WND's Farah Forgets About His Own Teenage Right-Wing Phenom Topic: WorldNetDaily
Joseph Farah spends his July 6 WorldNetDaily column dissing Jonathan Krohn, the teenager who has rejected the conservativsm he spouted at 13 at CPAC and is now a liberal-leaning college student-to-be:
According to the article, “Jonathan Krohn took the political world by storm at 2009′s Conservative Political Action Conference when, at just 13 years old, he delivered an impromptu rallying cry for conservatism that became a viral hit and had some pegging him as a future star of the Republican Party.”
Somehow I missed this memorable speech – or forgot it. He also wrote a book called “Defining Conservatism,” which is currently ranked 2,338,880 at Amazon – and not rising.
What is Krohn talking about today? The 17-year-old’s 15 minutes of fame is based on what he said and wrote when he was a 13-year-old conservative.
But wait -- didn't Farah and WND have their own teenager spouting conservative platitudes at one point? Yes, they did.
Kyle Williams started his WND column in 2001 at the tender age of 12. As we detailed at the time, Williams wasn't offering anything terribly original, just spouting right-wing talking points.Farah wasn't mocking his age or purported wisdom then, as this introductory article shows:
Williams’ column is called “Veritas,” and he focuses like a laser beam on the deeper truths he has discovered in his young life.
“Home-schooled in rural Oklahoma, Williams gives us faith that America really does have a bright future,” said Joseph Farah, editor and chief executive officer of WorldNetDaily. “I have every confidence that Williams’ writing will be as inspirational to WorldNetDaily readers – young and old – as I found them.”
He’s no one-trick-pony, this Kyle Williams. Week after week, he has turned in very professional work. He meets his deadlines. He writes provocatively and persuasively. I find him to be inspirational – redefining our expectations of just what young teen-agers are capable of doing.
If you aren’t already checking out his column on Saturdays in WorldNetDaily, I really urge you to do so. And drop young Kyle an encouraging e-mail if you agree with me he’s something special.
But that wasn't all:
Shortly after I founded a new book-publishing partnership with Thomas Nelson Publishers – WND Books – I twisted a few arms and secured the young Mr. Williams his first book contract.
Now, in addition to being America’s youngest weekly pundit, he may also be America’s youngest non-fiction author. Kyle Williams’ “Seen and Heard” is out. I want to ask you to consider buying the book by this gifted young prodigy and perhaps giving it to your son, daughter or grandchild to help raise their own expectations about what they can achieve if they simply put their mind to it.
That's right -- like Krohn, Williams wrote a book. According to Amazon, it's ranked right now at 4,256,981, a couple million titles below Krohn's book.
WND stopped carrying Williams' column in 2005, and he pretty much disappeared from the scene. The most recent information we could find on him was a series of columns he wrote in 2009 for the student newspaper at the University of Oklahoma, where he was "a history and classics sophomore" at the time. His ideology appears not to have changed much -- some of those columns served up conservative viewpoints.
Since being homeschooled was one of his original calling cards and he once bragged about giving up on public schooling after a single semester, Williams' going to a public university is presumably a huge disappointment to Farah, who sends his own kids to the far-right Christian, homeschooler-friendly Patrick Henry College.
Did Farah forget about the right-wing teen phenom he nurtured and published, or is Williams' going to a public school too much for the guy? Either way, mocking Krohn for being a conservative teen star who changed his views is rather petty -- and, given the existence of Kyle Williams, more than a little hypocritical.
The Media Research Center is very angry about the mere existence of a movie about a stuffed bear.
In a June 29 MRC Culture & Media Institute item, Lauren Thompson vents her rage at the Todd McFarlane film "Ted":
“Ted” is a living teddy bear that’s been John’s (Mark Wahlberg) best friend since he was little. John is now in his 30s, and the two share a bachelor pad. Ted’s tastes, according to the trailer, run to bong hits, cocaine, multiple hookers, humping inanimate objects, voyeurism and brawling.
