Just Not That Smart

Opinion | thepilot.com

We’re going to have to face a painful fact: Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans are just not that bright.

The body of the late Justice Antonin Scalia was barely cold before McConnell and his lackeys rushed to warn everybody not to politicize this solemn moment, about three seconds before they began politicizing it for all they were worth.

McConnell, Toddler-Terrifying Ted Cruz and Young Marco Robotto — sorry, I mean Rubio — declared that there’s an 80-year-old “rule” against a president nominating a Supreme Court Justice in the last year of his term.

They had discovered this rule by the research method known as “making stuff up.”

Turns out, this situation where one of the Supremes shuffles off this mortal coil in the last year of a presidency just doesn’t happen all that often, certainly not often enough that one could glean so much as a guideline, let alone a rule, from history.

The Constitution — which the wingnuts claim to revere but apparently know jack-squat about — is very clear that the president “shall” nominate, among various other officers, “Justices of the Supreme Court” and appoint them “with the advice and consent of the Senate.”

So we have the spectacle of the president doing his constitutional duty, and the Senate saying, “We won’t advise, we won’t consent. Heck, we won’t even meet the nominee.” Having demonstrated their own uselessness as a Senate, they now appear to be dead-set on rendering another of the three branches of government as paralyzed as they are.

Where the “three no’s” (no meetings, no hearings, no vote) that McConnell et al. have promised to stick to are found in the Constitution has never been explained. Like the supposed “80-year rule” against nominating in an election year, this appears to be pure applesauce, as the late Justice Scalia was fond of saying.

Not only is this behavior by the Republicans against both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution, but it’s also foolish. If the Republicans hold the line on their promise to delay even a hearing till after the election, they’ll keep this issue open until Election Day.

They’ll give whoever the Democratic nominee is a perfect example of the kind of mulish obstructionism that people are so heartily and vocally sick of.

They are handing even a half-smart candidate a club the size of a California Redwood to thrash them with on a daily basis, and both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are not half-smart — they are both very, very smart.

The current course of action by the Senate Republicans seems perfectly calculated to lose not only the presidency but the Senate. When that happens, folks, stuff’s gonna get real, as the kids say.

Or consider this alternative scenario: A few Senate Republicans actually do their jobs, defy the leadership, and give the candidate nominated by the president a hearing.

Centrists and independents say, “Hey, maybe these guys are reasonable after all,” but the wingnuts scream, “OMG! We are betrayed again by the evil party establishment!” and tear the party to shreds before handing the raggedy, bloodstained banner of the presidential nomination to “outsider” Donald Trump.

Democrats win the presidency and the Senate, and get to replace not only Scalia, but Ginsburg, Kennedy and probably Breyer as well.

Majority Leader McConnell is leading his party into the political equivalent of the Valley of the Little Big Horn. He and his supporters in the Senate should turn their horses around and get the heck back to the high ground.

They should face the reality that President Barack Obama was indeed elected to that job, by large margins, and he’s going to do the job till the last day in office.

But they should also demand the sort of bland centrist that Obama will almost certainly give them to avoid a fight, then run for the rest of the year on who gets the next three appointments.

They've really not thought this through, which I suppose is no surprise to anyone. I hate to say it, but they’re just not that smart.

OK, that’s a lie. I love to say it.

The Drone Menace, Redux

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

OK, this whole drone thing is getting out of hand.

You may recall that, back during the U.S. Open, I wrote with some amusement about the Pinehurst Village Council’s attempts to ban drones from the event. Seems they might have been more prescient than I thought. A recent spate of news stories makes one think that drones are moving from the category of “expensive toy for people with more money than sense” to the category of “menace.”

Take, for example, an item from fire-ravaged Southern California. According to NBC Los Angeles, the efforts of firefighters battling the so-called “North Fire” were hampered when planes deployed to dump water and chemicals on it were forced away from the blaze by no fewer than five drones of unknown origin hovering in the area (no doubt to take pictures or videos).

“This is serious,” said John Miller of the U.S. Forest Service. “[Aircraft] can strike one of these things and one of our aircraft could go down, killing the firefighters in the air.” One fire captain said the drone-caused delay “definitely contributed” to the fire’s jumping of the 15 Freeway.

