Hard on the heels of top Scott Brown advisor “Craz-E” Eric Fehrnstrom’s outing as the long-hidden author of the “CrazyKhazei” attack site against Democratic Senate candidate Alan Khazei, comes a blog-based assault on Elizabeth Warren headlined by Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee Glenn Reynolds through his blog Instapundit, part of the ultra-Republican Pajamas Media conglomerate.
How this kind of ham-handed attack can advance Scott Brown’s campaign for re-election is hard to say, but what I find significant is Brown’s unwillingness to go on the record to condemn this and similar Internet-based attacks against Warren, combined with his refusal to apologize for Fehrnstrom’s dirty tricks against Khazei, or to sanction his top aide.
Brown is easy to attack as a poser — not a real Senator — and the more he claims to oppose dirty campaigning while simultaneously employing a confessed online trickster in a top position and not condeming perverse campaigns like this one, the wider his credibility gap grows.
…has Brown been asked about it or do we know for sure that he is even aware of it? Even so, the internet is full of stupid stuff. Should we really expect each candidate to condemn everything that may come out from a blogger without formal connections to the campaign?
See what he says. If his refusal to censure even his own top aide for engaging in this sort of thing is any indication, he is unlikely to think any action on his part is warranted, despite his protestations to abhor negative campaigning. The point is that he is just posing at being a clean campaigner, not doing.
…is whether it is even appropriate to ask a candidate about every stupid thing the internet produces by every fan.
Please note this huffiness comes from the author of the weekly Friday joke collection – some of which is borderline slanderous. Still, it must be Bob’s chivalrous sreak that compels him to defend Warren against any ‘nasturtiums’, no matter how funny.
Arriveth Our Queen!
You wrote (emphasis mine):
You find this “funny”???? Really????
Your better than this porc. At least, you have been historically.
.
I must have missed them.
would be equivalent to the joke above about Elizabeth Warren.
Surely you haven’t missed the “unprecedented” jokes about Scott Brown from “machine” comedians.
At LEAST as funny as the picture Bob posted the same day of the Speaker of the House holding a revolver to a child’s head. Not a cartoon – a photoshopped picture. And I’m not going to get into the photoshopped ‘jokes’ about the eventual opponent of this potential Democrat candidate. It was a good parody of Warren’s ‘thought’ process.
Look! Over there! Something a left wing blog posted, written by a comedy website, funny(?) because it’s metaphorically true. Totally the same as something written by a right-wing blogger, not-funny(?) because it’s such a stretch of a connection that the focus is not on politics but on de-humanizing women.
Yawn.
two wrongs always make a right.
The handle is stomv.
way up the thread.
Let’s be clear for a moment.
Austerity of the sort touted by the Speaker does cost lives. If it offends your tender sensibilities to have your beloved Speaker thus mocked, perhaps you ought to write him and ask that he stop embarking on bad policy.
Frankly I prefer incivility to needless poverty. And you?
No it wasn’t. It was sexist crap, and if this weren’t about the MA GOP’s marquee race, you’d say so yourself – as you’ve done in the past about far less offensive material.
In the past, Peter Porcupine has lambasted us here at BMG for tolerating and/or promoting allegedly sexist writings of others. So I confess to finding it astonishing that the same Peter Porcupine is now lambasting us for criticizing what strikes me – and, I think, must strike any fair-minded person – as an unambiguously sexist attack on Elizabeth Warren. I mean, my goodness: “You have a really nice ass and a great boob job”?? All due respect, PP, that’s far worse than anything you’ve ever complained about from us.
As I’ve noted previously, our old friend PP seems genuinely scared about the increasingly likely prospect that Scott Brown could lose his seat in 2012, and is therefore behaving in ways that seem out of character. I guess we have a lot more of this to look forward to. Too bad, but I suppose understandable.
I am inclined to agree with Christopher here. Republican candidates are not responsible for the whole conservative movement — not even Instapundit, a major conservative blogger as prominent on the right as Atrios is on the left.
However, like the revelatory audience participation at the Republican presidential debates (Hooray for executions! Let them die!) the fact that this image is immensely amusing to the hordes on the right says something about them.
Minimally: that they shouldn’t be invited into your home.
Do I know for sure if he is behind it. No, but it goes to show what happens when you earn a reputation for acting a certain way after years in the public arena.
that he has tenure.
the Republicans are adopting a position of “My body, my choice?”
I think the attack on female appearance is a great strategy for the GOP in Scott Brown’s race. I’m not saying this because Brown may be the senate’s prettiest senator, but because most of the women I know love for men, particularly men they don’t know, to ignore their minds and critique their bodies.
