Super Bowl Bud Ad Causes Wingnut Frenzy

Aberdeen Times : 

Super Bowl Sunday has become a truly American holiday, and one of its most cherished traditions is the rollout of new, creative, occasionally controversial, and always insanely expensive TV ads.

One that’s already raising a few eyebrows is from a perennial advertiser on sports programs of all kinds, the Anheuser-Busch Corporation. Titled “Born the Hard Way,” the ad provides a highly dramatized version of the journey of A-B co-founder Adolphus Busch. The young and handsome Adolphus comes to our shores via a stormy passage on a rickety boat, experiences anti-immigrant prejudice (“You ain’t wanted here! Go back home!” an unshaven lout yells at him), sees his first black person, is forced to jump overboard after a steamboat explosion, and eventually makes his wet and weary way to St. Louis, where a chance meeting over a beer with the older and prosperous Eberhard Anheuser causes him to reveal his dream of brewing the watery and undistinguished pilsner that would become the catalyst for so many of my own youthful misadventures.

Now, the bit about anti-immigrant sentiment lasts maybe five seconds of the 60-second ad, which in normal times would be regarded as a standard, if hackneyed rags-to-riches story. It should also be noted that the ad was written, produced, and shot months ago, long before Cheeto Mussolini’s disastrous, ill-conceived and chaotically executed Muslim ban-that’s-not-a-ban-but-Trump-said-it-was-a-ban-on-Twitter.

But to the special snowflakes of Trumpland, who spend half their time crowing and thumping their chests about their idol’s recent electoral triumph and the other half stomping their feet and whining about every perceived slight to his (and by extension, their) awesomeness, even a bland ad for a blander beer is a vile and traitorous act of offense to the sovereign. “Budweiser Attacks American’s [sic] Who Want Secure Borders,” blared the wingnut website “Gateway Pundit” (where they apparently find the rules of punctuation too “elitist,” or “politically correct”).

A site called FreedomDaily.com blasted that “Budweiser Airs DISGUSTING Super Bowl Commercial Bashing President Trump.” It should be noted that President Tweety’s name is never mentioned in the ad, but why let little details like that get in the way of right wing butthurt? Breitbart.com, the wretched hive of online scum and villainy that gave us Trump adviser Steve Bannon, accused Anheuser Busch of “playing politics.”

But for the truly unhinged reactions, you have to go to the comments section at Breitbart, where one angry little Trumpkin asserted that “the Super Bowl has been a globalist propaganda machine for a number of years now.” Another raved (in ALL CAPS, of course) that we should BOYCOTT THE SUPER BOWL AND THE NFL!!! #MAGA!”

Yeah, that’s going to happen. Nothing says “Make America Great” like boycotting the Super Bowl, Budweiser, and the NFL.

Oh, they’re also mad at Kellogg’s cereal for some reason. I didn’t dig any deeper, because wading around too long in the fever-swamp that is the Trump-centric blogosphere eventually leads to sensations of disorientation and nausea. All I can say is, if these people keep getting so offended by the “liberal” bias they imagine in one food or beverage company after another, pretty soon they’re going to be living on nothing but Papa John’s pizza and Chic-Fil-A. Scurvy is a distinct possibility.

I suppose it’s not surprising that they’re a little bit touchy. After all, the poor dears find themselves trying to defend an Executive Order that was supposed to help keep us safe but which quickly degenerated into chaos and confusion, including the detention of legal permanent residents, small children, and people who risked their lives to help U.S. soldiers in the Iraq War.

Things reached maximum lunacy (we hope) when we saw Press Secretary Sean Spicer desperately trying to convince us that five year old Iranians really are dangerous and the increasingly haggard Kellyanne Conway making up a fictional “Bowling Green Massacre” to try and “prove” that “Obama did it too!” (He didn’t. Obama slowed down the admission of Iraqis to impose new vetting procedures after a terror plot was discovered; he didn’t blanket ban people from seven countries).

