It's Happening Again...

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

I tell you, this stupid “Emailgate” scandal may finally be the thing that drives me into the Hillary Clinton camp. As I’ve written several times, I’m not a huge fan of Mrs. Clinton, because she’s always come across to me as Republican Lite: all the corporate harlotry and knee-jerk hawkishness, but without the deranged raving about “legitimate rape,” gay marriage leading to bestiality, and Ebola-carrying Mexican immigrants with “thighs like cantaloupes” from toting huge bags of drugs.

All that said, I’ve frequently found myself, almost in spite of myself, rising to defend Hillary Clinton because of the sheer ridiculousness of the attacks on her from the right-wing propaganda complex, aka the national political media.

Last time she ran for president, we had the usual Very Serious Right Wing Pundits ruminating on whether Hillary was showing too much cleavage and whether or not she left a tip at a Midwestern “loose-meat” diner (whether she did or not, the Very Serious Right Wing Pundits didn’t like it).

Then, when she was secretary of state, those same Very Serious Pundits asked very seriously if she might be faking a blood clot to avoid testimony about the Benghazi murders — testimony she gave when she recovered (and which the Very Serious Pundits then mangled and misrepresented in shameful and dishonest fashion).

Now we’re supposed to get all aghast over the fact that — hang on to your hats, folks — when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used a personal email account! From a server in her own home! OMG (as the youths on the Interwebs say), she may very well have violated the Federal Records Act of 1950! Or regulations from the National Archives! Or something!

Never mind the fact that the change in the FRA to include “electronic communications” was signed in November 2014, after Clinton had already left, on Feb. 1, 2013. Never mind the fact that new regulations from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) regarding personal email use by government officials didn’t go out until September of that year.

Never mind the fact that Colin Powell used a personal email account when he was secretary of state because, like most government email systems, the “official” one was years behind the times and frustrating to use (according to interviews with General Powell).

Never mind that two months ago (before this phony “scandal” even broke), Clinton aides turned over 55,000 pages of work-related emails to the State Department for archiving.

Never mind that, after the State Department reviews them to make sure there’s no classified material, the emails in their possession will be posted online.

No, this is all just more evidence that “proves” the prevailing narrative of how “secretive” and “non-transparent” the Clintons are, and how they feel they’re “above the rules.” Because nothing says “secretive” like turning over 55,000 pages of your email to be posted online, and nothing says “I feel like I’m above the rules” like violating a rule that wasn’t in place when you were in office.

But surely there’s something juicy in the “personal” stuff she didn’t turn over. There’s undoubtedly a smoking gun about Benghazi in the emails between Hillary and the caterer for her daughter’s wedding. (“We decided to go with the white roses for the centerpieces, and BTW, I totally knew about the attack days in advance and did nothing because I hate America and wanted the ambassador to die. BWAHAHAHAHA. Hugs, HRC.”)

Is it irresponsible to speculate? As right-wing pundit Peggy Noonan once said about a particularly ludicrous rumor involving President Bill Clinton, it would be irresponsible not to. That, after all, is the standard used by our so-called liberal media for all things Clinton.

Our national political reportage has become an outright disgrace. Those outlets that aren’t blatant mouthpieces for the far right have become like particularly stupid hound dogs, dutifully chasing whatever manufactured “scandal of the week” gets ginned up by Drudge and Faux News, until actual analysis causes it to fall apart and they’re left chasing their tails in confusion. At least until next time, when the same moronic canines go baying off into the same woods because some right-wing blogger who’s off his meds points and yells, “Rabbit!”

In 1992, I got off the fence, put aside my misgivings about Bill Clinton, and threw my support behind him in large part because of the meanness, general blockheadedness, and pettiness of the forces arrayed against him.

I may have had my doubts, but I’d seen the Republican National Convention, and I knew I wanted nothing to do with those people, because they were bat-spit crazy. In 2015, it seems that history is repeating itself across the national media stage.

So I guess what I’m saying is that, once again, I’ve finally joined Team Clinton. Good job.

Is Hillary Clinton a Replicant? Some Say Yes, Some Say No...

You know, if I was to tell you in these pages that a Republican politician was contesting his loss in a primary election on the grounds that his victorious opponent was, in fact, dead and being impersonated by a synthetic body double, you’d probably roll your eyes and go “he’s gone too far this time. That doesn’t even work as satire.” 

Well, maybe it doesn’t, but it’s actually true. In Oklahoma’s 3d District, Timothy Ray Murray, whose website [now taken down] describes him as a “human, born in Oklahoma,” got himself roundly shellacked in the primary by the incumbent, Rep Frank Lucas, with Murray taking a mere 5.2% of the vote to Lucas’ 82.8%. You’d think this would be a knockout blow to Murray’s campaign “to help bring House leadership back to traditional values.” But wait, Murray says, not so fast. “It is widely known,” Murray asserts in a press release addressed to “News Person”, that “Rep. Frank D. Lucas is no longer alive and has been displayed [sic] by a look alike.” Poor Frank met his end, it seems, on a “white stage” in Southern Ukraine, where he and “a few other Oklahoma and other States’ Congressional Members” were executed by hanging at the hands of (of course) The World Court. This rendered Lucas ineligible to serve on account of being, as noted above, dead.  

