While watching the news this week from the UK l have to say that l admire the rightwing media in the US for being consistant. Not right, just consistant.
Three things have happened this week and it's hard to find more than a handful of reporting on them on the right wing side of the US news, expecially Fox (aided in most parts by Drudge and the right wing blogosphere) who, if these stories were about democrats, would have them as banner headlines for the last week.
What are the three things? Well l can't do them all justice here but here's one of them.
Voter Fraud:
Before the election John McCain, when talking about voter fraud and ACORN, said that it would be "destroying the fabric of democracy" if they went unchecked. The insinuation was that because of ACORN millions of false votes would be counted for Obama, illegally handing him the election. They would have you believe that a group that pays people to register voters checks the names and, if it finds false ones on there reports it to federal authorities AS REQUIRED TO BY LAW, leading to the person involved being arrested, have actually taken these false names up to the polling booth and pressed a button/punched a card/pulled a lever and registered a vote. Whether the people going back up to vote again took a change of clothes and were wearing fake mustaches or eye patches doesn't make the reports.
This has been one of the hot button topics of the right before and after the election. The rejection of the core principles, ideals, and the war-mongering reckless blood lust of regular conservatives and neo-cons is still hard for them to take. A community advocasy group with links to a president they dislike for reasons ranging far and wide, be they birther, christianist or McCartyite, gives them a great target, expecially when the media arm of the party and the reincarnation of Howard Beale decide to spend countless hours on something which was not only check into by the Bush administration, but led to a scandal when nine US Attorneys were dismissed for not going along with a blatent attempt of voter intimidation on false evidence. Go to Factcheck.org and you find this:
Satterberg: [A] joint federal and state investigation has determined that this
scheme was not intended to permit illegal voting.
Instead, the defendants cheated their employer, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or ACORN), to get paid for work they did not actually perform. ACORN's lax oversight of their own voter registration drive permitted this to happen. ... It was hardly a sophisticated plan: The defendants simply realized that making up names was easier than actually canvassing the streets looking for unregistered voters. ...
[It] appears that the employees of ACORN were not performing the work that they were being paid for, and to some extent, ACORN is a victim of employee theft.
Of course none of this will slow down the likes of Glen Beck and this week at ACORN's 39th Anniversary he sent Fox News "producer" and professional Glee Club Member Griff Jenkins, a man so poor at civics he actually thinks that the US 1st Amendment means that when he asks a question people HAVE to answer him to loiter outside wearing what looked to be his dad's tux, and standing on a piece of carpet he seemed to have picked up at a flea market, to do the usual peice of quality Fox "journalism" by ambushing people going in and asking them loaded biased questions. There was also bit of an "ahh, bless!!" moment when a left wing blogger tried his hand at fox style "reporting" but due to the fact that he hadn't been trained in the dark arts of the Sith by the masters at Fox it didn't go as well as he hoped.
So while all this was going on with ACORN a man named Mark Anthony Jacoby, who owned a company called Young Political Majors (YPM), plead guilty to voter fraud and in a plea deal was sentenced to three-years probation and 30-days of community service. The thing l haven't yet mentioned is that Jacoby and YPM are actually REPUBLICANS.
Brad Freidman of the Bradblog has been keeping tabs on this tale of actual voter fraud and has the full details of it along with other cases of voter fraud including the case of Paul Bishop in Clay County, KY and the new case of alledged voter fraud by Anne Coulter who may not have an ex-boyfriend in the FBI to help her this time.
The Jacoby story was printed in the LA Times last tuesday and Friedman wrote this about it:
"Jacoby and Young Political Majors were hired by the California Republican Party to head up their voter registration efforts in the state. Jacoby had been arrested for Voter Registration Fraud last October, smack dab during the media's orgasmic heights of last year's phony GOP ACORN "Voter Fraud" hoax, even as Fox "News" (and the other news outlets who similarly fell for the scam) were going wall-to-wall with their unsupported insinuations about voter fraud by ACORN, Democrats and Obama."
So the question is, WHERE WERE FOX NEWS AND GRIFF THE EXPERT TEABAGGER AND PREPPY BOYWONDER FOR THIS? They could have flown him to California to do the report and still got him back in time to air the mothballs out of his dad's suit to stand outside and do his Kabuki dance at the ACORN thing.
An actual real case of voter fraud, something they have been screaming about for months and none of them, not Beck, O'Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh, Dobbs, Malkin or the other Helen Lovejoy's on the right have seen fit to report on this. Not even Senator McCain, who was the first to raise alarm about this before the election has made a comment.
In reality this is par for the course for republicans. As l wrote above, there were three stories to pick from this week, all of which failed to register in the so-called "Liberal Media".
Somehow the guilty plea in a real case of voter fraud, the story of an adulterous affair by yet another self-rightous "religious" family values conservative (but this time without the added element of gay sex, bathroom stalls or diapers) or the murderous activities of Shawna Forde a member of a group lauded by Dobbs, Beck, Hannity and O'Reilly (who said of them, "Talking Points applauds the Minutemen. They are in the great tradition of neighborhood watch groups.") have somehow failed to be mentioned by ANY of them.
All you can hear are the sounds of crickets chirping.
BTW if you are wondering why l chose the voter fraud story over the other two, expecially over the hypocrisy of O'Reilly who spent a lot of the last few weeks complaining about the lack of coverage over the murder of Private Long, yet has spent very few minutes on the Forde murder story, the simple fact is that Griff Jenkins really REALLY annoys me. To quote the late, great Douglas Adams "he has a smile that makes you want to hit him in the face with a brick".
Watching him at the Democratic Convention last year helps bring me out of the funk i've been in for the last few days almost as much as these do.