A tale told by an idiot

By Capt. Fogg 

Has Andrew Breitbart blown a fuse? He seems to be saying just that: raving strangely about shooting people and being under attack from "liberals." Perhaps that's true, since like most of that rabble without a cause calling themselves conservative these days, a liberal is anyone you disagree with, and if these dull-witted bastards agree with anyone, it's with other ignorant, deluded, dull-witted bastards. 

There are times when I'm not thinking as clearly as I should, and in those unclear moments, I always think to myself, "Fire the first shot. Bring it on." Because I know who's on our side,

he said to a group of people on his side of the border of sanity, or at least those capable of listening to this without calling 911. 

We outnumber them in this country and we have the guns... I'm not kidding. They talk a mean game, but they will not cross that line because they know what they're dealing with.

Perhaps he's not kidding, but sorry, the "we" he's talking about really don't have the numbers, and although I hesitate to tell him, they aren't the only ones with guns. The rest of us just don't wave them around and threaten other people with them so that we can get our way.

So what line are you talking about, Andy? What line won't I cross to defend my country, the truth, democracy, and common decency? I'm afraid I know exactly what I'm dealing with, and I'm not impressed.

But still, a threat of violence is a threat of violence, and I think it's worth noting that when the frustration involved in transporting the United States back to it's darkest years of poverty and exploitation gets to these people, when they find themselves confident in talking to people of like mind, the true colors come out -- and so do the guns. 

Andrew Breitbart isn't a conservative. Conservatives don't dream about, talk about, and apparently advocate starting violent revolutions, by definition, nor do most sane people under circumstances as we have today. Andrew Breitbart doesn't believe in democracy, because although revolution may speak from the muzzle of a gun, democracy does not, nor does it suppress votes, buy votes, and base political power on firepower, threats, or buying power.

I mean, what the hell is he so desperate about? He's got money, our federal taxes are the lowest in his lifetime, and it certainly wasn't witches or demons or liberals who started a war and refused to pay for it or, as Republicans nearly always do, escalated the debt beyond all reason. What content can anyone find in his barking and hissing? What can he explain other than to drone on and on about how liberals are that and conservatives are like a deranged dog chasing its tail. Argument by diktat, argument by amplitude, argument by lying, shifting his terms around like some street hustler with walnut shells.

Like most of these brats and hooligans and barroom bullies, all he wants is power: the kind of power that stems from divine right, hatred, and the wealth of Hades. The kind he has no qualification to hold and no following to elect him to. So sure, Andy, your friends have guns, that's the only way sad, depressing losers like you and them can get noticed: hate-shouting, gun-waving, witch-hunting, and all the rest of the bellicose bullshit you try to pass of as a cause. So sure, bring it on, show everyone what kind of spoiled, petulant, and democracy-hating bolshevik brat you are. I'm waiting.

Come out shooting and see how far the "liberals" let you get before you and the whole camo-clad, rebel-yell-shouting vermin get what you deserve.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Box office bomb: Sarah Palin and the failure of The Undefeated

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Sarah Palin's admirers and various other delusional conservatives are doing their utmost to try to convince us that The Undefeated, the hagiographic documentary about Palin, has been a rousing success thus far.

In the process, they're also attacking anyone who suggests otherwise. Take The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf, for example, a conservative civil libertarian (and hardly one of Palin's fiercer critics) who on opening night last week went to a midnight screening of the movie out in Orange County, California, and found the theater empty (save for two young women who didn't know what it was about and left after just 20 minutes, as well as a couple who came in near the end, made out in the back row, and quickly left). (The rest of the multiplex was jam-packed for Harry Potter.) Friedersdorf's anecdotal point was simply that the midnight first screening of the Palin documentary didn't attract an audience even in a conservative place like Orange Country. (Big deal. That's hardly much of a surprise. Surely Palin's fans would show up at a normal time.) Friedersdorf was just reporting the facts as he witnessed them.

