Harry Targ : Political News as Commodity

Screenshot of Rachel Maddow reporting on the phony ACORN media sting during her MSNBC show. Image from Democurmudgeon.
What sells is legitimate:
Political news is a commodity

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / March 6, 2012

“The public version of Andrew was not the version I knew. I won’t miss the public version of Andrew. But the next time I’m walking down the street in New Hampshire, I will think of him, and I will wish I could run into the Andrew Breitbart who I knew.” -- Lawrence O’Donnell, The Last Word, MSNBC, March 2, 2012.

Andrew Breitbart, the despicable electronic journalist of the Right, died on March 2 at the age of 43. Breitbart gained fame for producing short “documentaries” which distorted the image and activities of ACORN, a national organization of community activists. The slander of this grassroots organization led ultimately to its defunding by Congress.

Breitbart prepared and disseminated distorted footage of a speech by Georgia Rural Development Director for the Department of Agriculture Shirley Sherrod leading to her dismissal by the Obama Administration. He constructed a clumsily doctored documentary from a Labor Studies class at the University of Missouri to make it look like the instructors, one of whom was a trade union staffer, were advocating working class revolution.

Breitbart produced vicious lies about people and organizations. The harm he did to the real lives of poor and powerless people in our society in these and other instances is incalculable.

And not only did Breitbart produce venomous news accounts, he became a role model for other so-called journalists who have produced like-minded distorted reportage on venues such as Fox News.

In addition, it is important to recognize that the distorted journalism that pervades Fox News can be found in the work of almost every other major media purveyor, electronic and print, in the United States. And Breitbart was a producer of this distorted journalism and an inspiration for the expansion of it throughout the profession.

So why did Lawrence O’Donnell, who generally is a principled journalist and voice of those victimized by powerful economic and political elites, memorialize Breitbart in such touching ways?

And O’Donnell was not alone. Arianna Huffington and many others took the view that Breitbart, although he presented distorted information that impinged on progressive movements and policies, was passionate about his craft. Several media pundits suggested that Breitbart’s slanderous advocacy journalism, even if misplaced, was a contribution to a new journalism.

Why is it that journalists laud those who produce and disseminate news that destroys organizations and people who do good works? Why are journalists -- who produce news that exacerbates anti-worker, racist, and sexist attitudes and values, or more generally produces pain and suffering -- celebrated by their peers?

Perhaps part of the answer can be found in an analysis of news in modern society. We know that products that people produce and consume have “use value,” that is they provide some concrete and practical purpose which explains why we value them. Food is produced and consumed because we need food to survive. Beyond food, we consume many products because they provide us with comfort and pleasure.

Before the rise of capitalism, workers and peasants produced goods and services for their own use. With the rise of capitalism workers increasingly participated in the production of goods and services for sale in the marketplace. Workers produced not for use but for sale. Virtually every product became a commodity for sale.

In a system of commodity production the sales effort becomes more important than the basic value the goods hold for their producers. As capitalism unfolded over the last 200 years, the production of goods and services became more concentrated in fewer and fewer corporations and financial institutions.

Huge conglomerates organized the production and distribution of goods and increasingly engaged in the process of generating demands for the wants people have in a modern society. In short, ours is a society of mass production and mass consumption. And consumers are vital to its survival and growth.

What does this analysis of the rise of our modern economy mean for journalism? It suggests that at some time in the past, images of our world and knowledge about it were produced and consumed by families and communities for their immediate needs. Over time, large media corporations were created to produce news and knowledge for dissemination among larger and larger populations. News became a commodity.

Media corporations increasingly saw the need to produce news, a commodity, which would be broadly consumed by the people. In other words news, in a world in which 10 media monopolies dominate, required the selling of their product. As the media monopolies competed for customers for their commodities, appeals increased to the base desires, values, and beliefs of a population that already were shaped by racism, sexism, and animosity toward workers and the poor.

Here is where skilled journalist/viral ideologues enter the picture. They applied their skills to the production of news that would entice and increase the appetite for more of the news that privileged scandal, racism, and sexism.

But what about the more rigorous, informed, and "professional" journalists who waxed eloquently about Breitbart’s professionalism despite some of his odious practices? Well, sad to say, virtually all media workers are engaged in the business of producing commodities for sale in the media market. So for them, the Breitbarts of the world are to be admired for their craft, if not their message and impacts on people’s lives.

