Marcy Wheeler and the Americans for Prosperity Self-Sabotage Tent Conspiracy

This is one of the more classic cases of partisan hatred blinding an otherwise intelligent person into abject imbecility, if not progressive insanity.

"Emptywheel" is Marcy Wheeler, who holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, which just goes to show that even high-powered credentials are no guarantee against epic self-beclownment.

William Jacobson reports, "The Epistemic Closure of progressives to their violent union thugs." At the screencap union thugs are taking down the AFP tent:

Even more pathetic is how many other unhinged progs jumped on board, at Memeorandum, "Breitbart Folks Appear to Fake Violence in Lansing." Hilariously, lame-blogger Steve M. at No More Mr. Nice Blog sucks it all up, downplaying the vicious union thug attack on Steven Crowder as insignificant.

It's too easy with these people. This is the left. This is what they do. Just own it people. You folks won last month. Let's see if you can keep your majority. As it turns out, it's not going too well at the state level.

'The idea is to intimidate all of us into silence...'

Yes it is, at Patterico, "Stacy McCain on Cyberstalking."

RELATED: At Popehat, "Update On Defense of Patterico."

PREVIOUSLY: "Cyber-Stalking Harassment Troll Bill Schmalfeldt."

Progressives Can Just FOAD

From Zilla of the Resistance:

They have the "right" to FOAD, that's about it. MT @ampowerblog Plz RT is.gd/g5vl80 #TrollRights #SpeedwayBomber #GoonSquad #TCOT
— Zilla Stevenson (@ZillaStevenson) December 9, 2012

And from 20011 at AmPower: "Zilla of the Resistance! — 'Stand Against Evil - Never Let it Win'."

Plus, R.S. McCain's updated: "‘At a Time of My Choosing’."

PREVIOUSLY: "Cyber-Stalking Harassment Troll Bill Schmalfeldt." (With a detailed discussion of progressive hate-troll Walter James Casper III.)

Cyber-Stalking Harassment Troll Bill Schmalfeldt

At The Other McCain, "June 3: Bill Schmalfeldt Begins Cyberstalking Aaron Walker."

Schmalfeldt began trolling Aaron Worthing shortly after the latter published his magnum opus on Brett Kimberlin's legal harassment. Robert has screenshots of some of Schmalfeldt's tweets, and he writes:

this is liberal grouch, serial block an report abuser. Stalking me again @ The_Book_Jerk (remove the space)
— Aaron Worthing (@AaronWorthing) December 9, 2012

What was Schmalfeldt seeking? Some way to discredit Walker, to create a narrative in which Kimberlin could be portrayed as the victim.

This is the “accuse the accusers” motif that has added layers of unnecessary confusion to this story: By a sort of narrative ju-jitsu — minimizing the deliberate harmfulness of Kimberlin’s actions, while depicting his targets as unethical, selfish or motivated by purposes of political revenge — the “accuse the accusers” strategy creates a false equivalence between victim and victimizer. This method of online obfuscation is effective because few people (including law enforcement officials and judges) have the patience necessary to trace the conflict to its origins, nor do they seem willing to contextualize any particular aspect of the conflict by studying it as part of an overall pattern of behavior.

Schmalfeldt began his involvement by declaring to Melissa Brewer (@catsrimportant) — an ally of Kimberlin and Rauhauser — that he wanted coverage of the Walker case not written by “some right-wing shithead.” He then started to hector Walker, questioning whether the convicted bomber Kimberlin had done anything threatening. Schmalfeldt offered as his motive his “strong views about the First Amendment.”

Keep in mind that, on May 20, Schmalfeldt evidently got himself banned from Daily Kos, where he’d been a diarist less than six months. Schmalfeldt’s stint as a blogger at the Examiner was terminated May 2, after he was accused of abusive conduct toward fellow Examiner contributor Joe Newby. (Shmalfeldt resurfaced June 22 as Examiner columnist “Bill Matthews,” only to be terminated again Aug. 6 after his deception was discovered.) His “strong views about the First Amendment,” we may suppose, involve Schmalfeldt’s antisocial belief that he should be able to say anything to anyone in other people’s privately-owned online space, without regard for the proprietors’ rules or even basic human decency. (See “Bill Schmalfeldt: Too Disgusting For Daily Kos,” Nov. 25, by Lee Stranahan.)