This is not the sort of thing a “traditional values” guy like Murray is going to take lying down. “I will NEVER,” he promises, “use Artificial Intelligence look alike [sic] to voice what The Representative’s Office is not doing nor own a robot look alike.” Well, I know I’m reassured. 

In truth, Timothy Ray Murray may have done a huge favor for the Raving Nutter Wing of the Republican Party (aka “the base”). Now that birtherism has been thoroughly discredited except in the heads of a few sad dead-enders and the grifters who prey on them, maybe the GOP can embrace “make the Democratic candidate prove she’s not a replicant” as their pet lunacy for the next couple of years. 

It can start, as such madness often does, on the Internet. A few well-placed posts on a few fringe cites claiming that, say, Hillary Clinton’s “fall in the shower” in December 2012 was actually fatal and that she’s been replaced by a vat-grown flesh-droid with the personalities of Saul Alinsky, Huey P. Newton, and Bill Ayers (preserved on floppy disk by Steve Jobs in 1995) downloaded into its blank consciousness. Gradually, the idea will percolate upwards to the slightly less nutty environs of the right-wing blogosphere, like National Review Online, where someone will observe “of course, Hillary Clinton could just dispel the rumors by providing a DNA sample.” 

After that, it’ll snowball. Fox News will soon be running show after show, with the usual endless parade of outrage-mongers looking into the camera with brows furrowed and demanding “Where’s the DNA?” 

Finally, Clinton will make the mistake of knuckling under and actually providing a sample. Then the blood, so to speak, will really be in the water. Overnight a few dozen self-appointed DNA experts will flood the Internet, insisting that the test is a fake, because, I don’t know, the streaks on the test card are the wrong shade of gray on their computer monitors or something. Nothing will do to prove Clinton’s humanity, the GOP will say, but full genome sequencing. “I’m not saying that Mrs. Clinton is really a replicant,” they’ll say piously, “but I’d like to see the sequencing of all of her chromosomal DNA as well as DNA contained in the mitochondria.” It won’t matter that that’s something that none of them will have never heard of before the brouhaha. Angry Tea Partiers (as if there are any other kind) will show up at Town Hall meetings with an American flag in one hand and a bag of disreputable looking goo in the other, raging at insufficiently crazy public officials:  "I have a DNA sample here that says I’m human! Why are you people ignoring the chromosomal DNA!?” before they drown out the response by singing “God Bless America.” Finally, Clinton will grit her teeth and undergo the procedure—the results of which will also be denounced as fake by “DNA experts” who failed high school chemistry. And the beat will go on…

Too crazy, you say? Could never happen, you say? I would have said that about birtherism, until it described pretty much the same arc I’ve laid out above. If there’s one thing researching this column has taught me, it’s that there is literally no theory too outlandish for wingnuts and their captive media to promote from fringe to mainstream and no evidence that they’ll accept to refute it. It could happen here…

Dusty Rhoades lives, writes, and practices law in Carthage. 

White Crime: Where's the Celebrity Outrage?

Latest Newspaper Column:  The Pilot 

George Zimmerman was acquitted of the charge of murdering unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin by a jury of his peers. You would think that, for at least a little while, that verdict might calm the resentment and incessant claims of victimhood by some of my fellow white Americans.

You’d think that. But you’d be wrong.

Certain members of the most privileged race in the most privileged society on this planet just don’t seem to be happy unless they’re pretending to be members of an oppressed class.

The most recent and most noxious manifestation of this is the way they’ve begun treating every crime involving an African-American or Latino. “Why doesn’t President Obama (or Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson) comment on (insert name of crime here)?” they grouse. “He talked about the Trayvon Martin case!” — as if the fact that the president commented on one case that had an emotional effect on him now requires him, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to form a Special Black Flying Squad to jet to the scene of literally every murder in the country and deplore it.

Take, for instance, the tragic case of Chris Lane, the college student and baseball star from Australia who was gunned down Aug. 16 by three teenagers in Oklahoma. This was a horrific and senseless act, made even more so by one of the shooters’ flippant “explanation” that they did it because they were “bored” and “didn’t have anything to do.”

Sadly, just as they did with the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens, the American right wing didn’t even wait till the body was cold before they began making hay of the tragedy for political points.

