From 1987 to 1988, Sharpton was libeling innocent men in the Tawana Brawley hoax, falsely accusing them of a sickening rape. A long and expensive grand jury investigation determined that the entire case was a hoax. New York attorney general Robert Abrams concluded that Sharpton had engaged in “abominable behavior, deplorable, disgraceful, reprehensible, irresponsible.”
A few years later, in 1990, all was calm at the trial of the Central Park jogger’s rapists—except, according to the New York Times, when Al Sharpton arrived.6 Saying the proceedings were “just like the old Scottsboro boys case,”7 he even brought hoax perpetrator Brawley to the trial. He said she was there to “observe how differently a white victim was treated and how the accused in this case have been mishandled a lot differently from the people she [Brawley] accused.”8
The stunt with Brawley, the London Guardian reported, turned the Central Park rape trial into a “racial showdown.” Venomous mobs outside the courtroom destroyed television equipment and punched cameramen and reporters. Those who tried to argue with the protesters got their faces smashed. The Sharpton supporters chanted, “The jogger’s a whore!” “Slut!” “The jogger’s a drug addict!” “The jogger’s an actress!” “Lynch the boyfriend!” “Lynch all her boyfriends!”9 When the frail, off-balance jogger showed up at court one day to testify, the mob chased her van to continue hurling abuse at her.
In the courtroom, Sharpton’s supporters jeered and cackled at defense witnesses and screamed “Liar!” at the prosecutor.10 Only when Sharpton was absent for a few weeks on account of his own trial for fraud and larceny was the courthouse calm, according to the Times, with spectators consisting mostly of “young college and law students and four rows of reporters.”11
The following year, in 1991, Sharpton whipped up angry rock-throwing mobs in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights after a car accident killed a black child, Gavin Cato. In the rioting after the accident, a rabbinical student, Yankel Rosenbaum, had been knifed to death.
After days of violent tumult, Sharpton gave a speech at Cato’s funeral declaring that his death had not been an accident and, indeed, that a Jewish ambulance had refused to transport the black child to the hospital. “The world will tell us he was killed by accident,” Sharpton said. “Yes, it was a social accident.… It’s an accident to allow an apartheid ambulance service in the middle of Crown Heights.” This conspiracy theory arose from the fact that the police had instructed the Jewish-owned Hatzolah ambulance to take only the Hasidim because a city ambulance had already been called for the other victims. (I thought liberals liked government health care!) Sharpton went on to denounce the “diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights” and then led the angry mob on a march through the Hasidic center of Crown Heights.
On account of Sharpton’s presence at the funeral, the city was forced to deploy “vastly” more police than there were marchers, as the Times put it. The full cavalry was there—double lines of cops on both sides of the street along the march, motorcycle patrols, and even a circling police helicopter.12 Sharpton would later brag that his march was peaceful.
Then, in 1995, Sharpton famously incited an anti-Semitic pogrom against a Jewish-owned store in Harlem, Freddy’s Fashion Mart, telling angry mobs, “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business.” There were weeks of violent protests outside the store, which finally ended in a blaze of bullets and a fire that left several employees dead.
Of course, after all this, Sharpton became a pariah—Oh wait! No, in the opposite of paying a penalty, he became famous and ran for president and Al Gore kissed his ring after these spectacles.
In light of Sharpton’s history, you’d think that, in the middle of liberals blaming the Arizona shooting on “rhetoric,” someone in his organization might have said, Hey boss, I’d keep a low profile for the next couple of weeks. We just don’t want you to be on TV right now because someone is going to say, “Hey, how about Freddy’s? What about Gavin Cato’s funeral? Weren’t you the guy stirring up the violent rabble at the trial of the Central Park jogger’s rapists?”
But liberals, being a mob, are perfectly capable of holding two completely contradictory ideas in their heads at the same time. They can believe that Jared Loughner was inspired by Sarah Palin—even though there’s no evidence Loughner liked Palin or even knew who she was. But at the same time, they can resolutely deny Al Sharpton had anything to do with inciting people who were known to have heard Sharpton, and who believed they were following him, when they assaulted, attacked, and murdered those he had denounced as “white interlopers,” “diamond merchants,” and “racists.”
