The Tea Party Rapist.
Police say they have arrested a spokesman for the San Diego Tea Party for investigation of kidnapping a woman and sexually assaulting her last month.
Authorities tell UT San Diego (http://bit.ly/wlz9U3) that 50-year-old Michael Kobulnicky was arrested Thursday without incident outside of his home. He is currently being held without bail.
Police say a 56-year-old woman was walking home on Feb. 25 when a man drove up and offered her a ride. She accepted, but the man drove past her house, pulled her out of the car and assaulted her before driving off.
A more detailed description of the crime is here.
Of course, it would be wrong to tar the entire movement with this particular brush — the average ‘bagger may be a lunatic and a chump, but they’re not a rapist.
No, we’ll leave the collective judgment game to less reputable characters.
It almost seems like what our wingnut friends most want is to poke the stick at racial issues so that can scream about the horrible indiginity of being accused of racism, as though they are seeking insulation against future charges of race-baiting. My concern is that’s a sign something a lot worse than video of Barack Obama with Derrick Bell could be on the way. You can go back and forth as to whether this or that element of the contemporary Right is guilty of racism (you cannot, after all, look into everyone’s heart). But there is no question that anti-anti-racism is at epidemic levels, as we are seeing right now.
Breitbart’s Final Smear
Andrew Breitbart’s “last laugh” seems to be more of a hiccup. Before he died, Breitbart promised to release damning video from Barack Obama’s college years. “I have videos,” he told the collection of birthers, racists, and other assorted nuts at the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). “This election we’re going to vet him.”
This is the story of an empty threat laid bare by unforeseen events. It’s becoming clear that Breitbart didn’t have any damaging video, but that’s not stopping his fans from clamoring for it. And that’s a bit of a problem.
Brett Smiley, New York Magazine:
Breitbart.com’s explosive, blockbuster video that would expose Barack Obama as a radical commie who wasn’t vetted by the media was almost entirely hype.
Breitbart.com’s editor-in-chief Joel Pollak and editor-at-large Ben Shapiro appeared together on Fox News Wednesday night with Sean Hannity to discuss the one-minute teaser clip released earlier today in which a younger Barack Obama, president of Harvard Law Review, spoke to a group at a rally about racial equality among the Harvard Law staff. The demonstration was led by professor Derrick Bell, who took an unpaid leave of absence in protest of a lack of female black professors at the school.
“Open your hearts and open your minds to the words of professor Derrick Bell,” Obama said in 1991.
And that was it.
The rightwing blog PJ Tatler explains what the big, terrible, shocking deal is here. It turns out that Derrick Bell, who died last year, was a Harvard law professor who was “credited with developing ‘critical race theory,’ which suggested that the U.S. legal system was inherently biased against African Americans and other minorities because it was built on an ingrained white point of view. He argued in his many books and lectures that the life experiences of black people and other minorities should be considered in hiring decisions and in applying the law.”
So far, so nothing. But we’re not to the stretchy part yet. Citing his obituary, PJ finds that “Some scholars, both black and white, challenged Bell’s ideas, as well as his strong support of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.”
Aha! There you go; young Barack Obama once knew a guy who knew Louis Farrakhan. Therefore, Barack Obama hates white people. This is weak. This isn’t even guilt by association; it’s guilt by association, by association. It’s a crazy game of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” where you can connect anyone to anyone you like — perfected by the logically-impaired Glenn Beck, before Fox got sick of hosting that hothouse of lunacy.
But why stop there? Why stop at Farrakhan? Here’s video of Louis Farrakhan praising Ron Paul for wanting to audit the fed. And Ron Paul infamously ran a racist newsletter. Since, as the wingnuts seem to believe, if you know someone it means you agree with every single thought they’ve ever had, we have to conclude — as we follow this chain — that Barack Obama doesn’t hate white people, Barack Obama hates black people. Obama believes what Bell believed, which was what Farrakhan believes, which is what Paul believes. Right? I mean, according to the rightwing blogosphere, that’s the way things work.
