’t know who the dynamic duo were when he “met†them in Chicago…just some old folks from the neighborhood…right?
Man all those flags waving at Crowe. I’d waved a single sheet of TP.
Yes. The girl fell in a hole or something and stayed there for a long time. My boss saw that one and told me about it. Also it rained.
She was singin’
Don’t turn around, oh oh
Der Kommissar’s in town, oh oh
You’re in his eye
And you’ll know why
The more you live
The faster you will die
Alles klar, Herr Kommissar?
[…] PROTEIN WISDOM– Brave New Wor(l)ds – “A Utopia, of sorts, where “unity†prevails  even if in […]
:::whew!!!::: [waves hand] who cut the cheese in here?
[glances in AJB’s general direction]
Dude, swallowing that much of the Messiah’s semen is just going to give you the stinkiest farts. Take it outside.
good lord, I was so busy looking for fresh air I forgot to close a italic tag
AJBs second link:
By 1961 Posada had relocated to the United States where he was trained by CIA in sabotage and explosives at U.S. army’s Fort Benning, before the failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.
GOP written all over it, you are just too smart for us, AJB.
oh geez…Stevie Wonder at the ObamaTemple on CNN
Y’all know that Brittany Spear’s set designer is responsible for the Greek Temple?
ARGH! I just muted the tv… Al Gore is next …
@ #26,
I don’t think this is Obamas night of the long knives. Which wasn’t a failure by the way.
No, I think that is still to come, and, the way things are looking, in a more literal sense.
I can’t believe this country is getting so close to becoming fascist.
Thank God for the second amendment.
AlGore just compared Obama to Lincoln.
Helluva post, Jeff G.
@ #16…isn’t that a perfect Orwellian slip?
Algoring just ended to more old pop music. I can already see the SOTU addresses; O! might get the Forrest Gump character to deliver them. Let the sun shine in, baby.
Michael McDonald is now reminding everyone he is not Ray Charles.
George W. Bush has freed more people from bondage than Obama has.
I hear one of them’s white, B Moe.
All I can think of is The Mosquito Coast
Funny you should mention that. Harrison Ford plays an overly controlling father who decides he’s going to create a paradise in Central America somewhere. So he forces his family to go, because he’s the father dammit, and it’s their job to do what he says.
So they build these Swiss Family Robinson tree houses and it’s all kinda cool at first, and then Harry decides to Defy God and create ice right there in a tropical rainforest. And he does, too, but then things fall totally apart because of how tyrannical and controlling Harry is.
So, you know, apropos.
I hear one of them’s white, B Moe.
If McDonald were any whiter he would be translucent.
Are you kidding, Bush has enslaved the whole country! Haven’t you heard a word we have been saying?
He must be a token black then, right? Help me out here.
BHMB: “Are you kidding, Bush has enslaved the whole country! Haven’t you heard a word we have been saying?”
Uh-huh… oookay, then…
(Someone humor the madman whilst I go get the net…)
In watching the Democrat Ampitheatre tonite, I can see clearly that I’d missed the Dem’s extensive patriot geneology. Fortunately they’re reminding the shit out of us, in between the flags and constant historical references and all…all of which segues directly into The Obama Experience.
It’s impressive. If not for the frequent fantasizing and lies, surely they’d have my vote. Oh wait, here comes half the joint chiefs of staff. They may get it yet.
Specific policy statements accountably pledged in exchange for votes? Nah.
KO and Chrissie bloviate. I’m constantly amazed that Olby can speak with half his brain missing. I guess they left the speech centers or something.
They seem to expect specifics from Barry. Yeah. Good luck with that, guys.
KO giving stage directions. No ego there.
Lust noticed: “MSNBC welcomes our global audience to hear Obama’s acceptance speech”
Not “Mr. Obama.” Not “Senator Obama.” Just the ONE name
Somebody mention celebrity?
JUST.
Paging Mr. Freud, your slip is ready.
That lost international respect thing: Does it have to do with what appear to be mental nine year olds speechifying about actually electing this guy? Because if I were European catching this on satellite, I’d be incredulous.
OMFG: Pat Buchannan?
Roll over, Beethoven.
Vid: Plugs gropes a group of young girls. My kinda convention.