Does the Southern Poverty Law Center have a file on Sharpton? They can feel free to use my notes.
MSNBC’S Ed Schultz turned not only to Sharpton but also to former congressman Alan Grayson to discuss violent right-wing rhetoric after Tucson. Yes, the Alan Grayson who said on the House floor that Republicans’ health care plan was: “Die quickly.” The Alan Grayson who said he couldn’t listen to Vice President Dick Cheney “because of the blood that drips from his teeth while he’s talking.” And the Alan Grayson who went on radio and called a female official at the Federal Reserve a “K Street whore.”13
Soon, the media were cheerfully announcing a “center on civil debate” being established at the University of Arizona, despite the overwhelming evidence that the shooting had absolutely nothing to do with public discourse.
Further nailing down its irrelevance, one of the center’s honorary co-chairs was that balm of public debate former president Bill Clinton. Clinton had actually hired private detectives to dig up dirt on his “bimbos” and blamed the Oklahoma City bombing on conservative talk-radio hosts. Clinton unleashed adviser James Carville to vilify Independent Counsel Ken Starr as “an out-of-control sex-crazed person,” a “spineless, gutless weasel,”14 engaged in “a slimy and scuzzy investigation.” (Which was true, but only because Starr was investigating Clinton.) Carville said, “Ken Starr can go jump in a lake.”15
Clinton adviser Harold Ickes said the investigation “smacks of Gestapo,” and “outstrips McCarthyism,” asking, “What is this, a police state?”16
Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal—who looks exactly like that—called Starr “a zealot on a mission … waging an assault on American rights [engaging in] anti-constitutional destructiveness, [who acts out] his personal temper tantrums and harasses critics.” He called Starr an “inquisitor of unlimited, unchecked power” pursuing an investigation that was “unethical, illegal,” and added that he was a “Grand Inquisitor for life” presiding over a “reign of witches” out of “vindictiveness.”17
And that was in a single breath!
As students of history will recall, the courts found otherwise, holding Clinton in contempt, disbarring him, and accepting his $800,000 settlement with Paula Jones, and then the entire Supreme Court boycotted his next State of the Union address.
But it seems perfectly natural to Democrats that the man who sicced these curs on the public would be made co-chair of the Center for Civil Discourse.
How about making Michael Moore chairman of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness? Or naming John Edwards chairman of a commission on tort reform? Why not make Helen Thomas a last-minute fill-in for Alan Dershowitz at a B’nai B’rith awards dinner, allow Senator Patty Murray to operate heavy machinery without adult supervision, or put Barney Frank on the House Banking Committee? (Wait—what? Since when?)
One begins to understand why liberals are constantly misquoting Ralph Waldo Emerson’s remark that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” by surgically removing the word “foolish.”
Just in the last half dozen years, this has included Ted Koppel;18 Charlie Rose (who also incorrectly attributed the line to Churchill);19 Keith Olbermann, who misquoted Emerson by saying “Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, I believe was the original quote”;20 Mark Geragos;21 the New Republic’s Jeffrey
Rosen;22 NPR’s Daniel Schorr—explaining—repeatedly23—that John Kerry’s answer to the flip-flop accusation should be “Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds”;24 and Margaret Carlson.25 Not a single conservative misquoted Emerson on TV to defend inconsistency during that same time period.
The mob’s leading TV network, MSNBC, has turned the embrace of inconsistency into a kind of performance art, invariably trotting out the worst possible Democrat to talk about this or that Republican scandal. It’s as if they got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to act natural while interviewing a pot about the kettle.
Whenever Keith Olbermann needed a Democrat to discuss the sleazy sex scandal of a Republican, he turned to Chris Kofinas, former communications director for … John Edwards. Yes, John Edwards.
Kofinas’s star turn in politics was his role covering up the fact that Edwards was carrying on an extramarital affair with New Age groupie Rielle Hunter, who was pregnant with Edwards’s child, while he was running for president as a family man with a cancer-stricken wife. Today, Kofinas’s specialty is going on MSNBC to blast Republicans for their sex scandals.
