A Tale of Two Women and One Man Who Failed (But this IS the Media)

How's this for an oxymoron?

Her Serene Highness Queen Ratfucker Omnipotent of Medialand, otherwise known as Arianna Huffington, came to Philadelphia yesterday to address the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists.


Why, I don't know; but there's nothing Arianna ever does that doesn't include promotion of that one thing she loves most in the world (herself), and - true to form, she was on a plug, announcing the start of a special news section at The Huffington Post, exclusively for African Americans, entitled Huffpost Black Voices.


Now, that struck a chord with me, and I'm a white woman born and raised in the South. It seems to me that HuffPo seems to grow like the weed it is and spread like a cancer through the media world, and at the most opportune times. The week that Rupert Murdoch was testifying in Parliament and getting slammed in the smacker with a shaving foam pie, Arianna turned up in London to launch - you guessed it - HuffPost UK Edition. Yep, no sooner than that lying liar tabloid tripe News of the World gets shut down, Arianna gives the Brits a totally online version of her version of yellow journalism. I even speculated that she was in the UK on the off-chance of interviewing Rebekah Brooks, Murdoch's titian-haired enforcer, for the job of overseeing the British version of her rag - that is, if Brooks doesn't go to jail.


But then, I would imagine Mrs Brooks would scare the living cack out of the fragrant Mrs Huffington. In a previous life, Brooks (then Rebekah Wade) was married to the absolute biggest star in British television, Ross Kemp, who's built like the proverbial brick one, and she was arrested and fined for domestic abuse, when she beat the cack out of Kemp one night. On second thought, I hope Huffington hires her.


So now the fact that The Huffington Post has opened up a spic-and-span, banging, brand new section with articles for black people by black people, hit me as being - well, just a wee bit like Jim Crow ... Plessey v Ferguson ... separate but equal.

It also struck me as a bit strange, and slightly patronising, that Huffington's message should be subtly divisive. According to the NABJ's blurb, itself ...

she also urged attendees at NABJ’s opening ceremony to examine the “split-screen world” the nation lives in when it comes to black communities.

“Depending on which of the screens you look at, you have a very different view of what is happening, and what the future is going to be like,” said Huffington, president and editor-in-chief of The AOL Huffington Post Media Group. “Nowhere is this more true than it is when it comes to the African-American community.”

And how appropos that this was given on our President's birthday, a man who, depending on the time of day or year, she's variously described as weak, ineffectual, spineless, cowering and out-of-touch.

On the other hand, another speaker at the NABJ convention, and one who got little publicity and fanfare (not that she'd expect it), was the marvelous Carole Simpson. I well remember Carole Simpson during her stint at NBC in the mid-1970s. I've read her book, about how she literally had to fight her way to the top of her profession, whose mandarins not only looked down at her because of her race, but also because of her gender. She was the first African American woman to anchor a network news broadcast and the first of the same to moderate a major Presidential debate in 1992.


When you look at these two women, there really is no comparison. Simpson was born in an age where, for a large section of the country, she couldn't get served in a restaurant or get a room in a major hotel. She lived through the Civil Rights' era of Bull Connor, George Wallace, Little Rock, water cannons, Freedom Riders and police dogs. She lived through the bra-burning era of the feminists, and she never lost sight of her goal, whilst retaining all her core principles and professionalism.

Huffington was born into a wealthy family of corrupt politicians. Her money bought her a place at Cambridge. She got a foot in the door of the British politcal media, in her twenties, by sleeping with a well-known, high-profiled British journalist, author and broacaster, Bernard Levin, considered by all to be the most famous journalist of his era. He was forty years her senior and although he managed to get her first two books published (although the second was pulped due to a plagiarism suit), she was never considered to be anything more, in Britain, than an intellectual lightweight, a dilettante and a bad writer.


She fanagled her way onto the edges of the American media machine, by carefully nurturing a friendship with Barbara Walters and later married a fabulously wealthy corporate oilman, spending years as his beard whilst they both tried to climb the political ladder, and then, when he came out of the closet and they divorced, she spent his money.


For all the plethora of books she wrote during this time, they never sold a bundle. It says something, to this day, that Ann Coulter's books top The New York Times best-sellers' list (puke), but Huffington has to resort to giving her tomes away.


The Huffington Post was created for one reason and one reason only - well, two, but the minor reason was to ratfuck the Progressive community - and that was the promotion of Arianna Huffington as a bona fide journalist. That's right, the woman who couldn't get a byline in The Telegraph, The Guardian, The New York Times, or The Washington Post, had to found an online newspaper in order to publish her snarky op-ed articles.


Her past associations (for career advancement) include Andrew Breitbart, Matt Drudge, Newt Gingrich and Darrell Issa, with whom she partied in Las Vegas the weekend Gabby Giffords was shot and he should have been at home in his California Congressional District with his constituents and his wife.


Now, in this day and age, who's the best role model for a young woman aspiring to a career in journalism? Fight your ground and stick with the game or sleep and smarm your way to the top. I shudder to think what the choice would be in this generation whose ethos seems to be instant gratification.


Part of Huffington's brief at the convention, was to field questions from actual attendees and online participants. (Arianna loves anything "online"; look for HuffPo Porn to be her next creation, and look for it to be interactive).


Lester Holt, the weekend NBC Evening News anchor and host of The Today Show moderated, and here's the big fail.


Arianna crafted The Huffington Post into the corporate conglomerate it's become off the backs of unpaid workers - not just the ubiquitous intern (most of whom came from well-off families who subbed their salaries), who not only had to moderate comments, cut and paste from original works to form another aggregate article and man the phones, but also, on occasion, had to unblock toilets, arrange for washing machine repairs, vacuum Madame's carpets and pick up Arianna's daughters from their exclusive Brentwood schools; but also legions of bloggers, ordinary people from all walks of life, to whom Arianna, in her malevolent benevolent dishonesty, promised exposure of their work in a positive light, which just might lead to a paid position someplace in the journalistic/media world.


These latter poor bastards wrote alongside their celebrity betters - people like Alex Baldwin, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Huffington's pet gnome, Bill Maher (you know, experts in the field of politics and sociology) - who really didn't have to worry that they were writing for free just to show the world that entertainment people were capable of stringing a sentence or two together coherently.


And, lo, when the day came, that Arianna sold out to the corporate interests she'd heretofore (for radically chic purposes) decried, when she went from being media whore to corporate whore, she dropped "the little pipple, dahlink" like the proverbial hot potato, or - more likely - as though they'd given her a vast cootie infection.


And there's the rub: Arianna's empire, her wealth, is based on something that's just actually a euphemistic form of 21st Century slavery. Odd to think, that, in the cyber age of technological advancement, a moghul like Arianna depends on good, old fashioned plantation slavery to get her message to the people. A message that's often a screed against anything and everything that our first African-American President does or says.


But, you see, Arianna - brave Arianna! - didn't flinch at the fact that, at first, Lester Holt appeared to be doing his job in broaching the subject of her use of free, unpaid labour in HuffPo's production. I mean, that was provocative - this white woman of privilege, who dared to use unpaid slave labour, who brushed off the threat of a strike by all her unpaid, common-and-garden moment with a true "Let them eat cake" moment which would have made Marie Antoniette blanche.

Huffington did not shy away from controversial topics during the quick question and answer session, moderated by NBC News anchorman Lester Holt, and fueled inquiries from Twitter users.

Regarding the Huffington Post practice of using unpaid content, Huffington said while the company employs more than 1,300 journalists, it is also a platform.

“People can choose to participate in the platform, if they have something they want to write that requires wider distribution, or not to participate in the platform,” Huffington said. “We are not dependent on them.”

Oh, so that's what slavery was all about then. It was a "platform," where "participants" (read: slaves) could choose to do something for the wider good and comfort of the masters they served, or they could choose not to participate.

Can you imagine Prissy telling Miss Scarlett that she didn't choose to cook breakfast for Miss Scarlett and Lil'Wade, because she simply didn't choose to participate?


And the massive fail to this absolutely brassneck example of class and racial privilege, in this setting in particular, arrived when Holt, at the top of his game in his profession, simply passed on challenging her front, which was grossly insulting to her audience, to say the least. In the meantime, protestors from the National Writers' Union picketed outside.


This incident puts Reverend Sharpton's take-down of Pat Buchanan's derogatory and racist reference to the President, into a whole different perspective. I wonder if Al Sharpton had been moderating that session, instead of Lester Holt, if Reverend Sharpton would have let that explanation pass so easily?

Somehow, I think not.

The Enemy Within

There's been a campaign going on around the blogosphere for awhile, advocating that MSNBC ban Pat Buchanan from appearing on the network. Buchanan is a political analyst, who, in the wake of the tragedy in Norway, wrote an editorial, which appeared to rationalise, if not favour, the motives of the assassin in question, Anders Behring Breivik.


If that were not enough, Buchanan dug himself into a deeper hole, when he appeared as a guest on Rev Al Sharpton's new MSNBC progam, and made reference to the President, using a term with echoes the collective periods of time encompassing the Antebellum South right up through the era of Civil Rights struggles. You can watch the incident, which occurs at about the five-minute mark here.