“Where is Obama’s statement about Chris Lane?” asked an Aug. 26 front page article on the conservative website Real Clear Politics. Also on Aug. 26, both Sean Hannity and Fox News hostess Martha MacCallum of “America’s Newsroom” questioned why Obama had “failed to speak out” and accused him of a “double standard” since he’d dared to comment on the Martin case. Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin said on “Fox News Sunday” that it would be a “nice gesture” if Obama would express condolences.

Well, as it turned out, he already had. “As the president has expressed on too many tragic occasions,” an official White House statement released Aug. 24 said, “there is an extra measure of evil in an act of violence that cuts a young life short. The president and first lady’s thoughts and prayers are with Chris Lane’s family and friends in these trying times.”

Not that you saw or heard that on Faux News. Nor is there any chance that such a statement, even with its mention of an “extra level of evil,” will placate the haters. Nothing will. The president could dress in sackcloth, sit in the ashes, and renounce his status as an African-American, and it still wouldn’t be enough self-abasement to satisfy those suffering from Obama Derangement Syndrome.

It’s not that they’re racist, you see; it’s just that the fact that the president once mentioned that he’s a black man, too, causes them to lose their freaking minds whenever they think about it.

By the way, I’m sure Chris Lane’s family is deeply moved by the right’s heartfelt concern for them, expressed as it was in their immediate use of their family member as the poster child for white butthurt.

Later, it turned out that one of the three teenagers charged in the killing is white, which raises the question: Which white celebrity is responsible for speaking out against whites killing people? After all, if black politicians and celebrities are required to comment on every murder involving a black suspect, shouldn’t the same apply to white suspects? Who is responsible for deploring them?

I nominate washed-up rocker Ted Nugent. Since Mitt Romney avidly courted the support of the talent who gave us such musical gems as “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang” and “Yank Me Crank Me,” and since the Nuge has announced that he himself has considered running for the GOP presidential nomination, I think only he has the gravitas and the Republican street cred to be called upon to weigh in every time a white person is involved in a crime.

After all, like the president, he did comment extensively on the Trayvon Martin case, calling Martin a “gangsta wannabe” who “got justice.”

That’s the criteria, right? Comment on the Martin case, and you become responsible for commenting on every crime committed that involves a member of your race from then on. So c’mon, Nuge. Speak up about the white guy. I mean, fair’s fair. Right?

Get It Now, Get It First, Get It Wrong, Redux

Latest Newspaper Column:

One of the most aggravating features of our multi-network, Twitter-driven, twenty-four-hour news cycle is something that invariably happens in the wake of a horrible event like last week’s bombing at the Boston Marathon: driven to get something, anything, out there, the cable news channels, the airwaves, and the Twitterverse became veritable fountains of misinformation. Apparently, the old journalistic principle that you didn’t go live with something unless you’d verified it with at least two sources is as dead as Walter Cronkite. Now what they report on is what’s been “reported,” whether or not said “report” is actually true or even from a credible source. Hey, they’re not lying. All they’re saying is that someone else said it. Such is the sorry state of “journalism” today. 

So in the aftermath of the carnage, unsubstantiated rumors and gossip became “reports”, which were breathlessly passed on but which quickly became discarded as new and more lurid rumors took center stage. The device was a pipe bomb. There were two other devices found that hadn’t exploded. No, three. Twelve people were dead, among them an eight year old girl who’d come to see her Daddy run the marathon. A Saudi national had been arrested running from the scene. And, of course, before the echoes of the blasts had died down and the wounded were still bleeding in the streets of Boston, conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones of the online nuthouse Infowars were proclaiming that the whole thing was a government conspiracy. (When an Infowars “reporter” asked if the bombing was a “false flag operation to take away our civil liberties,” Governor Deval Patrick’s three-word response was a lesson in how to handle stupid questions: “No. Next question.”)

The wave of BS reached a crescendo on Wednesday when CNN said there were “reports” that a suspect had been identified. Then there were “reports” that there was a suspect in custody. Then there were “reports” that there wasn’t. Finally, the Boston FBI office released a statement refuting the story: “Contrary to widespread reporting, no arrest has been made in connection with the Boston Marathon attack.” Once can almost hear the exasperation as the release goes on to say: “Over the past day and a half, there have been a number of press reports based on information from unofficial sources that has been inaccurate. Since these stories often have unintended consequences, we ask the media, particularly at this early stage of the investigation, to exercise caution and attempt to verify information through appropriate official channels before reporting.” 

Yeah, good luck with that. 

The part about “unintended consequences” brings to mind one of the most pernicious effects of misinformation: if you say one thing today, and say something different tomorrow, there are thousands of the above-mentioned conspiracy theorists out there who’ll insist that the correction was not an attempt to set the record straight, but is part of a cover-up. For example, after the Newtown massacre, one incorrect MSNBC report that killer Adam Lanza (originally misidentified as his brother Ryan) had left his Bushmaster semi-automatic mass murder weapon in his car is still being seized on to this day by callous gun nuts to “prove” that the government is lying about assault weapons to promote the “gun control agenda.” Of course, these are the same people who won’t believe anything else ever reported on MSNBC, but you can’t expect consistency from crazy people. 