On a less catastrophic but still disturbing note, there’s the story of William Merideth, from Hillview, Kentucky. Merideth apparently took exception to someone flying a drone over his property (and, according to some accounts, ogling his teenage daughter sunning herself on the deck).

“When he came down with a video camera right over my back deck, that’s not going to work,” Merideth said. To illustrate just how much that wasn’t going to work, he blasted the little buzzing nuisance out of the sky with his shotgun. A few minutes later, according to Merideth, a carful of angry men pulled up, with one demanding if he was “the [bad word] who shot my drone.” In traditional Kentucky fashion, Merideth met the group with his Glock on his hip, declaring, “If you cross that sidewalk onto my property, there’s going to be another shooting.”

Unfortunately, Merideth ended up being the one arrested, charged with “criminal mischief” and “wanton endangerment.” He’s vowed to fight the charges in court. “What other recourse do we have?” he asks.

This is one of those areas in which the law simply hasn’t kept up with issues raised by modern technology. We’ve never really had to deal, for example, with the question of just how high up your property line goes. No one would seriously claim an airliner flying at 10,000 feet over your house is trespassing. But what about a drone hovering over your yard at 50 feet, snapping pictures? Exactly how much force are you allowed to use to keep some jackass from annoying, harassing, or otherwise being a jerk with his new $1,500 quad copter?

Not much, it appears, since the National Transportation Safety Board recently ruled that even private drones are considered aircraft, and therefore subject to FAA regulation. As you might imagine, shooting down an aircraft is a pretty serious crime, with penalties of up to 20 years in prison, and the law doesn’t currently seem to make any distinction if said “aircraft” is some dude-bro’s expensive toy.

No one’s been prosecuted yet under federal law for dronecide, and an FAA spokesman has opined that that would be more of a “destruction of personal property issue and out of our jurisdiction.” However, we are talking about a federal bureaucracy here, so anything’s possible, especially if it’s stupid. Meanwhile, the California legislature is trying to catch up; they’re considering a bill to allow firefighters to “disable” drones that are getting in their way.

In light of the Drone Menace, a variety of companies have jumped in to answer Mr. Merideth’s question, “What recourse do we have?” Idaho’s Snake River Shooting Products has begun marketing a special “Drone Munition” shotgun shell. “Prepare for the Drone Apocalypse!” their advertising blares, alongside pictures of threatening drones hovering nearby with glowing red “eyes.”

A company called Droneshield can sell you a “net gun” to snag drones out of the sky. If you really want to go whole hog, the German company MBDA has tested a “laser effector to acquire, track and defeat a free-flying mini-drone.” It’ll probably only set you back a few million. It should be noted, however, that the FAA also frowns on you turning a flying object into a couple hundred pounds of flaming wreckage over populated areas.

As few as five years ago, if you’d told me that clueless goobers flying hopped-up toy helicopters controlled by their cellphones would even be a thing, let alone a societal problem, I’d have laughed in your face. But these are the times we live in. What next?

O'Reilly, Williams and the Usual Gang of Idiots

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

It’s been a bad couple of weeks for broadcast “journalists.” First there was the kerfuffle over NBC anchorman Brian Williams, who, it seems, might have embellished some of his adventures covering the Iraq war. Williams, speaking at a tribute to a retired soldier, recalled the time when, so he says, the helicopter he was on was forced down by enemy fire.

He was later forced to recant by soldiers who were there at the time who said Williams didn’t show up until a half-hour to an hour after the incident. Williams apologized and is now on a six-month suspension from NBC News.

Among the harshest critics of Williams was Fox News Host Bill O’Reilly, who said that the incident illustrated “a culture of deception in the liberal media” and that his viewers should question “if other news organizations are distorting the facts.”

By “other news organizations,” of course, O’Reilly means “other than Fox News.” If his viewers began caring about news organizations “distorting the facts,” O’Reilly would be out of a job.

The online liberal magazine Mother Jones delved into some of O’Reilly’s own claims of exploits he had while covering the 1982 Falklands War for CBS. O’Reilly, for example, has repeatedly claimed that he was “in a war zone in Argentina, in the Falklands, where my photographer got run down and then hit his head and was bleeding from the ear on the concrete. And the army was chasing us.”

