Classic Putz: Ward Churchill, the "face of the left."

This pile of self-indulgent, phony outrage and righteousness is about as putzy as it gets.

Various lefty readers email to say that Ward Churchill is not the authentic face of the Left. I wish I agreed with that. But, sadly, he is its very image today.

Really? Some totally obscure, undistinguished academic, from a middle-of-the-pack state college, with no ties to the Democratic Party, and no megaphone at all, is its poster boy? Riiiight.

It gets better.

There was a time when the Left opposed fascism and supported democracy, when it wasn't a seething-yet-shrinking mass of self-hatred and idiocy. That day is long past, and the moral and intellectual decay of the Left is far gone.

Opposing the war in Iraq = supporting fascism. Nice.

Then there's this stunning admonishment.

I'm waiting for you [on the Left] to take a more active role in confronting the Ward Churchills -- and Michael Moores, and Barbara Boxers -- who are doing harm to the country, and even more harm to the Left.

This, from someone who promotes Ann Coulter's books and movies, fawns lovingly practically daily over Michelle Malkin, is a fan of Rush Limbaugh, endorses the views of people like Hugh Hewitt, while openly cheerleading for the party that has made all of these hate mongers and demagogues rock stars.

I may throw up.

"Elites" = 60% of the country.

As Thomas Frank documented in What's the Matter with Kansas?, a narrative that's told again and again on the right is that a cabal of liberal elites in the media, the sciences, the judiciary, academia and in Hollywood actually run the country.

This is effective propaganda, Frank explains, because it allows the people who really run the country (the Republicans, corporate America, the extremely wealthy) to pursue the ruthless economic policies that benefit only them, while hiding behind the social issues that rile the GOP's red state base, that they never seem to actually do anything about.

Putz spins the same yarn, today:

He [Scott Norvell] also says that many Iranian elites view Ahmadinejad the way many American elites view Bush, as a not-very-bright guy who's using saber-rattling to secure power.

Scott Norvell is the Fox News bureau chief who accidently let it slip in the Wall Street Journal Europe that his network is essentially a propaganda arm of the Bush Administration.

Apparently, Putz and Norvell haven't looked at any polls lately, because currently, 60% of Americans disapprove of President Bush. As for the saber-rattling part, 62% disapprove of his handling of Iraq, and 54% don't trust Bush to do the right thing about Iran.

That's a heck of a lot of elites.

Putz hearts Malkin, part 2.

Putz still has a crush on Michelle Malkin. As we've noted before, Putz's eagerness to promote an extremist like Malkin regularly is telling.

Here are some current images from Malkin's blog, which are supposed to be funny, I think.





Cute, aren't they? Accusing the New York Times of anti-Semitism and sedition? Blaming the deaths of US servicemen on liberals?

So funny!

Apparently, neither Malkin or the wingnut moron who did the cheesy photoshopping didn't see the irony of showing Karl Rove in a Nazi helmet. Either that, or they actually like the association.

Nice friends you've got there, Putz.

Lots of Kos. Gen. Casey? Not so much.

I notice Putz is saying an awful lot about Kos these days. So much, in fact, that he seems to have totally missed trivial little item completely:

U.S. government officials confirmed on Saturday that the leader of U.S. forces in Iraq has submitted an early draft of a plan to withdraw roughly 28,000 combat troops by the end of 2007.

Errr, come again?

As NBC has earlier reported, Casey intends to begin the reduction of combat forces in Iraq by two brigades, or some 7,000 to 10,000 soldiers, beginning in August and September. This would reduce the total number of U.S. military forces in Iraq to approximately 117,000 to 120,000 troops. The reduction would be accomplished by cancelling the deployments of two brigades set to rotate into Iraq later this summer.

This is a rather glaring omission, is it not? I mean, for the past week, Putz has again and again ridiculed the Democrats' calls for troop reductions, and even went so far to call John Kerry a traitor for doing so, but he remains totally silent when the Pentagon proposes the same thing, in a way that's timed (August and September) for maximum political benefit?

Not a single word?

