Local Breitbart Clone

uses adulterated video to justify 20,568th consecutive unhinged rant against Those Evil Liberals Who Are Destroying America (this time the target was ThinkProgress.com.)

Anybody surprised?

Anybody want to have a hold-your-breath contest as we wait for any wingnut anywhere to suffer any consequences for lying?

Anybody feel like the next, fatuous Centrist "independent" who opens their pie hole for the millionth time to whap on and on about the "Liberal media" and "both side being guilty" needs to be exiled into the Shame Circle until the end of the decade?

Here, then, is the Anatomy of a Brietbartian Ratfucking.

Step One: Enemy Identified! In this case, Scott Keyes of ThinkProgress reported a typically horrifying fact uttered by a member of the wingnut Brain Caste that sounded hideously embarrassing to anyone not in the cult:

John Fund To O’Donnell: Gender Discrimination Lawsuits Are ‘Not The Responsible Thing For A Conservative’

...
At the Right Nation conference in Chicago this past weekend, Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund sat down with a blogger’s roundtable and discussed O’Donnell’s [wrongful termination] complaint against ISI. Fund admitted that O’Donnell’s case may well be justified, but went on to admonish her for filing a gender discrimination lawsuit because, according to Fund, “that’s not the responsible thing for a conservative to do.” Instead of combating gender discrimination in the workplace, Fund suggested that O’Donnell should have just quit her job and looked for work elsewhere:

FUND: Maybe there was some male chauvinism involved, I’m not saying it’s impossible. Boys will be boys. I don’t deny that that can’t [sic] happen. But the bottom line is she became dissatisfied and her response was not to seek other employment, it was not to have a showdown with the management. She took a train down to Washington and she met with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and accused ISI of gender discrimination. Now, gender discrimination does exist in this country. There are women everyday who are given less than their due. But the response of a conservative – a properly thinking conservative – is not to go first to the federal government and still try to keep your job.
...

Step Two: Release the Flying Monkeys! An obliging goon is now dispatched from the Brietbart flying monkey factory to divert, invert and (to quote Archie Bunker) "prevert" the facts. By any loud, ratfucky means necessary, the story MUST be deflected the hell away from the simple, wingnut-humiliating facts (bonus points if the Rat Lit can be sufficiently warped so fucking far away from reality that it can also be used to attack some blameless Liberal. Do a good job, and rumor has it Brietbart himself may give you a cookie!) In this case, when the Rat Signal was activated, one of Chicago's own climate-denying/union-bashing wingnut cloacae denizens leaped into action:

The Unethical Practices of ThinkProgress.com

Real leftists are basically the lowest form of humanity. Sadly it is all too often that many good, honest, well-meaning Democrats get tarred with the hatemongering, ethically compromised leftists among them. Here we have another example of this sort of behavior from the cretins of ThinkProgress.org with an incident that occurred on Sept. 18 at the Right Nation 2010 event in the western suburbs of Chicago, Illinois....

And so forth.

"Real leftists are basically the lowest form of humanity..."
"...hatemongering, ethically compromised leftists..."
"The unethical actions perpetrated by these immoral leftists..."
"I am sure that once this story gets out, his low-born pals will slap him on the back..."

And so on.

"But this is how the left is. Unethical, immoral... fact is they simply are not good people. They'll steal, lie, and cheat to get their way..."
"It is ignoramuses like this..."
"It is weasels like this that support Barack Obama and his Chicago Way style of garbage-spewing politics."

And so on.

"These are the people responsible for the heightened level of vitriol in American politics."

We pause here to fully appreciate in the breathtaking vistas of projection, delusion and rage-drunk paranoia encapsulated in the the mental-picture of one of Andrew Brietbart's acolytes up on his hind legs screeeeeeching about how it is the "Unethical, immoral" Left that is ruining American.

Step Three: Deploy the Adulterated Video! In Brietbartylvania it has become common practice to supplement the written smear campaign with a snip or two of video which purports to be "Proof!" but turns out to have either been completely stripped of its original context (See, "Sherrod, Shirley") or simply carved up and re-edited to invent crimes and conspiracies where none whatsoever existed (See, "ACORN"). In this case, the entire jeremiad

"Here you may be wondering if this is my word against theirs? It is not because we have video of Mr. Fund asking that his further comments be considered off the record..."

rests on five second of carefully barbered video.


Notice how the video simply does not say what our local blogger says it does.

John Fund did not ever say that "his further comments be considered off the record..." In fact, quite the opposite. Mr. Fund says specifically that "...this is the only thing I'm going to say that's off the record". Got that? Ergo, out of every subject and person he covered during his wide-ranging discussion, based on the evidence presented there is only one item that he wanted to take off the record.

And was that, one embargoed subject the one on which Mr. Keyes built his article?

Of course not, and we know it because this diverges from a typical Brietbartian Drive-by in one, crucial regard: in this case, Think Progress caught the slander immediately and published this update the next day:

Following this post, a contributor to Andrew Breitbart's site has accused me of multiple wrongdoings. After saying I was the type of person "responsible for the heightened level of vitriol in American politics," he went on to call me an ignoramus, a "weasel," a "leftist jackal," an "ethics deprived wretch," a "pig-ignorant jackass," a hatemonger, and the "lowest form of humanity." But in addition to his name-calling of me, he also made a few factually incorrect statements, saying I (a) "was not invited to the blogger room," (b) "did not pay to attend the event," and (c) "illegally trespassed on the property under false pretenses." In reality, I was invited, I did purchase a ticket like all other attendees, and I never gave false pretenses about who I was.

He also accused me of publishing comments that were intended to be off the record. There was only one specific instance where Mr. Fund made this request, saying that “this is the only thing I’m going to say that’s off the record.” This request occurred approximately five minutes before the video clip above. I honored Fund’s request and did not publish the specific comments he asked be off the record. Fund made clear that the rest of the conversation was on the record.

The blogger who is impugning my character said that I am willing to "steal, lie, and cheat to get [my] way." In reality, his grievance seems to be that not everyone at the roundtable shared his right-wing views. There is no requirement at these events that all attendees subscribe to a strict, narrow ideology. Mr. Fund himself would know this, as he attended the liberal Netroots Nation convention in July.

Future historians take note: This is what it looked like when the Right stopped merely drinking the Koolaid and started injecting it directly into their spines.