Is Kofinas really the best person to be giggling with Keith about Governor Mark Sanford’s affair? Surely there are tons of Democrats who were not themselves involved in covering up a major sex scandal of a Democratic presidential candidate. Next up, Joseph Goebbels joins us to discuss civil rights violations under Abraham Lincoln.
There’s never even an attempted alibi for Kofinas’s role in lying about Edwards’s affair. Kofinas might say, for example, “I was known to be a nincompoop by the entire Edwards campaign staff, who kept me out of the loop in a terribly humiliating way. Because the campaign treated me like an imbecile, made fun of me behind my back, and turned me into a laughingstock, it’s easy to see how I could have been completely unaware of Edwards’s affair that even the caterer knew about. There. I have redeemed my reputation!”
Kofinas is such a regular on the Republican scandal beat, it’s as if some tiny synapse in Olbermann’s brain connected “Kofinas” with “sleazy sex scandal” but wasn’t quite sure why.
Anyone not paralyzed by liberal groupthink listening to Kofinas’s smirking commentary about Mark Sanford would say, “Hey, you know, I was just thinking, you worked for a Carolina politician, too, and didn’t he get his mistress pregnant while running for president? In fact, weren’t you the front man for the cover-up?”
I have no idea what you’re talking about. Now let’s talk to O.J. Simpson about domestic abuse.
Similarly, when MSNBC needed an expert to excoriate the wrongdoers on Wall Street and propose needed financial reforms, the anchors turned to … Senator Chris Dodd and Representative Barney Frank.
Dodd and Frank are among the top ten individuals most responsible for the nation’s economic meltdown. For years, they both ferociously defended the insane practices of Fannie Mae that sent the entire American economy into a near-depression. Even as late as 2008, Dodd was calling Fannie “fundamentally strong” and “in good shape,” while Barney Frank assured Americans that Fannie Mae was “just fine.”26
Naturally, therefore, when the housing market imploded, bringing the entire economy down with it, MSNBC called on Dodd and Frank to explain what had happened. Their response was to denounce Republicans for opposing the Democrats’ latest financial reform bill.
On April 16, 2010, Chris Matthews interviewed Chris Dodd; on March 31, 2010,27 Keith Olbermann interviewed Barney Frank;28 and on June 25, 2010, Rachel Maddow interviewed Frank. Frank claimed that Republicans were “maintaining that we don’t need any financial reform”—with “financial reform” defined as “a bill written by Dodd, Frank, and the Democrats’ BFFs on Wall Street.”29 Obama administration financial adviser Elizabeth Warren specifically cited Dodd and Frank on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show as the two best financial watchdogs in Congress.30 Because who would be better to regulate large passenger steamships than the captain of the Titanic?
This wasn’t even the mainstream media’s usual obtuse refusal to ask obvious questions when interviewing Democrats. (E.g.: ABC’s George Stephanopoulos interviewing John Edwards after a solid year of the National Enquirer running stories about Edwards’s mistress and neglecting to ask a single question about the alleged affair;31 CBS’s Bob Schieffer failing to ask Attorney General Eric Holder about the Justice Department’s refusal to prosecute the New Black Panthers for voter intimidation because he was “on vacation that week [and] … didn’t know about it.”)32
MSNBC’S interviews with Dodd and Frank were expressly on financial reforms intended to prevent in the future what Dodd and Frank had caused in the past. Oddly enough, those allegedly being “regulated” were delighted with the Democrats’ financial reform bill. In April 2010, both JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon and Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein said they supported the Democrats’ financial reform. What better evidence is there that the Democrats were getting tough with Wall Street than the enthusiastic support of Wall Street?
If liberals can call the main culprits of the financial meltdown “reformers,” just imagine what they could do with a word like “torture.” Actually, you don’t have to imagine. I’ll tell you.