That's right. Pat Buchanan, political speechwriter, strategist, commentator and one-time Presidential candidate, referred to the President of the United States as a "boy."


Now, I know Pat's past seventy, and he's a man of his era and time. I grew up in the South, and Pat always, for some reason, makes me think of the Virginia history textbook I was made to study in the Seventh Grade. I don't think it had been re-written in sixty years, and that was in the mid-1960s. Every five years or so, the publishers would tack another couple of chapters onto the end of the thing, as time passed and more events occurred; but in Virginia, in 1966, in the wake of historic Civil Rights legislation passing, we were still being taught how happy and gay (as in contented) African Americans were when they were enslaved, chattel, someone else's property and not their own person.


The quaint little drawings showed plump, well-fed people, dressed simply, but smartly, dancing happily around a campfire and receiving gifts of a ham at Christmas. We were taught that masters and mistresses were kind, and that their slaves didn't really want to be free. I think Pat bought into this too. In fact, I think he genuinely believed and still believes malarkey like this.


But, rightly, politely and forcefully, Rev Sharpton upbraided him on this slip-of-the-tongue. When Pat referred to the President as "your boy, Barack Obama," the reverend was ready:-

He’s nobody’s boy– he’s your president, he’s our president, and that’s what ya’ll don’t get through your head.

Rev Sharpton, that's what a lot of people don't get through their heads.


The next night, Lawrence O'Donnell, had as his guest, Arianna Huffington. I've followed Huffington's career for about thirty years. She's the privleged daughter of a corrupt Greek politician, whose family fled Greece in the socialist coup of the early 1960s. Huffington, nee Stanisopoulos, is a prime example of someone who has used money and sex to climb both the social and professional ladders.


Following her academic career at Cambridge, she expected to be welcomed with opened arms into the British political media, most of whom are traditionally centre-Leftish; but Huffington was so far to the Right in those days, she made Phyllis Schlafly look like a weeping Nellie atheist. She wrote a couple of books, and got sued for extensive plagiarism in one of them. In fact, plagiarism follows Huffington like a lost puppy, as does unethical journalistic methods.


She decamped to the US in the early 1980s and suddenly became BFF with Baba Wawa, no mean social climber, herself. Then she managed to marry Michael Huffington, a closeted gay politician, who needed a wife for his image as much as Arianna needed a (rich) American husband in order to stay in the country. Huffington was a neocon and to the Left of Madam, who was still rabidly Rightwing.


He served as a Congressman from California for two years in the 1990s, hoping to win a Senate seat in 1996 from Diane Feinstein. (He lost). I've no doubt, had he won, he may even have attempted a run for the White House in 2000 or 2004. Imagine Zsa Zsa Mach II as our First Lady!


Also, during the 90s, Arianna developed a penchant for Newt Gingrich and a pathological hatred for all things Clinton. She contributed to George W Bush's Presidential campaigns, not once, but twice, and suddenly woke up on the morning of November 3, 2004, the day Dubya officially became Lame Duck plus three, and experienced a full-on Damascene conversion, declaring herself no longer a neocon, but a 100% dyed-in-the-wool Progressive.


No questions asked, no details given, the shallow and insipid 24/7 news media accepted her as the new and fully-fledged voice of the Left.


In another space and time, she would have been called a ratfucker, because since Barack Obama's inauguration, she's worked steadily and consistently to ructure irreparably the Left. It was she, as well as Jane Hamsher, who made sure that the Firebaggers (who inhabit the opposite side of the political coin from the Teabaggers, but who share with them a single brain cell) were sufficiently conflicted to believe that the President was weak, spineless, a tool of Wall Street, a closet Republican, a war mongerer, an enemy of the people, especially the Middle Class.


In the weeks leading up to the 2010 Midterms, she trolled the United States, being given almost unlimited airtime on MSNBC, to tell all and sundry of the middle class that "the President just isn't that into you."


Almost as much as Ed Schultz, another ex-neocon rapidly converted to progressivism, she was instrumental in ensuring that people on the Left, who should have voted, sulked out the vote and gave us the Tea Party Congress we loathe and detest today - and all the while, referring to the President as "nowhere man."


Last night, she set up her shingle on O'Donnell's show, to talk about the debt ceiling agreement, and immediately offered this choice titbit about the President:-

I think he needs intense therapy, to explain to himself first of all why he did what he did, because there is no rational explanation.

All said with that maliciously sweet butter-wouldn't-melt-in-her-mouth smile plastered to her greasy, botoxed face.


That was a pernicious remark, which exhibited the utmost contempt and disrespect for this man. She's a nasty piece of work, totally without tact or class. A person whom, in the words of Oscar Wilde, knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.


She is, above all, the embodiment of white privileged elitism, from the debutante daughters to the flaunting of her own brand for her own purposes.


Oh, and she still cahoots with Newt.


But what dismayed me the most about the entire segment of the O'Donnell show is the way the host let her spew her disrespectful venom without once taking her to task.


Kudos to Rev Sharpton, who didn't stint in reminding a long-time political operative from the other side, that a modicum of respect was due the President of the United States. Neither is it mete to imply, snarkily or otherwise, that this President is mentally or emotionally unfit enough to require therapy, but it seems that the President and anyone who supports him now not only are told regularly by the Professional Left that they need professional help or that they really are Republican trolls (like the President is a secret Republican) paid by Andrew Breitbart or that they're "the dumbest motherfuckers," we're now deemed "starry-eyed followers", like the adherents to some sick cult.


I guess the question we are left to ponder is why Rev Sharpton was quick and right to call out blatant disrespect, and Lawrence O'Donnell wasn't?

Our (Political) Gang 2011

Remember the old film shorts from the 1930s "Our Gang?" Ever wonder who the Our Gang crew would grow up to be if they went into politics? Well ... Let's pretend a reality television show was produced entitled OUR (POLITICAL) GANG 2011 ... Starring ...

Michael Moore as Spanky

Dennis Kucinich as Alfalfa

Joan Walsh as Darla

Bill Maher as Skippy

Tavis Smiley as Stymie

And ...

Cornel West as Buckwheat

Special Guest star

Arianna Huffington as The Wicked Witch of the West

I TOLD Y'ALL About Arianna Huffington. Now How's That Ratfuckery Thingy Goin' Fer Ya?

Chickens have come home to roost, or rather buzzards picking over the carcass of the dead. One of the “founders” of Huffington Post has come back to blog.

Andrew Breitbart.

If that’s not proof that Arianna Huffington isn’t the biggest ratfucker since Donald Segretti touched a college student named Karl Rove with his magic wand, I don’t know what is. The question is, who touched Huffington? Was it Newt or Issa? People should have sussed that she was about to come out of the neocon closet when she was photographed tree-hugging Gingrich on holiday last summer, and then earlier this year she was snapped sitting with Darrell Issa in Vegas, his arm cosily wrapped around her shoulder.

My guess is that it was neither. She was merely an opportunist, interested in promoting her own brand. She saw that Progressives needed the equivalent of Drudge and went for the market, successfully conning a shallow media and an even shallower public following in her wake.

Once she’d successfully driven a wedge in the Left, appropriating its lowest common denominator by feeding them a diet of her talking points, and once the Midterms had handed her back the stronger Republican Party she craved, she crawls, like the Kochroach she is, into the sunlight.

Think of it. She’s had y’all wound so tight, you’ve managed to spend two years sniping and griping at everything this President said, did, tried to say or tried to do,when more energy could have been spent sounding off at the Republicans or organising retaliation against the Tea Partiers.

Just remember what the Iliad warned: Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.

Here’s the lnk:- http://veracitystew.com/2011/03/14/final-death-blow-for-huffpo-andrew-breitbart-now-blogging-for-huffington-post/

Arianna's Marie Antoinette Moment

Boy, do I love it when frauds are exposed. I love it when people are exposed as users of other people in order to gain their own prominence. There's nothing I like better than to see someone jump a shark out of sheer ambition, only to see the shark rear up and take a prime piece of well-deserved ass.





I have long known Arianna Huffington to be the abject phony and opportunist that she is. When I first heard of her, she was a raving Rightwing wannabe political commentator, trying desperately to gain a foothold in the British political media and failing. She'd just written a polemic, challenging Germaine Greer's feminist writings, which would have made Phyllis Schlafly look like Jane Fonda.





Then there was the plagiarism trial, which resulted in further besmirching her name as a dilettante and a political parvenue.





Fast forward to the Nineties when I'm home visiting my folks, only to see a huge article in the Washington Post's Sunday magazine, describing Arianna Huffington (I'd known of her as Stanisopoulos), dutiful Congressional wife, located in Washington and trying to organise weekly soirees resembling the intellectual and poltical salons of the French Empire, fancying herself and her European antecedents as a modern-day Madame de Stael.





The salon idea failed, but it hooked her up with Newt Gingrich, and together, they mounted a virulent campaign intent on impeaching one William Jefferson Clinton, with Arianna manning the online petition for Clinton's political demise.





Well, we all know how that worked out too, and we all know the success story that eventually became The Huffington Post. In one way or another, we were all sucked into the Huffington vortex, reckoning and believing it to be the Left's answer to Drudge.