In the end, the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the media, the 10 media conglomerates that produce one-half of all we read, listen to, and view in news and culture, is a direct result of the fact that our economic system requires the commodification of everything, including news and culture. Andrew Breitbart was an inevitable product of this system.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Danny Schechter : Exit Snow and Breitbart: End of an Era?

Is it the end of an era?
Exit Olympia Snow and Andrew Breibart

By Danny Schechter / The Rag Blog / March 6, 2012

There was an eerie synchronicity in the pending resignation of veteran Maine Senator Olympia Snowe, a Republican who had more than she could take of hyper-partisan “conservative” correct-lineism in Congress, and the death of Andrew Breitbart, the right-wing provocateur who did his very best to create the dynamic that Snowe was rejecting.

She would never use the language of her Party-mate Rick Santorum who confessed that some policies he disagreed with made him want to throw up, but if we lived in the age when all roads led to Rome, Congress would surely have its own vomitorium in the basement and it would be well-attended.

Breibart’s unexpected passing of “natural causes” might foreshadow the death of his political brand just as Snowe’s retreat to the state lobsters made famous may mark the end of the center in the GOP.

There was nothing natural about Andrew’s angst and activism as he smeared and bullied political opponents with the full support of the extremist echo chamber that helped him build his career.

There was no tactic that was too unethical in his aggressive arsenal that relished embarrassing and exposing enemies with videos and bombast.

After he died, the likes of Matt Drudge and Michelle Malkin were there with teary condolences as were his adoring staff members who posted this testimonial: “Andrew lived boldly, so that we more timid souls would dare to live freely and fully, and fight for the fragile liberty he showed us how to love."

What he did love was to retweet every criticism he received as badges of honor in what seemed like an endless self-promoting crusade. No wonder, the right wing blogosphere is in mourning, echoing each other's laments.

Brinart’s spirit was animated by a large dose of Stalin.

Conservative Ron Deher wrote,

I couldn’t stand some of what Breitbart did, and criticized certain of his stunts on this blog. But Lord have mercy, a 43-year-old man dropped dead and left a widow and four fatherless children. He was a provocateur, not a criminal. The thing Breitbart suffered from is the same thing… too many of us suffer from: making ideology more important than basic human decency.

David Frum, the man who coined the phrase “axis of evil,” was honest enough to admit

that to speak only “good” of Breitbart would be to misunderstand the man. The good was there. Breitbart was by all accounts generous with time and advice, a loving husband and father, and a loyal friend.

Yet perhaps Breitbart’s most consequential innovation was his invention of a new kind of culture war, and it’s difficult to assess his impact on American media and politics if you withhold an objective evaluation of his career -- a career that was so representative of his times.

It was that “culture war” that offended a cultured senator like Olympia Snowe who said she was through with the spirit of confrontation and polarization that drives politics, fed up with an environment which has no room for individual conscience or dissent.

NPR reported, from a story in The Nation:

Politico's Jonathan Allen published a piece that epitomizes this genre today. The article, "The center crumbles," laments that "Congress can't find the middle ground because no one's willing and able to stand there anymore."

For some like Snowe, the question is, why bother? The prospect of running hard to win another term -- particularly a six-year Senate term -- is less and less attractive for folks who came to Washington to make things happen only to find out there's no common ground to get things done, only partisan point-scoring that leads to paralyzed politics.

Some years ago when I was making the film In Debt We Trust, I spent a long night in Congress waiting to interview Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee who was then speaking on the floor against Republican demands that the United States seal both our Southern and Northern borders with a fence or East Berlin-like high wall to stop illegal immigrants.

She very calmly challenged the idea with facts and figures that seemed very rational and to the point.

But when the vote came, all of the Republicans were looking down at their blackberries where they were being instructed on how to vote by their leadership.

Despite agreeing with some of the points she made in the debate, the GOP voted as a block, no deviations! That was before the Tea Party fanatics moved in and frequently rejected the advice of their whips because it was not obstructionist enough.