As you may have surmised by now, while Bud was the beer of my misspent youth, I now consider it swill. Apparently the real Adolphus Busch, a wine drinker, felt the same way. But I may just buy a six-pack in their honor after this. I’m not going to drink it, mind you, but in a world where even the beer is a political statement, one must do one’s part.

Big Business vs. Religious Bigotry in Indiana: Guess Who Wins

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

You know, I’m hard on the Republicans sometimes. But it can’t be easy for them. It seems that Republican politicians keep getting caught in the middle between having to placate the almighty “job creators” whose money they can’t live without and the Religious Right, whose members provide them with those all-important primary votes.

Just recently, it happened again in Indiana.

The subject this time was the Hoosier State’s new Religious Freedom Restoration Law. RFRA, as it’s also called, is one of those laws passed to pander to the persecution complex of the most privileged religious people in the most privileged nation on Earth, who nevertheless are not happy unless they can equate themselves with Holocaust victims, antebellum slaves, or at the very least, black people in the pre-Civil Rights Act South, all because they have to deal with people who don’t think or pray the way they do.

RFRA on its face seems pretty innocuous. It basically says that the government can’t “burden a person’s exercise of religion” unless it’s for a “compelling governmental interest” and the means used is “the least restrictive means” to accomplish that goal. It’s the same sort of measure that allows the Amish, for example, to use reflective tape and kerosene lanterns on their buggies rather than electric safety lights.

Some people, however, fear (not without reason, as we’ll see below) that the law could be used to exempt businesses from local and state anti-discrimination laws and allow them to discriminate against people in the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community.

The law’s passage led to an immediate backlash from the aforementioned “job creators.” The $4 billion tech company Salesforce announced it was “dramatically reducing” its investment in Indiana, including canceling all programs that required its people to travel there. Tech giant Yelp followed suit.

San Francisco’s mayor and Connecticut’s governor banned city- or state-funded travel to Indiana. The NCAA, which is holding this weekend’s Final Four basketball championship in Indianapolis, said it intends “to closely examine the implications of this bill and how it might affect future events as well as our work force.”

Even NASCAR, for crying out loud, spoke out against it. “We will not embrace nor participate in exclusion or intolerance,” it said in a formal statement.

As the pressure mounted, Gov. Mike Pence immediately took to the airwaves to claim he was shocked — shocked, I tell you — that anyone could think that such a nice, sweet law as RFRA could in any way countenance discrimination against anyone. He blamed the media for “sloppy reporting.” He tried to blame Obamacare, because, well, it’s Obamacare. At some point, he probably tried to blame Benghazi, too.

The governor’s protests might have been more convincing if so many of the law’s supporters weren’t insisting that the law DID give them the right to refuse service to LGBT people.

Micah Clark of the Indiana chapter of the American Family Association, for example, said as much in an interview with The Indianapolis Star. In an interview with Donald Wildmon of the AFA, Clark also urged Gov. Pence not to support efforts to “clarify” the bill to provide that it doesn’t allow discrimination, saying that that would “totally destroy” the law.

Eric Miller, of the right-wing organization Advance America, used the group’s website to crow “Victory at the Statehouse!” when the bill passed, because, he said, “Christian bakers, florists and photographers should not be punished for refusing to participate in a homosexual marriage!” ( I’m pretty sure he meant the wedding, not the marriage, but whatever).

It should be noted that Miller and Clark were among the few guests invited to the “private” signing of the bill. It’s more than a little disingenuous to claim that a bill isn’t meant to legalize discrimination when the people who’ll tell you that’s exactly what it was meant to do are standing behind you and smiling as you signed it.

As of this writing (Wednesday evening), Indiana legislators were feverishly trying to come up with a “fix” so the law won’t mean what its supporters say it means. We wish them much luck.

By the way, this won’t be the last time this battle gets fought. Walmart, for example, has asked that the governor of Arkansas veto a similar RFRA measure there. (Funny, I always thought Walmart WAS the government of Arkansas).

