A recent Livescience.com article appearing in Yahoo! News highlighted a study by psychologist Gordon Hodson of Brock University in Ontario in which a nexus is supposedly found between being unintelligent and conservative and being racist. I presume then that, as conservatives and morons tend to be more racist, the dots between them are connected? The story not only provided an overview of the study but also links to other similar studies which appear to back up Hodson’s conclusions. Well then, there it is. We always knew that liberals are smarter and more tolerant. We just needed a study to prove it.
Gordon Hodson
At best, psychology is an inexact science, as the human brain is the most complex system in the known universe, and to try to understand what makes it tick is daunting if not impossible. But layer on top of that the possibility that the researchers themselves may harbor a bias that leads them to subconsciously steer their studies towards reaching pre-determined conclusions, and you have the makings of a sham science project … with predictable results.
Hodson’s complete study is not available for free online, so I readily admit I only know what has been made public. Apparently the researchers offered a list of questions which would measure participants’ left or right leanings based upon the answers. For example, one measure in defining “conservative” is gauging one’s level of agreement with the statement “schools should teach children to obey authority.” Then they overlaid these results with responses to questions with overtly racial overtones such as “I wouldn’t mind working with people of other races.” I guess if you answer “yes” to authority and “no” to working with others not like you, you are a conservative racist. Conversely, if you replied “fight the power, maaan” and “I want my office to look like a rainbow, my brother,” then you are a tolerant and cognitively well-adjusted liberal. Oh, if only the world were so simple. (more…)
The Occupy losers are delighted; they finally got the footage they think will shift the focus off the almost unbelievable legacy of Occupier violence, sexual assaults and general degeneracy that has been so carefully documented by Big Government. They hope that the visual of the UC Davis police force using pepper spray to stop these mutants from disrupting the campus will re-mobilize the fainthearted liberals who have grown fed up with the Occupiers’ antics. We conservatives need to ensure that doesn’t happen.
And we can do it the same way that we disrupted their narrative during the first phase of the occupation – by providing the context and telling the truths that the Occupiers used to be able to count on the liberal mainstream media to conceal.
The Occupy movement is in a public relations freefall, and the outlines of the next phase in what is a classic Alinskyite propaganda operation are becoming clear. The problem for the Occupiers is that people are now seeing them for what they are, a movement composed entirely of weirdos, losers and mutations who worship at an altar of greed, laziness and bad hygiene – all served up with an utter lack of irony and self-awareness that drives away even those who might support aspects of the Occupiers’ inchoate ideology.
I knew the Occupiers had a problem when I partied in San Francisco last week with several very liberal friends – all of whom mocked the nearby Occupiers for being stupid, lazy and stinky as thoroughly as I did, and with the kind of searing contempt for these deadbeats that made me proud to be an American. My pals will never be tea partiers, but that’s not the point.
The point is that the puppeteers behind the scam now see that they have lost control of the narrative, and they are attempting to morph the Occupy movement in order to recapture it. The liberal media frenzy focusing on last week’s necessary actions by the police is the result.
The UC Davis pepper spray incident wasn’t an accident. The Occupiers wanted it. They needed it. They have been trying to make it happen. And they are counting on the notion that the aesthetic unpleasantness of video clips showing the reality of the use of force by the police – force made necessary solely by the actions of the Occupiers themselves – will shift the narrative from the Occupiers’ myriad personal and ideological failings and onto them as victims of state oppression.
Interestingly, the mainstream media is going into overdrive to depict the Occupiers as victims of a repressive police state when our head of state is the Occupiers’ Number One Fan. But again, neither irony nor self-awareness were ever liberal strong suits.
Remember that this community-organized movement is critical to the Left’s election strategy for next year; it mobilizes the radical base while providing a perfect target to triangulate against down the road. But now that plan is falling apart. The pepper spray imbroglio is part of a second phase designed to regain the initiative it has lost as a result of the very exposure it cultivated in the first place.
There’s just one problem for the Occupier’s puppet masters – this isn’t the same world in which Saul Alinsky operated, and that’s why this band of clowns is going to fail.