More disco. Once O! brings back Plymouth, we’ll have RoadRunners again!
Oh good DICK Durban!
Some people like Lieberman as McCain’s VP?
That’s the Doomed! ticket.
Oh…69,744 at Lambeau Field, watching Green Bay lose to my Titans in the final preseason game. Just for perspective…
“Barack Ooobaaamah”: Wild applause every 45 seconds.
“Barack Ooobaaamah, our next President”: Mad applause every 45 seconds.
“Barack Ooobaaamah, next President of the United States!“: Sheer delirium. Every 45 seconds.
Man THE ERFFIN ONE!!!
Not surprising that even your insinuations are factually incorrect; who suspected it. Posada Carriles, went to Ft. Benning, in ’63, when the Kennedy administration decided
to incorporate the exiles into the US Army. He did some work with operatives out of Nicaragua; eventually he moved
to Venezuela, where he hunted down guerillas that were trying to topple the Venezuelan government; the
counterparts to Ayers & Doehrn. He was dismissed from the security service, because he had done some surveillance of the winning candidate Carlos Andres Perez, who supported the Sandinistas, nationalized the oil companies
let the guerillas off the hook, including a junior officer
associated with the Red Flag group Hugo Chavez. He worked
against the Castro regime, off and one through the 70s; although three monthes before, he had tipped off the US authorities to exactly the same type of plot, that he was
later accused of being involved in. The persons charged were employed by his detective agency; yet they could not have carried out such an operation without assistance from the Venezuelan security services, like the local snitch Richard Morales, who tipped him off to the feds.
Interestingly, Morales, a candidate who inspired Miami Vice, in a major drug deposition, about as much as admitted they were not involved. (A recent BBC investigation; using a respected criminal analysis group, casts doubt on the Venezuelan govt case)The first court, a military court acquitted him of the charges, he later escaped and went to work operating against the
Sandinistas; in El Salvador. After Iran Contra blew up, he moved to Guatemala, where he worked with the
presidential security force; where he was shot
by a Castro agent. He conducted operations against the Castro regime for a time; although the details are sketchy due to much of the sources was a lefty Castro groupy, Anne Marie Bardach, whose has needed more retractions than Maureen Dowd, & Alexandra Stanley combined. So that large part of the wiki remains dubious
Venezuela’s economy rose with the oil spike, which led to massive expenditures, that were unsustainable and proved so when the barrel price collapsed. CAP out of office, campaigned on a platform to keep the safety net, yet reversed himself once in office
(basically every damn fool think we think Obama would do.)
A massive revolt ensued with Chavez used as the excuse two years later for the Coup. In the interim, a series of
other unidentified bombings unsettled the Venezuelan economy; eventually leading to his release and his presidential victory. Not long into his first term, there was a hurricane, that hit the Venezuelan coast that claimed thousands of lives; while he was busy meeting with Fidel and other dignatories (that’s a detail, Katrina crzy Cindi, Danny & co; don’t talk about)Chavez’s
hatred for Posada; probably has more to do with the latter’s effectiveness in hunting down the former’s associates
DICK Now!
Did he just say with great humility?
Man no fist pump?
“Hard work”?
You be slacker African
THEY COULD HAVE STOPPED THE HURRICANE AND THEY DIDN’T!!! FAILED POLICIES!!!
WE NEED CHANGE!!!
Hey Barry! Guess who those military folks are voting for?
Isn’t #135 an example of that “Tyranny of Facts†thing?
Good one Keyser Soze.
I want to be on my own.
Government teats are bitter, bitter things.
Obviously, Obama and his brown shirts haven’t been paying attention to the new rules:
Certainly Rule #2 is in play re Ayers.
BTW, you do know that Ayers is the token conservative in the UIC department of education?
“Hard Work”
You Sir do not know the meaning.
Drill Here, Drill Now Baracky
Evil Insurance companies! Take that!
Oh..and, your taxes will go down.
Fantasyland, here.
O thinks there is a line item veto?
“America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done. Not with so many children to educate, and so many veterans to care for.”
creepy infantilization.
Are you all listening to this shit? He should have picked Harry Potter for VP, only way he gonna pull any of this off.
