BigGovernment's sad, self-serving, incomplete birthday retrospective
September 10, 2010 10:58 am ET by Simon Maloy
So it turns out it's BigGovernment.com's birthday, and the Breitbart-spawned website is celebrating in grand fashion with editor-in-chief Mike Flynn's look back at how BigGovernment has, in the past year, become the most powerful news outlet in all of human history. After all, Flynn credits his collection of third-rate bloggers with putting an end to the "time when news organizations like the Post and the Times could set the national agenda." Apparently that doesn't happen anymore -- who knew?
And as one would expect, Flynn singled out for meritorious recognition what he felt were the very best pieces of BigGovernment "journalism," starting (where else?) with the ACORN videos: "After the second day of our video release the U.S. Senate voted to defund ACORN and the Census Bureau severed all ties with the embattled organization." True enough! Conveniently omitted, of course, was any mention of the fact that those videos were "severely edited," that James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles routinely lied about their interactions with ACORN employees, and that subsequent investigations found that ACORN employees had not engaged in any criminal acts.
But what of the other stories Flynn claims BigGovernmnet has "broken"? He lauds "Jim Hoft's great expose on Kevin Jennings, Obama's 'Safe Schools Czar' " as a shining example of BigGovernment's peculiar brand of journalism. Hoft, of course, is a blogger with Gateway Pundit who can neither read dates nor count to two, and his "expose" on Jennings was actually little more than a rehash of homophobic smears cooked up by an anti-gay hate group.
I found it curious, though, that Flynn would revisit all the BigGovernment stories that had an impact this year, but leave out the one story that earned them more notoriety than all the others. After all, it was a huge story, complete with damning video, and it resulted in a government official losing her job. It was all over TV and the newspapers for weeks, and everyone was talking about how BigGovernment started it all. You remember which one I'm talking about, right? Funny that he wouldn't even mention it...
Anyway, that wasn't the only story that failed to make Flynn's final cut, and as a die-hard BigGovernment fan, I'd be remiss not to supplement Flynn's piece with an addendum of my own enumerating the various BigGovernment moments from the past year that, to me, best represent the website's unwavering commitment to journalism and the destruction thereof:
- Their hiring -- and rapid firing -- of racist sex wizard (and MySpace sockpuppeteer) Kevin Pezzi.
- Their "exclusive" report that ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis visited the White House days before the ACORN videos were released, which later fell apart when actual journalists determined it was a different Bertha Lewis, prompting Breitbart to issue a semi-correction (which he later disavowed).
- The debut of Michael Moriarty, the former Law & Order star and current barking-mad conspiracy theorist.
- James O'Keefe's spectacularly lame "exposé" of minor errors on census workers' timecards.
- Kyle Olson's speculation that White House press secretary Robert Gibbs' purple bracelet was a secret coded message to the SEIU (it turned out to be an expression of support for the cancer-stricken daughter of a friend).
- Their suspicion that Obama had stolen his own Nobel Prize winnings (that he hadn't even received yet, and eventually donated to charity).
- And, of course, their brilliant exposé of the White House's Maoist Christmas tree ornaments, which actually featured images of Andy Warhol's famous parody of Mao, and were decorated by local community groups, not the White House.
Happy birthday, BigGovernment! Hope your second year is just as successful as the first.
I'll be sure to mark the occasion in my next "Hall of Fame" post by awarding BigGovernment.com something like the dog$#!t-star or something. LOL.
-----------------------------
IMHO
I see nothing technically wrong with this statement. Yellow Journalism is a form of journalism...
It's agenda-driven, "ends justifies the means" pseudo-jounalism, not concerned with facts or truth, but with getting the desired results.
Notice the bragging about ACORN is focused on having their federal funding removed, ignoring the subsequent vindication of ACORN, and exposed criminal behavior of the operatives running the pimp & ho scam.
All Breitbart needs is an opinion poll showing an overall negative opinion of ACORN, and in the mind of the propagandist, that equals success.
I hears Rush LImbaugh the other day playing a clip of somebody mentioning him on the subject of Climate Change. The clip was essentially saying that we have, on one side of the issue, the vast majority of all of the credible scientists, the Pentagon, the CIA,etc., and on the other side we have Blimpy Limbaugh, Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck.
Rush's rebuttal was to point out an opinion survey showing that a majority of Americans believed the anti-science side of things, the corporate-backed Denier Cult liturgy. Blimpy screamed from the safety of his bunker " Palin and Beck and I are WINNERS!!"
