I’ve got to say, Charles Johnson has come a long way since the 2008 election (when LGF was a pretty horrible sight/site). I think a lot of people will still have problems forgiving him for the worst of the anti-Islamic propaganda he and those who hung out in his comments sections propelled over a number of years before he (and apparently his weeded-out commenters) saw the light and turned on his erstwhile allies, who are now bitter, bitter enemies, but the guy has a knack of getting under the skin of the right-wing blogs and “news” sites like no one else I know. And so it’s been the last 24 hours or so.
In yet another humiliating attempt to catch the Obama campaign in a hidden video conspiratorial outrageous outrage, the heirs of Andrew at Breitbart.com have creatively edited a video of a lecture by Harvard Law School Prof. Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., to make it look like he was admitting hiding a supposed damning bit of “evidence:” that Barack Obama was a closer friend to Prof. Derrick Bell than they wanted known.
Unfortunately for the reactionaries at Breitbart.com, they had to cut out some important context to make it look that way.
Footage of Barack Obama praising and hugging Professor Derrick Bell. It was spliced and diced by the media to avoid showing just how close Obama was to Bell. More than that, a close associate of the Obama campaign, Harvard Law School’s Professor Charles Ogletree, admitted on our exclusive tape, ‘We hid this throughout the 2008 campaign. I don’t care if they find it now.’
— Ben Shapiro
[Emphasis mine] {i.e. Johnson's—YAFB}
Here is a short video showing that Prof. Ogletree wasn’t talking about the Obama campaign hiding that portion of the video; in reality, he was completing a humorous jab at some of his colleagues who also attended the same 1991 gathering as Obama and Bell.
...
Uh, and this is … you can see this is 1990, so this is 21 years ago.
None of these people look like this today [laughter] and I know they’re going to be afraid or mad that I found this but it’s a good example.
[quiet laughter]
Let me see if I can get this, uh, to work…
Now what makes this so interesting, when you think about it, uh it’s uh, of course we hid this throughout the 2008 campaign so don’t… [laughter] … I don’t care if they find it now but uh, because it just told you that his growth had been, uh, astronomical in terms of his sense about race …
Please notice: he was joking about his colleagues and himself looking older, not seriously “admitting” to hiding anything.
...
This damning exposé by Big Rump editor-at-large Gil Mann is getting worse all the time!
drip
Hear that?
drip
Sounds like somebody knocked over a can of Colt 45, but that’s not what it is. It is, rather, the sound of a steady leak of damaging allegations. And no matter how much enablers in the MSM try to pretend otherwise, THE TRUTH will eventually pool on the tile, and if you’re walking around in your socks, THE TRUTH will out and might give you trench foot if you ignore it.
drip
I told you that shocking clip I released earlier was just the beginning, and… what? I didn’t? Oh crap, that’s right, I meant to crib Shapiro’s last two graphs but only copy-pasted the penultimate one. My co-bloggers told me they fixed it! I trusted them to fix it! It’s not my fault!
drip
Hello, what have we here? A BLACK MAN GIVING SOMEONE OR SOMETHING A HUG THAT’S WHAT.
THE TRUTH. Outs every time.
This is all far from over, assuming I can locate a clip of Tim Meadows’s “Handsome Black Man” sketch. Otherwise yeah, it’s over. I already wasted countless hours trying to find something useful from Starsky and Hutch, but talk about a misnomer—that pimp never hugs a soul, much less David.
drip
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 03/08/12 at 08:48 PM
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Betty’s been covering the BIG Breitbart left-behinders’ desperate and hilarious attempts to recover from being scooped by BuzzFeed with the BIG revelation that President Obama spoke at a demonstration to introduce Professor Derrick Bell back in 1990.
As some commenters both here and on Balloon Juice have noted, since similar footage has appeared in documentaries in recent times, the only “scoop” is the spectacularly blatantly race-baiting spin Joel B. Pollak (“THE VETTING: OBAMA EMBRACES RACIALIST HARVARD PROF”) and Dana Loesch (“Andrea Mitchell Runs Defense for Obama, Derrick Bell”) are trying to feed their readers before Pollak’s appearance on the Hannity show this evening. The righty blogs are in medium cry about it right now (though I detect a hint of “OK, we’re on board. BOMBSHELL!!! Er, but is that all you’ve got?”, reading between the lines).
