Justin's Political Corner

ST. LOUIS   •   Liberal CNN host Piers Morgan says he has banned conservative St. Louis radio host Dana Loesch from his show, alleging she was “glib” in a Twitter comment about the beheading of a British soldier.

The soldier was killed in London by a machete-wielding assailant, officials said today.

Loesch, in an apparent comment on criticism of gun owners by gun-control advocates, responded by posting on her Twitter feed: “Was the guy with the machete a member of the NRA? Asking for a friend.”

Morgan, who is British, responded via Twitter: “You think the beheading of a soldier is something to be glib about???”

A heated Twitter exchange ensued between the two, who have appeared on each others’ shows debating their opposing ideologies.

During the Twitter exchange, Loesch slammed Morgan for “calling me Nancy Lanza because I stood up for 2A rights,” referring to the mother of Newtown massacre shooter Adam Lanza. Morgan wrote that Loesch should “shut up with stupid political wisecracks” and “show some bloody respect.”

The exchange culminated with a Tweet from Morgan: “Can’t stomach @DLoesch goading Brits with her outrageous tweeting re beheaded soldier story. Unfollowed, and banned from my show.”

“Unfollowed” means you don’t subscribe to someone’s Twitter feed.

Loesch’s own Twitter profile later displayed the line: “Proudly banned from Piers Morgan’s TV show.”

Piers Morgan »> Dana Loesch. 

h/t: Kevin McDermott at St. Louis Post-Dispatch

(cross-posted from Daily Kos)

ST. LOUIS   •   St. Louis will host a regional Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in September, the American Conservative Union announced today.

CPAC conventions, which meet annually in Washington and other cities, have often set the agenda for grassroots conservatism nationwide, and have highlighted rising stars of the Right.

The St. Louis CPAC will partner with St. Louis-based radio host Dana Loesch and FM NewsTalk 97.1 (KFTK), as well as the Show-Me Institute, according to a statement. It’s scheduled for Saturday, September 28, 2013 at the St. Charles Convention Center. Further information is available at http://conservative.org/cpac/stlouis/#

h/t: STLtoday.com

In the immediate aftermath of Breitbart’s death last year, at age 43, the Beltway media reflexively whitewashed and glorified his work and legacy, canonizing a reactionary circus barker as some kind of American Icon, a gonzo iconoclast, a conservative punk rocker, or a “Zany, Magnetic Media Hacker,” as Wired’s Noah Shachtman put it. Publications ranging from Time, the Washington Post and Slate sang Breitbart’s praises; scores of ambitious up-and-coming media figures burned both ends of the candle to compose the seminal Andrew Breitbart funeral tribute.

Some examples:

• The Los Angeles Times: “His genius was rooted in the realization that in the new media universe, being outrageous often gets far more attention than being authoritative…In many ways, Breitbart was a throwback to the subversive media manipulators of the 1960s, especially counterculture provocateurs like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. They courted the media with bizarre antics. Breitbart often did the same.”
• Jack Shafer in Reuters: “I admired the way he ignored journalistic convention and the usual ethical standards to pursue the stories that were important to him. I admired his entrepreneurial approach to journalism and his disdain for the credentialed, self-important press corps.”
• Time: “Breitbart gave hard and must have expected to get it back hard. He came out of the American political tradition that if you cared about things, then you fought about them…Part of Breitbart’s legacy is a rise in the power of openly partisan journalism outlets and contested news. But if another part of his legacy–as exemplified by the first reaction to his death–is a rise in skepticism, alertness and critical reading of the media, that’s not entirely a bad thing.
• The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza: “Andrew Breitbart was complicated. He clearly saw around the corner of where journalism was headed but the ways in which he used that insight rightfully raise questions about his ultimate motives… If you loved him, you really loved him. And if you hated him, well you really hated him. Having met Breitbart on a few occasions and corresponded with him infrequently over the years, I can’t imagine he would want it any other way.”

This is how the mainstream press describes great iconoclasts, not paid hatchet-men and extraction industry tools like Breitbart. It’s uncanny how these major media obits synced with the rebel-washed image of himself that Breitbart pushed on the public, as for example this quote from his book “Righteous Indignation”:

“My mission isn’t to quash debate — it’s to show that the mainstream media aren’t mainstream, that their feigned objectivity isn’t objective, and that open, rigorous debate is a positive good in our society. Man, how I long for the days of Sam Kinison, Richard Pryor, Abbie Hoffman, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, George Carlin, and Lenny Bruce.”

Slate’s Dave Weigel quoted that very excerpt in his Breitbart obituary; what’s interesting is Weigel’s smart decision to edit the next sentence in that quote:

“Today, the only people upholding their free-speech legacies are conservatives like Anne Coulter and Rush Limbaugh.”

Weigel’s decision to edit out that sentence from his Breitbart quote changes everything — put that sentence in, and Weigel’s Breitbart is suddenly a lot less interesting and unique and trailblazing. That edit was emblematic of the mainstream media’s love affair with an otherwise garden variety GOP sleaze-peddler.

Breitbart, of course, had nothing in common with the comedians whose anti-establishment spirit he claimed to embody. Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce came up from poverty and overcame anti-Semitism and entrenched, violently enforced racism to wield their wit against powerful forces. Bruce was hounded throughout his career by the FBI, local cops and eventually blacklisted from nearly every comedy club in the United States. Whereas Breitbart collaborated with the FBI and New York police to spy on Occupy Wall Street protesters. Perhaps the only thing Bruce had in common with Breitbart, who spent his career in a mostly uncritical national limelight, was his untimely death at age 40 while in the throes of paranoia and emotional collapse.

Breitbart, the adopted son of a wealthy West Los Angeles restauranteur, used his privilege to immiserate the most marginalized, impoverished, widely demonized groups of Americans. He was a faithful errand boy for rich, Scrooge McDuck tycoons like Peter Thiel, Foster Friess, and the Koch Brothers, wielding smear journalism against anyone or any interest that threatened their power — usually African-Americans or groups like ACORN, serving impoverished, neglected inner city communities.

There was nothing innovative or new about Breitbart’s smear operation. Indeed, he walked a trail blazed by the now-forgotten snitches and smear artists of the McCarthy era – quasi-eccentric figures like Matt Cvetic and Henry Matusow. Cvetic drank himself to death a few years after McCarthy’s fall; while Matusow recanted, was jailed for perjury, and spent the last decades of his life begging for money and working as a clown for children’s parties. Breitbart, for his part, collapsed on a sidewalk outside his home in Brentwood at the tender age of 43.

Breitbart’s Doomsday Machine

By now, it has become clear that in the months before his death, Breitbart had constructed a journalistic Doomsday Machine and programmed it for an apocalyptic episode of self-destruction. Perhaps it was convenient that Breitbart’s heart exploded when it did; as a martyr, he did not have to witness the implosion of his media empire or bear the responsibility he deserved for its rapid demise.

In the year after Breitbart’s death, his heirs and associates produced a string of grotesque episodes that have embarrassed even their own impossible-to-shame allies on the right, including:

• Spreading the lie that Chuck Hagel took money from a non-existent group called “Friends of Hamas.” What began as a New York Daily News reporter’s burlesque joke-hypothetical question to a Senate staffer was recycled by Breitbart.com editor-at-large Ben Shapiro [see below] and reported as fact from “Senate sources.” From Breitbart, the reporter’s joke traveled onto the Senate floor and nearly sank Hagel’s confirmation as Obama’s new Defense Secretary. Even after the story was completely debunked and disavowed even by fellow right-wingers, Breitbart.com remains the only media outlet in the world that continues to stick by its debunked story;
• In mid-March, Breitbart published a straight news story claiming that Paul Krugman had filed for bankruptcy. The story was sourced from an online news parody site, The Daily Currant;
• Also in March, Breitbart’s most famous protege, video smear-artist and convicted criminal James O’Keefe, wasforced to pay a six-figure settlement to one of the victims of his heavily-edited ACORN videos, which was deceptively re-edited to give the impression that ACORN employees were willing to participate in sex trafficking. ACORN was once a powerful community activist organization working in mostly poor minority communities. O’Keefe’s video, which was heavily promoted by Breitbart, helped destroy ACORN and ruin the careers of many of its employees. Other lawsuits against Breitbart associates continue, including one filed by Shirley Sherrod, an African-American employee of the Department of Agriculture who was fired after Breitbart pushed a heavily-edited video manipulated to make Sherrod appear as if she was anti-white. O’Keefe’s work has been underwritten by everyone from billionaire libertarian Peter Thiel to the billionaire Koch brothers and the billionaireFoster Friess;
• At the most recent CPAC conference in 2013, Breitbart.com’s sponsored panel bashing Muslims was considered too hateful and extremist by CPAC’s organizers and banned from the official CPAC agenda — despite the fact that Breitbart News Network is a major sponsor of CPAC.

Pull the camera back a bit further, looking back on the year since Breitbart died, and the same pattern of appalling failure, journalistic fraud, and malevolence repeats itself on a broader scale. The actual record of Breitbart’s legacy — not the manufactured, iconoclastic legacy cooked up by Breitbart’s fanboys in mainstream media, but his real legacy — turns out to be much less than advertised.

What Breitbart really left behind is not so much a media business as an asylum for fringe-right degenerates, a motley collection of depraved losers, beer hall rage-a-holics and downright freaks offering themselves up as mercenaries for the rich and powerful, taking dirty jobs no one with a shred of self-respect would consider. As hired-assassins who couldn’t hit the side of a barn if their lives depended on it, the unlikely heirs Breitbart once hired as sycophantic underlings come off as a comedy troupe of slapstick fascists — and it would be funny, if not for the powerful corporate forces sponsoring their attempts at sectarian smears and top-down class warfare.

“A Major Letdown”

The string of Breitbart.com’s epic failures began with Andrew Breitbart’s final act — what he promised would be his biggest bombshell of all, bigger than the Anthony Weiner boner-tweet, bigger than the destruction of ACORN or Shirley Sherrod. In a speech to the 2012 CPAC conference, Breitbart titillated his conservative groupies with what he said was video evidence that Barack Obama was a Manchurian candidate programmed and set upon America by Marxist Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. “Barack Obama was launched from Bill and Bernadine’s salon. I was there,” Breitbart snarled.