We don’t know what will come out of this so called “fix,” but we do know one thing for certain: Hatin’ on the gay folks is bad for business these days. And that’s going to be a problem for the GOP.

Reader Mail, plus More Hilarious Wingnuttery

So this letter ran today in the Pilot: 

Dusty Rhoades’ column in the Dec 7 Pilot disturbed me. To say that the prosecutor in the Ferguson case “threw” the case or deliberately lost it for the state involves a level of cynicism that is difficult to take.

Certainly, the prosecutor could have gotten an indictment if he “wanted” to. And just as certainly, there were political pressures for him to do just that. But Mr. Wilson is not a ham sandwich, of popular grand jury lore.

No he was not. But the rest of us would have been treated like one, which was part of the point. 

Imagine for just a minute, even if you are as arrogant as Mr. Rhoades and are able to reach conclusions based on a superficial view of the evidence from newspapers and TV reports, that the prosecutor who did see all the evidence had a good-faith belief that the actions of Darren Wilson may have been justified.

Wrong. I actually read the transcripts. And I'm betting I read more of them than Mr. Muller. if actually doing your research is your idea of "arrogance," then guilty as charged. 

A prosecutor represents the state in an adversarial system, but he is not a pure advocate and must believe that the evidence on review supports a criminal conviction. Can you imagine a prosecutor asking a jury to find beyond a reasonable doubt that someone is guilty of a criminal offense when the prosecutor himself has significant doubts?

Yeah, actually, I can, because I live in the real world. 

But, understanding correctly the highly charged nature of this case, rather than deciding himself to not proceed further against Wilson, which prosecutors do all the time, he presented the case to a grand jury as a check on the use of his discretion.

Again, a break which no one but someone like Wilson would get. 

Yes, doing so and presenting evidence on both sides was highly unusual.

And thus, not "equal justice." 

 But viewed in this way, the prosecutor was hardly giving Wilson a “break,” and just maybe was trying to do justice in the best way he could.

Justice which the average Joe (or Michael) would not have access to. 

I acknowledge that I don’t know where the truth lies, but I respect the process and don’t share the view that “justice” requires a particular result here.

William Muller, Pinehurst

"Justice" does not require a particular result. It does, however, require a fair trial, not a sham. 

At least Mr, Muller was (mostly) polite. But then of course, our old friend "Francis" needed to weigh in in the comments with his usual brand of wingnut fuckwittery: 

More surprising than the article you have commented on is the fact you succeeded in having the Pilot post it, you have openly criticized, and even called arrogant one of those who John protects from any unflattering remarks, not often will you read honest appraisals on the individual you mentioned, even this comment may have gone too far, a very thin skinned critic who lashes out at others with no restrictions.

Get that? The guy with over 1100 posts on The Pilot website, the vast majority of them vicious personal attacks on me (including one that said I should die a slow and painful death from Ebola) is whining that The Pilot is "protecting me" from "unflattering remarks." Not only that, he's doing so in response to a letter disputing one of my columns that's on there as a "Top Letter to the Editor." And as for no restrictions, let's not forget that he's still allowed to post and I'm not. 

 Classic wingnuttery: using a public forum to complain endlessly, week after week, about how that forum is violating their right to free speech. 

It's That Time of Year Again: The PWoC Returns

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Yes, it’s November, folks, and we all know what that means. It means it’s time for Christmas decorations to start appearing on the shelves and in the streets. It’s time for Christmas commercials to begin showing up on TV. And it’s time for loud (and ultimately useless) grousing about how awful it is that all this is happening when it’s not even Thanksgiving yet.

All of this is followed, as the night follows the day, by the annual Phony War on Christmas (PWOC), that yearly ritual in which the most privileged class of people (white, straight Christians) in the most privileged country on Earth get to whine about how they’re being oppressed because someone wished them “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.”

