Wednesday, December 24, 2003

Hate Speech

Via Steve Perry's War Blog (and I say this over and over: not the lame Steve Perry aka Journey's frontman lead singer), we have an example of the hysterical nature of certain wingnuts as they seek to deify the second coming of Bush while demonizing any who dare question the divinity of the Kennebunkport Crawfordian.

As one Canadian just discovered, news in the United States no longer breaks in cresting waves but increasingly strikes in a swarm of tiny stings, delivered by an expanding hive of conservative news-media outlets whose growing influence is set to dominate the coming presidential election campaign.

The new U.S. micromedia swept north of the border last week, and, as usual, its assault began as gossip.

Few Republican Party loyalists in the United States noticed that a young Edmonton man set up a website called Canadians for Wesley Clark, urging Canadians to support the popular retired general's bid to become the Democratic Party's presidential candidate.

Mr. Clark's official website links to the page.

Within hours, news of the Edmonton site was picked up by gossip gadfly Matt Drudge and became a top news story on the Texas-based website GOPUSA, a one-man operation whose news stories often provide content for hundreds of phone-in radio shows across the United States.

Less than 12 hours later, the Canadian made headlines in the conservative New York Sun, which proclaimed: "Anti-Bush Foreigners Eye Web for Donations to Democrats."

By the end of the day on Friday, the Edmonton website had become part of the election: George W. Bush's campaign team sent millions of Republicans a fundraising letter that accuses Mr. Clark of "raising foreign cash to attack our president."

The whole thing was so unnerving for the Canadian student who runs the Wesley Clark site that he will identify himself only by his first name, Rob.

"I knew something big was up when I checked my e-mail one day and found over 200 of them, all of them hateful and quite ignorant," he said yesterday.

"I've received almost a thousand e-mails since then."

As news, there was not much to it.

The website informed visitors that foreigners cannot donate to U.S. political campaigns and urged them to give instead to non-partisan groups that produce ads opposing Mr. Bush.

After the story exploded south of the border, even that pitch was removed.

(Courts have not decided whether foreign donations to U.S. activist groups are legal.)

None of the major U.S. newspapers, magazines or TV networks considered it news, but the story is a perfect example of how small, ideologically driven media outlets are becoming part of U.S. politics, many observers said.

"There's no question that conservatives have built up a sophisticated echo chamber in which talk radio and cable help drive certain stories" that have their origins on the Internet, said Howard Kurtz, a Washington-based media analyst for CNN, as well as The Washington Post.


That's quite a bit of the story, but not all of it. Take a look at the rest here.

In a certain sense, this should be considered food for thought for anyone opposing the regime of Dubya. When the left busily snipes away at each other, questioning what sorts of aggressive political tactics are acceptable (e.g., the Bush ad that 'cleans up' some obvious gaffes in his SOTU address, making the dauphin sound more, uh, presidential), the right will unleash the dogs at the earliest opportunity--and, if it doesn't work out, they simply move on. There is NO NEED for them to worry about being called on this by the press because the press has the collective memory of a plasmodial slime mold these days. And if anyone DOES call them to task, there is always the defense of plausible deniability. As the story above makes clear, this latest case of launching slime bombs against a Canadian, for chrissakes, comes from the Republican version of the Storm Troopers (aka the varied flavors of dittoheads who have mastered just enough technology that they've managed to program the various hate-radio telephone numbers onto their speed dial), whose ideological underpinnings are Matt Drudge, Limbaugh, the MurdochPress, and so on--which are affiliated with, but not quite subsidiaries, of the Republican Party. The wingnuts supply the vitrol, while the inner circle can pick and choose which attack they will add their own-knee-to-the-groin to, and which will remain in the realm of the Shock Troops. Works out nicely for them.

If the left wants to compete, we will need to launch our own attacks--early, often, and unrelenting. The fact is we've got far more in the way of issues--although, in retrospect, I'd have given Bush as much grief as possible on the SOTU remix--hit him on it, then move on. I took a look at a Howard Dean policy address--my link was via the good people over at Bad Attitudes--and it's the kind of attack that is hard-hitting but eminently fair. Whether or not Howard becomes the nominee is of less interest to me than what he says--all of his points are dead on accurate. Let Dean and the rest of the people running for the nomination do their "presidential" stuff--while, simultaneously, we should make certain that as many people as possible know just what sort of petty, two-bit, low-rent-for-such-a-high-brow guy Bush really is. If we do this right, Bush might show his true colors, instead of getting the free ride of a lifetime from the SCLM. And Bush's true colors aren't that pretty. Which is why Karl Rove's job for the next eleven months will be to keep Bush far away from anything even remotely resembling a genuine public setting. Sure, he'll give speeches to the moral equivalent of a carefully vetted studio audience. But the key to this election will be to make sure the vast, unwashed masses (i.e., the rest of us) are unaware of the true candidate--a moral, ethical, financial, and political failure, who rose to the top of the slag heap with the connivance of a willing, MurdochLead media--and, even then, it took a few illegal actions in Florida as well as the worst decision in the history of the SCOTUS to get him there...

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