The story ends with O’Reilly dragging his photographer to safety. He disparaged journalist Bill Moyers by sneering, “I missed Moyers in the war zones of [the] Falkland conflict in Argentina, the Middle East, and Northern Ireland. I looked for Bill, but I didn’t see him.” And so on.

O’Reilly also talks about being caught in a “major riot” in Buenos Aires, where “many were killed” and O’Reilly himself had an automatic rifle pointed at him by an Argentine soldier.

Problem is, according to all accounts, no American journalists (and only a tiny handful of British ones) were allowed into the “war zone” in the Falklands, so it’s clear O’Reilly never reported from there. No one else can seem to remember the incident with the photographer.

As for the “major riot” with fatalities, CBS news’s own account (including footage apparently shot by O’Reilly and his team) shows an angry demonstration, but doesn’t show any violence beyond “a man throwing a punch against the car of a Canadian news crew,” according to the Mother Jones article (which actually includes the footage in question).

O’Reilly, confronted with these contradictions, immediately followed Williams’ example, issued a full apology, and went on a six-month hiatus from Fox News.

Ha ha! Just kidding. O’Reilly told Politico that the article was “garbage” and snarled that Corn was a “despicable guttersnipe.”

He even went so far as to threaten New York Times journalist Emily Steele if he didn’t like what she wrote. “I am coming after you with everything I have,” Steele says O’Reilly told her. “You can take it as a threat.”

This was probably a mistake. As I once said to Winston Churchill as we crouched in a bunker during the London Blitz, “Never get into a public fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.” I’ll never forget his reply to me: “Who the bloody [expletive deleted] are you?” Then he threw a Scotch bottle at me. That Winston. What a kidder.

Where both O’Reilly and Williams went wrong is that they began to believe in their own celebrity. The stories they were covering were larger than life, so they felt as if they needed to be larger themselves. It’s a perilous trap, as Master Yoda explained to me right before the attack on the second Death Star: “Forget not my words: the story you are not.”

The difference, however, is summed up in a conversation I had with Arianna Huffington when we were having a drink at the 2012 Democratic Convention. “To be a right-winger,” I told her over apple-tinis, “is to live life without consequences. Accountability is for liberals. If you’re on the right, you can lie, you can make stuff up, and if you get caught at it, all you have to do is claim that you’re the victim of a political vendetta by liberal media and stand your ground. Voila! You’re a right-wing hero.”

I’ll never forget her response: “Security! Over here!”

I think she’s kind of into me. Chicks dig it when I speak French like that. But hey, let’s keep that last part between us. No need to tell the wife. She’s still all stressed out from doing reshoots for the new “Avengers” movie.

THE GOBSHITES SPEAK: I knew this one would get a reaction from the usual gang of idiots, and as always, I'm right. Most of it is in the standard vein of "O'REILLY'S NOT A LIAR, YOU'RE A LIAR BLAGH BLAGH BLAGH! As always, the charge is led by the spasmodically  foaming "Francis", who used to post as "Mark," so I've taken to calling him "Mark/Francis": 

Francis posted at 9:31 am on Sun, Mar 1, 2015.

Posts: 1427

Talk about living life through the experiences of others, dude you have made a living from perfecting that craft, only uniform that yourself has ever worn is probably the BSA, and that may be stretching things a bit, only danger you faced has probably been trying to outrun your own shadow, l 'm not an O'Reilly fan but only thing worse than a liar is a coward that cashes in on writing about that liar.

There's nothing quite so amusing as being called a "coward" by someone who's already admitted in print he's so afraid of me that he doesn't dare post under his own name. Come out from under the rock, "Mark/Francis". I'm pretty sure I know who you are now anyway. 

Then of course, there's the weekly" "why are you writing about this" response by the people who can't wait every week to tell me how much they're bored by the column they read every week: 

FarmBoy posted at 10:04 pm on Sat, Feb 28, 2015.

Posts: 127

Gee Dusty, thanks for such a relevant topic.

Any time, FarmBoy. Let me know if you ever have anything useful to add. 

The Hot New Fad For the Right Wing Asshole On The Go

This is, I guess what you'd call the "Director's Cut" of this week's column,  since I can't say "asshole" in the paper. Even though it's exactly the right word).

Imagine, if you will: You’re driving along the road, minding your own business, when you pull up behind one of those great big pickups that would be very useful hauling feed and seed or towing a horse trailer, but which is way too clean and unscratched to have ever seen an actual farm.

