The First Church of Free Speech

The latest tempest-in-a-teapot in the media has to to with Huffington Post blogger Nico Pitney being called upon during a White House press conference after Obama’s people told him that they just might do so. What this has to do with the price of tea in China is beyond me, but the political talk shows acted as though it was VERY important. I’ve been watching these things for over thirty years (it used to really tick me off when they’d interrupt cartoons for Carter or Reagan) and I have yet to learn anything from any of them -except that Alexander Haig was certifiably bonkers.

Here’s what happens during the typical White House press conference:

1) The President or one of his representatives walks out and announces something that the media has already been talking about for the past several days. He then calls on lap-dog reporters to ask questions, or for cruel sport, he calls on toothless old hounds whom he knows can no longer bite him.

2) The White House Press Corps asks inane and impertinent questions, many of which have nothing to do with the subject at hand. They are more interested in making sure they appear on TV or radio.

3) Should a member of the Courtier Press actually sneak in a question that just might be informative, the President or his spokesperson will dodge the question or simply lie. Since the reporters are more interested in advancing themselves than tricking information out of the White House, the President and his spokesmen usually get away with this. Lap-Dog Reporter #2 isn’t about to cost himself or herself face time by following up on a question asked by Lap-Dog Reporter #1.

So what exactly is the big deal about the White House telling a blogger than they might call on him, and then doing it? Parsimony leads to one conclusion: cliques resent nothing so much as when a person they personally haven’t approved of is invited to the party. In other words, they’re Heathers 1, 2 and 3 -and they’re worried Nico Pitney or some other interloper is coming to steal their boyfriend and make them meet with accidents.

Let’s put one more urban legend to rest: What goes on at White House press conferences counts as journalism about as much as Etch-A-Sketch counts as art. If I want information about what the Executive Branch is going to do about say, inmates being held in kennels without due process, the last place on earth I would get that information is at a press room briefing or press conference. It’s not in the White House’s interest to give us the full story and tell us the whole truth and apparently it’s not in the White House Press Corps’ interest to get it from them.

The real issue is the fact that so many reporters who cover the White House are sycophants for popular presidents and this is shown by the questions they ask. Even if the fix was in regarding Pitney and it was a set-up through and through, that only makes the courtier press that much more pathetic: like a fall guy who puts up a better fight than a “legitimate” opponent.

CNN’s Howard Kurtz is always reliable as a smarmy, dishonest shill for the Right. Case in point:

Just this morning on his show, Reliable Sources, he discussed how Falafel O’ Bill was being called out for his role in the assassination of Dr. Tiller. For three years, O’Reilly has been calling Tiller a murderer who has the blood of tens of thousands of babies on his hands. O’Reilly also sent his creepy, semen-crusted little stalkers to harass Tiller, as well as posting Tiller’s photo on TV so any would-be assassin would know exactly whom he was supposed to kill.

Since Kurtz is a fluffer for the right wing, and O’Reilly’s incitements to murder were on video, Kurtz had to resort to his usual shtick of slipping in a baldfaced lie and switching to a new subject before anyone catches him in the lie. In this case it was the claim that when Bill O’Reilly repeatedly referred to Tiller as “Tiller the Killer” and “Dr. Killer”, he was just using the epithets the “pro-life” [sic] crowd used -a false claim made by O’Reilly himself, even though he (O’Reilly) had reverted to calling the doctor “Dr. Killer” after claiming that he wasn’t the one calling Tiller a murderer:

So Kurtz was using O’Reilly’s “it’s not me, it’s the neighbors” excuse when Falafel Boy himself was still calling Dr. Tiller “Dr. Killer”.

That was just the beginning. Kurtz invited fetus-worshiping hack columnist Kathleen Parker on his show to say that Bill O’Reilly bears no responsibility for the murder that he had spent three years trying to incite. The choice of Parker shows just was a shameless, mendacious character Howard Kurtz really is. Parker has her own history of using her media outlet (a syndicated column) to call for the murder of public figures.

Back in 2003, Kathleen Parker was attacking Democrats for not being complete war whores. In her column, she claims to have had a discussion with a “former Delta Force member” in which he says that a General (Wesley Clark), a Senator (John Kerry), two Congressmen (Gephardt and Kucinich) and a Governor “should all be lined up and shot.” Now this Delta Force commando has about as much basis in reality was Janet Cook’s crack baby or any of Jayson Blair’s fantasies and fabrications. The proof is in the fact that Parker went back and changed the quote to “lined up and slapped”. So either this Delta Force trooper is a made up character, or Parker was lying about what he said. Either way, it’s clear that Kathleen Parker thinks it’s acceptable to use her column to gin up death threats against others.

Here we have a right-wing fluffer using a deranged hack with a record of calling for the murder of public figures (five so far!) vouching for the character of another deranged hack who has called for the murder of public figures.