I don't know if I were born cynical or if I acquired cynicism, having married a Brit and lived abroad for so long, but - suffice it to say - I never bought St Paul's Damascene conversion and I sure as hell didn't buy Arianna's abrupt Left turn from neocon to Progressive, literally overnight. And I knew I was proven right as soon as she started nit-picking and wantonly criticizing, not only the President, but also various high-profile members of his Administration, in particular, Tim Geithner, as she waged a war against the evils of Wall Street and the corporate take-over of America.





As Arianna always has a very vocal opinion about anything which she can use as a stick with which to beat the President, I cocked a suspicious eye at the fact that she chose to remain silent at the height of the Shirley Sherrod controversy - but then I knew Andrew Breitbart was a co-founder of HuffPo and a protege of Arianna from donkey's years back.





I cocked an even more suspicious eye as she trolled the country, trolling the more gullible and less emotionally and politically mature sections of the Left, in the run up to the 2010 Mid-terms, driving a wedge deeper than the Grand Canyon in that particular demographic. The message the Greek Media Whoracle preached was simply that Obama didn't give a rat's ass about the middle class, that he'd hung them out to dry, and that - by the way - she had a reasonably priced book she'd written that would explain everything.





So, when she announced that she'd signed a pact with the corporate devil that is AOL and sold her little internet baby for the handsome sum of $315 million, I could just imagine that shark tasting feta cheese.





And now, I'm sure he's had a feast.





Her legion of unpaid bloggers took umbrage that she'd scored such a profit on their backs. It kinda smelled like slavery in the Old South - you know, when Massa would laugh all the way to the cotton bank with his profits whilst his slaves toiled wearily in the fields. But, hey, they should be grateful they were cared for, and so Arianna's dutiful bloggers - the hoi polloi, not the well-oiled and wealthy celebrity types - should be grateful she was affording them exposure.





She even despatched one of her paid lackeys, someone named Marco Ruiz, to the front line to explain why she wasn't about to share her good fortune with her unpaid minions, but how, as well, her good fortune benefitted all the little people, dahhhlinks, because these unfortunates got free exposure. Actually, Marco explained, it was rather like the same situation as when an author appeared on a television program promoting his latest book, or when an eminient authority appeared on such a program to expound upon a subject.





Except, it's not, because those authors and authorities get paid an appearance fee. Even her surrogate son, Bill Maher, pays his Real Time guests $2500 for just sitting at a table. That at least covers their First Class air fares from the East Coast.





The beleagured bloggers have even created a Facebook page, highlighting their concerns, entitled, "Hey Arianna, Can You Spare a Dime?" And Marco the cheerleader has been assigned a presence on that page to fight Arianna's corner. His latest attempt was to inform all the unfortunates how ungrateful they were, and how he'd forever be grateful for what Arianna had done for internet journalism and for hiimself.





"But, Marco," a commentator pointed out, "you are paid."





And now, it seems, various contributors have decided to take a leaf from Wisconsin's book and institute a strike against The Huffington Post, demanding collective bargaining rights. The spectre of various HuffPost bloggers manning a picket line en masse outside Huffington's swish Soho offices in New York, with Madame assuming the Scott Walker role is the stuff of legend - another little man standing up for his own interests against a rich corporation, which is, essentially, what Huffington's become.





Bill Lasarow, publisher and editor of Visual Art Source, which has contributed content for free to HuffPo for a year now, has announced that his organisation is going on strike against Huffington, with two demands, specifically:-





1) that Huffington develop a system whereby bloggers are paid for their efforts and

2) that Huffington differentiates between paid promotional content and writers' work.





They are also proposing that contributors band together to instigate a system of collective bargaining. While it's not illegal that bloggers are unpaid, Lasarow points out, it's unethical and just a wee bit hypocritical.





And so much for the sainted little people for whom Arianna had made herself a self-appointed spokesperson.





If nothing else, this proposed action has shown, indelibly, how far removed and how out-of-touch with ordinary people, the faux and fashionable Progressive intelligentsia has become. Immediately this idea was mooted and put into the public domain, one of Arianna's celebrity bloggers - you know, the ones who have substantial income from another source - jumped to her defense.





Robert Scheer, who blogs occasionally for HuffPo, but whose professional writing efforts are imbursed by Katrina vanden Heuvel's trust fund, AKA The Nation, readily assumed the role of Huffington Knight Errant, saying, “In defense of the use of unpaid bloggers, of which I happen to be one among the many who appear on a regular basis on the Huffington Post, we are not exploited.”





Oh, well ... that's all right then. God's in his heaven, all's right with the world, and Robert Scheer speaks for a multitude.





The op-eds, Scheer says dismissively, were never a source of serious income anyway. Maybe not for Mr Scheer, but the striking contributors say - and rightly so - for well-known contributors, who aren't concerned about reimbursements for their efforts, to take this sort of dismissive attitude is nothing short of disgraceful.





And, really, doesn't this sort of disdain smack of the Koch-infested Right? It certainly goes a long way in explaining why, at the beginning of last week, when the Wisconsin protests were reaching their heights, that the editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post sought to write a lengthy account of hers and Bill Maher's exploits at the Vanity Fair Oscar party, making light of Kirk Douglas's aphasia, rather than lend moral support to those middle class strugglers in Wisconsin, whom she formerly purported to support. She would do well to remember Kirk Douglas, a lifelong liberal and Democrat, was the one man who broke the Hollywood McCarthyite blacklisting of Dalton Trumbo, a writer.





Instead, Madame weighed in on the potential strike situation, whilst at a conference in New York City last week, with these words, ridiculing these people: "Go ahead, go on strike! The idea of going on strike when no one really notices!"





Oh, really, Arianna? I guess you haven't been noticing the thousands of middle class people - you know, the ones you convinced the President disdained - camping out in freezing conditions to fight for their rights against a governor, who's increasingly become megalomaniacal.





With such an attitude, it's mete to ask how one says, "Let them eat cake" in Greek, the moral of this story being: Beware of Greeks causing rifts.

Following the Rightwing Fashion

Living in the UK, I often say I’m five hours ahead and one day behind everyone else. Also, working a long day and catching up with news Stateside leaves me less time than I want to write about things I’ve read or seen.
I’ve only just caught up with watching Bill Maher’s Real Time from February 4th, and something Bill said on that program has stuck rigidly in my craw.

John Fund was a panelist that week, and the only Republican in a trio which included Rep Anthony Weiner from New York.

I would normally applaud Bill including Republican points-of-view in the program. I think it’s valid to hear the other side, even if one doesn’t agree with what they say. Although I’m normally pessimistic by nature, I sometimes come across a Republican/conservative who makes a good point – good enough to make me think. I also like to think that there are still reasonable and moderate Republicans somewhere out there, with whom the Democrats can cooperate in a civil and constructive fashion.

Conversely, I think the wingnuts need to be exposed for the fearmongerers that they are and for the irresponsible deceit they propagate. Therefore, a two-way discussion is always helpful.

I know there was a time when Bill moaned about being unable to attract viable Republican guests on his program, often bragging that they were afraid to appear, knowing that he would ask the questions others were afraid to ask, and that was true; but lately – at least since John Bolton’s last appearance in early 2010 – Bill’s been wont to give his Republican guests too much of a free and easy ride.

That Friday night, February 4th, as he took his place in the moderator’s seat, the first thing Bill did was apologise to John Fund, for his being the only Republican/conservative guest that evening and having to pit himself against two obvious Democrats on the panel. He went onto explain that they’d been recently trying to have at least two Republican guests on the show, but that particular week, they’d been unable to find a second.

That remark kick-started something in my brain. The previous week, Bill actually had a panel of three Republican/conservative guests, and thus far, this season, the Rightwing viewpoint has far out-weighed that of the Left. For too long on that program, anytime a Republican/Rightwinger (synonymous) appears, they dominate the discussion, interrupt, talk over others and are just generally rude.

And as for Bill, he either lets their comments ride or totally ignores them by cracking a bad joke.

At the beginning of the second half of the 2010 season, Andrew Breitbart was on the panel, along with Amy Holmes. This was fresh in the aftermath of the Shirley Sherrod escapade, but throughout the panel discussion, not a mention was made of either Sherrod or race in anyway … until Carl Sagan’s widow appeared as the mid-panel guest.

She was very quick off the mark to confront Breitbart about this incident. Breitbart almost stood up in his chair and quickly berated Bill, by reminding him that one of the pre-conditions to Breitbart’s appearance on the show was that there would be no mention of either Sherrod or racial issues. Bill mumbled a hasty agreement and moved onto the next topic.

W … T … F?

What happened to those questions other hosts were afraid to ask? And why did he feel it mete to apologise to John Fund for not being able to secure another Republican guest so Fund could feel good about safety in numbers?
Bill regularly complains about Obama’s “neediness” in pandering to the Republicans, ignorantly refusing to realise that, now that the House has a GOP majority – thanks in part to Bill’s reverse cheerleading efforts in convincing the lowest common denominator of the ueber Left that Obama was no different than Bush, that he was weak and a pussy – Obama has to reach agreement with this half of the bicameral legislature in order to govern effectively. He has that responsiblity, and so does the Speaker. And polls have shown increasingly that the voting public want to see compromise and cooperation, rather than stalemate and stagnation. Otherwise, why don’t we all go to hell in a handcart?