As always, the first cries of woe came from our old friends at the Resentment Channel, aka Fox “News.” Bill O’Reilly, whose platoons of researchers apparently comb the Interwebs looking for stories to spin up into new occasions for right-wing butthurt, announced, in his words, “the first salvo in the war on Christmas.”

In one school district in Maryland, O’Reilly said indignantly, “there will be no mention of Christmas or any other religious holiday on the school calendars going forward. That’s because a Muslim did something!”



Now, you may be thinking, “Doggone those Muslims! Now they’ve gotten Christmas banned! Is there no end to their perfidy?” Not so fast. What “a Muslim” (actually several local Muslim leaders) did in Montgomery County, Maryland, was ask for a day off for one of their own religious holidays, known as Eid al-Adha or “feast of the sacrifice.” They were certainly not asking that there be no Christmas.

I imagine they didn’t expect the school board’s reaction, which was to totally punt on the issue and remove all religious designations from the school holidays, both Christian and Jewish. It was a decision which satisfied no one.

Note well that the Christian and Jewish holidays themselves are still there: Everyone still gets the same time off for Christmas and Easter, as well as the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It’s just that Christmas vacation happens over what’s now called “winter break.” Easter vacation is where it’s always been, during “spring break.” As for the Jewish holidays, they’re
designated as days of “no school for students and teachers,” according to a report in the Washington Post. So the kids still have the same holidays they had before, to celebrate in any way they and their families see fit. 

You’d think that would placate Mr. O’Reilly and his colleagues. You’d think that, that is, if you’d been living in a cave without TV for the last 20 years and were unfamiliar with Mr. O’Reilly’s shtick. This board decision, he groused, was “wiping out” all our traditions. “They’re wiping out — you know Christmas and Easter and Passover, these have a Judeo-Christian tradition in our country,” he said. “So they just wiped out all our traditions for these people.”

Actually, “they’ve” done no such thing. While calling the break at the end of the year “Christmas break” is something we may have gotten used to over the years, I seriously doubt that anyone regards how it’s designated on the written school calendar crumpled up in the bottom of Junior’s backpack as one of their fondly embraced traditions.

In any case, I strongly suspect that students and parents will still refer to the holidays as “Christmas break” and “Easter break,” and no one will try to stop them. All will still be allowed to participate in their real traditional observances of the season, such as trampling their fellow celebrants on Black Friday so as to snag the last of the “door buster” 50-inch TVs for $199 at Best Buy.

I’ve noticed that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of outcry from Jewish people over the Montgomery County School Board decision, even though their holidays got the same treatment as the Christian ones. Perhaps this is because Jewish folks, having actually been the recent targets of horrific and genocidal persecution, are less inclined to get their knickers in a twist over what some school board calls a holiday.

It’s a lesson some people could stand to learn. If the thing that makes you indignant is a faraway school board calling the end-of-the-year vacation the “winter” rather than the “Christmas” break, or the thing you feel the burning need to protest is someone using “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” then I submit that you’ve actually got life pretty good and should just be thankful for that, it being the season for thanksgiving and all.

Running Away From Obama: How'd That Work Out For Ya?

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

So what happened this past Tuesday? What was the cause of this so-called “Republican Wave”?

You can blame the gerrymandering, which marginalizes Democratic votes and concentrates Republican ones. That certainly didn’t hurt Renee “I need MY paycheck!” Ellmers in her race against Clay Aiken.

But that doesn’t explain Kay Hagan losing to Thom Tillis, nor does it explain Republican victories in other U.S. Senate and state governor’s races.

You can blame the pernicious influence of money in politics. But the fact is, both sides spent huge amounts of money, and in North Carolina, Hagan actually outspent Tillis.

So what was it? You might come to the conclusion that people just don’t like Democratic policies. But then you’d have to explain away what happened when certain measures were actually put on the ballots in various states:

— Voters in Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota passed bills to raise the minimum wage, even while electing politicians who opposed such an increase. Not only did these measures pass, but they passed by wide margins. (A similar bill passed in Illinois, but it’s only considered “advisory” and doesn’t have the force of law.)