Looking haggard and swollen as he stood before the CPAC audience, slurring his words, Breitbart described the nefarious plot that his bombshell video would soon expose, bringing down the Obama presidency:

“the rest of us slept as they plotted, and they plotted, and they plotted and they oversaw hundreds of millions of dollars in the Annenberg Challenge and they had real money, from real capitalists. Then they became communists. We got to work on that. That is a parenthesis. Barack Obama is a radical, we should not be afraid to say that!”

The speech was just inane and incoherent enough to be taken seriously by Glenn Beck. It should have been a warning sign; it should have been greeted with derision by everyone in the media purporting to do their job — but they were too enamored of Andrew Breitbart, too easily seduced by his marketing power, his “brand,” his celebrity, his vulgar attempt at gonzo-McCarthyism… too intellectually insecure to dismiss Breitbart’s fake populism for what it was: race-baiting corporate propaganda, handsomely rewarded.

Less than a week after Breitbart’s heart popped like a water balloon, the heirs to his legacy were revealed on Fox News’ Sean Hannity Show. Seated together in a remote studio were Breitbart’s new editor-in-chief Joel B. Pollak, and his mini-me, a weasel-faced anti-masturbation crusader named Ben Shapiro. Before an utterly underwhelmed and clearly disappointed Hannity, the duo unveiled the dramatic Obama video.

What Breitbart’s young heirs delivered — what Andrew Breitbart’s corpse delivered, posthumously — turned out to be a monumental dud. The video showed President Obama as a Harvard law student, affecting the same relaxed, monotone-dull, soporific way of speaking that soothed voters in the 2008 election. The video needed explaining — the African-American Harvard Law professor, Derrick Bell, was a race- and class-war radical, Breitbart’s heirs tried to argue. And Obama hugged him — and embraced him.

To the average viewer, it was hard to get worked up over an arcane doctrine called “critical race theory,” which needed explaining. Jeremiah Wright’s rants needed no explaining. But Derrick Bell’s did.

The anti-Obama right was visibly angry. Hannity tried his best to contain his anger at Pollak and Shapiro, but fellow Fox commentator Juan Williams, the network’s token liberal, called it a clunker right on the program:

“I must say, I thought this was going to be so much more,” said Williams. “I thought this was going to be a smoking gun… But it really didn’t come to much.”

Even Glenn Beck was sorely disappointed — and his bar is notoriously low — telling his radio listeners:

“The Obama college tape — wasn’t that a major letdown? I mean I feel bad for Andrew that that was the thing that came out right after [he died] because it was a little disappointing. I think that’s because, you know, if you die you say to your wife, ‘Oh honey, I have something really important to tell you, don’t let me forget.’ And then you go and die. And then she finds the note. And it’s like, ‘Please remind me, I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow.’ That’s really kind of disappointing, you know. Because you’re like, ‘I thought he had something really important to tell me.’ … This thing came out and it was like, ‘The. Last. Story. Andrew. Breitbart. Did: Very. Important. Video.’ And you’re like…[shakes head ‘sadly, no’] ‘Not so much.’”

And from there, it’s been all downhill for Breitbart.com.

Indentured Servitude Limbo

Part of the problem was the “talent” charged with pitching and selling the video to the public. Leaving aside whatever demons Breitbart battled with and lost, his legacy is a company racked with infighting, lawsuits, scandals, embarrassments, and is staffed at key levels with sexual predators, police informants, and genocidal sociopaths.

Right-wing radio host Dana Loesch, editor-in-chief of Breitbart’s “Big Journalism” site, would have been the closest thing to a number-two presentable face after Breitbart himself. But weeks before Breitbart died, Loesch had been put out to pasture from her brief stint as a CNN contributor after she came out in support of defiling enemy corpses. Early in 2012, US Marines in Afghanistan photographed themselves defiling and urinating on Taliban corpses, in violation of American military and international law; Loesch went on the air supporting the soldiers, adding that she too would gladly pull her pants down and defile their corpses if given the chance:

“I’d drop trou and do it too.”

Andrew Breitbart stood by Loesch, but he was alone; even Rush Limbaugh denounced the corpse defiling.

Problems with Loesch only got worse after Breitbart’s demise, culminating in a lawsuit she filed in late 2012, accusing Breitbart’s heirs of “forcing her into ‘indentured servitude limbo.’” Loesch’s lawsuit asked for a relatively modest $75,000 in compensation (given Breitbart’s billionaire sponsors), and demanded that Breitbart.com LLC release her from her contractual duties.

Loesch’s lawsuit, filed at the end of 2012, offers a rare insight into the chaotic and poisonous corporate culture that Andrew Breitbart left behind.

The lawsuit describes Breitbart.com LLC as “poorly managed” and describes Breitbart’s heirs as a “vindictive party” determined “to sabotage the reputation and career” of Dana Loesch.

Claiming that she’d been identified as “the face of the Breitbart empire” in the fall of 2012, Loesch’s lawsuit alleges “internal difficulties the new company had with managing the media ‘empire’” and claimed “the working environment for Loesch became increasingly hostile.”

Loesch claimed her contract allowed her to terminate their agreement with a 30-day written notice; Breitbart.com LLC responded that she was bound by the contract to continue with Breitbart.com, yet at the same time, denied her access to the website, effectively muzzling the media company’s only media semi-celebrity.

With Loesch out of the picture, the “face of Breitbart.com” title has mostly gone to the same two clowns — Joel Pollak and Ben Shapiro — who botched the Obama student video on the Sean Hannity Show, and started Breitbart down the long slide into the fringe-right margins.

And that is just how Pollak and his little sidekick Shapiro, a pair of ambitious celebrity-seekers, like it. Pollak and Shapiro both harbor deluded fantasies of becoming the telegenic faces and voices of the conservative movement. The only thing holding them back: their faces and voices.

The Dorm Troll

Joel Pollak was born in South Africa, and moved to suburban Chicago at a young age, becoming a US citizen by age 10. Pollak enrolled in Harvard in the mid-90s, telling a local paper that his dream was to become the Ted Koppel of his generation, with his own TV program like Nightline. It explains a lot — as the idealistic part of that dream soured, all that has remained is the childhood ambition to be a TV talking head; the content is fungible.

In every way Joel Pollak of the 1990s was a different creature, conforming to the politics and mood of the Clinton era: Photographs of Pollak as an undergrad show him proudly sporting an expansive “Jewfro” — he looks much happier and almost likeable, if not human, in his Jewfro. Pollak was a Democrat student activist in his undergrad years. Another photograph shows young Joel Pollak, with his Jewfro cropped, smiling as he screams in unison with other pro-Clinton activists protesting against the Clinton impeachment hearings.

We spoke to several former Harvard classmates of Pollak. Each offered a uniform description of an extremely aggressive, often blundering, always self-promoting character who knew no shame. One former classmate who knew him during his undergraduate years and then during his time at Harvard Law School told us the young Pollak idolized Cornel West, the former Harvard African-American studies professor, socialist activist and critical race theory proponent.

“He absolutely loved Cornell West. He would try to present himself to us as West’s darling. Some Harvard students like to collect relationships with famous professors so it was also part of that.”

In 1999, Pollak graduated Harvard, and moved back to his native South Africa, where he remained until at least 2006, working as a speech writer for a controversial white, Jewish South African politician, Tony Leon, who was accused by top ANC politicians,including former President Thabo Mbeki, of racism. Leon inherited a party that had been known for its comparatively progressive politics during the apartheid-era, merged it with the pro-apartheid National Party, and made race-baiting and fear a cornerstone of his politics.

It was while working for Leon that Pollak met his future wife, Julia Bertlesmann.

Bertelsmann was the daughter of Tony Leon’s close friend, Rhoda Kadalie Bertelsmann, herself a well-known columnist and political activist with neoliberal leanings. After apartheid collapsed, Rhoda Kadalie turned against the ANC and “majoritarian” politics, favoring instead the neoliberal politics of Tony Leon’s party, and its alignment with Ariel Sharon and George Bush. As the ANC veered the country away from the special alliance it enjoyed with Israel during the apartheid era, Kadalie Bertelsmann emerged as one of South Africa’s most fervent apologists for the Israeli government, authoring a series of op-eds condemning critical comparisons of Israeli policies towards Palestinians to those of apartheid-era South Africa.

Before falling under the sway of Tony Leon’s race-baiting neocon politics, Pollak was a Clinton Democrat. When he left South Africa in 2006, Pollak says, he had become an opponent of the concept of majority rule — which in the context of South Africa means opposing black rule.

No surprise then that Pollak explicitly equated his opposition to majority rule (i.e. black rule) to his opposition to America’s first black president, which he describes in “Proud To Be Right”:

“I saw in Barack Obama’s presidency the roots of a cult of personality. I recognized in the Democrats’ eager rush to consolidate political power, and to expand rapidly the role of the federal government in the American economy — adangerous majoritarian impulse that our Constitution, and my experience in South Africa, warned against.”

Pollack’s return to the US coincided with Bertlesmann – then 18 or 19, and Pollack a decade older – enrolling in Harvard. Pollack didn’t just follow his future wife to Harvard, but according to former classmates, he also moved in to her dormroom, along with her teenage friends.

As one former Harvard student described the situation to us:

“When she was an undergrad, they were living together in her dorm room. From what I heard, it was something that people in the house there thought was kind of strange. An older law student always being there all the time with these younger students—and being his usual obnoxious self who was not even low key.

“I know a few people who know Julia [Bertelsmann]…and the consistent theme is there was this really smart, promising, beautiful high school student and somehow she ended up with this guy. Dot, dot, dot, question mark – what’s up with that? It might be part of [Pollak’s] personality. He sees something he wants and goes for it.”

It was at Harvard, where he had enrolled at law school, that Pollak authored a new book denouncing Obama’s election victory, “Don’t Tell Me Words Don’t Matter: How Rhetoric Won The 2008 Presidential Election.”

“He goes up against someone big and tries to puff himself up,” the former classmate told us. “That’s kind of his formula.”

