The Eeyore Republicans

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Eeyore is alive and well and working for the Republican Party.

You remember Eeyore, the perpetually gloomy donkey from the Winnie the Pooh stories. Nothing was ever good news for him, from finding his lost tail (“Most likely lose it again anyway”) to someone wishing him good morning (“If it is a good morning, which I doubt.”)

I’m convinced Eeyore is running the right-wing press operation. As blogger Steve Benen pointed out last week, nothing makes these people happy — “An American POW goes free? Complain that he didn’t deserve it. Unemployment rate drops? Complain that the White House has orchestrated a conspiracy to manipulate data. A strike takes out Osama bin Laden? Complain that Bush and Cheney aren’t getting enough credit.”

The latest dark clouds effused by the right-wing gloom machine came in response to the capture of Ahmed Abu Khattala, the accused ringleader of the attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Now, you’d think that catching a murderous terrorist who orchestrated an attack on our people would be something everyone would cheer about. You’d think even the Republicans would be happy, since their current PR strategy has consisted of, to paraphrase Uncle Joe Biden, “a noun, a verb, and Benghazi.”

You’d think that, that is, if you weren’t familiar with the Eeyore Republicans. They’ve really outdone themselves with their creativity in finding something to kvetch about.

One of the most common gripes was that it took too long. After all, some said, Khattala had been giving televised interviews from cafes in Libya, so why wasn’t he caught then?

Some people apparently believe that a special forces operation is as simple as seeing someone on screen, immediately identifying the locale, putting together a team on the fly, entering a turbulent and chaotic country, and bagging the quarry within the 60-minute time frame of an episode of “24.” I may not be a military expert, but unlike some people, I do know that life is not like TV.

Some claimed that the capture was orchestrated to coincide with Hillary Clinton’s book tour. No, really — they’ve actually said this.

“In the midst of Mrs. Clinton’s failed book tour and failed book roll-out,” Rush Limbaugh sarcastically observed, “all of a sudden we capture the militia leader who led the attack. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Fox News host “Kennedy” claimed that she thought “this is convenient for [Clinton ] to shift the talking points from some of the things that she’s been discussing.”  

Thankfully, not everyone on Fox was so cynical as to suggest that this was all about Clinton’s book tour. No, to them, Obama put American troops in harm’s way to promote Clinton’s interview on Fox.

“The timing on this stinks,” right-wing radio host Larry O’Connor told the network.

For the very first time, he claimed, Clinton was going to get some tough questions about Benghazi, and the triumph of Khattalla’s capture would distract from those. In other words, we captured the ringleader of the attacks on Benghazi to distract attention from questions about Benghazi.

Meanwhile, other right-wingers were taking up the old familiar cry that sure, we have a terrorist in custody, but big whoop. The real question is, are we being brutal enough to him?

New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte bitterly complained that the administration was  “rushing to read [Khattala] his Miranda rights and telling him he has the right to remain silent,” even though regular criminal procedure hasn’t stood in the way of convicting and imprisoning dozens of other terrorist suspects.  

John McCain (who was a POW) continued to wage his bitter war of words with none other than John McCain, griping that Khatalla should have been imprisoned in the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay — a facility whose closure he’d called for in 2008.

But, hey, who cares about consistency? Or for that matter, sanity? If there’s one thing the last few years have proven, it’s that accusations of inconsistency or pure silliness have stopped meaning anything to these people. They just don’t care about those things, because the only thing that matters to the right wing is their hate.

They hate President Obama, for a variety of reasons: racism for some, tribalism for others, partisanship gone mad, whatever. Ergo, anything Obama does is wrong, anything that goes wrong anywhere in the world is entirely his fault, and there is no plot too outlandish to be beneath the man who is, in their minds, both a fiendishly cunning supervillain and too dumb to speak without a teleprompter.

Sorry, Eeyores, but when you can’t celebrate ANYTHING as good news for America because the president you hate may get some small amount of credit for it, then it has to be said: Maybe you hate your president more than you love your country.

The Folkenflik Revelation

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In his recent book “Murdoch’s World: The Last of the Old Media Empires,” National Public Radio media correspondent David Folkenflik describes, in no-holds-barred detail, how Australian media magnate Rupert Murdoch built his company News Corp “from a small paper in Adelaide, Australia, into a multimedia empire.”

Among the details of scandals and corporate infighting is a revelation that’s gotten some people’s backs up: that the Fox News PR department actually hired people to go on the Internet — on blogs, message boards and other public outlets — and “post pro-Fox rants” on websites.

“One former staffer,” Folkenflik writes, “recalled using 20 different aliases to post pro-Fox rants. Another had 100.” They were provided various technological work-arounds to disguise the fact that their pro-Fox commentary was coming from within online accounts associated with Fox itself.

When I read this, I immediately thought two things: (1) Is “David Folkenflik” not the coolest name ever? And (2) wait, you mean I can’t trust the rantings of anonymous strangers on Internet comment boards to be the real thing?

I’m shocked; shocked, I tell you.

It is a striking phenomenon that you notice in online discussions: Make some mention of Fox News’ decided rightward slant and obvious bias, and someone will immediately and vigorously leap to their defense, usually by attacking MSNBC (on the often erroneous assumption that anyone who regards Fox as nakedly partisan must be a huge MSNBC fan).

You never see that sort of passionate defense of CNN, CBS, et al., and you rarely see it of MSNBC. It had not occurred to me it could be the result of paid shills. The technique is called “sock puppetry”: pretending to be someone you’re not to bolster a particular point of view or promote a product. It’s a well-known tactic in PR and marketing.

During the dot-com boom of the 1990s, for example, speculators developed a technique called “pump and dump”: anonymously going on influential stock trading message boards to tout a “great, underrated” stock (which the pumper, of course, owned a lot of), driving up the price, then selling it by the bushel basket when it peaked.