Could it be that it doesn't fit Putz's "the Democrats are defeatest traitors when it comes to Iraq and Bush and the Republicans are always right" world view? Or is it simply he's too distracted by the phony Kos "scandal?

The biggest news coming out of Iraq in months and Putz totally ignores it. And he practically daily accuses the "the media" of distortion.

Mind-numbing, isn't it?

The evil New York Times.

I guess I should be used to it by now, but Putz's constant droning on about our treasonous, corporately-owned, publicly-traded media is getting really boring.

Today's rant is about the pro-terrorist New York Times' begins thusly:

BILL KELLER ISN'T VERY BRIGHT, or else he thinks you aren't.

Yeah! Take that, idiot newspaper boy! In your face!

Putz, along with the rest of the wingnutosphere, is having a hissy fit because the Times, surely at the behest of Osama bin Laden, reported on the Bush Administration's latest legally-questionable spying program.

Not-very-bright Keller writes,

A secondary argument against publishing the banking story was that publication would lead terrorists to change tactics. But that argument was made in a half-hearted way. It has been widely reported — indeed, trumpeted by the Treasury Department — that the U.S. makes every effort to track international financing of terror. Terror financiers know this, which is why they have already moved as much as they can to cruder methods. But they also continue to use the international banking system, because it is immeasurably more efficient than toting suitcases of cash.

What? Does the New York Times actually want us to believe that terrorists already knew we were watching them?

Not very bright. Indeed.

UPDATE:

Putz adds this little dig:

I realize that the Times' circulation is falling at an alarming rate, but it hasn't yet reached such a pass that its stories are only noticed when Rush Limbaugh mentions them.

He's referring to Keller's argument that if the story hurts national security so much, why do the wingnut media beat it into the ground?

What I wondered about was this circulation thing, so I looked it up here.

DAILY
MARCH	Home Delivery	Single Copy	Other	Total
1998	660,931	390,015	59,197	1,110,143
1999	679,390	396,450	59,134	1,134,974
2000	708,974	364,055	76,547	1,149,576
2001	724,200	338,015	88,832	1,151,047
2002	726,105	362,089	106,297	1,194,491
2003	709,881	323,166	97,693	1,130,740
2004	688,645	310,155	134,963	1,133,763
2005	687,366	286,820	162,247	1,136,433
SEPTEMBER
1998	635,289	396,185	35,184	1,066,658
1999	675,486	373,854	36,953	1,086,293
2000	704,172	349,996	43,012	1,097,180
2001	694,526	344,288	70,557	1,109,371
2002	684,533	347,068	81,399	1,113,000
2003	702,419	341,904	74,242	1,118,565
2004	692,154	310,431	118,472	1,121,057
2005	690,294	287,107	148,789	1,126,190

Can anyone explain out how these numbers are "falling at an alarming rate"?

John Kerry: career traitor.

It doesn't get any Putzier than this beauty:

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY: Sen. John Kerry has spent a career taking the side of America's enemies.

Charming. This is what the right has become. Why don't they just rename the Republican Party "Ingsoc" and get it over with?

Putz, thinking this grotesque smear insufficient, adds,

Kerry will have his Iraq position all figured out by, say, 2016. This is one of many reasons why Democrats should be embarrassed that he was their nominee -- and why Republicans should be embarrassed that he came so close to winning.

Wait a minute.

If John Kerry has such a long, well-documented track record as a traitor, shouldn't it be Bush who's embarassed?

I mean, a wartime President, managing only a 2% margain over a traitor -- the smallest margain by an incumbent since 1916 -- carried limping across the finish line by a well-funded smear campaign and a bunch of homophobic Ohioans?

Then again, since the Republicans picked this lazy-minded, unaccomplished lightweight in 2000, the least objectively qualified man ever to hold the office, a man who believes there's more than one Internet, and who cannot pronounce the word "nuclear", maybe Putz has a point.

The Republicans should be embarassed.

Classic Putz: Nuke 'Em, George.

