(photo: vividBreeze/flickr)

Isn’t it interesting how the US establishment media, even as it went out of its way to push the Republicans’ distorted talking points on Hilary Rosen’s comments concerning Ann Romney, simultaneously ignored things that might not reflect well on Mrs. Romney or her very wealthy husband — things like the full history of her birthday party host Fred Malek, aka Nixon’s Jew Counter?

And no, Malek was not merely following Nixon’s orders, as Timothy Noah points out:

But here’s what Malek left out. Four of the people on Malek’s Jew list got demoted, with Malek’s active involvement. This is what Malek denied to the Post‘s Woodward and Pincus in 1988 (when Woodward and Pincus identified two of the four but were unable to prove the Malek link). “In no way did I take part in moving anyone out of the BLS,” Malek told Woodward and Pincus. “If I had even been peripherally involved or asked to alter someone’s employment status I would have found it offensive and morally unacceptable, and I would have refused.” Please note this comparatively rare instance in which a Washington hack tells a lie in the subjunctive tense. Malek was more than peripherally involved. And he most certainly did not refuse.

The proof is a memo that was withheld from Woodward and Pincus but was made public many years later. The memo, from Malek to Haldeman, notes the imminent demotions of Harold Goldstein, Peter Henle, Leon Greenberg, and Ben Burdetsky. I have no idea how many of these four were actually Jewish, but all four names appeared on Malek’s Jew list. (Malek’s memo did not mention the 13 by name but a  different memo  to Malek from White House aide Dan Kingsley did. Shiskin, oddly, didn’t make Malek’s list of 13, even though he was BLS director at the time.)

When you add all these details to Malek’s story, it acquires a very different meaning. Far from subverting Richard Nixon’s anti-Semitism, Malek enabled it. The fact that Malek later helped install the Jewish Shiskin as commissioner of BLS is not particularly relevant because by then Nixon had presumably moved on to other bizarre and/or hateful obsessions. (I’ve checked the unedited tape of Naftali’s Malek interview, and Malek doesn’t mention the demotions there either.)

Kinda like how the establishment press runs to demonize every single brown-skinned guy with a non-Anglo name caught up in an FBI entrapment net, yet gives far less attention (especially national attention) to right-wing terrorists like Kevin Harpham and James Cummings who don’t need the FBI to bait them into attempting violence.

Pay no attention to the Iraq warmonger behind the curtain!

Republicans and other elite representatives of the One-Percenters running this country know that the facts are against them, in everything from economic dealings to the criminal-justice system to the environment. So, when confronted by the facts, they do everything they can to draw attention away from themselves, preferably through the use of inflammatory statements intended to bog people down in defending against them.

It’s yet another misdirection play, part of the Wall Street counterinsurgency plan, just like the Cost to the Taxpayer and the Stinky Noisy Rowdiness gambits. They want oh so badly to make this about the protesters and not the message, and to be about the smears the one-percenters create as opposed to the methods and motives and actions of the one-percenters themselves. “Pay no attention to that oligarch behind the curtain!” is their cry.

Now comes the latest and most vile smear of all. The Wall Street hedge fund financed ECI Republicans and conservatives like William Kristol and Gary Bauer who are currently screaming “anti-semites!” now (in the face of all the evidence to the contrary) are the same ones who backed the Iraq invasion and did their damndest to paint Iraq war opponents as anti-semites in order to keep the public from pulling back the curtain on the phony WMD claims and other nonsense used to justify the invasion of a nation, their slaughter of its peoples, and their plans to profit from it all.

One of the things that gives these conservatives’ and Republicans’ game away is their odd blindness to all other forms of bigotry. They flatly refuse to admit what even Michael Steele was compelled to admit — the decades-long use of the Southern Strategy, the Republican fanning of race-hatred flames as a way to get and hold white votes. Professional Christian (in the Twain sense) John Mark Reynolds has been assiduously broadcasting the ECI-backed smears against Occupy Wall Street, yet is also on record as saying that conservatives and Republicans don’t regularly use racism and bigotry for electoral gain, a classic case of hollering about the hypothetical mote in a neighbor’s eye whilst ignoring the two-by-four sticking out of one’s own.

Will the elites who among other things brought us the Iraq catastrophe get away with their similarly-dodgy attacks on Occupy Wall Street? Not if we continue to turn the focus away from the one-percenters’ trumped-up smears and back where it belongs: on the one-percenters’ actions.

Just when you thought the McCain backers couldn’t get any more disgusting, we see this:

During the October 30 broadcast of his Cincinnati-based radio show, Bill Cunningham asked "Randy Furman," a fictional Jewish character voiced by fellow WLW-AM host Scott Sloan: "Did you hear about this [Columbia University professor of Middle East studies Rashid] Khalidi tape where [Sen. Barack] Obama is toasting a guy who wants to gas and fry Jews? … This Obama guy loves the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization]. Can’t you figure that out?"

Cunningham later added, "Jews for [Sen. John] McCain because Obama wants to gas the Jews, like the PLO wants to gas the Jews, like the Nazis gassed the Jews. You got Obama introducing Arab terrorists, and the L.A. Times won’t release the story."

I’m astonished that these gents aren’t attacking the hard-right and McCain-backing Jerusalem Post for daring to point to a story in the Huffington Post about McCain’s heading the International Republican Institute when it gave grants to an organization co-chaired by Professor Khalidi (who, by the way, is a respected academic – Juan Cole lists his books — and not the evil demon the righties make him to be). But I digress. Read the rest of this entry →