— Washington state passed a referendum that mandates universal background checks for gun purchases. The bill passed with 60 percent of the popular vote, despite millions of dollars poured into the state by the NRA and other gun rights groups to fight it.

— Voters in Colorado and North Dakota rejected so-called “personhood” laws, which define human life as beginning at fertilization of the egg. It’s clearly a back-door attempt to restrict reproductive freedom, and voters in those states soundly defeated both measures.

— Oregon, Alaska and the District of Columbia legalized possession of small amounts of marijuana. A solid majority of Floridians (57 percent) voted to legalize it for medical use, but that measure fell short of the 60 percent it would have needed to become law.

It seems that voters, when asked to choose, favor liberal policies on the minimum wage, gun control, reproductive choice, and even legal weed. Yet they don’t seem to like Democratic candidates. And I know why.

It’s because they act like such wimps.

One of the recurring themes of campaign coverage was how Democratic candidates were “running away” from President Obama. He’s “wildly unpopular,” the press assured us, despite the steadily decreasing jobless rate, a declining deficit, millions of Americans getting health insurance as a result of the much-reviled Affordable Care Act, and 63 months of economic expansion.

And boy, did they ever run away. Kentucky’s Alison Lundergan Grimes refused to even say whether or not she’d voted for the president. Clay Aiken told reporters he didn’t want the president to appear with him. Incumbent Sen. Kay Hagan spent all her time touting herself as the “most moderate” senator.

Republicans, on the other hand, constantly repeated, “Hagan voted with Obama 96 percent of the time."  They painted Hagan as “the deciding vote for Obamacare.” (Funny how every incumbent Democrat in every state was “the deciding vote for Obamacare.”) In the last days of the election, they even put it on the signs: HAGAN=OBAMACARE.

And not once did I hear her stand up and say, “Yeah, I voted for Obamacare, and here’s why: No pre-existing condition exclusions, no lifetime caps on coverage, more people are getting insured, and you can keep your kids covered until they’re 26.” You know, all the things people tell pollsters they like — so long as you don’t call it Obamacare.

Here’s the thing about trying to run away from the president from your party: You’re also running away from the policies that you voted for. That doesn’t work. The Republicans aren’t going to let you do it, and trying to do it makes you look weak, craven, and wholly dependent on polls to determine your loyalty.

Not only does it not work, but as we’ve seen above, it’s so unnecessary. Remember, the president you’re so shy about being seen with got elected twice by large margins. People actually want a lot of the same things the Democrats claim to want. You want to motivate your base voters, the ones you really need in the midterms, then stand up and say, “Yeah, I voted for that, and I’d do it again. I did it because it’ll help the people of my country and my state, and here’s why I say that …”

You want better turnout, Democrats. You need to move the polls, not chase them. You need to stop listening to overpaid Beltway consultants who tell you people won’t like you if you come out strong for the things that help people. You know, the ones Democrats are supposed to believe in.

A few noisy people may not like liberal policies, but everyone hates a two-faced coward.

THE GOBSHITES SPEAK: 

The comments in The Pilot since this column went live show that the Right's not even trying to hide the racism any more:

From commenter "PearlHarbor":  A couple of articles I read called the election white man's revenge.

Articles where? Stormfront.com? The KKK Journal? 

And of course, our old friend "Francis" spoke from beneath his concealing hood of anonymity: As much as it pains me to say this Obama may have been just what we needed, something had to wake White America up, we have been far to lenient and passive when it comes to allowing others dictate their demands, from illegal immigrants marching in our streets to the moral Monday crowd driven by the NAACP trying to use their numbers, it's always been about them, never us, time to think about what we want for a change.

Yes, Francis, let's never forget that it's the white man who is the truly oppressed minority in this country. Wake up, white men!

Jesus. 

What's Setting Them Off Now?

