America’s governor shits on a special ed teacher to make a political point, on the basis of a James O’Keefe videotape.
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[…] (h/t DougJ) […]
Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
This blog will pay for itself.
This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.
You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.
That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.
Israel is using food as a weapon of war. Unforgivable.
It’s a doggy dog world.
I also would like a pony to improve my balloon juice experience.
The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.
I really should read my own blog.
In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.
Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!
Bad news for Ron DeSantis is great news for America.
Washington Post’s Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.
Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.
“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!
Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!
They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.
When we show up, we win.
These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.
Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?
In my day, never was longer.
Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?
Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.
The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.
You are here: Home / Abandon all hope
JAHILL10
Sorry, I’m not jumping ship yet. La Palin is about to reach saturation of idiocy and I want to watch her slow, embarrassing decline.
Steve
I am more upset that the school district suspended her for the crime of being secretly recorded. What the hell?
lamh32
@JAHILL10:
I’m already boycotting TLC (not really, I only watch 2 shows on there anyway), so what’s going on now?
Is it from DWTS?
funluvn
Isn’t that O’Keefe boy just precious? That he still has teeth is amazing to me.
El Cid
Serves the teacher right for thinking she was all that just for flinging herself between a careening van and her kids just to protect these special ed parasites.
It’s up to citizen journalists to do what the lamestream media won’t: buy drinks for women and chat them up at bars and record them so that you can sneak any offensive or awkward comment onto YouTube.
Kryptik
And as I always do, I subject myself to the commentary on the story, and find most of the folk find it just peachy keen, since she’s part of the Teacher’s Union, which makes it all ok.
Fuck all.
beltane
See, if special ed teachers exercised their 2nd Amendment rights this sort of thing would never happen.
El Cid
@funluvn: If any little punk ever deserved to have the stuffing beaten out of him and left with his underwear up over his head in the middle of the street on a cold day, it’d be O’Keefe. But I don’t really support violence. I might cheer if it happened, but I’d say a hearty ‘tut-tut’ at how undignified it all was.
arguingwithsignposts
Just a point of clarification: “America’s governor” in this instance is Chris Christie of NJ, not “America’s half-term governor” in Alaska.
beltane
@funluvn: The fact that he still has teeth is a sad commentary on the state of our country’s moral decline.
J
Curious, isn’t it, how when it comes to Wikileaks the content of the message is a matter of complete indifference and all that matters is the messenger’s character and personal life, whereas when it comes to Breitbart and O’keefe the messengers (and what they do to the message) matter not at all?
funluvn
@El Cid:
I’m not into it either, but I’m still amazed that someone with less inhibitions on the subject hasn’t rearranged that smug face.
El Cid
@arguingwithsignposts: Palin would never be something as lowly as America’s governor. Something like Real America’s Guardian, or the Heartland Anti-Elite Christ.
JAHILL10
@arguingwithsignposts: Ooops, my bad. Christie is definitely after the NJ teachers union. It’s almost like he wants to run for the Republican nomination or something…
gnomedad
@Kryptik:
And unless I misinterpret the story, she was in fact complaining about the union.
El Cid
@gnomedad: She was. How much you wanna bet that the drink-buying douchebag (who simply must have targeted this poor lady and stalked her down) asked her a million times about this topic?
How the fuck is this different from hiring some asshole to talk with someone at a bar or club or where ever about their job, and maybe he or she complains about it or the boss, and then you release that recording to get her or him fired?
How is this different from getting yourself invited into someone’s house and then recording the dinner table conversation or the talk on the porch or the patio and releasing anything offensive onto YouTube?
Maybe O’Keefe would enjoy having his house bugged or a sensitive long-distance microphone and videocamera spying on him 24/7 and having pictures and recordings of himself at home released online too.
GregB
Linda Tripp Republicanism making a big come back.
Whistleblowers target the abuse of employees and threats to public health. These ratfuckers are targeting lowly workers.
Ratfuckers. Ratfuckers. Ratfuckers.
Jason In the Peg
@J: Wikileaks is arrogant, self-centred and has a sense of morality that is vainglorious.