That sounds familiar. Progressive stalking trolls claim a "free speech right" to harass someone even after they have been told repeatedly to cease and desist. This is why I reported Walter James Casper III to the authorities: "Intent to Annoy and the Fascist Hate-Blogging Campaign of Walter James Casper III." As we've seen for some time, progressives have quite a different view of how free speech works, the most important manifestation being the notion that left-wing free speech includes the right to suppress political views that contradict the left's radical agenda.

For example, when I posted on Pamela Geller's new SOIA campaign yesterday, I linked the hideous left-wing fascist website "The Animal." The pigs there exhorted their readers to take their spray cans to the subways to deface Pamela's advertisements, with the reminder, "you know what to do." And right on cue, criminal harasser Repsac3 found "The Animal" links here and promptly put out his endorsement of that brown-shirted vandalism on Twitter, even quoting approvingly the method of the hate-fueled revisionist attack:

"Any war between man is savage." fb.me/1MVgYq1VJ
— J. Casper (@repsac3) December 8, 2012

Clearly these are not the tweets of someone committed to the free flow of ideas. Like Bill Schmalfeldt, Repsac3 does not go away, even after the authorities have been alerted to his criminal activities. I've blocked him at every turn, here at the blog's new comment system and on Twitter. And I've exposed his obsessive email stalking campaign and provided evidence of those attacks to the police. Even after all of that --- even after the hate-addled Repsac declared that I'd "won the Internet" --- this clinically-deranged asshole still can't keep away, he just can't let it go. His putrid attack-and-harassment blog is still up and running, now being updated daily by the flaming bunghole baker-boy Kevin "Rim-Station" Robbins.

And we know why. Like those of the Kimberlin-Rauhauser axis, Walter James Casper III is marinated in progressive evil, and he too believes that harassing those who speak truth to the radical left agenda is simply just one more acceptable element of the vicious drive to maintain Democrat-Socialist power. These people will stop at nothing. It's no coincidence that Repsac3 was a ringleader for the attacks on my workplace, coordinating his actions with Carl Salonen, and widely endorsing and facilitating the harassment by others, such as the notorious dirtbag (O)CT(O)PUS, a.k.a. David Hillman, the f-king perverted proprietor of The Swash Zone.

Robert Stacy McCain identifies this left-wing pathology as "troll rights":

“Troll Rights” may be an interesting legal concept, but it’s a lousy career strategy. Schmalfeldt entered early June with more than one burnt bridge behind him, and his apparent plan for redemption was to make himself the white knight who would slay the dreaded Aaron Walker dragon that was threatening that noble progressive, Brett Kimberlin.

“The Narcissist as Self-Imagined Hero” — Schmalfeldt isn’t the first such character we’ve encountered. Incapable of accepting responsibility for his own errors and misfortunes, the narcissist instead externalizes blame for his failures, demonizing and scapegoating others. Unwilling or unable to emulate successful people, the narcissist envies them. Viewing success as a zero-sum game, he convinces himself that the game is rigged against him, and that the success of others results from their unfairly taking advantage of the “system,” thus wrongly cheating him out of the rewards and admiration he believes he deserves.

Exactly. Walter James Casper III is another "such character we've encountered." A failed blogger who gets no more than 20 hits a day, he's for years harassed people better than him --- happy and attractive people like Tania Gail --- for no other reason than political disagreement. Repsac3 isn't content to just demonize people and lie about them, he goes so far as to hunt them down and help those launching workplace harassment campaigns. Again and again he's claimed that he will not be rebuffed, that it's his right to ram his noxious opinions down the throats of his enemies. He habituates the comment threads, spiking the football, at all the most reviled progressive attack blogs, from LGM to Sadly No! And it's all just more fun and games. But for the victims, it's online terrorism. Never ---- not once ever ---- has he stood against these attacks. While purportedly all about free speech, he supports trolls and attackers who mount campaigns of online lawfare against political enemies. But take note. Those who ask why bother? Why even deal with people like this, it's not worth your time? Think again. Turning a blind eye to evil simply empowers it by indifference. Robert Stacy McCain has been faced with this question:

Narcissists crave attention, and some people think that the best way to deal with Bill Schmalfeldt is to ignore him. Schmalfeldt started cyberstalking Aaron Walker in June, and I tried to ignore him. It wasn’t until September that his name was first mentioned on this blog. We keep re-learning the same sad lesson:

“It is very easy to decide ‘this isn’t any of my trouble’ and permit vicious behavior. . . . Who wants to get involved? Easier, and surely safer, just to duck one’s head and hide, and hope the danger visits someone else.” – Ace of Spades, May 22

Evil is persistent. Duck your head, shrug your shoulders — “Gosh, too bad what happened to Aaron Walker” — and never mind who will be visited next by this particular specimen of evil. Never mind what innocent person the monsters will choose to victimize, because nobody can be bothered to pay attention to what’s happening.

Head over to Robert's for the full post.

In some ways I've been lucky. I had pro bono legal representation that helped me defend against the literally unimaginable workplace attacks. I'm also a tenured professor with legal protections against the idiot progressives who repeatedly try to have me fired for my conservative beliefs. But from Scott Eric Kaufman to E.D. Kain to Carl Salonen and more, it's been quite the trial. These stupid demons think they can strike me down only to see me emerge stronger and more committed to exposing their deeds. And such moral clarity has only emboldened idiot narcissist Walter James Casper III. He just doesn't know when to quit. Indeed, he can't quit because he's in the grip of a malevolent fever. If he were to vanquish me, silencing my voice, he'd simply notch the victory and move on to his next victim ---- all part of the progressive campaign of demoralization and demonization of right-wing beliefs and traditional values.

This is the scourge of contemporary American politics. These battles are the those at the ramparts of freedom, and often the left has been winning. The lines are clearly drawn and progressive are on the march, but clear-eyed patriots know what's coming and the progressives are overplaying their hands in hubris and conceit.

Never cave to these people. They will not stop their attempts to put you under, but the tide is turning back, little by little, to decency and righteousness. The stakes for our nation have never been higher.

Democrats Are Pathologically Unserious

Milton Wolf, at the Washington Times, "GOP should fear voters, not the ‘fiscal cliff’":

How many times does Lucy have to pull away the football before Charlie Brown finally wises up and quits playing her game?

Republicans don’t have to keep falling for the Democrats’ duplicity. The Democrats pretend the so-called “fiscal cliff” debate is about getting our financial house in order, so they propose a tax increase on people earning more than $200,000 a year (i.e., “millionaires and billionaires” in Democrat-speak), which will fund their leviathan government for all of — drumroll — four days.

These are pathologically unserious people. Their goal is not to solve the current fiscal crisis. Their goal is to use the crisis to grow government and further their statist agenda which, incidentally, created the crisis in the first place. Recall Democrat Rahm Emanuel’s unmasked moment of clarity: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

Now, in hopes of enacting their panacea of tax increases, Democrats offer spending cuts that everyone knows never will happen. What’s worse, the president calls for $255 billion in more spending. Only a Democrat would claim increased spending will reduce the deficit, and only a Republican would fall for it.

The Democrats’ lust for tax increases goes far beyond simple class warfare, as atrocious as that alone is. Democrats are fully aware that the rich already are paying more than their fair share. The wealthy (top 10 percent) may earn 50 percent of the income, but they pay 70 percent of the federal taxes. If that’s not fair, what is? Eighty percent? One hundred percent?

The Democrats’ long game is to push an ever-increasing tax burden onto fewer and fewer taxpayers. This grows a class of Americans who may or may not earn paychecks but certainly become beneficiaries of government largesse while remaining blissfully detached from its enormous cost. (What’s their fair share?) Economists would call this a recipe for disaster. Democrats would call it a voting base. Weak-kneed Republicans are poised to help them build it.

Continue reading.

The Left's Values Voters

From Christopher Caldwell, at the Weekly Standard, "Values Voters Prevail Again":

Had this presidential campaign been a chess match, one move would have merited a row of exclamation points. A chess master will violate the rules of strategy as neophytes understand them (“You’re gonna lose your Queen!”) but only because he sees possibilities on the board that are invisible to others.

