Conspiracy! Wingnuts Think Liberals Planted Questioner At Donald Trump Event

The lunatics on the right have embraced some pretty outlandish conspiracy theories over the years. Not the least of which is that President Obama, who supports Planned Parenthood, gay rights, gun safety regulations, separation of church and state, and equality for women, is a Kenyan-born Muslim. Based on his political platform Obama would be the worst Muslim ever. But conservatives have never let reason interfere with their dementia.

Now the Doofus Brigades in the daffy rightosphere have latched unto a new bit crackpottery with which to tingle their nether regions. Two of these “news” sources were featured on Fox Nation, the community website of Fox News. According to the Daily Caller’s Jim Treacher, there is something fishy about the meathead who asked Donald Trump about the “Muslim problem” in America. Treacher notes that “Some people are speculating that the guy was a plant.” He doesn’t bother to identify any of those speculators, but he is worried that nobody knows the questioner’s name. Nobody ever knows the names of random people asking questions at rallies, but this time it’s cause to freak out.

The intrepid pseudo-journalists over at Breitbart News went even further to declare their “Exclusive” story revealing that “The man, whom some suspect to have been a liberal or Democratic plant in Trump’s audience, was featured in a meme in the spring of 2013 that was credited to aattp.org, the website of the group Americans Against The Tea Party.” Actually, that photo dates back to a Glenn Beck 9/12 Project rally in 2009 where there were lots of guys just like this. Also aattp.org features actual Teabaggers and has no incentive to promote phonies. The real ones are bad enough.

Fox Nation Donald Trump

Before demonstrating the unparalleled idiocy of these cretins, let’s just point out the obvious fact that liberals don’t need to plant a moron among the Trumpsters. Most of them already believe that Obama is a Muslim who is waging a “War on Christianity.” If liberals sent trolls to Trump’s events they would just blend in with the rest of the imbeciles. Even Trump disputes that the questioner was a plant. He told the Curvy Couch Potatoes of Fox & Friends that…

“When he was asking that question, by the way, a lot of the people in the audience were nodding. They were not laughing at him or anything. They were nodding. I don’t think he was a plant.”

Indeed, they were nodding. Because they agree with the asinine premise. As does Trump. In fact, they’re proud of it. So the entire notion that liberals would have gone to the trouble to plant someone to ask a question that most of the people in the crowd would have asked without any prodding is absurd. All they had to do was watch and wait. Trump’s supporters would expose themselves on their own in due time. [Note: Due time in this instance was the very first question]

But none of that would stop Breitbrat Patrick Howley from concocting the most preposterous plot surrounding the alleged liberal plant. Howley, a disreputable hack who has confessed to unethical and unlawful tactics to smear his ideological foes, asserts that the “plant” at the Trump affair was previously spotted at a Tea Party gathering in 2013. He even posts a link to what he says is photographic evidence of the sighting.

There are just two small problems with Howley’s hysterical hypothesis. First of all, he doesn’t provide any proof that the guy in the old Tea Party photo was a plant. If he was a legitimate Teabagger back then, he couldn’t very well be a liberal plant now..

More importantly, the two men do not share even a remote resemblance. The Teabagger is significantly older with a full head of gray hair. It is unlikely that he got younger in the years since the Tea Party rally. Also, he has a narrower face and a more pronounced chin. No one could plausibly say that these two men were the same person unless they were hopelessly predisposed to seeing only what they want to see, or they were determined to deceive others. And in furtherance of that goal, Howley wrote that “We know now that the left-wing media and activists were aware of this man more than two years before last week’s Trump rally.”

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

No, actually, you don’t know anything of the kind. You don’t know who the Teabagger was, you don’t know who the Trump guy was, you can’t honestly pretend that they were the same person, and even if he were a plant his question represents exactly what Trump and his followers believe. So all you’ve got left is to continue to lie and invent ridiculous scenarios for which you haven’t got a scrap of proof. In other words, you can do exactly what you always do and hope your glassy-eyed disciples don’t catch on. The rest of us are familiar with your conspiracy ravings and aren’t impressed by your poor journalistic skills and complete absence of logic. So carry on.