[...]
So it’s pretty much “Family Guy” in theatrical release. McFarlane, a strident liberal, has never taken the high road with that cartoon.
Thompson is even more offended that other people like it:
The Kansas City Star thinks all that is just awesome. “There are feverishly inappropriate jokes that will live on in dorm-room bull sessions forever. When skirt-chasing Ted lands a job as a grocery clerk, he and a busty co-worker, make the stockroom their love nest. You may never look at parsnips again without snickering.” Wow. You can pay $10 (plus popcorn) for sex jokes involving parsnips.
The New York Times, perhaps mindful that its high-brow readers tend to approve of sex with root vegetables only when it occurs in art museums at taxpayer-expense, was more measured. “Sexual and flatulence-based gags are accompanied by the usual side dishes: warmed-over pop-cultural references and cheap-shot jabs at celebrities and ethnic minorities,” the Times warned. But, “There are some genuinely, wildly funny bits in the movie — a brutal motel-room fistfight between Ted and John; a cocaine-fueled talking binge; a few choice insults and smutty riffs.”
Thompson provided no evidence she has actually seen the film she's bashing.
Then again, neither has Brent Bozell, who devotes his July 6 column to "Ted"-bashing:
Seth MacFarlane, whose $100 million contract with Fox makes him the highest paid TV writer in history, is now trying to take over the cineplex, with the same old shtick. You could pluck his oeuvre out of the summer movie-preview articles without any difficulty. His was the one where the teddy bear comes to life and becomes a profane slacker who practically lives inside a bong and hires hookers in groups.
The movie's title is "Ted." It won its opening weekend with a $54 million gross at the box office. Clearly, MacFarlane's fans cannot consume enough of his pop-culture sewage.
Bozell hates the film (which it isn't clear he hasn't seen) so much, in fact, that he gives away the ending. Which tells us Bozell doesn't care about movies at all and simply wants to destroy the movie-going experience for any film he doesn't think other people should watch. Which is better known as censorship.
WND's Farah Ramps Up the Paranoia Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah is getting more paranoid by the day, and he picked the perfect outlet to express it: the radio show of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.
A July 5 WND article by Chelsea Schilling kicks off with some primo paranoia from Farah:
His private property was scouted by a drone that sounded “like a lawnmower buzzing over my head,” WND Editor and CEO Joseph Farah revealed on the July 5 Alex Jones Show.
“I’m taking my dog for a walk and guess what I see right over the tree line right above my head is a drone,” he said. “I don’t live in the city, I don’t live in a populated area, I live in one of the most rural places you could possibly live in Northern Virginia and there could only be one thing that this drone was spying on and that would be me, that would be my property because there’s just nothing else around except woods and deer.”
Farah joked that the drone might have been spying on him because he qualifies as a “terrorist” in a new Department of Homeland Security report that defines “extreme right-wing” terrorists as Americans who are “reverent of individual liberty.”
As we documented, Farah is simply lying about the conclusions of that report.
But Farah wasn't done freaking out:
“We’ve got our work cut out for us. More and more, I realize that the liberty lovers out there really have to stick together,” he urged. “Fundamentally, we’ve got to stick together, or we’re going to hang together, as our founders said.
“Look – this is the first term – if he’s re-elected it’s going to be war – they will be at war – we will be hunted down like dogs, keep that in mind, that’s what the stakes are,” warned Farah.
Farah continued, peddling the discredited conspiracy theory that the Fast & Furious gun-walking scandal was designed to undermine gun rights in the U.S.:
Then, near the 19:00 mark, Farah called “Fast & Furious” one of “the biggest government scandals I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime.”
President Obama is guilty of “treason of the highest order” for his role in the scandal, Farah declared.
