Posted 3:38 PM by Scoobie Davis

Karl Rove and Me
I'm the zillionith blogger to embed it, but below is the video of a rapping Karl Rove.

I only included it because I just discovered on my Statcounter stats that my Googlebomb blog is number nine for a Google search for "Karl+Rove+sociopath." I'm proud.

Posted 11:10 AM by Scoobie Davis

Fox News' Latest Right-Wing Fembot

Sorry about the lack of recent posting but I've been very busy with a lot of things. I just read Rebecca Traister's devastating article about Fox News Psycho-babe Rachel Marsden. The only quibble I have with the article is the comparison to Ann Coulter. While Marsden is obviously disturbed, Coulter says insane things (e.g., here) but there is a method to her madness. As I have suggested on previous occasions, Coulter doesn't believe her own bullshit--even fellow wing-nuts have suggested that she's putting people on. Coulter says insane things for the money. It's a cash deal and nothing more.

Posted 6:21 PM by Scoobie Davis

Will Post Tomorrow

Posted 8:40 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
Joe Conason on why Rove testifying without an oath is a joke.

Posted 1:08 AM by Scoobie Davis

The Devil You Say! The Satanic Panic/Clinton Body Count Nexus

On Monday, a federal jury in Salt Lake City awarded the Procter & Gamble corporation over $19 million in its defamation lawsuit against several former Amway distributors who spread the rumor that P & G was controlled by Satanists. On the surface, it was justice applied to unscrupulous people who tried to get ahead by spreading baseless rumors about a competitor. On another level, one could say that it was logical for the Amway distributors to spread this longstanding rumor about P & G because Amway/Quixtar/Alticor is a quasi-religious cult and it made sense--at least from their perspective--to view the competition as being in league with the devil.

When the Amway/Satan verdict came in, I was working on a post that noted that many of the people involved in the "satanic panic" that had its heyday in the 1980's were the same people who promoted the "Clinton Body Count" in the 1990's. Let's discuss these phenomena:

Satanic Panic
During the 70's and 80's, a group of self-described experts on Satanism emerged--some of the more prominent of these "experts" were Mike Warnke, Lauren Stratford, and Michelle Smith. They and lesser-known fundamentalists spread sensational tales of highly organized satanic covens engaging in horrifying acts of Satanic ritual abuse (SRA). These highly questionable reports were reported in the mainstream media by journalists such as Geraldo Rivera and Tom Jarriel (who interviewed Warnke for a 20/20 report in 1985). In many areas around the country, this lead to what social scientists call "a moral panic." Tales of satanic ritual abuse fueled real charges of child abuse. However, a 1992 FBI report found that claims of organized covens of Satanists coordinating abuse and sacrifices were completely unfounded.

The Clinton Body Count
Soon after Bill Clinton entered the White House in 1993, reports emerged, mostly in the fundamentalist Christian and right-wing media, that Bill and Hillary Clinton were cold-blooded killers who were bumping off dozens of political enemies and political friends (e.g., Vince Foster and Ron Brown) who knew too much. These incredible tales became known as the "Clinton Body Count" (CBC). The Clinton Body Count was spread on web sites like the Free Republic and on right-wing talk radio (notably on Rush Limbaugh's and G. Gordon Liddy's shows). Jerry Falwell sold CBC-themed VHS tapes on his Old Time Gospel Hour television program. Billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife also funded efforts to spread this hoax. Although much of the right wants to forget about it, CBC is still a staple on Internet sites like Free Republic and on talk radio. (8/07 Update: Sean Hannity has revived the Vince Foster canard on his radio and television shows).

Overlapping Conspiracies
What I find interesting is that many of the people responsible for creating a wave of fear and hysteria in the 1980's regarding supposed satanic sacrifices were the same people in the 1990's who claimed that Bill and Hillary Clinton were killing people left and right. This makes sense because both the Satanic panic and the Foster conspiracy theories are both examples of urban legends. Here are some of the main players involved in both modern legends:

Patrick Matrisciana and Jeremiah Films. Matrisciana runs Jeremiah Films, a company that produces fundamentalist and right-wing videos. Some of the satanic-themed videos include Devil Worship: The Rise of Satanism and--no, I'm not making this shit up--Harry Potter: Witchcraft Repackaged However, Matrisciana became well know in political circles when he produced a series of anti-Clinton tapes--the most being The Clinton Chronicles-- that claimed that the then-president was involved in murder, drug smuggling, and other heinous crimes.