Those were Breibart’s ideas in action. The Los Angeles Times praised him for turning media manipulation into an art:

Breitbart was a revolutionary eager to overthrow a media establishment that he viewed as a front for left-wing social causes. Always brimming with righteous indignation -- before he died, his final tweet offered an explanation for why he’d called an adversary a “putz” -- he had contempt for anything that smacked of liberal do-gooderism or hypocrisy.

In his last known conversation in an LA bar he blamed liberals for forcing the GOP to debate social issues so they could challenge them. To him, like generations of anti-communists before him, there was always a liberal (his version of communist) under every bed.

Noted writer Patrick Goldstein said,

Breitbart would’ve been a marginal figure if he had simply been a media gadfly. His genius was rooted in the realization that in the new media universe, being outrageous often gets far more attention than being authoritative. After Ted Kennedy died in 2009, when everyone else was lionizing the great liberal crusader, Breitbart ripped him as a “duplicitous bastard.” He also called him a “prick” and "a special pile of human excrement."

Personally, he went from a liberal family to join a reactionary community. He helped found Huffington Post. Appearances on Bill Maher’s shows and Fox News programs helped build his national celebrity even as he co-wrote a book criticizing the celebrity culture that propelled him into national visibility.

Many on the left lacked his sophistication and were unprepared to respond to his attacks. Organizations like ACORN, known for grassroots organizing and voter registration, were destroyed by Breibart’s calculated shock tactics, partly because his undercover gang with video cameras understood its vulnerabilities and played on its naiveté. Rather than defending them, many Democrats rushed to distance themselves and in the process helped defund an important organizing force.

He was less effective in his campaign against Occupy Wall Street but what he lacked in invective, local police forces more than made up for with spying, surveillance, and physical attacks on Occupy. He was a cheerleader for this repressive response.

He did seem to have some loose screws, though. According to Wikipedia,

At the Conservative Political Action Conference convention in Washington, D.C., on February 10, 2012, a belligerent Breitbart was captured walking with a glass of wine, screaming a diatribe at protesters, including repeatedly calling them "filthy freaks" and "murderers," demanding that they "stop raping the people." He was restrained by convention hotel security, resisting as they physically pushed him away from the demonstration.

He wanted his enemies to hate him, and, no surprise, many reciprocated in kind.

Wikipedia also noted that

Breitbart often appeared as a speaker at Tea Party movement events across the U.S. For example, Breitbart was a keynote speaker at the first National Tea Party Convention at Gaylord Opryland Hotel in Nashville on February 6, 2010.

What's the lesson for the left?

No one would suggest emulating Breitbart’s deliberately deceptive methods, but perhaps his example argues that the activists he sought to destroy need more audacity, more discipline, and more cleverness in exposing right-wing media with better alliances and collaborations. They need to create mutually supportive echo chambers that go on the offensive as opposed to just reacting to attack.

They also need to try to seize the national stage, not shrink from it for fear of being co-opted.

Olympia Snow deserves our respect for taking the stand she did. Andrew Breibart didn’t deserve to die at age 43, but -- who besides acolytes and his own ditto-heads, including many haters -- will really honor his legacy?

[News Dissector Danny Schechter writes the News Dissector blog and edits the new Mediachannel1.org. His new book is Occupy: Dissecting Occupy Wall Street (ColdType.net). Email Danny at dissector@mediachannel.org. Read more by Danny Schechter on The Rag Blog.]

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Amanda Marcotte : Does Weinergate Mark an End to Sexual Privacy?

J'accuse! Right wing blogger Andrew Breitbart points the finger. Photo from AP.
The worst thing about Weinergate?
The total obliteration of sexual privacy
by ideologues like Andrew Breitbart

Prior to this scandal, the media and political operatives had to at least pretend that a politician's sex life had some bearing on the public interest before they picked up the pitchforks.

By Amanda Marcotte / AlterNet / June 7, 2011

Like most political junkies who tuned in to Anthony Weiner’s press conference confession of online flirtations, I went through a series of emotions: irritation at Weiner’s stupidity, anger at Andrew Breitbart’s sleaziness, frustration that this story gets coverage during an economic crisis, and embarrassment for the reporters who thought it appropriate to ask if he’s getting professional help or demand that Weiner’s wife stand around so that everyone can gawk at her.