As you prepare to pass this wheeled behemoth, your car is suddenly enveloped in a cloud of choking black smoke that causes you to weave dangerously. As you fight your way clear of the blinding cloud, you see the truck pulling off and faintly hear the derisive laughter of its occupants.

Congratulations. You’ve just encountered some Good Americans who are patriotically protesting against Obama’s fascist nanny state by engaging in a practice they call “Rolling Coal.”

Are you the kind of “conservative” who thinks that the first question that needs to be answered when analyzing a political position is, “Will this annoy liberals?”

Are you the type of person who, if the First Lady comes out in favor of something like, say, healthy meals and exercise, immediately starts howling that your rights are being violated worse than those of Jews in the Holocaust and declare your intention to stuff as much junk as possible into your face because that’ll show them, by golly?

Are you the type of person who’s decided to shop every week at Hobby Lobby, even though you’ve never shopped there before and you don’t actually have any hobbies, but you want to show those danged feminazis that you’re not taking any of their guff?

In short, are you a typical right wing asshole?

Well, you could always run for a Republican congressional seat. But if that seems like too much trouble and/or expense, then maybe Rolling Coal is for you.

Get yourself a big ol’ truck, go to an Internet site like Dieselhub.com or one of those magazines aimed at truck aficionados, and order you some “smoke switches,” “aggressive tuners and modules,” and “special injectors” which will, and I quote, “trick your engine into thinking it needs more fuel.”

This will allow you to blow out a huge cloud of black smoke on command when you encounter, say, a Prius or other hybrid. (You can even get a sticker along with your gear that says “Prius Repellent.”)

But don’t stop there. You can also use your new gizmos to smoke people with liberal bumper stickers. Or bicyclists. Be sure to use your smartphone to record your hilarious encounters with those enemies of all that is free and good about America.

Then you can join the Coal Rollers on YouTube, where your fellow freedom fighters have posted videos of their blows against The Man, a category which includes the aforementioned Prius drivers, liberal bumper sticker displayers, and cyclists, as well as cops and pretty girls walking by the side of the road (because nothing gets a woman hotter than having acrid toxic gases blown in her face by a truck the size of small aircraft carrier).

Of course, you knew that once a few brave souls began spewing The Black Cloud of Liberty in everyone’s face, Obama’s Islamocommiefascist Iron Fist of Doom was going to come down to crush it the way the Chinese crushed the flowers of freedom in Tiananmen Square.

The jackbooted thugs of the EPA have issued one of their fatwas, saying, “It is a violation of the Clean Air Act to manufacture, sell, or install a part for a motor vehicle that bypasses, defeats, or renders inoperative any emission control device.”

Translated into American, that means that after-market devices intended to increase fuel consumption and belch clouds of pollution into people’s faces are regarded as illegal by Obama’s EPA. This is how freedom dies, my friends.

If there’s one silver lining for the right, it’s that the Republicans in the House finally may have found the grounds for bringing the Articles of Impeachment they’ve been feverishly fantasizing about for so long. I mean, to heck with requiring some sort of “high crime or misdemeanor” as grounds to impeach. You just do NOT mess with a man’s truck.

Bearing False Twitness

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Steve Bouser's columns don't usually cause me alarm, but the one he wrote for this past Wednesday's paper, about the number of people getting more and more of their news from social media, certainly did.

This is not because I dislike or fear Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and the like. Truth be told, I probably spend a lot more time on those things than I should.

(In my defense, I first got on Facebook because my literary agent at the time told me all the other writers were doing it, and it was a cheap and easy way to present myself to my audience. So now, a few years and 5,000 Facebook friends later, I justify the time wasted - sorry, spent - by claiming I'm marketing. A flimsy rationalization, but it's the only one I have.)

No, it's not an aversion to social media that alarms me when I hear that 19 percent of all Americans, and a whopping 33 percent of those under 30, get some or all of their news from social networks like Facebook or Twitter. I'm alarmed because I know those networks so well. I know them well enough not to trust them.

Twitter in particular is a classic example of the old maxim that you can determine the collective IQ of a group by taking the IQ of the dumbest person in it, and dividing it by the number of people in the group.