This is all they want, to have a majority of people confused and factually wrong. It's like they take pride in being ignorant.
And I like to occasionally go into an Uncle Remus dialect just to keep it "folksy".
LA's a pretty segregated town, and Breitbart probably doesn't know many African Americans except Justice Thomas and Alan Keyes, much less a tough African American woman who survived and prospered despite enduring the wickedness of Southern segregation.
Shirley Sherrod exposed what a joke Big Government really is. Big Government now has the credibility of a Klan website, lol.
Now where have I heard that latter term before...?
Expanding the 1st Amendment to include Freedom to Shamelessly Deceive Since 200x
I dont know how anyone would celebrate a shameful legacy of such malicious slander, libel and misconduct as has always been the defining pattern of BigGovernment.com (or any of Breitbart/O”keefes websites, work and postings.)
They might as well say Hooray! We are as bad as the government of Iran when it comes to maligning our political enemies!
Now lets base national policy on unvetted Youtube clips thrown together by a scrawny coward and bonehead ignoramus with an already established pattern of lying!
I think BigGovs bs birthday role-call was just a clumsy attempt to convince themselves (more than anyone else) that they are not the useless, mendacious, time-wasting contrivance that they truly are.
But by their own hands, they have become the very picture of unreliability on the internet. Most people can see that now, and they have only themselves to blame for that.
As an aside, I found one recent item that has slightly piqued my curiosity.
Perhaps some of you may have seen the recent LA Times article in which the author attempted to paint a very sympathetic (but totally shmalzty, negligent and unconvincing) picture of Andrew Breitbart.
It was a real bogus handjob of an interview (I personally believe he paid for it), and almost all of the comments on the webpage of the article make it clear that most people (at least those on the site) are not buying his bs anymore.
One poster made a point that I thought was rather noteworthy.
S/he pointed out that Breitbart never stays in the rural MidWest, and only remains in the wealthy coastal cities whose (purportedly) liberal residents make him so angry. Breitbart always whines about how much he hates liberals, and how they are all over LA... so why would he choose to live right in the middle of them?
I used to live in a very conservative, homophobic town in the Detroit Metro. And as soon as I was able to, I got the hell out of there tout suite!!!! I am much happier living in a gay-friendly city. And when I visit back home, i am often reminded by the town itself why I left.
Nevertheless, I work across the Midwest every summer.
Politically and socially speaking, most MidWestern residents are Breitbarts own people. They just LOVE him. They eat up every bit of garbage he puts out. Most of them have never heard of ACORN, but believe and act on everything he says about it... they really are HIS community (or at least, what he claims is his community.)
I mean, its like a regular Breitbart-paradise out there, and nevertheless, he never goes out there.
The poster on the LA Times made it clear that s/he thinks Breitbart is just too much of an urban, elitist softy to deal with the Midwest.
Maybe there is something too that.
(for the record, i certainly do not believe that we in cities are elitist or softies, or even reliably liberal... but that is a stereotype many people in the rural MidWest have of city dwellers.)
I mean, I only go out to Nebraska and the Dakotas for seasonal work, and hustle the bejeezus right out of there when I am done. I live in a very gay-friendly city, and worked very hard to get here.
Breitbart is very wealthy. He doesnt have to live in a place full of what he calls West Coast Hollywood liberals, he can move to Idaho if he really wanted to.
In fact, he should... he would be happier there.
He can still make a big nuisance of himself in small town America, since all his work taking down the institutional left is done entirely on the internet. He never does anything offline, other than flip-off advocates who protest child abduction.
I am sure he probably spins out some bs as if he is at the forefront of the culture war... but that certainly would not hold any water. Since his work is done entirely online, he has no reason to stay in the heart of the supposed liberal beast.
Maybe living among liberals isnt as bad as Breitbart says.
Maybe he just has issues that can only be resolved by shameful and grotesque spectacle... like GG Allen (certainly, they both have a record of throwing all manner of feces around, and attacking innocent people for no real reason.)
Maybe he is just an ungrateful shmuck who based his whole career on working out some stupid juvenile complex better left to a trained therapist.
Since its clear that he doesnt see the people who he targets as real human beings (what sociopath does?), its quite possible that he thinks these are just dolls for working out this complex.
Personally, I think it all goes back to bad toilet training.