After reading John’s Post and Mike Stark’s diary at Daily Kos, I feel strongly enough to put up a short post of my own.
* First, posting it as a diary on Kos was stupid. John knows that Kos doesn’t control the diaries and most of you know it, but apparently Wonkette doesn’t know it and she’s a f*cking blogger. In the minds of most viewers Kos owns what Mike did.
* Second, the entire move was amateurish in the extreme. Al Franken and Keith Olbermann do a number on O’Reilly because they bait him into flipping his lid without breaking a sweat. What did O’Reilly do here? He stepped out his door, said a few words and went inside. Big mean fascist O’Reilly came off looking like an average guy bothered at home. Stark, meanwhile, hung abusive signs around the neighborhood and apparently pestered every resident on O’Reilly’s block. Taken in isolation that makes Stark look like a complete jackass. Since most people don’t get their context at Daily Kos, rest assured that it will be.
* The fact that O’Reilly had it coming hardly justifies the tactical stupidity of the move. Unless I am wrong Stark will hurt advertising at Daily Kos and sponsorship for Yearly Kos more than FOX could have done. Kos hardly needs site management advice from an amateur blogger with a day job, but in his place I’d ban Stark while it looked like my idea.
Could be that I’m wrong and the whole thing will blow over, or O’Reilly will physically attack someone and Stark wins. Then again, this is the sort of move that high-paid image consultants have happy dreams about. I wonder whether FOX has any of those.
***Update***
One more not insignificant point. I really, really wouldn’t trade places with Mike Stark’s mailbox.
demimondian
I don’t think that Stark is wrong. He’s a provocateur — but it’s worth pointing out that there’s the famous YouTube video called the “Macaca video”. You might have heard of it.
It was posted by one Mike Stark.
I don’t think that this is at all tone deaf. O’Reilly has engaged in exactly this kind of attack interviewing frequently in the past — and turning it around on him will resonate. His boorish behavior has only persisted because people have been too polite to turn it back in his face.
Tim in SF
Tim, here’s Bill O on national radio inciting his listeners to descend on Stark’s house.
Sauce for the goose.
.
Dave
So because the tactic Billo uses is so bad you need to “turn it back in his face”?
I’m not buying that. Makes Stark no better than Billo himself. Frankly I like Stark for the most part, but this isn’t the way to go about it.
Psycheout
Bill O’Reilly is going to win this one. Daily Kooks is going down.
Wilfred
I’m with demimondian on this. O’Reilly’s method is to make an individual poster the spokesman for the entire left. But here there’s a real person to deal with. If Mike can make it him against O’Reilly he can ‘de-massify’ things and isolate O-Reilly as the scumbag he is.
Tim F.
That might work better if Stark didn’t publicize his stunt on Daily Kos. Now he represents the site.
Ted
Ana Marie Cox is no longer Wonkette, and IIRC, it’s some guy now. I have no idea if he’s very familiar with the blogs or not.
Keep smokin whatever you’re smokin. It must be good stuff.
And btw, is the Earth still the center of the universe, and does NASA still fake all of their space flights??
Nikolay
It was not.
There was a video of Mike Stark going nuts in George Allen’s vicinity and it did nobody any good.
The Other Steve
I’m torn on this. I don’t like what Mike Stark did, but I suspect Demi is right and what’s going to get Bill O’Reilly in trouble is the fact that he won’t ignore something like this, and he’ll go off on it in his over the top fashion.
I don’t think the fact that he posted it on dKos matters, if he had not O’reilly would have still smeared the site with it anyhow. Especially considering the top recommended diary entry is one denouncing the stunt.
dougie smooth
Stark is a jackass. Remember this:
“Senator Allen, did you spit on your first wife?”
Mike Stark is Britney-Spears-stupid to take these human sewage dumps and make them look like the victim.
The Other Steve
Yeah, Stark got some of Allen’s thugs to whomp on him a bit.
Frankly, I think Stark is doing himself and the cause a disservice with his stunts. It was funny when he called up right-wing talk shows and asked questions.
Dave
But you’re forgetting that Kos is not read by people outside the blogosphere, and mostly politically astute dems as that. Billo has TV and Radio and the capability to reach more people that Kos ever will. He also has the ability to control his message, something that Kos can’t do due to the fact that anyone can post a diary.
Billo not only has the high ground on this one, he’s got the message advantage too.
ConservativelyLiberal
Stark posted the clip last year when he was basically jumped while trying to ask Felix Macaca a question. It looked pretty good, several repug goons jumping one guy. Stark likes to push the edge, but in doing so he has to know that doing that can lead to cuts to himself.
That said, the more I watch this unfold, the more I admire what he did. I wish he had not dragged Kos into it, but had posted it to his own site. I am sure that it would have made the rounds, and tactically it would have been smarter to let someone else at Kos link to it. He blew it in that regard.