“It seems more and more clear every day that this was a government operation with the motivation behind it to disarm Americans and to make the case against individual ownership of firearms for Americans,” he explained. “And the sneaky way they did that was to show how nasty these guns are because they’re too available in America, and we let them go over the border to Mexico, and they wind up in the hands of drug cartels and people get murdered. The scenario worked out just the way they planned it, except for the fact that it blew up in their face, to a certain extent, because the American people found out about it.”
Farah exclaimed, “You talk about impeachable offenses? This is beyond impeachable! This is treason of the highest order. … This goes right to the very top.”
The crazier Farah gets, the more he discredits himself and his website. Fortunately for the rest of us, he doesn't seem to have realized that.
CNS Quotes Romney Calling Mandate A Tax, Ignores His Campaign's Conflict Topic: CNSNews.com
We'vedetailed how CNSNews.com has been attacking non-conservatives for insisting that the individual mandate in President Obama's health care reform is a penalty and not a tax, as declared by Chief Justice John Roberts -- even though Mitt Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom has said that "the governor has consistently described the mandate in Massachusetts as a penalty."
Now, a July 6 CNS article by Melanie Hunter quotes Romney himself calling it a tax -- again, without mentioning Fehrnstrom and the conflict within Romney's own campaign.
Why is CNS protecting Romney? It's obvious -- it's biased, much more so than the media outlets its parent, the Media Research Center, loves to criticize.
NewsBusters' Double Standard on Reflexive Bashing Topic: NewsBusters
Tim Graham's July 6 NewsBusters post carries the headline "Obama, Top Aide Jarrett Reflexively Bash Fox News," touting how "President Obama drew “Turn Off Fox News” headlines on the Drudge Report" and how "Drudge also highlighted that top Obama aide Valerie Jarrett blamed Fox News for the impression that’s developed that Team Obama is waging a class war on the wealthy" (an accusation, by the way, that's entirely backed up by facts).
It's hilarious that Graham would looking down on "reflexive bashing," because that's what he and the rest of the MRC crew do all the time. So much so, in fact, that they invoke the same tropes.
For instance, a July 5 NewsBusters post by MRC researcher Matt Hadro dismisses Vanity Fair as a "liberal rag." The same day, Graham denounced the Guardian newspaper as a "leftist U.K. rag."
That's the epitome of reflexive bashing. But Graham is apparently so self-unaware that he attacks others for doing exactly what he does.
While most Americans were commemorating the nation’s birthday, racial violence, lawlessness and animosity marred Independence Day celebrations in Georgia, Florida, Ohio, California and Illinois.
Chris Rock started the day off with a bang: “Happy white peoples Independence Day,” he tweeted. “The slaves weren’t free but I’m sure they enjoyed fireworks.”
In Chicago, Ill., some were enjoying the celebration until they were set upon by a mob of dozens of black people intent on violence. One man was taken to the hospital, where he remains in good condition. Eleven black people were arrested and charged with assault.
As is often the case, the mainstream media did not report the mob was black. Witnesses and others took to the Internet to set the record straight.
Flaherty and WND seem unusually desperate to portray blacks as violent and murderous. Perhaps they should explain why.
MRC Is Sad Media No Longer Using 'Illegals' Slur Topic: Media Research Center
Lauren Thompson has a sad in a June 27 MRC Culture and Media Institute item:
In a span of six years major networks stopped using the terms “illegal alien” and “illegals.” The liberal media’s agenda is clear, and the word "illegal" is now considered a racial slur. In 2006, major networks CBS and ABC used the terms “illegals” and “illegal aliens” in their stories (NBC did not). Today, those terms have all but disappeared from network immigration reporting.
The change is clear evidence that pressure from activist groups is succeeding in eroding and altering the terms of debate. Sadly, the most influential of those activist groups may be the Society of Professional Journalists – the professional body that proclaims its mission as “improving and protecting journalism.” In 2011 SPJ decided to encourage newsrooms to discontinue using the terms “illegal alien” and “illegal immigrant” because it is “offensive” to Hispanics and immigrants.
