There are a lot of contenders in the Right's County Fair of Batshittery, these days, but Jeff Lord's mind-numbingly offensive column in the American Spectator is a blue-ribbon winner.
Yes, if you're reading this, I'm sure you don't read a lot of articles in the Spectator. Can't say that I blame you. But this one is so out there it has a train-wreck, modern-art kind of pull to it.
Under the headline "Sherrod Story False", Lord patched together some kind of insane quilt of attacks on Shirley Sherrod, defense of Andrew Breitbart and indictment of, well, liberalism throughout the 20th Century . . . all based on his assertion that Sherrod lied when she told the story of her relative Bobby Hall being lynched. Lord's logic is that, by his interpretation of the technical wording of a Supreme Court decision in the case, Hall wasn't lynched -- he was just beaten to death by cops in a public square.
Like I said, blue-fucking-ribbon.
Read on . . .
The greatest thing about watching your opponents climb onto the Crazy Train is that they're usually not all headed to the same destination -- and they start turning on each other pretty quickly over which stop to get off.
To paraphrase Hannibal Smith, I love it when a plan comes together -- but I love it even more when an enemy falls apart.
In this case, both contributor John Tobin and Washington correspondent Philip Klein wasted no time in paddling away from Lord, and after an even more embarrassing
defense of himself -- which he actually signs "Atticus Lord" -- even associate editor W. James Antle has taken a begrudging swipe.
You might expect some kind of backpedaling from Lord, some clarification that he wasn't minimizing the Hall case. You might expect him to step back, move to the side, and find some more conventional subject on which to lie and attack Shirley Sherrod.
Nope. After doubling-down with his "Mockingbird" defense, he triples- and quadruples-down in the comments of Antle's posting:
"I confess I am continually astonished at the notion that the lynching standards are MY standards. I simply said what the Court said...the color of law business comes straight from the decision, written by William O. Douglas and signed onto by Hugo Black, Stanley Reed, Chief Justice Stone. Wiley Rutledge later made the fifth vote."
And:
The only thing that counts is what the Court says the definition is. Not anything else.
So there. Shirley Sherrod is so a big fat liar.
While I wouldn't normally consider AS's comments to be a bastion of intellectual honesty, Lord has a nary a friend in sight. The nicest comments characterize his postings as "a distraction" and "not helpful". Less nice ones called it "a service to Stormfront, David Duke and their sort".
One of the best comments, from one Angus Johnston, cut down Lord's "but the Court said" nonsense quite well:
"There was no crime of lynching under federal law in 1945. The question of whether Hall was lynched wasn't before the Court. They had no reason to consider it, and so they didn't. They didn't say he was lynched, and they didn't say he wasn't lynched. Their decision gives us no guidance whatsoever as to whether he was lynched, because it doesn't address that question."
Is there even a word for what would come after "quadruple-down"? Does anyone know what it is?
Lord's reply:
"So how could Ms. Sherrod have said with such assurance her relative was lynched?"
Yup. He really did. You did not hallucinate it, and I did not make it up.
That Crazy Train? Lord is sitting astride the top, waving his arms and riding that sucker all the way to the ravine.
Couldn't help myself -- my first (and hopefully last) comment on American Spectator went like this:
That may be the most idiotic argument I've ever seen in print.
Mr. Lord, you should never again in this life be paid to write opinion, analysis or a freaking restaurant review.
She could say he was lynched because white men murdered him in public, in broad daylight, with no risk of legal consequence. That is exactly what "lynching" was.
Your increasingly bizarre obsession with semantics as a way of minimizing or dismissing her story is an insult to every thinking person unfortunate enough to drag their eyeballs over it. Every day AS lets you breathe their virtual air is a stain on their reputation (note: I understand there is no "air" in the virtual world of cyberspace. The obsessively nitpicky should understand that's what's called a "metaphor". Sorry if I confused you).
You can always hope that the high-profile craziness of the Jeff Lords, Rand Pauls, Sharon Angles will jolt the less crazy, that the broader movement will stop, take a better look at the cliff they're all running toward, and step back toward the reasonable center.
Maybe. We can hope. But whether they do or don't, it should be our mission to spotlight these loons, hold up in front of the rest and say simply "is this who you are?"
And for that particular show-and-tell, Jeff Lord looks like a blue-ribbon winner.