More recently, a “sock puppetry” scandal broke out in the publishing world last year when it was revealed that British thriller author RJ Ellory was creating aliases with which to go online and post not just glowing reviews of his own books, but nasty “one-star” reviews on Amazon and other book sites trashing authors with whom he felt he was in competition.

Ellory later apologized, but another Brit author, Stephen Leather, defiantly announced that he’d go online under his own name and under various other names and various other characters. “You build this whole network of characters who talk about your books and sometimes have conversations with yourself,” adding that everyone else does it too. (For the record, I haven’t, and hope I never will.)

Sound crazy? To paraphrase “Chinatown”: Forget about it, Jake. It’s the Internet. What probably surprises some people about the Folkenflik revelations is that a news network (as opposed to a writer trying to flog his own work to a jaded public) is using fake identities and deception to try to promote or defend its brand.

But it really shouldn’t. Not just because it’s Fox News, but because televised news in general is becoming less and less about excellence in reporting, and more and more about marketing and branding, stars and image. Fox is just better at it.

Take, for example, the set — or, as they call it, the “news deck”— that Fox reporter Shepard Smith recently revealed to the public for his show. There are 55-inch touchscreens that can be “put on the air at a moment’s notice”! A 38-foot-long “video wall” upon which Smith can move and shuffle images with what looks like a Wii controller on steroids!

The whole thing looks like Starfleet Central Control. It makes CNN’s absurd election-night coverage, which featured correspondents “beaming in” with a blue haze around them like the Princess Leia hologram in the first “Star Wars” movie, look downright puny.

Which is entirely the point. News isn’t news anymore, and hasn’t been for a long time. It’s what someone long ago dubbed “infotainment.” That’s why so many “analysis” shows are nothing but people yelling crazy, inflammatory crap at each other, and why most reportage of “breaking stories” is a steady stream of rumor, supposition and plain just making stuff up.

News is a commodity, a product, and it’s being marketed like one, with the various sources targeting their various demographics and all the stops — including online sock puppetry — pulled out to sell the product.

Whether the product is all sizzle and no steak is not their concern.

Lessons Learned? I Wouldn't Bet the Farm On It

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It's been, to say the least, an interesting couple of weeks in American race relations. Things kicked off when the NAACP voted, at its annual convention, on a resolution that "condemns the bigoted elements within the tea party and asks for them to be repudiated." Note that the statement doesn't call all TPers racist. And as we know, it's not unusual in American politics for one group to ask another to "repudiate" its more fringe elements - so long as those fringe elements are on the so-called "left."

On one occasion, for instance, the late Tim Russert called on Barack Obama to repudiate, of all people, Harry Belafonte, for referring to President George W. Bush as a "terrorist," as if the rantings of an aging calypso star were somehow the responsibility of every black politician.

But, boy howdy, ask the TPers to distance themselves from the people at their rallies who carry signs showing the president as a witch doctor, complete with bone in nose, and just watch their old gray heads explode.

The immediate reaction was to go into their standard attack mode - as always, a variation on the old schoolyard riposte, "I know you are, but what am I?" It was the NAACP, the tea partiers asserted, who were the real racists.

Then the leader of a group called the Tea Party Express, a guy named Mark Williams, published a mock letter from the NAACP to Abraham Lincoln. "We Colored People have taken a vote and decided that we don't cotton to that whole emancipation thing," Williams wrote. "Mr. Lincoln, you were the greatest racist ever. We had a great gig. Three squares, room and board, all our decisions made by the massa in the house."

Nope, no racism there.

Within a few days, Williams was, as requested, repudiated. He and the Tea Party Express were tossed out of the the Tea Party Federation. The NAACP issued a press release commending the federation. A new day of tolerance and understanding dawned in America.

Ha ha! Just kidding.

Enter Andrew Breitbart, the man who gave the world the infamous ACORN "pimp" tapes, in which members of the community organizing group were supposedly caught on tape advising a fake pimp and his prostitute how to set up in business and avoid taxes. The tapes were later discovered by the California attorney general's office to have been "heavily edited." They cut out the fact that, among other things, one ACORN worker had called the cops and that the supposed "pimp" (shown in the intro in full Superfly regalia) had actually been dressed in a suit and tie and claimed he was a law student.

After that, Breitbart was discredited and never again believed or taken seriously by anyone of any significance.

Hee hee! Got you again!

Breitbart claimed to have found a tape of a U.S. Department of Agriculture functionary named Shirley Sherrod telling an NAACP group that, in a former job, she hadn't given a white farmer who came to her for help "the full force of what she could do." She'd taken him to a white lawyer ("one of his own kind") and, as the clip ends, left him there.

The NAACP, apparently unaware of what a dishonest propagandist Breitbart is, condemned Sherrod. She lost her job with the USDA. Then the rest of the tape came out. Once again, things were not as Breitbart had presented them. Imagine that.

Sherrod found out that the lawyer she'd referred the farmer to hadn't done much. In fact, the poor guy was about to be foreclosed on. At that time, she went on to say, she realized that "it's really about those who have versus those who don't ... and they could be black; they could be white; they could be Hispanic."

She got to work, she helped save the man's farm, and she and hisfamily remain friends to this day. He and his wife even went on CNN to try to clear Sherrod's name. Instead of a story of racism, it was a story of overcoming it. The NAACP and the White House apologized and USDA head Tom Vilsack offered Sherrod her job back. She's not sure she wants it, and who can blame her?

In the end, everyone learned a valuable lesson. From then on,everyone listened to what other people were actually saying, instead of filtering it through their own prejudices and trying to pick out little out-of-context nuggets to pelt their perceived enemies with.

Ho ho! That's a real knee-slapper, that one is.