But one concern rose above all others. This scandal may represent the end of the presumption of sexual privacy for politicians, and possibly even for journalists, activists, and bureaucrats -- anyone whose public humiliation could benefit the ideologues wed to the politics of personal destruction.

Prior to this scandal, the media and political operatives had to at least pretend that a politician's sex life had some bearing on the public interest before they picked up the pitchforks. Being an adulterer wasn’t, in and of itself, a matter of public interest. There had to be a hook.

If you were a social conservative who advocated for using the government to control the sexual behavior of consenting adults, for instance, then you were held to your own standard and your adulteries were considered public business. If you opposed gay rights, your own history of same-sex relations was fair game. If you broke an anti-prostitution law you vigorously enforced on others, like Eliot Spitzer, you had no reasonable expectation of privacy.

Arnold Schwarzenegger had a long past of being accused of sexual harassment, so the state of the marriage he used as a shield matters. Even at the height of the national panic over Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Clinton’s detractors claimed that it wasn’t the sex that was the issue, but the perjury. No one believed them, of course, but the claim at least paid tribute to the idea that the private sexual choices of those who support sexual privacy are not the public’s business.

But with this Weiner scandal, there’s not even the veneer of an excuse in play. Weiner has an outstanding record supporting sexual rights of others, with 100% ratings from NARAL and Planned Parenthood, and has a strong record of support for gay rights. No laws seem to have been broken, no public trust compromised, no campaign irregularities indicated, and there’s been no suggestion that his flirtations interfered with his ability to do his job.

The entire rationale for the scandal is that Weiner isn’t living in accordance with strict social mores regarding monogamy, and that’s it. Even the whining about how he lied when initially confronted is hollow. In the past, lying when someone asks nosy questions that are none of their business was considered a socially acceptable white lie. (And really, who among us would be a paragon of transparency with Wolf Blitzer waving a penis picture in our face and saying, “Is this yours?”)

The pretense that it has to matter to the public in order for the public to get involved has been dropped.

This loss of privacy should worry people more than whether or not Weiner was right to lie or even how rude it was of Andrew Breitbart to hijack the press conference. The presumption of sexual privacy may have been stretched at times past the point of recognition, but this represents the first time it’s really snapped, at least in my memory.

If this Weiner scandal is more than a blip, and instead the beginning of a free-for-all of rooting through politicians’ trashcans to make sure their private sex lives adhere to someone else’s standards, where will it all end?

There are two main concerns when personal choices -- or even failings -- become a matter of public interest, even if it doesn’t affect the public. One is that it opens the door to real witch hunts where no one is truly safe, and the other is that it will degrade the quality of the actual work people are doing that actually does affect the public.

The problem with opening the door to conducting sex scandals where simply violating some sexual standard is all that’s needed is that the question arises: Who gets to set the standards? The answer is probably closer to “the religious right” than “Dan Savage," if only because the more sexually liberal out there don’t bother with feigning outrage at the private behavior of consenting adults.

You saw this problem erupting with the Weiner press conference, where reporters asked questions that implied that a standard of monogamy be applied across the board, regardless of the preferences of the people actually in the marriage, and that failure to comply with monogamy standards constitutes a grievous personality flaw that requires professional intervention. (One shouted question specifically asked if Weiner was seeking professional help.)

Once the standard for a sex scandal moves from “public interest” to “arbitrarily deciding this person’s behavior is gross/immature/offends Jesus," it’s open season. Today the crime is not following the standards of monogamy set by those outside your marriage (since we don’t know the details of Weiner’s relationship with his wife, these are the only standards really in play).

Tomorrow, it could be that your personal behavior offends people who don’t approve of premarital sex or who think it’s gross or silly for adults to play little private games with each other. Already, half the reason this is a scandal is that Weiner said things while flirting that sound silly in a more public context. Can any of us really say that 100 percent of our flirtations in life would pass the scrutiny of a hostile audience out to maximize our humiliation?

If these new standards come in to play, it will mean a drastic reduction in the number of people willing to risk running for office -- or be activists or writers or anyone that Andrew Breitbart deems interesting enough to start a harassment campaign against. Sensible people, realizing their sex lives will be an open book, will choose careers that don’t attract the attention of witch hunters.