And whilst Bill complains about Obama’s pandering to the Right, he, himself, looks increasingly cosy in the company of such staunch Republicans as John Fund, Michael Steele and Darrell Issa. And this week, after regularly ranting against corporate welfare and the power and wealth of corporate power in the US, he bows from the waist to the Queen Mother of Corporate Media Whores, Whoreanna Fuckington, herself, with a softball interview which allowed her, not only to continue her abject participation in the Big Lie propagation concerning the President, but also to cherry-pick her chosen Messiah for the GOP Presidential nomination, John Huntsman.

Bill calls himself a Progressive, but he’s in favour of the death penalty, is anti-union in sentiment, doesn’t like federal funding of the National Endowment for the Arts, is virulently pro-Israel and has a fear of Islam and Muslims that’s almost palpable, considering his interview with Anderson Cooper last spring. All those sentiments sound pretty closet Republican to me.

Or maybe, since Whoreanna’s sold herself to the highest bidder and isn’t afraid to be photographed either clinching Newt or reclining comfortably into the arms of Darrell Issa, turning Right is now the fashionable thing to do for some dedicated followers of political fashion like Bill Maher.

Some would call it flip-flopping; others, hypocrisy. I say it’s chickens coming home to roost.

American Exceptionalism, American Nightmare

A couple of weeks ago, in the Overtime section of Real Time with Bill Maher, a viewer posed a question wondering how foreigners viewed "American Exceptionalism." When Bill read the question, Kim Campbell, ex-Canadian PM, smugly quipped, "Pretty dimly."





That remark niggled me more than just a little bit, not because it was uttered by a foreigner who chose to live in the United States, rather than her own country, but because her cute and clever reply and the ensuing discussion made obvious the fact that no one on the panel - and apparently not even Bill Maher - understood the real meaning of the phrase.





Rather than speaking of "American Exceptionalism" as de Tocqueville described the experience, they applied the purely Palinesque definition of the phrase - in other words, the "dumbass definition."





Well, why am I even surprised? I've spent the past thirty years, not only watching America and Americans devolve into a nation of dumbasses, fed on a supersized diet of instant gratification, with brains stultified to the point that critical thinking is an unfamiliar process being relegated to the evermore distant past, I've had to watch the UK and Europe bingefeast on an orgy of celebrity worship, reality television and trivial tat tarted up as bling.





In the ancient past - well, in the 1970s, that brilliant decade when college enrollment soared to dizzying heights, thanks to the social justice programs of Lyndon Johnson's era - when I was reading Alexis de Tocqueville in French for literary purposes and re-reading him in English as part of a history course, I was given to understand that "American Exceptionalism" derived from the fact that our country had a beginning unlike no other before it or since.





We were a nation founded on the ideals of freedom and liberty. That a fair few people in the country at the time of its founding were neither free nor equal was an oxymoron our fabled Founding Fathers pondered for a bit, but put aside in the contemporary necessity of founding a country. Black males, slave or free, were the equivalent of three-fifths of a white man. If you were a female, black or white, forget it. You didn't count. You answered to your nearest male relative or your master. If you were a black woman and misbehaved, you could be sold or beaten or both; if you were a white woman and misbehaved, you could be beaten or committed or both. And from the very beginning, it was obvious that the Founding Fathers, men who, in Europe, would have found themselves amongst the highest echelon of aristocracy, intended that only the elite should rule - white men over a certain age, owning a certain amount of land or collateral and educated to the highest level.





Not many people know that - well, certainly not many Tea Partiers. People like their revered Founding Fathers would be denigrated as elitists by the Tea Party today.





When de Tocqueville spoke about "American Exceptionalism" in the early part of the 19th Century, when suffrage had just been extended to all white men over the age of twenty-one and people were beginning to push their brand of civilisation Westward, he spoke about the coalescence of a nation of people from various ethnic backgrounds and religions, come together under a tent labelled "Liberty" and functioning as one.



More than just a Sputnik moment, for de Tocqueville, who'd come from a nation of homogenous people, all of whom spoke a language influenced by none other than Latin, all practicants of the same religion and viewing anyone of a different denomination as heretical, a nation whose social life was strictly bounded by class, convention and privaleges derived from a heriditary ruler, this was really e pluribus unum in the flesh.



Social mobility was such that a man really could be born in a log cabin, into a family of illiterates, and ascend to the highest office in the land, by will of the people and not by birthright.



This was real American Exceptionalism, that out of many, could come one that functioned as a nation based on Constitutional rule and not religion, geographic or demographic type. It made us different from the rest of the civilised world. Not better. Different.



Lately, however, at least during the past three years, American Exceptionalism has been misinterpreted to mean we, as a nation, are better than any other nation in the world. Our people are better. They're smarter, they're stronger, and because of this, we're owed, if not respect, then at least obeisance, as Americans, as the propagators of freedom and democracy, Yankee-style.



This deliberate misniterpretation of American Exceptionalism is a particular pet hate of mine, especially when it's used by people who should know better or by people who do know better, but use the incorrect interpretation to further their own agenda.



So rather than bask in the fact that she''d scored a petty point against Americans in their own country with a subtle put-down, Kim Campbell should have enlightened us by reminding everyone that American Exceptionalism means we differ from other countries in our origins, alone, and not by our superiority. And Bill Maher should have reminded people that each country in the world is exceptional in that it celebrates, good and bad, its own unique history. This is what the President addressed when he spoke of American Exceptionalism as opposed to British or French or Russian Exceptionalism, not any sense of superiority, but a sense of individual difference as nations based on their common history shared. It was a call to embrace and envelope immigrants into a nation's culture, making them and their heritage a part of a shared history as well.



For de Tocqueville, the single defining element of American Exceptionalism was the sense of being included, whereas anything out of the ordinary in the Old World was to be excluded and avoided - and shunted over to the New World, if at all possible.



And now, with the news that Arianna Huffington, that "doyenne of the Left" has sold The Huffington Post to AOL for a neat $315 million dollars and a position as CEO Queen Regnant of an internet empire, we have no less than Chris Matthews lauding her as the embodiment of the American Dream fulfilled, when an immigrant can decamp to our shores and in a lifetime reach the top of the heap.



But how many immigrants arrive in this country, travelling First Class (on Concorde at the time), buy a condo on New York's Upper West Side, join a gym frequented by Baba Wawa and ingratiate herself into a friendship with the same, then mosey on out to California, effect to be befriended by the Gettys, who introduced her to the ubiquitous billionaire oilman husband (who happened to be gay)?



Just your average immigrant tale. America's the land of the rich and the grifting and anyone blatantly shameless enough to promote their own brand.



Arianna's Old World decadence. She's the courtesan who passed herself from man to man along the way, each one successively wealthier and more powerful, each offering her a leg up for a leg over, leaving her other leg free to kick them to the curb when it suits her to inch up the ladder on her back. But at the end of the day, the ultimate media whore has become the ultimate corporate whore; and after all, "courtesan" is just a euphemism for a woman who sells herself to the highest bidder for her own advancement.



To laud such a person's achievements as the ultimate immigrant's dream is irresponsible.



Since August, she's been photographed in a bear hug with Newt Gingrich whilst on vacation in Amalfi and nestling into Darrell Issa's corporate shoulder during a weekend in Las Vegas. Does this sound like something a "doyenne of the Left" would do? Besides, she's now walking back the idea of The Huffington Post as the Progressives' Bible, instead saying she's interested more in a centrist approach to politics.



I guess the President made the centre sexy in his State of the Union address, except that he managed successfully to tug the centre more to the Left, where it belongs. Arianna's "centre" is the Overton Window facing Right, where she's always been more comfortable, in the land of titled Eurotrash slurping martinis at cocktail parties and watching the sun set over Lalaland, talking of stocks, bonds and corporate mergers and counting money doffed in offshore accounts and derived from tax cuts.



Pardon my cynicism and disbelief that anyone could believe someone who voted for George Bush twice could wake up on the morning after his re-election and declare herself firmly in the Progressive mold, but maybe Arianna's return to her neocon roots is a blessing in disguise for the Left who supported her.



Maybe with Madame, will go the pejorative idea of elitism that she represents in the eyes of those people whom the real Republican Party have conned into voting against their interests all the time. Maybe Arianna can return the Republican Party to the confines of the boardrooms instead of the barn rooms, and maybe then, the Democratic Party can remember its role as the defender of the working class and the working poor.



Then maybe we'll see some true, Progressive change in the implementation of social justice programs.



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Judged by the Company One Keeps, Dahlink

There's an old Spanish proverb, which states, roughly translated, "Tell me whom you pal around with, and I'll tell you who you are."








Now, that really means that a person is judged by the company they keep. Back in 2008, a certain very egotistical and narcissistic Vice-Presidential candidate asked the public to believe that a certain Presidential candidate was unworthy of attaining the Oval Office, because he "palled around with terrorists."









So, what are we to believe when presented proudly with a picture, posted on her Facebook page, of none other than that sage, strident and omnipresent Progressive pundit-cum-voice of the beleagured Middle Class, Arianna Huffington, nestled cosily in the crook of an arm belonging to Darrell Issa, whilst out on a night of partying in Las Vegas on the night of the day which saw Rep Gabrielle Giffords shot?