Sharia Law vs. The NRA: The Politics Of Beheading And Guns

The news of a grisly murder in Oklahoma has once again brought out the panic peddlers who are always watching out for any gruesome event that they can exploit to advance their nightmare scenarios. While there is still a deficit of actual facts, knee-jerk Islamophobes leap forward to cast aspersions on people whom they regard as universally barbaric. Therefore, any chance to defame a Muslim is quickly pounced on and embellished in the most hostile manner. However, according to the Washington Post, all that is actually known about the murder at this time is that…

“A man who had just been fired by an Oklahoma City-area food processing plant allegedly severed the head of one of his former co-workers and attacked another before being shot by the company’s chief operating officer, according to police. […]

But the FBI, which is assisting in the investigation, has so far found no links to terrorism, the officials said. There was also no indication that Nolen was copying the beheadings of journalists in Syria by the Islamic State, the officials said, adding that they are treating this as an incident of workplace violence.”

The fact that the investigation is in the early stages has not prevented the Fear Merchants from going totally overboard with their hysteria. Undoubtedly Sen. Lindsey Graham, who warned that ISIL is on their way to America to “kill us all,” is probably thinking, “One down, 359,999,999 to go.” And the folks at Fox News are doing their part by boldly declaring in all caps that “SHARIA LAW IS COMING!!!”

Fox Nation

Fox posted their warning on their community website, Fox Nation (See the acclaimed ebook Fox Nation vs. Reality to learn more). The alarmist story was sourced to the uber-rightist blog, The Daily Caller, which is run by Fox host Tucker Carlson. The exclamation about the coming of Sharia law was taken from the Facebook page of Alton Nolen, the suspect in the Oklahoma crime, but Fox doesn’t disclose that in their headline or their article. They leave it to appear that there is just some sort of impending doom that is approaching that will foretell the end of civilization as we know it.

The Daily Caller’s article was written by Patrick Howley, a disreputable hack who has confessed to unethical and unlawful tactics to smear his ideological foes. Howley includes ridiculous and irrelevant observations such as the fact that Nolen had a tattoo that read “as-salaamu ataikum,” a Muslim greeting meaning “peace be upon you.” Nolen also had a tattoo of Jesus and a pair of Christian praying hands. So what does that say about Christianity?

Of course, it is utterly absurd to imply that a murder, even if it is determined to be related to terrorism, suggests that Sharia law is about to be implemented in America. What happened in Oklahoma was a crime and will be treated as such. It will never be tolerated as lawful in this country under some warped interpretation of Islam. So even if there are additional crimes linked to terrorists, Sharia law is most definitely not coming to America.

If Americans are determined to be afraid of something, they may want to put this recent crime into perspective. In 2014 so far, there has been one beheading in the United States. Compare that to the more than 8,000 deaths by guns this year. [Estimate based on data from 2012]

Guns vs. Beheadings

That’s more than double the fatalities of 9/11. Which makes it all the more ludicrous that right-wingers are now clamoring for unwieldy and unwarranted measures to address their fantastical notions about domestic terrorism. They propose strengthening border security, spying on mosques, prohibiting immigration from Muslim countries, and even building concentration camps.

However, you will not hear any similar commitment to eradicating the true epidemic of deaths and injuries by guns. To the contrary, conservatives are pushing for more guns to be carried and for fewer restrictions on firearms. They are against regulations to keep guns out of the hands of felons or spousal abusers. They fight efforts to prohibit cop-killer bullets. They oppose smart-gun technology that would prevent unauthorized persons from using a firearm. They are even against laws that prohibit people on the terrorist watch list from purchasing guns.

Nevertheless, a single beheading, as horrific as it is, whips wingnuts into a frenzy, while 8,000 deaths, many of them children, doesn’t move them to lift a finger. This leads to a fundamental question that needs to be asked by the American people and the media: Who represents a bigger threat to the country, ISIL or the NRA?

So F**king What? The ObamaCare Website Contractor Scandal Delusion

You know that things are getting bad for conservative wingnuts when they resort to complaining about President Obama for doing what they previously called for him to do.

