This is “what democracy looks like,” I guess.

Remember when the tea partiers defecated on cop cars?

Remember when tea partiers sent death threats to law enforcement and American citizens?

Remember when tea parties had Marxist front groups place ads looking to astroturf by hiring protesters?

How about when tea partiers vandalized city property?

What about when the tea party silenced a civil rights leader?

Right. The tea party didn’t do any of those things.

Andre Carson did slander the tea party by saying that they called them the “N” word “fifteen times” while walking to the Capitol building. A copious amount of video footage taken from various perspectives debunked Carson’s claim entirely. The incident is a real life demonstration of Frankenstein’s Monster. Sadly, Lewis helped to create the creepy liberal attitude that silenced him at that rally. Tea partiers don’t have to take votes before they decide whether or not they’ll allow black people to speak and they don’t make jazz hands while talking in groupspeak as they discuss it. Lewis would have found more encouragement to speak at a tea party than an Occupy Wall Street protest.

Nancy Pelosi likened the tea party to Nazis.

Last week she said of the OWS protesters and their actions: “bless them.”

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By now we’ve all heard the reprehensible remarks made by Congressional Black Caucus Whip Andre Carson (D-IN) where he told the audience at a CBC Jobs Fair Town Hall in Miami that Tea Party Congressmen would like to lynch black people. Given the opportunity to revise or retract his remarks, Carson instead stood by “the truth” of his comments.

So now it seems pretty fair to say that Andre Carson is a race-baiting bigot who has brought shame upon the U. S. House of Representatives. But any regular reader of Big Government knows that this is not new information. In fact, Andre Carson’s despicable, divisive slander of August 22nd is just the latest of bogus attacks made by the 2nd term congressman against the Tea Party. Andre Carson is the man who told the mother of all race-baiting lies against the Tea Party: That racial slurs were screamed “fifteen times” at he and Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) in Washington DC on the day before the ObamaCare vote in 2010.

The headlines at the time (as well as Topic #1 on cable news and Sunday talk shows) was “Racist Tea Party Yells ‘N-Word’ at Civil Rights Icon John Lewis”. Andre Carson’s name was hardly mentioned in any of the stories. But a Big Government investigation revealed that it was he, in fact, who gathered Capitol Hill reporters around himself on March 20, 2010 and breathlessly told them what had happened “outside of Cannon (Congressional Office Building)” just moments before. (audio courtesy Kerry Pickett, Washington Times)

By now you know the story become part of Democratic Party lore showing up in talking points as recently as just last week as Alan Colmes mangled the “facts” but still was able to perpetuate the lie on Fox News’ “O’Reilly Factor”. You should also know by now that Andrew Breitbart offered a $100, 000 reward for anyone who can produce video proof o the supposed racial hatred. The only videos uncovered were found by the Big Government staff. They show the exact moment Carson described, “down the steps of Cannon”, from four different angles. Not only were there no slurs heard on any of the videos, but the scene is not at all how Carson described it to Capitol Hill reporters.

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Academics have, for centuries, looked far back in time as they argued and speculated about why the Roman Empire fell, but we now have an opportunity to observe in real time the accelerating decay of that imperial gatekeeper of liberal conventional wisdom, the New York Times.

A pair of op-eds from August 27^th illustrate this sad phenomena as its writers invent a new stage in the Kübler-Ross grief scale inserted somewhere between “denial”, “anger” and eventual “acceptance”: “delusion.”

The first op-ed is by congressman and civil rights legend John Lewis, whose work in the Sixties makes it awkward to have to point out that he is entirely full of it, having morphed from an anti-establishment hero into just another establishment hack.  Sadly, he seems totally oblivious to his sad transformation over the last five decades even as he keeps milking his past in order to block any kind of critical look at the nonsense he is peddling in the 21^st Century.

His op-ed is entitled “A Poll Tax by Another Name,” which is a problem because what he is whining about – mostly laws that require voters to prove that they are who they say they are – is neither literally nor figuratively a “poll tax.”

Poll taxes are, well, taxes charged voters for the privilege of voting.  Voter ID laws, in contrast, are requirements that people identify themselves before voting.  Nope, not the same.  Not even close.

“Despite decades of progress, this year’s Republican-backed wave of voting restrictions has demonstrated that the fundamental right to vote is still subject to partisan manipulation. The most common new requirement, that citizens obtain and display unexpired government-issued photo identification before entering the voting booth, was advanced in 35 states and passed by Republican legislatures in Alabama, Minnesota, Missouri and nine other states — despite the fact that as many as 25 percent of African-Americans lack acceptable identification.”