The whole thing’s as half-assed as you’d expect from this bunch of puffed-up amateur demagogues. BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith’s Twitter feed tells some of the story about the day’s developments if you’re interested. He deeply resented the BIG allegation that the video had been “selectively edited,” and since then, as Rumproaster Nellcote let us know on Betty’s last thread, PBS’s Frontline has issued the full video to prove there was no such editing:
Today, the website BuzzFeed published a clip of the speech along with an article explaining some past and current context for Obama’s remarks. The website claimed the clip was “not previously available online.” The editors at Brietbart.com responded that the video on Buzzfeed had been “selectively edited” and said that they would release the full footage tonight on Fox News.
But there’s nothing new about the clip or Obama’s role in the controversy at Harvard Law School. In 2008, as a part of our quadrennial election special The Choice 2008, FRONTLINE ran the same footage of the speech as a part of an exploration of Obama’s time at Harvard Law School, where he graduated in 1991. It’s been online at our site and on YouTube since then.
Meanwhile, geek that I am, I’ve been checking out the Wikipedia article for Derrick Bell. We’ve caught conservatives desperately and clumsily trying to edit Wikipedia and even Conservapedia to suit their own purposes in the past. I don’t think this episode is quite as comical, but I’ll catalogue it after the fold just to add to the day’s daftness.
You’re in a desert walking along when you look down, and you see a tortoise, she’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on her back. The tortoise lays there, her belly baking in the hot sun, beating her legs trying to turn herself over, but you’re not helping the poor thing. Why is that, MITT?
I haven’t written much about Trump’s adventures in our Highland fastnesses before (I think the sum total of it on Rumproast is in the comments here) because the story’s quite depressing, and much more our problem than yours, though it has garnered some media coverage in America over the years.
The New Clearances
In 2007, The Donald flew in, waved his checkbook around, and set about bribing, menacing, and armtwisting his way into building a mammoth new billion-dollar “world-class” golf resort at Balmedie, near the UK’s old oil capital of Aberdeen, initially slated to include “a 450-bedroom hotel, a golf academy, 950 holiday homes, 36 golf villas and a residential development”. One of his websites trumpets:
I have been actively looking for links land in Europe for the past few years, and of course my preference was Scotland over any other country because I am half Scottish. My Mother, Mary MacLeod is from Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis. She grew up in a simple croft until she landed in Manhattan at the age of 20 and her first language was Gaelic.
When I saw this piece of land I was overwhelmed by the imposing dunes and rugged Aberdeenshire coastline. I knew that this was the perfect site for Trump International - Scotland. I have never seen such an unspoiled and dramatic sea side landscape and the location makes it perfect for our development. Our site is close to two of the world’s most famous courses and is just 15 minutes by car from Aberdeen Airport.
The initial wrangles focused on his plans to stabilize sand dunes that comprise a Site of Special Scientific Interest that make up 40% of this coastal “unspoiled and dramatic landscape”. The dunes naturally shift with wind and tide, and form a rare environment hosting a vast range of bird and wildlife. Trump’s argument was basically that he’d stop them blowing away and tidy them up, which is surely a good thing all round.
People try to live in this area too. Trump chose to honor his mother’s memory and his Scots heritage by re-enacting the Highland Clearances on a smaller scale. This did not go unopposed, one major thorn in his side being the organization Tripping Up Trump:
The TUT campaign has been key to Donald Trump’s retreat from the use of compulsory purchase orders.
The threat of forced evictions was deliberately held over the heads of the Menie families for nearly two years. Donald Trump’s track record shows he cannot be trusted to behave reasonably towards his neighbours or act responsibly towards the environment. He has bullied and mislead from the start.
Former Republican congressman and libertarian hero Bob Barr takes aim at gun control advocates:
Of course, the media often reports on violent crime, which aides anti-gun politicians in their never-ending crusade against firearm rights. After all, bad and salacious news sells. The facts, however, tell another story. According to a seminal study published in the mid-1990s by Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, firearms are used in self-defense about 2.5 million times each year in this country.
Unfortunately, news stories that feature law-biding citizens using firearms to fend off attackers often either go unreported or wind up buried in the back pages of newspapers.
Then, in a spectacular display of “who ya gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?” he goes on to state a blatant untruth about one such incident:
The controversy over who shot first, Greedo or Han Solo, in ‘Episode IV,’ what I did was try to clean up the confusion, but obviously it upset people because they wanted Solo [who seemed to be the one who shot first in the original] to be a cold-blooded killer, but he actually isn’t. It had been done in all close-ups and it was confusing about who did what to whom. I put a little wider shot in there that made it clear that Greedo is the one who shot first, but everyone wanted to think that Han shot first, because they wanted to think that he actually just gunned him down.