In January, the Obama White House set out to pick a fight with the Catholic church over contraception. A Health and Human Services directive ordered that all insurance plans cover contraception, morning after pills, and sterilizations with no exceptions for religious conscience. This looked like an act of folly. Not only was it an affront to the free exercise of religion, but Catholics are the largest group of swing voters in the country. They are heavily concentrated in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and other potential swing states. And it was in the name of Obamacare—the most unpopular federal program in living memory—that the administration thumbed its nose at them.

The Obama campaign understood that “reproductive rights” are similar to “gun rights.” Even if the number of people who care about protecting them is small, all of them vote on the issue. And in a country that now has as many single women as married women, the number is not small. President Obama won the Catholic vote on the strength of a landslide among Hispanics. (Non-Hispanic Catholics opposed him 59-40 percent.) His pollster Joel Benenson credits him not just with identifying new demographic groups but also with figuring out how to appeal to them. “He won,” Benenson wrote in the New York Times, “because he articulated a set of values that define an America that the majority of us wish to live in.” For this election he is right.

Not since Jimmy Carter has a Democrat won an election this way. “Values” campaigns have favored Republicans. The journalist Thomas Frank warned in his book What’s the Matter with Kansas? that Republicans were talking about the Bible and gays and abortion in order to distract attention from their failed economic agenda. “People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about,” Frank wrote. In Republicanism he saw a movement “of working-class guys in Midwestern cities cheering as they deliver up a landslide for a candidate whose policies will end their way of life.”

That is elegant writing, but the argument was wrong in three ways...

Keep reading.

Caldwell's most important point is that the Democrats are forcing their values on the rest of America, and Obama is the Enforcer-in-Chief.

IMAGE CREDIT: The People's Cube, "Sandra the Riveted of the Grift Generation."

That So-Called Racist Mitt Romney 'Dog-Whistle' T-Shirt is Almost Certainly Photoshopped

I personally don't believe that someone would wear a shirt like that to a Mitt Romney rally. I attended dozens of tea parties on 2009-2010, and I only once saw controversial posters, at the protest against Nancy Pelosi at the Orange County Airport --- and I denounced those in a series of posts identifying the San Diego organizer, Roger Ogden, who later apologized for the misunderstanding and claimed his posters were not racist.

This story was all over Memeorandum yesterday, most conspicuously at Crooks and Liars, where the hopelessly idiotic Dave Neiwert claims this one, utterly suspicious t-shirt "proves" Mitt Romney's running a "dog-whistle" campaign. But the photo, which is licensed to Getty Images, got traction at more reputable outlets, such as New York Magazine, "Check Out This Mitt Romney Supporter’s Horrendously Racist Fashion," and originally at the much-less reputable BuzzFeed, "Man At Romney Rally Wears Mindblowingly Offensive Shirt."

Well, it goes without saying that some folks aren't having it --- Robert Stacy McCain, for example, "False-Flag Troll, IRL":

I can pretty much guarantee that this man photographed at a Romney rally in Lancaster, Ohio, is not in fact a Republican, but rather is a plant sent out by the Democrats as a dirty trick.

Clue #1: Wearing a “Romney/Ryan” sticker on the back of his T-shirt. Nobody does this. Nobody.
Clue #2: It’s kind of chilly in Ohio this time of year, and the guy’s wearing only a T-shirt, while those around him are wearing coats.
My guess is that this guy also wore a coat when he entered the rally, then stationed himself toward the back of the crowd (in front of the riser where the press photographers are stationed) and then removed his coat to expose the T-shirt, with the explicit purpose of having it photographed.
. . . aaanndd, Clue #3: No name? A press photographer is going to take a picture like this and make no effort to ID the guy? Nuh-uh.

Actually, it's even less credible.

See Wordsmith's post at Flopping Aces, "Racist Romney/Ryan supporter in Lancaster, Ohio?" Click through for the analysis, but bottom line: Wordsmith's calling bullshit. And what's more, one commenter says that he went through the Getty photographer's slideshow from the Romney/Ryan rally and there are no crowd images, or any other images, with this man wearing that particular t-shirt. But most interestingly, one commenter links to a "photo forensics" site that claims to have a date-stamp for the digital file as "Profile Date Time 2012:01:25 03:41:57" (here).