The Alinksyite strategy behind the Occupy movement operates on the premise that the liberal mainstream media will always present the movement in the most favorable light and will willingly airbrush out the… unpleasantness that always occurs whenever bands of leftists gather together.
This is an information operation, a propaganda campaign that depends on gaining legitimacy and sympathy from the good-hearted, soft-hearted mass of Middle America. The Occupiers cannot afford to be seen as they really are, a motley collection of tools ranging from greedy college students demanding normal people subsidize their Third World Womyns’ Studies graduate degrees, to drug-addled drummers living off the largesse of Uncle Sucker, to Jew-hating Palestinian suck-ups yearning for Holocaust Part II, to union-trained “up-twinkling” professional protesters, to straight-up Marxists looking to enslave the American people in the service of their dark collectivist god.
They need to be seen as “peaceful,” as “concerned,” as something approaching normal. The mainstream media is only too eager to comply, bypassing the masses of creepy mutations that make up the bulk of the Occupiers to find and interview on camera the rare Occupier who is unpierced, semi-coherent and looks like someone who might actually get a job some day. In this way, the mainstream media can help its left-wing allies promote the fiction that this is some sort of relatable, organic movement reflecting the real feelings of the majority of Americans.
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 27th 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 21st 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.
Throughout his tenure, there have been several facets in which President Obama has been demonstrably weak on leadership, with the debt debate coming to the forefront in recent months. Now however, lost in that news cycle has been another failure of leadership for the President – his own request to tone down violent rhetoric in this country. For it was mere months ago that Obama stood in front of a crowd in Tucson that had anxiously sought leadership amidst the chaos of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting; a teachable moment that had The Guardiangushing about how the President had delivered “calm amid the toxic rhetoric.”
That moment of calm has long since dissipated. Where once the President had denounced discourse that places “the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do,” we hear Republicans blamed for holding the American people hostage to their economic policies. Where once we were urged to talk “with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds,” we now hear tea party members being denounced as terrorists.
Make no mistake, this ratcheting up of terrorism and hostage-taking discourse directly coincides with recent events in Norway. The instant that Oslo terrorist, Anders Behring Breivik, was labeled as a ‘right-wing Christian,’ liberals finally had their moment to seize upon – not just a chance to mislabel conservatives as extreme ideologues but a chance to label them as violent ideologues. This message has been a coordinated and vicious attack amongst the media, the Democrats, and most assuredly, the President.
Prior to the Norwegian massacre, references to the tea party as extreme were prevalent, but making the leap in logic to terrorism had been scant. After the Norwegian massacre however, liberals defining the tea party as hostage-taking terrorists have become far more frequent. In the last few days it has become practically commonplace.
This past Friday Politico ran an op-ed titled, “The Tea Party’s Terrorist Tactics,” which featured an illustration of an individual with a dollar sign-shaped bomb strapped to their chest, and argued that the party had progressed from hostage-taking to “the intentional infliction of harm on innocent Americans to achieve a political objective – terrorism.”
Joe Klein penned a piece for Time in which he accused Republicans of being beholden to ‘tea party robots,’ and worse, that their perceived unwillingness to compromise is something that would have made Osama bin Laden proud. The exact quote being that were he alive, bin Laden “could not have come up with a more clever strategy for strangling our nation.”
Noted ‘conservanerd‘ David Brooks has abandoned all pretense of conservatism in his latest New York Times column titled “The Mother of All No-Brainers.” It’s pretty clear that he believes that his readers are the brainless ones – rarely have so many shaky premises, false assertions and heapin’ helpings of pure nonsense been gathered into one NYT opinion column. That’s saying something.
Brooks is Obama and Axelrod’s favorite pseudo-conservative for a reason: his creepily slavish devotion to the idea that we mere drones need to be guided, led and – sadly yes, controlled – by a coterie of Ivy League-indoctrinated betters who will lead us out of the darkness of our sad little lives. These wise leaders may be identified by the crease in their slacks – Obama’s sharp press famously demonstrated to Brooks that The One would be The One. It’s that kind of profound insight that has made David Brooks the most popular conservative pundit among those who hate and despise everything conservatives stand for.
