Outrageous Revisionism: Breitbart's "Big Government" Compares ACORN to KKK

Are you sitting down for this one?

David Neiwert reports at Crooks And Liars:

As Eric Boehlert notes, Andrew Breitbart has a real credibility problem, and it extends well beyond his journalistic malfeasance in the ACORN video hoax.

His website, Big Government, is similarly developing a reputation for running blatantly dishonest commentary, often in the cause of defending the videos and their makers or likewise attacking ACORN. The latest example was pointed out by Matt Tatum at AmSpec and Dave Weigel, who both called out this atrocity from "historian" Michael Zak at Andrew Breitbart's "Big Government" blog:

Democrats used the Klan to suppress their political opposition, with vote fraud and intimidation and violence. Klansmen aimed at African-Americans, nearly all Republicans in those days, and at white Republicans who tried to help them. Once threatened by the KKK, Republicans could in many cases save their lives only by publicly swearing allegiance to the Democratic Party. According to a southern governor, "Few Republicans dare sleep in their houses at night."

"The suppression of enough GOP votes could ensure a Democratic victory," wrote one historian. "There's no question that Klansmen closely watched the polls" - easy to do before the secret ballot was introduced in the United States in the 1880s. All too often, Republican ballots were not even counted.

Like ACORN, the Ku Klux Klan operated with impunity until Republican politicians and journalists sounded an alarm. In 1869, Nathan Bedford Forrest, the KKK's Grand Dragon, ordered the Klan disbanded. Why? The national organization was getting too much attention, so Klansmen would have to soldier on in state-level organizations, such as the Red Shirts in South Carolina and the Men of Justice in Alabama. Nonetheless, most members of these spin-off groups considered themselves to be Klansmen.

Good God. It's hard to know where to begin. Let's try with Weigel's observation:

The fact that the KKK suppressed and terrorized black voters while ACORN, well, doesn’t — sort of left out here.

More to the point, the entire raison d'etre of the Klan was to disenfranchise black voters, to terrorize them into submission and to ensure that they could not participate as full citizens. According to historians, they killed an estimated 20,000 people in the years 1866-1870 alone (see Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, p. 49). Indeed, the Klansmen of the postwar period essentially negated the war's outcome by destroying Reconstruction through a campaign of terrorist violence that encompassed massacres, white citizen militias destroying black townships, and the complete destruction of the voting franchise for black people, thereby ensuring white rule for the next century and beyond. (For more on this, be sure to read Stephen Budiansky's riveting account, The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War, which was excerpted in the New York Times.) ...>more

Attention, Teabaggers: There Will Not -- Repeat, NOT Be A Counter-Action at the Rally in Morristown, NJ on Labor Day

Daryle Lamont Jenkins writes at One Peoples' Project:

On Labor Day, there is a tea party planned in Morristown, NJ that will feature two radio show hosts that we have profiled here, Bob “I don’t have any problem with the National Alliance” Grant, and Steve “I don’t know any white racists in New York City” Malzberg. Now there has been some people who have questioned their involvement given how much these two characters over the years like to routinely pick fights with black people (don’t ask them about that; they will pretend they don’t know what you are talking about). Well, we contacted one of the organizers, Maryann Franzese and left a message on her machine and via email regarding this. She never responded. In fact, the next time we heard from her it was on Friday. She called Malzberg’s radio show on WOR-AM in New York to complain about us and someone who attended the meeting that concerned her – and apparently Steve since he cut her off before she got into the details of that concern, like how the man brought up when Steve once suggested that police break up a protest of black Rutgers students using their guns and hoses...

There will -- repeat WILL be, however, a new offering of t-shirts bearing the now-infamous "Teabagger" cartoon for sale over at Mike Flugennock's Cartoon Schwag Shop.

They LIKE Us! They Really, Really LIKE Us!

Teabaggers Piss Selves, Are Shocked -- Shocked -- To See Selves Revealed As Racists

As could be expected, our publicity campaign outside the recent suburban Virginia healthcare "town hall" generated some wonderful feedback from our local defenders of liberty, many of whom -- despite extensive university education in some cases -- apparently still don't know Democrats from Leftists from Socialism, judging by the reactions to the leafletting of the parking lot outside South Lakes High with this cartoon by DC linester Mike Flugennock:



Let's kick things off with our long-time Special Friends, Freak... uhh, FreeRepublic.com:

To: stratman1969
This sort of thing is so typical of Moran ~ he, too, suffers from a severe case of brain damage ~
5 posted on Fri Aug 28 08:36:37 2009 by muawiyah
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To: stratman1969
Now, opponents of socialized medicine and the Obama agenda are being depicted as Ku Klux Klan members who want to lynch Barack Obama.