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

A couple of weeks ago, an anonymous staffer at the allegedly liberal TV network MSNBC took to Twitter to mention an ad that was scheduled to run during the Super Bowl: “Maybe the right wing will hate it, but everyone else will go awww: the adorable new Cheerios ad w/​biracial family.”

You may remember when the first commercial featuring the attractive African-American dad, white mom and annoyingly cute daughter aired. Racist trolls came out of the woodwork.

“Shoving multiculturalism down our throats when we know it fails … awesome,” groused one neo-segregationist on the popular site Reddit.

(You can tell the right-wingers by their code words, particularly their hatred of multiculturalism and obsession with things being “shoved down their throats.”)

“Why are we celebrating race traitors and their ugly monkey children?” posted another, sounding exactly like some of the comments posted about Michelle Obama and her daughters on right-wing sites like Breitbart.com and RedState. YouTube had to shut its comments section down because of the flood of racist, hateful comments made about the video.

Let me tell you, folks, when you get too nasty for YouTube’s notoriously vile comments section, you have reached a new depth. We are talking the Marianas Trench of awfulness. “Sinister,” “an abomination” and “disgusting propaganda” are just some of the ones that can be printed here.

So it wasn’t that bold to predict a backlash from those persistent voices on the right who use conservatism as a cover for their bigotry and hatred. However, let us not forget one of the right’s most sacred beliefs: pointing out that racism exists, has existed, or even might exist is worse than actual racism.

Rather than distance themselves from the people who attacked the original ad, people like RNC Chairman Reince Priebus demanded an apology from MSNBC and said he was ”banning” all RNC staff and “Republican surrogates” from appearing on the network, even though MSNBC had apologized for and deleted the offending tweet within three hours. The rest of the right-wing noise machine followed suit.

So, predictably, MSNBC head Phil Griffin went into full grovel mode, assuring the poor babies whom the tweet had offended that “the tweet last night was outrageous and unacceptable,” and that the person responsible had been sacked.

(After which Fox News, in a show of solidarity, fired frequent commentators Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and Bill O’Reilly for all the nasty things they’ve said about liberals. Ha ha! Just kidding about that last bit.)

So the Super Bowl came and went, and sure enough, there didn’t seem to be nearly as much uproar over the new Cheerios ad. Probably because this time, right-wing rage was directed at Coca-Cola for an ad showing happy, smiling people — white, black, Latino, Asian, even a brief shot of a gay couple roller-skating with their child — over a sound track of “America the Beautiful” sung in a variety of languages.

The tag at the end of the commercial was “America Is Beautiful,” which you’d think no one could object to. You’d think that, but you’d be wrong. Right-wing reaction was predictably apoplectic.

“Coca-Cola is the official drink of illegals crossing the border,” tweeted Fox’s Todd Starnes. Despite the fact that nothing in the ad said anything about immigrants not learning English, the hashtag #speakamerican took off on Twitter, as in this message from someone calling himself @RealTrueCon: “#Characters in these Cola commercials, from Mexicans to Indians, learn to #SpeakAmerican already! Or better don’t be in ’em.”

(Of course, unless you’re speaking Cherokee, Navajo or any one of a plethora of Native American tongues, you’re not really “Speaking American,” are you?)

Then there was this from those right-wing stalwarts at Breitbart.com: “When the company used such an iconic song, one often sung in churches on the Fourth of July … to push multiculturalism down our throats [sound familiar?], it’s no wonder conservatives were outraged.”

Actually, it’s never any wonder when conservatives are outraged. The only surprises come when you try to figure out what trivial thing is going to set them off next.

To be a right-winger in 21st century America is apparently to go through life like a raw exposed nerve, just looking for something, anything, to trigger another explosion of incomprehensible rage.

It must be exhausting for them. Glad I’m not one.

Everyone Wants To Be a Holocaust Victim These Days

The Pilot Newspaper: Opinion

Dear Lord, here we go again. It seems that a battle is brewing out there as to who gets to claim the honor of comparing themselves to Jews in the Holocaust.

