This was once a reporter, before pulling a Sharyl Attkisson.
I will ladle out his swill undiluted for a paragraph or so:
Progressive Bloggers Are Doing the White House’s Job
James Oliphant / NationalJournal.comThis administration enjoys an advantage afforded no other: a partisan media that has its back, minute-by-minute. — Off the record: The Obama administration has a complicated relationship with traditional media….
I would like to tell you just how incredibly angry this monstrous lie makes me. Instead, I will just tell you that this liar obviously belongs squarely in the Party of Lies™ as it carries out the agenda of the Prince of Lies™ on behalf of their platform of the Seven Deadly Sins®.
It’s been a familiar pattern since President Obama took office in 2009: When critics attack, the White House can count on a posse of progressive writers to ride to its rescue. Pick an issue, from the Affordable Care Act to Ukraine to the economy to controversies involving the Internal Revenue Service and Benghazi, and you’ll find the same voices again and again, on the Web and on Twitter, giving the president cover while savaging the opposition. And typically doing it with sharper tongues and tighter arguments than the White House itself.
LIE! LIE! LIE! LIE!
“Progressive Bloggers” (of which, it ought be noted, I’ve been a noted member for something like a decade now — March was the 10th anniversary of this blog) have been outgunned and out-subsidized* for many years now. The Bush Administration and the GOP actively coordinates the Righties. They hone in and attack, like a swarm of useless (honeywise) killer bees, and are very often paid and paid pretty well for their efforts.
Rightie bloggers and the GOP fax machine:
A Mirage made in the Antithesis of Heaven
[* In fact, I cannot think of ANYwhere they HAVE been subsidized.]
Meantime, the number of progressive independent bloggers like myself dwindles precipitously close to extinction. If you will look at the front page of Memeorandum, you will note that more and more, progressives are confined to larger blogging mills like ThinkProgress or Daily Kos, or Talking Points Memo, et al, with independents fading from sight.
With Daily Kos and the Huffington Post, bloggers are expected to donate all their efforts, something that is anathema to rightie blogger mills.
Rightie bloggers make cash for selling out America — 30 pieces of silver generally being the minimum wage.
Increasingly, corporate and newspaper blogs are cornering the market and pushing the little guys out. This has always been much MORE true of the Left than the Right, because, unlike Pajamas Media (who famously subsidized many of the top Rightie bloggers until dumping them for TV podcasting, allegedly, after the 2008 election) and even paid trolls on the Right, there has never been a nickel in Leftie blogging, all the phony false-equivalencing about “George Soros” to the pathetic contrary.
Emperor Soros the Merciless, as seen by Rightie Bloggers
But listen to this ‘journalist’ pretending that the Left has the Righties at some grand disadvantage. Next he’ll be claiming that the Left completely dominates AM Talk Radio …
While the bond between presidential administrations and friendly opinion-shapers goes back as far as the nation itself, no White House has ever enjoyed the luxury that this one has, in which its arguments and talking points can be advanced on a day-by-day, minute-by-minute basis. No longer must it await the evening news or the morning op-ed page to witness the fruits of its messaging efforts.
Credit the explosion of social media, the fragmentation of news, the erosion of the institutional press. Fortuitously for the president, the modern media landscape not only provides ample space for the expression of pure partisanship, it actively encourages it. Backing your friends and belittling your enemies is a healthy business model, one rewarded by a torrent of clicks, retweets, “likes,” and links. “The incentives are to play ball,” says one former liberal blogger, “not to speak truth to power. More clicks. More action. Partisanship drives clicks.”
The Obama administration had the good fortune to come to power just when the forces undermining the traditional media became truly disruptive, creating a Web-based royalty. And those who came of age, who mastered the new tools, were largely in step with the administration—in many respects mirroring the young Turks in Obama’s ranks who used those tools in similar ways to get the president elected.
Here are some examples of right wing coordination, with ZERO counter-examples, from my blog (and by Blog Swarm, I mean the righties not only picking the same story, but using the same talking points, speaking the same propaganda points, and homogenous in a manner that free thinkers — and Lefties — do not, have not and never will):
- Republican Almost Admits Eastwood Speech at RNC Sucked 6 December 2012‘That’s the difference between narrative and fact, and the Republican party seems in a vast psychotic break between their self-consoling and comforting fictions and the painful reality of actual results….’