Nice going, Mr. Kurtz.

George Lucas must be the greatest filmmaker of all time. Just look at how many people attack him and his films, yet can’t resist watching them or talking about them. I mean, it’s not as though Lucas churns out a movie every year, now is it?

Case in point: Stephanie Zacharek of Salon. Her deep dislike for George Lucas and his movies is well-documented but then, a seething resentment against Lucas is mandatory if you want to write for that web site. From David Brin (who wrote The Postman, a movie that pretty much ended Kevin Costner’s movie career) calling Lucas a fascist to Alynda Wheat, who called Lucas a racist to his face and became a total drama queen when he ridiculed her for being a cretin, to David Thomson, who attacked Lucas for not putting more sexual content in movies aimed at ten-year-old boys (how long before this guy gets busted in a men’s room?) to Steven Hart, who thinks that just because he never read mythology or studied comparative religion (as Lucas did before he switched his major from anthropology to film studies) then George Lucas couldn’t have, either. Zacharek has taken her unhealthy fixation on George Lucas to new lows over the years, not only by making up her mind to trash his films before so much as watching them (I defy anyone to read her “reviews” and not think the fix was in) -even attacking him for the cameras and projectors he uses!

So is it any surprise that Stephanie Zacharek uses her review of a Star Trek movie as an opportunity to take another swipe at George Lucas, this time for not including sexual content in Star Wars? Four years AFTER the last Star Wars movie was released? Of course not!

The British government made up a list of troublemakers and decided to ban them from entering the country. Among those who have been told they are not welcome are Muslim fanatics preaching jihad, racists who support violence (including a leader of the KKK), Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps and a few neo-Nazis, including the Savage Wiener (aka Michael Savage).

The Savage Wiener is not only a racist and a gay-basher (telling one caller to his short-lived TV show that he hoped they got AIDS), but a racist gay-basher who uses Nazi terminology (like referring to Arabs as Untermenschen) and even plagiarizes his bigoted shtick from Nazi writers like Hanns Johst Schlageter. On top of that, he’s not above using his radio show to try to incite violent threats against those who displease him, like in 2007 when he told a guest that he should somehow obtain the names and addresses of the Marine Corps prosecutors and investigators looking into the Haditha Massacre. His show is filled with his paranoid, bigoted, violent fantasies.

So naturally, according to the morons at Fox News, this is a great crime against free speech. Just a few minutes ago, Falafel O’Reilly had a fit because the British government decided it was time to keep out the trash. O’Reilly had the nerve to whine about the UK (a country whose cities were bombed on a daily basis for several years by Nazis) barring Nazis from entry to the country. Glenn Greenwald pointed out that right-wing concern trolls were silent when British singer Cat Stevens was barred from entering the United States. On top of that, American citizens have been placed on “No Fly” lists by their own government, such as James Moore -a journalist and critic of the Bush Crime Family, along with tens of thousands of others.

Falafel Boy’s guest, Laura Ingraham, was also whining up a storm. But then, she has cause to be worried that the Foreign Office has yanked the welcome mat out from under racists and gay-bashers who promote violence. Ingraham got her start with a neo-Nazi student publication: the infamous Dartmouth Review. This paper was funded by fascists and white supremacists and was a a ripe source for Jew-baiting and racist insults aimed at black students, such as describing black students as talking like Amos & Andy clones (”We be up to our ‘fros in studies”). The paper ran a quote from Adolf Hitler on its masthead and staged a mock lynching of a black man for its pages. The paper also outed a number of gay students and sent goons armed with sledgehammers to smash a display erected by Dartmouth students who opposed Apartheid. To this day, Ingraham is unrepentant. In fact, she uses her AM radio show to gin up more racist agitprop -this time against Mexicans, and is a torture-loving sadist who thinks water torture is little more than a fraternity prank. If the Foreign Office is going to exclude race-baiting radio hosts who condone unlawful violence, they should add Ingraham to the list ASAP.

As a source for unintentional comedy, a column by Dennis Prager ranks right up there Steven Seagal movies. This recent piece from Prager is so saturated with foolishness, nonsense and logical fallacies that I’m going to have to give it the point-by-point treatment:

Any human being with a functioning conscience or a decent heart loathes torture.

Does this mean all your fellow torture enthusiasts at TownHall lack functioning consciences and decent hearts?

Its exercise has been a blight on humanity. With this in mind, those who oppose what the Bush administration did to some terror suspects may be justified.

May be justified. Uh-huh.

But in order to ascertain whether they are, they need to respond to some questions:

1. Given how much you rightly hate torture, why did you oppose the removal of Saddam Hussein, whose prisons engaged in far more hideous tortures, on thousands of times more people, than America did — all of whom, moreover, were individuals and families who either did nothing or simply opposed tyranny? One assumes, furthermore, that all those Iraqi innocents Saddam had put into shredding machines or whose tongues were cut out and other hideous tortures would have begged to be waterboarded.

