The New York Times interviewed Andrew Breitbart about the Anthony Weiner affair on Saturday. He attempted to strike a non-partisan tone saying that…
“I am as offended when John Ensign acts like an idiot, when Chris Lee acts like an idiot.”
However, the Times failed to note that Breitbart’s BigGovernment blog did not publish a single story about the travails of either Ensign or Lee. Not one single story. How offended was he?
Compare that to his obsession with Weiner that produced 17 separate stories and consumed every single headline on his masthead (except for the plug for his lame book), and that was four days after the story broke.
Obviously Breitbart was not as offended by the sexcapades of Ensign and Lee as he was about Weiner. He was lying as usual. And as usual the Times, our so-called liberal mainstream media, was clueless and unable to set the record straight. That’s how Breitbart gets away with being a dishonest slug and propagating his horse manure brand of pseudo-journalism.
Today Congressman Anthony Weiner held a press conference where he apologized for his “shameful” personal behavior. He said he was taking full responsibility for what he called “dumb” mistakes that included inappropriate communications on Facebook and Twitter and for lying about it when confronted.
There is no question that Weiner should and will suffer consequences for these serious lapses in judgment. But Weiner isn’t the only character in this morality play. The media must be held accountable for presenting the issue fairly. They must ask themselves whether this story is as critical to the American people as the debate over the debt ceiling, foreign wars and terrorism, and other pending matters of public concern. Of course it is going to be covered, but to what extent, for how long, and what issues will be displaced as a result?
The press must also seek to position it in context to prior similar events. If they raise questions as to whether Weiner, who broke no laws, ought to resign, they should also press GOP Congressman Ken Calvert and Senator David Vitter, both of whom illegally patronized prostitutes.
Another character in this melodrama is Andrew Breitbart who engaged in a bizarre hijacking of the Weiner press conference. He showed up at the hotel and commandeered the podium for nearly twenty minutes. He spent most of that time in a display of self-aggrandizement and bemoaning his victimhood. But if justice is to be served, Breitbart should be required to apologize for his part in disseminating purposefully deceitful videos smearing the reputations of ACORN and former USDA employee, Shirley Sherrod.
Just because Breitbart lucked into being correct (like a broken clock) doesn’t mean that his pattern of deception should be dismissed. Charles Manson can honestly testify that he had nothing to do with the death of Marilyn Monroe, but that doesn’t absolve him from his participation in other atrocities. Breitbart deserves no accolades over this, and he still owes the people he deliberately harmed an apology. Weiner, at least, was man enough to own up to his mistakes, eventually. If Breitbart exploits this matter for his own gain, I predict it will backfire on Republicans, simply because Breitbart is such a repulsive figure that he will produce more disgust than support.
The tabloid circus surrounding this is going to heat up for a few days. Smarmy, holier-than-thou martinets of virtue will speak out while hypocritically suppressing information that reflects poorly on themselves. Glenn Beck, not surprisingly, has leaped to the front of that line, spending the opening minutes of his program railing against Weiner. And equally unsurprising, Beck failed to note that he previously was engaged in a public feud with Weiner over investigations into the corrupt practices of his sponsor, Goldline. Again, Weiner’s misbehavior does not absolve Beck or Goldline of their own malfeasance.
Let’s see if we can get through the next week without ignoring some of the serious matters that face our nation. We have to address the budget and the Republican threat to Medicare. We have to deal with unemployment, energy, the environment, and funding for programs like education and infrastructure. Our country has a lot on its plate that is more important than the overactive libido of a New York congressman. Will we rise to that challenge?
Ben Shapiro’s “Primetime Propaganda” is a book that perfectly epitomizes the rightist paranoia about liberal bogeymen under our beds, in our closets, and, most of all, on our TV sets. The book is promoted as…
“The inside story of how the most powerful medium of mass communication in human history has become a propaganda tool for the Left.”
In the book published by Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins, Shapiro claims to have interviewed Hollywood’s most important power players and gotten them to admit that they have been secretly inserting their subversive messages into popular programs for decades. But his work is decidedly one-sided and he takes great pride in the obvious. For instance. the revelation that MASH had an anti-war theme is not exactly earth-shattering and it hardly exposes a liberal conspiracy. However, he presents it as a triumph of investigative journalism.