Returning to a Friday tradition, here's a post from 9/11/01:

GEORGE BUSH IS NOW THE MOST POWERFUL MAN IN THE WORLD: People always say that about Presidents, of course, but usually it's only notionally true. Now, if he wants to nuke Baghdad, there is nobody to say him nay -- and damned few who would want to. That's a danger if he goes off half-cocked, but I don't think there's much risk of that.

"Some people say."

If you've seen "Outfoxed", you'll know that one of the techniques Fox teaches their apparatachiks, errr, reporters, is the Some People Say.

The Some People Say allows you, the supossedly objective party, to politically smear someone (on the left, of course) without actually doing it yourself, by repeating the smear as an unnamed source.

As in,

Some people say that John Kerry's wounds were self-inflicted.

Nice, eh? Well, Putz must watch a lot of Fox News, because he's mastered this very well.

And as an aside, I see some blog-commenters are speculating that Kos is gay.

I see some blog-commentators are speculating that Instaputz is a classless jackass.

Happy happy, joy joy.

After The New Republic trashed it, Putz is just ecstatic that the National Review Online gave some love to his book.

THIS IS MORE LIKE IT: An Army of Davids tops NRO's summer reading list.

Also on the NRO's list:



Oh, and the editor of the NRO's new book:



Great company you're keepin' there, Putz.

The media hates America.

After reading Putz every day for weeks, I've come to expect posts like this:

U.S. SOLDIERS TORTURED BEFORE DEATH: And yet Guantanamo will get more ink.

Another completely unsubstantiated, damn-the-America-hating-pro-terrorist media take from Putz. Let's take a look around, to see if he's right.

As of 4:05PM CST:

CNN.com's lead story, U.S. soldiers' bodies mutilated, booby-trapped
no mention of Guantanamo

Yahoo.com's lead story, Iraqi: Soldiers killed in 'barbaric way'
no mention of Guantanamo

New York Times.com lead story, Bodies of G.I.'s Show Signs of Torture, Iraqi General Says
no mention of Guantanamo

BBC.com's lead story, US Soldiers' Bodies Found in Iraq
no mention of Guantanamo

MSNBC's lead story, Iraqi official says bodies of missing GIs found, Signs of 'barbaric' torture; U.S. military awaiting positive ID from DNA
no mention of Guantanamo

Foxnews.com's lead story, Military Recovers Bodies of Missing GIs
no mention of Guantanamo

And so on.

So in fact, Putz is dead wrong on both counts.

Kos is right, he's just a liar. The story is all over the media, it's getting more ink than anything else. No Gitmo to be found.

The convenient thing about smearing the media for Putz is that he never has to actually prove his claims of bias since conservatives take it as a matter of faith that the terror-emboldening media willfully distorts the news to make Bush and America look bad. So Putz never has to show, objectively, that his claim is true, that there are more stories in the media about Gitmo than about two US soldiers being tortured. He just has to say it again and again for it to be true to him, and true to his readers, evidence be damned.

Putz gets hammered for lying.

Here, here, and here.

Putz embarassingly got caught red-handed with his typical, "Kos is an extremist fringe leftist" smear, and rather than take it like a man, and admit he was wrong, the best he can manage is this whiny garbage:

The funny thing, though, is that I'm happy if the Kos crowd moves toward the middle, and I've been positive on James Webb all along. A smarter political move would have been for Kos supporters to gently correct me (a la the email above) and stress the common ground as a way of increasing support for their candidates. Instead, I got jumped on in a way that reinforces the worst stereotypes about the Democratic lefty blogosphere, and that suggests they're more concerned with their own positioning than with their candidates' winning.

Yeah, that is funny. "Gently correct me." Too rich.

So, to recap, this is what Putz recommends:

Putz: As I've said again and again, you Kos Supporters are a bunch of extremist, pacifist left-wingers on the irrelevant fringe of the American political spectrum.

Kos Supporter: Dearest Instapundit, would you please consider not calling us irrelevant, extremist, pacifist left-wingers on the fringe of the American political spectrum?

UPDATE:

Welcome Unclaimed Territory readers!

Cheap political stunts - a reason to vote GOP.

The Republicans stage a disgraceful piece of political theatre, and Putz criticizes the Democrats.

DEMOCRATS MAKE CASE for voting Republican.