Ah, but that was enough to put him in the crosshairs, and he has since been viciously attacked by Andrew Breitbart, conservative bloggers, and conspiracy theorists (who insanely claim he set the whole thing up), as well as by various right-wing trolls on the Internet. You know, the usual suspects, wallowing in dishonesty, hatred, and outright craziness.

What happened to Friedersdorf is instructive (and deeply troubling), if predictable, but the question remains, how has The Undefeated done so far?

Critically, it has been panned. As I write this, it has a 32 at Metacritic (which seems to be a tad high given the overwhelmingly negative reviews it has received) and a 0 (yes, zero) at Rotten Tomatoes.

To Palin's defenders, this hardly matters. They, like conservatives generally, write off film critics as liberal partisans who couldn't possibly review a film independently of their supposedly left-wing political views. (This is how they dismiss negative reviews of any "conservative" movie, like Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. If you didn't like that sadomasochistic turd, you had to be politically and/or theologically predisposed against it. There's no possible way you could just have disliked it, or thought it a terrible movie.)

So what they do is turn to box office figures. Critics may not like a "conservative" movie, but the public is another story. That's the real America, the "heartland" pushing back against the leftie elites. Surely the box office can prove that The Undefeated is an exceptionally popular, and hence exceptional, movie. This is the case that John Nolte (who also attacked Friedersdorf) makes at Breitbart's Big Hollywood: "Numbers Don't Lie: "The Undefeated" Had a Remarkable Box Office Debut.

Well, not so much. If there's anything remarkable about the movie's first-weekend haul it's how remarkably mediocre it was, well short of what some might have been expecting given the ongoing fascination with all things Palin.

The Undefeated grossed $65,132, or $6,513 per screen on its first weekend of release (as it played on ten screen total across the country). This put it in 40th place in terms of weekend gross but 5th in terms of screen average. Not too bad, though it's hard to compare a movie that played on ten screens (and for which people who wanted to see it had to search out those few screens) and a movie that played on thousands of screens, like Horrible Bosses, which averaged $5,672 on 3,134 screens. If a movie is playing on that many screens, attendance can be spread out more, reducing the per-screen average.

But, still, yes, $6,513 isn't bad. But it was the first weekend for The Undefeated, not for Horrible Bosses (which has a total gross of over $60 million to date), and one would expect the numbers to have been higher.

Not to worry, says Nolte. If you compare The Undefeated's numbers to the numbers of other political documentaries, it did very well. Its weekend gross puts it well back on the list, but its per-screen avergage makes it look much stronger. No, it wasn't Fahrenheit 9/11 ($27,558 average on 868 screens), Bowling for Columbine ($26,143 average on eight screens), or Roger and Me ($20,063 average on four screens), and certainly not An Inconvenient Truth ($70,332 average on four screens), but it stacks up fairly well against most of the other major political docs of the past 20 years.

Nolte takes this to mean that the movie was an unqualified success -- and then goes on, predictably, to slam Palin's critics.

Here's the thing, though: As Joshua Green notes at The Atlantic, The Undefeated's numbers really weren't that good, or at least aren't worth bragging about. Now, the movie could have some life as it opens elsewhere around the country, and perhaps the ongoing infatuation with Palin will attract solid audiences, but shouldn't it have done better? Maybe not at Michael Moore or Al Gore levels, but Palin is a major political celebrity with a huge following. Where was the excitement for this piece of hagiographic crapola? Maybe elsewhere, maybe in the Heartland (as opposed to right-wing Orange County?), maybe if somehow some buzz can be generated, maybe if people go merely out of curiosity, but it certainly wasn't there opening weekend.