Those GOP bastards, forcing people to prove they are who they say they are before voting in an election!  It’s almost a Robert Byrdian level of racism!

Wait, I should show more respect for this Democrat icon.  After all, Byrd was a kleagle.

Let’s leave aside the dubious notion that a quarter of all black adults lack a photo ID – which would mean, among other things, that a quarter of them can’t drive.  Or cash checks.  Or fly on an airliner.  Or get a job, not that this would be a big issue in the miserable Obama economy.

Let’s also leave aside the even more dubious (not to mention patronizing and utterly obnoxious) idea implied by Lewis that these citizens lack the basic competence to obtain such ID.  It’s interesting that hardcore conservatives have a significantly higher opinion of African-Americans’ ability to function than those liberals who loudly claim their leadership, but it isn’t surprising.  Liberalism is an ideology based upon low expectations.

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John Hawkins of RightWing News recently interviewed Andrew Breitbart about his new book.  It’s a fun interview and a great read!

I always find it fascinating when people who used to be liberal say they turned to the right. That happened with you. Can you tell us about it?

Well, it’s a cliché from the left to the right. And it’s usually a story of opportunism in those few cases where the people move from the right to the left. It’s almost embarrassing to go back into my liberal background because it was about as shallow a belief system as humanly possible. It was go-along to get-along social. It was living in Los Angeles, being young, and single, and flowing with the trendy liberal crowd.

When I started to work in Hollywood at a fairly low level delivering scripts around town, listening to AM talk radio, I at first listened to it as a novelty. But I started to have certain things in my life going on such as living in a rent controlled apartment, having listened to the Clarence Thomas hearings, the OJ Simpson trial — I just started to see trends in my personal experiences that ran so contrary to what the media narratives were. At first I was flummoxed by it and then I just started to listen to certain people on the radio who were more clear thinking than the professors that I had in college.

I remember thinking when I was in college that a lot of these known Chomsky-like, verbose high lefty thinkers made absolutely no sense but I thought that was my problem. So when I started to listen to conservative thinkers and to read conservative thinkers, there was a clarity of thought. It wasn’t muddled. It wasn’t confusing. It started to make sense at an intellectual level and tie into the values that my parents gave me when I was a young kid that I diverted from when I was in high school.

So it was basically a reconnecting with everything that my parents attempted to instill in me in my youth. It has made me sleep a lot better at night, being centered and oriented with human nature as opposed to living in a world of self loathing nihilism, trying to undo human nature, and trying to create a path towards an unrealistic utopia.

Now, you were recently banned from the front page of The Huffington Post….

Oh, the tragedy of my life.

(Laughs) It is, it is. Apparently you made some sort of ad hominem attack on Van Jones and The Huffington Post has a policy against that. It must have been in place for at least two minutes or so before you were banned. Can you talk about that?

Read the entire review at RightWing News.

Check out Andrew’s list of upcoming appearances and other press coverage.

This exchange from PBS featured on Newsbusters regarding illegal immigration and the DREAM Act caught my attention:

[GORDON]PETERSON: Jimmy Tingle said if they all looked like Norwegians, there’d be no problem, Mark.

MARK SHIELDS: I think there, I think there’s a lot of truth in that …

It seems as if many commentators in the media are spellbound by an impulse possessing the power of Jacobim Mugatu… not into dusting the prime minister of a third world country, but rather into annihilating legitimate political discourse in this country.

"You learn racial arts! You call them bigots! Happy! Happy! Happy!"

Is this what it has come to … claiming that Americans who happen to be opposed to our southern border being illegally trampled over like Walmart greeters on Black Friday would approve of illegal Norwegian immigration … because Norwegians are the right race? Of course it has, but I still hate to consider that this sort of accepted intellectual laziness is from some of the same folks who regularly deride people like Bush, Palin etc. as idiots. Could it be some of the same people? If so, had Alanis Morissette used their actions as an example of irony, nobody would have laughed at her.

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Don’t ask me what I think of the NAACP’s desperate, politically timed report, ask Cedra Crenshaw, Damon Dunn, Tim Scott, Ryan Frazier, Allen West, Star Parker, Bill Marcy, Charlotte Bergmann, Robert Broadus, Ryan Frazier, Charles Lollar, Stephen Broden, Michel Faulker, Bill Randall, Patrick David King, Chuck Smith, and Isaac Hayes, all conservative black candidates running for higher office, endorsed and embraced by tea parties around the country. This malicious “report” is crafted and timed as a cynical means to scare the black community to the voting booth, and is dutifully played up by the same media that ignores the aforementioned black conservative candidates because it goes against the “narrative”.

