Michele Malkin: Why that McCain volunteer’s “mutilation” story smells awfully weird; Update: Police to administer polygraph; conflicting evidence at scene; Update: Hoaxer confesses

Michele Malkin

Why that McCain volunteer’s “mutilation” story smells awfully weird; Update: Policeto administer polygraph; conflicting evidence at scene; Update: Hoaxer confesses

Throughout my career, I’ve covered dozens of fake hate crimes — campus hate crime hoaxes, Muslim hate crime hoaxes, fake noose hangings, etc., etc., etc. Most were perpetrated by liberals, but there have been some shameful ones onour side of the aisle as well.

I’ve reported on the great lengths that warped attention-seekers have gone to in perpetrating fake hate crimes, including beating themselves up, carving swastikas on their dorm room doors and walls, locking themselves in bathroom stalls, and burning down their own houses.

Which is why I’m not jumping up and down with outrage over Drudge-promoted story of a McCain volunteer claiming to have been attacked by a black man whom she accused of carving a “B” in her face after spotting her McCain bumper sticker.

She refused medical treatment after reporting the incident to police. Why on earth would she do that?

The Hotline: 10/27: Incendiary Charges

The Hotline

10/27: Incendiary Charges

On Friday we observed that Matt Drudge was aggressively promoting a report that a 20-year-old PA female was robbed and mutilated by an African-American male who allegedly wanted to “teach her a lesson” for being a John McCain supporter. It was eventually revealed that the female (a McCain campaign volunteer named Ashley Todd) had “made the whole story up”. Now Talking Points Memo is reporting that McCain’s PA communications director initially “told reporters in the state an incendiary version of the hoax story…well before the facts of the case were known or established.” Lefty bloggers are accusing the McCain camp of being both irresponsible and cynical in pushing such a racially charged story before it could be confirmed. Ezra Klein rips the McCain camp for trying “to eke out some temporary political advantage from a brutal street crime (country first, my friends!).”

Washington Independent: The Maestro Speaks — and He’s Not Blaming the CRA

Washington Independent

The Maestro Speaks — and He’s Not Blaming the CRA

Friend of the site Charles Morris points out something many people might have missed in former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s testimony Thursday before Congress.

Headlines noted that Greenspan acknowledged his misplaced faith in the ability of free markets to correct themselves. But he also did something else — he didn’t point to the Community Reinvestment Act as the cause of the foreclosure crisis, a belief widely embraced by many conservatives.

According to the New York Times, Greenspan told Congress that “excess demand from securitizers” fueled the subprime bubble. He didn’t contend that civil- rights activists had overrun the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to force the government to make loans to poor borrowers.

So now it’s all on the record.  Let’s put the whole blame-the-CRA thing to rest. Greenspan’s credibility might not be what it once was, but he’s hardly a bleeding heart, either. And even he’s not blaming low-income borrowers.

Or, as Morris put it:

“The Maestro has spoken. As the sportscasters say, ‘Put it in the books.’”

Media Matters: Cunningham falsely claimed Hill quoted police chief warning of possible riots by Obama supporters

Media Matters

Cunningham falsely claimed Hill quoted police chief warning of possible riots by Obama supporters

Summary: Referencing an article in The Hill, radio host Bill Cunningham falsely attributed to a “police chief” the claim that “[i]f [Sen. Barack] Obama is elected, like with sports championships, people may go out and riot. If, on the other hand, Barack loses, there will be another larger group of people who will assume the election was stolen from him.” In fact, the quote that Cunningham read from the article was not attributed to a “police chief” or any other law enforcement officer, but was from Bob Parks, whomThe Hill described as “an online columnist and black Republican candidate for state representative in Massachusetts.”

OpenLeft: Egg Industry Shill Plays The Race & Class Cards On Prop. 2

OpenLeft

Egg Industry Shill Plays The Race & Class Cards On Prop. 2

The industrial egg industry has truly lost its collective head over the prospect of Californians passing Proposition 2, the legislation that would give farm animals the luxury of stretching their limbs.

Julie Buckner, the Californians for Safe Food spokesperson who went on Oprah to claim thatProposition 2 would destroy California’s egg industry, is trying a really tacky new tack,according to today’s New York Times.

Buckner told the Times that Winfrey’s implied support for the measure “only codified her sense that the ballot measure is being pushed by “wealthy, narrow-minded elitists” who do not understand its real-world consequences.”She went on to dis the Humane Society, who’s sponsoring Proposition 2, for being funded, apparently, by diamond-encrusted dog-loving dilettantes:

 

“This is an organization raising money from upper-middle-class white women writing $100 checks,” she said.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Reagan is the pres, but I voted for Shirley Chisholm

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Reagan is the pres, but I voted for Shirley Chisholm

 It does not follow that, even if you eliminate ideology as a factor, that race is the only reason to support Barack Obama. Indeed, there are an infinite number of other reasons, flimsy and otherwise, why Powell could have made his choice. He may respect the fact that they’re both the children of immigrants. He may have been particularly touched by Obama’s memoir. He may like Obama’s Ivy-League background. He may simply like his haircut. We don’t know, because we aren’t in his head. 