Sure enough, as soon as it was revealed that the “Saudi national” who was supposedly taken into custody was being questioned as a witness, not a suspect, commenters at the right wing website “the Blaze” were proclaiming that the President was “protecting his Muslim brothers.” 

I know we can’t forbid news organizations from spreading misinformation (darn that pesky First Amendment!). But there ought to be some kind of required warning label on all the crap the news media spreads in the immediate aftermath of a horrible crisis. Something like a disclaimer in the ubiquitous “crawl” running across the bottom of the screen: “Warning: thanks to the near-total erosion of journalistic standards, the so-called ‘information’ you are receiving in this broadcast may be based on rumor, half-truth, prejudice, completely unfounded speculation, or the person on-screen just pulling allegations out of their rear end because they have nothing solid to report but don’t want to just stand there looking like a goober.” If we’re going to be so consistently misinformed by our media, we should at least be informed of that fact.

Dusty Rhoades lives, writes, and practices law in Carthage.

No More Clown Questions, Bro (UPDATED)

Latest Newspaper Column: 

One of my all-time favorite science fiction short stories is R.A. Lafferty's "Slow Tuesday Night." The basic premise of the story is that humanity has removed a mental block that slowed down action and decision-making, and people now live at a freakishly accelerated clip.

"Transportation and manufacturing had then become practically instantaneous," Lafferty writes. "Things that had once taken months and years now took only minutes and hours. A person could have one or several pretty intricate careers within an eight-hour period." One character makes and loses four fortunes in the course of the night, "not the little fortunes that ordinary men acquire, but titanic things."

The story's a clever satire on how life seems to keep moving faster - and it was written in 1965. One wonders what Lafferty would make of the speed of life now. We haven't quite gotten to the insane pace of his fictional world yet, but sometimes things happen that make it seem like it's not that far off.

The most recent example is the rise and fall of the catch phrase "That's a clown question, bro," which apparently was coined, had its vogue, and was declared dead in the course of a week. And I seem to have missed the whole thing.

It seems there's a young player for baseball's Washington Nationals named Bryce Harper. Harper, after hitting a game-winning home run against the Toronto Blue Jays, was being interviewed in the locker room. A Canadian reporter stepped forward and asked, "Bryce, you know, in Canada you're of legal drinking age. A celebratory Canadian beer would seem to make sense after a hit like that. Favorite beer?"

Now, as noted above, Bryce is a young fellow. Nineteen, to be exact. And he's a Mormon to boot, so drinking beer, Canadian or otherwise, is not likely to be on his agenda. The team's PR man tried to step in, but Harper fielded the question (so to speak) with an aplomb far beyond his years. Giving the reporter a disgusted look, he delivered the smackdown: "I'm not going to answer that. That's a clown question, bro."



Of such humble beginnings, it seems, are Internet memes born. Within a day, "clown question, bro" became the top "trending topic" on Twitter. T-shirts appeared for sale with the catch phrase on them. A beer company in Denver - called, appropriately enough, the Denver Beer Company - announced that it was bringing out a Canadian-style lager called "Clown Question, Bro."
It's too bad, I guess, that Harper didn't have the presence of mind to immediately contact an intellectual property lawyer and have his phrase trademarked. Or perhaps not. *

Because a week later, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was being quizzed by a reporter regarding President Obama's announcement that the administration would not be trying to deport the children of illegal immigrants who were of good moral character and didn't pose a threat to national security. The reporter asked if Reid intended to bring the defunct DREAM Act back to the Senate (where it had been strangled in its crib by Republican filibusters) to "put people on the record." Reid paused for a long while, then smiled and told the reporter, "That's a clown question, bro."

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

 
At that point, blogger Dan Amira of New York Magazine declared the phrase dead after only seven days, "the victim of a brutal and obviously premeditated attack" by Reid - who was, Amira said with tongue planted firmly in cheek, under investigation for "meme-slaughter."

I guess if an old politician like Reid is saying something, it can't possibly be cool anymore. Kind of a shame, actually. "Clown question, bro" is the perfect dismissal for those questions that are just too stupid or slanted to be answered any other way. Like the now-standard "Isn't this (insert absolutely anything the president does or says from now till November) just being done for political gain?"

Maybe if Sarah Palin had answered Katie Couric's "What newspapers do you read?" with "That's a clown question, bro," she would have seemed less dimwitted. At least until the next question.

But who knows? Maybe the reports of its death are premature. Maybe the phrase will go on and have a long and happy life in our culture. I hope so. And I hope I can keep up with the next thing to come along.

*UPDATE: It seems I spoke too soon.