- This Week in Agit-Prop 7 September 2012
Note that the American Enterprise Institute is virtually never on Memeorandum, but that PowerLine is run by John Hinderaker, now a board member of the CATO Institute, inserted during the hostile Koch takeover a couple of months ago, and a player in the Dan Rather takedown. William A. Jacobson was one of the “movers” of this week’s phony Labor Day “Empty Chair Day” and Memorial Day’s “Blog about Brett Kimberlin Day” …
This is a coordinated and intentional gaming of the Memeorandum robot, and it’s been taking place for a long time now.
This is ALSO the antithesis of a free press, and is nothing less than a fascist attempt to control information and bully the so-called mainstream press, aided and abetted by the craven and ignorant stenographers who have supplanted actual reporters in our American newsrooms. And, while I believe I’m probably writing a one-way ticket to the eventual gulag here, it needs to be said, and nobody’s saying it. This week it has NEVER been so clear or apparent.
And I do not know how it has come to this. I have fought this increasingly inevitable conflict of utterly divorced realities, and, therefore, bloodshed in final arbitrage of two American matter-antimatter worldviews. All of human history tells us that when fundamental “identities” are in opposition, tragedy ensues. The Hutu-Tutsi mass slaughter of a hundred thousand human beings over tribal identity — mostly by machete – happened between two ethnic, racial, cultural groups that nearly anyone anywhere in Africa would have had a hard time differentiating at a glance.
And I do not know how this happened.
If America were a family, we would currently be in the position of the angry husband coming home and beating his wife (within nonfatal, non-scarring wounds) and the wife debating for far too long whether to call the police, or, having called them, repents, feeling at some deep level she is to blame for the violence.
There is no right and wrong here; only right and left.
- The Jackbooting of the Fraidy Cats (with video) 10 June 2012
And the blogosmear goes CRAZY (shrieking their “silence” for a second straight day):
Liberty Chick / BREITBART.COM: REPORT: 70 HOUSE MEMBERS TO CALL ON DOJ TO INVESTIGATE SWATTING OF CONSERVATIVE BLOGGERS
Discussion: Cardigan / iOwnTheWorld.com: REPORT: 70 HOUSE MEMBERS TO CALL ON DOJ TO INVESTIGATE SWATTING OF CONSERVATIVE BLOGGERS
Lance Burri / The TrogloPundit: A few words about “Spoofing” and “SWATting,” and would it matter to you if somebody got killed?
The Lonely Conservative: 70 Members of Congress to Call for Investigation Into the SWATting of Bloggers
Susan Duclos / Wake up America: Listen To SWATting 911 Call- Now Report Says 70 House Members Will Call For DOJ Investigation
Alex Alvarez / Mediaite: CNN’s Don Lemon Questions Erick Erickson About ‘Swatting’ Attacks On Conservative Bloggers - The Fainting Couch and the Zombies of Tea 7 September 2011
Because when the sniffing and phony moral posturing, the “incivility” that the uncivil pretend to deplore fades away, we will always have the ball-less centrists of the media and the spineless on the left — who are so afraid of picking a fight with the snarling right that they will not and have not protested the obscenfication of the term “liberal” and its demonic substitute, “leftist” which is a term that was formerly applied to potentially Communist revolutionaries in jungles and third world countries — we will always have the delayed reaction of dumping all their contempt on this “awful” game with its terrible, violent thoughts.
