This "Blog Watch" entry examines Firedoglake, the hard-left attack platform of Jane Hamsher and her venomous anti-Bush cadres.
Hamsher's well known among the antiwar blogocracy, and her tactics have frequently raised controversy. As her Wikipedia entry indicates, Hamsher's support of Ned Lamont in his run against Joseph Lieberman in 2006 erupted into a nasty affair when Firedoglake ran a photoshopped image of Lieberman in blackface. Hamsher later faked an "apology" after the Lamont campaign rebuked her, while continuing her attacks on Lieberman, and denouncing his "race-baiting" and "Rovian" tactics.
Hamsher also gained notoriety for her vile slurs against National Review's Kate O'Beirne, whom she called "a dangerous bitch," a "foaming fascist," and announced that the "bitch is dead meat."
With this introduction readers surely have a strong clue to the kind of noxious effluents that drain off the page at Firedoglake. I've only recently become truly familiar with Firedoglake's nasty repertoire, as I've stepped up my campaign this last few months of dissecting and rebutting the left blogosphere's anti-Americanism and Bush-bashing.
But let me continue the discussion with "T-Rex," FDL's "late-night" diarist. Recall in recent posts (here and here) I took issue with T-Rex's unhinged attacks on Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution (O'Hanlon's been skeptical of Iraq progress, but his recent optimistic report was attacked relentlessly by antiwar contingents).
T-Rex spouts a particularly offensive brand of Bush-loathing. He hates not just the administration's policies, by the president himself. In one recent post, T-Rex compared Bush to Britney Spears, saying that the president and the fading pop star shared much in common, arguing that both of their careers were grinding to a halt:
Britney and the Bush Administration seem to be continuing their tandem downward spirals, what with Bush’s parade of embarrassing gaffes at the APEC summit, clearly not knowing where he was or what he was doing there...Then we got to the Petraeus/Crocker product roll-out today and not only was the hearing derailed by the failure of Petraeus’s backing track (No lip-synching for you, General!), but Petraeus’s lukewarm stew of cooked data and vague fist-wavings at Iran was probably as much of a disappointment to the one third of America and the world who still support the war as Britney’s spectacular failure to deliver at the VMA’s last night was to her fans....Notice here T-Rex's reference to Bush's "stolen" elections, which is just imbecile fodder for the Bush-bashing hordes (investigations into the 2000 Florida recount found Bush winning in most vote-counting scenarios, and even John Kerry conceded Ohio's voting in 2004 as too close an outcome to contest).
What we saw on TV today was the faltering last gasp effort of President Train-wreck and his minions to prove to the world that they’ve Still Got It, that all it takes is a few kajillion dollars and some minor cosmetic tweaking and they’re the same lean, mean media-storming machine that “won” the elections of 2000 and 2004.
The real problem here of course is that neither the Perfect Britney nor President Mission Accomplished were ever all that good to begin with....
Both of these specimens of jumped-up trailer-trash are creatures whose fortunes were made entirely by PR. Marketing is all that BushCo knows how to do effectively, same with the team of industry professionals who used to handle Britney.
But what's obnoxious to me is T-Rex's mindless ad hominem "trailer trash" attacks on the president. This is just ugly partisan demonization that serves no purpose in political debate. Even Britney (who needs to grow up) doesn't deserve such attacks.
Such tripe is routine at Firedoglake. Scarecrow - one more of Hamsher's henchmen - routinely spouts Marxist-Leninist agitprop, for example, in this post denouncing the "Bush/Cheney regime's war against Iran." (But see also Scarecrow's recent entry positing moral equivalence between administration policies and Palestinian terrorists, Hamas).
This brings us back to Hamsher herself. In the past week - amid all the controversy over MoveOn.org's vicious attack against General David Petraeus - Hamsher has not only fully endorsed MoveOn's slur of the four-star commander (praising Hillary Clinton for essentially doing the same), but she's also repeatedly attacked those Democrats who voted against the Webb amendment, the backdoor Senate bill to weaken the military and force a precipitous withdrawal.
There's no need to go on with more examples and more links. While there's some variation in style, all Firedoglake diarists display a rabid hatred of the administration, the military, and traditional American values.
What's amazing to me is that Firedoglake - like the disastrous Daily Kos - mounts its unending attacks against the administration, Iraq, the military, and anything even remotely associated with red-state principles, as though it represents the heart and soul of the Democratic Party and contemporary liberalism. In the comment thread to a post by FDL's Christy Hardin Smith, one commenter argued that FDL's foaming Bush-bashing antiwar types represent the new center of American politics (this is the same comment thread in which one of the visitors came within a hair's breath of advocating death to conservatives, arguing they "don’t even deserve to consume oxygen").
Whether marked by narcissism, megalomania, or just plain stupidity (true Kos-style pathologies), Firedoglake is bad news for Americans committed to justice and rationalism, and especially for those who want to see the United States prevail in Iraq. I have yet to adopt a rating system for evaluating blogs dissected in this series (although a rating-scale was suggested by "Duoist," one of my occassional readers), I would rank Firedoglake among the most vile blogs in the left-wing blogosphere (about a "9" on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being Stalinist totalitarianism).
For more on Firedoglake - like its ad comparing President Bush to Adoph Hitler - check out the YouTube below, which features Sean Hannity exposing the vicious partisan hatred of Firedoglake and MoveOn.org (radical lefties created this video, so be warned of the sleazy defense of MoveOn and Jane Hamsher in the concluding annotations):
also the previous entries from Blog Watch: The Blue Voice
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