Ignored even by fellow right-wingers, Pollak’s book on Obama was published by an obscure, Illinois based company specializing in medical textbooks, HC Press — which happens to be owned by Joel’s parents, Raymond and Naomi Pollak. The future heir to the Breitbart empire was over 30 years old, living in his girlfriend’s college dorm, and tapping his parents’ money to attack welfare and Big Government handouts.

On campus, Pollak took on the role of ultra-Zionist enforcer, working closely with the pro-Israel super-lawyer and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz to stamp out any iterations of Palestine solidarity activity. Pollak’s pro-Israel histrionics were on most vivid display in a class taught by Harvard law professor Duncan Kennedy, one of the most influential and renowned legal theorists of the past few decades.

Pollak and Dershowitz both loathed Duncan Kennedy’s politics, a loathing made clear by Pollak’s own personal blog rants at the time. Despite that hostility (and the waiting list) Prof. Kennedy made sure that Pollak was enrolled in his class, and he hired Pollak his research assistant. On his personal blog “Guide To The Perplexed,” which still stands as a record of his strange college years, Pollak blogged critically, almost obsessively about Kennedy.

Fellow law students recalled how a class debate on whether armed resistance by a theoretical occupied population was permissible set off Pollak into one of his notorious fits of histrionics.

According to one classmate, “He came back to class a week later and slammed a hunk of metal on the table and started shouting, ‘This is what you people are justifying! You are supporters of terrorism! This is piece of a Qassam rocket that’s fallen near [the Israeli city of] Sderot!’ Basically his behavior was embarrassing even to the other Zionists in the course.”

The classmate added, “[Pollak] is just someone who, in everything he did, speaking as someone who’s known him over the years, the persistent characteristic is a very, very deep lack of inhibition or shame.” He added, “I don’t know if it’s because he received too much positive reinforcement as a child or what. And in a way, it’s kind of admirable – he’s always willing to say something no matter how ridiculous or inappropriate it might be in the circumstances.”

In 2010, after graduating from law school, Pollak declared his candidacy for Congress as a Tea Party challenger against Democratic, Chicago-area stalwart Jan Schiakowsky. Despite an endorsement from his former taskmaster Dershowitz, a desperate deployment of his mixed-race wife to brand himself as an enlightened moderate, and an embarrassing but highly entertaining song routine (imagine a Teabagger’s version of that folk singer from Animal House), Pollak was trounced. He failed in an election where nearly every half-baked Tea Party challenger destroyed Democratic opponents. That should have been an ignominious end to his career, but then Breitbart came along with a liferaft.

From Harvard Law graduate to abject political failure, Pollak was recruited by Breitbart to help edit his growing portfolio of right-wing smear sites. And it is there that Pollak’s story of shamelessness, bizarre twists and ethically dubious behavior reached wild new lows.

Genocide Ben

Since Breitbart’s death, Breitbart.com has been defined almost as much by Pollak as it has by his tightly wound little sidekick, Ben Shapiro, now the site’s editor-at-large.

“I know this sounds pathetic, but I’ve never been to a rock concert” —Ben Shapiro, June 17, 2011

Ben Shapiro — known variously as “Virgin Ben,” “Tali-Ben,” or simply “Genocide Ben” — has constructed for himself a biography that makes him look like some sort of prodigy wunderkind. One thing Ben wants to stress is that he was 16 years old when he started college at UCLA.

“I’m twenty-one years old, a heterosexual red-blooded American male, a graduate of University of California at Los Angeles, a student at Harvard Law School, a nationally syndicated columnist, a bestselling author…and a virgin. And I’m proud of it.” —Ben Shapiro, “Porn Generation”

Ben Shapiro’s most useful talent is that he makes Joel Pollak look sane, cool and relaxed. Shapiro’s job is to fidget nervously while holding his tongue, like his bladder’s about to explode through his nose — providing needed contrast to Pollak.

As boy-wonder prodigies go, Ben Shapiro sure picked a shitty career path. A real prodigy would’ve pursued a mad artistic or science dream, or cashed in by taking a job in finance or management consulting; but Ben chose to be a lowly Republican errand boy instead, taking an almost masochistic pleasure in making as much of an ass of himself as is humanly possible.

“There are at least 100,000 child pornography websites available on the Internet. Also available: incestuous porn, bestial porn, and with extreme commonness, ‘virgin’ porn — for those guys who like to pretend that their fetish girls really haven’t done anything before taping a hard core sex video. ‘Schoolgirl’ porn is especially typical — from ‘first-time lesbian’ schoolgirls to ‘organ’ schoolgirl porn. The ‘college roommates’ idea is also big; lesbian porn between co-eds is insanely popular. The idea that the porn industry doesn’t push men to look at fifteen- to eighteen-year-old girls as sex objects is ridiculous.” —Ben Shapiro, “Porn Generation”

Some of what Ben Shapiro publishes is fascinating for the sheer Freudian freakshow entertainment value. Some are downright bizarre and raise all sorts of obvious questions, as in “How did Harvard let a deranged lughead like the author of this piece into its esteemed law school?” For example, this Ben Shapiro-authored attack on the Supreme Court. It’s a piece of pure meatheadery, beginning with the headline, “When Justices Become Dictators.” It begins:

“This week, the Supreme Court of the United States once again proved that it is a feckless, dictatorial and altogether ridiculous body. Its latest spate of decisions reveals legislative usurpation, disingenuous deference and silly inconsistency. But, of course, what else should we expect from the court that tells us our Constitution protects pornography but not political advertising, sodomy but not the Ten Commandments, and mentally disabled murderers but not private property?”

Prose that deranged and clunky wouldn’t grade a “C” in your average Californian community college expository writing course. But apparently Harvard Law School’s admission committee read that and thought, “We have our new Oliver Wendell Holmes!” Either that, or Harvard Law has a quota for fringe-right nutcases like Shapiro.

That’s the black comedy side of Ben Shapiro’s punditry. But there’s a darker side to Shapiro’s writing that reveals him as much worse than a mere silly nutcase. Ben Shapiro is on record advocating genocide against Palestinian Arabs in Greater Israel. Advocating genocide is considered a war crime — Nazi journalists were hung in Nuremberg for advocating genocide, and Hutu media personalities who advocated genocide in Rwanda have also been charged with genocide.

Yet that didn’t stop Harvard Law School’s Ben Shapiro from penning a column, “Transfer Is Not A Dirty Word,” calling for ethnic cleansing — which is legally classified as genocide and a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.

Here is Ben Shapiro, editor-at-large at Breitbart, advocating genocide:

“Here is the bottom line: If you believe that the Jewish state has a right to exist, then you must allow Israel to transfer the Palestinians and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper. It’s an ugly solution, but it is the only solution. Any time the Jews get wise and threaten mass expulsion of Arabs, the Arabs pull out their big stick, equating Nazism with Zionism… Their spokespeople cry ‘Genocide!’ And the Jews cower in fear that they could be equated with their parents’ murderers. The Jews don’t realize that expelling a hostile population is a commonly used and generally effective way of preventing violent entanglements. It’s time to stop being squeamish. Jews are not Nazis. Transfer is not genocide. And anything else isn’t a solution.”

Actually it is genocide. And it’s the reason why Ben Shapiro came to be known as “Genocide Ben.”

Here, then, is Andrew Breitbart’s true legacy: His two leading heirs, Joel Pollak and Genocide Ben Shapiro, stepping in as the new faces of Breitbart.com to unveil the Obama student video that Andrew himself promised would bring down Obama’s presidency, just as he helped bring down ACORN, Shirley Sherrod, Andrew Weiner, and a handful of tweedy NPR executives.

But without Breitbart’s privileged Brentwood demeanor to make the smearing appear vaguely respectable, the Breitbart.com operation is being pushed further into the margins of its own conservative movement, as evidenced when CPAC banished this year’s Breitbart hate seminar to the unofficial margins of the CPAC convention, which already had enough hate and racism on its agenda.

Last Refuge Of A Daily Caller Scoundrel

What’s most fascinating about Breitbart’s legacy is that these two central characters — Joel B. Pollak and Ben Shapiro — are the best they have to offer. Look at the layer below them in the Breitbart media group, and it’s like pulling up the rotted, vermin-infested floorboards in a rotted old swamp shack —where degenerates and quasi-fascist maniacs permeate the entire Breitbart culture. Here you get a look at the late Andrew Breitbart’s true personal sensibility, through the pathological tendencies of his chosen heirs. The minions who comprise the Breitbart community include:

• John Nolte, Breitbart.com editor and blogger. Has repeatedly called for murdering teachers and mothers. During Occupy protests in November 2011, Nolte tweeted, “Teachers who take kids to protests without parents’ permission should be murdered.” In April 2012, he responded to an HBO comedy show gag involving a young girl by writing, “whoever this little girl’s stage mom is… she should be murdered.” When police violently cracked down on Occupy protests, Nolte was sexually aroused: “Dirty, filthy #OWS hippies getting what they deserve from cops = MY PORN”; “Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes. Dirty, filthy hippies arrested with bruises and gashes…”; “sniff sniffThere’s just something about a police baton swung towards the skull of #OWS that sniff chokes a man up. #ItsSoBeautiful”.
• Jeff Dunetz: Breitbart.com blogger nicknamed “Yid With Lid,” Dunetz, has accused practically everything alive or dead of “anti-Semitism”, from Media Matters and George Soros, to President Obama, and even corporations like Delta Airlines.
• Kurt Schlichter, Breitbart.com columnist. Advocated mass-murdering peaceful American protesters on board a flotilla sent to Gaza to protest Israel’s blockade; urged conservatives to arm themselves and prepare for war against the left because “Leftists want us dead. D-E-A-D.”
• Ali Akbar, Breitbart columnist and head of Breitbart.com-associated outfit the National Bloggers Club, is a convicted felon who was jailed and put on probation for four years for credit card fraud, vehicle burglary, and intent to commit theft.
• Brandon Darby, FBI informant who infiltrated young anarchist protest groups and ratted them out, leading to arrests and jail time for his former friends. Darby also spied on an Arab-American school teacher and peace activist, Riad Hamad, whom Darby claimed had asked him to launder money for Middle East terrorists. Not long afterwards, Hamad’s corpse was fished out of a lake, his arms bound and his mouth duct-taped; police ruled it a suicide. After Darby outed himself as an informant, Andrew Breitbart brought him into his close circle of friends, and had Darby accompany him in public demonstrations in support of the Koch brothers.
• James O’Keefe, convicted of attempting to illegally spy on a US Senator and forced to pay large settlements to victims of his manipulated videos which destroyed the livelihoods of several people.
• Lee Stranahan: Breitbart.com blogger who spent years peddling photographs specializing in many of Genocide Ben’s favorite fetishes, including bondage and S&M, and Ben’s fave,schoolgirl lesbian fetishes. Stranahan covered the Steubenville rape trial for Breitbart.com, tweeting out his belief that the rape of the 16-year-old schoolgirl was not “brutal” and that many women tell him that their rapes are not “brutal” but merely “non consensual.” During the Trayvon Martin murder trial hearings last summer, Stranahan outed the name of a witness who claimed she’d been sexually abused by Martin’s killer.