Not that there aren't some bright and fascinating people on Twitter. I "follow" very smart folks like astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, talented ones like writers John Scalzi and Neil Gaiman, and entertaining ones like actress and geek-goddess Felicia Day. A lot of my far-flung cadre of friends in the writing business are on Twitter, and an evening spent tweeting back and forth with them is like being present at a great literary cocktail party. Except at a cocktail party, I'm usually dressed. Usually. There was that time in Milwaukee ... never mind.

But Twitter is also full of idiots, crackpots and the chronically ignorant. Twitter is the place where, after it was revealed that the Boston Marathon bombers were from Chechnya, thousands of calls went up for the U.S. to start bombing ... the Czech Republic.

So many, in fact, that the Czech ambassador actually had to issue a statement on the embassy website, noting "in the social media a most unfortunate misunderstanding" and reminding Americans that "the Czech Republic and Chechnya are two very different entities - the Czech Republic is a Central European country; Chechnya is a part of the Russian Federation."

He did not add "you freaking imbeciles," which is what I would have done. This is probably why I'm not an ambassador.

By the way, other tweets and Facebook posts claiming that failed VP candidate and reality TV star Sarah Palin was one of those calling for an invasion of the Czech Republic and "other Arab countries" turned out to be untrue was well. Those tweets linked to a joke "story" in the online satirical newspaper The Daily Currant.

Perhaps more ominously, Twitter in particular has shown itself to be highly vulnerable to hacking and the hijacking of supposedly reliable news sources to spread misinformation by pranksters or more serious political dirty tricksters.

Just last week, the Associated Press Twitter account was taken over by hackers who posted that a bomb had gone off at the White House and that President Obama had been injured. Some tweeters immediately cried "shenanigans,", and AP took the account down quickly, but not before the Dow Jones Industrial average plunged 140 points in the space of a few minutes.

A group calling itself the "Syrian Electronic Army" claimed responsibility for the hack, but one can't help but wonder if perhaps some clever stock speculator was doing some short selling before having a hacker buddy send the Dow into a spin. But that's just the way my mind works after years of reading conspiracy thrillers.

As we discussed last week, you can't always trust the TV news to bring you the latest facts, since they've now collectively decided that passing on unconfirmed and often anonymous "reports" (aka rumors, conjectures and general BS) is a substitute for actual journalism. But trusting social media is even riskier.

So what are we to do? Well, my advice is to look at a lot of different sources. Also, never believe the first thing you read or hear. Skepticism isn't a perfect system, but it'll have to do.

The Closed Loop of Ignorance: A Case Study In Wingnuttery

Actual online exchange I observed today: 

Commenter #1: "Lower gun violence= no gun free zones"

Commenter #2: " I'd sure like to see proof that getting rid of gun-free zones reduces crime. Give it your best shot."

Commenter #1: "heck I'd love to be able to prove that theory of mine about gun free zones. But the liberal media and the liberals in D.C. will never let that happen."

So the fact that there is no evidence is evidence of the conspiracy to suppress the "facts" that you have no evidence for. 

Right. Got it.

Let’s examine this exchange because it illustrates so much about the wingnut “style” of argument.

First, there’s the bold assertion of so-called “facts” which are really just prejudices, half-baked notions, and/or “gut feelings” raised to the status of truth.

Then there’s the admission, when challenged, that no, there isn’t any evidence of the assertion but that that just proves the point, because  there’s a liberal conspiracy to hide the “truth”. This combines several of the central tenets of wingnuttery:

(1)    The insistence that the person speaking is part of an oppressed and eternally put upon class of people who are, despite their oppression, smarter, harder working, and more enlightened than their imagined oppressors. Ironically, the person claiming this oppression is almost always white, Christian, and heterosexual, and the majority are male—by far the least “oppressed” and best advantaged group in the United States, possibly in all of human history. 

(2)    The angry and bitter attitude that it’s hopeless that the truth will ever be known because of a vast conspiracy by the oppressors.

(3)    The rejection of any idea that they need to support their claims because the data they need to do so is forever unavailable, and

(4)    The unshakable conviction that their “facts” are, nonetheless, true, despite the lack of evidence, because their innate “common sense” (really just the above-mentioned prejudices, half-baked notions, and “gut feelings”) is more important than proof.This is the core of the anti-intellectual, chip-on-the shoulder resentment that marks a certain class of wingnut.