WorldNetDaily. WorldNetDaily is run by Joseph Farah. Farah was one of Scaife's main operatives. Farah has openly endorsed the CBC--even recently. WND is one of Matrisciana's top supporters On of WND's columnists is Hal Lindsey who, back in the 1980's, cashed in on the satanic panic with the book Satan is Alive and Well on Planet Earth. Lindsey is the brother-in-law of Johanna Michaelson, an alleged former shamanic healer who now works to expose the worldwide satanic conspiracy.

Representative Robert K. Dornan (R-CA). During the Clinton years, Dornan was a substitute host for Rush Limbaugh and, like Limbaugh, Dornan spread rumors that the Clintons were behind the death of Vince Foster. Back in the 1980's, in order to deal with the problem of "backwards masking" (many fundamentalists believed that rock music had backward messages that sent subliminal messages to American youth to worship the Devil), Dornan introduced HR 6363 which would have required suspect rock albums to have a label that read "Warning: This record contains backward masking that makes a verbal statement which is audible when this record is played backward and which may be perceptible at a subliminal level when the record is played forward."

Representative William Dannemeyer. Dannemeyer, like Dornan, was an extreme right-wing member of Congress from Orange County. He appeared in The Clinton Chronicles and advocated the impeachment of bill Clinton. Also, "[i]n 1994, in a letter to congressional leaders, former Rep. William Dannemeyer listed 24 people with some connection to Clinton who had died 'under other than natural circumstances' and called for hearings on the matter." More recently, Dannemeyer wrote a letter to California Attorney General Bill Lockyer claiming that convicted murderer Scott Peterson was innocent and that the real killer was a member of a satanic cult.

Marlin Maddox and Bob Larson. Maddox and Larson did fundamentalist radio shows in which they railed against supposed satanic conspiracies. During the 1990's, both men devoted entire programs to many of Matrisciana's anti-Clinton conspiracies.

And finally, a mixed bag:

Geraldo Rivera. On the one hand, Rivera was one of the key figures in the mainstream media who gave credence to implausible tales of SRA. On his syndicated talk show, Rivera gave credence to wild claims of satanic sacrifices. Rivera wrote the forward to Jerry Johnston's sensational book, The Edge of Evil: The Rise of Satanism in North America. On Rivera's 1988 TV special Devil Worship: Exploring Satan's Underground, he made unfounded claims about the supposed satanic threat. However, in the late 1990's--especially during impeachment--Rivera was a voice of reason against the anti-Clinton hysteria of the American right. However, it wouldn't last for long: in 2001, Rivera joined the Fox News Channel, headed by Roger Ailes, one of the more prominent of the Clinton conspiracy theorists of the 1990's.

UPDATE: Eric Rauchway has a good article in the New Republic on how the GOP is demonizing the Democrats.

UPDATE II: In a 1987 episode of Geraldo Rivera's syndicated talk show Geraldo, Rivera made the following panic-inducing claims:

Estimates are that there are over one million Satanists in this country. The majority of them are linked in a highly organized, very secretive network. From small towns to large cities, they have attracted police and FBI attention to their Satanic ritual abuse, child pornography, and grizzly Satanic murders. The odds are that this is happening in your town.

(Source: Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend by Jeffrey S. Victor, pp. 32, 33.)

Posted 1:48 AM by Scoobie Davis

Procter & Gamble Awarded S19.25 Million Against Amway Distributors in Defamation Suit over Satanic Urban Legend

In the 1990's, some Amway distributors spread the rumor that household products conglomerate Proctor & Gamble was affiliated with the Church of Satan (Snopes has a detailed entry on the rumor). P & G took them to court and on Monday P & G prevailed to the tune of almost $20 million!