If there’s one thing Breitbart’s heirs can be thankful for, it’s that there’ll always be an endless stream of degenerate right-wing failures looking for an asylum they can call home. And Breitbart.com will be there to welcome them in, weaponize them for the wealthy right-wing, and turn them on the rest of us.

H/T: AlterNet

Conservative talk show host Dana Loesch called a St. Louis-area mother an “idiot” for attending an anti-gun violence rally in late March in downtown St. Louis. Three weeks later, the Riverfront Times reports Nikki Moungo, a 42-year-old mother of three, said Loesch lacks “compassion or sympathy” for victims of gun violence. Moungo was part of a Moms Against Guns rally that Loesch found disturbing. Now, the two are locked in a war of words over the controversial issue.

* Moungo called Loesch “extremely superficial” in her interview with the media outlet posted Tuesday. The mother has been helping her neighbor cope with the death of Matthew Pellegrini, a shooting victim murdered in St. Louis in 2012.

* Moungo called out Loesch’s assertion she is a “limo liberal” by saying, “You don’t have to wait for gun violence to affect you to get involved.”

* Loesch responded to Moungo’s interview with a blog post of her own. The conservative activist said, “I’ve actually had threats against myself and my family… . I’ve even had people show up at my house. People who’ve never been in the firsthand position of ever having to defend themselves should stop lecturing those who HAVE been in such position. Thanks for completely proving my point.”

* Among other observations, Loesch made fun of Moungo’s Frontenac sunglasses and designer clothes in addition to the fact that many of the women who attended the downtown St. Louis rally were from the suburbs. Moungo co-owns a construction business with her husband and has three boys ages 21, 19 and 9, according to the Riverfront Times piece.

* The war of words expanded to Twitter. Loesch posted, “In reality, [Moungo] is thin skinned because she obsessed over it for a week. My critique was right and it stung. Now move on.”

* Moungo replied when she said Loesch had “no clue” about her life circumstances in suburban St. Louis. She also told the conservative blogger, “Don’t mock those who mourn, try being civilized.”

* The online fracas started with Loesch’s commentary on the anti-gun rally posted to RedState.com March 30. The blogger started by calling attendees “well-heeled progressive women from the nice, safe part of Missouri… .”

* One of the speakers at the rally suggested the United States cede its sovereignty to the United Nations in terms of better gun control. A journalist asked Mayor Francis Slay if he agreed with Dr. Robert Flood’s statement, but he refused to answer the question.

* Moungo is not the only St. Louis resident infuriated by Loesch. Local chef Dale Beauchamp called upon Loesch’s supporters to “use your easily purchased firearm on yourself.” Twitchy.com reports Beauchamp apologized for making his comments and the restaurant for which he works, Little Country Gentleman, distanced itself from the chef’s remarks in a string of tweets made Thursday.

* Loesch is a St. Louis native who contributes to many national news media outlets on a regular basis. She is married with two children.

Fuck people like Dana Loesch!

h/t: Yahoo! News

Craven anti-reproductive choice psychopath Dana Loesch is using the Kermit Gosnell story to pro-choicers and abortion in general.

The real facts about the Kermit Gosnell story, via The Nation’s Katha Pollitt:

Blood-spattered floors. Cat feces. Broken equipment. A 15-year-old giving anesthesia. Two women dead, countless more maimed and injured. Third-trimester fetuses delivered alive whose spines were then severed by the doctor. This was the Women’s Medical Society in West Philadelphia. This is what illegal abortion looks like. 

That’s right. Illegal abortion. A great deal has been written about Dr. Kermit Gosnell and the shocking conditions and practices at his facility, which was closed last March after a drug raid, and is back in the news because a grand jury has indicted him and nine employees for murder in the deaths of one woman and seven infants. There have been many calls for further restrictions on abortion, much revulsion expressed at post-viability abortions, much blame cast on prochoicers for supposedly doing nothing to stop him. But it has not been pointed out often enough that what Dr. Gosnell was doing was illegal in Pennsylvania. It is not legal to perform abortions after twenty-four weeks. It is not legal to slit the necks of born-alive fetuses at any age, much less at thirty weeks or even more. It is not legal for untrained, unlicensed employees to perform medical procedures. 

Now prochoicers are being blamed for this rogue operator. The grand jury report suggests that Tom Ridge, Republican governor from 1995 to 2001, discontinued inspections because prochoicers claimed they were too burdensome. The ones I talked to were skeptical. “We never lobbied against inspection,” Carol Tracy of the Women’s Law Project, which represents clinics in Pennsylvania, told me by phone. She pointed out that under Ridge’s Democratic predecessor, Bob Casey, who was famously opposed to legal abortion, Gosnell’s clinic was inspected three times, and each time serious problems were found. Nothing was done. Perhaps it’s relevant that Gosnell’s patients were poor, many of them immigrants—like 41-year-old Karnamaya Mongar from Nepal, with whose murder Gosnell has been charged—who may not even have known that safe and legal abortion is available here. 

 Irin Carmon at Salon debunks the “it’s being under-covered prior to this week” meme:

This week, the right wing has been working the refs, demanding to know why the press has been allegedly silent on the trial of Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia doctor who allegedly committed horrific acts against his patients with impunity for years. Fox News’ Kristen Powers kicked it off with an op-ed in USA Today, claiming, “The deafening silence of too much of the media, once a force for justice in America, is a disgrace.” Michelle Malkin has helped spearhead a Twitter campaign. Breitbart.com calls it “a full-blown, coordinated blackout throughout the entire national media.”   

If you’ve never heard of the Gosnell story, it’s not because of a coverup by the liberal mainstream media. It’s probably because you failed to pay attention to the copious coverage among pro-choice and feminist journalists, as well as the big news organizations, when the news first broke in 2011. There would be something rich, if it weren’t so infuriating, about these (uniformly male, as it happens) reporters and commentators scrambling to break open this shocking untold story. You know, the one that was written about here, hereand here, to name some disparate sources.

On the other hand, Loesch at RedState.com was using the Gosnell story as an excuse to drum up support for even tougher abortion restrictions and/or outright bans of the practice:

We need sensible abortion control. Think of how many classrooms of children lost their lives at the hands of Gosnell. The difference between Gosnell and some other abortionists is that Gosnell was caught. Gosnell didn’t use an AR-15 to snuff out the lives of these live infants. He assaulted them with scissors. Too many to count. There is a photo of one child (via the grand jury testimony) stuffed into a shoebox like a pet hamster. His little legs were too big so they hung out over the sides. Just one life.  
Call your lawmaker today. It’s time for common sense abortion control. 

Call your lawmakers. Demand common sense abortion regulation. Even if it saves just one life. #Gosnell
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) April 12, 2013

Waiting for the call of “sensible restrictions” since #Gosnell has blown the lid off of an industry.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) April 12, 2013

Where is the “sensible solution” talk about abortion regulation in the wake of the #Gosnell live infant murders?
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) April 12, 2013

Remember when pro-abortionists said women would die in dirty clinics if abortion was illegal? #GOSNELL
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) April 12, 2013

The difference between #Gosnell and some of these other abortionists is that Gosnell was caught.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) April 12, 2013

(Cross-Posted from DanaBusted.blogspot.com)

Piers Morgan Tonight host Piers Morgan clearly has not had enough, nor can he get enough of, conservative commentator Dana Loesch. Maybe that will change after the latest episode of the Piers and Dana Show™, in which Loesch triumphantly declared that Morgan “admitted” the “truth” that he is in favor of completely disarming American citizens. In the umpteenth pointless cable news segment devoted to absurd gun nut talking points, though, Loesch appears to have “admitted” that she, in turn, is in favor of unlimited numbers of children being killed with guns.

The “sizzle” in this clip is the steady stream of absurdities that come out of Dana Loesch’s mouth, but the steak is Van Jones‘ absolute nailing of the point I’ve been trying to make about these cable news gun-nut “debates,” a point that Piers Morgan would do well to heed. 

Dana Loesch would probably object to being called a “gun nut,” and point to the term as evidence that liberals are dismissive of those who disagree with them, but she earned the label in a previousPMT segment when she argued that Americans have the right to bear arms equivalent to those of our global enemies. That’s what makes you a gun nut, not a valid concern for the right of self-protection.

Loesch burnished that credential repeatedly in this segment, blithely arguing, for example, that “Anything can be qualified as an assault weapon. If you stab someone with a spoon, it can be qualified as an assault weapon.”

This is a reference to the popular gun-nut talking point that assault weapons classifications are mysterious, arbitrary distinctions based solely on the weapons’ appearance, when, in fact, there arespecific functional criteria involved. The “confusing” variations arise only out of legislators’ attempts to make assault weapons bans less restrictive, a generosity that has obviously outlived its usefulness.

Loesch also casually dismisses the utility of high-capacity magazines by asking “Do you realize how easy it is to reload? Piers, you can take a speed loader and reload a revolver, 150 rounds. That means he had to reload four times.”

Then, there’s the exchange that Dana Loesch is so proud of, in which she gets the answer she wanted. “What’s the difference between 30 rounds and what’s the difference between seven rounds?” she asks.

“The difference between 30 and seven is 23,” Morgan replies. “So it could save 23 lives if there was a federal ban on these magazines.”

From this, Loesch concludes “Seven lives lost are OK with you, then? Seven lives lost are OK?”

“You know what, Dana, seven is better than 30, yes,” Morgan replies.