Let’s take a quick look at the cheesy rhetoric and flabby thinking that this servant of the failed status quo put out on the Fourth of July. It’s a wonderful illustration of how liberals argue – and provides a lesson in countering the nonsense.
The Republicans have changed American politics since they took control of the House of Representatives. They have put spending restraint and debt reduction at the top of the national agenda … Republican leaders have also proved to be effective negotiators.
First, he sucks up to the conservatives. This is to try and make us think he is one of us, that he speaks as a friend instead of the house servant of his lefty overlords. Feel your defenses crumbling? Then:
[The Democrats] have agreed not to raise tax rates.
Wait, what? Since when have the Democrats agreed not to raise tax rates? Isn’t the President still talking about raising the rates next year, or is that one of those inconvenient truths?
[The Democrats] have agreed to a roughly 3-to-1 rate of spending cuts to revenue increases, an astonishing concession.
Hold on … weren’t they agreeing not to raise rates just a sentence ago? Or are these “revenue increases” – don’t you love euphemisms? – all going to come from wiping out the scourge of corporate jets? Whatever.
And wait a second – exactly who has agreed to this 3-to-1 ratio? It best not be someone on the GOP side unless she or she wants a well-funded primary opponent next year.
Watch out, because these harmless “revenue increases” are “to close loopholes and eliminate tax expenditures.” The “tax expenditures” language is priceless – as if the government “spends” money by not taking it. And the “loopholes” are the same kind of deductions that every business takes – deductions merely being a recognition of costs since what is taxed is profits. David, if you want to get on board with a low corporate tax rate and wipe out most all deductions, we conservatives might be on board. But you don’t. You want to raise rates without raising marginal rates; the sneaky way to do that is make more income taxable by eliminating deductions. And you think your readers are too stupid to see that.
Jon Huntsman’s presidential announcment was met with resounding approval from those who wish to see four more years of the Obama Administration. Among the rest of America, the reaction ranged from ennui to observations like “It’s good to see the Cryptkeeper getting work again.” Regardless, Huntsman’s candidacy fuels some of the most intense liberal fantasies outside of Anthony Wiener’s hard drive.
For the liberals and the MSM – as if the two were different – Huntsman represents the ultimate in a win-win GOP candidate. They win because head-to-head against Obama, Huntsman would get pummeled like a handicapped Tea Partier at a SEIU anti-violence rally. And, in the off-chance some unlikely event takes place that allows Huntsman to beat Obama – like a surprise unicorn invasion or a sudden onset of accurate and complete reporting by the MSM – the GOP still loses. The only thing worse than Obama implementing neo-socialist economic policies, spending like an alcoholic lottery winner, providing amnesty to every illegal north of the Rio Grande and buying into the global warming scam is having a nominal Republican do those things.
The very worst case scenario for the MSM is that ex-Utah governor Huntsman still provides it with a ready, willing and able yardstick of sober rectitude and utter supine submission by which to measure – and find wanting – the Republican candidates with the stones to actually fight for conservative principles. His schoolmarm presidential announcement was really just a lecture directed at the American people – in particular, the ones upset about the destruction of our traditions and our future – instructing them not to get uppity, to be “respectful” to those who disrespect them, and to accept that we are morally obligated to ignore the evidence before our eyes that our opponents intend to fundamentally alter our country for the worst. Pretty presumptuous for a guy who Don Quixote would assess as having no chance in hell.
To Huntsman and his squishy ilk, we’re the problem. Our role is to come out and vote for the pseudo-conservatives, then to sit down, shut up and take what we are spoonfed by our D.C. betters. And the MSM rewards this attitude by bestowing upon these fifth columnists the proverbial “strange new respect” that distinguishes a Republican who has accepted leftist dhimmitude.