He links to wingnut Hugh Hewitt, who writes,

When the vast majority of House Democrats vote against victory in the war, the American people should know.

So, because the Democrats wouldn't play along with the Republicans' cheap political stunt, they're voting "against victory." Even the Republican who coined the phrase "freedom fries" knows the vote was a joke.

Salon ("Resolved: America Great! Bin Laden Evil! Go Bush!"):

[Rep. Walter] Jones is not a natural dove. He sits on the Armed Services Committee and his district includes Camp Lejeune, the home base of nearly 47,000 sailors and Marines. But Jones is one of a handful of Republican congressmen to break ranks with President Bush and the GOP leadership over Iraq. In recent months, he has been campaigning for a "full and honest" debate on the Iraq war. And he has written several letters to GOP committee chairmen and Majority Leader John Boehner, requesting the chance for a public vote on a pullout date.

Of course, none of that has happened.

Jones now says he feels duped by his own party's leadership. "Maybe I should have been less trusting, but I felt it would be a debate that would allow us to talk about policy," Jones told me. "I don't see how we would have gotten hurt if we had allowed members of both parties to go down to the floor to offer an amendment." To express his frustration, he appeared Wednesday at a press conference with Rep. Neil Abercrombie, a Democrat from Hawaii, who bound his own hands in yellow twine to dramatize the bonds under which members of Congress toil.

When only about third of Americans approve of Bush's handling of the war, it's really beyond belief -- a stunning display of arrogance -- that people like Instaputz glibly label the Democrats traitors over a meaningless, politically-motivated, midterm elections cheerleading bill for the Bush Administration.

It really makes you wonder: are Instaputz and Hugh Hewitt and the House Republicans reading the polls? Are they simply in denial that two-thirds of the country think Iraq was a mistake, and think Bush has bungled the war badly? Do they really believe the war in Iraq is a winner for them in November?

Someone pass the Kool-Aid.

UPDATE:

CNN just released a poll indicating 53% of Americans favor a pull-out date. What a bunch of cut-and-run traitors.

The false equivalence.

Ah, the false equivalence, one of Putz's favorite rhetorical devices. Bill Maher has referred to this technique as "it's a wash."

Putz uses it all the time, and did so in 2004.

George W. Bush blew off his guard duty, after dodging combat in Vietnam? Well, wasn't there something fishy about John Kerry's combat medals?

It's a wash!

Tom DeLay, the highest ranking member of congress to be indicted on criminal charges in over a century, and the most powerful Republican on the Hill for the past decade has to resign in disgrace and may go to jail? Well, William Jefferson got caught taking bribes!

It's a wash!

Now this:

WILLIAM JEFFERSON UPDATE:

Democrats voted last night to strip Rep. William J. Jefferson (La.) of a plum committee assignment while he is embroiled in a federal bribery investigation.

The 99 to 58 vote followed weeks of public and private wrangling, as Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) sought to take a strong election-year stance on ethics, while Jefferson's allies -- mainly fellow members of the Congressional Black Caucus -- protested that he was being singled out for unfair treatment.

It's that culture of corruption in Washington.

What's amusing about this is not only does it draw a false equivalence between Jefferson and DeLay/Abramoff (apparently Putz is incapable of understanding the distinction between systemic and individual corruption), but this article reports that the Democrats stripped Jefferson of his committee seat.

I don't remember Republicans stripping DeLay of anything, do you? In fact, as I recall, the GOP threw a banquet for the Hammer.

But hey, it's a wash.

"The press" empowers terrorists.

This really requires no comment at all.

And of course it's true -- as Austin Bay notes in the post linked above -- that no single event like this is decisive. It's all part of a long process of ups and downs. But, of course, that's also true of the bad news. Funny that when something bad happens, the press doesn't hedge it with qualifiers and contrary views the way they do when something good does. And it's too bad that I have to spend so much of a post on a Zarqawi's death talking about the misconduct of the American press. But terrorism is an information war for the most part, and the press is, in various ways, empowering the terrorists.

"Ignoring" Ann Coulter.