And we’re off! Here we have a classic example of begging the question: It assumes that the U.S. had a legal or moral right to invade Iraq -an invasion that has caused over a million Iraqis to lose their lives. Second, torture didn’t end when Saddam Hussein was overthrown. Abu Ghraib simply went from being a torture chamber run by the Iraqi government to being run by the U.S. government. The torture didn’t end.

What’s more, the U.S. government (the one Americans are responsible for) wasn’t torturing Iraqis until the war started. Finally, one can always think of more and more ghastly ways to torture and kill people. It doesn’t excuse the less gruesome varieties. I’m sure the guy who got his tongue cut out would prefer that to getting a red-hot poker rammed up his backside.

2. Are all forms of painful pressure equally morally objectionable? In other words, are you willing to acknowledge that there are gradations of torture as, for example, there are gradations of burns, with a third-degree burn considerably more injurious and painful than a first-degree burn? Or is all painful treatment to be considered torture? Just as you, correctly, ask proponents of waterboarding where they draw their line, you, too, must explain where you draw your line.

Just as rape is still rape no matter how many bruises and cuts are left on the victim, torture is still torture even if there are no burn marks.

3. Is any maltreatment of anyone at any time — even a high-level terrorist with knowledge that would likely save innocents’ lives — wrong?

Of course.

If there is no question about the identity of a terror suspect , and he can provide information on al-Qaida — for the sake of clarity, let us imagine that Osama Bin Laden himself were captured — could America do any form of enhanced interrogation involving pain and/or deprivation to him that you would consider moral and therefore support?

No.

I’d like to point out that this kind of sophistry is the sort of thing college freshmen cough up between bong hits: take something that is clearly immoral, then make up a bizarre scenario with no basis in reality whatsoever that might possibly justify the heinous act. It’s as though a rape apologist asked if rape could be excused if the human race had been reduced to one man and one woman and the survival of the species depended on it. I prefer to leave bizarre premises to bad science fiction writers, thank you very much.

4. If lawyers will be prosecuted for giving legal advice to an administration that you consider immoral and illegal, do you concede that this might inhibit lawyers in the future from giving unpopular but sincerely argued advice to the government in any sensitive area?

God I hope so!

They will, after all, know that if the next administration disapproves of their work, they will be vilified by the media and prosecuted by the government.

If what they advise is illegal and depraved, good.

5. Presumably you would acknowledge that the release of the classified reports on the handling of high-level, post-Sept. 11 terror suspects would inflame passions in many parts of the Muslim world.

People around the world have known about the U.S. Government’s campaign of kidnapping, torture and murder for almost seven years now. The idea that the new revelations would inflame them is like exporting coal to Newcastle. The only people who have been roused by each new atrocity exposed are members of the mainstream news media, who spent seven years seeing, hearing and speaking no evil. Everyone else who was paying attention already knows about the torture, rape and murder carried out against prisoners by the Bush Administration.

If innocents were murdered because nonviolent cartoons of Muhammad were published in a Danish newspaper, presumably far more innocents will be tortured and murdered with the release of these reports and photos. Do you accept any moral responsibility for any ensuing violence against American and other civilians?

The responsibility is on the perpetrators of a crime, not on those who expose it and certainly not on people who opposed the crime.

6. Many members of the intelligence community now feel betrayed and believe that the intelligence community will be weakened in their ability to fight the most vicious organized groups in the world.

Tough.

As reported in the Washington Post, former intelligence officer “(Mark) Lowenthal said that fear has paralyzed agents on the ground. Apparently, many of those in the know are certain that life-saving information was gleaned from high level terror suspects who were waterboarded. As Mike Scheuer, former head of the CIA unit in charge of tracking Osama bin Laden, said, ”We were very certain that the interrogation procedures procured information that was worth having.” If, then, the intelligence community has been adversely affected, do you believe it can still do the work necessary to protect tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of people from death and maiming?

There’s no evidence that torture has saved any lives.

7. Will you seek to prosecute members of Congress such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who were made aware of the waterboarding of high-level suspects and voiced no objections?

Possibly. Let’s investigate and see.

8. Would you agree to releasing the photos of the treatment of Islamic terrorists only if accompanied by photos of what their terror has done to thousands of innocent people around the world? Would you agree to photos — or at least photo re-enactments — of, let us say, Iraqi children whose faces were torn off with piano wire by Islamists in Iraq? If not, why not? Isn’t context of some significance here?

Context is just another version of the tu quoque fallacy: “Oh yeah? They do it too!”

Not only is that not a valid excuse, it’s an admission of guilt.