Imagine the contempt he must have for his audience to be so brazenly disingenu… hold on, I think I got my notes mixed up.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 02/12/12 at 08:33 AM
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If you’ve ever wondered how they put together these videos, here’s how (go easy clicking the links embedded in the text over at that site—possible malware warning, though just reading the text is fine).
Oh anti-gay activists, is there anything you can’t make intensely homoerotic? From Raw Story, which sounds super-gay all of a sudden, comes (ha) this far-out (hee hee) claim from the head (oh ho ho) of conservative Christian organization the Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy the Family Research Council, which takes the official position that the hate better be the only thing swelling in you now:
Tony Perkins: Star Wars ‘surrenders to gay empire’
So I was trying to find a way to rescue that dumb thing I just posted, and when I Google-Imaged “Dick Van Patten” (sounds weird, but you’ll see, or better yet, won’t), this came up with the first set of results.
You don’t understand, I’ve been seeking out this issue my whole entire life. All I remembered was that there was a green rabbit-guy who kicked some other guy in the face—this really stuck with me for some reason—but now that it’s in front of me, every single panel is achingly familiar. I just Butterfly Affected into me when I was, like, six or seven. My prostate feels fantastic!
Thanks, Rumproast. Next time I’ll try to post something we can all derive enjoyment from.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 01/17/12 at 10:29 PM
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In which America’s favorite unkillable psychotic backwoods mongoloid sets aside his standard arsenal and adopts your weapon of choice, the ukulele.
I guess they went over-budget with the (rather impressive) Jason makeup, otherwise the costuming department surely would’ve outfitted the psychiatrist with some shoes.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 01/13/12 at 10:07 PM
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Fight back against the War on Friday the 13th by keeping the Jason in Jason Lives! Report to Drill Sergeant Final Girl for your training. C’mon, she worked so hard putting together the kyllabus.
SCHEDULING NOTE: I’m not sure how many (if any) people who know me IRL read this blog, but if you’re out there, I will be watching Friday the 13th 3D tonight from approximately 9pm to 10:35pm. Any non-emergency phone calls made during that time will result in some sort of weapon or garden implement coming RIGHT AT YOU. You wouldn’t want to know me IRD, would you? Hell, you’re getting the short end of the stick as it is. The stick that will be coming RIGHT AT YOU.
All you poli-sci dorks who don’t overlap Vennwise with horror geeks, feel free to assume the post title refers to this.
we don’t need to hold on for another hero ‘til the end of the night
I’m often asked “gil, why do you read the Daily Caller if you don’t agree with its editorial stance, gain insight from its reporting, or find its human-interest stories compelling?” To which I can only respond “You’re not really here! You’re something my subconscious whipped up in response to the battery of booze and pills I’ve ingested, then sent forth to taunt me! GO ‘WAY!” Then I whip a bottle at them and they evaporate. But they raise an interesting question!
An interesting question I’m not going to answer, because this isn’t about me, it’s about me getting my jollies setting you, the readers, against each other in a horrifying bout of bloodsport. That’s right, it’s time for…
THAT THING I SAID IN THE TITLE ALREADY.(trumpet fanfare)
Happy Birthday, Shirley Jackson! Hey, I know a fun game: let’s juxtapose some of her most famous writing with an excerpt from her obituary, see if it gives us chills:
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.
In 1965, Shirley Jackson died of heart failure in her sleep, at her home in North Bennington, at the age of 48. Jackson had suffered throughout her life from various neuroses and psychosomatic illnesses.
Yep, definitely got some chills. That’s what I love about her, she can always be counted on to provide those.
Okay, that’s a lie. I’m actually going to search online for the hardcover edition of The Haunting of Hill House I gave to a girlfriend years ago and see if it’s still going for an obscene amount of money. God damn I wish it’d been something easily replaceable, like an engagement ring.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 12/14/11 at 07:44 PM
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I could either deal head-on with the massive self-loathing that causes me to do such things, or I could distract myself from same by making you fight for my amusement. Guess which way I’m leaning! That’s right, it’s time for yet another commenter contest with nebulous rules, imaginary prizes, and a curious reticence on the issue of who exactly is doing the judging and how.
"[W]e wholeheartedly endorse the excellent Rumproast blog" -- Jim Newell, Wonkette
"Mind you, don’t let yourself be trapped dialoging with these guys: truth is their enemy; pyschological warfare and misinformation dissemination is their profession." -- TeaParty.org
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