In a defensive posting on Andrew Breitbart’s BigJournalism, Shapiro complains about the criticism his book has received. He is dismayed that critics allegedly focused on the parts referencing Sesame Street, but then proceeds to bash Sesame Street for the remainder of the posting.
According to his own defense, Sesame Street is awash in propaganda. For instance, they broadcast segments teaching kids about divorce. He apparently thinks that subject has no relevance to kids today. The program also aired segments after 9/11 about peaceful conflict resolution. Shapiro asserts that these were designed to steer kids away from retaliating against terrorists, when the more likely purpose was to illustrate how wrong the actions of the terrorists were. Then Shapiro whines about everything from teaching kids not to beat up other kids of different cultures, to using gender-neutral language like firefighter or flight attendant. If that is evidence of leftist indoctrination, then Shapiro is implying that rightists support cross-cultural fights amongst children.
What doesn’t seem to be acknowledged in Shapiro’s book is that the vast majority of television programs in the period of time his research encompasses were far from being dogmatically left-wing. There were more police dramas and westerns than any other genre of program. Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and The Waltons, or Dragnet, Magnum P.I., and 24, were not exactly peddling liberal doctrine. Nor were the iconic sitcoms from Andy Griffith, The Golden Girls, or Frasier. Why didn’t Shapiro interview people from those shows to ascertain whether they were planting conservative opinions in their programs?
Even worse, Shapiro is attempting to position this book as a scholarly investigation into historical television practices and philosophies. But he provides no historical context whatsoever to support his obviously predetermined conclusions. He lumps shows like The Partridge Family, Happy Days, and Family Ties, into the liberal cabal that “took over your TV,” but fails to note that those years were mostly dominated by Republican presidents and conservative culture. It was the heart of the era that saw the rise of the Reagan Revolution, the Moral Majority, and the Christian Coalition. If the purpose of these pinko TV executives was to reshape America in their leftist image, they failed miserably. Yet Shapiro insists that this was their purpose and that they succeeded in turning America into a socialist state.
For the record, Shapiro is the Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an ultra-conservative organization whose mission is to “combat the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values and disarm this country.” Shapiro was interviewed about the book by Horowitz’s Front Page Magazine who called him “a courageous defender of our civilization – and such a brave soldier on the frontlines in our culture war.”
Shapiro’s previous books were Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth, and Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future. He recently penned an article for CNSNews, a division of the rabidly right-wing Media Research Center, wherein he castigated Jews who support President Obama as…
“Jews in name only. They eat bagels and lox; they watch ‘Schindler’s List’; they visit temple on Yom Kippur – sometimes. But they do not care about Israel. Or if they do, they care about it less than abortion, gay marriage and global warming.”
That exclusionary and insulting diatribe suggests that the Jews are such a shallow people that they are incapable of caring about more than one thing at a time, particularly if it’s about the rights and well being of others. And Shapiro neglects to disclose who designated him as the Jewish certification authority.
Shapiro is a part of the conservative campaign to assault the media and popular culture, and he is tightly integrated with the leaders of that campaign. David Horowitz’s Freedom Center began as the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in 1988 to “establish a conservative presence in Hollywood.” Andrew Breitbart, who runs both the BigJournalism and BigHollywood blogs, wrote in his recent autobiographical book, “Righteous Indignation,” that…
“The biggest point I wanted to make was one I’m still making: Hollywood is more important than Washington. It can’t be overstated how important this message is: the pop culture matters.”
This is a coordinated attack on the creative community that has long been a target of the right-wing martinets of virtue. They demonstrated their hostility for the arts when they orchestrated congressional hearings and blacklists against Hollywood in the 1940’s and 1950s. And they are demonstrating it today as they seek to defund public radio and television, as well as arts institutions like the National Endowment for the Arts. Their censorious mission is reflected in attacks on movies like Avatar and rappers like Common. It is ingrained in the works of the secret society of Hollywood conservatives, the Friends of Abe. They recognize the power in creative expression and they are determined to either hijack it or shut it down. That’s why Shapiro et al are so adamant about silencing overt propaganda like this alarming segment from Sesame Street that he explicitly rebuked for advancing a gay/liberal agenda:
Do you feel gayer or more liberal yet? Shapiro’s new book appears to be the literary equivalent of James O’Keefe’s dishonest video ambushes. Shapiro taped conversations with his subjects and is releasing them without having obtained permission to do so. Of course, he certainly won’t release any tapes that exhibit ideological fairness or otherwise don’t fit his agenda. And, as noted above, we won’t be seeing any comments from producers of the far more numerous conservative-themed programs that reveal their own biases. There is no way of knowing whether the tapes were edited in misleading ways, as the right is prone to doing – particularly the Breitbart right. And notice to whom Shapiro ran first to whine about being criticized.