If BillO is on the radio telling his listeners to descend on Stark’s home, then any sympathy he would have got from the middle ground will have been lost. I think more people in the middle would then look at the whole thing as a wash, and BillO would be taking the low road (as I expected he would). The falafels are hitting the fan. ;)
Either way, I am enjoying the show. With little going on in regards to BushCo and the Dems actually doing anything about him, this sideshow is pretty funny. If BillO’s neighbors knew little to nothing about his court case, they do now. And since the lady who sued him had a tape of the incident, it will be awful hard to dismiss it out of hand.
BillO has got away with some pretty sleazy stuff over the years, karma has a way of evening things out. Now if karma could only get in gear with BushCo…
Xanthippas
Yeah, you’re going to need karma for that as stunts like this really do nothing to improve anything in the world. I’m very happy to see that this bozo thinks that somehow defeating Bill O’Reilly is worth all of the bad press he brings the left, and that defeating Bill will somehow make the world a better place.
Seriously, people who agree with this need to get a clue.
HyperIon
today i read somewhere (maybe even here on another thread) that BOR’s TV audience is not really that large because it is on a cable channel. in fact the statement was that DKOS got more daily hits than BOR’s TV show. i don’t know about radio. of course, who knows if this is true. i just read it somewhere on the InterTubes… Oh, and the average age of BOR’s audience was given as 65+.
Dug Jay
O’Reilly has already won. On tonight’s program he ignored the specifics of this Stark matter and set about decrying the shamefull and disgusting things posted on Free Republic, and got the guy behind that site to acknowledge that they could and should do a better job of monitoring the nasty and hateful comments that are sometimes posted there.
O’Reilly then brought on former Congressman Harold Ford of Tennessee and brought up Daily Kos. Without referencing the Stark incident, but noting other examples, he characterized Kos as far worse than the conservative blog he had just been castigating, referring to Kos variously as Klu Klux Klan-like, a hate site and worse. He asked Ford how could all of the Democrat candidates, except Biden, agree to attend the Kos hate convention. Ford did his best to not say anything too negative about Kos, but wasn’t wholly successful. All in all, O’Reilly probably won this battle, and is set up at a later date to move on to a discussion of the Stark incident.
cleek
what a completely stupid thing to do. Stark just handed the whole thing to O’Reilly and made Kos look like a nest of loons.
i wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see the Dem candidates start pulling out of YearlyKos.
Greg
For whatever it’s worth, Mike Stark’s diary has fallen from the recommended list and this one criticizing him has been in the #1 spot for most of the day. Any damage has already been done though, but I don’t think it will matter a week from now.
Geek, Esq.
Stark is a clown. Occasionally he’s a useful one.
LeeX
Yes, Stark is a clown and he should have bragged about his prank on his own damn website. Even tho BOR puts on makeup for his gig, he is more than a clown. BOR is a celebrity, and as such he is open to ridicule. When you become a public figure, you get abuse about your personal life. If you are a jock, a pol, or an actor, your personal life is up for grabs. You are a role model. BOR is a creep and an asshole, and I don’t feel sorry for him. Stark shows similar qualities, too. But BOR started it all, so fuck him! Let him fight his war on Christmas…
BettyPageisaBlonde
He’s not a clown. He’s a fool.
A clown knows how to fall cleanly, a fool goes for it without thinking about the broken leg.
ConservativelyLiberal
I do have to say that I think that this type of media assault has really been a disservice to the country. I guess sideshows can be funny, but they do distract from more important things like the war and so on. I am sick of Britney, Paris and whatever cheap distraction they can wave in our direction. Either way, I vascillate back and forth on this. BillO is part of the problem, so I really have no sympathy for him.
I know two wrongs don’t make a right, but this one sure makes it hard to say that in some ways. I do think that the posters were the stupid part. That was unnecessary and wrong, IMO. The court documents are more questionable as they are a matter of record.
I do think that BillO loves this kind of attention, and I bet he is thinking of ways to milk this for all it is worth. But he has the problem that this will draw attention to something that he would rather let lie, so that ties him up. In that regard, I like the result. Sorry, but BillO with something that he can’t exploit? His head is probably ready to explode. That thought comforts me in a small way… ;)
If BillO goes after Stark on the radio and stays quiet on cable, he may be hoping that it will stay off of the radar of cable. If anything, he can say one thing on the radio, and another on cable. I am sure that he will have no problem saying ‘that is not what I said on the radio, pinhead’.
One thought is that for those who think this is wrong, and who support cameras everywhere, IMO that is an interesting dichotomy. I know BillO was on private property. If anything else though, this shows that privacy as we know it is gone. Nothing is sacred anymore.