Thompson goes on to rail against the "SPJ’s dishonest terminology." But at no point does she explain why not using "illegals" is "dishonest," nor does she explain why some news organizations consider it to be offensive, let alone rebut the idea. As Poynter has detailed, some believe the word "illegal" presumes criminality, though being in the U.S. without documentation is a civil, not a criminal, offense, and that it oversimplifies the issue of illegal immigration.
Thompson can take heart, though: The right-wing-beloved Fox News still clings to "illegals."
AIM Mad Wash. Post Political Fact-Checker Won't Do Another Person's Job Topic: Accuracy in Media
Don Irvine spends a July 3 Accuracy in Media post whining that Washington Post political fact-checker Glenn Kessler won't do anything but political fact-checking:
Glenn Kessler, aka The Washington Post Fact Checker, informed readers that even though the Obama campaign had misinterpreted a recent Washington Post story on Bain Capital and outsourcing, he would not award any Pinocchios (his rating system for accuracy) to the Post for the actual story, since it was the interpretation of the Post story, and not the story itself, that was wrong.
[...]
So the lesson is that the Obama campaign is free to twist the information from any future Post article however they like, and though Kessler may comment on it he won’t rate its level of dishonesty. That way he can protect both the paper and his relationships with other Post employees.
Irvine conveniently ignores the fact that fact-checking the newspaper is not Kessler's job -- it's clear that he only fact-checks claims by political candidates.
The Post has an ombudsman that handles what is published by the Post itself, Patrick Pexton. In his June 29 column, Pexton addressed the Post story in question, pointing out that the article was correct in its facts but that some quibbling could be done on interpretation.
Irvine didn't mention Pexton's column in bashing Kessler for not doing something that's not his job.
CNS Still Attacking People For Doing What Romney Campaign Is Doing Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com is still clinging to its misguided editorial policy of attacking anyone -- well, any non-conservative -- for claiming that the individual mandate in President Obama's health care reform law isn't a tax.
In a July 2 article, Patrick Burke goes back all the way to January 2011 to bash then-White House Council of Economic Advisers chairman Austan Goolsbee for claiming it's not a tax.
In a July 3 blog post, Eric Scheiner asserts that calling the mandate a penalty and not a tax is a "Jedi mind trick."
But as we've noted, Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom has pointed out that "the governor has consistently described the mandate in Massachusetts as a penalty" -- and went on to defend that description. Of course, neither Burke nor Scheiner -- like the other CNS writers making the same attack -- mentioned that inconvenient fact.
CNS has noted the debate in Romney's campaign over the issue -- but not in an original article. It's mentioned only in a July 4 Associated Press item.
WND Promotes Misleadingly Edited Video About Christian-Muslim Conflict in Dearborn Topic: WorldNetDaily
Chelsea Schilling began her June 28 WorldNetDaily article dramatically:
It happened in an American city: Hundreds of angry Muslim children and adults rioted against Christians, throwing chunks of concrete and eggs at their heads, spraying them with urine and cursing at them – while police stood by and threatened the victims with “disorderly conduct.”
The city of Dearborn, Mich., hosted its annual 2012 Arab International festival on Father’s Day weekend. As can be seen in a video of the attack, a group of people professing to be Christians holding signs was viciously assaulted by an angry mob of Arabs – as the crowd chanted “Allahu Akbar!” – Arabic for “God is the greatest!”
Schilling went on to claim that "police are nowhere to be seen."
Knowing Schilling's record of factual inaccuracies, it's a given that this isn't the full story about this incident. And it isn't.
The Christ and Pop Culture blog (h/t Bartholomew) has the full story that Schilling overlooks, and it appears these Christians weren't as "passive" as Schilling portrays them. According to the blog, the Christian group, led by street preacher Ruben Israel, was carrying a pig head on a pole -- as Israel explained to police, that's because Muslims are “petrified” of pigs and so it “keeps them at bay.” The Christian group was also shouting at the Muslims that they are going to hell and their religion is a lie.
