Amazing, how over the span of eight-plus years, high-powered conservatives with a national reach are touting themselves as such helpless little infants, so untutored in the ways of society, that they can claim they’re unfamiliar with something that’s present in every sports bar and many fast-food places, and has been for over two freaking decades: “closed” captioning on TVs.

I am not kidding. Sarah Janacek and Kellyanne Fitzpatrick did it in late 2002, and Jim Hoft’s doing in early 2011:

It appears that Gateway Pundit saw a picture of the Tucson rally, in which the Jumbotron was featured. He then mistook the closed captioning as “instructions” for the audience to applaud.

That’s right, folks: A bit of technology that every sports bar, many regular bars, and many casual-dining restaurants have possessed for nearly three decades is somehow so unfamiliar to these self-styled wise ones that they can allegedly mistake it for “applause signs”.

If this sounds awfully familiar to some of you, it should: It’s the same bogus story that was bruited about after the Wellstone memorial:

Kellyanne (Fitzpatrick) Conway went on TV the day after the memorial and told a nationwide audience that the Jumbotron instructed the crowd “when to cheer and when to jeer.” (The speeches were close-captioned and would indicate when there was LAUGHTER and APPLAUSE.)

Even though the words on the closed captioning followed the speaker’s words by five or so seconds and were often misspelled, Sarah Janecek, a Minnesota Republican lobbyist, said the speeches on the Jumbotron were proof that the speeches had been written and vetted by the cynically politically motivated Democrat who ran the event. Actually, the people who spoke at the Wellstone memorial were all chosen by the families of those who died. No one’s speech was vetted. The Wellstone people had all spent the previous five days going to funerals. It never occurred to them to vet the speeches. The irony is that because they weren’t thinking politically, they opened themselves to being accused of staging a political event.

Janacek’s tried to deny all of this, but I — and several other persons who were at the event and/or heard Janacek’s dishonest commentary on it on Minnesota Public Radio the morning afterwards — know better. Here’s Techno, a regular Balloon Juice commenter and personal friend of Paul Wellstone:

@Doctor Gonzo:
It is true what you say about this stupid slander about closed captioning being used after the Wellstone funeral. In fact, it was first said by that execrable Republican hack Sarah Janecek on MPR the day after the funeral.

The reason I remember this so clearly is that I was driving my car and got so upset at this lie that I had a heart attack and wound up in the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. I have not knowingly conversed with a Republican since that day except to insult them. I am STILL angry about that cynical lie.

And here’s Velveteen Ocelot commenting at Democratic Underground:

She was all frothing at the mouth about the memorial right afterwards, lying out her ass on local Hate Radio about how the organizers were using closed captioning to prompt the crowd, and going on about how horrible and partisan and scripted it was. Maybe she realizes how full of crap she was and feels bad about it now; or maybe — more likely, I think — she just wants to distance herself from the truly repellent Katherine Kersten, who really went off the deep end in that obnoxious column. I was doing some volunteer work at one of the DFL offices just before that election, trying to get out the vote for Mondale, and Al Franken showed up and got after Janacek on the phone to call her on her bullshit. I know what she said then, and it was 180 degrees from what she’s saying now.

A caution to those conservatives who, like Jim Hoft, are tempted to revive and repurpose the Wellstone event “applause signs” smear, or any other of the smears originated and disseminated by Republicans about that event: The lying by Republicans about the Wellstone event in Williams Arena was so egregious and so infuriating that it did two (2) things: it led to the rise of the reality-based, progressive side of the blogosphere, and it caused Al Franken to decide on a career in electoral politics. Do you all really want to risk anything like that happening again?

UPDATE: TBogg notes that at least one other right-wing blogger is jumping into the fray on Hoft’s side — even as his own commenters try vainly to correct him. And when a person who actually works as a closed-captioner tried to explain to Hoft and his fan base how closed-captioning works, one of them looked him up online, found out he was gay, and decided that meant his word couldn’t be trusted. Oy gewalt.

photo: longhorndave via Flickr

If “both sides do it”, as the righties and their media defenders like to say, why is it that both sides fear the far-right teabaggers more than anything else?

This morning’s latest example, via DKos (I’m sure there will be more before lunchtime):

In an e-mail sent a few hours after Saturday’s massacre in Tucson that killed six and injured 14, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, Miller told state Republican Party Chairman Randy Pullen he was quitting: “Today my wife of 20 yrs ask (sic) me do I think that my PCs (Precinct Committee members) will shoot at our home? So with this being said I am stepping down from LD20GOP Chairman…I will make a full statement on Monday.”

[...]

The newly-elected Dist. 20 Republican secretary, Sophia Johnson of Ahwatukee, first vice chairman Roger Dickinson of Tempe and Jeff Kolb, the former district spokesman from Ahwatukee, also quit. “This singular focus on ‘getting’ Anthony (Miller) was one of the main reasons I chose to resign,” Kolb said in an e-mail to another party activist. Kolb confirmed the contents of the e-mail to the Republic.

When was the last time a Democrat (or a Republican) resigned any sort of position because he or she feared being shot at by folks on their left wing? Answer: Never.

Oh, and when Tweeting stuff like this, the hashtag is #BothSidesDONT

On Monday, Jane said that Sarah Palin’s career may be over now because of her inflammatory rhetoric’s being linked to Jared Loughner’s assassination attempt on Gabrielle Giffords — an attempt that severely injured her and left six others dead. A recent German radio interview with Stefan Prystawik, the German press liaison for John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, would likely be yet another nail in Palin’s political coffin, should it be translated into English for mass-media consumption.