Wait just a moment.
I was sure that I had a point.
Right! O’Keefe would never impugn the intentions or morality of the American Government!
Shit. I don’t think that’s it either.
gnomedad
@El Cid:
I guess her using the n-word was just a bonus, sending Jimmy into spasms of nostalgia for the good old days when you could drop the n-word whenever you wanted. That’s why they’re calling Obama everything but — it’s like one of those figure-and-background illusions.
O’Keefe is a slimy, sociopathic git.
The Republic of Stupidity
@El Cid:
You forgot the ‘phony, artificially contrived’ part…
Srsly… isn’t this good enough to get Don Juan Dildo buried by one hell of a just civil suit, at the least?
And when does this sort of behavior FINALLY get deemed criminal enough by law enforcement to act on?
freelancer
If you see James O’Keefe, ever, you say “I’m not saying anything to you.” and then you spit in his face and walk away.
The Dangerman
This limp dick prick is going to end up getting popped (and, with some justice, it will be videotaped).
Sly
Even if she didn’t jump in front of traffic to save her students, she’s still priceless. Special Ed teachers are worth their weight in gold and then some.
I get more than a little miffed when regular teachers come under coordinated attack. Professional solidarity, and all that. But very few people outside of teaching have an accurate sense of how extraordinarily valuable Special Ed teachers are to a school. It’s one of the big reasons I’ll never work in a charter or private school that doesn’t have open enrollment (i.e. schools that can screen out high-needs kids): some of the best teachers you’ll ever meet have Special Ed training, and watching them in action can help you understand effective teaching more than anything else.
So James O’Keefe and Governor Christie can’t start rotting in Hell soon enough, as far as I’m concerned.
gbear
Is he still on probation? He should have gotten locked up on a parole violation for his last escapade.
He’s going to wind up in jail again for some stupid stunt he pulls, and I would sign on for the newsletter that details the humiliations he’ll receive every day.
BR
This just reinforces what priscianus jr said a couple of days ago:
https://balloon-juice.com/2010/11/14/open-thread-a-million-little-would-be-madoffs/#comment-2201751
General Stuck
@Sly:
Yes they are, my mother was one.
El Cid
I’m not sure if this makes it better or worse, though it does make it more dangerous and more widespread, but O’Keefe himself didn’t have to do this: it was a self-motivated citizen journalist, who then brought his drink-prompted recorded snitching to the O’Keefe shit-house to be transformed into another ‘scandal’ to be widely distributed as an important news story.
trollhattan
@freelancer:
Please tell me “spitting” somehow involves fist implantation.
This fuckwad seems teflonized, despite his many run-ins with the law. Who keeps reapplying the coating?
Mouse Tolliver
So basically this teacher is White Shirley Sherrod? She was criticizing the union for not firing the racist teacher, but now she’s being punished as if she were a racist?
J. Michael Neal
@Mouse Tolliver: I wouldn’t even be too sure that she was criticizing the union. What we have has so little context attached to it that we don’t have the slightest idea what point she was trying to make to the cad. For all we know, her point was that the school administration can be so arbitrary in the way it punishes teachers that you have to make it so that tenure makes it impossible to fire the racist teacher.
Ash Can
@El Cid: At least this time it wasn’t splattered all over the national headlines. Unfortunately, the headlines didn’t say something along the lines of “Pigfucker At It Again; Who Will Stop Him?”
Ripley
@JAHILL10: This may be Christie’s opening gambit; blessedly, he’s way too fat to place or show, let alone win.
YellowJournalism
Sick, sick, sick. I want to get the giant boot from that Simpsons in Australia episode and kick this guy in the nuts. It’s much more practical than just slashing tires because it’s possible that the force would cause sterilization, thus doing the world a big service.
Of course, this is all hypothetical hyperbole since we’re not supposed to condone violence against our enemies or something.
J. Michael Neal
@YellowJournalism:
You need to watch more hockey.