If the "forensics" data is accurate, the photo's from January of this year, and thus is not only Photoshopped but is also not a picture from a recent Romney/Ryan rally in Ohio.

But again, the main reason this as a completely manufactured controversy is the past record of conservatives utterly rejecting any racist paraphernalia at campaign events and tea parties. Where there's been racism it's been completely repudiated. When the famous photo of so-called Texas tea party "leader" Dale Robertson emerged, the absolute renunciation was swift. Newsbusters has the flashback, "TPM Trumpets Racist Rebuffed by Tea Party Groups as 'Prominent' 'Leader'." And of course folks will remember that the leftist media was jonesing for racist tea-partiers so badly that it had to invent them, for example, Contessa Brewer, "Guy With AR-15 at Obama Rally Was Black Dude: MSBNC Kinda Leaves That Part Out."

The so-called racist Mitt Romney "dog-whistle" t-shirt is almost certainly a scam. It's bogus. We've seen this movie before and the ratings are in: total flop. The "race card" doesn't work anymore, if it ever really did. The left's goal is to falsely delegitimize criticism and silence dissent. This photo below, seen early in the tea party era at Gateway Pundit, captures what's really going been going on with race on the right:

I'll update if more information becomes available, but I'll tell you again, it's a scam. Just one look at that "Romney/Ryan" picture and you can see that's an obvious Photoshop.

Crooked Timber's Chris Bertram is 'Very Sad' That Communist Historian Eric Hobsbawm Has Died

Chris Bertram is professor of philosophy at University of Bristol, in Southwest England. He's an expert on Rousseau, apparently, and, from what I gather, a fan of Karl Marx as well, or some variation of Marxism. Most interestingly, he's a defender of Joseph Stalin, or at least the Stalinist model of Soviet Communism, from what appears in the comments at his post at Crooked Timber, "Eric Hobsbawm is dead."

Perhaps he's just being playful, but Bertram's sense of humor is rather Stalinist as well:

Jonathan, ajay …

Annoying as our commenters often are, I’m not persuaded that it would less bad to murder them if there were more people around.

But especially interesting is Bertram's response to A.N. Wilson indictment of Hobsbawm at London's Daily Mail, "He hated Britain and excused Stalin's genocide. But was hero of the BBC and the Guardian, Eric Hobsbawm a TRAITOR too?"

Read that, and then Bertram's comment here:

That Daily Mail piece is truly marvellous. One of the upsides of the death of someone like Hobsbawm is that all the real arseholes are given an opportunity to remind us all what arseholes they are, and A.N. Wilson is no exception. The DM, of course, was rather partial to the Third Reich.

He doesn't dispute the facts in evidence regarding the Communist Hobsbawm. He simply, rather childishly, calls Wilson an asshole and the Daily Mail a Nazi organ.

Of course, this is Crooked Timber, an extreme left-wing academic blog, with contributors such as the socialist crank political scientist Henry Farrell, who I've blogged about many times. (Farrell got all butt-hurt when Glenn Beck singled out violent socialist Frances Fox Piven in his broadcasts a couple of years back.)

In any case, recall the comments from Bret Stephens' essay previously, "Eric Hobsbawm and the Details of History."

Contemporary leftists embrace their extremists and totalitarians, from the Occupy Movement to dictators like Fidel Castro. And for some, even Joseph Stalin wasn't too extreme. You simply cannot find comparable affinity to far-right extremism among today's conservatives in American politics. And it says something that it's the right that the mainstream press has attacked remorselessly this last few years as essentially white supremacists and Klansmen, while we have a president who was trained by Communist Party members and who palled around with Weather Underground terrorists in the radical leftist marination of Chicago's community organizing thug politics. All of these points are facts. The left has no problem with socialism and Communist Party politics --- for progressives and Democrat Party hacks, there are no enemies on the left, as I've long argued at this blog. Indeed, one of the lasting implications of the Obama interregnum will be the degree to which the extreme left ideological fringe has been mainstreamed in current political life.