On that note, has anyone seen a negative story about Boehner since he started golfing with the One and flailing helplessly before the liberal onslaught? The countdown has begun to a WaPo headline reading “Speaker Boehner Soberly Tries To Balances Duty To America Versus Unreasonable Demands of Hate-Filled GOP Right-Wing Fringe Lunatics.”
Huntsman simply represents the latest in the sorry line of domesticated Republican pushovers embraced by the MSM as long as they acquiesce to certain failure. On the journalism side we have conservanerds David Brooks and David Frum. On the political side, you had Bob Bennett and you have Orrin Hatch – what the hell is it with Utah anyway? Hatch has reinvented himself as Tea Partier and is tapdancing like Gregory Hines on meth to escape accusations of accommodationism that could put him out of his job and on the whining-about-how-the-GOP-left-me express with his pal Bobby.
John McCain found out just how much the love and respect of the MSM is worth during his run – while the vice-presidency may be worth a bucket of warm spit, MSM favor for a Republican is worth that less the bucket. The second he secured the nomination it was open season, and the effort redoubled when he dare blow minds with his one move that was both truly maverick and truly not idiotic – picking Sarah Palin.
So it’s not fair to compare Jon to John – Huntsman doesn’t have it in him to pick a true conservative veep nominee and he doesn’t have the sterling war record that, regardless of our disagreements with his policies and maverick antics, has earned McCain the sincere respect and thanks of conservatives (Hugh Hewitt calls him“a great American, a lousy senator and a terrible Republican”).
On the plus side, there’s no indication that Huntsman has an obnoxious daughter who is as publicly chatty as she is publicly embarrassing.
Huntsman’s role is not to win the nomination – he’s the only person on earth who actually believes he can do that and it’s even doubtful he’s that dumb. Huntsman’s role is to be the boring, ineffective moderate that the MSM can use to unfavorably compare to the real conservatives. Every time he is crushed by GOP primary voters it will be cited as undisputable evidence that the Republican party has veered off into a netherworld of primordial rightwingery that no sane person could possibly want any part of. His eventual defeat will be the final piece of evidence convicting the GOP of crimes against the mainstream. Can you trust a party so unwise as to reject Jon Huntsman? Mark this – I’ve got $5 that says that, stung by his forthcoming rejection, we will see Jon Huntsman sadly inform the MSM that he must reluctantly support President Obama because whoever gets the GOP nomination is “just too extreme” during a time when “we need to be united, not divided.” Of course, by then inflation will make that $5 worth $2.
The promotion of Huntsman is like the condescending whisper of a sanctimonious unionized schoolteacher telling you to “use your inside voice.” But the last thing the GOP needs now is the voice of the party to be muted, quiet and inoffensive. Which is exactly why the MSM wants so very badly for Jon Huntsman to be that voice.
In the end there is no question about Huntsman’s natural constituency among Republicans. It’s the guys who feel that we, as the GOP, are honor-bound to lose at all costs. And the MSM is going to aid and abet them right up until the moment that Huntsman actually – through a miracle of such magnitude it would convince Christopher Hitchens to leap into a confessional and beg forgiveness from the Almighty – appears to be a threat to a second Obama term.
I’ve worked in enough TV newsrooms and been in enough TV newsrooms to know what they like. Read a prompter, do a good live shot, make no waves, and fit the lib politics, and you will be loved and will climb quickly. It makes things so much easier if you fit the politics that big government is altruistic and big business is bad.
Susan Roesgen fits the template and thus, she gets a soft landing from CNN. Roesgen offended a large portion of Americans with her inaccurate comments disparaging Tea Party activists, thus she got fired from CNN, but not to worry, the ABC affiliate in New Orleans was there to grab her up, leftist politics and all.
There was a lot of discussion of this around the blogosphere as to whether or not ABC would air a video that, if Eric Fuller and Trent Humphries’ positions were reversed and a tea partier threatened someone who is obviously not a tea partier, would get mega-play on the airwaves. Some wondered aloud if they should rally others to pressure ABC to show what happened in its entirety, to let the truth play out, but it was for naught: ABC did air the clip and made it available online as well.