Unfortunately, those sensible people are exactly the kind of people we need more of in politics, having already ceded so much ground to the Bible-thumpers and people who believe that Obama is starting secret campaigns to confiscate guns and kill old people. Weiner, for instance, was targeted because he’s willing to fight the good fight on major issues of interest to liberals.

Of course, running sensible people out of politics would suit the ends of Andrew Breitbart and his faux outrage machine just fine, which is all the more reason that he should be resisted.

[Amanda Marcotte co-writes the blog Pandagon. She is the author of It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments. This story was published at and distributed by AlterNet.]

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Jay D. Jurie : The 'New Zeal' of Right Wing Propagandist Trevor Loudon

Trevor Loudon. Image from USA Survival News.
New Zealand's Trevor Loudon and the
Right-wing propaganda machine

By Jay D. Jurie / The Rag Blog / August 4, 2010

Until I came across the KeyWiki site I didn't know I had my very own "Wiki" page. When I went to "my" page I discovered it focused exclusively on the political side of my life.

KeyWiki describes itself as

...a bipartisan knowledge base focusing primarily on corruption and the covert side of politics in the United States and globally. While particular interest is taken in the left, KeyWiki serves to expose covert politics on both the left and right of the political spectrum.

Accompanying this description was a photo of the Statue of Liberty.

Wondering who might be responsible for all this, the KeyWiki "team" identified only one individual, named Trevor Loudon, while "members of the KeyWiki team will be added below shortly."

As it turns out, Trevor Loudon is a resident of Christchurch, New Zealand. Since New Zealand has a multiparty parliament it is a little odd that he describes his site as "bipartisan." His description makes it clear he is focusing on the U.S., so perhaps he means "bipartisan" in the U.S. context. If that's the case, then his "knowledge base" is virtually nonexistent when it comes to exposing "covert politics" on the right.

For example, a search on his site for David Horowitz -- one of the few members of the New Left who became an outspoken conservative -- produced information only about his incarnation on the left several decades ago. There were no pages or listings for well-known figures on the right such as Bay Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Nikki Haley, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, or Bill O'Reilly, though there are links on the companion KeyWiki.org site to blogs operated by Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin.

Statue of Liberty photo by David Prior / KeyWiki.
Thinking maybe these were insufficiently "covert," I tried several others, including Bo Gritz, Eric Rudolph, and Randall Terry, turning up nothing. I thought he might have entries for well-known white supremacists David Duke or Tom Metzger, or for well known anti-Semites or Holocaust deniers such as Don Black or Willis Carto, but again, nothing. There wasn't even a listing for the Ku Klux Klan.

There is no information on right-wing elected officials such as Michelle Bachmann, John Cornyn, Ron Paul, or Joe "You lie!" Wilson. Loudon maintains a separate blog called New Zeal ("promoting liberty in New Zealand and beyond") on which he re-posted a Washington Times op-ed piece by former Representative and nativist Tom Tancredo (R-CO), in which Tancredo wrote: "Mr. Obama is a more serious threat to America than al-Qaeda," to which Loudon approvingly appended "well said."

There are a lot of items about individuals and groups on the left, including denunciatory articles about legislators Neil Abercrombie and Dennis Kucinich, and negatively-framed information about Alan Grayson and Bernie Sanders, among others.

There's a list of "key organizations" that includes the Apollo Alliance, the Center for American Progress, Committees of Correspondence, Democratic Socialists of America, Institute for Policy Studies, and the New Party. Several other organizations and publications also rate considerable attention, including the Communist Party USA, In These Times, the Movement for a Democratic Society (MDS), the New American Movement (NAM), and The Rag Blog.

A September 2008 blog article ("therealbarackobama") by Brenda J. Elliott was entitled "Has Trevor Loudon found the Ayers-Dohrn-Obama 'smoking gun'?" According to Elliott, MDS was behind the creation of Progressives for Obama. Carl Davidson of Progressives for Obama responded that MDS "had nothing to do" with it, "nor did any one of the other alphabet soup of left groups you list." Elliott further asserted "MDS is the brains behind the SDS brawn."

America's Survival Inc. president and Accuracy in Media blogger Cliff Kincaid and Loudon co-authored a 32-page article entitled "From Arms to Education to Political Power: Return of the SDS and the Weather Underground" to further smoke out MDS. Loudon and Kincaid found that under the auspices of MDS, the new SDS, the Center for American Progress and pro-Barack Obama elements were ominously coalescing:

Key to this overall effort is the MDS, which unites Rudd, Ayers, Dohrn and other members of the SDS and Weather Underground from many different socialist and communist organizations.

