But Harris-Lacewell was too busy inventing a myth about innocent men accused of rape to bother with the facts. In an interview on the Duke lacrosse case, she told BlackAmericaWeb.com that the “sense of entitlement and privilege at Duke is nauseating.” She also accused the Duke women’s lacrosse team of supporting the accused players because “given the entire history of white men sexually assaulting black women, we always know that white women have been on the side of white men.”40 The actual history of interracial rape—according to FBI crime statistics—is that, since the seventies, approximately 15,000 to 36,000 white women have been raped by black men every year, while, on average, zero black women are raped by white men. (The Department of Justice uses “0” to denote fewer than ten victims.)41
As Harris-Lacewell has said (when she’s psychoanalyzing Tea Partiers), we know “that there are individuals [who] have sort of a predisposition towards intolerance.” When “things start changing very rapidly,” people experience “this anxiety, and it creates precisely the kind of intolerance that we’re seeing.”42
Harris-Lacewell was understandably confused and anxious. She was upset that no one asked her to replace Starr Parker on The View—as she had proposed on her blog. She was exhausted from carrying that Princeton backdrop around with her for every TV appearance. She couldn’t understand why Rachel Maddow was always showering her with sickening praise that was not afforded Rachel’s white guests. All this may explain the intolerance we’re seeing from Harris-Lacewell.
As she might explain herself—at least when she’s talking about conservatives—Harris-Lacewell evinced a “certitude” about her own position and worried that her “way of life” was “under attack.” She showed a “capacity to dehumanize” white male athletes because she believes that “they are not as good as” she is. Those were factors 1, 2, and 3 in her explanation to MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann of the (nonexistent) “move to violence” among Tea Partiers.43 (There was never any actual violence by Tea Partiers—but they were moving that way!)
MSNBC’s other black guest, Eugene Robinson, was also a rape truther, long after the evidence suggested otherwise. (I’m going to embarrass Eugene by pointing out that he’s won a Pulitzer Prize. Why? Because it’s the law.) Invoking classic liberal stereotypes of “preppy privilege” and students who were “downright arrogant in their sense of superiority,” Robinson said, “It’s impossible to avoid thinking of all the black women who were violated by drunken white men in the American South over the centuries. The master-slave relationship, the tradition of droit du seigneur, the use of sexual possession as an instrument of domination—all this ugliness floods the mind, unbidden, and refuses to leave.”44
It having been established that the accuser had once stolen a taxi, led the cops on a high-speed car chase, and tried to run down a police officer with the cab, among her other prior crimes, and that none of the lacrosse players’ DNA could be found on her person or effects, a rational person would find it quite possible to avoid thinking of drunken white men raping their slaves two hundred years earlier. Me? I thought of Tawana Brawley. But the mob is immune to facts, preferring myths and images.
Liberals are the “some of the people” you can fool all the time. It’s easy to implant myths in the minds of mobs because they only grasp ideas in terms of images. As Le Bon explains:
Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images. It is only images that terrify or attract them and become motives of action.
For this reason theatrical representations, in which the image is shown in its most clearly visible shape, always have an enormous influence on crowds. [S]pectacular shows constituted for the plebeians of ancient Rome the idea of happiness, and they asked for nothing more.…
Nothing has a greater effect on the imagination of crowds of every category than theatrical representations.45
Cut to: Maureen Dowd writing in the New York Times that a movie about Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson “makes clear that Plame was not merely ‘a secretary’ or ‘mediocre agent’ at the agency, as partisan critics charged at the time, but a respected undercover spy tracking Iraqi W.M.D. efforts.”46
The movie says so!
Not only that but Dowd noted that the movie “reiterates that Plame did not send her husband, who had worked in embassies in Iraq while Saddam and Bush Senior were in charge and was the ambassador in two African countries, on the fact-finding trip to Niger about a possible Iraqi purchase of 500 tons of yellowcake uranium.”
Dowd’s citation of a movie as proving this or that aspect of the Wilson-Plame fairy tale resembles Le Bon’s description of a theater manager who “was obliged to have the actor who took the part of the traitor protected on his leaving the theatre, to defend him against the violence of the spectators, indignant at the crimes, imaginary though they were, which the traitor had committed.”47
Precisely because of Plame and Wilson’s lies, the Senate Intelligence Committee was forced to hold hearings on these very topics. During those hearings, not only did the CIA’s inspector general testify that Plame herself told him she had “made the suggestion” that her husband go on the Niger trip, not only did the CIA reports officer testify that Plame “offered up his name,” but the committee actually obtained the memo in which Plame recommended her husband for the job. Indeed, there was no job until Plame came up with the idea of sending someone—perhaps her husband—to Niger.48
The movie may tout Wilson’s illustrious diplomatic career as reason enough for his being considered for a mission to Niger, but—as the New York Times reported back in 1990—Wilson’s so-called diplomatic career consisted of his being an administrator, “someone usually more concerned that the embassy heating and plumbing work than with what is going on in the host country.”49 Of course, the Times didn’t have the benefit of a Hollywood movie before reaching that conclusion.