Now, I would suggest that Palin's popularity, while certainly real given her devoted following, is a product of the media as much as anything else. Which is to say, she would have some popularity anyway, but it's all the attention she gets in the media that turns her into a cultural phenomenon. Which is further to say, much of her popularity is a mirage -- it isn't really there. Just think how poorly she polls even among Republicans. Yes, I'll include myself and this blog in here -- we overdo it, covering her with excessive attention, treating everything she does, every word she utters, as far more significant, far more interesting, than it really is. And so we build up these expectations around her, including that any movie about her must do extremely well simply because it's about her -- and of course we, and supposedly the public generally, just can't get enough of her. If this is all wrong, or at least grossly exaggerated, then it should actually come as no surprise at all that people haven't been flocking en masse to see The Undefeated. Why should they? She's not nearly as popular as we say she is.

Don't get me wrong... this isn't all the media's fault. Palin plays the media and makes it seem herself as if she's far more significant and far more interesting than she really is, worthy of all the attention she gets, worthy of her stardom.

But while she rakes in massive amounts of money, often by duping her gullible supporters, she hasn't actually been all that successful, has she, at least in entertainment terms?

Sure, many still love her, including a core (if small) GOP constituency, and she has her Facebook followers and her commentator gig on Fox News, but her TV show, Sarah Palin's Alaska, mostly a massive ego trip but also possibly part of a campaign to boost her political fortunes (as it was a kind of campaigning, if not actually preliminary campaigning for a possible 2012 run), saw a huge drop in viewership after the first episode and was not renewed for a second season. And, again, her poll numbers are incredibly weak, even among Republicans. So should we really have expected a shamelessly and gratuitously hagiographic documentary about her, a documentary with an obviously self-aggrandizing agenda, to be a hit?

Was Weiner framed?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

From the start (of Weinergate), Rep. Anthony Weiner has claimed that his Twitter account was hacked. While he says that he cannot say "with certitude" that the photo in question is not of him, which is a bit odd, he stresses that he did not send any such photo and that he is "the victim of a prank."

Is that credible?

Yes. Yes it is. I won't get into the details, but blogger Joseph Cannon -- and you're right, Jon Stewart, it does sometimes take bloggers to do the investigative reporting that the "mainstream" media refuse to do, or are too lazy to do -- explained what might have happened in an essential post earlier today. Suffice it to say that it's incredibly easy to "hack" (although it's not really hacking) into a Yfrog e-mail account like Weiner's and from there to make it seem as if a photo originated with the Twitter account connected to the Yfrog account. Again, Cannon explains how, and he's discovered an anomaly, added to all the other evidence, that proves the photo in question must have originated somewhere else -- that is, not with Weiner.

And who was the culprit? The evidence appears to point to Dan Wolfe, "a partisan zealot" who "was obsessed with Congressman Weiner. His obsession strikes many as downright pathological." It was Wolfe who first "reported" on the the photo.

Whether Andrew Breitbart is behind it is another matter, but his right-wing site Big Government has been reporting salaciously on Weinergate from the start. And of course the photo was first published there. 

You do the math.

Even if Breitbart wasn't involved, he went with the photo, and the story, without knowing the details, which is par for the course for him. And regardless of his involvement, it seems pretty clear that this was indeed a vicious right-wing prank.

Surprised?

Like Breitbart, like Sherrod: Right-left equivalency and the inside-the-Beltway stupidity of Howard Kurtz

By Michael J.W. Stickings

In The Washington Post yesterday, media critic Howard Kurtz had an appallingly stupid piece in which he laments "journalism as blood sport, performed for the masses," and states that the problem is the "crossfire culture" generally, with each side, left as well as right, guilty of "hyper-partisanship," "vituperation," and "ugly attacks," whether it's Breitbart, Beck, Palin, Gingrich, Buchanan, O'Reilly, or Erickson on the right or Dean, Walsh, Weigel, Olbermann, Carville, or Spitzer on the left.

And who gets it? Who understand the problem, according to Kurtz? Why, David Brooks, conservative at The New York Times, and John Harris and Jim VandeHei, editors of right-leaning Politico. That's the equivalency argument here. Both sides are guilty, but the sensible middle that Kurtz celebrates is really the center-right. What a distortion. No wonder anyone on the left -- and Kurtz's villains of the left are hardly wild radicals -- is compared to, and considered the same as, anyone on the extremist right.