On this issue, left and right are unified: if someone on the left is less than perfect for any reason, BOTH pounce. Thus far, no one on the left has defended Tea Party Zombies Must Die, nor do I expect them to. The righties are calling for boycotts and attacks on the parent company responsible. The lefties, as usual, are blissfully comatose…
- The Important Whoops, or Climategategate [how the Righie blogs pushed the false “Climategate” meme] 2 September 2011
Which produced THIS instantaneous chain-reaction (which OUGHT to be an important data-set in ANY theory of Global Smarming produced):
There’s Delingpole of the UK Telegraph, who launched the “climategate” meme in the international press, as you’ll recall. And Hoft, of course, and Weasel Zippers whose very name just drips with credibility. All “know” that now THIS IS SCIENCE, DAMMIT! …
I traced the biggest push of Spencer’s meme to the “Heartland Institute” (and its blogs and publications and press releases) run by old Koch machine crony Joseph Bast, which has devoted itself to Denialism in the past few years, and found that the “scientist” at the University of Alabama whose “peer-reviewed” paper it was in Remote Sensing Journal had been featured at this year’s Heartland Institute Global Warming Deniathon, Conference and Hoe-Down:
- 101st Chairborne Tactics Revealed 2 June 2011
We only need to go back to Weekly Standard editor Michael Goldfarb’s 2007called-for and enabled blog swarm attacking the New Republic for publishing stories of what was REALLY going on in Iraq, managing to “out” and publicly and militarily humiliate Scott Thomas Beauchamp to see how this works…
(Beauchamp’s sergeant is now serving time in a Federal penitentiary for having murdered, execution-style, Iraqi civilians.)
The “truth” was maintained by the flying monkey corps that what Beauchamp had written about our Brave, Noble Troops COULD NOT POSSIBLY BE TRUE, and, therefore, he and the New Republic should be punished. The end result was that Beauchamp was subjected to seven kinds of hell (serving in combat), while the New Republic cravenly backed away from him and issued the usual rationalizations and mea culpas. William Kristol clapped his hands together in glee. Goldfarb was hired as Internet Communications honcho for the John McCain campaign, and NOT ONE OF THE BASTARDS responsible for this meaningless waste of time and media resources in the phony firestorm was ever held accountable.
One lone blogger tried to sound the alarm, but was ignored — even though eventually proven correct. The tactic worked.
And so on and so forth.
That was just what a very cursory search of my files reveals. The Right has LONG engaged in coordinated blog swarms to push their news and agenda, beginning as an arbitrary point in time, with the blogswarm that took down Dan Rather at CBS back in 2004 (Which is WHY every posting on this blog concludes with “Courage,” the last thing Dan Rather ever said on CBS before being taken down by the blogswarm barbarians.
Hell, most people even BELIEVE that the documents in question were proven FALSE, when all that was proven was that they could not be authenticated as TRUE.
Propaganda works.
Got that?
Here is the piece de resistance, BTW:
- WaPost: Bush Meets With Rightie Bloggers 17 September 2007
Sunday’s Washington Post reveals that Bush met with prominent military and pro-war bloggers the other day.
Meeting with “milbloggers” — all of whom are Righties
Official White House photo by Joyce N. Boghosian
Gee, if you’ve been reading his vorpal sword, you’d know that I reported it Friday afternoon.
Well, better late than never, I suppose:
President Reaches Out to a Friendly Circle in New Media
By Michael Abramowitz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 16, 2007; Page A07The day after his prime-time speech on Iraq, President Bush sat down for a round-table interview not with traditional White House reporters but with bloggers who focus on military issues, including two participating by video link from Baghdad.
Judging from some of the accounts of the Friday meeting, the president offered up little news. Here is what one of the 10 bloggers, Ward Carroll of Military.com, described from his notes as some of Bush’s most notable comments:
- “This strategy is my strategy.”
- “I’m defining a horizon of peace.”
- “I don’t mind people attacking me. . . . That’s politics . . . but I do mind people impugning the integrity of our generals.”
Still, the hour-long meeting in the Roosevelt Room offered Bush another opportunity to break through what he sees as the filter of the traditional news media …
The article goes on to say:
“More and more we are engaging in the new-media world, and these are influential people who have a big following,” said Kevin F. Sullivan, the White House communications chief.
Bush told the group that, to his knowledge, it was the first time a president had met with bloggers for a chat at the White House, one of the participants wrote. The blogs represented at the meeting are generally pro-Bush and pro-military, and the ensuing reports were highly sympathetic to the president … Matthew Burden, a former Army officer who blogs under the name Blackfive, raved about how Bush slapped his hand and called him “brutha.”