Many are giving Fuller a pass by saying that he’s “stressed.”
Fuller’s actions could be a response to the trauma he suffered a week ago, said Dr. Laura Nelson, deputy director for the behavioral health sciences division at the Arizona Department of Health.
“Grief after what happened here in Tucson last week is a completely normal reaction, and … anger is a very common symptom of grief,” said Nelson …
“Vitriol” incited Saturday’s horrific shootings in Arizona. Or so we are told by Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik and Dick Durbin. Sheriff Dupnik revealed his newly acquired forensic psychology expertise, declaring Arizona the “Mecca for prejudice and bigotry” and echoing Dick Durbin’s plea to tone down political vitriol because mentally imbalanced people “are especially susceptible to vitriol.”
To be clear, I am not specifically blaming Jerry Brown, Joy Behar, David Letterman, the Gawker, or Congresswoman Sontany for the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Giffords. Certainly, though, no one can disregard their deliberate and vicious smears against female politicians solely based on their gender and their political viewpoint.
Frankly, finding a convenient scapegoat (other than the obvious – that the shooter is a violent nutjob) has proven difficult given the tragic array of victims – a female Jewish Democrat Congresswoman, a conservative Bush appointed Federal Judge, a young Catholic girl, etc. Personally, I have no answer or explanation for the horror other than a man motivated by evil. Seems vitriol is an equal opportunity assassin.
Vitriol these days seems to be a favored tool of the Left these days, especially when it is directed at women, specifically conservative Republican women. As Michele Malkin describes:
Women who put an “R” by their name have abandoned their ovaries and betrayed their gender. As Republican officeholders and conservative public figures who are women have grown in number and visibility, the progression of Conservative Female Abuse has worsened. The astonishing vitriol and virulent hatred directed at GOP Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is the most severe manifestation to date.
I studied dance for about 15 years, various disciplines, with classical ballet as my primary. Growing up I had lessons six days a week, planned to study ballet before journalism, and as a kid I even competed, once vomiting backstage in a trash can like a champ. I saw a lot in those days of privileged white suburban dance competitions. I saw stage moms who purchased false eyelashes for their girls at Sally’s Beauty Supply and linger backstage, stressing over routines more than their kids. I saw moms freak out if little Janie Smith scored higher in her jazz routine than their daughter and storm out of the backstage area leaving girls in their scary tan-flesh tights with severe ponytails and mothers holding Aqua Net cans all looking on in confusion.
Even though I’ve not competed for thirteen years, I had a flashback to those hair-sprayed school days the other night when I heard that Bristol Palin received death threats because she made it to the finals on “Dancing with the Stars.”
An FBI investigation was launched when a mystery white powder was found by studio employees in Bristol Palin’s fan mail last night.
Fearing the powder could be hazardous, experts were called in by Dancing With The Stars bosses to analyse it.
But it turned out to be nothing more dangerous than talcum powder.
The alert was sparked days after Bristol shocked many by winning a place in the semi-final of the dancing show.
[...]
‘The L.A.P.D., L.A. City and FBI Hazardous Materials officials responded to a report of a threatening letter containing white powder received at CBS Studios in Los Angeles.’
Police and fire engines rushed to CBS studios where the show is filmed and the area was evacuated, before it was established it was harmless.
What happened to all the talk from the left about a “return to sanity?”
Keith Olbermann has issues. And they have driven a him from being a sensible upstart in 1989, whom Pat Sajak described as “wry and amusing,” to the 21st Century commentator better known as a “bitter-sounding, hate-mongering name-caller.” Thus the Olbermann who was once a funny sports analyst for ESPN is now better known for naming, then deriding, the “Worst Person in the World” on his show “Countdown” on MSNBC. (Although Olbermann has ended the “Worst Person” segment for now, it’s interesting to note that in the past, worst persons have always tended to be conservatives like Dick Cheney and Sean Hannity, rather than the terrorists who want to kill Cheney, Hannity, and any other infidel they can get their hands on.)