Schilling does mention that "WND later learned that the Christian crowd had been carrying a pole with a pig’s head attached to the top and that "Christian street preachers shout, 'God is good, and God is not Allah!'"But an unedited video of the incident -- as opposed to the one Schilling used as the basis of her article --shows that Israel mocked the Muslims, and other preachers claimed that all they think about are violence and murder and hate.
But that's hardly a fully accurate representation of the provocation the Christians engaged in; Schilling is more interested in portraying Muslims as inherently violent.
Schilling's claim that police did little or nothing to protect the Christian provocateurs from the consequences of the behavior they incited is even more false. As Christ and PopCulture reports, the unedited video shows that not only did the police try to intervene several times, a Muslim man also tried to keep angry Muslims away from the Christians.
In short: These so-called Christians incited the Muslims, and now they're crying persecution. And Schilling is happy to regurgitate the misleading spin of a combative street preacher.
We've previously noted how WND has promoted Israel while hiding is virulently anti-gay views.
NEW ARTICLE: The MRC's Brent Bozell Problem Topic: Media Research Center
The head of the Media Research Center is spouting increasingly hateful and unhinged rhetoric. How does that reflect on the organization he founded? All too well, given the incivility spreading throughout the MRC. Read more >>
Obama Derangement Syndrome Watch, Erik Rush Edition Topic: WorldNetDaily
Erik Rush uses his June 27 WorldNetDaily column to go swimming in the same Obama-sleaze cesspool that Jerome Corsi wallows in:
On the bizarre side, there have been reports claiming Obama held membership in a gay men’s club in Chicago in years past. On the heels of this was the mother of slain Trinity United Church of Christ’s choir director Donald Young claiming that her gay son was killed (execution style in 2007) to protect Obama politically by erasing the trail of his alleged homosexual dalliances.
Rush doesn't tell us where these "reports" came from -- perhaps because if he did, he would have no credibility. Nevertheless, Rush continues to mainline the Obama-hate:
Several of my colleagues, as well as I and some credentialed experts, have postulated previously that psychological imbalance and perhaps even chemical dependency on Obama’s part may be among the many things being cloaked by the administration. Indeed, there is no manner by which that could be proven at this juncture, but it is possible that only those closest to the president would be privy to such things. Psychotics and junkies often have a singular talent for hiding their afflictions, even from family members.
Tell us again how someone who peddles such hateful fringe theories -- which also include his belief that Malcolm X is Obama's real father -- got to be the "Vice President of Administration and Strategic Alliances" for Pink Pagoda Girls USA? Doesn't Pagoda Girls founder Jim Garrow worry abouthow the credibility of his organization is harmed with Rush in such a prominent position?
It's a new month, and you know what that means: a new CNSNews.com article by Edwin Mora blaming President Obama for U.S. troop deaths in Afghanistan:
Of the 1,912 U.S. military personnel who have died in the now nearly 11-year-long war in Afghanistan, 1,343 have died since President Barack Obama was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2009.
Seventy percent of the Afghan War casualties have happened on Obama's watch.
As is Mora's practice, the words "Bush" and "Iraq" appear nowhere in his article even though, as we've documented, the troop death rate in Iraq at the height of that war was much greater than it has ever been in Iraq and more than twice as many U.S. troops were killed in Iraq than have been so far in Afghanistan.
Farah Picks Extremist Boykin As Romney's Preferred VP Topic: WorldNetDaily
Joseph Farah's July 1 column is all about "the kind of vice-presidential candidate Mitt Romney should consider if he is serious about winning the election and setting up the party with a viable successor in 2016 or 2020." Before listing his "safe, politically pragmatic choices that would be good for the country and for the future of the Republican Party" -- Scott Walker and Rand Paul -- Farah lists the "completely different list of personalities" he'd pick "if it were up to me to select the presidential nominee or vice-presidential nominee."