There isn't much to say about this equivalency argument. It's popular in mainstream Washington, especially at the Post, where David Broder remains its champion. But who on the left is akin to Limbaugh or Hannity? Is it Olbermann? Really? I acknowledge that the rhetoric on both sides can be uncivilized, but when has he or any of his peers, such as Maddow, ever expressed the sort of venom and bigotry you hear on a regular basis from "mainstream" conservatives like Limbaugh and Hannity? One oft-cited exception is Michael Moore, but what has he ever said to compare to what, say, Beck says on a nightly basis? Moore sometimes goes too far in his efforts to uncover right-wing conspiracies, and sometimes overstates his case, but he isn't a racist and doesn't resort to the sort of ad hominem and propagandistic viciousness that characterizes most of today's GOP and conservative media machine.

If anything, all the left is doing -- and, again, we're not talking here about the far left (Carville and Spitzer are hardly radicals), which is generally shunned by the Democratic establishment (for example, Ralph Nader, as well as Moore) -- is responding to the attacks of the right. Presumably, in the name of journalism, Kurtz would rather liberals just rolled over and let conservatives have their way. But with all the power Fox News, Breitbart, and right-wing talk radio wield, what are they -- what are we -- to do?

For more on Kurtz's piece, let me quote Digby's post in its entirety:

Howard Kurtz is an utter fool for finding equivalence between Shirley Sherrod, Howard Dean, Joan Walsh and Andrew Breitbart for any number of reasons. I would defend Joan on this, but she's done it perfectly well for herself, and she makes the right point about Dean as well. He is not a journalist. Indeed, among those four named above the only one is Walsh and she is perfectly correct in labeling FOX racist when, among other things, they just spent two weeks ginning up a story about "black panthers" which has no basis and which can only be seen as a tool to sow racist animus.

What makes me want to slam my head into a wall repeatedly is the notion that there is any equivalence between Breitbart and Sherrod. It's so offensive on so many levels that I can only assume that Kurtz believes that Sherrod rightly pointing out that Breitbart is a racist is the same as Breitbart wrongly pointing out that Sherrod is one. I've seen cases of he said/ she said before, but this really takes the cake.

Unless you are a person who believes that racism doesn't exist --- or subscribe to some philosophical view that one can never know if someone else is a racist unless they come right out and admit it --- then this is an insulting position for any rational person to take. Sherrod's own words and deeds speak for themselves. And regardless of what's in his heart, Breitbart's do as well. Any fudging of the lines between the two is an act of intellectual obtuseness and/or moral cowardice.

Yes, that's right. According to Kurtz, Sherrod is just as bad as Breitbart. Both are part of the problem, even though it was Sherrod who was dragged through the mud, character and career destroyed, by Breitbart and Fox News and who had every right to be angry about it, and who isn't a journalist.

It's obtuseness and cowardice, but it's also the expression of a narrative that plays right into the hands of the right, which is why Brooks and Politico are promoting it. Jon Stewart objected to "crossfire" journalism too, of course, but what he objected to specifically was the destructive dynamic of CNN's show Crossfire, with right and left just arguing with each other for no other point but the argument itself. This is different. This, let's be clear, is about left and right being essentially the same thing, each an equal part of the problem regardless of the actual merits of what is being said on either side. In this sense, if Limbaugh says something racist, which he often does, and Olbermann calls him out on it, both Limbaugh and Olbermann are equally at fault for being hyper-partisan and un-journalistic.

Stupid? Yes, of course it's stupid -- dangerously, ignorantly stupid -- but it's what the likes of Howard Kurtz think passes for above-the-fray superiority, allowing them to feel good about themselves while they turn their eyes from what's actually going on, like the bad journalists they are, and enable conservatives to turn political discourse into a cesspool of right-wing poison.