“I’m just trying to establish where you draw the line,” Loesch smartly retorts. “Where do you draw the line at preventing the deaths of children, Piers?”

“I would love to draw the line, Dana, at zero gun deaths in America,” Morgan says.

“So you do believe in disarmament, then,” Dana concludes.

Like a pro wrestling announcer who isn’t in on the con, Morgan is hurt and miffed by this screwdriver to the neck, but he completely misses the implications of Loesch’s “logic trap.” Under her construction, that “seven lives lost are OK,” Loesch’s opposition to any limit on magazine size amounts to an endorsement of unlimited lives lost.

The reason it never occurs to Morgan to turn the tables on Loesch is that his mission is not the same as hers. As Van Jones pointed out, it is the job of gun nuts like Dana Loesch to say anything, anything at all, to prevent a meaningful conversation about gun violence, in hopes that public urgency toward the issue will wane, and the status quo will prevail. I don’t presume to know what Dana Loesch thinks, but I’m fairly certain she doesn’t really believe that Americans should have the right to possess chemical warheads. She’s not stupid or insane, she can’t possibly believe that the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School would have turned out the same if the shooter had been forced to reload 30 times. These are just things that she says to derail the debate.

Most liberals would watch this clip and conclude that Dana Loesch is the villain. The unkindest way to interpret her actions is that she’s cynically trying to exploit this issue to gain fame and exposure for herself, and the kindest is that she sees herself as a bulwark against tyranny, willing to protect the rights she thinks she has, by any means necessary. Evil or misguided, though, Dana Loesch isn’t the problem, Piers Morgan is. He’s the one who keeps booking her on his show, knowing that the result will be pointless arguments like this one.

That doesn’t mean Dana Loesch has no responsibility in this, it just means viewers should have a clear understanding of what that responsibility is. Dana Loesch is a human being, and her responsibility is to act like one. Humanity requires a certain level of empathy, which is not to be confused with sympathy. Loesch views the gun debate through the lens of her own experiences, which do not include having her own child killed by a mass-murdering lunatic. If Dana Loesch’s child had been killed by the 13th shot from a 33-round magazine, during a killing spree that ended when the shooter had to reload, it’s entirely possible that she would still oppose limiting magazine capacity to 10 rounds, or seven rounds. I hope that question is never answered, but I suspect that if she were somehow able to take the full measure of these tragedies, she might not snicker contemptuously through a discussion like this.

h/t: Tommy Christopher at Mediaite

Three of St. Louis’ leading teabagger pro-2nd Amendment fetishists— Dana Loesch, Chris Loesch, and Jim Hoft— used today’s gun safety rally in Downtown St. Louis City at Kiener Plaza to smear Mayor Francis Slay and promoted baseless United Nations-related conspiracy theories, such as falsely accusing speaker Dr. Robert Flood of “ceding United States sovereignty to the United Nations.”

Earlier today a bunch of well-heeled progressive women from the nice, safe part of Missouri rolled into crime-ridden St. Louis city to condescend to city residents and hold signs proclaiming “Moms Demand Action! For Gun Sense In America!” Because what mom doesn’t demand action for things, gun sense especially? These moms aren’t like those pro-Second Amendment moms, who apparently do not demand gun sense, whatever that’s supposed to mean. 

St. Louis City Mayor Francis Slay stood onstage behind speaker Dr. Robert Flood, who remarked how the United States should cede sovereignty to the United Nations because they can deal better with gun crime. You know, the United Nations that has has as members of its security council top-rated countries like Rwanda and Pakistan who are famous for citizens’ safety. 

I was a bit surprised by this; as Democrats go, Slay is perceived as a moderate. He’s never glommed onto the incendiary rhetoric his party has used or insulted the tea party. While his office did give some preferential treatment to the Occupy movement, he also cracked down on them shortly thereafter and threw them out of the park in which they were squatting. Mass arrests occurred and the Occupiers responded by defacing a city employee’s house and landmarks around the city. Personally, I’ve always had a friendly relationship with members of Slay’s staff which again, is why I am surprised that he attended this rally. It was anything but a non-partisan rally. Slay’s people are always careful to keep him from very polarizing events but in this case, they failed.  

Other failures of this rally: only around 150 people from around the area attended. Also, after hearing about class warfare and “one percenters” for a year, I found it hysterical to see that the rally seemed to only attract the most well-heeled limousine liberals. ” I wouldn’t expect these women to understand the realities of city life or the need for us city residents to protect ourselves. 

As a city resident, I find it absurd that our @mayorslay is conflating this 2A issue. Everyone is against illegal use. So what then?
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 30, 2013

Also find it a riot that the police chief was reportedly there when he once told me that to be armed is to be protected.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 30, 2013

2.1m incidents of firearms used in self defense annually. 10% by women. This STL city mom wants grabbers to stay out of her rights. #fgs
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 30, 2013

I live in the city. I sure don’t need some prog, bussed-in county women try to speak over those of us here who live with this daily.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 30, 2013

She smeared the protestors as “bussed-in from the County progressives.” I bet you if the protestors being bussed in supported Dana’s viewpoint, she would cheer it. 

Does @mayorslay agree with the other anti-2A speaker who demanded we turn US sovereignty over to the UN?thegatewaypundit.com/2013/03/mayor-…
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 30, 2013

Watch @stacyontheright ask @mayorslay if he agreed with the call to cede US sovereignty to UN at anti-2A rally today thegatewaypundit.com/2013/03/mayor-…
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 30, 2013

As Dems go, @mayorslay has been regarded as a moderate, which is why I’m a bit shocked that he attended the far-left designed rally.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 30, 2013

The anti-2A rally was about everything BUT illegal guns. That’s a front. Same exact people were silent over Fast & Furious.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 30, 2013

So we had the mayor, police chief, and other city leaders participating in a rally where speakers called for US to cede sovereignty to UN.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 30, 2013

Kind of a big deal that @mayorslay was standing on stage w/a speaker who demanded the US cede sovereignty to the UN. thegatewaypundit.com/2013/03/shocki…
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 30, 2013

Look at STL City mayor and leadership lined up behind speaker as he demands for the US to cede sovereignty to the UN. stltoday.com/news/multimedi…
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 30, 2013

Love these suburban liberals who ride into a city where we live to tell OUR mayor to erode our 2A rights. Please. stltoday.com/news/multimedi…
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 30, 2013

Your 2nd Amendment rights are NOT being eroded by these new gun safety proposals, Dana!

Lady in that last photo? She comes from a cushy neighborhood. She doesn’t need to think about her safety. Rape is a high stat in mine. I do.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 30, 2013

Yes, please stand there in your Frontenac sunglasses and designer chapeau and tell us city folk how we need to disarm ourselves. Idiot.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 30, 2013

Every woman I’ve seen in the captions at the anti-gun St. Louis rally? Not a single one lives in St. Louis city. A bunch of limo liberals.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 30, 2013

All these wealthy liberal women from well-to-do suburban neighborhoods came to the city where we live to stand against our 2A rights.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 30, 2013

Same people who preached class warfare for a year show up to an anti-gun rally in the city donning designer duds. Hilarious.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 30, 2013

So yes, I am absolutely REVELING in ridiculing it right now.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 30, 2013

You are a deranged douchebag, Dana!

The only time those women are in the city? Cards/Rams/hockey game and maybe when they were younger for Mardi Gras. Period.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 30, 2013

WRONGO, Dana! That’s a blatant generalization. 

And then with all this, our mayor on stage with some far-left whacko who demands that the US cede sovereignty to the UN. STELLAR RALLY.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 30, 2013

I love my city. Born and raised. Long time booster. Fam lived in Hyde Park during the war. They came up from the farms to work in factories.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 30, 2013

All why I get obscenely indignant towards polices that would irreparably damage it.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) March 30, 2013

Her husband, Chris, also took to Twitter and piled on to the distortions:

Far more stabbing deaths, deaths by hammer etc… Where is your push? You do know they include suicides? @andy_borenzweig @deacondarrell
— Chris Loesch (@ChrisLoesch) March 31, 2013

He repeated the “more people killed by hammers” lie.

I’m consistent, I wish we could protect a women, born & unborn. You would see them all defenseless. #Consistency @andy_borenzweig
— Chris Loesch (@ChrisLoesch) March 31, 2013

He also an anti-choice zealot, just like his wife Dana.

The #NRA defended the rights of blacks in the South to arm themselves from the Democrats who wanted them defenseless. @andy_borenzweig
— Chris Loesch (@ChrisLoesch) March 31, 2013

Look at the UK or Australia violent crime & rape skyrocketing after gun bans. A gun is a woman’s equalizer in an attack. @andy_borenzweig
— Chris Loesch (@ChrisLoesch) March 31, 2013

Hey derpy derpson any semi-auto can do that with more power. Most deaths are from handguns in “gun-free” cities. #TruthAche @andy_borenzweig
— Chris Loesch (@ChrisLoesch) March 31, 2013

I want to know why #proglodytes disregard the deaths of black youth & babies. The unholy fruits of eugenics = “gun-control” & abortion.
— Chris Loesch (@ChrisLoesch) March 30, 2013

The #proglodytes would have us believe that murder is only bad when it isn’t in gun-control cities & happens in more than 1 or 2 at a time.
— Chris Loesch (@ChrisLoesch) March 30, 2013

Not necessarily related to today’s gun safety event, but this tweet by him is so off the charts stupid that I have decided to call it our here:

When Obamacare is fully implemented how long do you think it will take before things like extreme sports are outlawed for medical costs?
— Chris Loesch (@ChrisLoesch) March 30, 2013

Dr. Robert Flood, director of pediatric emergency at SLU, gave the keynote speech at the end of the rally. The good doctor urged supporters to call congress and turn your rights and sovereignty over to United Nations by supporting the Child Rights Act.

What a bust… Only 150 turn out for StL gun grabbing rally twitter.com/gatewaypundit/…
— Jim Hoft (@gatewaypundit) March 30, 2013

(cross-posted from DanaBusted.blogspot.com)

Dana Loesch is a dangerous fucktard who should be in a mental institution somewhere.