You have to admit that there is a certain twisted genius to this sort of "argument." It basically frees the speaker  from ever having to actually justify even the most outrageous claims, and creates a perfect protective force-field around the ignorance they cling to as if that ignorance was a gift  from God.

Unfortunately,  that’s not where ignorance comes from.

The Best Show On Right Now

     Today's column (once again, not online at the paper's website until probably tomorrow)

    I heard the rumble of the truck in the yard, followed by the squeal and hiss of air brakes. I was up out of the recliner and ready to meet the delivery guy when he knocked on the door.
      “Hey,” I said, “you got here just in time. I was about to run out.”
     He looked at the clipboard in his hand and his brow furrowed in confusion. “Wait, this isn’t a movie theater?”
     “Nope,” I said. “This is my house. What made you think it was a theater?”
     “Well,” he said, “you’ve ordered an entire tractor trailer load of popcorn. And it says here, you got another one last week.”
     “Yep,” I replied.
     “You really eat all that popcorn?”
     “Buddy, if you were watching a show like I’m watching, you’d be chomping down a lot of the stuff too.”
     “What show?” he said. “Survivor? Duck Dynasty? House Hunters International?”
     “Nope, nope, and nope. Much bigger than that.”
     “American Idol?”
     “Even bigger. I’m watching the civil war in the Republican Party.”
     “The what?”
     “Remember last year? The election?”
     He grimaced. “Don’t remind me.”
     “Remember how the Republicans were so sure they were going to win? And how shocked they all were when Mitt Romney got his butt kicked by a guy they insisted nobody liked?”
     “Yeah.”
     “Well, ever since,” I said, “they’ve been sniping at each other, pointing fingers, trying to make someone else take the blame. One wing of the party demands change, another demands that they double down on the crazy.”
     He looked dubious. “And you’re enjoying this.”
     “You bet I am!” I said. “The Tea Party blames the ‘establishment’ for not nominating candidates bat-spit crazy enough to make them happy. The ‘establishment’ big shots like Karl Rove blame the Tea Partiers for driving away women, gays, lesbians, Latinos, African Americans, and pretty much anyone not a right wing nut case. Rove even started a new political action committee called the ‘Conservative Victory Project’, to try and boost non-Tea Party candidates so the Republicans wouldn’t have another debacle like the ones they had with Richard Mourdock. Or Todd Akin. Or Sharron Angle. Or Christine O’Donnell.”
     “Come on,” he said, “I can’t believe it’s that bad. Didn’t Ronald Regan used to say that the 11th Commandment was not to speak ill of other Republicans?”
     “I see you know your history, my friend. But that principle fell by the wayside long ago. Come see.” I stepped aside and let him in. “Check this out,” I said, sitting down at the computer and calling up a website. “Remember Sarah Palin?”
     “Didn’t she have a reality show?”
     “No, before that. She ran for Vice President.”
     “Oh, yeah. So what’s she doing now?”
     I clicked on a YouTube video. “Watch.”
     An image of Governor Palin appeared, standing behind a podium. “This is a speech she gave at the Conservative Political Action Conference last week.” I turned the audio up. 



     “If these experts who keep losing elections and keep getting rehired and raking in millions,” Palin said, “if they feel that strongly about who gets to run in this party, then they should buck up or stay in the truck. Buck up and run.” The audience cheered. She smirked. “The architects can head on back." The cheers redoubled.
     “Wait,” the delivery guy said, “Wasn’t Karl Rove called ‘the architect’?”
     “You’re quite well informed for a deliveryman,” I observed. “But yes.”
     “Nice slam there. So what did Rove say?”
     I clicked on another link. This one showed Rove on “Fox News Sunday,” saying “If I did run for office and win, I would serve out my term. I wouldn’t quit mid-term.”
     “Ohhhh, SNAP!” the delivery guy said. “He just burned her, but good.”
     “See what I’m saying?” I said. “Is this a great show or what?” 
     “I get it,” he said. “But really, is this infighting good for the country? I mean, sure, it’s entertaining, but don’t we need at least two viable parties?”
     “Hmmm…” I said. “You might have a point, Mr…what was your name again?”
     “You tell me,” he said. “I’m a figment of your imagination.”
     Suddenly I sat up in my chair, blinking. I realized I’d been dreaming. I looked at the computer screen, where I’d been looking at a news story about a website called primarymycongressman.com. It was sponsored by the conservative Club For Growth “to raise awareness of Republicans In Name Only (RINOs) who are currently serving in safe Republican seats.”
     I looked at the empty bowl on the table beside the computer. This called for more popcorn.
    