That’s a promise he won’t keep.
Obama loses debates to John McCain.
Osama said Obama?
No..Osama isn’t in a cave. He’s in Mecca, or Medina.
Trust me.
The Democrats would’ve defended this country.
The leftists, socialists? Not so much.
Just had a nice dinner with the husband. Unmuted the tv just enough to hear Obamessiah say (paraphrased) “I want equal pay for an equal days work, because I want my daughters to have the same opportunity as your sons.”
Oh, fuck. A new Federal Department of Job Equivalency with a bureacracy dedicated to making dictorial directions that any job dominated by females MUST be the equivalent to a totally unrelated job dominated by males.
The US will turn in to Mexico where corruption and bribery is the only way to do business.
“I will rebuild the military”.
Yeah, I’m sure…
The challenges are too great to question a candidates character.
Up is down. These people are fucking nuts.
He’s so sassy.
“Surely we can agree to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country”
Yeah, if that baby has the audicity to survive an abortion, just kill it.
The Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting. Asshole.
That’s it. No more. Now turning the tv to Desperate Landscapes.
ooh. He has a unique pedigree now.
Serr8d
Cuz it’s all about the AK 47’s ya’know?
“all across America, something is stirring”
Pepto-Bismol anyone?
Heh. I’ve got a couple. Or so.
This is the best speech anyone has ever given, anywhere at any time.
(Pablo Predicts Tomorrow’s Punditry Today)
I’m glad you guys are watching not me. I don’t have enough Zantac 150s to take this.
Yes, Pablo. They’ll have to scrape Chris Matthews and Slobberman off the floor, the November election will be canceled because O! should just be elected by aclamation. He is The One, and in the interest of Unity(tm) all dissenters need to shut up or be shut up.
We need to welcome our new ObamaLord.
It was nice he ended with God bless The United States of America.
God bless the U.S.A.!
A shame that comes from the head of the Secular Party.
You can’t really believe him, can you?
He used the word promise at least 31 times from one text I have.
sort of like this…
promise promise promise promise promise promise promise promise promise promise promise promise promise promise promise promise promise promise promise promise promise promise promise promise promise promise promise promise promise promise promise
About half of his lines could be delivered by any Republican. Who knew O! was such a radical moderate?
Is it just me, or does a country song seem out of place wrapping this up?
I’m setting up a pool to guess the number of times Olby creamed his jeans. Stand by.
Is it me, or did they soften the impact of the Greek pillars by adding windows betwixt them?
We’ll need to wait until he finishes, it seems.
Dicentra
This is the first time the non-politicals in the audience might be listening. O! has to pretend he is not a radical leftist. Something at total odds with his record and behavior.
He’s as genuine as the plywood Greek Temple he’s standing in front of..
He’ll be sleepin’ on the couch tonite, huh?
Mojo
anything below 3 figures is a sucker bet
Mojo: no way am I joining your pool, because it would mean that at some point I would have to find out. I don’t want any of that information within a country mile of my ears.
Well yes, Alinsky’s first rule was don’t let them know what you’re really up to.
FOR THEIR OWN GOOD!
He’ll be sleepin’ on the couch tonite, huh?
Nah, it was just words, just speeches…
Jeeze, Keith, wipe your chin.
It’s called the psychology of marketing. Not unlike the big Texas banner in the front rows. You didn’t expect anything less, did you?
Bruce is singing “Born in the USA”.
Guess it puts that question to rest.
How much botox is in Michelle’s forehead now? She traded “barely restrained rage” for “perpetually puzzled”.
I hear you can score a sudsy draft of out Cindy McCain’s pooter by lifting her pony tail. She’s the Queen of foaming beers!
Leave it to thor to mistake urine for beer. Or an empty suit stuffed with Chicago machine hackery and Marxist theology for a leader of the ages.
Some of Chris Matthews’ jism made its way north and hit the windshield of my Jeep.
Well, I for one welcome our new Machine overlords!
I’m impressed someone watched this charade. I watched our local Shakespeare troupe perform Macbeth. Eerie coincidence, huh?
Would you like to expand on your remark about Pynchon? I take it it’s a criticism (a condemnation?)
#190
That’s who thor reminds me of! Benny Profane!
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