Collateral Damage has more.

The past few months have not been good for Amway/Quixtar--click here, here, and here.

Posted 12:18 PM by Scoobie Davis

Working on a huge article--I will post it tonight.

UPDATE: Sorry but something came up and I won't have it up tonight. check tomorrow.

Posted 1:25 AM by Scoobie Davis

In Defense of Al Franken

I try to post on subjects that you won't find anywhere else. It's for that reason that I didn't mention Al Franken's decision to run for the Senate in 2008. In the May 2007 issue of Playboy, the Playboy Forum has an article by author Curtis White that is highly critical of Al Franken. Articles in the forum tend to be thoughtful as well as entertaining but this particular article was pointless. For instance, White devotes six paragraphs to criticizing Franken for pointing out the simple fact that liberals love America (e.g., here is what Franken has written: "We [liberals] love America just as much as they do. But in a different way. You see, they love America the way a 4-year-old loves her mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups"). To show you where White is coming from, here is the concluding sentence of his article: " To prefer a Democrat to a Republican is at best to prefer death by a thousand cuts to a good, clean bullet to the back of the skull."

This is sophistry. Does anyone think that this country would not be much different had not Bush and his cronies stolen the 2000 election? White is hopeless. Al Franken is someone who stepped up when nobody else would. In the 1990's, Democrats were having their brains being bashed in by a radio bully with an audience of 20 million. The national Democrats did nothing about it (I have a story I will post soon about this). Al Franken filled the void by writing Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations. He followed that with several other books, most notably Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. This is a man who knows the score.

Addendum: Puffing up my Sitemeter Stats by Appealing to Horndog Web Searchers
The May 2007 issue of Playboy also had the pictorial "The Girls of Conference USA" (Dang, Hef still has not taken my advice to do a photo shoot of the girls of the Mid-American Conference). Who were the hottest women in this pictorial? Based on the pictures, here are my choices:
The Winner: Sammie Claymont of Rice
First Runner Up: Haydn Porter of Tulsa
Second Runner Up: Leela Martin of Memphis
Third Runner Up: Aylisa Park of UTEP
Special Mention: Holly Tippin of Tulsa, Vanessa Vega of and Amanda Garcia of Texas El Paso, Stella Hayward of Rice, Adrienne Day of Southern Miss, Taylor Reid of Southern Methodist, Angela Leigh of Marshall, Mandy Calloway of Kayli Sands of the University of Houston, Mia Joseph of Central Florida, and Morgan Jade of Tulane.
Honorable Mention: Madison Shepard, Vanessa Milian, Natalie Cruz, Alexis Callaway, Victoria Johnson, Nancy Salas, Akantha Edwards, Anahi Casas, Sandy Morales, Mila Cruz, and Sophia Gavali of UTEP, Olivia Lyric of Memphis, Jamie Junior of East Carolina, Megan Pittman of Alabama at Birmingham, Carrie Gene, Terra Bilboise, Tracy Alexander, and Kala Marlane of Southern Mississippi, and Victoria Lynn, Angela Noel, and Ariana Lynn of Central Florida.

Posted 12:16 PM by Scoobie Davis

The Washington Post's Fred Hiatt Must Go
The "why" by Robert Parry. Parry also masterfully dissects the disastrous performance in yesterday's hearing by Victoria Toensing and why she has been on the same page as Hiatt:

At the hearing, Toensing was reduced to looking like a quibbling kook who missed the forest of damage – done to U.S. national security, to Plame and possibly to the lives of foreign agents – for the trees of how a definition in a law was phrased, and then getting that wrong, too.

After watching Toensing’s bizarre testimony, one might wonder why the Post would have granted her space on the widely read Outlook section’s front page to issue what she called “indictments” of Joe Wilson, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and others who had played a role in exposing the White House hand behind the Plame leak.

One might chalk it up to bending over backwards to give the Right a chance to get one more shot in at the Plame-Wilson family, perhaps some weird sense of “balance.” But Toensing’s attack lines also matched the Washington Post's editorial positions which have consistently hammered Wilson and made light of White House wrongdoing in the case.