Expect to see Shapiro making the Fox News rounds with an already announced appearance on Sean Hannity’s show. Watch as he shamelessly bashes the broader media even as he exploits it. And sadly, like a victim of spousal abuse, the media will forgive him and beg him not to go. His Murdoch-published book will get plenty of play from Fox News, the rightist blogosphere, and conservative talk radio as he laments the imagined prevalence of left-wing media. How ironic.
There has not been a more obvious case of penile obsession than that exhibited by Andrew Breitbart and the pervs at Fox Nation. Since the non-story about Anthony Weiner’s alleged Twitter escapade, these alleged “news” sources have maintained a frenzied focus on it. Despite the utter lack of verifiable evidence, the Fox Nationalists have posted FOURTEEN articles on the subject:
That’s fourteen separate articles on this one issue that hardly compares to the urgency of other matters currently in the news cycle. The second most reported story on Fox Nation, with two whole articles, was the Palin/Trump pizza summit. They sure know their priorities.
As for Andrew Breitbart, he puts Fox Nation to shame. It has now been four days since the story broke and Breitbart’s BigGovernment blog still features it in a big way. In fact, EVERY SINGLE HEADLINE on the site is Weiner-related. There is no other story (with the exception of Breitbart’s lame book) that warrants a headline on that pseudo-news site.
I know these weasels live to smear their liberal adversaries, but this ridiculous. When Americans are desperate for information about pressing issues concerning jobs, the economy, health and Medicare, and national security, the rightist media is glued to titillating irrelevancies. Weiner is one Congressman from New York who is not even a member of the Democratic leadership. He is in a heavily Democratic district that would likely elect another Democrat if the worst case scenario were to occur and he left office. The GOP has little to gain from hyping this other than to remind people of the verifiable incidents of Republican malfeasance in office.
So why are they doing it? Because they are being hurt so badly by their own news that they are desperate for a distraction. Their presidential candidates are a laughing stock, even amongst Republicans. And their budget plan that kills Medicare is unpopular with every sector of the electorate, including conservatives and Tea Partiers. They are in a rapid meltdown and they think that this will save them. Thus the fixation that blots out every other news story for these losers. Pathetic.
Committed news junkies this morning are following a ludicrous story about New York Congressman Anthony Weiner. I’m not getting into it now because at this point there is nothing substantive to report. There are only salacious accusations with no proof whatsoever.
What I will get into is the fact that Andrew Breitbart, the notoriously dishonest purveyor of right-wing lies and propaganda who has been caught disseminating slanderous videos that were proven to be faked, has now expanded his field into porn and the yellowest of journalism. Here is a screen capture of the top of his BigGovernment web site:
Note that every single story is on one subject – the alleged Weiner controversy that Breitbart himself invented. (Well, there is one exception – an ad for Breitbart’s thoroughly dishonest book). Apparently Breitbart considers this non-story more important than any other news story on the planet. There is literally no other story worthy of covering than this one. Not the presidential campaign. Not the congressional vote on raising the debt ceiling. Not the tornadoes in the Mid-West. Not the War on Terror. Nothing.
Breitbart’s desperation to hoist a fake scandal on his dimwitted readers is palpable. Seriously – EVERY SINGLE HEADLINE! It exposes Breitbart as obsessed with advancing his slander. And to make matters worse, Breitbart went on CNN this morning (shame on CNN) and talked about “relationships that Congressman Weiner has been having with women, young women…” That despicable quote was wholly unsupported by even the flimsiest of facts. Breitbart even tried to qualify it later, after he had already set it loose into the mediasphere. He knows very well that that’s all it takes to set ignorant tongues wagging, and that was his intention. His whole existence is reliant on the slobbering imbeciles who live for dirt on their liberal adversaries and don’t care if it’s real or manufactured.