Of course, that means you can take Paul’s association with the Republican Party and eventually make Eric Cantor believe what Farrakhan believes or John Boehner believe what Obama believes. In fact, since there is no unknown person in the world, we all believe the same damned things, since association is like a virus that turns you into an ideological clone of everyone you know. What’s all this fighting about then?
What we learn from this little exercise is that — as the right argues until it’s more convenient to argue otherwise — everyone is an individual, capable of generating their own thoughts. We also learn that the old saw about politics making for strange bedfellows is true.
And we also learn that you shouldn’t make empty threats to generate headlines and drive traffic to your site. It might just bite you in the ass in the great beyond. Which, if we continue this line of reasoning, is exactly what Andrew Breitbart believed. Makes you wonder why he did it.
-Wisco
Breitbart poster vandalizes an inexplicable ‘HOLLYWOD’ sign.
Not a typo. Look for yourself.
Anyhoo, you can buy one of these designs as a poster, bumpersticker, or t-shirt and the proceeds go to Andrew Breitbart’s family — who are already richer than God. IOwnTheWorld.com has plenty of other photoshop suggestions for Breitbart vandalism. Stick it on the Washington Post building or the Louvre!
Have fun!
Logic Fail.
Buzzfeed has a post up listing “25 People Who Think President Obama Killed Andrew Breitbart.” I think the more important point than the feverish paranoia is the complete lack of logic.
OK, so Breitbart has a tape that’s absolutely going to destroy Obama, right? So the president has Breitbart killed and — what? The video suddenly ceases to exist? That’s what happens when you die, right? All the video you have self-deletes or something, right?
If Breitbart had anything, killing him would accomplish squat. But, of course, this is what wingnuts do; they think only until they reach the conclusion they want to reach, then they stop thinking. More thinking just confuses the issue with logic. Why ruin a perfectly good conspiracy theory with common sense? Where’s the fun in that?
Breitbart publicly celebrated Ted Kennedy’s death.
I’m just going to go ahead and leave this here…
Early this morning, news broke that Sen. Ted Kennedy had passed away after serving in the U.S. Senate for nearly 50 years. Soon after, conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart began a sustained assault on Kennedy’s memory, tweeting “Rest in Chappaquiddick.”
Over the course of the next three hours, Breitbart unapologetically attacked Kennedy, calling him a “villain,” “a big ass motherf@#$er,” a “duplicitous bastard” and a “prick.” “I’ll shut my mouth for Carter. That’s just politics. Kennedy was a special pile of human excrement,” wrote Breitbart in one tweet.
Of course, as in all things, it’s only OK when conservatives do it.
What better way to memorialize Andrew Breitbart than by immediately playing the victim card?
Examiner’s Charlie Spiering exposes the commies’ glee at Breitbart’s death by grabbing the inevitable nasty messages on Twitter. Big scoop: there are assholes on Twitter! Stop the cyber-presses!
Meanwhile, backwater wingnut blogs are already “reporting” that President Obama had Breitbart killed. So now it’s my turn to break the big, obvious story: there are lunatics in the rightwing blogosphere! Stop the cyber-presses!
I don’t believe it because it was on a Breitbart website.
Probably the most concise take on his legacy you’ll read today.
Breitbart dead.
Holy crap and wow. Talk about something out of the blue.
Andrew Breitbart’s news sites Big Journalism and Big Government, are reporting the death of their founder shortly after midnight in Los Angeles. “Andrew passed away unexpectedly from natural causes shortly after midnight this morning in Los Angeles,” his sites report. Breitbart was 43. Asked to confirm the news, Joel Pollak, editor-in-chief of Breitbart.com, told The Atlantic Wire by email, “I can’t tell you more than I have already, unfortunately. We’ll know more later.” Ben Howe, a Breitbart colleague, tweets that he has “personal confirmation” the news is legitimate and not a hoax as some on Twitter had initially suspected. ”We have lost a husband, a father, a son, a brother, a dear friend, a patriot and a happy warrior,” wrote Larry Solov in the announcement on Breitbart’s sites.