UPDATE: Cliff Schecter on why Karl Rove must go to prison.

Posted 11:48 PM by Scoobie Davis

What is Cognitive Dissonance?

Krauthammer then (2004): "It looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again."

Krauthammer now:

And as a former chief resident of the psychiatric consultation service at Massachusetts General Hospital -- my house staff and I were called in to diagnose and treat medical inpatients (many of them post-op, many with cardiac disease) who had developed psychiatric symptoms -- I know something about organically caused dementias. And I know pseudoscientific rubbish when I see it.

I was at first inclined to pass off [Michelle] Cottle's piece as a weird put-on -- when people become particularly deranged about this administration, it's hard to tell -- but her earnest and lengthy piling on of medical research about dementia and cardiovascular disease suggests that she is quite serious.

And supremely silly. Such silliness has a pedigree, mind you. It is in the great tradition of the 1964 poll of psychiatrists that found Barry Goldwater clinically paranoid. Goldwater having become over the years the liberals' favorite conservative (because of his libertarianism), nary a word is heard today about him being mentally ill or about that shameful election-year misuse of medical authority by the psychiatrists who responded to the poll. The disease they saw in Goldwater was, in fact, deviation from liberalism, which remains today so incomprehensible to some that it must be explained by resort to arterial plaques and cardiac ejection fractions.[emphasis mine]

Posted 2:56 PM by Scoobie Davis

Joe Conason on the Bush Justice Department
Great article.

The article mentions the notorious L. Jean Lewis. I checked on YouTube for a video of Lewis' collapse in the Senate hearings but couldn't find it. If anyone has it, it would be great if he/she could post it to YouTube or Google Videos.

Posted 12:34 PM by Scoobie Davis

This Looks Big

Greg Palast:

Bush Hit-Woman Behind
Prosecutor Firings Has Long History
of Purges to Protect Bush
Published March 14th, 2007 in Articles

Harriet Miers fired investigator in 1997 to cover Bush draft-dodge

by Greg Palast
from the original reports for BBC Television and the Guardian (UK)

The Mister Big behind the scandal of George Bush’s firing of US Attorneys is not a ‘mister’ at all. The House Judiciary Committee has released White House emails indicating that the political operative who ordered the hit on prosecutors too honest for their own good was Harriet Miers, one-time legal counsel to the President.

But this is not the first time that Miers has fired investigators to protect Mr. Bush.

In 1999, while investigating Governor George Bush of Texas for the Guardian papers of Britain, I obtained an extraordinary, and extraordinarily confidential, memo to the US Attorney’s office in Austin. It disclosed that, in 1997, Governor Bush secretly suggested to the chairwoman of the Texas Lottery Commission that she grant a contract to the client of a Bush ally.

The Governor’s back-door demand to the Lottery chairwoman was not so easy. Bush wanted the Lottery to grant a multi-billion dollar contract to GTech Corporation. But GTech hadn’t even bid on the contract - and a winner was already announced.

There was only way for the Chairwoman to carry out the fix: fire the director of the Lottery who had discouraged GTech from bidding because of its history of corruption.

The Chairwoman, Harriet Miers, did the deed: fired the Lottery director; Miers then ignored the winning bid — and gave Bush’s favored company the contract, no bidding, in perpetuity.

Read the rest of the story

Posted 1:44 AM by Scoobie Davis

Powerline Blogger Embraces Apocalyptic Nutjob

John Hagee would be good entertainment were it not for the fact that some influential people on the right's media apparatus--such as Fox News' Neil Cavuto--take him seriously. The man is a complete nutjob who would start World War III if he had the chance (Orinus and Talk to Action have good recent posts on Hagee). Powerline Blog's Scott Johnson has a recent post that praises Hagee and informs us that Hagee's recent speech at the national AIPAC meeting had him crying. This would would be funny were it not for the fact that Hagee is so scary.