I sure could do without the public cams or cams all over my home, but it seems that we are a video nation. We thrill to nailing the other guy on tape. IMO, all it will do is get more bizzare after this incident.
We Americans do like to outdo each other… ;)
KCinDC
The “Macaca” video was posted by Ben Tribbett of “Not Larry Sabato”. Mike Stark had a later, much less helpful video, in which he baited George Allen and was manhandled by Allen’s goons. Stark should stick to calling in to radio talk shows.
CaseyL
I don’t think so, cleek. O’Reilly’s really not that important, and is beloved only by people who wouldn’t vote for Jesus if he ran as a Democrat. The RW blogs that’ll make much of the incident are also very unimportant in the real world.
Stark keeps pulling this crap, he’s going to get arrested for harassment, stalking, and malicious mischief. And it’ll serve him right.
Gary Farber
“but apparently Wonkette doesn’t know it and she’s a f*cking blogger”
Um, speaking of paying attention to who writes at a particular blog….
Has Ken Layne or Alex Pareene had a sex-change operation? And before them Wonkette was David Lat.
Gary Farber
“but apparently Wonkette doesn’t know it and she’s a f*cking blogger”
Um, speaking of paying attention to who writes at a particular blog….
Has Ken Layne or Alex Pareene had a sex-change operation? And before them Wonkette was David Lat.
jake
Wins? Is there a prize involved?
So I guess the concern is: One dKos user will somehow screw things up for the Democrats who attend a dKos hosted event. As a result undecided voters might be swayed to vote for the party of war, bigotry and lies by this event and we’ll have president Ruli Guliani for the next eight years.
Or perhaps the concern is more confined to dKos. All of the sponsors will pull their adverts because they don’t understand the user/host distinction and no more dKos.
No to the former, doubtful to the latter.
Tom H
Mike says:
Replace “liars, cheats and fools” with terrorists, and that’s the typical wingnut argument for torture, warrantless wiretapping, restriction of civil rights, and all manner of vindictive behavior.
The only difference between Mike Stark and a frothy wingnut is what party the man votes for.
Punchy
Surprise! And when Stark ends up with a broken jaw, two black eyes, a busted up knee, then all the sympathy turns back on Stark.
Here’s BOR in a nutshell–he’s always right, and he’s about as arrogant as any human being on the planet. To say he will return fire–and completely overdo it–is counting on the sun to rise in the East.
I guarentee BOR will overstep this. Stark ought to fear for his l!fe, knowing the wingnuts out there.
~Foo Fighter~
Ham handed as Mike Stark’s stunt might be…it demonstrates to the BillO’s of the world that people are sick of being the intellectual bullying and are ready to fight back.
Kudo’s to Mike Stark for fighting back and not caring if he looks like an ass (and I think he does look a little like an ass…but it needed to be done.)
~Foo Fighter~
David
“but apparently Wonkette doesn’t know it and she’s a f*cking blogger”
Um, speaking of paying attention to who writes at a particular blog….
Has Ken Layne or Alex Pareene had a sex-change operation? And before them Wonkette was David Lat.
Despite the change in gender, they maintain the name, they maintain the attitude, they maintain the persona… ergo, they maintain the descriptor. Afterall, it IS still ‘WonkETTE’ and not simply ‘Wonk’.
KCinDC
David, the Wonkette bloggers have bylines now. Wonkette is a blog, not a person, and thus is an “it”, not a “she”.
Bill Hicks
After a few days it looks like Mike Stark’s stunt has been a resounding success and Tim and John are looking a bit overblown (pun intended).
Bill O’Reilly has not and will not talk about this incident on his show because he does not want to let people know that he sexually harassed a young female subordinate (think: your daughter or sister). Why do you think he paid so much to avoid the suit and publicity?
DailyKos does not appear to have lost any advertising dollars, at least I haven’t heard anything at DailyKos or elsewhere in the blogosphere.
The reputation of DKos is not likely to change either. Mike Stark’s political theater is known only to the blogosphere and therefore to a small minority of the population. Furthermore, this small minority of blog readers is mostly aware that this is Mike’s puppy and that DKos is only a platform for spreading a message. So maybe a few people nationally including the moron at Wonkette got confused and now frown on DKos for this incident.
Bill O’Reilly will continue to smear DKos no matter what Mike Stark does. BillO hates DKos for ideological, political, and power related issues; he doesn’t give a fuck about the civility of blog posts.
BillO is a bully and they do not stop bullying in response to polite and well-reasoned requests.
So Tim, how about an update next week assessing the impact this has had on DKos so we can get some perspective on whether this really is as big a problem as you predicted? Sounds like something a scientist would do. Propose a hypothesis then see how the results confirm or reject the hyp. Then report it in the literature.