Or ask former chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and liberal icon Mary Frances Berry, who said:

“Tainting the tea party movement with the charge of racism is proving to be an effective strategy for Democrats. There is no evidence that tea party adherents are any more racist than other Republicans, and indeed many other Americans. But getting them to spend their time purging their ranks and having candidates distance themselves should help Democrats win in November. Having one’s opponent rebut charges of racism is far better than discussing joblessness.”

The same media that plays up the NAACP’s desperate smear campaign continues to trot out the provably blatant falsehood that a “mob” of Tea Partiers hurled the N-Word at Congressmen John Lewis, Emanuel Cleaver and Andre Carson the day before the health care vote on the steps of the Cannon House Building.

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Because it really doesn’t fit the narrative. From the National Black Conservatives press conference in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 4:

In the article “Andrew Breitbart’s Video ‘Evidence’ Of Lying Congressmen Is Anything But” published August 6th at Mediaite, author Tommy Christopher makes a number of factual errors and unverifiable claims that ought to be corrected or clarified.  The problematic sentences are identified in block quotes with explanations of the errors beneath each quote:

Earlier this week, conservative media figure Andrew Breitbart seized upon a New York Times story correction as proof that Civil Rights hero John Lewis (D-Ga) and others were “lying” when they claimed that a crowd of protesters had hurled the “n-word” at them as they walked to the Capitol to vote on health care reform.

Breitbart did not accuse John Lewis of lying in his Big Journalism post; in fact, the only reference to Lewis at all comes by way of a quote from the New York Times correction. Breitbart did, however, accuse Rep. Andre Carson of lying: “Which [media outlet] will be the first to admit that Congressman Carson lied about the events of that day?”

…its important to go over the other evidence that the incident did occur, at least as told by the corroborating testimony of three credible eyewitnesses. In a court of law, that’s called evidence.

There is only one corroborating witness, not three.  Rep. John Lewis has never gone on record saying he heard the n-word used at this event.  Rep. Emanuel Cleaver said he heard racial slurs like “a chorus” as he walked a “few yards behind” Rep. Lewis, but video evidence proves Cleaver was not walking to the Capitol with Lewis and Carson when the events in question occurred. (more…)

Tommy Christopher at Mediaite has decided to wade into the “Phantom N-Word” story and do the heavy lifting of the Congressional Black Caucus, Media Matters, MSNBC and all of the networks and publications that spread the false charges of racism emanating from the health care protests in Washington DC on March 20^th. After reading Tommy’s lame attempt I see now why the other apologists for the Congressional Black Caucus have stayed silent for months on this issue.

Let me answer his two main arguments immediately and then provide detailed and sourced evidence to support me answers:

1. There is corroborating evidence from three eyewitnesses who said the racial slurs occurred

WRONG: There is one witness with no corroboration. And that witness is NOT civil-rights hero Rep. John Lewis. (more below)

2. The five videos showing the moment the slurs were supposed to have taken place don’t reveal what each and every person present is saying, therefore, it does not prove the racial slurs didn’t happen.

WRONG: The videos we have provided of the incident unequivocally prove that the scene described by the one witness is a complete fabrication. Furthermore, it is not incumbent on the accused to prove something did not happen, it is incumbent on the accuser to prove that it did.

To back-up his claim that there is corroborating evidence from three respected congressmen, Tommy links to two articles: The original report from McClatchy that started the “N-word” story in the first place and a subsequent piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Cynthia Tucker where she discusses the matter with Rep. John Lewis.

For three eyewitness testimonies to be “corroborating” they need to support one another’s version of the events. Let’s look at each person’s testimony:

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Buried at the bottom of a story published the other day, the New York Times printed a curious little correction:

The Political Times column last Sunday, about a generational divide over racial attitudes, erroneously linked one example of a racially charged statement to the Tea Party movement. While Tea Party supporters have been connected to a number of such statements, there is no evidence that epithets reportedly directed in March at Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, outside the Capitol, came from Tea Party members.

Let’s go over that again:

• The Times is admitting that there is absolutely no evidence that any epithets were shouted at the Congressman by any member of the Tea Party.
• This correction demonstrates we have finally proven our point to the nation’s most eminent and influential liberal media organ: that Rep. Andre Carson lied when he told the AP that members of the Tea Party hurled the “N-word” 15 times during the March 20 health-care rally that took place at the U.S. Capitol.