Seeing as how “Blackfive” was instrumental in BOTH the Beauchamp Affair AND the recent New York Times/Moveon “ad rates” flap (conspicuously dropped this weekend), I stand by my suggestion that both incidents may well be directly connected to White House dirty tricks. (See Friday’s post, “How Green Was My Talking Point” — scroll down to the bottom for my coverage of this story.)
Glad to see the Washington Post is keeping up (more or less)….
Now, contrast this FACT with Oliphant’s lame “evidence”:
Consider: A search of White House records shows Ezra Klein, then with The Washington Post’s Wonkblog, visiting more than 25 times since 2009; last week, a Post story detailed the travails of Lesley Clark, a White House reporter for McClatchy who has been to the Oval Office three times in the last three years, and has asked one question directly to Obama in all that time….
You will note that Ezra Klein — until recently — WORKED for the Washington Post, so, weigh that when you compare this fake Faux Reporter’s Fake Faux Outrage whilst ginning up his fake Faux charge — classic Rightie projection. Accuse US of doing what we’ve NEVER done, and that the Rightie blogs ALWAYS have done.
An illustration from this blog from 10 June 2008
That, friends, is evidence so tissue thin that it might not support the weight of a solitary virus. Oliphant (who is a lawyer, and, presumably, KNOWS that he is constructing a case out of whole cloth) bases his “proof” almost entirely on assertion and implication and virtually not at all on evidence.
What other lies can we gin up?
Do you see how lame this phony “evidence” actually is? How tedious the attempt at some linkage between ONE reporter and the entire Leftie blogosphere while entirely IGNORING the documented evidence of Rightie blogosmear™ coordination directly with the PREVIOUS White House?
And not to mention the false Rightie meme (never explicitly stated) that:
The “mainstream media” is in league with Obama and therefore biased and therefore, EVEN THOUGH, FOR OUR CHARGES TO WORK, BIAS MUST BE INTRINSICALLY BAD, OUR BIAS is good, because it counteracts the bias we claim the other side is showing!
You see, IF bias is bad, then Right Wing bias is bad. But if it is NOT bad, then Oliphant and his Oliphantine Media MeeToo’ers don’t have a leg to stand on.
This is the fundamental contradiction of the meme, which, thankfully for them, NOBODY EVER BOTHERS POINTING OUT. They are hoist by their own petard. Period.
What a petard hoisting actually
looks like in real life.
Unlike Righties, we do not think in Lock Step (or Goose Step, as the case may be) as the Righties have been SHOWN again and again to be. As the forgetful Oliphant notes:
Certainly, the writers don’t always do the Democrats’ dirty work. Zaid Jilani, a former blogger for ThinkProgress,an arm of the progressive Center for American Progress, said the White House reacted angrily when he wrote a post critical of the administration’s Afghanistan policy. Other progressive writers say they have gotten pushback from Obama aides when they haven’t toed the line on issues such as surveillance and immigration…
Never happened in Rightieland. If you don’t believe my examples, I have DOZENS more, covering a big chunk of the last decade.
I’m sorry, but Mr. Oliphant is blowing smoke up our ass.
You will note that Mr. Oliphant the Elephant LOOKS like a GOP.
WHY is it that you can tell a Republican just by how nerdy he looks and how angry and pinched the face? Even on Facebook, you can always tell who they are just by looking at their 1950s square, pale faces.
It is a mystery.
I’m sorry, but that last insult/observation wasn’t for you, Gentle Reader. I just don’t have any way of kicking this smirking, lying bastard where he so richly deserves it.
My fault for not being evolved, I suppose.
Mr. Oliphant’s agit-prop is the very definition of “false equivalency.”
Courage.
========================
A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog His Vorpal Sword. This is cross-posted from his blog.
A writer, published author, novelist, literary critic and political observer for a quarter of a quarter-century more than a quarter-century, Hart Williams has lived in the American West for his entire life. Having grown up in Wyoming, Kansas and New Mexico, a survivor of Texas and a veteran of Hollywood, Mr. Williams currently lives in Oregon, along with an astonishing amount of pollen. He has a lively blog, His Vorpal Sword (no spaces) dot com.