Putz, in the wake of Ann Coulter's latest projectile vomitus:

My general strategy these days is to ignore Coulter (Ted Rall, too), and if everyone did that things would be better. But yes, this deserves to be condemned. Of course, she's managed to troll Hillary into condemning her, probably assuring a bestseller slot.

So Putz's "general strategy" with Ann Coulter is to "ignore" her? That's curious, because, in addition to their being a huge ad for Coulter's book on his blog today, there's this from yesterday:

IT'S 6/6/6, and Ann Coulter has a new book out. Coincidence?

And these:

ANN COULTER and the Mark of the Beast.

ANN COULTER: "Mainstream Democrat".......

SO I GET HOME AND FIND MY INBOX full of complaints from lefties that I've been "silent" about Ann Coulter's remarks on Friday. I guess they're scrollbar-challenged, as I did in fact note them and link to Sean Hackbarth's denunciation...You can't assume that everyone is keeping up with everything, and I tend mostly to ignore Coulter.

THE INSTA-WIFE AND I watched this Ann Coulter documentary yesterday. Here's her review.I find Coulter rather over-the-top, though she comes across much better in the documentary than in her columns or TV appearances.

DOUG WEINSTEIN CALLS ANN COULTER an elitist.Related thoughts here, from Juliette Ochieng.

IS ANN COULTER faking it?

ANN COULTER says that John Roberts isn't conservative enough. (Drudge story here.). Beldar disagrees.

And that's just in the past few months. Apparently, what Putz means by "ignore" is not "don't post about" it's "don't criticize" while "promoting her book and her documentary." This is odd, because Coulter's stock and trade is shrill, political hate speech, the stuff that Putz is constantly chiding "the Left" and Democrats for supposedly engaging in.

So the best he can do in the wake of her saying the widows of 9/11 were "enjoying their husbands' deaths" is to write, "this deserves to be condemned" (without actually condemning it himself), while simultaneously taking a cheap-shot at Hillary.

And after he's thrice promoted her book, which calls liberals "godless."

Great.

The media whining continues.

Putz went on a media-bashing binge today.

JIM GERAGHTY: "The mainstream media has lost interest in the war on terror."
That must mean that we're winning.

DEMOCRATIC POLLSTER MARK BLUMENTHAL is Fisking RFK, Jr. Really, this is an embarrassment for RFK and for the Rolling Stone.

GUILTY UNTIL PROVED INNOCENT? And maybe not off the hook even then. That seems to be the attitude of the German media where U.S. soldiers are concerned -- and of some folks in the United States, too.

THE NEW YORK TIMES WANTS more photos of American corpses. Meanwhile, the London Times is apologizing for mis-labeling photos of Iraqi corpses so as to blame Americans instead of insurgents for their deaths.

BARRY MCCAFFREY REPORTS ON IRAQ, and thinks things are going better than the news reports suggest. Full report is downloadable at the link.

EUGENE VOLOKH says that the San Francisco Chronicle is still airbrushing Pete McCloskey's antisemitic comments.

So, for those keeping track of that evil, America-hating, pro-terrorist, liberal media, the "mainstream media" --- you know, the corporate media owned by General Electric, News Corp., CBS Corporation, Disney and Time Warner --- is secretly rooting for us to be blown up by terrorists (or to "lose" the "war on terror"---whatever that means), Rolling Stone is an embarassment, the New York Times is clearly evil because they want to actually document the human cost of the war (while Neil Cavuto at Fox simultaneously claims that the media ignores attacks on Americans), the London Times also hates Americans, various unnamed "news reports" are willfully distorting all the good news in Iraq because they collectively want America to lose, and the San Francisco Chronicle, though also obviously liberal, is secretly anti-Semitic.

I wonder what it feels like to actually be this crazy.

Dixie Chicked, revisited.

Remember just a short while ago when Putz wrote this,

THE DIXIE CHICKS: Learning the difference between capitalism and censorship.

And that was on May 23, when the Chicks were already #1 on Amazon.

Now this. Oops.

