Now that the wingnuts have taken down Van Jones, the mob is frothing at the mouth for more victims. And Glenn Beck has obligingly named them.
Glenn Beck’s Next Target: Cass Sunstein
By DAVID WEIGEL 9/4/09 3:36 PM
As he makes a real impact in pushing conservative fringe attacks on Obama administration officials into the mainstream, Glenn Beck’s Twitter feed has become a must-read. In a message from last night, Beck told his followers to “FIND EVERYTHING YOU CAN ON CASS SUNSTEIN, MARK LLOYD AND CAROL BROWNER.” They are, respectively, the nominee to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the Associate General Counsel and Chief Diversity Officer of the FCC, and the Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change. Browner was also administrator of the EPA for all eight years of Bill Clinton’s presidency.
You can follow Beck's Twitter feed here, if you can stomach it. I think it's important to monitor rightwing hate sites, just to keep tabs on what they're up to. So now we know, Beck's mob will be going after Sunstein, Lloyd and Browner. I predict they will do it in their usual way: seize on a tidbit of information taken out of context, distort it, and throw out a shitstorm of lies and ridiculous faux outrage until the target succombs. These one-trick ponies have used this tactic over and over, successfully. Think of Dan Rather and the "fonts." That was an early taste of blood for the mob and now they can't get enough.
Let me tell you an awful story from personal experience to illustrate this tactic.
How the Freepers Destroyed the Final Days of a Dying Man
My friend, Andy Stephenson, was a voting rights activist, fighting for voter verifiable paper ballots and against the Diebold voting machines. He was also a very popular blogger at Democratic Underground. He was employed by a voting rights organization but left on bad terms which are irrelevant to this story. That incident did not in any way diminish his commitment to the cause. He continued the fight.
While on a trip to DC for a voting rights conference he became very ill. He called me from the hotel desperate for help. I advised him to go straight to the emergency room, but he declined because he had no health insurance. He finally got the hotel doctor to prescribe pain killers, and returned to Seattle the next day.
Back home (and enrolled in Medicaid), he was diagnosed initially with diabetes, then, tragically, with pancreatic cancer. Being a compulsive researcher, he found out that his odds of survival were terrible, and that his best hope was treatment at Johns Hopkins. Since he was uninsured, his friends at Democratic Underground launched a successful online fundraiser to pay for his surgery.
THAT is when the Freepers sprang into action. Andy isn't sick, he's a scam artist, they howled (based on nothing except the fact that we were fundraising for him at DU).
They launched daily attacks on him from their little hidey hole. They put up a website specifically devoted to attacking him. They harrassed the hospital. They harrassed PayPal and got the check from the fundraiser to cover his surgery delayed. They got his Medicaid temporarily cancelled by filing bogus complaints.
And here is where their one-trick protocol came into play.
Andy was on the East Coast for his surgery (a horrific surgery - the Whipple). Because of the harrassment and the delayed check, his surgery was postponed for a week, so Andy came to New York to visit me for a few days. While he was here we went to visit a friend in Hoboken. At dinner Andy announced he'd gotten at least a little good news at Johns Hopkins. The doctors told him "the tumor was encapsulated." They told him this indicated his cancer hadn't metastisized. This was great news.
One of the friends at dinner misunderstood what Andy had told us. At DU, attempting to share the good news, she posted that the tumor was encapsulated, and so it wasn't cancer.
We were all at the same table together and heard the same thing, she was well-meaning but simply misunderstood what "metastisized" meant.
But that was it. From there on, no matter how many attempts were made to correct the misinfo (including publishing Andy's hospital bills on the web), no matter how Andy's friend attempted to correct her mistake at DU and to set the facts straight, it was a done deal.
The Freepers had declared Andy a faker and now they had their "evidence," which they proceeded to embellish, distort and hype despite the absolute fact that it was simply not true.
Andy did get his surgery. He recuperated at a friend's house then went home to Seattle. But he didn't survive long. His final days were hellish, not just from the horrible disease but from his awareness that he had been targetted by the mob and they had delayed his care. And that such vitriolic hatred and lies could be heaped upon him as he was dying simply because he'd fought against unverifiable electronic voting machines being used in our elections.
The mob mentality is alive and well to this day. They got Dan Rather. They got Van Jones. They've got their next targets and they will use the same tactics.
How do we fight distortion, lies and smears? How do we protect Sunstein, Lloyd and Browner from the irrational, angry mob?