Category: Uncategorized

Recently Glenn Greenwald pointed to a post by “OldPunk” at an Instapundit-approved blog. Here’s some of what the post said about Obama’s speech last week about race. The “you” to which OldPunk is addressing himself is black Americans generally:

You see, you’ve just given life to the suspicion that black people in America are, and have long been, a fifth column — unanimously hating the very country that has afforded the highest standard of living ever achieved by black people in human history. We’re teetering at the edge of believing that you’re a secret society, a massive collection of sleeper cells just waiting for your chance to do serious harm to the rest of us. You’ve made it possible for us to believe that.

I’d bet a lot of money that “OldPunk” was outraged in 2003 by Saddam’s massacres of Iraqi Kurds (though not when they were actually happening during the eighties, when he almost certainly didn’t know about them).

The funny part is, some Iraqi Kurds were more than just under “suspicion” of being “a fifth column” during that time. They were actually accepting arms and training from a country with which Iraq was at war, and which in fact had its armies on Iraqi soil.

So if this is “OldPunk”‘s view of black Americans now, I wonder how he’d respond if there were substantial African American militias in U.S. cities who’d been armed and trained by Saddam Hussein and/or Osama bin Laden, at the same time there were Arab troops in Seattle and Boston? My guess is he’d be saying “break out the nerve gas.”

The correlation here is probably almost exact. Just about every single person who wanted war because Saddam “gassed his own people” is someone who’d want a white American president to gas other Americans.

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Iraq Winter Soldier Hearings Show Weakness of Independent Media

Jeff Cohen — full disclosure: he used to be my boss and is a friend — makes some very valid and important points in ““Iraq Winter Soldier Hearings: Victory for Independent Media.”

But there is another way of looking at this.

The fact that the mainstream paid so little attention to Winter Soldier — as well countless other worthy stories — is itself a failure of independent media to propel those stories into the mainstream…

The great success of Fox News Channel is not that it has done what it has done, but that it has influenced the “mainstream” as it has.

And in that sense, independent media has totally failed.

To take the example at hand, what we did not see in the last several weeks was independent media asking questions about Winter Soldier at the White House press conferences, or at the Pentagon or State Department. Had they done so, the administration spokesperson’s words would likely have led to more attention to Winter Soldier than all the work of all the people who labored on it for months…

But no one asked at the news conferences, so none of that happened.

The rest.

Right wingers and the dialogue on race.

From my.barackobama.com:

Apparently, today was a slow news day.

So Fox News evidently decided to pore through our millions of user-created pages on My.BarackObama.com and put a screenshot of inflammatory content on the front page of FoxNews.com.

You see, more than 700,000 people have created accounts on the system. You can create one right now if you choose, in about a minute — anyone can.

Now, from time to time people get up to no good — creating fake profiles (like one for Sean Hannity created today), or posting profane or inappropriate content. When they do, the community reports the offending content and if it violates our terms of service it is removed (as the Sean Hannity profile was).

My.BarackObama.com has been at the core of our bottom-up organizing strategy. The tools available have been put to work by a community of supporters that is bigger and more powerful than anything presidential politics has ever seen.

Evidently, Fox News didn’t think it was a big deal that hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans are participating in the democratic process creating groups and local events in communities all across the country.

But they did think it was a big deal that one random person on the Internet, without the knowledge of the Obama campaign, posted a profile in the system with the image of the New Black Panther Party on it.

When we were alerted of the existence of this page, we pulled it down. Yet even after we pulled the page, Fox News continues to disingenuously and prominently feature this “story” on their homepage.

From a purely strategic standpoint, it would have been wiser for Obama to distance himself from the firey pastor at some earlier stage in the development of his political ambition. The entire situation has provided the right wingers with the Swift Boat narrative of 2008 and it’s not going to go away. Sean Hannity, who is exceedingly proud of the fact that he was the first major media figure to provide the Swifties with a platform in ’04, continues to replay the pastor’s incendiary sound bites a couple dozen times each hour, and if that’s not enough, to draw further guilt by association — When is someone going to ask Barack Obama if he’s ever met with Louis Farrakhan?, followed by an incendiary Farrakhan sound clip.

Hannity has actually been asking that last question for at least a month. As a major media figure with a nationally syndicated radio program and an hour long show on one of the biggest cable news networks, you’d think that Sean could just ring up the Obama campaign and ask the question himself — my guess is someone would get back to him with an answer within the hour. But then he couldn’t keep mentioning Louis Farrakhan and Barack Obama in the same sentence, over and over again, day after day. Scary scary black scary.

The strategy is simple, as is appropriate to the simple minds to which it is intended to play: continue the guilt-by-association until voters cannot hear Obama’s name without subconsciously visualizing him peering out a window with a carbine rifle in his hand. (Another example: buried somewhere in the public portions of Obama’s website there is a link to the New Black Panther party, which prompts Hannity to ask repeatedly and with great concern, Why is Barack Obama linking to the New Black Panther party?, as if the link is contained within a giant flashing banner ad at the top of Obama’s home page, personally sanctioned by the candidate himself.)

Add to this the rest of Hannity’s litany — Obama’s shocking refusal to, um, wear a flag pin, and his wife’s blatant anti-Americanism, as expressed in a poorly-worded remark at some event somewhere — and you’ve got trouble with a capital B-L-A-C-K.

Here’s the thing: Hannity’s a front line combatant in the propaganda wars, and an utterly reliable harbinger of whatever achingly stupid right wing tangent will occupy our political discourse in the months ahead. Occasionally someone will send me an email suggesting that there’s no point in paying attention to what the radio nutjobs are talking about, as if they have no influence, everybody already knows they’re nutjobs, so why bother. To which I can only reply, tell it to President John Kerry.