Liberals hysterically denounced the CIA’s treatment of terrorist detainees at Guantánamo as “torture,” but were more understanding when Damian Williams smashed a cinder block on Reginald Denny’s head during the L.A. Riots and then did a victory dance around Denny’s body. The attack on Denny broke facial bones in 91 places and resulted in permanent brain damage. 33 A jury acquitted Williams of all charges except simple mayhem for dropping the block on Denny’s head.34
Representative Maxine Waters defended Williams, saying the “anger in my district is a righteous anger” and “I’m just as angry as they are.”35 She even paid a visit to Williams’s house after the attack to see if there was anything she could do for him (taking time out from her busy schedule of attending hearings to get more federal support for banks whose boards her husband served on).
But the CIA considers putting a caterpillar in the cell of Osama bin Laden’s trusted aide, Abu Zubaydah, and liberals demand war crimes trials.
The Justice Department’s top-secret memos on interrogation techniques—released by President Obama in 2009—show that the Bush administration actually rejected the “caterpillar” torture, unless Zubaydah were specifically informed that it was a harmless insect:
As we understand it, you plan to inform Zubaydah that you are going to place a stinging insect into the box, but you will actually place a harmless insect in the box, such as a caterpillar.
If you do so, to ensure that you are outside the predicate act requirement, you must inform him that the insects will not have a sting that would produce death or severe pain.36
Was this a harrowing account of U.S. brutality or the premise for a children’s book? “Zubaydah and the Very Scary Caterpillar.” Get Owen Wilson to do the voices and you’ve got a hit cartoon movie on your hands.
The New York Times didn’t use the words “brutal,” “horror,” or “inhumane” in reference to the beating of Reginald Denny but was quick to attach such descriptions to the treatment of terrorists at Guantánamo.
These headlines referred to the detainees in Guantánamo:
• At Human Rights Film Festival, Horror and Hope37 (“graphic depiction … stomach-turning experiences of abuse and humiliation … devastating indictment … inhumane treatment of prisoners”)
• Taking a Long, Bumpy Ride to Systematic Brutality38
• Justice 5, Brutality 439
These were Times headlines referring to the attack on Reginald Denny:
• Trucker Beaten in Riot Is Hospitalized Again40
• 5th Man Held in Los Angeles in Beating of a Truck Driver41
• 60 Arrested in Disturbance at Site of Los Angeles Riots42
Bob Herbert titled a column about the nationwide riots after the Rodney King verdicts “That Weird Day.”43 A column on Guantánamo
was titled “Madness and Shame.”44
Could we run a photo of the cinder block dropping on Reginald Denny’s head next to a photo of the caterpillar?
What if we had treated the top leaders of al Qaeda the way a completely innocent bystander was treated in the L.A. riots? Would Maxine Waters defend it?
Other “corrective” techniques used against top-ranking al Qaeda members included facial slaps, abdominal slaps, facial holds, and “attention grasps.”45 If you can’t quite picture “the grasp,” think back to every department store you have ever been in where you saw a mother trying to get her misbehaving child’s attention.
Reginald Denny will never again be able to drive a truck or operate heavy machinery.46 (Whereas Abu Zubaydah feels uneasy whenever he sees a butterfly.)
But Maxine Waters, who ferociously defended Damian Williams, remains an honored guest at MSNBC, where Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann were convinced that once Americans found out the CIA was depriving al Qaeda terrorists of sleep, there would be a revolt.
Contrasting the treatment of Reginald Denny and Abu Zubaydah makes no sense to liberals. They can’t see contradictions, so their minds go blank. You might as well be speaking to them in Urdu.
But for breathtaking cognitive dissonance, nothing beats the Left’s comparative ranking of Attorneys General Janet Reno and John Ashcroft. Ashcroft was regularly referred to by liberals as the worst attorney general in human history—and that was in his honeymoon phase, before they started saying he was as bad as Osama bin Laden.
The New York Times’s Paul Krugman called Ashcroft “the worst attorney general in history”47—less charitable than even Anthony Romero of the American Civil Liberties Union, who said Ashcroft “will turn out to be one of the worst attorney generals in American history.”48 Rutgers University law professor Frank Askin said Ashcroft was “the worst attorney general in my memory,” adding, “There’s nothing good I can say about him. I’m glad he’s gone.”49