And who is at the top of Farah's list, ahead of even Michelle Bachmann, Jim DeMint and Allen West? Jerry Boykin. Farah elaborates:
I don’t know why America isn’t clamoring to get a man like this in the White House. He’s genuine hero – a spiritual man of vision who loves America and would always do what’s right for the country. He would make us all proud to be Americans, again.
What Farah doesn't tell you, which explains why America isn’t clamoring to get a man like this in the White House: Boykin is a far-right, anti-Muslim extremist who's prone to conspiracy theories.Right Wing Watch lists a few examples:
Boykin: President Obama has created a Hitler-style Brownshirt army to force Marxism on America
Boykin: Islam not protected under the First Amendment
Boykin: No mosques in America
Boykin: There can be no interfaith dialogue between Muslims and Christians because Islam is not an Abrahamic faith and has nothing in common with Christianity
Boykin: Christians must go on the offensive against Islam
Boykin: George Soros and Council on Foreign Relations members are working to create a Marxist, global government
As if to prove Boykin's extremism -- which is obvious, it seems, to everyone but Farah and his WND subordinates -- a July 2 WND article by Drew Zahn touts Boykin's new "video warning that Barack Obama is following in the footsteps of Fidel Castro, Joseph Stalin and others who have led communist revolutions in their nations." Because likening your political opponents to Castro and Stalin is a sure sign of vice-presidential timber.
Zahn fawningly describes Boykin as "a former senior Pentagon official who has battled Marxism around the globe." He also uncriticially repeats Boykin's bogus claim that Obama's reference to a "civilian national security force" is "the model that has been used when societies have moved to Marxism." WND has fearmongered about this for years, obscuring the fact that Obama was talking about an expansion of the foreign service.
MRC Curiously Silent About Right-Winger's Anti-Catholic Attack Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center loves to defend the Catholic Church against anyperceivedslight -- after all, MRC chief Brent Bozell is on the board of advisers for the right-wing Catholic League.
But there's one nasty anti-Catholic attack the MRC has remained utterly silent about: Last week, Iowa radio host Jan Mickelson asked a congressman whether he had "any power to pull the Nuns on the Bus over and pistol whip them."
Pistol-whipping nuns seems like the very thing Bozell and crew should be offended by. But, sadly, don't expect to see them come to these nuns' defense -- effectively condoning this threat of violence.
First, the MRC has been railing against the Nuns on the Bus tour -- designed to promote federal spending on social issues -- as nothing but a bunch of "lefty" nuns who are, in the words of Matt Hadro, causing "doctrinal chaos" and, thus, "needs reform."Similarly, Mike Bates dismissed them as "liberals attacking modest GOP efforts to control Federal spending."
It’s an “understatement” that the church has a “messaging” problem. Cloud does not acknowledge that the Vatican is facing a hostile media that wants to distort and poison its image inside and outside the church walls – including Time magazine. It's easy for Sister Simone to "outflank the church hierarchy" by manipulating the radical feminists and secular leftists of the news media.
The second reason you won't hear the MRC denounce Mickelson is because he's a right-wing radio host -- and, as it just so happens, one of the judges for last year's annual MRC liberal-bashing awards. And the ones in 2010 and 2007 and for numerousotheryears all the way back to 1998.
In other words, Mickelson is a frind of the MRC. And the MRC is too cowardly to criticize its friends in public.
As we saw with RushLimbaugh's three days of misogyny against Sandra Fluke, the MRC simply does not, and will not, hold its fellow ideologues for the same behavior it excoriates in non-conservatives. It's another gutless, hypocritical performance for Bozell and Co.
So Jan Mickelson is free to pistol-whip away at those nuns, and Bozell won't lift a finger to stop him. Way to set an example, Brent.