Last October the ObamaCare website launched with an historic thud. It barely functioned and was widely deemed to be an embarrassing failure for Obama and CGI Federal, the firm that developed the site. Right-wingers from across the land were sent into a frothing ecstasy as they extended the website’s problems to all of ObamaCare and everything else the President did. One of their most often heard demands was that “heads must roll.”

So you might think that they would have been happy to learn that Obama had fired CGI for the website fiasco. They could have spun it as capitulation to their demands and a victory for their side. But if you thought that, you are not very familiar with their unique brand of psychosis and inbred hostility.

So instead, an article popped up today on the Daily Caller website, a disreputable operation run by Fox News host Tucker Carlson. The author is Patrick Howley, whose resume includes an attempt to infiltrate Occupy Wall Street groups to incite violence that he would then blame on the Occupy movement (he failed). The article was then picked up by Fox News for posting on their lie-riddled, hate site, Fox Nation.

Fox Nation

For More Fox Nation Lies, Read Fox Nation vs. Reality, available at Amazon.

Howley’s article is a monumentally silly effort to invent a scandal where none exists. The shocking revelation he exposed is that the firm hired to replace CGI had once employed someone who had also been employed by the Obama campaign in 2012. Now try to follow this, because it’s even stupider than it sounds. Rayid Ghani had first worked for Accenture where he did research on consumer behavior. Later he was recruited by Obama’s campaign to work on voter tracking. Today he does not work for either Obama or Accenture, but Accenture has been hired to do continued maintenance on the ObamaCare website. Or put another way, the Obama administration has hired a firm that no longer employs someone who is also no longer employed by Obama. Scandalous, isn’t it?

Howley’s logic is painfully idiotic. He is proposing that you take everyone who has ever worked for Obama in any capacity, find out where they worked previously, and scratch them off of any lists for future employment or contracts. That would probably disqualify most of the Forbes 500 and ten or twenty million people.

To make matters even more comically obtuse, last October Howley wrote an article for the Daily Caller complaining about tangential affiliations between Obama and CGI. In that piece he asserted a wholly unsupported allegation that there was some sort of chicanery in the relationship because Michelle Obama had attended Princeton at the same time as a woman who later became a CGI executive. He made no attempt to prove that they ever met. Once again, Howley’s perverse logic suggests that any company that employs any of the thousands of people who attended the same Ivy League universities as the Obamas is exempt from government work.

So to summarize, Howley alleged impropriety when Obama hired a firm where a Princeton classmate of Michelle was employed, despite showing no connection between them. However, he was not mollified when Obama fired that firm and replaced it with another firm that does not employ a man who is also not employed by Obama. Nice work, Sherlock.

In addition, Howley squeezed another angle into his article that claimed that there were ongoing security threats within the ObamaCare website. He did not in any way substantiate his claim, but he did provide pretty good evidence that no such security exploits exist. He referenced the testimony of an ex-con who was paraded before a Republican-controlled committee hearing to say that breaking into Healthcare.gov “would be a hacker’s wet dream.” That’s actually true. And the fact that it hasn’t happened speaks to the reliability of the security on the website given the desirability of hackers to break it.

This is just another example of what happens when right-wing extremists have nothing of substance to say about policy or process. They scrape the bottom of the scandal barrel in a desperate search for controversy, or least distraction. It is their hope that they can either tarnish their foes with mud or keep them from bringing attention to the fact that the conservative platform consists of little more than repealing ObamaCare, cutting taxes for the rich, cutting benefits for the poor, and regulating the behavior of citizens in the privacy of their homes. That platform, along with alienating women and minorities, is not going to serve them particularly well in 2014, 2016, or beyond.

So F**king What? Michelle Obama’s Princeton Classmate Is A Successful Businesswoman

When conservatives get desperate for derogatory material with which to bash President Obama, they generally make bigger asses of themselves than usual. For example, the Daily Caller, a right-wing rag run by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, just published a shocking expose that will surely topple the President and his evil cohorts.