These assertions are certain to generate some laughter among those actually familiar with the organizations in question.

Former Obama administration "green jobs" director Van Jones was among those singled out by Loudon for special attention. Kincaid has used a Loudon link about Jones on his blog. Glenn Beck has given Loudon a shout-out for "exposing" Jones and Joel Rogers of the New Party. Another shout-out comes from Andrew Breitbart, who conjured up the recent brouhaha over Shirley Sherrod.

Loudon has expended considerable energy making a case that Obama boyhood mentor Frank Marshall Davis was a secret Communist. According to Loudon, U.S. Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan "doesn't lean left. She leans socialist-communitistic (sic) first."

In fact, Loudon's preoccupation with individuals with links, no matter how obscure, to (real or perceived) socialist or communist organizations puts him at the center of a revival of the redbaiting tactics of former Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Among the reasons I apparently rate my own KeyWiki page is I once signed a petition in support of academic freedom for, in Loudon's word, "terrorist" Bill Ayers. Loudon's definition of terrorism seems highly selective, or he must look across the Pacific to find it.

Nowhere does he mention the deadly French intelligence services bombing of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in the Auckland harbor, or refer to that as a terrorist act. Nor does Loudon have anything to say about an incident in which New Zealand police pointed automatic weapons at the passengers of a Maori-operated school bus.

The Rag Blog's Jay D. Jurie: Sufficiently 'covert'? Image from Jay's KeyWiki page, in a photo lifted from Next Left Notes.
My page shows me as a signer of a statement several decades ago that advocated closer working relations between NAM and the Socialist Party USA. I owe Loudon a debt of gratitude for this, as I had forgotten all about it. After being reminded of this, my regret is that those closer working relations never materialized.

Virtually all "Rag Bloggers," including Marion Delgado, have some listing on KeyWiki. Thorne Dreyer and David Hamilton are among those who have interested Loudon most. In fact, simply writing for The Rag Blog or signing the Progressives for Obama petition appears to be enough to rate your own KeyWiki page. And Loudon seems to consider The Rag Blog a virtual mouthpiece for his theoretical MDS/Progressives for Obama nexus.

[It should be pointed out that The Rag Blog is an independent progressive newsweekly, published by the non-profit New Journalism Project, and has no affiliation with any political group or party.]

Still left unanswered is the question about why Loudon hasn't exposed covert politics on the right?

Since KeyWiki has only been in existence since April, perhaps he's just been preoccupied with filling in the left-wing side.

A larger question is why has a New Zealander like Loudon created a Wiki site primarily concerned with the U.S.? Answers to these two questions seem to overlap. In several of his writings Loudon makes it clear he is a committed "Americanphile." He apparently sees New Zealand as a satellite for what he believes, but the U.S. is the mother ship.

What are those beliefs? Several on-line sources identify Loudon as a member of the "Zenith Applied Philosophy" or ZAP cult, based upon an admixture of Scientology, Eastern mysticism, and John Birch-style laissez-faire capitalism. Loudon's admiration for the U.S. and its traditions is apparently limited to that which conforms to his laissez-faire outlook. He has taken it upon himself to help chart the rightful course for the U.S.

Whereas its site claims "KeyWiki isn't a part of any political party and we don't support candidates," Loudon is a former vice-president of New Zealand's ACT (Association of Consumers and Taxpayers) Party. ACT appears to be more or less the equivalent of the U.S. Libertarian Party. According to its website, ACT espouses "free market classical liberalism" and "...seek[s] to rebuild diplomatic and political relationships with Australia and the United States." ACT also seeks to negotiate a free trade agreement with the United States.

All of the above makes it patently obvious that Loudon is engaged in the "covert politics on the right of the political spectrum." Rather than engage in honest pursuit of knowledge or debate, his modus operandi is duplicity. While KeyWiki masquerades as objective or balanced its real purpose is to conceal the advancement of a right-wing agenda.

In the deceitful pursuit of this purpose Loudon is not alone, as the shameful Breitbart attack on Shirley Sherrod makes evident. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson recently wrote of "a cynical right-wing propaganda machine."