You can’t hardly turn around these days without encountering some right-winger claiming that Obamacare, or legal abortion, or whatever it is that grinds their particular gears, is just like the suffering of the millions who were crammed into camps to be worked, starved, and/or gassed to death.

The latest entry in the I-wanna-be-a-Jew stakes is billionaire venture capitalist Tom Perkins.

Perkins asserted in a now-infamous letter to The Wall Street Journal that, thanks to the Occupy movement and the nasty things said in his local paper about his rich buddies, he needed to “call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘1 percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American 1 percent, namely the ‘rich.’”

He went on to grouse about nasty things people had said about his wife, best-selling novelist Danielle Steele, then wound up with this jaw-dropper: “This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendant “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now?”

In case you didn’t get the reference, Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”) was a series of coordinated attacks against Jewish homes and businesses in Germany and Austria in 1938.

It resulted in the immediate deaths of 91 Jews, the arrest and incarceration of 30,000 Jews in concentration camps, the destruction of an estimated 7,000 Jewish businesses, and the burning of more than 1,000 synagogues.

As far as I know, neither Mr. Perkins nor any of his fellow 1-percenters has suffered anything more than hurt feelings. We should not, however, let that get in the way of a nationally published snit from a privileged drama queen and his novelist wife.

Friends, I see a crisis a-brewin’. Not for Mr. Perkins, mind you. I think he’ll be fine. But if all sorts of different people keep claiming they’re the moral equivalent of Holocaust victims, pretty soon there really is going to be conflict.

I suppose we could convene some sort of blue-ribbon panel to decide who gets the “our suffering is just like the German Jews of the 1930’s-40s” award. But that could lead to more hurt feelings, and since hurt feelings equal the Holocaust to these people, that’ll just put us back to square one.

I’ve suggested before that maybe the professionally aggrieved need to come up with some other atrocity to which they can equate their particular butthurt. So far, they seem unable to do so. So here are some other things the right and the “1 percent” can claim their suffering is equal to:

— The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre: Supposedly instigated by Catherine de Medici, Mother of King Charles IX of France, this 1572 killing of French Protestants ended with up to 70,000 people dead.

Upside: since many of the dead were aristocrats, the 1-percenters can probably figure out a way to draw some parallel that will make at least as much sense as Kristallnacht. Downside: it’s a little far removed, historically speaking.

—The Cambodian Killing Fields: At the end of the Cambodian Civil War, dictator Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge went on a rampage of vengeance against just about everyone they figured was connected with the former regime: professionals, intellectuals (a group which included anyone who wore glasses), Buddhist monks, you name it. By the end, more than 2.5 million had been executed and buried in mass graves.

Upside: It’s recent enough for people to recognize the reference. There was even a movie. Downside: some of the dead were intellectuals, like college professors and scientists, and the right’s not crazy about them either.

— The Congo Free State: In the late 1800s, King Leopold of Belgium turned the Congo into a collection of private concessions and demanded a “labor tax” on the natives, which essentially reduced them to slaves feeding Europe’s growing hunger for the region’s rubber. Up to 8 million died in the ensuing rebellion, their hands cut off by soldiers to prove to the military authorities that they had made a real kill and hadn’t wasted bullets.

Upside: the right loves to equate taxation with slavery. Downside: they do love them some privatization.

Huguenots, Cambodians, Congolese — these are just some of the millions of real victims the wingnuts and billionaires could compare themselves to, if only they’d expand their imaginations and do the research. And yet we keep getting the same lame comparisons to the Holocaust.

America deserves better from its self-pitying oligarchs and crybaby dead-ender politicians.

Woodward Wimps Out

Latest newspaper column (which, for some reason, doesn't appear on the website. No one else's Sunday column did, either....another glitch by The Pilot.
 
Geez, when did Bob Woodward turn into such a wimp?

You may remember Bob Woodward as the fellow who became a journalistic folk-hero when he, along with partner Carl Bernstein, broke a series of stories about skullduggery, dirty tricks, and outright criminality in the Nixon White House that become collectively known as the “Watergate Scandal,” and which eventually led to the resignation of a President.