The Daily Caller’s investigative reporter, Patrick Howley, who famously uncovered the Case of the Scandalous Hat, and the plot to Gobble Up Gun Magazines, is on the hunt again for officialdom’s dirty linen. Howley’s credentials are bolstered by his experience as a violent right-wing thug who admitted to infiltrating OccupyDC for the purpose of undermining it. And with that trophy on his mantle, he has now discovered an ominous link between the First Lady and an executive at CGI Federal, the company that built the troubled ObamaCare website.

Daily Caller
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It seems that Michelle Obama attended Princeton at the same time as Toni Townes-Whitley, who went on to become a senior vice president at CGI. While there is nothing in Howley’s article that proves that these two women knew one another, the accusatory tone is unmistakeable. After all, how is it possible that a graduate of a respected Ivy League university would otherwise manage to secure employment as an executive of a prominent, multinational corporation? Howley’s reporting on this, if anything, did not go far enough. He could easily have implicated the entire Princeton class of 1985 in some sort of criminal conspiracy with the Obama White House. But perhaps the most revealing part of his article is this (emphasis added):

“Toni Townes ’85 is a onetime policy analyst with the General Accounting Office and previously served in the Peace Corps in Gabon, West Africa. Her decision to return to work, as an African-American woman, after six years of raising kids was applauded by a Princeton alumni publication in 1998.”

It would have been nice if Howley had elaborated on what other options Townes-Whitley had to return to work as, if not an African-American woman. Perhaps she could also have returned as an Anglo-Prussian Hermaphrodite. Those Princeton grads can be exceedingly versatile.

In addition to ferreting out the fact that two women who may not have known each other in school, and who still may not know each other today, are linked tangentially by a company that does business with the U.S. government, Howley also managed to regurgitate an already debunked myth that the ObamaCare website cost $678 million when it actually is estimated to have run at about $70 million according to the Sunlight Foundation. So Howley was only off by 90 percent.

This is typical of the quality of journalism practiced by conservative ideologues who have no respect for the truth and spend their careers trying to slander their perceived political enemies. [Note: The story was also re-posted at the Fox News community web site and Fib Factory, Fox Nation]. Howley is an obvious hack with unresolved issues of hostility. And he works for Tucker Carlson, the most notorious loser in the right’s media echo chamber. So we can expect more of this sort of hilarity in the future. And lord knows we need the laughs.

So F**king What? Obama Supporter Wears Hat

The Obama haters seem to be struggling to come up with new scandals to hang on the President. They have already run through his Kenyan birth, his Marxist father, his gun confiscations, his economic sabotage, and his treasonous golf schedule. Now, grasping for anything with which to hammer the President, the congenital liars at Fox Nation have uncovered something so spine-chillingly horrific that they had to feature it on their news feed.

Fox Nation

So F**king What?

The Fox Nationalists sourced this ridiculous article to the laughably inept Daily Caller. The author, Patrick Howley, is actually identified as an “Investigative Reporter,” despite his history as a violent right-wing activist who admitted to infiltrating OccupyDC for the purpose of undermining it. Howley also recently alleged an absurd scheme by a media investor to buy up all the gun-related magazines in order to shut them down.

Now that Hat-Gate has been revealed we can concentrate on more important matters like how often the President flosses and whether the First Lady is a Belieber.

Right-Wingers Think Obama Donor Is Buying Up Gun-Related Media To Shut It Down

FERCHRISSAKES!!! I just can’t take it anymore.

There have been a plethora of utterly insane notions floated by cretins on the right that make no rational sense whatsoever. They range from non-existent “death panels,” to FEMA concentration camps, to Kenyan-born presidents, and those are the least deranged among them. Recently the Tea-publicans were aghast at a ridiculous claim that the Department of Homeland Security was stockpiling munitions in preparation to wipe out large swaths of the American population. Seriously, they really believe that.

But now they are venturing further afield into territory that is unexplored by even the most severely hallucinatory meth freaks. An article published on Fox Nation cries “Obama Donor Buying Up and ‘Destroying’ America’s Top Pro-gun Media Outlets.”