Trevor Loudon has not only helped fuel this machine with half-truths, distortions, and fabrications, but is one of its drivers.

[Jay D. Jurie is a proud Rag Blogger who teaches public administration and urban planning and lives near Orlando, Florida.]

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Tom Hayden : Sherrod, Obama, and the Strength of Roots

Charles Sherrod and Carl Braden (a civil rights legend, along with his wife Anne), in 1963. Photo from Wisconsin Historical Images.

Collective amnesia

The media have been silent about Shirley Sherrod's husband, Charles Sherrod, a real hero to many of us in the '60s for his key role as a leader in SNCC in building an INTER-RACIAL civil rights movement. Charlie left SNCC when Stokely Carmichael took it over, expelled white folks, and adopted "black power" as its ideology, in order to continue building a black-and-white movement in Georgia. The notion that Charlie's wife could have been guilty of what's being called "reverse racism" against whites is therefore doubly ludicrous. Some of us who knew Charlie back when, however, haven't forgotten his shining example.

-- Doug Ireland / The Rag Blog

Remembering the struggle in rural Georgia:
Sherrod, Obama, and the strength of roots

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / July 23, 2010

See 'Using Race to Smear Obama,' by Eugene Robinson, Below.

How would members of the Obama administration have reacted to racist pressure from the Deep South in the early 60s? Would they have fired Justice Department civil rights monitors who antagonized hard-line segregationists?

For those of us with long memories, this is one of the key questions posed by the firing of Shirley Sherrod in a fit of official overreaction to the shameful right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart. It is true that the administration reversed course quickly after the true story was revealed, but that the Obama administration can be spooked so easily by Glenn Beck and FOX News raises a serious question: if they are so tough on national defense, drugs, and crime, where is their resolve against the deceitful attack dogs of the right?

My introduction to virulent southern racism came in 1961 when I ventured to Albany, Georgia, first to write an article about the Deep South organizing done by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and, second, to become a freedom rider on a train to Albany that December.

It was then I met, and came to admire, a brave young civil rights worker named Charles Sherrod, whom everyone in the movement simply called “Sherrod.” Albany was a segregated town near Plains, Georgia, and the home of Hamilton Jordan who went on to become Jimmy Carter’s chief of staff. Sherrod was the kind of front-line young militant who eventually brought about the New South of Carter, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore, among others. Sherrod had to face violence, and the possibility of death, every day in his effort to mobilize young people and their parents against the suffocation of fear.

Shirley Sherrod (Center) with Charles Sherrod (to her left) at the Charles Sherrod Civil Rights Park in Albany, Georgia in 2006. Photo from Rural Development.
Sherrod, and his equally committed wife Shirley, made a conscious decision to stay in rural Georgia long after the voting rights laws were passed and the national media departed. I left Albany after my two brief and harrowing experiences in 1961, and never returned until I spoke at a commemoration of the Albany civil rights movement a few years ago. The Sherrods were still there. She was engaged in programs supporting rural farmers, while he had served on the city council and was a minister in a nearby state prison. There were 500 people at the event, the stalwarts of the past.

So Shirley Sherrod’s life cannot be reduced by a dishonest and amoral right-wing blogger into a few seconds of videotape 25 years old. She is one of many thousands who had the force of character to face racist abuse, and seemingly immovable state power, when they were demonized and disenfranchised. They were the trees standing by the water, and they would not be moved. They tried to bring their morality to politics, not accept the politics of Machiavelli.

Our leaders today could learn from this strength of long ago. In fairness, government officials and leaders of large organizations, who are beneficiaries of the Southern civil rights legacy, have institutional reputations to protect. They should avoid needlessly provoking the right, and have every right to pick their fights intelligently.

But years of battering from the right have bred a defensive anxiety in the ranks of too many Democratic liberals. They flinch before they fight. It’s almost as if they internalize the right-wing refrain that they are weak, tea-sipping elitists. They give far greater consideration to conservatives, militarists, and bankers who rarely vote for them than to the millions of activists in social movements who actually made their power possible.

This is a moment when roots should be remembered, recovered from oblivion and venerated, not airbrushed out of history and polished resumes.

