Dave Weigel at Slate highlights the latest flailings of Andrew Breitbart’s virtual houseboy and his little buddies:
Keach Hagey [warning: Politico link] welds together a few ongoing storylines and sees a pattern: Conservative blogs and news sites are going after reporters who seem to be giving aid and comfort to Occupy Wall Street. The last example, which hasn’t drawn too much attention yet, is a video of New York Times stringer Natasha Lennard on a panel about #OWS, at which she muses about movement ideas and strategy. Is it damning? Having seen a lot of reporters perform on panels (having been one a few times) I don’t see it, but I do see the pattern…
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In the first week of October, The Washington Post‘s Stephanie McCrummen published a scoop about an old rock at Rick Perry’s childhood campground with an outdated, racist name. At RedState.com, lawyer Mike Robinson took the occasion to inform readers of McCrummen’s very petty crime record, mostly consisting of speeding tickets. (Disclosure: I’ve paid a speeding ticket and been caught by two speeding-tracking cameras this year alone, so this doesn’t really move me.) “It is pretty easy to throw mud on someone even if they didn’t do anything truly wrong,” he wrote. After Manuel Roig-Franzia wrote up the minor discrepancies in Marco Rubio’s biography, RedState’s Erick Erickson informed readers that Roig-Franzia had once gotten into a showy fight with his editor, and that he was “an apologist for the Cuban communist regime and a hater of the Catholic church.”
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In both cases, a reporter had written something the bloggers didn’t like, so the hunt was on to prove he/she was unethical, untrustworthy. Look at the latest James O’Keefe expose, too. Earlier this month, Huffington Post reporter Sam Stein got a tip about fishy phone calls coming in to the Economic Policy Institute, people claiming to be union members asking if they could get favorable studies from the think tank. According to Stein, two of the people reached said no. According to O’Keefe’s eventual report, one professor who does work with the think tank, Jeffrey Keefe — he teaches at O’Keefe’s alma mater, Rutgers — did say that someone buying a study could get it killed, even though the buyer would have to pay for the work anyway. But O’Keefe’s sting video focused half of its attention on Keefe, and the other half on Stein…
Further detail at the link. Looks like Erickson’s Trike Farce Strike Force is busy trying to move the rally cry “To the countertops!” from the Malkinite swamps into what passes among Kochsuckers as professional media.
Mino
Hoo boy, as if reporters aren’t already second thinking themselves. Look at the NPR fiasco.
El Cid
Will the neo-Confederates ever get over their loss to Graeme Frost?
Yutsano
Who the fuck is keeping that weasely little toad out of fucking prison? Hasn’t he violated his probation several times over already?
Professor
You say Kochsuckers, I say Koch+Cain= KochCain. Give me a laugh!
Lurker
Scientologists refer to the practice of smearing opponents for the purpose of discrediting them as “dead-agenting.”
cleek
there’s a market for slime. these people serve that market.
slimemongers. ? slimmongers. ? slimongers. ?
Paul in KY
FWIW, I’ve had 18 speeding tickets in my 35 odd years of driving. Spread over 6 states.
I likes to drive fast :-)
Judas Escargot
Another one of the Noble Ancestors of computer science, John McCarthy (inventor of LISP), has died.
He used to post on USENET back in the early 90s, on the ai groups, and also in some of the alt groups (alt.ai.philosophy and alt.postmodernism I think– this is from memory, work blocks Google Groups so I can’t verify). He was actually quite a rightwing libertarian curmudgeon as I recall… but then again, so weren’t 80% of USENET posters at the time.
Cain
It makes sense that a lot of computer science guys have a libertarian mindset because they believe that they can create all kinds of stuff just with their mind.
Then again, open source and free software seems to be perfectly fine in their mindset which I Find interesting.
Origuy
Imagine what would happen if people like O’Keefe and Erick O’Erick got positions of power in the government. They’d be digging through IRS files and tapping phones every chance they got.
RalfW
Huh.
Right-wing dick-wads use every slimy, distasteful, person-destroying tactic at hand to attempt to discredit (perceived) opponents?
Huh. Really. I’m reeling.
Judas Escargot
@Cain:
Now that I am older and a little grey myself, I can (somewhat) cut an academic of McCarthy’s generation some slack. Back in his day it was easier for someone to go to school and end up in his position through hard work and merit. (Provided that they were white, male, and from a middle/upper class background, of course).
The notion of “Libertarianism == True Meritocracy” could almost be believed back then, if you didn’t think too hard on the subject.
Current libertarians of course have no excuse: The empirical results that 30+ years of Rand-Rot has had on the culture should be pretty obvious to all by now.
Djur
@Cain: The original Free Software people were leftists, like Richard Stallman. The more business-friendly types, as well as out-and-out right-wingers like Eric Scott Raymond, came along later and coined the term “Open Source” to distinguish themselves from the existing leftish movement.