Since then, Woodward has released several books, some of them quite interesting, like “The Brethren”, his inside look at the Supreme Court, and “The Commanders,” an account of the prelude to the first Gulf War. He’s also written some that, to put it as politely as possible, strain the credulity of the reader. Books like “Veil,” in which he claimed that CIA director William Casey dramatically confessed his knowledge of the Iran-Contra scandal to Woodward himself on his deathbed. Or “The Agenda,” which opens with a description of a conversation between Bill and Hillary Clinton. In bed. Just the two of them. Perhaps Woodward was hiding underneath the bed. Reading Woodward in the past few years has usually led to a lot of eye-rolling and “yeah, rights” on my part, and the occasional book chucked across the room in disgust. 

Recently, however, Woodward’s attention-seeking made him a bit of a laughingstock. At issue was an op-ed Woodward had written in which he claimed that the Obama administration was “moving the goal posts” in sequester negotiations by asking for additional tax revenue as part of the deal. Woodward went on Wolf Blitzer’s TV show and intimated that he’d been threatened by White House aide Gene Sperling. “They were not happy at all,” Woodward said. “It was said very clearly, 'You will regret doing this.'"

Later, in an interview with Politico, “Woodward repeated the last sentence, making clear he saw it as a veiled threat… ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I think if Obama himself saw the way they're dealing with some of this, he would say, 'Whoa, we don't tell any reporter that you're going to regret challenging us.’"

This made Woodward a hero to the right, since they’re always ready for anything that will support one of their favorite bogus claims: that Obama and his people are “thugs.”

Woodward was even invited on Sean Hannity’s show for a round of “show us how the bad man threatened you.”

Unfortunately for Woodward, the White House released the full text of the exchange, starting with Sperling’s e-mail:

“Bob: I apologize for raising my voice in our conversation today. My bad. I do understand your problems with a couple of our statements in the fall — but feel on the other hand that you focus on a few specific trees that gives a very wrong perception of the forest. But perhaps we will just not see eye to eye here. But I do truly believe you should rethink your comment about saying that Potus asking for revenues is moving the goal post. I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim.”

Wow. “I apologize for raising my voice”? “My bad?” “Perhaps we won’t see eye to eye?” Terrifying. This Sperling guy’s a regular Tony Soprano.

(Gene Sperling, in Bob Woodward's Imagination)

Woodward’s response indicated that he knew there was no threat: “Gene, You do not ever have to apologize to me…I for one welcome a little heat; there should more given the importance.”

Merriment ensued among the DC press corps. “Hezbollah is intimidating,” Jeffery Goldberg of The Atlantic wrote on Twitter. “‘I think you will regret staking out that claim’ is not intimidating.” Even conservatives had to admit that, in the words of the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis, “we were played.” Eric Ericson of RedState ruefully admitted that he’d “moved into the ‘not a threat’ camp.”

I remember back in the day when journalists had some cojones. In the summer of 1972, a pair of reporters discovered that the Nixon White House had a secret slush fund controlled by Attorney General John Mitchell. Katharine Graham, who was at the time the publisher of the Washington Post, discusses in her autobiography what happened when they called Mitchell for comment:

“After [one of the reporters] read him the first two paragraphs, Mitchell interrupted, still screaming, "All that crap, you're putting it in the paper? It's all been denied. Katie Graham is gonna get her [vulgar expletive for a female body part] caught in a big fat wringer if that's published."

That, by golly, is a threat. “As a friend, I think you may come to regret that,” doesn’t even come close. You’d think that, since one of the aforementioned journalists was Bob Woodward himself, he’d know the difference. But since those glory days, Woodward’s become one of the Beltway Insiders, a fading fabulist looking for attention, desperately trying to reclaim former cachet, and not above a little right-wing style drama-queenery and fake victimhood to get it. Or maybe time really has rendered him that gutless. Either way, it’s sad.