Apparently, the movie also portrays Karl Rove and Scooter Libby vindictively leaking Plame’s name to the press in order to destroy her career as the single most important spy in the nation’s history. Dowd says, “The movie is a vivid reminder of one of the most egregious abuses of power in history, and there are deliciously diabolical turns by actors playing Scooter Libby, David Addington, and Rove.”
How many times do we have to go through this? As long as one Republican after another is required to go on MSNBC’s Hardball and stand up to the “birthers,” when will Chris Matthews stand up to Maureen Dowd? Can anyone in the Democratic Party stand up to Dowd?
After years of sturm und drang about Karl Rove and Scooter Libby “leaking” Plame’s name to the press, it finally emerged in August 2006 that it wasn’t anyone in the White House at all, but Richard Armitage, an Iraq War critic, who gave a reporter her name. The New York Times story on the shocking revelation began, “Richard L. Armitage, a former deputy secretary of state, has acknowledged that he was the person whose conversation with a columnist in 2003 prompted a long, politically laden criminal investigation in what became known as the C.I.A. leak case.”50
Have you ever noticed how you have to tell liberals the same thing over and over? Liberals simply cannot learn. They’re like children who put their hands over their ears because they don’t want to listen to Mother. Most normal people just give up and let liberals enjoy their fantasies. Even when you force an individual liberal to look at evidence and admit the truth, leave him alone for a few days and he’ll go right back to spouting the same hokum.
Conservatives heard Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii, but then found out there were newspaper announcements of his birth and dropped it—except for the remaining two hundred Americans who still believe Obama was born in Kenya.
Conservatives—like everyone else—believed Saddam was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. After the invasion, however, no stockpiles were found. The former Iraqi general under Saddam Hussein, Georges Sada, wrote a book claiming Saddam had moved the stockpiles out of the country,51 but conservatives dropped it, refusing even to me
ntion the nonstockpiled WMD that were found.
Conservatives thought Mohammed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence agents in Prague on April 9, 2001. We thought so because that’s what Czech intelligence concluded, and they have a better intelligence service than we do; because an eyewitness claimed to have seen the meeting; because Atta had had clandestine meetings in Prague before; and because the Iraqi intelligence officer wrote in his diary for that day, “Hamburg student,” which Atta was, and described himself as in his visa application. But the CIA and 9/11 Commission concluded that Atta was not in Prague on April 9 because, although no eyewitnesses saw him in the United States between April 4 and April 11, someone used his cell phone in Florida on April 6, 9, and 10.52
So conservatives dropped it, with Bush and Cheney never mentioning it again—and indeed, being taunted for having ever believed it.
Many conservatives believed Clinton’s granting pardons in exchange for donations to his presidential library or payments to his brother-in-law was a crime, but then found out they were wrong: The president has unrestricted power to grant pardons, except in the case of impeachments. So conservatives stopped calling it a crime.
Contrast that with liberals. Even having the New York Times acknowledge that: (1) Plame recommended her husband for the Niger trip, (2) Armitage told the press about her involvement, and (3) it was not a crime for Armitage to reveal her name—all that was not enough to get liberals to stop claiming that the leak of “secret agent” Valerie Plame’s name was a crime and that someone in the Bush White House had committed it.
Liberals can’t learn.
Wasn’t welfare reform such a triumphant success that Bill Clinton started claiming credit for it? In 2009, the Democratic “stimulus” bill largely repealed welfare reform. Didn’t we already prove that putting criminals behind bars would reduce the crime rate? Liberals are right back releasing criminals again. Haven’t concealed carry laws disproved the critics’ hysterical predictions and instead been magnificently successful at reducing crime? In 2009, the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress rejected a bill to allow “portability” of state concealed carry permits. (Everything must be national, except laws about guns.)
Ravens can learn to snatch fishermen’s untended lines to get fish. Worms learn not to eat harmful bacteria (as opposed to the tasty nutritious bacteria they normally feed on). Fruit fly larvae can learn to detect the scent of predators. But liberals cannot learn that the August 6 Presidential Daily Briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” had not a speck of what we call “useful information.”
I described the August 6 PDB in painstaking detail in my 2006 book Godless: The Church of Liberalism. The memo read like a fifth-grader’s book report that was left to the last minute and based on quickly cobbled-together information from Google. The only “warnings” of future acts by al Qaeda were completely wrong. Thus, the PDB contained blindingly obvious facts such as “Bin Ladin [sic] since 1997 has wanted to conduct terrorist attacks in the U.S.,” while warning that bin Laden supporters might be planning an attack in the US “with explosives” and that they might be preparing to attack “federal buildings in New York.”
The 9/11 attack did not involve explosives. It did not target a single federal building in New York.
With liberals continuing to cite the August 6 PDB as if it had laid out the 9/11 plot in blinding detail, in frustration I even printed the full memo in the paperback version of Godless.
And still liberals cite the August 6 PDB as proof of Bush’s incompetence.
On December 3, 2008, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann ominously announced, “The title of the August 6th, 2001, Presidential Daily Briefing, ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S’: It could have included copies of the terrorist itineraries and the message from the future. If a president did not act on it or perhaps did not even read it, it still wouldn’t have made any difference.”