In short, it appears that the same bitterness that has overtaken and ruined Cher, and so many others in Hollywood, has overtaken and ruined Olbermann as well. And this seems to be something Sajak picked up on (and something Sajak bemoans).
I’ve always believed that this bitterness, now present as a quasi-rage in Olbermann, is itself an explanation of why he has had trouble remaining gainfully employed. He had to step away from his ESPN gig in 1997, was canned by FOX Sports in 2001, and most recently told to hit the trail by NBC’s Sunday Night Football (SNF). (Olbermann found it impossible to keep sports and politics separate during his stint at SNF: jumping, as he would, from comments about a play on 3rd and long to comments directed at Sarah Palin.)
Ms Maddow’s examples of this happening on FNC? A grand total of: one. John Kasich, appearing on Hannity, gave out his website URL and encouraged donations. It’s the only example Maddow gave because it’s the one Media Matters cited. That’s called ‘journalism’.
“Unlike you, I am not a progressive. I am not a liberal who’s so afraid of the word that I had to change my name to progressive. Liberals amuse me. I am a Socialist. I live to the extreme left - the extreme left – of you mere liberals.”
You have to give the guy credit for standing behind his views, and doing so openly. You have to respect him for that, at least.
The right finally had an action hero: young, dynamic, serious about policy, with a biography ready-made for inspiration.
“He’s our Cuban Barack Obama,” said Alex Lacayo, 36, a campaign volunteer at the Rubio victory party on Tuesday night who could not stop giving hugs to strangers. “He gives us hope.”
Facepalm.
I realize that the quote came from a conservative which, but the media seems desperate to find the conservative Barack Obama so they can formulate a plan to tear him down just as the President was rocked by an election cause by his own willful misfortune.
The media doesn’t understand conservatives at all.
The American tradition allows for all voices and viewpoints to be heard in our nation’s political discourse. Yet, when, in that spirit, ABC extended an invitation to Andrew Breitbart and Dana Loesch to participate in their election night coverage, ABC was promptly attacked by the usual suspects on the Left.
After receiving unwarranted and misdirected attacks, ABC News’ Senior White House Correspondent, Jake Tapper, had to defend himself, even from NYU journalism instructor, Jay Rosen.
@jayrosen_nyu not at all what I said. I gave them abc news twitter handle and contact info. I said don’t get mad at me about decision.
Tapper referred to the large number of complaints he received in this Tweet.
What if half the people blaming me for an abc news management decision were out rallying voters to the polls? Just a thought.
During the 8/28 Restoring Honor rally Al Sharpton marched to the National Mall where he and a couple thousand people (some I saw firsthand carrying signs featuring Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck with Hitler staches and bearing words like “TEABAGGERS”) came up over a hundred thousand or so short of matching the conservative turnout.
The mainstream media however did all it could to flame the adversarial attitude portrayed by Mr. Sharpton and inflate the appeal of the cantakerous counter rally.
When someone calls my office and wants to sue somebody for libel or slander, assuming they manage to get through my phalanx of people devoted to keeping me insulated from time burglars, the first thing I say to them is, “You probably have no case.” I don’t wait to hear the facts. I don’t need to know their evidence. I know that statistically speaking, it just is not going to have merit. Yet threatening defamation suits is a growing tactic in the war on the new media.
Defamationcases generally fail. And by “generally,” I mean almost all of them. I’ve never lost a libel case I’ve defended. Why are defamation cases so bad? Defamation is a unique tort because it involves publishing false and unprivileged negative information about someone. With the First Amendment’s free speech guarantees – you know, the ones that frustrate and irritate the left to no end when those of us on the right avail ourselves of them – defamation takes on whole new dimension you do not find in regular torts like negligence. There’s a tension between the right to speak and the right not to be lied about, and the courts generally err on the side of free speech. This is especially true in the context of political debates. (more…)
On my Twitter account, I follow a few hundred mainstream media-types (keep the enemy closer, right?), and unless I've missed it (and I hope I have), not a single one has spoken out in defense of Roland Martin. Not one. How scary is that. The politically correct Groupthink...
Gordon Hodson
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