That’s what I’m about to attempt, with my high-school German and a few online translation aids. (If any readers speak or understand German, feel free to pick over this in the comments.)

Right from the get-go, the interview’s title lets you know the score: “Es ist also sicherlich so, dass Frau Palin da Geister gerufen hat”. I interpret that to mean: “It’s also certain that Mrs. Palin has summoned the demons”, or evil spirits. The subhead translates as: “While publicist Stefan M. Prystawik believes the assassination attempt on Jewish US Politician Gabrielle Giffords was an isolated event, he sees its root cause in the nation’s right-wing political trends – and American political icon Sarah Palin.”

Prystawik’s interviewer, Friedbert Meurer, starts by asking him: “Can one dismiss this act that happened in Tucson as that of a deranged man, or was it a political assassination attempt?” Prystawik’s response: “Well no, not totally. It’s already apparent that the main cause lies with the extremism and psychic (he probably meant “psychological”) instability of the perpetrator, but on the other hand it is certainly already known that the environment for such actions was first — I will not say that the environment made it possible, but at minimum it certainly diverts the thought currents of extremists towards such deeds.” Upon prodding by Meurer, Prystawik mentions “der rechte Rand” — the right edge, fringe, or wing — as being behind this environment, or “Umfeld”. . . . Read the rest of this entry →

Jon Kyl

There’s an old Bill Cosby routine, called “Shop”, on the album Why Is There Air? that is quite apposite to the events of the past two days. In it, Cosby describes how his junior-high-school shop teacher tricked the guilty party into tacitly confessing to having put a bullet in the shop class furnace — and without directly accusing the kid or even so much as saying his name. With the right-wing attacks on Pima County, Arizona Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, we’re seeing something rather similar play out.

Just as Cosby’s shop teacher didn’t directly accuse any of his students of being the one who put the bullet in the furnace, Sheriff Dupnik, without naming persons or ideologies directly, blamed the political climate in Arizona for making possible the shooting of Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and several others. And, just as the kid who put the bullet in the furnace inadvertently revealed himself — “I didn’t put the bullet in the furnace, and stop talking about my mother!” — the attacks by conservatives on Sheriff Dupnik, who never once said the words “conservative”, “Republican”, “Tea Party”, or “right-wing” when discussing the creation and creators of the climate of bigotry and prejudice, stand as a tacit admission that they know full well they are responsible for having created it.

First off, we have the nuttier of Arizona’s two nutty far-right senators, Jon Kyl, who said this on CBS’ Face the Nation Sunday morning:

First, I didn’t really think that that had any part in a law enforcement briefing last night. It was speculation. I don’t think we should rush to speculate. I thought that the report that we just saw from Tucson seems to have it about right: We really don’t know what motivated this young person except to know he was very mentally unstable as was pointed out in the piece.

It’s probably giving him too much credit to ascribe a coherent political philosophy to him. We just have to acknowledge that there are mentally unstable people in this country. Who knows what motivates them to do what they do? Then they commit terrible crimes like this. I would just note Gabrielle Giffords, a fine representative from Tucson, I think would be the first to say don’t rush to judgment here.

Um, except the sheriff didn’t do any of what you claim he did, Senator. Unless you’re going on the record as approving of Arizona’s becoming the capital and mecca for prejudice and bigotry?  . . . Read the rest of this entry →

Courtesy of Talking Points Memo.

(Crossposted from Renaissance Post.)

Yesterday afternoon, at a press conference to discuss the Tucson, Arizona shooting of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and over a dozen others — a political hit that has so far resulted in six deaths, a nine-year-old girl’s among them — Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik was quite clear on who he thought was to blame in egging on a mentally imbalanced suspect with ties to the right-wing racist hate group American Renaissance. From FDL’s Jane Hamsher’s liveblogging of Sheriff Dupnik’s news conference:

Says Giffords was the target, and that there were 2 incidents occurred in a “very vitriolic” campaign. Someone in an “angry audience” dropped a weapon out of their pants. Another incident where windows were broken out of her office. At her office at Swan and Pima right now, suspicious package being investigated.

The 22 year old suspect does have a criminal past. Says this is how “unbalanced people respond to vitriol coming out about ripping down the government. Arizona has become the capital. We have become the mecca of prejudice and bigotry.” Believes people who are unbalanced especially, like the suspect, are extremely susceptible to vitriol.

Interestingly enough, there has been an effort by the media organs that have served as enablers of the peddlers of vitriol to minimize, if not outright conceal, their roles in spreading it. One method is to simply pretend that Sheriff Dupnik — a man who, as an Arizona law enforcement officer, has been a first-hand witness to the effects of this media-promoted vitriol — didn’t say what he said. This method is the one used by Carl Hulse and Kate Zernike of the New York Times, who in this story on the shootings scrubs out Sheriff Dupnik’s comments on media-enabled vitriol helping to make Arizona the capital and Mecca of prejudice and bigotry as assiduously as various right-wingers such as Sarah Palin and Giffords’ Republican opponent Jesse Kelly have been scrubbing their websites of crosshairs and other implied threats directed at Representative Giffords. Meanwhile, Tennessee Republican Senator Lamar Alexander is ordering the press to stop talking about Palin and the Stalinesque “Commissar Vanishes” removal of this inflammatory material from right-wing websites; knowing how the corporate media usually leaps to fulfill the requests of their GOP allies, I suspect this will happen very shortly.

. . . Read the rest of this entry →