Posted 10:53 AM by Scoobie Davis

The State of the Right

Gary Kamiya on the "Coulterization" of the American right:

Yet despite their supposed beliefs, a kind of nihilism, an intellectual sterility, emanates from the Coulters and Limbaughs of the world. This is in part due to the fact that they are, at bottom, entertainers, stand-up comedians of resentment. Their riffs are so facile and endless that they devour whatever actual beliefs supposedly stand behind them. Incapable of compromise or nuance, lashing out robotically, never finding common ground or examining their own ideas, they are shills of negativity, forever battling cartoonish monsters in a lurid, increasingly unrecognizable world. And most Americans, even conservative ones who may share some of their putative positions, are tired of their glib, empty paranoia. If these are the messengers, there must be something wrong with the message. . .The GOP brain trust presumably knows this -- but it doesn't have any other cards to play. And as the feebleness of the right's agenda becomes more and more apparent, we can expect the noise from figures like Coulter and Limbaugh to get louder and louder. But the tactic will not work -- in fact, it is likely to backfire. And if the Republicans go down big in 2008, conservatives will finally be forced to confront the Frankenstein monster they created -- and decide whether they dare get rid of it before it consigns their movement to oblivion. Based on their recent history, I don't think they have the common sense to take out the garbage.

Also, Eric Boehlert on why Fox News can dish it out but they can't take it:

The cheese has really fallen off the cracker at Fox News over the Nevada Democratic Party's decision to break its presidential debate partnership with the cable news channel because the outlet is not seen as being fair. On Saturday night, Beltway Boys co-host Morton Kondracke completely lost it while discussing the snub and compared Nevada Democrats to communist propagandists. On Monday night, Fox News talker Bill O'Reilly went one better and likened the "radical" Nevada voters to Nazis.

The bizarre outbursts were just the latest in long line of wild-eyed Fox News denunciations that always come whenever there's a high-profile, albeit logical, observation that Fox News broadcasts a conservative-friendly version of the news and that the partisan news operation does not always employ the traditional checks and balances of mainstream journalism. In fact, Kondracke's own flare-up closely followed a name-calling press release in which Fox News itself denounced Nevada Democrats for being controlled by "radical fringe" special interest groups.

Of course, a real news organization wouldn't issue a nasty statement like that, nor would it give the statement exclusively to Matt Drudge, which Fox News did. And Kondracke's wild on-air denunciation of Democratic activists simply proved the activists' point about Fox News and its purposefully slanted programming.

Read the entire post.

Posted 1:30 AM by Scoobie Davis

An Open Letter to Clarence Page



Dear Mr. Page,

You are a very talented and highly-regarded journalist.  It is for that reason that I am asking you to reconsider your relationship with the Washington Times, a newspaper that carries your syndicated column.  There are several reasons that I believe a reconsideration is in order:

1.  The Washington Times is a vehicle for the Reverend Sun Myung Moon to gain power and prestige with the American political elite in order to advance his theocratic agenda. As Moon told his followers: "Through the Washington Times, Insight magazine, and The World and I, I have been preparing the foundation for you to influence America. . . I am building up a media center, including a television studio and a wire service. Why? Because I want to be rich? No--to educate Americans in God's truth."

2. Having respected journalists writing for the Times advances Moon's antidemocratic and fascist agenda in which dissenters will be "digested" and  "will perish."  Former Washington Times editor James Whelan pointed out, ". . .the Moonies are a political movement in religious clothing. Moon seeks power, not the salvation of souls. To achieve that, he needs religious fanatics as his palace guard and shock troops. But more importantly, he needs secular conscripts--seduced by money, free trips, free services, seemingly endless bounty and booty--in order to give him respectability and, with it, that image of influence which translates as power."

3.  There is reason to believe that much of the money that Moon has used to fund the Times--an estimated $3 billion--has been obtained through charity fraud and swindling people out of their life savings through the "spiritual sales" scams.

4. The Times is a journalistic monstrosity whose editorial page is controlled by white supremacists.

I could give many other strong reasons for you to reconsider your relationship with the Washington Times, but I believe the reasons I gave are more than sufficient.