This obviously isn't coming from our side. We're the sane ones in this debate.

The crazier and more insane the left gets, the better we look. Who would want to put these lunatics in charge of their health care?
8 posted on Fri Aug 28 08:41:46 2009 by concerned about politics ("Get thee behind me, Liberal")
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To: stratman1969
The other Democrat Representative in this area, Gerry Connolly, has yet to criticize Moran over anything whether it's whoring in the moonlight, harrassing children, beating his wife, or now calling critics of Obama care "KKK" types.

People have this mistaken idea that Connolly (pronounced "cannoli" and he looks like he's had plenty of 'em) is a decent man. He's not if he's going to buy into this stuff.
9 posted on Fri Aug 28 08:42:57 2009 by muawiyah
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To: DJ MacWoW
The racist card is getting old and will cause a backlash.

This is the work of the democrat politicians. I hope they're smart enough (which I doubt) to see what they've done to this country and try to fix it before it gets too late.

We can't fix the racial divide in the U.S., because the racism isn't coming from our side. It's out of our hands.
11 posted on Fri Aug 28 08:45:07 2009 by concerned about politics ("Get thee behind me, Liberal")
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To: concerned about politics
I believe that the Dems have caused it on purpose.
12 posted on Fri Aug 28 08:52:22 2009 by DJ MacWoW (Make yourselves sheep and the wolves will eat you. Ben Franklin)
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Yes, folks, you heard right; "Democratic Party member = Leftist"? Or, do they mean "Leftist = Democratic Party member"? Seriously, these people think that people in the Democratic Party are "Leftists" just by being Democrats! Hell, they actually think that this cartoon was paid for by the Democratic Party, specifically Virginia Democratic Rep. Jim Moran! Pardon us while we laugh until we crap our drawers.

That's right, we're talking about a statement of plain raw truth -- about as raw as anyone can stand it -- and the Teabaggers think it was perpetrated by a lame-assed, standard-issue corporate Democrat like Jim Moran, who probably wouldn't even be able to summon up the balls to take his own side in a barfight. Being offended by your own reflection in the mirror is one thing, but to attempt to pin the rap for this cartoon on a butterball outfit like the Democratic Party? Oh, how we laughed around the office here at TTAC.

Anyway, on to what is apparently the original source of this brouhaha, and who all the other Teagging blogs are cribbing their copy from, Marooned in Marin:

A number of people left last night's polite and information-packed "town hall" meeting in Reston to find these stuffed under their car windshields. We've cropped out the URL at the bottom to avoid giving these folks any more attention than they deserve.

Wounded, we are, absolutely wounded, to think they'd crop our URL from our inline image, after all those people probably took copies home and typed in the URL on their own. But, really -- polite? information-packed? We suspect MinM may have accidentally accelerated his Z4 to a South Lakes High in an alternate universe; the healthcare Town Hall we attended featured some long-winded busting of some of the more egregious myths about Obamacare before Jim Moran finally shut his cakehole and brought on Dean so we could get on with the mayhem. But, anyway, on to our favorite comments from the MinM thread:

Anonymous said...
A typical leftist trope. Right out of отдел агитации и пропаганды, the old Soviet Department for Agitation and Propaganda. William Ayers (who co-wrote Dreams from My Father) has some of this in his Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism.
August 26, 2009 8:18 PM

As we said, some of these people have an actual university education; hell, this guy even knows a snatch of Russian -- learned no doubt under deep cover at a listening post in Kiev back in '62. Never mind that Stephen Hawking here promptly tries to drag Bill Ayers into it -- c'mon, that's so Last October -- and then pin it on a bunch of broken-down old Stalinists, like ANSWER. Thanks for playing; here's a copy of our home game. So, Bob, who's our next contestant...?

Restonian said...
Here's the funny thing about this... the URL that was on these flyers is actually for a blog that's critical of the teabaggers, and that has explored, among other things, how they're being cynically manipulated by business interests. It posted the picture presumably to embarrass these folks.

Which begs a question: Did the racist clowns who put these on people's windshields in Reston the other night purposefully add the URL of that blog to discredit it, or were they just too jacked up to notice?
August 26, 2009 11:22 PM

Please, please, please, Mr. Golf Cart Drivin' Guy...if the URL to this blog is there to embarass us, then why the hell did we lead off our first post with it -- and use in our masthead, f'cryinoutloud? Also, it is important to note that we at the offices of TTAC do not get -- as you say -- jacked up. High, buzzed, chillin', mellow, laid-back, feelin' right, perhaps, but never, ever "jacked up".