Here's the link to the picture, itself:-








http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fb...








Notice Issa's easy, proprietorial body language. Here's a man with his property, or at least someone who buys what he's selling, and I'm not talking about car alarms.








For anyone seeing the logic of the President writing an op-ed in the WSJ, basically in response to Issa's open-handed invitation to tell the fat cats what they want undone, then Huffington's totally and deliberately misrepresented take on this as seen on the Olbermann show last night, suddenly makes method of her madness.








It's as important to remember that Mrs Huffington, who during her 1990's enchantment with one Newt Gingrich (an enchantment which is still lasting to this day, considering the intimate little photo she displayed from her summer holiday in Amalfi, which just happened to include "bumping into" Newt), led the internet clarion call to impeach Bill Clinton as it is important to remember that the man in whose arm she's nestling holds the power to subpoena, investigate and impeach that man whom he's gone on record as having "the most corrupt Administration in history."








We all know that the accusation that President Obama "palled around with terrorists" was blatantly false, unless Bill Ayers was Obama's babysitter in Indonesia or Hawaii; but every picture tells a story, and this particular one says Arianna Huffington is palling around with a sinister-looking, high-ranking Republican with a dubious criminal history, who holds the power of impeachment in his greasy, corporately corrupt hands.








Fine with me if Arianna wants to indulge in a little bit of Rovian ratfuckery. I never bought her Damascene conversion anyway. So she's ratfucking her Progressive following, but what's she doing with the King Rat?

Joan Walsh, Joe Miller and The First Amendment

I’m sorry to say that Joan Walsh and I are no longer friends, and that’s upset me. No more gossipy girls’ lunches or hour-long telephone calls, no more whispery confidences about who’s doing what with whom, no more laments over the San Francisco Giants or the Washington Redskins … but our friendship was never like that. She’s in San Francisco, and I’m on the South Coast of England; she’s the editor of Salon.com, a pretty up-front and Progressive internet newspaper (for lack of a better word), and I’m a ghost on an internet page.

Nope, our “friendship” was the shadowy cyber sort encountered on Facebook. Joan would peddle her ware and opinions on her page, and I was one of the thousands of plebs who made comments on her opinions.

Until now, I genuinely admired Joan. I thought she was an honest and forthright journalist with real scruples. I thought she was a Progressive, in the truest sense of the word, who could and would put the ignorance of the Right to shame, a living embodiment of what a principled Progressive, endowed with cold, hard common sense and realistic pragmatism, could be. Besides, unlike her more strident and high-profiled soul sisters (Huffington, Hamshire, Dowd et al), she had the President’s back.

That’s not to say she was above criticizing him, but her criticism was valid and constructive, instead of snide, snarky and petulant.

But, alas! I was wrong. I misjudged a character I thought I knew; but now I know that Joan’s as much a ghost on an internet page as I am, for this week, she crossed the journalist’s Rubicon to join the soul sisters of the Dark Side: the faux Progressive trio of mean girls who use their bully pulpits to dissuade and discourage the Democratic base from ever seeing any kind of sense and rationalism in anything the President does – whatever he does usually being not enough for what their idea of perfection for the country would be.

Earlier in the week, Joan blogged on Salon about one of the current memes being propagated throughout the Democratic base by Arianna Huffington: “Obama doesn’t get it.”

The blog was in response to a feature article The New York Times Sunday magazine had published, an extensive review of the President on the even of the mid-terms, entitled, “The Education of a President.” In the article, Obama started out making what appeared to be a snarky reference to Madame Huffington’s recorded criticism of his recent redecoration of the Oval Office, something every President does with a special fund provided by the government. In my opinion, humble that it might be, Obama had every reason to make an off-hand remark about Huffington’s disapproval of his colour selection.

About two months ago, she’d published a totally gratuitous blog on The Huffington Post, criticizing the taupe colour scheme, and, in particular, the rug chosen, which featured woven quotations from the Founding Fathers. In referring to this item, Huffington joined the Beck-Limbaugh circus in poking fun at the President’s daughters, openly maligning the intelligence of the older daughter, Malia. It was a totally gratuitously cruel, bitchy and vindictive remark levelled at an 11 year-old by a sixtysomething woman, who has two daughters of her own, whom she’s ferociously shielded from the glare of the media, especially in the fall-out surrounding the break-up of her marriage to a gay Republican politician.

In Joan’s article, she chided Obama, basically for mean to her “friend”, Arianna Huffington, and - more or less, for the rest of the Times article – for sounding whiney, complaining and weak.

Just the sort of thing a Progressive, wavering between showing up at the polls on Election Day or sulking out the vote amidst a welter of Leftwing propaganda varying from the President being a corporate sell-out to his not having achieved a single thing of note that would push the country even an inch in a Leftist direction, needed to read. Not.

I read Joan’s blog with dismay. It was the sort of rhetoric I’d have expecte from the pen of Maureen Dowd or the keyboard of Madame, herself, but certainly not from Joan Walsh.

I read the article on Salon, itself, but later in the day, a link to it appeared from Joan on my Facebook page. Having read it, out of curiosity, I clicked onto the comments’ section and received an epiphany of a revelation.

Something’s stirring amongst the grassroots of Progressive Democrats. People are beginning to wake up to the fraud that is Arianna Huffington. Certain peope are suddenly remembering that Mrs Huffington immigrated to these shores with a solid history of virulent Rightwing idealogy, that she married a neocon’s neocon and not only drank the Koolaid, but served it on a silver platter to all and sundry who stopped long enough to listen. People are remembering that not only did this woman push the idea of a Gingrich Presidency in her writings throughout the 90′s decade, she recently was photographed on her summer vacation, treehugging the Newt, himself, after “coincidentally” meeting up with him in Amalfi, whilst the current Mrs Gingrich III, managed to look distracted in the background of a photo recording the accidentally on purpose reunion of two true, too true amis de coeur. People are suddenly connecting with the fact that Madame utilised the internet, during the late 90s, in a way in which it had previously never been utilised, to campaign actively for the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

Then, suddenly, on the morning of Novembe r 3, 2004, in the wake of a Kerry defeat, the neocon awoke to declare herself a fully paid-up member of the Progressive philosophy – but not before it became fashionable to hate George W Bush.

The suspicion that Huffington just might be a rogue GOPer in Progressive clothing, that she’s a plant Gingrich, if not Rove, whose brief has been to sow discord, dissension and discouragement amongst the Democrats’ base, has been slow to rise; but rising, it is. Three weeks ago, when Huffington appeared on Rachel Maddow’s program, hawking her latest ghost-written tome, she went public with the message she’s been propagating in her wanderings throughout the heartlands of the United States, moving amongst the middle classes in a desperate effort to ensure her book makes the Times best-sellers’ list.

The message is trickledown. The message is if the diminishing middle-class doesn’t stop depending on the government and start doing for itself, America will turn into a third world country, because – according to Huffington – Obama just “isn’t that into” the middle class; instead, he’d rather play war games late at night, she said, with General Petraeus.

When that program was broadcast, Maddow’s Facebook page went viral with people lining up to call out Huffington for the fraud and phony she was.

In fact, several months prior to this, Joan Walsh had appeared on ABC’s This Week, openly calling out not only Huffington, but also Maureen Dowd, for senseless, cruel and bitter ad hominem attacks on the President.

“People are even calling him names now,” lamented Walsh, at the time. “I mean, Maureen Dowd’s calling him Spock. Arianna Huffington refers to him as ‘Nowhere Man.’ And they’re loving it. And it’s wrong!”

So, on Tuesday, when more than several of Walsh’s commentators on her Facebook page called out Huffington’s perfidy and questioned Walsh’s motive for what was essentially a petty, backbiting litany of gratuitous criticism, implying that the President was weak, Joan bit back … and sounded just as whiney, complaining and weak as she accused the President of being.

“It’s obvious that most of you have misread this article,” she wailed. (And that sounded more than just a little condescending).

The plebs responded vociferously, defending their stance, calling Huffington out as a Republican plant, a Rove operative and a neocon-in-hiding with an agenda. Now it was Joan’s turn.

“Wow, from all the name-calling,” she whined, “it’s clear such people have no place on my Facebook page.”

And with that, she shut down comments entirely, dropping me and various other regulars from her friends’ list.

Now, let me make it perfectly clear, to paraphrase Richard Nixon, no one called Joanie names. This was all about her umbrage at the President snarking back at a woman who’d derided his daughters in print. The worst thing Huffington was called amongst the comments was “Media whore.” If the designer shoe fits, well … you get the drift.

My dismissal came as a result of my questioning her integrity. After all, I reasoned, it’s perfectly acceptable for Joan to use the medium of a nationally televised opinion program to chide and criticize Dowd and Huffington for unacceptable and disrespectful ad hominem attacks on the President’s character, but ordinary people aren’t entitled to criticize a journalist for the content of an article with which they agree or remark upon her “friend’s” past activities as suspect and derogatory? One rule for the Fourth Estate and one for the plebs whose opinions they hope to insinuate and influence? We can criticize the President of the United States, but once we speak out against a journalist with whom we disagree, our First Amendment right of reply is abruptly cut off because the ego of a national opinionator has suffered a fit of pique?