     Dusty Rhoades lives, writes, and practices law in Carthage.
    

Wingnuts Punk'd Again

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You know, I've never really been a huge fan of former Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel. I don't dislike him, mind you; he's just never been someone who excited me all that much.

He does get a lot of respect from me for being one of the first Republicans to buck his party and point out that George Dubbya's Wacky Iraqi Adventure was turning into another Vietnam. But when I found out that President Obama was nominating him for defense secretary, my reaction was, and I quote: "Meh."

What I saw of his confirmation hearings didn't stir up any more excitement. But, as so often happens with politicians in the Washington monkey house, I find myself rising to defend him, not because of his own merits, but because of the people attacking him and, more importantly, the way they go about it.

First, the Israel Lobby tried to paint Hagel as anti-Semitic for pointing out that there actually is such a thing as an Israel Lobby. Then Lindsey Graham announced that he intended to filibuster Mr. Hagel's nomination - the first time this had ever been done to a secretary of defense nominee - in a snit over the fact that, after hours upon hours of hearings, the only result of Republican attempts to create a "Benghazi-Gate" scandal has been to make former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the most popular politician in the country, according to the Quinnipiac University Poll taken afterward.

Of course, Hagel had nothing to do with the Benghazi killings or the State Department, but let's not let that get in the way if Lindsay Graham's got some tantrumin' to do!

But for true crack-brained right-wing attacks, you've got to go to the Internet loony bin known as Breitbart.com.

After the death at an early age of its founder, Andrew Breitbart, some wondered if the muckrakers at Breitbart.com (who became famous for shamelessly doctored and deceptively edited "expose" videos of ACORN and Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod), would fade away. Sadly, it seems that the perpetually apoplectic Mr. Breitbart may have actually been a moderating influence, which should give you an idea of the level of crazy we're dealing with here.

On Feb. 7, a headline at Breitbart.com blared, "SECRET HAGEL DONOR?" The story, written by "editor at large" Ben Shapiro, claimed that the administration was refusing to turn over documents about possible foreign sources of funding for Hagel because one of those was a group called "Friends of Hamas."

Given the mainstream media's penchant for taking any unsourced and sketchy Breitbart.com story and running with it without bothering to check it out (See "Sherrod, Shirley," above), it's probably a miracle that this didn't blow up into another one of those scandals where the accusations turned out to be hollow, but not before they nearly destroyed people's lives and careers.

In fact, reporters began asking people like Mike Huckabee what they thought about the story, while never actually bothering to ask whether the story they were asking for comment on was true. But what does that matter? Friends of Hamas "has a ring to it," in the words of Lou Dobbs.

Well, the name may have a ring to it, but once again, there's no bell. No one - not the State Department, not the Treasury Department, not any reporter who stirred himself or herself long enough to do a simple Google or Lexis search - could find any record of any such group ever existing.

There's a reason for that: It was a joke.

On Feb. 19, New York Daily News reporter Dan Friedman wrote in an op-ed that the "Friends of Hamas" reference came from a mildly sarcastic hypothetical question he'd asked an anonymous Republican staffer on Capitol Hill.

"I asked my source," Friedman wrote, "had Hagel given a speech to, say, the 'Junior League of Hezbollah, in France'? What about 'Friends of Hamas'?"

He had no idea that anyone would take the names seriously. They were "so over-the-top, so linked to terrorism in the Middle East, that it was clear he was talking hypothetically and hyperbolically. No one could take seriously the idea that organizations with those names existed."

No one, that is, except a pack of right-wing pseudo-journalists with axes to grind and not enough journalistic ethics to even pretend to try to find corroboration, so long as the story has a "ring" to it.

Worse, they don't have the sense to recognize sarcasm when they hear it. That's why the right, once again, has egg on its face.

It's been said (either by Joseph Conrad or Doctor Who) that you can judge a man by the quality of his enemies. Given the sorry state of Mr. Hagel's enemies, I hope he does get confirmed.