Institutional memory is critical to any political movement -- or, indeed, most any organized effort at all. It is critical for us to bring such memory of who did what and when to the Obama campaign. It turns out to be important when, for example, McCain's economic advisor Former Senater Phil Gramm gets exposed for his role with UBC, we can readily go back and recapture everything we know about that Senator and his misdeeds and lunacies so we can make McCain answer for them.
Yesterday I posed a cryptic diary about McCain's spokeswoman and national Director of Communications: Jill Hazelbaker. I wanted to test our institutional memory by asking people to write down everything they knew about her, without looking at other people's responses.
Despite my offer to donate money to political campaigns for every top-level comment I got, only 20 people participated. But that was enough to get a sense of what people know about this woman: not as much as we should.
Six people out of 21 knew that she was involved in a scandal -- one that happened right here, on the progressive blogosphere.
McCain's mouthpiece is a confirmed liar.
(1) Jill Hazelbaker is a liar
This photo that appeared in yesterday's diary is a view of Jill Hazelbaker that has been distorted -- appropriately enough, for her. Looks a bit like it could be Cindy McCain or Vicki Iseman, doesn't it?
Here is a more clear view of her:
(I've added the forked tongue in the interests of full disclosure. She is, after all, a liar.)
The heavy lifting on exposing Jill Hazelbaker was done by our friends at Blue Jersey, but I will cite solely to DKos diaries here, which have the links if you want to check out the originals.
Jill Hazelbaker's first significant appearance in the stories and diaries of Daily Kos was here, a story where she asserted that NJ Senate candidate Tom Kean Jr.'s receiving $13,300 in contributions from Blue Cross/Blue Shield executives on the same day he voted to let them keep a $40MM tax exemption was a "total coincidence."
That simply tells you that she's a bullshitter, not a liar, but it's a good thing to bear in mind given her role in the McCain campaign.
The next appearance came when Jill Hazelbaker spat out a bogus charge of corruiption against Robert Menendez. Details at the link. But even this story simply shows she's an unprincipled hack, not a liar. But, again, it's a good thing to bear in mind given her role in the McCain campaign.
No, the really good stuff appears here, in Markos's front page story about her trolling a New Jersey Democratic blog under fake names, claiming to be a Democrat disenchanted with Menendez, and then lying about it.
Note: as this New York Times story noted, there is some doubt as to whether Jill Hazelbacker was the only one who could have used the IP address. Blue Jersey considered the case against her being the concern troll to be based on guilty knowledge found in one of the posts, suggesting that she either wrote or directed this activity. Regardless, she lied about the underlying events, as noted below, and the circumstantal evidence seems sufficient to support the allegation against her.
As "blueforever06" -- Blue? Forvever? Hazelbaker wrote this on Blue Jersey:
This is a truly sad day for the bluejersey. Covering NJ like a rug? Maybe you'd have a shot if you focused on actual campaign issues. As an ardent democrat who used to enjoy reading this blog, I am frankly disapointed at the turn bluejersey has taken.
It turned out that, well, the IP address that was used to post this comment -- and many others -- was Jill Hazelbacker's own personal computer. Several troll comments on Blue Jersey -- and on Ned Lamont's site -- were traced to the same IP address she had used to send out press releases.
Juan Melli of Blue Jersey had this comeback:
How is it that I can call you out on posting from Junior's campaign HQ and then... YOU KEEP DOING IT? Seriously, just stop it. It's laughable and embarrassing and a huge no-no in the world of the web. No one believes for a second that you're "an ardent democrat who used to enjoy reading this blog." It doesn't take an IP address to sniff out a concern troll from a mile away.
It looks really silly for your candidate that you're spending your time fighting with a blog. I mean, we're flattered and all, but you just keep making the joke funnier and funnier.
You have to go to Blue Jersey for all the damning evidence about what Jill "Sprezzatourette" Hazelbaker did in fending off the progressive blogs as a concern troll. If you don't find the case against her personally open and shut, I submit that this statement from the aforelinked Times article, occurring after the controversy became known, is a blatant lie:
[Blue Jersey's editors] suspect the person behind the postings, which have appeared on the site regularly since July, is Mr. Kean’s campaign spokeswoman, Jill Hazelbaker. Ms. Hazelbaker called the accusations "nonsense," and said neither she nor anyone else she knows of in the office had anything to do with the postings. "I’ve never e-mailed them nor posted on the Web site," she said on Wednesday. "It’s a blog. You can’t believe what’s posted on blogs." She declined to make Mr. Kean available to discuss the matter.
The Kean campaign’s technical adviser said that the Internet protocol, or I.P., address that linked the posts to the Kean headquarters was an old one, "from over a month ago." But an e-mail message Ms. Hazelbaker sent to a reporter on Wednesday shares the same I.P. address.
(My emphasis throughout.) This is either a knowing lie or such gross dereliction of a spokesperson's responsibility to tell the public the truth that it amounts to the same thing. What she says about the campaign she works on cannot be trusted. Not then -- and not now.
That's worth knowing -- and worth remembering.
(2) Remember?
Every time we write Jill Hazelbaker's name here, we would do well to remind ourselves, and each other, and anyone else who might read what we have to say that she is an unprincipled hack and a liar: for example, "documented lying hack Jill Hazelbacker says ...." (If she truly wants to clear her name, let her do now what she should have done in 2006 and investigate who in the Kean campaign wrote these messages, and who had the "guilty knowledge" described in the links above.)
But we don't. Why? Because we don't make it easy on ourselves to maintain institutional memory. While DemocraticLuntz, tethys, Pragmaticus, Anton Sirius, bosdcla14, and second gen were able to make reference to her history, about 70% of the posters could not. (The proportion knowing her history was probably inflated by selection bias, as they would be more likely to open such a diary.)
There will be hundreds of more names of people on whom we have the dirt somewhere in the archives of this and other progressive blogs, but we have not created a system that makes us likely to be able to bring it up at the right moment. This is a problem of information retrieval. It had an easy solution: dKosopedia.
I had planned on going onto dKosopedia and creating a page containing our institutional knowledge of Jill Hazelbaker; unfortunately, the site is down for maintenance so I was not able to do so. (I don't believe that there is currently such a page, based on a Google search of the site archive.) Luckily for us, this is a case where Wikipedia has come through with a nice page on her, which shows much (though not all) of what we'd want to be able to bring up at a moment's notice.
Why should this be done on dKosopedia rather than Wikipedia, you might ask? Try inserting some derogatory factual information about Justice Scalia and see how long it lasts there. Wikipedia is subject to a tug-of-war among factions as to how history ought to be drafted. We would win any such tug-of-war on dKosopedia -- and, again, this is intended more for our internal use, even though it can be read by anyone, rather than as a site that is presented as a face to the world.
We need a community scratch pad where we can keep notes on the people and the topics that may be coming up in this year's elections (and beyond.) We have dKosopedia at our fingertips. Now all we have to do is use it. If there were a concerted effort to transfer the most prominent factual information that came out each day to appropriate pages on DKosopedia, think of how useful that might turn out to be.
Think of it? And wonder -- why aren't we doing this?