Fox Nation

The article is a re-posting from the Daily Caller web site which is run by Fox News contributor Tucker Carlson. It was written by Patrick Howley, someone they identify as an “Investigative Reporter,” despite his history as a violent right-wing activist who admitted to infiltrating OccupyDC for the purpose of undermining it. Howley asserts in his opening paragraph that…

“Employees of Obama donor Leo Hindery Jr.’s media conglomerate Intermedia Partners, which now owns most of the top gun-culture media outlets in the country, believe that Hindery plans to gut and destroy all of them.”

What a perfectly devious plot. Hindery is an investor with more than thirty years in the media business. He has been a significant figure in sports programming, cable television, telecommunications, and other properties that have made him one of America’s wealthiest businessmen. Yet the paranoia-racked brains of conservative dimwits think that he is plotting to “consolidate all of the major pro-Second Amendment media titles in this country, strip them down, and destroy them.” For some reason they think that Hindery has suddenly cast off his mantle of capitalist media baron and is willing to lose millions of dollars in a scheme to deprive magazine readers of titles like “Shooting Times” and “Gun Dog.” That’ll show the NRA. And he and Obama will have a good laugh.

The evidence presented by Howley consists mainly of testimony from anonymous employees who are afraid they are about to be laid off. Imagine that – there are magazines and media companies that are struggling in these digital times and may have to downsize or close. Who knew? Howley also cites the reduction in work at a Minnesota studio that he describes as a “beautiful” facility that had “60 employees, a massive studio, at least nine editing bays and fully-wired machine rooms and was conducting about four studio shoots per year.” Pardon me but, it doesn’t seem like four shoots a year is enough to sustain the studio he just described.

The weakness of the arguments in the article are almost irrelevant when considering that the premise is so bonkers to begin with. This is nothing more than an investment company pulling together assets and then seeking ways to mitigate expenses through operational mergers. There may be a case to be made that such consolidation negatively impacts employees and public choice, but that’s not a case that Republicans ever seem to be concerned about. In fact, they generally defend and celebrate such monopolistic corporate behavior as the workings of the glorious free market. There is nothing here, however, that any sane observer could claim is a plot to deliberately destroy these businesses in league with the Obama administration as an assault on the Second Amendment.

It is just astonishing that people will put stories like this out and expect to have any credibility. They are cognitively numb and running on the fumes of conspiracy theories and delusional psychoses. Their audience must be on feeding tubes waiting for someone to declare them legally brain-dead and pull the plug. And when their businesses fail I’m sure they will have an explanation at hand that blames it all on Obama, George Soros, and eco-terrorists.

Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Case Of The Tea Party Smoke Bomber

If there is still anyone who wonders where Fox News gets the information it publishes, let there be no mistake – They make it up. Take, for instance, this article featured on Fox Nation with the headline, “Occupier (Not a Tea Partier) Throws Smoke Bomb Over White House Fence.”

Fox Nation vs. Reality

The Fox Nationalists linked to an article on their own FoxNews.com about the protest in Washington by Occupy Congress. Nowhere in the article was there any evidence that the smoke bomb was thrown by an Occupy protester. There are no witnesses, no suspects, no statements from the authorities – nothing that implicates a protester.

Nevertheless, Fox makes a declarative statement of fact that the smoke bomb was thrown by an “Occupier.” They also make a similar statement that the smoke bomb was not thrown by a Tea Partier, an assertion for which they also have zero evidence. And we already know that Tea Partiers have conspired to create disruptions at progressive events and blame the progressives. Here are just two verified examples:

Patrick Howley, an assistant editor for the uber-conservative American Spectator magazine, admitted to infiltrating OccupyDC for the purpose of undermining it. He then attempted to lead a group of protesters into storming the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. The protesters, being much smarter than Howley, did not play along. Howley stormed the museum alone and was pepper-sprayed by security.

Mark Williams, former spokesman for Tea Party Express, told his radio listeners that he was planning to sabotage union rallies with the intention of making them look “greedy and goonish.” And he beseeched his listeners to do the same. Williams was the one-time spokesperson for the Tea Party Express, but was dismissed for publishing a virulently racist article on his blog.