That’s great, as far as it goes – a thorough vindication of the Tea Party — but it doesn’t go far enough. (more…)

So after this whole Shirley Sherrod thing, I’m thinking, Andrew Breitbart has a point.

Let’s review:

1. The Tea Party was born, causing a frightened media to drum up accusations of racism
2. Later, Congressman John Lewis claims Tea Partiers shouted the “N-word” at him. The press runs with it. Breitbart posts a $100K reward for evidence. None comes.
3. The NAACP creates a race-baiting resolution to smear the Tea Party.
4. Breitbart responds with the Sherrod video – becoming the first conservative to use leftist tactics on the left.
5. It works: the White House and the NAACP look stupid.

Moving on, from the Powerline blog, New York Times reporter Matt Bai writes this of the Tea Party movement on July 17th: (more…)

If you want to see a good example of a reporter/critic who’s grown fat and sassy in his job and has been reduced to phoning it in, take a good look at Tom Shales:

The Pulitzer-Prize winning TV critic was once one of the brightest bylines in the Post’s Style section, but like anyone who’s stayed too long in a job (Shales began at the Post in 1972 and became TV critic five years later), he’s pretty much condemned to an endless rehash of previously expressed opinions and long-held beliefs. The only thing that’s changed is that he — like, apparently, every other writer on the Post — has come out of the journalist’s “impartial” ideological closet and now feels free to opine about all sorts of things.

Case in point, this crack, which comes at the end of his professional obit of Larry King, the Methuselah of talk-show hosts who recently announced he was hanging ‘em up on CNN. After spending the bulk of his column on his assessment of King’s career — arguing the strange theory that King wasn’t loud, boorish or attitudinal enough to compete in the modern era of Confrontation TV, instead of the more reasonable assumption that King had simply run out of gas after 25 years — Shales pulls the following rabbit out of his hat: (more…)

We all know the story by now.  Rep. Andre Carson (D, Ind.) says that he and Rep. John Lewis (D, Ga.) were assaulted with racial slurs by Tea Party protesters as they walked down the step of the Cannon office building and headed to the Capitol on March 20.  McClatchy News reported that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D, Mo.) also told reporters that he heard the ‘N-word’ as he was walking a few yards behind Rep. Lewis.  “It was like a chorus,” Cleaver said.

Only problem is: Cleaver wasn’t there.  He didn’t walk behind Lewis coming down the steps of Cannon on the way to the Capitol.  He walked behind Lewis coming up the steps of Cannon on the way back from the Capitol.

Of course, Cleaver and Carson could claim that racial slurs were screamed both times by the Tea Party protesters.  If that’s the case, then they have contradicted their own narrative from two weeks ago when the AP ran a story with the headline:

Wrong video of health protest spurs N-word feud

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FINAL National Tea Party Federation – CBC – ALL_SIGS v1.0 –

Rep. Andre Carson wants to change the subject.  I don’t blame him.

On April 13, 2010 he told AP reporter Jesse Washington, “I think we need to move toward a dialogue that explores why this kind of divisive and reprehensible language is still making it into our political debate.”

The “divisive and reprehensible language” that Rep. Carson is referring to is his claim that while he left the Cannon office building on March 20 with Rep. John Lewis, they were verbally assaulted by health care protesters hurling the “N-word” at them.  He said the scene was so hostile he “expected rocks to come” when he was coming out of Cannon.

I wanted to see the evidence. I wanted the truth. In the course of our search we have actually uncovered further video evidence that casts serious doubt on Rep.Carson’s claims:

Now this story is much more important than the accusation of fifteen racists among the thousands of protesters that day.  This is now about the accusers.

It’s not just that Congressmen Carson’s accusation of an extraordinary racist verbal assault by the tea party participants on March 20 doesn’t appear to have occurred, it’s that the accusers have now gone into the bunker and, having raised the incendiary subject, are doing everything they can to avoid the discussion.  Why? What’s changed? (more…)

I recently watched the HBO documentary Reporter,  profiling the New York Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Nicholas Kristof, as he reported on the genocide taking place in the Congo.

Notably, the documentary spent considerable time focusing on Kristof’s journalistic standards, rather than only spotlighting the great tragedy taking place.  In fact, much of the video documents Kristof teaching his trade to journalism students.  That part of the film was very revealing.