To quote former US President: “Give. Me. A. Break.”

I don’t know if Joan Walsh and Arianna Huffington or Maureen Dowd move in the same social circles. I don’t know if they enjoy girlie, gossipy lunches or long-winded telephone conversations, or if they even use the same deoderant, but at best, this looks like the professional Professional Left closing ranks and shutting down the response facility of the hoi polloi when they utter a thought devised in their own mind and not gleaned from the instuctive, destructive meme of misinformation the media bods, Right and Left, want to inflict upon the otherwise unsuspecting sheeple.

At worst, Joan risks acting like the proverbial high school girl who hangs desperately about the peripheries of the social boundaries set by the socially popular mean girls’ society, cravenly willing to defend their diatribes to the death, do their homework for them and carry their bookbags a mile if it means acceptance as one of the chosen few.

Either way, it’s infringing upon the First Amendment.

The day after this article appeared, Salon was awash with no less than three articles, heavily and rightly criticizing the strongarm tactics of political bully and hypocrite, Joe Millar, in using a private security force (two of whose members included serving military personnel) to handcuff and illegally arrest a reporter whose only crime was to attend a Miller rally and try to ask the candidate a legitimate question, concerning a part of his past his would-be constituents have a right to know.

Some years ago, Miller, hoping to be elected GOP chairman for Alaska, whilst employed as an attorney in a public capacity, used his firm’s computers to rig the results of an online survey which would have affected the result of that particular election. If the Senatorial candidate is running on a ticket of political purity, then his public have a right to know if he’s guilty of the smallest ethical quirk. It’s another matter entirely that he relies on bevies of armed goons not only to protect his person, but to ensure that the public he serves are prohibited from asking questions that seriously need to be asked about someone in whom we’re entrusting our representation and interests as citizens.

Again, that’s a denial of a right accorded to us by the First Amendment of our Constitution.

Not only is this unusual similarity denial of free speech common ground amongst the power players on the Right as well as the Left, it’s also a comment upon how the two sides of the political spectrum enforce supression of our Constitutional rights for their own agendae: The Joe Millers of the Right swagger into suppression with an armed guard, ready to use brute force in order to quell dissension; the Joan Walshes of the Left flounce off in a pique of anger and simply deny dissenters access to their Facebook page.

I suppose we should be thankful for small mercies and the lesser of two evils.

Are We the Sheeple?

I guess campaign season’s started in earnest now. Congress has returned from its summer hiatus. (If you think they have too long a holiday, come to the UK. Parliament’s out July, August and September, the last month being the bunfest where they go off to the seaside to have their annual conventions.)
You know there’s an election coming up, because Fox News froths at the mouth that much more, the President’s out and about on his town halls again, and the two former Democratic Presidents are taken out of mothballs, dusted off and sent out and about as well.
It does my heart good to see Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter again, not because I prefer them to the present Democratic incumbent – I’m very satisfied with him, thank you very much – but it warms the cockles of my heart to see the rousing rounds of applause their appearances evoke, as if people recognise in a hindsight that’s too late exactly either what the former President achieved or could have achieved, or how much better off they were under a particular Administration.
I voted for both Carter and Clinton twice, and I hope to vote twice for Obama, if he decides to run again in 2012; but I’m doubting that at the moment, and I wouldn’t really blame him if he didn’t – in fact, I’d say the country would deserve its fate if he didn’t.
I remember 1980, and Ted Kennedy’s wild moment of hubris, taking his ego-enhanced campaign right to the floor of the convention and then acting like a drunken and petulant child when the delegates chose Carter. It sent out waves of impressions about how divided and vapid the Democratic Party was; it showed just how much they appeared to be unfit to govern.
1980, if you haven’t fathomed, gave us the Reagan Democrats (many of whom didn’t see fit to return to the party until 2008), Morning in America with the laughing Gipper, trickledown, the First Gulf War, Saddam Hussein, and 12 years of Republican rule that set us on the Road to Hell down which we’re still careening and off which Barack Obama is trying to steer a particularly recalcitrant ship of state.
Hell, I’m even old enough to remember 1968, when I was just a freshman in high school, and what that Democratic Primary yieled us. 1968 saw a country in the throes of VietNam, with a President from the Deep South, who’d alienated his geographic demographic by enacting the most Progressive pieces of legislation since the New Deal – the Civil Rights Act and Medicaid – suddenly become truly, madly, and deeply unpopular, thanks to the advances of television at the time, with the VietNamese War brought nightly into our houses in living color. From the Midwestern Progressive state of Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy challenged LBJ.
For anyone thinking Obama is too professorial, McCarthy would have made Obama look like a lawyer. McCarthy was a real professor, a cerebralist, a poet, a true idealist and and ex-novitiate priest, who’d thought about a monastical career. He ran as the peace candidate, paved the way for Robert Kennedy’s candidacy and LBJ’s retirement, and continued along the primary path to dog Kennedy and, after Kennedy’s assassination, to worry his fellow Minnesotan, Huberty Humphrey, right up until the primary.
Another divided Democratic party, along with a few Republican dirty tricks against their own, yielded Nixon, Watergate, Roger Ailes, Donald Segretti, and a young college student activist from Texas name of Karl Rove.
Only the Lord in whom I don’t believe knows what a primary challenge to Obama would entail in 2012, but I’d bet money I didn’t have that you wouldn’t see another Democrat in the White House until all of the current generation who’s just voted are no longer alive to remember Obama.
Think about that. And whilst you’re thinking about it, think about the direction in which the Republican Party is moving.
Think about the fact that Mitt Romney, whose father was briefly the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 1968, panders shamelessly to the Teabaggers who are increasingly gaining control of the GOP. Mitt’s dad, George, was the Eugene McCarthy of the Republican Party – a social liberal, personal friend of Martin Luther King, and a campaigner for Civil Rights. Nixon’s dirty tricks machine, controlled by the late Lee Atwater and the then wunderkind Roger Ailes, put about rumours of drinking to excess (Romney was a teetotaler) and a preference for polygamy (the old fear factor of Romney as a Mormon), and thus, scuppered Romney’s title bid.
Think about the fact that Newt Gingrich, another ex-college professor, was once considered the intellectual of the Republican Party, the thinker, and remember that, only recently, Gingrich echoed Dinesh D’Souza’s unusual bit of lateral thinking and developed a curious new euphemistic reference to the n-word as to why Obama was different to any previous occupant of the Oval Office.
Now think about the fact that Arianna Huffington, the current self-proclaimed doyenne of the Progressive “journalists”, was and still is an extremely close friend of Newt’s – close enough to be photographed tree-hugging the Newt whilst on vacation in Amalfi. (Sorry, I don’t buy the obvious lie that the two “ran into” each other by coincidence. Amalfi is an old playground of the very rich and very aristocratic Eurotrash remnants. You don’t travel there by coincidence. )
One doesn’t allow oneself to be photographed on holiday cosying up to one’s adverse political opposite, no matter how close the association in the past, and still regard oneself as believeably progressive.
But in this day of short-term memory loss, I suppose that’s acceptable.
Still, many of the people with whom I speak, online and otherwise, seem to think as I do – that Huffington never was the Progressive she claimed to be – from November 3, 2004, to be precise – that the Damascene conversion in the wake of John Kerry’s defeat was never the 21st Century equivalent of what happened to St Paul on the road to Damascus.
Sorry, folks, that was all a fake. Her aggregate was founded and developed (by herself and her erstwhile protoge’, Andrew Breitbart) as a money-making venture. Like Rupert Murdoch, another man whom Arianna admires, she saw a niche on the internet for a liberal answer to Drudge and pounced on it – with Drudge’s encouragement and blessing.
That the so-called liberal media believed the conversion to be in earnest only reveals the extent of their shallowness and stupidity.
During the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen the President traipse countrywide on the campaign trail for candidates, many of whom totally undeserving from the lack of support they give him, in November’s mid-terms. Again and again, he’s hammering home the message that the Democratic Party is on the side of the middle and working classes, that giving the balance of power back to the Republicans would be like taking the country back to the Dark Ages, or at least back to the mid-Nineteenth Century.
In his wake, we have President Clinton, getting out a starker message: if you don’t vote, says Clinton, you may as well just join the GOP right now, because not voting enables them to take power.
And bringing up the rear, President Carter, on a book tour, easily pontificating that Obama’s problems today are down completely to the 24/7 cable news cycle and that Fox News is no news organisation, that it flies the banner of the Republican Party and seeks to manipulate people, who would benefit from voting Democratic, into believing that the current serving President is not a legitimate holder of the office and should, therefore, be removed.
Well, Arianna’s on a bit of a mission, herself. Like President Carter, she’s on a book tour – a snake oil hawking tour, actually, a bit of akin to the sort of gypsies, tramps and thieves variety crossed with Dr Love’s Travelling Salvation Show.
Arianna’s new book is all about the middle class, of which Arianna is completely and totally an expert (not). Really, she knows all about the middle class. She’s got enough middle class people working for her for free for her to know enough about their suffering. But Arianna has a problem. You see, Arianna’s ghostwritten books, unlike the ghostwritten books of Glenn Beck or Ann Coulter, don’t sell. So, in addition to showing up in the usual places – Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room, Keith Olbermann’s Countdown, Good Morning America – she’s going out and about amongst the little people with her message.
What’s her message?
Well, she’s hawked it enough in the past two years on Huffington Post. It’s simply that Obama isn’t that into the middle class, that he’s done nothing for them, that he doesn’t like them, that he was all for bailing out Wall Street (sorry, but wasn’t that George Bush and Hank Paulsen?- ne’mind, it still sounds good), that he’s a Nowhere Man, and – now the latest – that because the Democrats ahve punted on voting on the tax cuts until after the election, they aren’t fit to rule.
Now that HP’s take on the Uriah Heep of political journalism, the craven Howard Fineman, Arianna’s finally broken through the portal of the one MSNBC political opinion show which shut her out, in memory of the late Tim Russert, who hated her less than cordially. There she was, alongside her latest lapdog Fineman, who doubles as a political consultant of sorts in Chris Matthews’s echo chamber, on Chris’s show. This was a first. During the last few months of Russert’s life and tenure as news supremo, she was banned from the station entirely. In deference, Chris kept up the ban; but now she’s there with the boys – probably she forbade Howie from appearing himself, unless Mommy went along to chaperone. Two nights later, she was on another favourite mommy’s boy, Olbermann, her greasy perma-fixed smile in place as she declaimed the Democrats unfit to rule.
Connecting the dots back to the Republican fold isn’t difficult when you consider that Huffington has remained curiously silent throughout the summer over the Shirley Sherrod fiasco and Andrew Breitbart’s part in that; in fact, she kept an extremely low profile when commentators on her site pointed out that she and Breitbart share a long history and that he co-founded the aggregate with her. Nor has nary a word been uttered from her permanently smiling lips regarding Newt Gingrich’s quasi-racist remarks regarding the President as a Luo tribesman in mind and attitude.
There’s plenty of column space for Sarah Palin, however, and Christine O’Donnell, cleverly disguised as pejorative articles, they’re articles nonetheless. Palin and her new girl, O’Donnell, are media savvy, if intellectually challenged. Arianna’s own pet imp, Bill Maher, proudly takes credit for introducing O’Donnell to the American viewing public and enabling her to gain a foothold on a national platform. These gals know that any publicity is publicity, itself, and they’re both adept at turning a negative experience into a sympathetic victim stature for their own agendae.
On Friday night, Bill Maher, Arianna operative, was doing her bidding in his opening comments. After a couple of pejorative jokes about the Republicans’ stature at the moment, in particular their latest Pledge to America, he turned his attention to the Democrats and, literally verbatim, echoed Arianna’s meme about the tax cuts, finishing with a pronouncement that the Democrats were “unfit to govern.” There you have it: the Democrats are unfit to govern, but the Republicans have offered the country a less than salubrious “pledge”. Judge for yourself, Bill implies – nudge, nudge, wink, wink – but one party is explicitly unfit to rule.
His discussion panel was weighed to the Right, with the talking points puppet, Amy Holmes, and Bill’s Huffington litter mate, Breitbart, who – halfway through the program – revealed that he and Bill had organised a pact for the evening: Breitbart would “behave himself” if Bill promised not to bring up race on the program. Nice arrangement. Breitbart was thrust into the national domain this past summer precisely because of the question of race and his concocted efforts to show how an NAACP operative held racist views towards whites. Bill was on hiatus at that time. The question of race still resonates throughout the GOP and their off-shoot, the Tea Party movement, to this day, and is relevant to this election cycle, no matter how much one might want to shove it under the already rank carpet. It was well within Bill’s duty as a political commentator to bring this question up to Breitbart. It was imperative, but he didn’t. He’d entered into a pact with the political devil and tanked on it. Just as the week before, when he brought his satellite interview with Michael Moore to an abrupt close, when Moore started to rant about how the Democratic Party should speak out against the racist comments and innuendo perpetrated by Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, calling them the imams of the American Taliban.
Was that Bill being circumspect, or was his surrogate political mother pulling his strings?
We’re seeing a lot of demagoguery on the rise in America at the moment. It’s easily recogniseable, and it’s encouraged, from sections of the Right. We’re all familiar with Rush, and how he recently brought no less than Karl Rove to his knees, we watch Beck do a teary and indignant Elmer Gantry routine in the pretence of restoring honor, and we have Palin shoved in our faces, now going out of her way to refer to the President as “Barack Hussein Obama (something Ann Coulter has been doing forever).
These are easily condemnable, especially in the sway they hold over manipulating people’s opinions.
But we have the same on the Left. Huffington and her operative Maher have long put out the deliberate misinformation that theh Obama Administration has accomplished nothing. After beginning his 2009 season with an earnest plea for the public to work with the President, reminding them that it would take a long time for the Administration to rectify the fuck-ups left by Bushco, six months later, Maher rants that the only think Obama accomplished in his first 100 days was to choose a dog. He wanted Obama to be more like Bush, and then when he perceived him to be, he criticized him for it. He ended the first part of this season’s shows with repeated pejorative references to the President’s race. A Maher apologist reminded me that he did as much with Bush, referring to Bush as President “Shit for Brains”, whilst his latest name for Obama is President “PoopyPants.” The Bush epithet referred to Dubya’s perceived lack of intelligence; the Obama epithet implies weakness, which has a very sinister relation to white men’s perception of African American soldiers in the face of adversity.
Bush’s ignorance was not only willful, it was contrived. Obama is anything but weak in resolve, and people are born into their race.
What’s worrying is that these particular pundits and their satellites hold sway over the opinions of a vast amount of people. Just log onto Huffington Post after madam blogs to see how many of the faithful are promising not to go to the polls. Just look at Bill’s Facebook page to see how many people, many of whom are old enough to know better, claiming that Bill speaks only the truth, that Bill’s word is like the word of the God in whom he sometimes doesn’t believe.
Like their counterparts on the Right, they’re seeking to manipulate the opinions of those people either incapable of or too lazy to think for themselves – the people who view news as infotainment, who seek gurus and thought processors, and who, once these charlatans are revealed and reviled, rise up in indignation, the type of which you’d expect to hear in defence of a relative or loved one insulted.
Someone once said, opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one. Well, there sure are a lot of assholes floating amidst the flotsam and jetsam of the 24/7 news and entertainment cycle. I’m just wondering who the pundit’s going to be who suggests the change in the wording of the Constitution to read “We the sheeple …?”
Get out and vote. Democratic. Please. The change is coming. I promise you. Remember: incremental change is often the sort that lasts.