The Dixie Chicks led the chart this week with their unapologetic seventh release Taking the Long Way, which sold more than half a million copies in its first week, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Despite country radio's reluctance to play the album's first single "Not Ready to Make Nice," this strong debut proves that the Texas trio's Rick Rubin-produced album is truly a genre bender that appeals to a wider fan base.

I wonder if Putz will revisit the topic and admit that his oh-goody-the-Chicks-are-tanking post was wrong.

Nah.

Like a broken record.

Again, with the media.

It will be interesting to see how much media play this gets, since it, er, undercuts some earlier reporting on the story.

Putz is referring to a Popular Mechanics piece which he excerpts giddily, and starting with,

Government or contractor negligence was not discovered.

Yay! No government negligence! In your face Bush haters!

So again, to Putz, the media lies to make Bush look bad, blah, blah, blah. That's his nutty theory, and he's sticking with it. Which is why he totally ignored today's New York Times, in a piece titled, "Army Corps admits flaws in New Orleans levees" (6/1/06):

In a sweeping new study of the causes of the disaster in New Orleans, the Army Corps of Engineers acknowledged today that the levees it built in the city were an incomplete and inconsistent patchwork of protection, containing flaws in design and construction, and not built to handle a hurricane anywhere near the size of Katrina.

...

The chief engineer of the Army Corps, Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, said the report showed that "we missed something in the design," particularly in the construction of the drainage canal floodwalls that caused so much of the flooding.

...

"At the end of the day, we have to stand by the decisions," he said. If the Corps builds floodwalls, those floodwalls have to stand up to the test and the system has offer the intended level of protection. "And we didn't get there," he said.

"We didn't get there." That seems to undercut Putz.

Media, media, media!

Putz is starting to sound like Jan Brady. God, what a whiner.

A HADITHA ROUNDUP, plus this pretty much sure-fire prediction: "The media frenzy around the actions of a handful of Marines is now building and, as happened with the illegal acts at Abu Graib [sic], will be used to advance agendas unrelated to the allegations, agendas which trade on the slander of the American military, and which use the very rare exceptions to paint broadly, even as the enemy will."

Let me get this straight. "The media" which just lost 2 more of their own over there, making Iraq a deadlier conflict for reporters than WWII or Vietnam, covers the disgrace at Abu Grhaib, which, incidentally, was more a failure of leadership and policy that it was those "bad apples" -- and that's precisely the way the media reported it.

Then it reports on what appears to be a massacre of Iraqi civilians at Haditha, what Congressman John Murtha called "Iraq's Mai Lai." Therefore, they have an "agenda" to "slander the American military."

It's getting harder and harder to read this excrement every day.

What "angry Democratic activist" means.

Here we go again. Putz sheds crocodile tears of concern for Hillary, writing,

HILLARY CLINTON GETS THE LIEBERMAN TREATMENT from angry Democratic activists. Obviously, only one potential Democratic candidate can fully pass their test. But he's perfectly positioned. He's even a veteran! . . .

Incidentally, the "candidate" Putz mockingly refers to here is Markos Zuniga, whose blog Putz frequently ridicules.

Of course, this "angry Democratic activists" theory of Putz's --- that the crazy, anti-war left fringe are unfairly targeting Hillary and Lieberman-- ignores the fact that John Kerry, John Edwards and Al Gore, three-fourths of the past two Democratic presidential tickets, have all renounced the war in Iraq, with Kerry and Edwards going so far as to renounce their votes on the Iraq resolution. It ignores the fact that the other Democratic front-runners from 2004, Dick Gephardt, Wesley Clark and Howard Dean have all come out against the war.

It also conveniently ignores the fact that 66% of the American people disapprove of the President's Iraq policy, and that 62% of Americans believe the war wasn't worth it. And a whopping 91% of Democrats disapprove of Bush's Iraq policy.

So Lieberman and Hillary, who have to this point refused to renounce their votes unlike most Democratic leaders, and are thus well out of the mainstream on the issue, and a fringe minority of their own party, are understandably getting heat from the party that they're supposed to be representing.

So when Putz writes "angry Democratic activists" he really means "mainstream Democrats who are opposed to the war in Iraq, along with mainstream America, and who openly criticize President Bush."