Given their history of attempts to implicate Occupiers for crimes they did not commit, it is entirely possible that a Tea Party, or other right-wing activist, was responsible for the smoke bomb. But I’m not leveling any charges because there is no evidence one way or the other. That, however, doesn’t stop Fox from inventing news stories that advance their agenda. Fox News has always been more interested in disseminating propaganda than in upholding ethical standards of journalism.

#OccupyWallStreet Hacked? Andrew Breitbart Publishes Stolen Emails

Andrew BreitbartThe last time Andrew Breitbart got any significant notice in the media was when he publicized the Twitter sexting of former congressman Anthony Weiner. It was a particularly repulsive bit of gossipy sensationalism that furthered no public interest, but ruined a man’s career (and possibly his family), just to satisfy Breitbart’s craving for attention and his obsession with destroying what he calls “the institutional left.”

That was four months ago and Breitbart must be getting antsy about having been ignored by the press ever since. Now, on his BigGoverment web site, he has published an article asking his readers to comb through thousands of emails that he says are from OccupyWallStreet organizers. He claims to have acquired them from Thomas Ryan, a “private cyber security researcher.” Breitbart provides links to download these emails so that his minions can scour them for evidence of “links to socialist, anarchist, and possibly even jihadist organizations.”

This article also appears on Alternet.org.

It’s not bad enough that right-wing media have attempted to portray the Occupy Movement as dirty hippies, lazy freeloaders, ignorant dupes, leftist traitors, godless heathens, diabolical Marxists, violent revolutionaries, and White House plants, Breitbart is adding Al-Qaeda terrorists to this list. If it wasn’t so dangerously provocative it would be moderately humorous. But Breitbart’s accusations are irresponsible and his activities may be illegal. The first paragraph of the story says…

Breitbart: “In keeping with the new media notion of crowdsourcing–enthusiastically embraced by the mainstream media when trawling through Sarah Palin’s emails–Big Government will be providing readers later today with links to a document drop consisting of thousands of emails.”

The correlation Breitbart draws between these emails and those of Sarah Palin is entirely inapplicable. Palin’s emails as governor of Alaska were released through a lawful process that requires communications by government officials to be available to the public. Both the state of Alaska and Palin’s attorneys had an opportunity to examine the emails for any privacy concerns and neither expressed any objection to their release.

Breitbart, however, is publishing emails that were expressly created by individuals for their personal use. They were private communications amongst people who did not grant their publication and were not advised of it. The emails were literally stolen by a hacker who admits that he gained access to them through deception and misrepresentation (social engineering). And Breitbart is now complicit in the crime by publishing the ill-gotten goods with full knowledge of their origins.

[Update: Gawker has more on Thomas Ryan and his “Black Cell” campaign to infiltrate and discredit the movement. Ryan’s activities include forwarding emails to the FBI, the NYPD, and companies targeted for protests.]

Anyone familiar with Breitbart’s Legacy of Sleaze will not be surprised by this latest atrocity. He previously was best known for unfairly smearing ACORN, Shirley Sherrod, and others, with videos that were deliberately edited to produce a false and negative impression.

It should be noted that, thus far, none of the emails that Breitbart or his lackeys have reviewed contain anything remotely embarrassing. That, however, hasn’t stopped him from lifting words like “destabalization” and “unrest” out of context to suggest something more devious than the public protesting that is protected by the Constitution. Breitbart will surely employ such tactics to demonize the movement, just as he did with his attacks on ACORN, etc. It’s hard-coded in his deviant nature.

Even if there are some unsavory comments sprinkled amongst the thousands of emails, they could not plausibly be attributed to the Occupy Movement as a whole because the movement has no leader or authoritative spokesperson. It would just be one person’s opinion. The possibility that someone in a group of passionate dissidents wrote something offensive is not inconceivable. But it is also not official doctrine and cannot honestly be represented as such. The key word there being “honestly.” If Breitbart finds something controversial he will no doubt try to tarnish the movement with the indiscreet remarks of a single, marginally associated individual.