In fact, if Bush had directed all members of the executive branch to drop everything and jump on the “warnings” in the August 6 PDB, bomb-sniffing dogs would have been wandering through our major cities and police lookouts would have been stationed at federal buildings in New York City—as planes smashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Another plane might have crashed into some bomb-sniffing dogs in Pennsylvania, on its way to an unprotected White House. None of the 9/11 targets would have received special protection as a result of anything in the August 6 PDB. Nor, of course, was the single most important fact—that terrorists would use commercial airplanes as cruise missiles—mentioned as a possibility.
True, the title of the PDB was “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” I have a memo titled “Actress Determined to Succeed in Hollywood.”
This is textbook mob behavior. As Le Bon writes:
Evidence, if it be very plain, may be accepted by an educated person, but the convert will quickly be brought back by his unconscious self to his original conceptions. See him again after the lapse of a few days and he will put forward afresh his old argument in exactly the same terms. He is in reality under the influence of anterior ideas, that have become sentiments, and it is such ideas alone that influence the more recondite motives of our acts and utterances. It cannot be otherwise in the case of crowds.53
Bush was the enemy, Rove his evil genius, so it didn’t matter what the facts were. Hollywood would supply the rewrite.
There’s your “reality-based community.”
FIVE
I’LL SEE YOUR BIRTH
CERTIFICATE CONSPIRACY
THEORY AND RAISE YOU
ONE OCTOBER SURPRISE
Democrats tell fantastic lies, they drag the whole country through their investigations and criminal prosecutions—and then, when the commotion turns out to have been another wild-goose chase, the whole incident drops down the memory hole. Then liberals return to accusing right-wingers of being crazy conspiracy theorists.
The one lonely myth believed by more Republicans than Democrats is that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, and is therefore ineligible to be president. The “birther” theory was concocted by liberals and shot down by the conservative media. According to John Avlon, the author of Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America, it was a Hillary Clinton supporter who publicized the claim that Obama wasn’t born in the United States during the 2008 presidential campaign.1
The allegation was promptly investigated and disproved by every major conservative news outlet—The American Spectator, Human Events, National Review, Fox News, and the Sweetness & Light blog, among others. Indeed, it was Sweetness & Light that coined the term “birther.” There were small newspaper announcements of his birth at the time in the local press. The “short-form” birth certificate Obama posted on his webpage was determined to be the usual version sent out by the hospital and accepted by the State Department as a “birth certificate.”
In October 2008, Hawaii Health Department director Chiyome Fukino put out a statement saying that both she and the state registrar of vital statistics, Alvin Onaka, had personally verified that the health department had Obama’s “long-form” birth certificate. She reiterated that state law prohibited anyone without a tangible reason from obtaining a copy of the original. Instead the department would issue the short-form “certificate of live birth,” which had already been produced and posted by the Obama campaign on his website.
Then, in 2009, Fukino again put out a statement saying she had personally “seen the original vital records maintained on file by the Hawaii State Department of Health verifying Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii and is a natural-born American citizen.”2
(Whatever Fukino and Onaka’s character and motives, the more people who must be lying for a conspiracy theory to work, the more implausible it is. Only two people—Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky—had to keep a secret about what happened in the Oval Office and, yet, within three years, the entire world knew.)
Some people continued to believe the “
birther” story anyway. Of course, it might be easier to convince them if every other crazy conspiracy theory about Democrats hadn’t been attacked as a vicious lie by the mainstream media before turning out to be true.
Remember when it was a crazy conspiracy theory to imagine Bill Clinton had carried on an affair with Gennifer Flowers? Or that he had flashed Paula Jones? Or that he had molested an intern in the Oval Office? Also remember when the mainstream media believed John Edwards’s denial of his affair with Rielle Hunter—and then believed him again when he said her illegitimate child wasn’t his? Remember how it took a quarter century to find out what really happened at Chappaquiddick? And remember when conservatives had the nutty idea that global-warming fanatics were cooking the books, but the mainstream media marginalized them by calling them insane? And remember how the entire Democratic Party, Hollywood, and the mainstream media lied about Alger Hiss, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, I. F. Stone, and dozens of other Soviet agents for nearly half a century until the Venona Papers came out?
Thanks, mainstream media!
Frankly, after all the media’s jaw-dropping cover-ups—always in the same direction—it’s amazing conservatives aren’t bubbling over with conspiracy theories. Instead, the conspiracy theories always come from liberals. Indeed, insane conspiracy theories are often being hatched in the illustrious outposts of the mainstream media, from CBS’s Dan Rather to the New York Times.
Presumably, if he cared to, Obama could request and release his “long-form” birth certificate. But he doesn’t want to. Liberals have intentionally fanned the flames of right-wing conspiracy-mongering in order to make all opposition to Obama seem deranged. Thus, in March 2010, Obama was able to dismiss the entire Tea Party movement as including “some folks who just weren’t sure whether I was born in the United States [or] whether I was a socialist.”