Sincerely,

Scoobie

Posted 4:15 PM by Scoobie Davis

Tidbits of Wisdom from Bill Maher
Bill Maher has gotten some heat for some comments he didn't make about Dick Cheney. I just got the April 2007 Playboy in the mail yesterday and the Playboy Interview is with Maher. It's a great read.  Here are some of the more insightful comments from Maher:

MAHER: . . Paris is the head-honcho cheerleader who decides who's cool and who's in her group.  You can make fun of her, and I of course enjoy doing so quite often, but you have to give her her due. Somehow she is the head bitch in the high school of America.

PLAYBOY: What is it about her?

MAHER: I think it's confidence. She's a rich kid. I compare her to George W. Bush, a rich kid who really didn't accomplish anything but had the confidence rich kids often have--an attitude that the world should come to them because it always has.  It's very attractive for a nation of followers. Britney Spears, who nominally should be the leader of the pack--she actually had a career, has sold millions of dollars' worth of records--and Lindsey Lohan, an actress who movies, understand who the boss is: Paris Hilton.  It's because she does what the Democrats don't do and the Republicans have consistently done.  They let the country come to them.  By standing their ground and standing by their principles, they have successfully moved the country way, way to the right. When Barry Goldwater ran in 1964, he lost by a landslide, but they didn't care.  Ronald Reagan was a laugh-out-loud joke when he first ran for president in 1968.  But he stood by what he thought was right and true, and the country came to him. . .

MAHER: I'm the antipope, The pope is very consistent about life: Don't fuck with it. I'm that way about death. I'm pro-death. I'm for the death penalty.  I'm pro-choice.  I'm pro-assisted suicide, and I'm pro-regular suicide.  What ever gets the freeway moving. . .

PLAYBOY: How important a force is Fox News?

MAHER: It's peaked.  And I think the ratings back that up.  The American public has caught on to the Bush Administration. "Oh, just because they're saying it on TV doesn't mean it's not complete bullshit." Now everyone knows it's not really a news organization.

PLAYBOY:  But Fox has a sizable audience.

MAHER: A loyal audience not interest in the truth.  For Fox, "fair and balanced" means all the news that's shit we print.  The audience turns to Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly and hears one side.

Addendum: The rest of the issue: There's a story by Deborah Schoeneman on how internet Hollywood gossip sites like Gawker, TMZ.com, and PerezHilton.com are giving the tabloids a run for their money. . .There's a pictorial on the women of WWE. . . There's a skeptical article about Human Growth Hormone as an anti-aging panacea. . .Next, month there will be a pictorial on the Girls of Conference USA. Hef still hasn't taken my advice to do a pictorial on the Girls of the Mid-American Conference.

Posted 1:47 PM by Scoobie Davis

Must Read
"Our right-wing arbiters of masculinity" by Glenn Greenwald

Posted 3:35 PM by Scoobie Davis

Newt and Callista

I find it amusing that Newt Gingrich finally admitted his affair with Callista Bisek (the woman who would become Wife Number 3 after he dumped Wife Number 2 several months after she was diagnosed with MS). I've received a bunch of hits for my conversation with Sean Hannity in which I confronted Slanthead about Republican sexual hypocrisy (this archived page is ranked high for a Google search of "Callista Bisek"). I think that's great because throughout the Clinton presidency, at the same time that the hard right was portraying Clinton as a philanderer, it was an open secret among these same people that the most powerful Republican during the Clinton years, Newt Gingrich, was boning Bisek.

When it finally came out in 1999 that Gingrich was dumping Wife Number 2 and marrying Bisek, I remember the exact words used by Rush Limbaugh--who had spend countless hours mocking Clinton for being a womanizer--on his radio show: "That's the first I heard about it." then he went onto another topic--never, to the best of my knowledge--bringing up the subject until yesterday. Similarly, the Bookie of Virtue, William Bennett, implausibly claimed in 1999 that he didn't know anything about the affair until then.