[A political activist for more than four decades, Tom Hayden is director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center. A founder of SDS and a former California State Senator, Hayden is the author of The Long Sixties (Paradigm, 2009).]

Image by Lance Page / truthout; Adapted by Christian Haugen / webtreats.

Using race to smear Obama

By Eugene Robinson / July 22, 2010

WASHINGTON -- After the Shirley Sherrod episode, there's no longer any need to mince words: A cynical right-wing propaganda machine is peddling the poisonous fiction that when African-Americans or other minorities reach positions of power, they seek some kind of revenge against whites.

A few of the purveyors of this bigoted nonsense might actually believe it. Most of them, however, are merely seeking political gain by inviting white voters to question the motives and good faith of the nation's first African-American president. This is really about tearing Barack Obama down.

Sherrod, until Monday an official with the Department of Agriculture, was supposed to be mere collateral damage. Andrew Breitbart, a smarmy provocateur who often speaks at tea party rallies, posted on his website a video snippet of a speech that Sherrod, who is African-American, gave to a NAACP meeting earlier this year. In it, Sherrod seemed to boast of having withheld from a white farmer some measure of aid that she would have given to a black farmer.

It looked like a clear case of black racism in action. Within hours, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack had forced her to resign. The NAACP, under attack from the right for having denounced racism in the tea party movement, issued a statement blasting Sherrod and condemning her attitude as unacceptable.

But Breitbart had overstepped. The full video of Sherrod's speech showed she wasn't bragging about being a racist, she was telling what amounted to a parable about prejudice and reconciliation. For one thing, the incident happened in 1986 when she was working for a nonprofit, long before she joined the Obama administration. For another, she helped that white man and his family save their farm, and they became friends. Through him, she said, she learned to look past race toward our common humanity.

Shirley Sherrod, then a former board member of the Farmers Legal Action Group (flag), with husband Charles and retiring board member Betty Bailey, were honored at a FLAG dinner in 2009. Photo from Agricultural Law.
In effect, she was telling the story of America's struggle with race, but with the roles reversed. For hundreds of years, black people were enslaved, oppressed and discriminated against by whites -- until the civil rights movement gave us all a path toward redemption.

With the Obama presidency, though, has come a flurry of charges -- from the likes of Breitbart but also from more substantial conservative figures -- about alleged incidences of racial discrimination against whites by blacks and other minorities. Recall, for example, the way Obama's critics had a fit when he offered an opinion about the confrontation between Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and a white police officer. Remember the over-the-top reaction when it was learned that Justice Sonia Sotomayor had once talked about how being a "wise Latina" might affect her thinking.

Newt Gingrich called Sotomayor a racist. He was lightning-quick to call Sherrod a racist, too. I'd suggest that the former House speaker consider switching to decaf, but I think he knows exactly what he's doing.

These allegations of anti-white racism are being deliberately hyped and exaggerated because they are designed to make whites fearful. It won't work with most people, of course, but it works with some -- enough, perhaps, to help erode Obama's political standing and damage his party's prospects at the polls.

Before Sherrod, the cause célèbre of the "You Must Fear Obama" campaign involved something called the New Black Panther Party. Never heard of it? That's because it's a tiny group that exists mainly in the fevered imaginations of its few members. Also in the alternate reality of Fox News: One of the network's hosts has devoted more than three hours of air time in recent weeks to the grave threat posed by the NBPP. Actually, I suspect that this excess is at least partly an attempt by a relatively obscure anchor to boost her own notoriety.

The Sherrod case has fully exposed the right-wing campaign to use racial fear to destroy Obama's presidency, and I hope the effect is to finally stiffen some spines in the administration. The way to deal with bullies is to confront them, not run away. Yet Sherrod was fired before even being allowed to tell her side of the story.

She said the official who carried out the execution explained that she had to resign immediately because the story was going to be on Glenn Beck's show that evening. Ironically, Beck was the only Fox host who, upon hearing the rest of Sherrod's speech, promptly called for her to be reinstated. On Wednesday, Vilsack offered to rehire her.

Shirley Sherrod stuck to her principles and stood her ground. I hope the White House learns a lesson.

[Eugene Robinson's e-mail address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com.]

(c) 2010, Washington Post Writers Group

Source / Truthout

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