There is something else–Barack Obama isn”t the first black person to run for president. Did Powell endorse Al Sharpton? Did he endorse Jesse Jackson? Did he even endorse fellow conservative Allan Keys? Did he endorse Doug Wilder? Did he endorse Carol Moseley Braun? If you are arguing that race is the primary reason, you have to explain why Powell didn’t support any other black candidates for president–some from within his own party. And this doesn’t just apply simply to Powell, but to all black people. Anyone who claims that blacks are simply voting for Obama because he’s black must grapple with the fact that, in 2004, both John Kerry and John Edwards destroyed Al Sharptonamong black voters in South Carolina, while Barack Obama did the opposite. If black people–and Powell–are blindly supporting the black guy, what explains the paltry support for all the other black guys?

Again, conservatives frequently argue for a high-bar for branding someone a racist. But this evidently only applies to white people. Think on it–If you say the “primary” reason Powell is supporting Obama is race, then the corollary must be that the “primary” reason Powell isn’t supporting McCain is race–an unquestionably racist act. That is, to accuse Powell of supporting Obama primarily because he’s black, is to accuse Powell of racism. So what we have here is a double standard. Deploy the high bar for people spreading Muslim smears and peddling Obama-bucks, but then abandon all skepticism when it comes to a four-star general.

Think Progress: Allen on Macaca incident: ‘I should have never called him anything but yellow shirt.’

Think Progress

Allen on Macaca incident: ‘I should have never called him anything but yellow shirt.’

In 2006, then-Sen. George Allen (R-VA) seriously damaged his re-election campaign when he was caught on video disparaging a young Indian-American as “macaca.” “This fellow here, over here with the yellow shirt,macaca, or whatever his name is. He’s with my opponent,” Allen told a crowd of supporters. Asked about the incident while speaking in Florida yesterday, Allen said that he “screwed up” and “should have never called him anything but yellow shirt“:

“I screwed up,” Allen said. “It wasn’t an intentional thing, if I had any idea that they’d make such an issue out of a non-existing word … I should have never called him anything but yellow shirt.”

Allen continues to claim that macaca was “a non-existing word,” but the fact is that macaca was a pejorative epithet that existed before Allen used it.

NY Times: The George Wallace We Forgot

NY Times

The George Wallace We Forgot

Likewise, to describe George Wallace as a simple racist is to give his biography short shrift. As a circuit court judge in the 1950s, Wallace was respectful toward blacks, and as a legislator from 1947 to 1953, he was a moderate. In 1948, when Strom Thurmond led the Southern delegations out of the Democratic convention to protest the party’s pioneer civil rights plank, Wallace stayed in his seat. Though no fan of the plank, he was yet more Democrat than demagogue, and was instrumental in rallying the other Southern alternate delegates to save the convention’s quorum, and pass its platform.

…

He might have carried a tolerant message into the Alabama governor’s mansion in 1958, but he lost the race after spurning the support of the Ku Klux Klan (which then backed his primary opponent, John Patterson) and being endorsed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Sadly for Wallace’s state, his region, his nation and himself, he did not respond as John Lewis did after his defeat by Carmichael. Mr. Lewis, whenever confronted with calls to divisiveness, chose to redouble his commitment to reason and tolerance. After his loss to Mr. Patterson, Wallace is said to have turned to an aide and declared, “I was out-niggered … and I’ll never be out-niggered again.”

After Wallace finally won the governorship in 1962, his administration was never as race-hostile as his campaign appeals implied; black leaders found his office door open, and often his mind, too. But he would eternally pay the price for the methods he used to gain that office.

…

It would behoove everyone in the current race for America’s highest offices to pay attention to what Mr. Lewis was really saying, and judge it for its provenance in his long experience. Better than perhaps any living American, he knows that courage on the front line is one thing, and on the campaign stage quite another, knows how tiny and harmless the seeds of fanaticism can seem, how one cry of “kill him” can crescendo into a chorus that can’t be stifled. Mr. Lewis might be deemed generous in wishing on no other member of his profession the harrowed look I witnessed in George Wallace’s eyes as he struggled up off the floor in Boston and beheld what a hell he’d wrought.

Right Wing News: If Obama’s Administration Takes Your 401K, Can We Call Him A Socialist The

Right Wing News

If Obama’s Administration Takes Your 401K, Can We Call Him A Socialist The 

A dear reader wrote yesterday that using the term “socialist” is a code word:

Martin Luther King Jr, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, A. Philip Randolph, etc were all denounced as “socialists”. Just as with Obama, the term is employed as a euphamism for something else entirely.Righties have simply reached back in history to use an old code word for black. It set whites apart from those deemed unAmerican and those who could not be trusted during the communism scare. It’s funny, McCain wants to buy your house – and Obama’s the socialist.

 

Well, I don’t know about whether the aforementioned men were socialist or not. What I know is this: socialism is soothing ideology in troubled times and for people who are afraid about their survival. And socialism never turns out the way people hope or plan.

Nashville Post Politics: You’re A Racist All Day

Nashville Post Politics

You’re A Racist All Day

Jake Ford on his race for the Ninth Congressional district:

Though Ford says comments he made earlier this year indicating the 9th District should be represented by a black candidate were misunderstood, he did say, “As far as I’m concerned, black people should vote together as a special interest group. If that makes me racist, then call me a racist all day.”