Posted 12:42 PM by Scoobie Davis

Three Great Articles
1) "Soviet-era compound in northern Poland was site of secret CIA interrogation, detentions" by Larisa Alexandrovna and David Dastych (I heard about it from the Thom Hartmann Show).
2)"Zeroing in on Cheney-Bush" by Robert Parry
3) "Bush’s New US Attorney a Criminal?" by Greg Palast

Posted 1:38 AM by Scoobie Davis

An Overlooked Example of Coulter Defending Anti-Gay Hate
Right after Ann Coulter made the "faggot" comment at the CPAC conference, many commentators and bloggers dug up some of Coulter's other homophobic comments such as her calling Al Gore "a total fag"(AndrewSullivan has a thoughtful article on why the "faggot" comment was so hurtful).

Comments like that are bad but nothing compared to something I caught in my review of Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right. If you're not familiar with this blog, here's a little background: I got an advance copy of Slander before it was released and discovered that Coulter lied through her teeth in the book. I announced this on this blog and other bloggers joined in and fact-checked the book and found more errors and outright misrepresentations in the book(here's a newspaper story on our efforts) I created this separate blog to address Slander. Our efforts culminated in an article in the Columbia Journalism Review that took Coulter to task (unfortunately, most of the supposedly liberal mainstream media didn't notice because Coulter's pathetic excuse for a book received good reviews from the New York Times,Washington Post, and the LA Times).

Back to Coulter and homophobia: here's what she wrote in the first chapter of Slander (to buttress her premise that "[e]ven Islamic terrorists don’t hate America like liberals do”):

In the wake of an attack on America committed by crazed fundamentalist Muslims, Walter Cronkite denounced Jerry Falwell. Falwell, it seems, had remarked that gay marriage and abortion on demand may not have warmed the heart of the Almighty. Cronkite proclaimed such a statement "the most abominable thing I’ve ever heard."

The problem is that this claim is just another example of Coulter playing fast and loose with the facts. In fact, what Cronkite had denounced were Falwell's now-infamous statements on Pat Robertson's 700 Club program two days after the 9/11 attacks in which he partially blamed that attacks on a variety of groups such as the ACLU, the People for the American Way, and family planning groups. Contrary to Coulter's claim, Falwell didn't mention gay marriage but he did include gays and lesbians as also being part of the reason that God supposedly lifted "the curtain [of protection to] allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve" (quick note on Falwell: talk about blaming America first!).

When I think about Coulter's whitewashing of Falwell's almost universally condemned diatribe, it lead me to several conclusions: 1) The people who paid good money for this book and remembered what Falwell actually said and still take Coulter seriously are sheep; 2) Did the reviewers who gave the book a good review catch this? 3) Did Coulter's gay friends take her up on this?

Having it Both Ways
What I find particularly noxious about Coulter's defense of Falwell is that she was lying to defend things she doesn't agree with. Coulter is an urban cosmopolitan who has many gay friends. She plays to the homophobic right because they buy books and tickets to her public speaking events. Coulter is a good example of a closet tolerant--someone who exhibits homophobia for political or economic gain. With both the Falwell whitewash and the faggot comment, she did it for political and economic reasons: to bash a liberal and to generate controversy that would lead to more book sales.

It isn't just the issue of homosexuality that Coulter is a closet tolerant. Coulter is a party girl. In my book, there is nothing wrong with this: I sometimes go to ridiculous extremes for a great party. It's just that I don't piously accuse my political opponents of being against chastity. Coulter courts the puritan right but lives a party girl lifestyle from the book sales and lecture fees. For instance, I noted that for spring break, Coulter will be hanging with the people who were instrumental in destroying Fort Lauderdale as a spring break destination. Coulter reminds me of members of the Saudi royal family who live a decadent lifestyle but who impose a strict lifestyle choices on others. It just sucks.

Posted 1:58 PM by Scoobie Davis

Coulter
I'll have a post on a little-known Coulter anti-gay slur later today. Hannity will have Coulter as a guest on the third hour of his radio show (along with Fox News Democrat Pat Caddell).

UPDATE: What Coulter said was pretty much a rehash of what she said on Hannity & Colmes last night. She refused to apologize. Caddell, as usual, acted like a Fox News Democrat.

Posted 12:27 PM by Scoobie Davis

Remember the various times over the past three years that prominent members of the right's media declared that the Plamegate scandal was "over"?