One highlight of the documentary was when Kristof traveled to a village that had just been ransacked by militants.  Villagers told Kristof that an enormous number of people were murdered.  Their stories were horrific.

However, despite their eyewitness testimony, Kristof was skeptical about what he was told.  In fact, he continued to inquire about who saw the murders.  Was there proof about the number of people killed?  Was there any evidence?  He didn’t believe it was enough to simply report that villager X saw Y happen; he wanted the truth.  Reflecting on that clip, I wonder whether I would have held myself to such a high standard, or would I have simply reported what someone told me? (more…)

Courtesy of Scott Johnson, one of the stalwarts of the indispensible Power Line blog, comes this illuminating correspondence:

My name is Greg Farrell and I would like you to know I have been exchanging emails challenging Washington Post Ombudsman Andrew Alexander and his version of the incidents concerning Rep Lewis and Rep Carson. I was there at the foot of the Cannon Building. Here is the exchange in order. The first is my response to Alexander’s version as set forth in his April 11 Washington Post column.

The following is Mr. Farrell’s email correspondence with Alexander:

Put your money where your pen is.

There follows a classic exchange in which Alexander gets much the worst of it. In fact, he exemplifies just about everything that’s wrong with contemporary establishment journalism: defensiveness, pettifoggery, arrogance, and an utter disinclination to use his faculties of reason instead of his emotions and his sense of “social justice.”

Scoring on the ten-point-must system, I’ve got Farrell well ahead on points. So read the whole thing — savoring every word — and then let’s have your thoughts on Alexander, the Post and the state of the MSM today. Remember to protect yourself at all times, and no hitting below the belt.

Talk about shoddy journalism…

Now— They’re putting phantom white men into the Congressional Black Caucus parade through the tea party protesters!

This hit piece by AP’s national race-relations reporter, Jesse Washington, is a disgrace.

“Wrong video of health protest spurs N-word feud”

This was one of the worst pieces of crap journalism we’ve seen coming from the democratic-media complex in a long, long, long time…

Wrong video of health protest spurs N-word feud

Three Democratic congressmen — all black — say they heard racial slurs as they walked through thousands of angry protesters outside the U.S. Capitol. A white lawmaker says he heard the epithets too. Conservative activists say the lawmakers are lying.

White lawmaker? Huh? These were members of the Black Caucus who paraded to the capitol. There were no white lawmakers with them. The media is now just making up anything to slander the tea party protesters. (more…)

They claimed to have “thrown the rightwing bloggosphere [sic] into a tizzy” with their dog-and-pony show announcement of “infiltrating the tea parties” on April 15th. Problem: pretending that you’re Harriet the Spy and infiltrating tea parties only works if you’re covert about it, otherwise, you’re just showing up.

They state:

WHO WE ARE, Crash The Tea Party style, is a lesson in Marxism 101: “A nationwide network of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents who are sick and tired of that loose affiliation of racists, homophobes, and morons; who constitute the fake grass-roots movement which calls itself “The Tea Party.”

Fake grassroots? Racists? A lesson in Marxism 101? It’s elementary enough that I’m further intrigued.

Their Twitter stream is rife with the sharp, lip-smacking sounds of liberal plebeians sucking up to government media elites:

@KeithOlbermann I love your work! Hope you like mine too: www.crashtheteaparty.org
about 8 hours ago via web

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In this morning’s Washington Post, ombudsman Andrew Alexander made the argument that “Allegations of spitting and slurs at Capitol protest merit more reporting.” This is zombie-mediaese for “we have to keep discrediting critics of this administration at all costs!”

An ombudsman is described as “a person who acts as a trusted intermediary between an organization and some internal or external constituency while representing the broad scope of constituent interests.” But here we see that the only interest being put forth is one that serves the Democrat establishment.

Alexander made the embarrassing claim that:

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II, a black Democrat from Missouri, said a protester spit on him. Rep. Barney Frank, the openly gay Democrat from Massachusetts, was heckled with anti-gay slurs. Two black Democrats, Reps. André Carson of Indiana and John Lewis of Georgia, said protesters subjected them to racial epithets. The episodes were recounted for days in Post stories and columns. Much blame was directed at Tea Party activists.

It’s embarrassing for the Post because there were a plethora of camera crews videotaping the alleged incident and not one tape has come forth validating this claim. In fact, Andrew Breitbart has offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who has a video showing that the “N-word” was used. There have been no takers. Do you really think the media wouldn’t be showing such a tape 24/7 if it actually existed? (more…)