Chris
Let’s see, on one side we’ve got a special-ed teacher who cares enough about her students to wind up with glass cuts in her eyes (on top of broken ribs, etc., after being hit by a fucking *van*), and on the other side, we’ve got a lying ratfucker who likes stalking women to get them on tape (at best)…
Yeah, I think this calls for some moral equivalency from the media.
Also: Nice work, New Jersey. Classy governor you got there.
YellowJournalism
@J. Michael Neal: My husband says that all the time. For different reasons, of course.
Yutsano
@YellowJournalism:
Objection: assumes facts not in evidence. All we know of O’Keefe’s sexual prowess is an ill-conceived pleasure cruise to discredit a CNN reporter. To suggest he is even capable of breeding requires much stronger evidence before the court.
CaseyL
I’m surprised no one else has noticed this, but James O’Keefe looks an awful lot like Lee Harvey Oswald. A young, extra-smarmy Lee Harvey Oswald.
freelancer
@CaseyL:
Yes. This. But what he looks like doesn’t matter to me at all. Sotomayor is by no means conventionally attractive, but I admire her for her character, her accomplishments and her mind. O’Keefe looking like a sniveling little weasel, doesn’t mean much. It’s that he acts like an amoral fuckhead that I find reprehensible. Like, “if I met him on the street, I’d headbutt him right in the fucking nose” reprehensible.
Yutsano
@freelancer:
Can I just say, if this blessed event were to come to pass, I would gladly contribute to your defense fund.
RadioOne
James O’Keefe should go down in history as the most over-hyped and yet worst ratfucker the GOP has ever produced. And man, they’ve produced quite a few of them over the past few decades. Unfortunately, no one in the media even remotely cares.
feebog
On what basis did her employer suspend her and withhold a pay increase? The fact that she repeated a word allegedly uttered by another teacher? The fact that she was complaining that the teacher in question was not fired? Disclosure here; I am a labor arbitrator who deals primarily with public sector arbitration cases including education. Obviously the facts are scetchy here, but this sounds like the school completely jumped the gun here. I would not be surprised to see this overturned once the hysteria dies down.
J. Michael Neal
@YellowJournalism: Your husband is a very wise man. You should
follow his commands without questiongive due consideration to all of his suggestions.ricky
Go watch the whole series at You Tube. O’Keefe has some serious sexual issues that need to be professionally addressed. He would be a very easy mark.
Triassic Sands
@El Cid:
Well said. And it’s obvious they are all faking problems just so they can get a free pass. Most are just biding their time until they can get on Medicaid and really live it up.
Where the hell are the death panels when you really need them?
Triassic Sands
@Steve:
And remember Jim McDermott was found guilty, not of taping, but merely leaking a taped conversation (involving the Great Orange Boner). For that he paid $60,000 in damages and $1.6 million in legal fees (his and the winners).
However, in 21st century Amurka there is no higher calling than entrapping someone into saying something ill-advised in a bar.
A Duck
Triassic Sands:
Tiergartenstrasse 4.
brendancalling
someone is eventually going to shoot O’Keefe dead, and he will richly deserve it.
russell
Actually, I’m thinking he’d kinda dig that.
mclaren
@BR:
Excellent point.
Thinking back, however, it suddenly becomes obvious that there have never been any social mechanisms in America to truly shut people down unless they make statements conflicting with deeply held popular beliefs.
Think about it. Set the Wayback Machine for 1985: all the pundits told us Gorbachev was just another Soviet apparatchik. A company man. Nothing would change in the USSR because of Gorbachev’s ascension. Anyone remember how, even when the sledgehammers were banging away at the Berlin Wall in 1989, the respected pundits like Kissinger were assuring us that this was just a feint, merely a ploy to keep us distracted while the USSR prepared to invade Western Europe and spread communism throughout Africa and Southeast Asia and South America…? And being spectacularly, insanely, crazily wrong didn’t discredit Kissinger. Or any of the other pundits. On the contrary: the more wrong they were about how Daniel Ortega was going to spread communism throughout South America and how the Soviets had surpassed us with alleged superweapons like the MiG-25 and their fearsome first strike missiles, the more respected these pundits became after all their wrong predictions during the 1980s.