Dana Loesch shouts at Piers Morgan: A spoon ‘can be qualified as an assault weapon!’ (via Raw Story )

Conservative radio host Dana Loesch on Thursday argued that classifying certain guns as assault rifles was silly because “if you stab someone with a spoon it can be qualified as an assault weapon.” Following Thursday’s revelations that Newtown shooter Adam Lanza had fired over 150 rounds with an AR-15 in less than five minutes, Loesch appeared on CNN to argue that it was a “false premise” that Lanza had used an assault weapon.

---

 

Newly minted RedState.com blogger, ex-CNN “contributor, and gun fetishist nutbag Dana Loesch was on national television yet again saying even more stupid shit about guns. The most insane thing of all that she said on tonight’s edition of CNN’s Piers Morgan Live was that a “spoon can be classified an ‘assault weapon.’” A spoon is NOT anywhere close to an “assault weapon” in the sane world, but in NRA/#TCOT-land, it is.

Mediaite:

Piers Morgan‘s show got heated on Thursday night when he invited Dana Loesch, Grover Norquist, and Van Jones to debate gun control. At one point in the segment, Loesch and Morgan grew especially frustrated as Loesch pressed the CNN host on where he draws the line on the number of gun deaths that are okay. 

Morgan went off the “outrageous” and “insensitive” NRA leadership, going on to cite statistics about gun-related deaths in the country, compared to those in other countries with stronger gun laws. Often making this comparison on the show in the past, Morgan stressed that those countries have “negligible” gun-related deaths. How, he asked, can that be explained in “any rational way”? 

“There is a deliberate effort to conflate the types of firearms,” Loesch insisted, noting that just because a gun “looks scary” doesn’t mean it can be categorized that way. She and Morgan later clashed over what qualifies as an assault weapon, with Loesch quipping that even a spoon could be labeled one. 

She further dismissed the argument about magazine capacity and criticized those who she felt are simply seeking to disarm people. Jones jumped in again to fire back at logic that doesn’t “make any sense” — like spoons. We’re talking about “funeral after funeral after funeral.” 

“How many deaths are okay to you?” Loesch asked Morgan. “Answer that question.”
As he sought to argue how a seven-round magazine is different from a 30-round magazine, she interjected, “So seven is okay with you then.”
“Seven is better than 30, isn’t it?” he retorted.

The other two guests were NRA board member and Americans for Tax Reform Founder Grover Norquist (who has been on KFTK’s The Dana Show before) and senior fellow at Center For American Progress Van Jones (whom Loeschhas smeared previously).



From the 03.28.2013 edition of CNN’s Piers Morgan Live:

After the show, she took to her blog at RedState to further smear gun safety advocates and repeated the baseless smear that the DHS is buying ammo, as even the deranged as hell NRA thinks it is too far out there..


RedState:

Let’s not cede further ground on this issue due to fear on language: any attempt to curtail the civil liberty outlined in the Second Amendment is an abridgment of that liberty. There is no splitting of the baby here. You take all of it or none of it. Restricting magazine capacity is silly, for the reasons I noted in my response to Morgan. First, they’re interchangeable, easily modified, and can be made with remedial shop skills in your garage. It is completely unenforceable. So what’s the next step then? Regulating the amount of ammunition one can purchase? The DHS is well on their way to drying up the supply by buying over a billon rounds of ammo. Ammunition is becoming projectile gold, for the lack of a better phrase. Restrictions on magazine capacity are easier to stomach than full on ammunition rationing, so that’s where Democrats will begin, through the proverbial Overton Window.

Restricting magazine capacity is NOT “anti-2nd Amendment,” as you allege.


Transcript:

PIERS MORGAN, HOST OF PIERS MORGAN LIVE: Let’s now bring in my all-star panel. Van Jones, CNN contributor and president of Rebuild the Dream, conservative radio talk show host Dana Loesch and Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform and an NRA board member. 
Welcome to you all. 
Van Jones, I just spoke again to Richard Feldman who is pretty close to the NRA leadership for quite awhile and the message is loud and clear from the NRA, as it always is. More guns and you’ll deal with gun violence. What do you say to that? 
VAN JONES, PRESIDENT AND CO-FOUNDER OF REBUILD THE DREAM: Well, I just think people are just flabbergasted to hear this. I mean, the idea that the kind of gun, the size of gun, the kind of magazine, none of these matters. Well, then, fine, just pass out bazookas. Start selling neutron bombs on the open market and then when people start using the bazookas and doing — say well, it’s not the bazooka or owner, you see, it’s just — I mean, it’s not the bazooka, it’s just the bazooka’s owner. 
Obviously the size of the cartridge matters. Obviously the kind of weapon matters. That’s why you can’t buy bazookas, you can’t buy neutron bombs, you can’t buy weaponized drones because these things matter. 
It’s very, very frustrating — the shame that I see right now is that on the one hand we’re not doing enough about mental health, but then we have people who are hiding behind the fact that we’re not doing one thing to stop us from doing anything else. And that’s wrong, too. 
MORGAN: I mean, Marco Rubio said today, he’s warned that he will filibuster any new gun legislation. 
Dana Loesch, how can that be an appropriate response to what happened at Sandy Hook? 
DANA LOESCH, CONSERVATIVE RADIO TALK SHOW HOST, “THE DANA SHOW”: Well, simply, Piers, because we have gun laws already on the books. Most of the proposals are simply redundancy. That’s why, why are we paying individuals to go and essentially waste taxpayer dollars to argue laws that we already have on the books? 
Laws which either aren’t enforced or criminals don’t obey them simply because that’s what criminals don’t do. Criminals are called criminals because they don’t follow law. 
MORGAN: Right. So Adam Lanza had two rifles, a BB gun, a starter pistol, four more weapons he took to school including the AR- 15, 1600 rounds of ammunition in his house, 12 knives, three Samurai swords, a bayonet, eye protection, ear mufflers at gun range, (INAUDIBLE) binoculars, paper targets, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And he went and did what he did. 
At what point, Dana, do you say, you know what, we’re just going to make it tougher for people to be able to have this kind of arsenal? 
LOESCH: Well, Piers, you realize that Adam Lanza, according to the “L.A. Times,” the “Portland Observer,” numerous local media report in Connecticut, he did try to purchase a firearm. And Connecticut’s gun laws prohibited him from doing that. Those gun laws worked in the sense that they prohibited him from purchasing a firearm. 
Now as to whether or not his mother should have had her firearms perhaps stored a little bit better and kept away from her son, that’s another topic of discussion. But, you know, again, he stole firearms, he committed a crime to obtain a firearm which he then used illegally. 
MORGAN: Grover Norquist, you’re on the board of the NRA. And the NRA it seems to me has a lot of very reasonable members, many of whom tweet me. And if you’re watching now, you want to tweet me, @Piersmorgan, and let me know if you’re an NRA member. And they can be quite rational and they say look, you know, we have no real problem with background checks. We don’t have any problem with more investment in mental health and so on. Not even much of a problem with the high capacity magazines. 
They’re not too sure about assault weapons. But they’re quite rational in what they say but the leadership always seem to me to be — particularly Wayne LaPierre, completely outrageous. Utterly insensitive, totally uncompromising. Why is that? 
GROVER NORQUIST, BOARD MEMBER, NRA: Well, I think if you look at the history of gun laws, make a list of which cities and states have the most oppressive gun laws. You’ll find they also have more crime and more shootings. There’s actually, if you look at the science, you know, liberals are always saying, we should look at the science, and yet they don’t want to look at the existing science on whether gun laws make us safer or less safe. 
John Locke did the first study of all the counties in United States and where you had concealed carry permits, more gun ownership by citizens, you actually had significantly less crime, hundreds and thousands of fewer murders, fewer rapes. 
MORGAN: OK, Grover, Grover —
NORQUIST: What you don’t have reported in the news is the fact that those states that put in concealed carry laws decades ago and have more people carrying guns are safer to live in than ones that ban it. So when you ask why don’t we do something stupid, the answer is because we have looked at the statistics, because we have looked at the science, and flat earthers should not be passing new laws. 
MORGAN: Well, let me — let me throw some science at you. How do you explain that, as I said to Mr. Feldman earlier, America has between 11,000 and 12,000 gun murders a year, 18,000 gun suicides a year, 100,000 Americans are hit by gunfire a year. And you look at somewhere like Britain or you look at somewhere like Australia or Japan or I could name dozens of other countries that have pretty strict gun control laws, and just have negligible gun deaths. 
I mean, literally, like 40 or 50 people a year get killed. How do you explain that, Grover, in any rational way that convinces me that countries that don’t have guns in mass circulation have almost no gun crime? 
NORQUIST: Well, if you compare apples and apples and look at the United States, and obviously Brazil and South Africa and other countries have a great number of gun crimes and they have very serious gun laws, so gun laws haven’t solved the problem in other countries, and where you put in more gun laws in Australia and Britain you’ve had more crime in general. More robberies, more crime. That they become less safe. 
Now in the United States, compare the states, 50 or 57, however you want to count them, they’ve all got different gun laws and different —
MORGAN: OK, Van. 
NORQUIST: — rules and —
MORGAN: Let me get Van in here. Let me get Van in here because he’s shaking his head vigorously. 
NORQUIST: Yes. 
MORGAN: Van? 
JONES: Well, first of all, that’s just actually not true but I want to say a couple of things. This is not about concealed —
NORQUIST: No, wait a minute. It is true. 
LOESCH: It is true. It is true. 
JONES: Hold on a second. It’s not true. 
NORQUIST: You can’t deny the science. 
JONES: First of all this is not about —
NORQUIST: You’re a science denier, Van. 
JONES: Are you going to let me talk? You guys are wonderful —
(CROSSTALK)
LOESCH: About gun laws, guys and statistics. 
JONES: Hey, listen, I’m with you. I’m for statistics. Here’s what’s actually true. This is not a debate about concealed carry. You want to move the argument over to something that nobody’s arguing about. Nobody’s arguing about concealed carry. People are arguing about military-style weapons on the streets of America and whether or not that is a good thing or a bad thing. 
LOESCH: That’s a false premise. 
JONES: The —
LOESCH: That’s a false premise. 
JONES: No. That’s not — it’s a false premise? 
LOESCH: No. Van, do you actually know what the difference —
JONES: That’s the entire debate in Washington, D.C. right now. 
LOESCH: I’m going to correct you because I’m tired of this talking point being put out there. First and foremost, let’s get something straight. Military-style assault weapons are not out on the street. We are talking about semiautomatic weapons, weapons that are capable of select fire or weapons that are fully automatic. 
MORGAN: OK. But Dana, Dana, Dana. 
LOESCH: Then you can — no, I’m not going to let this go anymore, Piers. 
(CROSSTALK)
JONES: You guys say the same thing every time. 
MORGAN: No, Dana, you said this repeatedly on my show. 
LOESCH: Then you can use the military term. Let’s stop conflating. 
JONES: You do the same thing every time. 
LOESCH: Let’s stop playing ignorance and —
(CROSSTALK)
MORGAN: General Stanley McChrystal —
LOESCH: Now you can go ahead and continue. 
MORGAN: General Stanley McChrystal used the phrase — so forget us, forget Van, forget me. One of the great military commanders of the last 20 years in America —
LOESCH: The man who bans conservatives (INAUDIBLE) — yes. 
MORGAN: — said these were military-style weapons. So is he wrong? Do you know more about these weapons than General McChrystal does? 
NORQUIST: Evidently because —
LOESCH: General McChrystal is also of your same ideology so I want to put that out there first and foremost. There is a deliberate effort to conflate the types of firearms. I do not own a military- style assault weapon just because of what — a firearm looks scary? Then you call it military assault? Do you realize that one of my children has a BB gun that looks like an AR-15? Is that going to be considered a military style assault weapon? It sounds silly and uneducated. 
(CROSSTALK)
MORGAN: Adam Lanza killed — Adam Lanza killed — wait a minute. Wait a minute. Adam Lanza killed —
LOESCH: And it’s dangerous. 
MORGAN: Adam Lanza, as we now know, in the space of 300 seconds, using an AR-15, killed 26 people, Dana. 
JONES: Thank you. 
LOESCH: And he reloaded four times. 
(CROSSTALK)
MORGAN: He had magazine — he had a magazine for 30 bullets. 
LOESCH: So, Piers, I want to ask you a question. Yes. 
MORGAN: Are you telling me — are you telling me that doesn’t —
LOESCH: And he reloaded four times. Anyone can reload. 
MORGAN: Are you tell me that doesn’t —
LOESCH: Anyone can reload. 
MORGAN: Dana, let me finish. Are you telling me that doesn’t qualify as an assault weapon? 
LOESCH: By the technical definition, no, Piers. Anything can be qualified as an assault weapon. If you stab someone with a spoon, it can be qualified as an assault weapon. 
MORGAN: So you’re equating stabbing somebody with a spoon —
LOESCH: Let me ask you a question, Piers. 
(CROSSTALK)
JONES: Oh my god. 
MORGAN: — to the shooting dead 26 people in five minutes? 
JONES: Hold on, hold on. 
LOESCH: If this is conversation about a ban on magazine capacity —
MORGAN: Really, Dana? Really? Talk about stabbing somebody with a spoon? 
LOESCH: Do you realize how easy it is to reload? Piers, you can take a speed loader and reload a revolver, 150 rounds. That means he had to reload four times. 
JONES: This is the strategy — it’s the conscious strategy. 
LOESCH: And the only reason that he stopped was because he heard authorities. 
JONES: What you’re seeing right now, Piers —
LOESCH: No, Van, this is the strategy of the people who actually deliberately want to disarm individuals. 
JONES: Piers, what you’re seeing is the conscious strategy to distract and —
LOESCH: You guys talk about magazine —
JONES: Hold on a second. Hold on a second. 
LOESCH: You talk about magazine restriction —
MORGAN: OK. Let Van — let Van have his say. 
JONES: See, this is the conscious strategy on the part of the pro-gun folks to constantly bring things back around to things that don’t make any sense. You’re talking about people stabbing people with spoons. If that was a problem we had in America, people stabbing people with spoons, we wouldn’t be talking about this right now. 
What we’re talking about is funeral after funeral after funeral. What we’re talking about is — are our children being gunned down and what we’re talking about is common sense measures. Not confiscating guns. We’re not talking about that. We’re talking about commonsense measures that 90 percent of Americans agree with and the majority of gun owners agree with. 
LOESCH: No. 
JONES: But when you guys get on television, you don’t talk like the people who actually are the gun owners in America. What you talk like are people who want to take the conversation in a direction —
LOESCH: I’m a gun owner in America, Van Jones. 
JONES: — that has nothing to do — I’m sorry, you said? 
LOESCH: By the way, the latest CBS poll shows that support for these gun control measures is tanking. This is —
(CROSS TALK)
LOESCH: let me finish my thought. 
JONES: No. 
LOESCH: Then I am going to let you answer. I’m tired of this conflation and this uneducation when it comes to using terms about firearms. Let’s use —
JONES: You want to make it about terms and words. Fine. Hey, listen, what we’re talking about is funeral after funeral after funeral. 
(CROSS TALK)
MORGAN: one at a time. 
LOESCH: What’s the difference between 30 rounds and what’s the difference between seven rounds? Piers Morgan, let me ask you a question. (CROSS TALK)
MORGAN: Let me explain to you the difference. Let me explain the difference. 
(CROSS TALK)
MORGAN: Let me ask you a question. The difference between 30 and seven is 23. So it could save 23 lives if there was a federal ban on these magazines. 
LOESCH: Seven lives lost are OK with you, then? Seven lives lost are OK? 
MORGAN: You know what, Dana, seven is better than 30, yes.
(CROSS TALK)
MORGAN: Better than losing 30, yes, it is. 
LOESCH: I’m just trying to establish where you draw the line. Where do you draw the line at preventing the deaths of children, Piers? 
(CROSS TALK)
MORGAN: I would love to draw the line — I would love to draw the line — I would love to draw the line, Dana, at zero gun deaths in America. 
LOESCH: So you do believe in disarmament, then. 
MORGAN: I said zero gun deaths. 
LOESCH: That’s the answer that I wanted. 
MORGAN: When did I say disarmament? Wait a minute. You talk about conflating the argument. Dana, when did I say disarmament? 
LOESCH: I’m taking it down — I’m using your logic and going down that road. If you’re talking about limiting magazines — first and foremost, magazines are universal. I can make one in my garage. 
MORGAN: I said I wanted zero gun deaths. 
(CROSS TALK)
MORGAN: Let me finish. We have to go to break. But you said — I said I wanted zero gun deaths. You announce that meant I wanted disarmament. That’s the problem with the pro-gun debate. 
(CROSS TALK)
MORGAN: Let’s take a break. Let’s all calm down, come back and talk about gay marriage. That will be even more lively, probably. Let’s try that. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)
MORGAN: Back now with Van Jones and Dana Loesch and Grover Norquist. Before we move on from guns, I just want to read a quick Tweet. This is from Steven Smith, who says to me “where can you buy these deadly assault spoons?” Maybe Dana can help him with that later. Let’s move on. 
LOESCH: Really, it goes over people’s heads. Anything, Piers. Stabbing deaths every day. 
MORGAN: Let’s move on. It was just a little joke, Dana. Let’s turn to gay marriage. Grover, I want to play you an astonishing piece of tape, really. Yesterday we had Bill O’Reilly almost converting to gay marriage. Today, Rush Limbaugh joined in. Listen to this. 
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
RUSH LIMBAUGH, RADIO TALK SHOW HOST: This issue is lost. I don’t care what the Supreme Court does, this is now inevitable. And it’s inevitable because we lost the language on this. We lost the issue when we started allowing the word marriage to be bastardized and redefined by simply adding words to it. 
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MORGAN: Grover, is he right? Is the gay marriage debate lost to those that oppose it? 
NORQUIST: Well, it’s an interesting question. Obviously, once you get the government into defining something, they’re going to mess it up. Marriage for a lot of people is a religious sacrament in any of the Abrahamic faiths. Yet the government should be enforcing contracts, if people want a contract with who they live with and how they want to pass on their estates. For years we worked with gay groups trying to get rid of the death tax, because that was one of the discriminatory factors there. 
So I think there are a number of laws that the government’s got itself into that we need to extricate it. If the government was less involved in marriage and defining it and regulating it, we might be better off, everybody. 
MORGAN: Dana Loesch, what do you think? 
LOESCH: I’m not quite sure whether or not it’s lost. I do agree that the language has been muddled. And just the two cases that are before the Supreme Court right now, I don’t think that both of them will be tossed down. But the Defense of Marriage Act, especially where it concerns insurance benefits and engaging in contracts, I think people should be able to enter into contractual agreements with each other. There shouldn’t be any sort of stipulation on that. 
That’s where, at the same time, while I’ve told individuals who have been out there advocating for same sex marriage and wanting to bring the government in, as someone who is a Christian conservative, I don’t want to bring the government in to defend my faith or to defend or define marriage. I think that’s something that should be left to the people. We don’t have the government involved in baptisms or taking of the sacrament. 
So I don’t think that government should be involved in marriage, either. I think bringing the government in period is a bad idea. 
MORGAN: OK. Van Jones, this sort of reminds me of conversations in America in the ’50s and ’60s, which would go along the lines of, I don’t mind, having thought about this quite carefully, black people using the same bus as me. But I’m not really ready for them to come to the same school. Is it that kind of repositioning? 
JONES: It’s sad. First of all, we are on the verge of one of the great breakthroughs and achievements in human freedom, human equality. I can’t tell you how proud I am to be in a country where people — where the freedom to marry is going to be available to everybody very soon. Rush Limbaugh is right. 
But the idea that suddenly now government is getting involved in marriage, government has been involved in marriage from the very beginning and nobody complained about it as long as it was for heterosexuals. Now — and I’ll say something else as well. You know, my marriage would have been illegal in a lot of parts of this country very recently, because I’m in a mixed race marriage. 
So what I know is that — and the government was involved in regulating that. So what I think we’ve got to recognize now is that there’s — no matter what happens — this is a great thing about America — there is an expiration date on some of this bigotry that is in our laws, because the next generation doesn’t want to hear any of this stuff; 70, 80 percent of young people in America think that if you love somebody, marry them. 
And the people who are messing up marriage in America are the heterosexuals. Heterosexuals are the ones being divorced. Heterosexuals are the — the people who are bringing marriage back and making marriage mean something is the gay community that’s fighting for that right. Now marriage means something. The Kardashians are doing more to destroy traditional marriage than gay people ever did. 
LOESCH: A couple points, Piers, really quick. I can’t compare gay marriage to what black Americans have gone through, because in the Bible — and I want to point this out because this is how Christians look at this. Nowhere in the Bible —
JONES: I’m a Christian. 
LOESCH: It’s not mentioned in the Bible. 
JONES: That’s not true. That’s not true. I’m a Christian. I’m a Christian. I’m a Christian. I’m going to tell you right now —
(CROSS TALK) 
JONES: The Curse of Hamm was used to say we were the victims — LOESCH: If you are trying to get Old Testament, remember, Van, the New Covenant with Christ, the New Covenant with God, that’s why we have the New Testament. 
MORGAN: Dana, Dana, Dana, Dana —
(CROSS TALK) 
LOESCH: — between a man, a woman and God, before God, on God’s terms. That’s how Christians define it.
MORGAN: Dana, Dana, Dana, what do you say to Van’s point that it wasn’t so long ago he wouldn’t have been able to get married without the help of the government interfering? Isn’t that an incredibly salient point? 
LOESCH: You know what, Republicans all throughout, Piers — I agree with that because Republicans — that’s why you have the Republican party because they split from Democrats and they split from — you know, the KKK was the militant faction of that. They didn’t believe. They were the original abolitionists, the Frederick Douglass Republicans. 
Yes, absolutely, they thought that was horrible. That’s why you had individuals fight for the Civil Rights Act. 
JONES: Can I respond to that?
MORGAN: Unfortunately, Van, we’ve got to move on. I think you made some very good points, actually, which I think are pretty inarguable. The fact you couldn’t have got married 50 years ago pretty well says it all. 
Let’s talk very quickly about a sad day, I think. Barbara Walters is going to retire apparently in May of next year, 80 odd years old, incredible energy, one of the most remarkable television journalists really ever. What do you make of that, Grover Norquist? 
NORQUIST: Well, she’s had a tremendous career. She’s been great fun to watch and listen to and learn from. And I’m sure this is the sequester’s fault. 
(LAUGHTER)
MORGAN: Dana Loesch, can we reach any point of agreement on Barbara Walters? 
LOESCH: I grew up watching Barbara Walters. And it’s nice to see a strong woman with such a great — such an accomplished career in the industry and it’s sort of sad to see her go because of that. 
MORGAN: Van? 
JONES: I have had the honor to be on “The View” with her, watching her. She’s one of the best ever. She’s able to keep the empathy high, but she asks the tough questions. And I just think it’s a moment in history. 
MORGAN: Yeah. Very sad day. It will be a great valedictory fly-by tour, though, lasting a year, which I’m looking forward to. So Barbara, if you’re watching, we wish you all the very best. You have been one of the truly great interviewers in television history. I for one will be glad you’re gone because you get so many great bookings which I may now have a sniff at. But that’s just a personal .
Thank you to my all-star panel, Dana, Van and Grover. I really enjoyed this. Let’s get you back soon. 

