Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Hey, you nincompoop right wing copycat bloggers: Does this really look like a townhouse to you? Or will you simply repeat any lie to smear a Kennedy?


Look at the building in the photograph. Does it look like a “townhouse” to you?

Me neither.

In fact, it’s a generic Manhattan co-op apartment building, about the size that typically holds 50 or so separate tenants. It happens to be the one where one of the tenants is Caroline Kennedy . (While the street address is a matter of public record, I won’t reproduce it here. Given all the right wing lunatics in America, I don’t see the need to equip Ms. Kennedy's frothing-at-the-mouth stalkers with information they can misuse.)

So what, you’re probably asking yourself, if Caroline Kennedy lives in that nondescript Manhattan apartment building? Here's what.
Why this matters

Some weeks ago, a fast-and-loose-with-the-facts slimeball blogger named Victor Davis Hanson laced into Caroline Kennedy for putting her name forth as a Senate replacement for Hillary Clinton . As evidence of the wrongness of Ms. Kennedy’s cause, Hanson wrote on the Pajamas Media blog.

Ms. Kennedy apparently spends a great deal of her time divided between her Park Avenue Upper-East-Side Manhattan townhouse and her hereditary estate on Martha’s Vineyard.
Where did Hanson get the townhouse from? Is he lying in an attempt to ignite some of the “class warfare” that Republicans were railing against only — was it something like 15 seconds ago? And how come right wing opponents to what they were calling “the death tax” suddenly resent a “hereditary estate” — whatever "hereditary estate" turns out to mean in terms of a tangible asset?

Beats me. All I know is, suddenly that exact Hansonian lie suddenly began popping up on what seemed like every third right-wing blog in the universe. Word for word.

Right wing lie spreads
like a metastasizing cancer

It was repeated verbatim on No Pasaran.

The same defamatory sentence also popped spontaneously into the head of whoever pens a blog called The Doc Is In, which bills itself, somewhat incongruously, as “a lively current events blog.”

Ed’s blog, also was inspired to pick up the magical sentence. The blog’s author also says his blog is “a look into the sights, sounds and smells of me.” Well, that’s for sure, Ed. And incidentally, the “information” you’re spreading around stinks.

Who else is spreading  lies about Caroline Kennedy? Well, among them there’s Conservative Women for Truth, who evidently wouldn’t recognize the truth if it jumped up and bit them on their conservative asses.

And there’s the History News Network, which probably ought to take a few lessons in historical sourcing. Or at least learn how to use Google Earth to check out what a townhouse doesn’t look like.

Are they ventroliquists' dummies?
Or just plain dummies? Or worse?

What is it with these lie-propagating, falsehood-huckstering, uncritical right wing idiots?

Are they all ventriloquists’ dummies? Or battery-powered robot clones?

Can you walk up to any one of them, yank the string coming out of the back of their necks, and hear them mouth the identical lie, “Ms. Kennedy apparently spends a great deal of her time divided between her Park Avenue Upper-East-Side Manhattan townhouse and her hereditary estate on Martha’s Vineyard?”

Are they mostly incapable of coming up with original ideas? Or even original smears? Or are they just too stupid to know the difference between a townhouse and a 50-tenant apartment building?

I don’t know the answer. But I can tell you this: I came back from vacation the other day with a hacking cough and a cold. Despite my illness, I had to go out in the pouring rain this morning just to take a picture of the apartment building where Ms. Kennedy lives to refute you right wing idiots.

Now my cough feels worse. So at this point, it’s not even a matter of politics or fact checking any more. At this point, you lying bastards, it’s personal and gets more so with every cough and sneeze!

2 comments:

Kuni said...

What else did you expect from Rightwingers? The definition of a Conservative is “a sociopathic liar”.

Joe said...

That "slimeball blogger" is a PhD historian who lectures in classics, and while his calling her domicile an townhouse and not an apartment might be "why it matters" when rhetoric is in bracket contention, I don't think it IS what matters one bit.

Compare this woman's accident of chance and birth, that is to say, being a Kennedy with why she should be "selected not elected" more than anyone else. If a birth defest was the matter at hand, I would be sympathetic.

But it isn't - it the matter of hypocrity on the highest order. The political creed that has spent a century trying all it can to break hereditary wealth and influence being transferred in the population at large tries it's very hardest to employ it when it comes to what are now casually called 'their dynasties'.

Dynasties. The Left. And no-one bats an eye. Are we to drool on command as well?

While it's somewhat plausible to say that Andrew Cuomo earned his job, it's hard to say that there weren't a passel of others who didn't as well. If this is non-elected and appointed, I wonder even there: why him?

D.P. Moynahan is the man who found a way the give Hillary Rodham Clinton plausibility on the national political stage by pushing for her to take his seat, to which his help got her handily elected.

She, at least, like George Bush, was elected. But now the lack of note of this sad situation where the potential democratic appointees look like nieces and nephews of royal empirial entitlement angling for Caesar's laurels in an attempt to get them over that hump of having to face the public's free choice and judgement of their character at least once before they are assumed to be part of the furniture in NY.

While the politics of NY has always seemed incredibly venal, this compounds it by an order of magnatude to it.