In the telling of this story it must not be forgotten that the emails being reviewed by Breitbart & Co. were obtained in manner that is at least immoral. And this isn’t the only example of such despicable, and possibly unlawful, behavior on the part of right-wing activists.

Patrick Howley, an assistant editor for the uber-conservative American Spectator magazine, admitted to infiltrating OccupyDC for the purpose of undermining it. He then attempted to lead a group of protesters into storming the National Air and Space Museum in Washington. The protesters, being much smarter than Howley, did not play along. Howley stormed the museum alone and was pepper-sprayed by security.

Mark Williams, former spokesman for Tea Party Express, told his radio listeners that he was planning to sabotage union rallies with the intention of making them look “greedy and goonish.” And he beseeched his listeners to do the same. Williams was the one-time spokesperson for the Tea Party Express, but was dismissed for publishing a virulently racist article on his blog.

Mike Vanderboegh, a militiaman from Alabama, encouraged his followers to break the windows of Democratic offices with rocks and baseball bats. More recently Vanderboegh published a Photoshopped picture of Attorney General Eric Holder in a Nazi uniform.

Rush Limbaugh delivered a radio sermon in which he called for riots at the Democratic National Convention. The rant was titled “Screw the World! Riot in Denver!” He was specific in describing his objective as “burning cars, protests, fires, literal riots, and all of that.”

This illustrates just how afraid the right is of the 99% of Americans who are waking up to the injustice and corruption of the 1%. They are increasingly fearful that their free ride is over. When people like Rush Limbaugh call the Wall Street protesters “human debris;” when Glenn Beck asserts that they “will come for you and drag you into the streets and kill you;” it is all too clear that they have lost control of their senses. They are so deranged by fear that there is no limit to the absurdity of their claims and actions.

It also illustrates the sort of desperation that leaves the likes of Breitbart clinging to the hope that he can find damning rhetoric that he can misrepresent in emails that were illicitly acquired. And it isn’t going to end any time soon. This is something that progressives and occupiers are going to have to be aware of as the struggle proceeds. Vigilance of the conservative whack jobs and their media accomplices must be an ongoing focus of the campaign for economic justice.

The Difference Between #OccupyWallStreet And The #TeaParty

As the “Occupy” movement continues to grow and expand across the country, some in the media have been trying to make comparisons between it and the Tea Party. In fairness, there are some similarities. Both are comprised of Americans who are angry about unfairness and corruption in politics and business. But the similarities are mostly on the surface. The differences are far more abundant and disturbing. For instance…

No critic of the Tea Party ever infiltrated it in order to instigate violence as Patrick Howley, an assistant editor for the conservative American Spectator, has admitted doing. He bragged about posing as a protester to “mock and undermine” the movement.

No critic of the Tea Party ever accused the Tea Party of plotting mass murder as Glenn Beck has done – twice. Last week he said that this protesting “leads to gas chambers” and to “millions dead.” This week he claimed that the protesters “will come for you and drag you into the streets and kill you.”

Tea Party SignsNo critic of the Tea Party ever made wild, unsubstantiated assertions as to the motives of Tea Party members. Certainly there was strong opposition based on evidence provided by Tea Party members themselves. Their rhetoric and signage expressed some unsavory opinions. But the Occupy critics are inventing criticisms that they cannot support.

No critic of the Tea Party ever encouraged others to break the windows of Democratic offices with rocks and baseball bats as right-wing militiaman Mike Vanderboegh did.

No critic of the Tea Party ever had their own cable news network to hype their agenda and events. The Occupy movement has had to struggle to get the press to pay them any attention, and when reporters did show up they were hostile and insulting. The Tea Party, of course, had Fox News which literally branded the Tea Party as a part of Fox News and gave them hours of valuable air time. Fox praised Tea Partyers as brave and patriotic, but that’s not how they portray the Occupy protesters:

The Occupy movement has been peaceful and focused on communicating a message of fairness and accountability. It is fighting for the rights of the 99% of Americans who have been rolled over by corrupt corporations and politicians. It is not the beneficiary of dedicated news channels and billionaires with vested interests. Other than that it exactly like the Tea Party.