The press has to recognize that Breitbart has zero credibility. How many incidents have to arise where he is proven to have fabricated videos, documents, and testimony, before the media stops treating him as if he were their peer? It’s just embarrassing to see them sully themselves by cozying up to this dirtbag. It has got to stop.
How Hollywood Drove Andrew Breitbart To The Mad Hater’s Tea Party
Andrew Breitbart just released his new book, “Righteous Indignation,” that opens a window into his innermost impulses and ambitions. It reveals the complex circuitry of his character that succeeds in being both self-loathing and Narcissistic. Breitbart takes us on his journey from unrequited Hollywood wannabe to Tea Party overlord and along the way establishes that his book might better have been titled “Noxious Irritation.” If anything, his indignation is aimed at a community that he desperately wanted to be a part of, but which wanted nothing to do with him.
Growing up in the Tinseltown suburb of Brentwood, Breitbart developed an early obsession with show business and celebrity. He writes with a palpable glee of having had the same tennis instructor as Farrah Fawcett and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The most trivial association with stardom sent him twirling, as when his family, “once rented out our motor home to John Ritter from Three’s Company. I bragged about it in school for weeks.” But despite his glamorous aspirations, the first forty pages of the book describe a young man seething with self-hatred. And judging from his own account it was deserved. He paints a picture of himself as an ignorant, alcoholic, loser.
Adam Carolla hates Los Angeles. He says so fervently and repeatedly in his latest podcast. It is a vulgarity-laced rant that excoriates Latinos, unions, and liberal celebrities and politicians. And his guest for the hour is the chronically choleric Andrew Breitbart who agrees with every word. To illustrate his hatred, Carolla offers this story, wherein he exposes his overt prejudice and ignorance:
Carolla: On one side of the stretch of Forest Lawn Drive are all the illegals. And they hang out there and they sell flowers to people who are going to Forest Lawn [Cemetery]. And, of course, next to where they’re selling all their stuff is trash. Trash everywhere. Fast food wrappers from the food they eat. Boxes from the boxes they use and then discard. There’s no trash cans put along there. It’s a bunch of illegals, standing around, selling things without a license, without permits, without anything.
Of course, Carolla has no idea whether the entrepreneurs he saw were documented or not. He didn’t pull over and ask to see any ID or business permits. He simply spewed his racist rage based on their appearance alone. That is racism by definition.
Andrew Breitbart wholeheartedly agrees with Carolla’s assessment of Los Angeles and its people, calling all of California “the suckiest place.” He tells Carolla that his views would help him were he to be a Republican candidate for office. That’s probably true. Then Breitbart offers a preemptive defense against any well-deserved accusations of racism:
Breitbart: If you tell the truth … You’re not allowed to say that story. If Media Matters or some left-wing group were to take what you just said, I guarantee they would distill it down to “This guy’s a racist.” They’re not listening to the logic in it.
Considered it distilled by this left-winger. Breitbart likes to complain about being called a racist, but he hasn’t yet figured out that the best way to avoid that is to stop being one. The entirety of the logic in Carolla’s rant comes down to “brown skin = illegal.” Breitbart also defended himself against charges of racism by confessing that, as a teenager, he jacked-off to pictures of Maria Conchita Alonso and Lisa Bonet. Yeah, that proves it. Even Carolla saw the disgusting fallacy of that remark:
Breitbart: Can I prove that I’m not a racist toward Hispanics? Did you ever see Moscow on the Hudson? Remember Maria Conchita Alonso in that? The things I did to myself as a teenager prove that I’m not a racist.
Carolla: But you’re like one of those plantation owners who’s having sex with their slaves.
They just laughed that one off and proceeded to imagine how much better things would be if they moved to Texas or New Zealand to get away from the more ethnically diverse culture of Southern California. The whole hour was a display of small-minded bigotry and crass attempts at humor. It’s the sort of show that thinks that calling Congresswoman Maxine Waters a cunt is funny.