The White Wings of Icarus Fall Silent

Arianna Huffington is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post. She fancies herself a powerful voice in the world of American Progressive politics, and I suppose she is, although I’ve always doubted the liberal credentials of someone who was closely-knit, literally and figuratively, into the framework of Newt Gingrich’s political philosophy throughout the 1990s. People change, yes, but lasting, believeable and genuine change is often of the calibre which occurs slowly, almost imperceptibly, throughout a number of years – much in the way the conservative former Supreme Court Justice, John Paul Stevens, evolved from a conservative jurist into the liberal conscience of the Court.

So pardon me, a natural secularist, if I found Huffington’s Damascene conversion from hardcore neocon and Gingrich neophyte into a fully paid-up member of the Progressive Populist club, practically overnight, more than a bit difficult to swallow.

Even harder to accept was the ease with which the liberal media readily accepted her within their fold. More than Mitch McConnell “taking the President’s word” that he’s a Christian, the media elite embraced this woman as one of their own.

She certainly has been making the rounds – from Morning Joe to various appearances on CNN, with stops in between on Ed Schultz’s and Keith Olbermann’s echo chambers, as well as a quasi-regular stint on ABC’s This Week – especially when there’s an opportunity to criticize whatever the President has said or hasn’t said, has done or hasn’t done, which hasn’t met her personal standard of excellence. And then, there’s always the opportunity for her particular brand of argumentum ad hominem. I believe her favourite reference to the President is “Nowhere Man.”

Don’t get me wrong. Politicians were made to be criticized, their feet being fashioned to be held to the fire by the people who elect them; but – Lordy! – according to Arianna Huffington’s political perspective, it’s amazing that the President is able to walk down the street and chew gum without tripping up. There’s criticism, there’s nitpicking … and there’s cherry-picking.

However, I’ve noticed, during yet another summer of discontent, that Madame’s been curiously quiet of late, starting right about the time of the Shirley Sherrod/Andrew Breibart incident.

In an interview printed earlier in the year in Wired magazine, Breitbart amply credited Huffington as being his mentor, saying she’d taught him everything he knew about his particular type of journalism – which is, at best, described as “press hackery” and, at worst, as a variety of ratfucking: shady, oblique quotes from anonymous sources, phrases and sentences taken out of context and spun with a view to imparting a message completely different from the original, and loads of nuanced criticism, which never offers any alternative suggestions, but always ends with a sneer and more than a dollop of condescension.

Needless to say, the interview went viral in the age of the internet, and more than a few of the many people who comment regularly on Huffington Post were quick to point out, not only the association between Huffington and Breitbart, but also the fact that Breitbart was the co-founder of HuffPo, himself.