She again bashed marriage equality, while guest Van Jones defended it. Grover Norquist spoke out against government regulation of marriage.

(cross-posted from DanaBusted.blogspot.com)

Anti-LGBTQ rights/marriage equality crank case asshat Dana Loesch wrote on Fixed Noise (and former CNN colleague)’s Erick Erickson’s RedState blog today to peddle misleading lies about marriage equality:

I’ve no issue with same sex couples entering into contractual agreements with each other or sharing benefits (the military decisions should be made by those with the credit of service day in and day out, not civilian advocacy groups). Isn’t that the goal of this conflict? If so, to me, that’s an issue separate from marriage. In suing over “marriage” itself one is demanding that God change His definition of the union between a man and a woman. If recognition of status, ease with other contractual obligations, and other issues are the issues, why the need to force people of faith to alter recognition of God’s Word on the matter? The people may bend as reeds to lawfare, but God will not. Frankly, I see no point in being on any side other than God’s on any matter, and God is more small government than any player in the scene.

She believes in the so-called “marriage is between a man and a woman only” farce.  A fine excuse to be a homophobe, Dana.

Loesch further distorts the truth on LGBTQ rights with her anti-marriage equality screed on RedState:

Really, this isn’t about gay rights. The left doesn’t give a damn about gay rights. Remember, it was the left that instituted Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and it was a Republican group that led the charge to repeal it. The left hasn’t done anything for the gay community except to offer it lip service and inaction. While leftist groups fight for “marriage equality” the Obama administration makes marriage an economic hit with horrible policy. You got bait and switched, leftists! No, the left cares nothing for gay rights, but they’ll pretend to if they can use the bloc as a wedge to pry the populace from the influence of the church. Why? because it’s easier to convince people that their civil liberties fall under the dominion of man, of government, if the church is portrayed as inept and anachronistic. This is the entire goal. Once man, sinful, awful man controls your rights, your existence as an individual ends and your life as a statist serf begins.
So no, “marriage equality” is emphatically nota conservative value or tactic. Anything where the solution is an invitation for government intervention should be viewed with utmost suspicion.

Really, Dana!? The left doesn’t give a damn about gay rights? Oh, yes, us leftists/progressives/civil libertarians care a lot about this issue, moreso than you. She also falsely accused the left of instituting DOMA, when it was the conservatives back in the 1990’s that forced it into law.

Also, the left has done FAR MORE than “lip service” to the LGBTQ community. If anything, it’s kooks like you and GOProud that do “lip service” to the LGBTQ community.


She even played the debunked “Christians have fewer rights” canard:

There are even more examples, some listed on this page, some not, as they are numerous. Pastors in Canada are already facing lawsuits for simply preaching about marriage from the Bible. Tolerance is demanded of Christians but in this pluralistic society, little, if any, tolerance is afforded to Christian beliefs. Christians aren’t the antagonists here, but they do seem to have fewer rights than those engaging in lawfare to bring about forced acceptance.

(Cross-posted from DanaBusted.blogspot.com)

Guess who’s smearing gun safety supporters again? If you said the shithead Dana Loesch, then you’d be correct. She smeared Jim Carrey (a celebrity that she used to admire) for simply releasing a song that bashes Charlton Heston and NRA entitled “Cold Dead Hand.” 

TPM:

Jim Carrey has become the latest Hollywood star to wade into the gun control debate. The actor teamed up with Funny or Die to release a song Monday, titled “Cold Dead Hand,” that goes after gun rights advocates, specifically former NRA chief Charlton Heston, who died in 2008. 

(cross-posted from DanaBusted.blogspot.com)

Today in union-hating by Dana Loesch: She is defending right-wing loon and The Dana Show regular Steven Crowder’s false accusations that the union member was “assaulting” him, when in fact it was the other way around.

DanaLoeschRadio.com:

 It’s insane to allege that Crowder — who wasn’t standing near the union member, who appeared to trip over his own feet rather than was “pushed,” and who had his back turned and turned with hands up in a non-threatening manner — pushed the union member. Where is Dunnings’ evidence? Why didn’t the union bring charges? Because it’s a bogus assertion. 

Prosecutor Stuart Dunnings said he didn’t obtain the full video until he got it from a far left group which is an absolute, outright lie as the full, unedited video was posted by Crowder when he posted the edited-for-TV video.The full, unedited video was always available.
Dunnings is simply protecting the union members behind the riot which saw them destroy property, put women and children in harm’s way, and assault those who were videotaped simply asking questions. It’s an embarrassment to the office in which he serves.

Dunnings did his job properly, and this is typical of her to demonize unions.


The Lansing State Journal, on the other hand, called out Crowder’s phony baloney:

Eclectablog:

It turns out that I was 100% correct. Ingham County Prosecutor Stuart Dunnings III is not filing charges in the incident because Crowder provided him with highly-edited video and the full, unedited version shows that his “attacker” was simply defending himself. 

Nice try Crowder. You’re a fraud and now everybody knows it.

Loesch and Crowder both are manipulative liars.

(Cross-Posted From DanaBusted.blgospot.com )

Oy vey! Dana Loesch, a vicious far-right hatemonger and sociopath, is making up false accusations about the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is a highly reputable organization. The reason for this is that the SPLC truthfully wrote about the increasingly disturbing influence of radical right anti-government “Patriot” groups.

SPLC, on the reasons why the far-right “Patriot” movement is growing:

The number of conspiracy-minded antigovernment “Patriot” groups on the American radical right reached an all-time high in 2012, the fourth consecutive year of powerful growth by a movement that is becoming increasingly militant as President Obama enters his second term and Congress debates gun control measures, according to a reportissued today by the SPLC.

Loesch, on the other hand, used it to attack the SPLC and even falsely attacked them for allegedly aiding and abetting Floyd Lee Corkins II’s role in the Family Research Council shooting.

DanaLoeschRadio.com:

Around seven months ago Floyd Lee Corkins II entered the Family Research Council headquarters and opened fire. Corkins told the FBI that he was inspired by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s hate lists published online. The SPLC designates groups with which it disagrees as “hate groups.” Despite having served as the inspiration for one tragedy, the SPLC is once again pushing its ironic “hate lists” in the spring issue of their publication. 

The same individuals who perpetuated this association were silent when it was discovered that the Southern Poverty Law Center’s smear lists did inspire the criminal behind the FRC shooting. There have been no calls for the SPLC to cease publishing it’s hateful lists or even pull the past lists which inspired Corkins. Are we to expect more tragedies based on the SPLC “hate lists?” Will SPLC even apologize for pushing hyper-inaccurate which have already endangered the lives of one group’s members?

No, Dana, the SPLC and their hate group listings did NOT inspire the criminal behind the FRC shooting. They did condemn the FRC shooting incident.

(cross-posted from DanaBusted.blogspot.com)

Here we go again: serial distortion artist Dana Loesch has attacked the recently reinstated REAL version of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), while supporting the House GOP’s fake version (certain GOPers supporting their faux-VAWA bill and taking credit for passing it, while voting against the real version). She has a long history of attacking VAWA.

VAWA is NOT a “slush fund”, you fucking arrogant nutjob!

(cross-posted from DanaBusted.blogspot.com)