I don’t listen to Carolla’s program, and suffice it to say I’m not going to be rushing to join his current audience of putrid preteens and grossly immature adults like Breitbart. But in the future I may pay more attention to his venomous spewing so that he can be exposed as the vile bigot that he is.
Jon Lovitz used to have a character on Saturday Night live known a the “pathological liar.” He would simply make up things to impress his associates and, as he settled on the perfect deceit, would exclaim, “Yeah, that’s the ticket.”
Andrew Breitbart has taken this notion to new levels. His capacity for dishonesty is boundless and entirely devoid of shame. The latest episode in his recurring series of video lie-fests takes place at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. The video posted at his BigGovernment blog shows a professor and a guest lecturer engaged in a discussion that includes statements that imply they are advocating violence on behalf of labor interests. “Yeah, that’s the ticket.” The only problem with this expose is that, like just about everything else Breitbart does, it isn’t true.
Judy Ancel, Director of Labor Studies at UMKC, is the professor in the video. She responded to Breitbart’s smear in an email with several examples of how Breitbart fiddled with the content to deliberately convey a meaning that did not exist in reality. For instance, she writes…
Breitbart is a master of taking quotes out of context, deletion of what doesn’t serve his purpose, and remixing to achieve totally different meaning. For example he has me saying:
o Breitbart’s version: “Violence is a tactic and it’s to be used when it’s the appropriate tactic.”
o The real version: After students had watched a film on the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike and the assassination of Martin Luther King, they were discussing nonviolence. I said, “One guy in the film. . . said ‘violence is a tactic, and it’s to be used when it’s the appropriate tactic.’. . . ” The class proceeded to discuss and debate this.
It is apparent that Ancel was quoting somebody in the film, not expressing her own views. This is typical of Breitbart and his ilk. It is the point I was making when I posted this video of Glenn Beck admitting that he idolizes Adolf Hitler:
Media Matters has some of the obviously manipulated video as well as the uncut versions that reveal Breitbart’s purposeful deception.
This project has all the earmarks of Breitbart’s modus operandi. It is precisely what he did to Shirley Sherrod. It is the very same tactics he used against ACORN, along with his protege, James O’Keefe. However, there are no credits for the video other than the name “Insurgent Visuals.” It’s odd that no one would want to take credit for what they must regard as a brilliant piece of investigative journalism.
However, after some investigation of my own, I discovered that Insurgent Visuals has a web site. Surely there would be some indication of who was responsible for this story. Nope. Just a short statement on their “About” page saying “We are a small collective of motivated political actionists intent on changing the world.” They are also intent on hiding their identity.
So I continued my investigation and discovered that Insurgent Visuals also had at one time a blog at BlogSpot. The blog was no longer available, but I was able to access it via Google’s cache. Once there I noticed that the blog’s contributors were Bruce Bronson, and some guy named — James O’Keefe! Who’da thunk it? So O’Keefe, a well-known lying video manipulator may have had an invisible hand in Breitbart’s new anonymous smear campaign. He’s certainly the guy I would call if I wanted to produce a phony videotaped assault on someone.
Prof. Ancel’s response to the video is worth reading in full. It outlines the dishonesty that Breitbart perpetuated as well as her outrage at having the privacy of her students violated and the forum for free expression in the classroom replaced with a chilling mood of fear and distrust. The email in full follows:
Last week the feud between conservative stalwarts Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson became public in a big way with Carlson’s web site citing numerous rightist pundits who claim that Beck has plagiarized them. Beck shot back accusing his critics of jealousy.
Andrew Breitbart was one of those cited in Carlson’s story. Today Breitbart upped the ante by telling the New York Observer that Beck “threw me under the bus” during the Shirley Sherrod affair when Sherrod was defamed as a racist in a deceptively edited video. Breitbart reveals that Beck had worked with him in the preparation and editing of the video.
Breitbart: Next thing I know, I’m under complete attack without the support of Glenn Beck, who I thought was somebody I could count on.
This is a startling revelation. First it’s an admission that there was an intent to misrepresent Sherrod in the video, something that Breitbart has previously denied. And it also casts Beck as a co-conspirator. This is significant because Beck has tried to portray himself as someone who had rejected the Sherrod video when it was first released by Breitbart.