Posted 10:40 AM by Scoobie Davis

The "Why" of the Radical Right
This blog has often documented what the radical right has said and done.  Here are some links that explain why they do it:

1) (via Orcinus) Bob Altemayer's book The Authoritarians is available online. It's a quick read.  It expands on the work of Adorno and Hofstadter. Altemayer was an influence on John Dean's book Conservatives without Conscience.

2) Jeffrey Feldman on the violent rhetoric of Dinesh D'Souza.

3) (via Roger Ailes) George Archibald on the meltdown at the Moonie Times.


UPDATE: Also, check out Joe Conason's new book It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush.

ADDITIONAL UPDATE: I checked my Sitemeter stats and someone from the Washington Times came to this site based on a Google Blog search of the phrase "Moonie Times."

Posted 9:27 PM by Scoobie Davis

Faux News

I saw it on The Simpsons tonight but I wasn't recording it. Cup O' Joe did. Bart Simpson to his psychiatrist:

I had a dream that me and my family were all cartoons! And that our success led to a propaganda channel called FOX News!

Posted 5:04 PM by Scoobie Davis

E-mail Me, Josette

I was checking my Sitemeter stats and found out today that someone from the United Nations World Food Programme in Rome had been lurking on this site.  Upon further examination, I found that the person came to this site based on a Google search of "Josette Sheehan Shiner" (as of today, my post on Shiner and Hillary is ranked 28th on a Google search). This is particularly interesting because Shiner is the head of the UN World Food Programme.

Is Shiner lurking on the the pages of Scoobie Davis Online? If so, I'm sure that she wouldn't be too freaked out--I mean, as a (former?) member of Moon's cult, I sure she has experienced a lot of weird shit (the Holy Handkerchief is just one example out of many).

Anyhow, if it was you, Josette, e-mail me. I'm curious about some things.

Posted 1:49 PM by Scoobie Davis

Phony Outrage

Arriana has a great post on the phony outrage by Hannity and Limbaugh over anonymous commenters on the Huffington Post who wished that Dick Cheney had been killed by the recent terrorist bombing in Afghanistan.  Read the post. It's succinct and to the point.

Let me add a few additional ironies:

1) Yesterday, Limbaugh's co-author Joseph Farah once again put forth the "the Clinton Body Count"--an infamous urban legend and a staple of wing-nut conspiracy theorists during the 1990's (thanks to ConWebWatch for pointing this out).  Regular readers of this blog know that Farah doesn't seem to like to admit to propagating this smear around the mainstream media circles. Limbaugh also liked to fantasize that the Clintons were murdering their political enemies or friends who knew too much. Additional irony: today Farah wrote the following in his WorldNetDaily column:

This is a love letter.

It is an expression of how I feel about you for making WND a bigger success
than I ever imagined 10 years ago when Elizabeth and I first began planning
what we saw then as "an Internet newspaper" committed to the highest
ideals of American journalism [emphasis mine].

2) Limbaugh wrote the forward to the paperback edition of the literary fraud Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right (the ironic premise of the book is that the lack of civility in political discourse is "all liberals' fault"). The book's author, Ann Coulter, had previously written about whether whether "to impeach or assassinate" Bill Clinton. UPDATE: Media Matters has more.
3) Hannity helped to launch the career of Hal Turner. UPDATE: Bob Geiger has a must-read post on Hannity.
4) I could go on and on and on and on and on and on but I think the point has been made.

Posted 11:12 AM by Scoobie Davis

New Jack T. Chick Tract!!!!!

It's called "Set Free!" It's not Chick's greatest tract, in my opinion, but it gave me a much-needed fix.

UPDATE: I just found this amusing Chick Tract parody about Albert Hofmann and the discovery of LSD (via Wild Mood Swings). Quick note: Stanislav Grof (who is mentioned in the tract) is a thought-provoking author. I attended one of his lectures in 1998.

Posted 10:43 AM by Scoobie Davis

Your Tax Dollars at Work
I just checked my Statcounter stats and found that someone from the U.S. State Department came to this site based on a Google search of "pictures of Michelle Malkin."