This guilt by association was just enough to jog some memories of Huffington the virulent neocon of the Nineties – neophyte of Newt and the founder of a website dedicated entirely to securing the impeachment of one President William Jefferson Clinton, Democrat. It was also enough, for awhile, for several commentators to slam accusations of “Breitbart journalism” against certain of her regular reporters, each time their “reporting” proved to be shoddy and inaccurate – which was quite a lot.

The dots were connected.

Huffington never referenced Breitbart, and, although her site offered many and varied articles concerning Shirley Sherrod, Fox News and the Obama Administration, with most of the blame being heaped heavily onto the President’s shoulders, she never offered up a word, distancing herself from this man and his shady practices, never reassured her adoring gaggle of fans that she totally condemned what he’d tried to do. She simply ignored the name Breitbart altogether, as if he didn’t exist in her fragrant world of expensive facials, debutant balls and speaking up for the “small people.”
It seemed as though Arianna, for once, had lost her mighty voice.

And now, with all the kerfuffle surrounding the Park51 incident in New York, all the not-too-cleverly disguised innuendo insinuating that Muslims, as a whole, are to be feared, vilified and persecuted, we’ve yet to hear Mrs Huffington expound upon this. The verbal attack on a construction worker, trying to thread his way through the New York mob, who appeared to “look Muslim” didn’t raise a whimper of protest from Arianna’s throat. Nor did the fact that recent polls reveal an increasing number of people seem to suspect our President is a Muslim. These are ordinary people who believe this, the sort of people for whom Arianna claims to speak, especially in her recent book, which has yet to climb onto the New York Times best-seller list.

Arianna, who always speaks the truth (according to her dittoes), should be guiding and enlightening these people to the contrary.

Instead, she’s uncharacteristically silent.

Sometimes silence reverberates more astoundingly than a plethora of loud and gratuitous criticism, and sometimes silence can be interpreted as tacit assent.

In days of yore, in the Nineties when the budget was balanced and everyone believed they had money in their pockets, Arianna was the First Disciple in the Church of Newt Gingrich. Now that Newt’s likening the Muslims to Nazis, one wonders if the sheets Arianna might be thinking of donning are made of designer-labelled white linen.

The Shark's Been Jumped

Did everybody miss it, or am I imagining things?

In the wake of the historic 2008 election, a debate arose over the role of the internet in influencing the ultimate result, as well as the roll of internet news agregates and blog sites as being the natural successors – indeed, the usurpers, of traditional print journalism. Over the past two years, it’s almost become de rigueur for various commentators within the blogosphere to make pretty disparaging remarks about the mainstream media, recently re-dubbed the lamestream media by one who simultaneously suffers and benefits from its attention.

The 24/7 cable news talking heads, from both sides of the political spectrum, and their soulmates riding the waves of internet news reporting rule supreme and unduly influence both the critical thinking processes and opinions of a lot of folk who would do just as well as to open a book entitled Civics 101 before they open their mouths.

This is no longer a world of hard, substantiated fact, or even a world of opinion backe by undisputable fact. It has become, however, a world of opinion, presented as fact and lightly laced with the unsubstantiated variety.

We live for the sound bite of the moment, for the slightest change in a politco’s body language, in order to have this mercilessly parsed and reinterpreted again and again by an unrelenting and irresponsible media. The trivial and mundane have been so far elevated into the world of the sublime that major news stories regarding legislation which may affect us all as a whole are lost in a welter of the confused and often conflicting banter of people who love to speak only to hear the sound of their own voices and whose first allegiance is to their own self-promotion.

That countless testimonies to these icons’ veracity is documented daily on a plethora of internet sites in homage to the services rendered by these dubious souls is frightening.

The internet has offered an opportunity for people who, for some reason, otherwise have been unable to succeed in the world of bona fide print journalism, the chance to shine – never mind, the sort of tactics employed by said “journalist” would be held up to close scrutiny and then discarded highly irregular by more traditional professionals.

Just as we shouldn’t trust the stewardess to land an Airbus with the pilot passed out drunk, or Al Qaeda’s iontentions if it happens upon the Pakastani nuclear arsenal, so we should always view the “citizen journalist” with a janudiced eye.

Until recently, internet journalism’s apogee was reached during the Obama campaign, when Mayhill Fowler, a retired schoolteacher and failed writer attended a private fund-raising event, closed to the press. In simple parlance, “closed” meant “closed.” No reporters. A chance for the candidate to unwind and charm. The fact that a private citizen attended, armed with a small recording device and reported off-the-record remarks made by a political candidate was considered unscrupulous to the nth degree. That sort of thing would have cost a seasoned reporter his job and his reputation.

But this is the new era of “face-in-the-crowd” reporting, and quite often, these sort of eye-witness accounts wouldn’t be admissable in a court of law, because they – like the talking-heads, who subsequently parrot and publicize them – are skewed and coloured to fit the agenda of whatever internet aggregate is pushing the issue at hand.

The order of the day is cherry-picking, and not outside in the fresh air and the orchard. It’s cut-and-paste and hope for the best. Band-aid journalism that spins like a top.

Yesterday, Rightwing blogger Andrew Breitbart, writing in Tucker Carlson’s DailyCaller, highlighted a video clip of USDA official, Shirley Sherrod, addressing a meeting of a local branch of the NAACP, wherein she appeared to admit having shown racism toward an individual case regarding a white farmer and his wife, in Georgia. Ms Sherrod is African American.

Immediately, the meme was picked up and pushed by Fox News, as well as the other media suspects, resulting in a severe condemnation of Ms Sherrod’s remarks by NAACP President, Benjamin Jealous, and Ms Sherrod literally being sacked on the spot from her position within the USDA.

All on the evidence of a couple of minutes gleaned from a speech which lasted much longer. Noone bothered to listen to what was said before the fated line was spoken; no one bothered to listen to any dialogue spoken afterward. In dact, as Ms Sherrod said later, no one was interested in listening to her explanation at all.

They just reacted.

Twenty-four hours later, and the video of Ms Sherrod’s entire speech has surfaced, and in the context of that discourse, it’s been found that her remarks were anything but racist, that she helped the supplicants mentioned and that she and the white couple became firm friends. At this moment, Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, is contemplating reinstating Ms Sherrod.

And so he should. With a big apology, a promotion and a raise in pay.

Last Friday, a “reporter” for the Huffington Post, Shahien Nasiripour, posted an article, which stated categorically that Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, had effectively blocked the appoinment of Elizabeth Warren to head the new consumer protection agency to be established under the new financial regulation laws. Nasiripour cited some suitably ghostly anonymous source, said to be “familiar with Geithner’s mind, ” although he didn’t offer any direct quotations from said Mr Anonymous.

Familiar with Geithner’s mind? Granted, on Monday, after the media had picked up on this story and ran it like the favourite at the Preakness, it behooved Talking Points Memo to do some actual investigating. And so, they contacted some viable sources – peple with names and faces and voices … like David Axelrod.

Ax reported that no decision had yet been made as regards the person heading this new agency, that the decision was a Presidential one and, really, nothing to do with Secretary Geithner, and that, yes, Mrs Warrenwas a firm candidate. This, I might add, came after a weekend where Warren was put in the singularly embarrassing position of having to disclaim any knowledge of any of her supporters actively promoting her as a candidate to the White House.

In other words, Talking Points Memo proved the Huffington Post article to be a tissue of lies.

By yesterday, Nasiripour followed up his article, again quoting Mr Anonymous – or maybe it was another Mr Anonymous, because this one claimed to be familiar, only with Geithner’s opinions. This article, in no way, distanced itself from the original one. It sure as hell didn’t apologise for any error or lax reporting. Instead, it accompanied a couple of other blogs, one purporting to know why Obama “feared” Elizabeth Warren. The other was simply a veiled threat of the direst of circumstances that would befall this Administration, if Warren were not appointed.

And so it goes.

The entire purpose of this fabricated article, presented as fact, but not substantiated, yet still reported in the mecia as a whole, is twofold: first, it means to thoroughly discredit Tim Geithner, a Cabinet official for whom Arianna Huffington has an almost pathological dislike. Second, it’s meant to box the President into a lose-lose situation.

If he appoints Warren, after all the publicity the media have been giving this, the Republicans in Congress will simply batten down the hatches and fight to the death to eliminate her from the proceedings. All well and good; he could just then wait until the next lengthy recess and appoint her there and then. But it would be an appointment with a stench attached. And if he appoints someone else, he risks being pilloried mercilessly by Huffington, who revels, at the moment, in referring to him as a Nowhre Man.

I think he should appoint Warren. She’s the best candidate for the position by a mile. But he should also announce at the time of this appointment, that he made the decision based on the candidate’s impeccable qualifications and not onany pressur from the media or otherwise … and, oh by the way, the White House Press Association will be revoking the credentials of The Huffington Post, forthwith, effective immediately.

We used to have a media that was the envy of the world. Our media exposed Joe McCarthy, laid open Watergate and Irangate. now it bends over to propagate the whims and agendae of a failed Republican operative and a neocon neophyte failed journalist, a parvenue and an intellectual lightweight, both of whom are feted as serious political journalists.

I only hope, that in the one-eyed, purist world which purports to be internet journalism, that this shark has been jumped, and some professional regulations applied to future ventures. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be averse to seeing that shark take a chunk out of someone’s feta cheesed ass.