Let’s set the wayback machine for the 1970s. Every pundit got it wrong about Viet Nam. Every pundit got it wrong about oil prices. Read predictions of oil prices made in 1970 and 1971 and you’ll see the pundits all predicted no spike in prices, nothing out of the ordinary. They all got blindsided by the 1973 Arab oil embargo. They all got whipsawed by the runaway stagflation — every economist predicted that simultaneous 20% inflation and economic recession were impossible. Employment couldn’t collapse while prices skyrocketed, they told us…and all the economists were wrong. Economists like Milton Friedman, all economists who were wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong during the 70s and whose reputations did nothing but soar.
Or let’s go back to the 60s. JFK got elected by touting the “missile gap” — which didn’t exist. All the pundits were wrong. All the pundits claimed Russia could never be so bold as to send nuclear missiles to Castro. The pundits were all wrong. I remember seeing an ABC rebroadcast of “THIS WEEK WITH DAVID BRINKLEY” in late 1964, and every pundit agreed with absolute assurance that LBJ would never ever send young American boys to fight and die in Vietnam in any numbers in the coming year. All wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, yet pundits like Walter Cronkite and Eric Severeid were honored and showered with plaudits and praised to the skies for their consistently wrong predictions.
So I have to ask…when in history has it ever been different?
Read the predictions by the sages of American politics in 1861. They predicted the Civil War would last 6 months. Union troops would whip the rebels and be home by Christmas.
Read the pundits who wrote about Andrew Jackson. They described him as a monster, a maniac, a madman who couldn’t possibly win the presidency.
Every expert has always been wrong. And it never seems to affect their reputations.
So is this something new? Or is it that with the internet and computers we now have a sufficiently detailed database to do a very fine-grained comparison of experts’ predictions against the reality, and now, for the first time, we’ve realized that the pundits are always full of shit. And it has never ever hurt their reputations. Ever.
This has always been the case. We’ve just never realized it before.
jcricket
This is why I love this blog (no, seriously) – start out on a thread about that wingnut-welfare-livin punk-ass loser O’Keefe and end up with a history lesson about the continued wrongness of the pundit class.
Anyhoo, after 6 years in complete control, resulting in the near total destruction of the global economy, the Republicans are back in charge of the House (and clearly the media) in less than 2 years. And the Republicans who are elected now are, if anything, more venal, stupid and ridiculous than the ones voted out of office in 2006. And the public seems convinced that we’ll Hoover our way back to prosperity.
If that’s not proof of the general point, I don’t know what is. Discredited Republicans and their ideas not only don’t die, they seem to be growing, like some kind of alien bacteria that flourishes more when it encounters failure.
jcricket
@mclaren: And it has never ever hurt their reputations. Ever.
Ken J.
Apparently, if you outsource the informers to Private Industry, it isn’t really a police state.
Fascism R Us. It’s not coming, it’s here.
gene108
@mclaren: It takes a serious mass movement to change the collective conscience to discredit people. I don’t think it has anything to do with the pundit class.
You had people pre-1964, who ran on a platform of “nigger, nigger, nigger…segregation forever” were perfectly credible, even though the fact an African-American sat next to you for lunch really wasn’t going to contaminate you any way.
Post-1964, people who ran on a platform of welfare and other social safety nets as being nothing more than the Democrats taking money from hard working whites and giving to lazy blacks were not and still have not been discredited.
America has been filled with people, who are totally fucking nuts, when you stop and think about it but until you can start a mass movement to change the way people think, there’s nothing you can do to discredit anyone.
You have to discredit the underlying belief in what they are doing. Right-wingers, with their huge media presence, are in a much better position to do this than anyone else in the country and so they usually end up controlling the debate.
People disapprove of ACORN because Fox News, Limbaugh, et. al. told them to disapprove. People will turn (have turned?) O’Keefe into a martyr for the cause because Fox News, Limbaugh, et. al. will tell them to, if anyone turns the tables on him.