Why is it when liberals do something satire, it’s pretty funny, and generally always somewhat informative (like laughing at “get your gov out of my medicare!” and such) or notating fakery (like making fun of “Senator Pickup Truck”) or TRUE (giggling a lot at Senator Pickup Truck’s full page spreeaaaad) and when Republicans do satire, it’s hurtful, misogynistic, nasty, and always a personal attack that makes no attempt of informing the public via humor in fact, usually the opposite – it’s about misinforming the public)?
Add the fact that liberals have a healthy sense of humor about themselves, and conservatives do NOT…think The Daily Show versus this piece of shit “humor” from Reynolds. Hell, TDS (and liberals in general) laughed at the jokes around Stewart FRIEND and liberal hero Anthony Wiener when there was cause because he brought it on himself and we can admit when what someone we like did is bad.
It’s like two completely different universes of humor…conservatives love humiliation humor and nasty crap…and liberals like smart, pithy, or humor that hits on truth.
Psychologically, I UNDERSTAND conservatives, but I certainly don’t LIKE what I understand. UGH.
During the recent special election for Senate, I was struck by how conservative commentators on BMG always and invariably referred to our Attorney General as “Martha” whereas hardly any liberal referred to Mr. Brown as “Scott”. Similarly, Mr. Obama is called “Barry” by the right wing much more than Mr. Bush was called “Georgie”.
Of course, an exception must be made for Maureen Dowd.
Think of all the characters the GOP makes household names of… and first names is just part of the game. Daschle. Clinton(s). Frank. Pelosi. Reid. Obama. Frank. Kerry. Gore. Kennedy(s).
I’m willing to bet that more of the GOP base can name Pelosi than either Boehner or Gingrich. Same goes for Reid over McConnell or Frist.
The Republicans make it personal. They can’t win on ideas, so they win on fear and badmouthing.
I recall a few striking occasions when a liberal did something courageous and patriotic and the response from right wing blogs was that left-of-center hero was acting conservative. Generally, conservatives have a notion that liberals are self-indulgent, weak-thinking social experimenters out to dabble in their favorite causes with other people’s tax money. By contrast, conservatives are respectful, thoughtful, patriotic, and generous.
Another way to say this is that conservatives are tribal. They perceive people outside their tribe as morally compromised. They express that personally. To them, it is just inconceivable that Nancy Pelosi could champion ugly liberal policy without herself being personally ugly — physically and personally. For conservatives, liberalism is not just an alternative political philosophy; it is a personal vice.
It’s the same reason why they often put the President’s middle name, “Hussein” in many attacks on him, or the Anglicized “Barry” that he used as a youth instead of the foreign sounding “Barack”.
This doesn’t qualify as “humor” in my book, it’s just more right-wing misogynist bullying.
You have to see these attempts as either wholly unhelpful to the GOP’s cause or signs of real terror on the part of the GOP. So far none of these attacks or hack article in the conservative press have gotten much traction.
To my knowledge no other candidate has been subject to this kind of “satire”; no other candidate’s viral video has been co-opted in an attempt to use against him/her; and no other candidate has attracted the attention of Rush Limbaugh.
I don’t think it fair to blame Brown for everything the right does – the point of the other things was that they were done by people on his payroll.
But, this is an extremely lame attack. Warren has succeeded because of her intelligence, commitment and her values. This ad distorts comments she made that likely have hit a nerve with the right. This attack treats women as if the only important thing is whether they are “hot” – and defines that entirely on looks – with emphasis on plastic surgery.
It is pretty offensive – especially against a brilliant successful woman in her 60s. It should turn off all women.
that Prof. Reynolds is a professor and not a comedian. Because this satire isn’t funny in the least. Not offensive either, which at least would provoke some emotional response. Instead, it’s just braid-dead stupid.
I’m not sure what happened to the sense of humor for many on the Right nowadays. There’s certainly things to parody on the Left — I’d be the first one to admit that! But contemporary right-wing attempts to use humor are about as funny as watching paint dry.
the soul of satire. John Stewart and Stephen Colbert are satirical. The Onion is often satirical, though sometimes it lacks a target. While one could argue that the idiocy above is social criticism, it is inherently witless. It also lack another satirical prerequisite: irony.
If it were actually funny, it would be more accurately called burlesque: “an artistic composition, especially literary or dramatic, that, for the sake of laughter, vulgarizes lofty material or treats ordinary material with mock dignity.”
Basically what we have is a MadLib, a “humorous” fill-in-the blank my kids used to do in fourth grade.
Contemporary conservatives are not known for their wit, but some Republicans have had it. Bob Dole certainly had it.
When he was asked by a reporter if he’d ever been to a communist county, he said, “Well, I’ve been to Massachusetts.” That is wit.
…will send a friendly letter to the University of Tennessee advising them that they should not keep a professor on the payroll if he is doing political work? Will some GOP organ also call for an investigation about using resources of a public university to send political messages like the did in WI for any references to the protests in Madison? Didn’t think so!