9. You say that America’s treatment of terror suspects will cause terrorists to treat their captives, especially Americans, more cruelly. On what grounds do you assert this? Did America’s far more moral treatment of Japanese prisoners than Japan’s treatment of American prisoners in World War II have any impact on how the Japanese treated American and other prisoners of war? Do you think that evil people care how morally pure America is?

Japan’s treatment of Allied prisoners was barbaric. However, Germany and Italy usually treated American and British POWs according to the Geneva Conventions (with some well-known exceptions) because the British and Americans generally abided by the laws of war when it came to POWs. In fact, our humane treatment of POWs saved a vast number of lives because Axis troops went out of their way to surrender without a fight as the war dragged on because word had gotten around that they would be treated decently. Compare that to how Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union murdered and abused each others’ prisoners on a regular basis and battles were fought to the last bullet and last man.

If you fail to address these questions, it would appear that you care less about morality and torture than about vengeance against the Bush administration.

Ah, the Appeal to Motive Fallacy. Well, so what if some of the people who oppose torture only see it as a convenient stick to beat Republicans over the head with? They wouldn’t have that stick if Dubya’s inner circle hadn’t approved torture, and if his willing torturers hadn’t carried it out. The motives of the people opposed to torture are irrelevant: Torture is a very serious crime and the Bush Administration engaged in that crime. In fact some of them are proud of it! The only question at this point is if Obama and Attorney General Holder are going to do anything about it, as they are legally bound to do.

Watching torture apologists make excuses for torture is like watching members of NAMBLA making excuses for pedophilia. There is one key difference, though: Even the most diseased child molesters aren’t so intellectually dishonest as to claim that the jury is still out on whether a creep putting his wiener in a 12-year-old is really pedophilia, as torture enthusiasts claim about water torture.

EDIT: I am informed by a poster at BloggingHeads that pedophiles do in fact try to rationalize their depravity in exactly the same way as torture apologists do with torture. I stand corrected.

Is torture effective? When it comes to effectiveness, nothing tops genocide. After all, when was the last time we had problems with the Pequots?

Torture has been shown to be effective for only two things:

1) Getting people to swear to things that everyone knows are not true. For example, Johannes Junius, a town elder in 17th Century Bamberg, Germany was tortured until he “confessed” to blighting the town with disease and the countryside with bad weather and failed crops -all through the use of witchcraft and black magic. Abu Zebaydah was tortured until he “confessed” that Iraq and Al-Queda were allies and that Iraq had something to do with the 9-11 attacks.

2) Arousing the loins of sadists and giving them a kinky thrill. During the numerous cases of witch hysteria, the authorities took great delight in examining the bodies of accused witches while searching for a “witches’ mark” -a search that almost always focused on the genitals. Compare that with the rape and sexual humiliation at Abu Ghraib.

Right-wingers who condone torture are every bit as vile and loathsome as witch-hunters and pedophiles.

The latest news from Scott Horton:

Daily Beast

Spanish prosecutors have decided to press forward with a criminal investigation targeting former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five top associates over their role in the torture of five Spanish citizens held at Guantánamo, several reliable sources close to the investigation have told The Daily Beast. Their decision is expected to be announced on Tuesday before the Spanish central criminal court, the Audencia Nacional, in Madrid.

As Detective McGarrett used to say on Hawaii 5-0:

Book ‘em Danno!”

Many of my fellow liberals think Glenn Beck’s teary-eyed sermons are a sign of his mental illness. That’s probably true to a point, but isn’t it obvious that they’re as smarmy and insincere as they are deranged? Beck doesn’t remind me of Goebbels or the Savage Wiener so much as the guy from the old Bud Light commercials who gets all misty-eyed and sentimental towards his dad:

No Glenn, you can’t have my beer, either.

I always thought Jessica Alba was very cute in an Anna Kournikova sort of way.

But then Falafel Bill O’Reilly sent one of his semen-crusted little stalker/producers out to do ambush celebrity interviews and we all got more than we bargained for!

Many people have humiliated Falafel Bill. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel since he’s stupid, dishonest and thin-skinned. But to see the sweet, angelic face of Jessica Alba putting one of O’Reilly’s hired little creeps in his place made me think that this is no mere mortal of a cutie, but a Goddess in human form. And not just because she looks much better as a brunette.

But O’Reilly and his dimwitted admirers know not defeat, which is why one of the wankers from TMZ (where Falafel Bill’s little trolls only wish they could ascend to) decided to have a go at the Goddess:

Falafel Bill, basking in his own ignorance, thinks he’s found a “gotcha” for Jessica Alba on the grounds that Switzerland, and not Sweden is a neutral country, according to the same moron who claimed that American troops massacred SS troops at Malmedy!

But then, this kind of humiliation is to be expected when foolish mortals trifle with a Goddess.