Beck: We defended her and said her side of the story demanded to be heard – because context matters. That’s how we do things.
Not exactly. First of all, Beck only defended Sherrod on his afternoon television program after the video hoax had been revealed. On his radio show that morning he castigated her saying that we “have video tape of a USDA administration official discriminating against white farmers.”
So Beck participated in the dishonest editing of the video with Breitbart, used his morning radio show to promote the phony clip that he helped to create, and by the time his TV show aired later the same day, and the bottom had dropped out of the story, he pretends to be pristine and unaffiliated as he defends the poor victim of Breitbart’s slander and the White House’s knee-jerk over-reaction.
Hannah Giles, the partner of right-wing propagandist James O’Keefe, who assumed the role of a prostitute in a series of videos designed to smear ACORN, is very upset about a documentary that she says intends to “shape a narrative that will change public opinion through the use of deception.” This critique will surely go down in the Annals of Irony with Colonel Sanders’ denunciation of animal cruelty.
Giles has taken to Andrew Breitbart’s BigHollywood blog to post a scathing critique of a documentary set to air on PBS’s POV series this fall. It’s called “Better This World” and PBS describes it as…
“The story of Bradley Crowder and David McKay, who were accused of intending to firebomb the 2008 Republican National Convention, is a dramatic tale of idealism, loyalty, crime and betrayal. Better This World follows the radicalization of these boyhood friends from Midland, Texas, under the tutelage of revolutionary activist Brandon Darby. The results: eight homemade bombs, multiple domestic terrorism charges and a high-stakes entrapment defense hinging on the actions of a controversial FBI informant. Better This World goes to the heart of the war on terror and its impact on civil liberties and political dissent in post-9/11 America.”
I haven’t seen this documentary and cannot comment on its presentation or accuracy. But I do find it ironic that Breitbart chose Giles to articulate this preemptive hit piece. It was Giles who gave birth to the ACORN project. She worked closely with O’Keefe to produce a video crockumentary that has since been proven to have been deliberately edited in order to embarrass its subjects and destroy the reputation of an organization they considered to be a political enemy.
Giles is, therefore, poorly suited to be a custodian of journalistic virtue. The only contribution she can offer this discussion is her intimate, personal knowledge of how to produce a dishonest work of fiction and present it as fact. To demonstrate her skill in this area she misrepresents the comments of the two filmmakers by juxtaposing answers to two completely different questions and reversing their chronological order to give the impression that they were related. Then Giles contends that this mash up was an admission on the filmmakers part to falsifying the narrative. Hannah sure knows her stuff.
In addition to the ironic absurdity of relying on someone like Giles to defend documentary integrity, Breitbart commits the sin of failing to disclose a glaring conflict of interest. The “revolutionary activist Brandon Darby,” who is an integral part of the story in the PBS doc, also happens to be a contributor to Breitbart’s web site. But rather than have Darby author his own first-person account of the events, Breitbart hands the job to Giles and nobody mentions Darby’s connection. They are, in effect, disparaging a documentary that they believe is unflattering to one of their associates without disclosing the association.
This is typical of Breitbart’s modus operandi: Lash out viciously at perceived enemies while accusing them of heinous acts that he engages in himself. You have to admire the audacity of Breitbart and Giles stepping up to accuse others of misleadingly editing film. These people have made lying an art form.
In a defensive posting on Andrew Breitbart’s BigJournalism, Shapiro complains about the criticism his book has received. He is dismayed that critics allegedly focused on the parts referencing Sesame Street, but then proceeds to bash Sesame Street for the remainder of the posting.
Andrew Breitbart just released his new book, 
Jon Lovitz used to have a character on Saturday Night live known a the “pathological liar.” He would simply make up things to impress his associates and, as he settled on the perfect deceit, would exclaim, “Yeah, that’s the ticket.”
Hannah Giles, the partner of right-wing propagandist James O’Keefe, who assumed the role of a prostitute in a series of videos designed to smear ACORN, is very upset about a documentary that she says intends to “shape a narrative that will change public opinion through the use of deception.” This critique will surely go down in the Annals of Irony with Colonel Sanders’ denunciation of animal cruelty.