Better smears, please

March 6, 2007

It’s not at all surprising that the right would be going after Democratic leaders with enthusiasm, but I’m a little surprised at just how weak conservatives’ complaints have been lately.

The right got all worked up about Nancy Pelosi’s military plane, which turned out to be nothing. They were really excited about the elementary school Barack Obama attended at age 6, before the story turned out to be false. The right thought they caught John Kerry being shunned by troops in Iraq, but their “proof” was easily debunked. Conservatives were beside themselves when John Edwards hired a couple of bloggers, but the excitement was misguided and short-lived.

And now [tag]Hillary Clinton[/tag] is drawing their ire with a “controversy” that’s equally vapid.

Today’s exhibit of winger mendacity — pushed today by Drudge, Fox News, and some of the big winger blogs — concerns the southern accent Hillary put on in Alabama yesterday.

The Drudge headline links to this audio of Hillary speaking yesterday. If you listen to it, the main thing you’ll hear is Hillary speaking in a southern drawl, saying phrases that sound like her own words: “I don’t feel no ways tired..I come too far from where I started from…Nobody told me that the road would be easy…I don’t believe he brought me this far to leave me.”

As you can see, this clip makes it sound like Hillary is adopting not just this drawl, but this language and this down-home grammar, as her own. The righties have been waving this around to prove what a phony Hillary is. This audio was promoted by, among others, PowerlineBlog, Free Republic, Instapundit, and Fox News, which linked to it under the headline, “Will the real Hillary please speak up?”

But as always, a simple fact-check shows this latest wingnut preoccupation to be highly dishonest. The audio clip Drudge linked to cherry-picked that quote and removed it completely from its context, which would have shown that Hillary wasn’t adopting this accent or grammar or language as her own at all.

Rather, it turns out that Hillary was actually quoting the hymn lyrics of someone else — while clearly and very openly imitating (not very well, it turns out) the cadences she thought the lyrics would traditionally have been delivered in. There was nothing phony about it at all.

Honestly, conservatives, I’ve come to expect better smears from you guys.

Maybe they haven’t fully recovered from their shellacking in November. Maybe the Dems just aren’t giving the right much material to work with. And maybe the smear machine just isn’t as clever as I thought it was.

But I have to say, this is all rather sad. I used to have a degree of grudging admiration for how well these guys could orchestrate an effective attack. But maybe the myth of the smear machine is scarier than the reality.

Indeed, there’s been an apparent dumbing-down of the right’s attacks. There’s no flare or creativity anymore. It was one of the interesting side notes of [tag]Coulter[/tag] calling John Edwards a “faggot” last week — the audience, made up of some of the leading right-wing activists in the county, laughed and applauded. I can almost picture far-right versions of Beavis and Butthead sitting in the front-row, giggling, saying, “Heh, she said ‘faggot.’ Cool.”

C’mon, conservatives, pick your game. Wrenching a Hillary quote out of context and treating it as a major political development reeks of desperation.

As Greg Sargent put it, “Look, Hillary’s real sins here were being corny as hell and painfully tone deaf. But phony this wasn’t. You’d think that after having so many of their silly tales blow up in their faces these wingers would start checking the facts once in awhile — if only to stop making themselves look so damn foolish all the time.”

fact-checking to fit reality?

“You people in the reality-based community don’t understand – we’re the actors, we create our own reality, and you react to it.” (Paraphrasing the famous quote)

Living in WingerWorld, where up is down, in is out, left is right, day is night, means never having to face up to the truth of having just made it up.

Remember, we are dealing with those who daily prove how user-friendly computers are, that bipeds who lack frontal lobes and opposable thumbs can use them.

Once again, the abject failure of homeschooling is revealed.

BTW – did you know that failed Hollywood-wannabe actor Matt Drudge originally was a “liberal,” and only became a “conservative” when he discovered he could make money and become famous (which were his goals) by being a rightie blogger – waaaaay back with the OJ Simpson crap. Like Newt Gingrich, who was a Rockefeller Republican until he figured out he couldn’t be elected that way and turned himself into a conservative, or “Michael Savage” who discovered he could get on the radio and make money spewing stuff he originally heard from others, all these guys are “Conservative” opportunists. The only “prinicple” they believe is “show me the money!”

  • of course if the only people the wingers look foolish to is the blogosphere, they could care less. the reality is that the MSM will run a story about the dust up, no matter how silly (see Pelosi’s Plane for example), but give much less coverage to the correction. and much of the base will see the initial story (“Hillary is a phony!”) and never see or hear the correction at all. sure they look stupid to anyone with functioning neural pathways, but votes make a wonderful salve for their bruised egos and they can be embarassed by the left while they laugh all the way to the electoral bank.

  • The right may be making hay out of Hillary’s speech, but admit it — it was embarrassing. If she had tried to read it, cadences or no cadences, in her normal voice, no one would have said a thing. Instead, it just adds to the perception of her lack of authenticity, which as a liberal I happen to believe is true. With a carefully plotted out as her campaign is, I can’t believe she didn’t give the speech a test run before a friendly audience and someone should have said, “This will not play well.” Is it a scandal? No. Did she break the law? No. Did she make a political blunder? Absolutely.

  • “C’mon, conservatives, pick your game.”

    They can’t. Their game is rabid innuendos and fiction. The Blogosphere is seriously putting a dent in their game. Used to be they could go on TV and say this or that and the liberal media wouldn’t even think about fact checking, much less calling them out. Now with the internets and blogs in particular, they get fact checked and called on everything.

    We complain about the MSM and how incompetent it has become, but I wonder if that is because they know if they wait a day or two, some blogger, some where will fill in the details or maybe their incompetence has created a backlash of bloggers.

    Either way, their ‘game’ has been seriously altered and even if it takes the bloggers a couple of days/weeks to get a relevant story from non-story to the front page, it happens, and they know that spouting off early (White House excluded) it’s going to come back and haunt them.

  • This is really all they have left. Hell, what can they say about Hillary that isn’t now a bad SNL joke? They shot their entire clip ages ago.

    The thing they’re desperate to cover up is that when it comes to practacal performance the last six years the Republican/Conservative record is dismal on a remarkable level. There’s no reason to vote for them for the majority of Americans.

    So they can only tear the opposition down. It’s all they have left, and in time, it wears thin.

  • I’m of the humble opinion that the people who were the strongest components of the right-wing smear machine are in hibernation, leaving it to the Kopy Kat Kidz to try to emulate those who destroy reputations oh-so-well. Those true geniuses of slander are saving their A-Game for when it’s needed. They expended a lot of effort getting Dubya re-elected, and they sense that there’s currently “Smear fatigue” in the air.

    In other words, wait a Friedman Unit or two. The smears will, sadly, get better, when the masters at the art form decide to get back into the game. Until then, the right has to settle on getting the smear from the people who used to be the ones who merely spread the smear. They’re simpley not up to the task

  • It may have been a weak smear but if you watched the news programs on CNN and MSNBC last night they mentioned the southern accent thing prominently in their newscasts and w/o putting it in its proper context…

    It doesnt matter how weak the smear is the right just wants to throw enough sh*t on the walls until, something sticks….the sad part is that after the multitudes of failures they have had this year with pelosi, Edards, Clinton , and Obam the Mainstream press will still dutifully report these “findings” as fact over and over and over again…

  • Zeitgeist at #2 above hit the nail on the head. Several years ago Bill Kristol was on the Daily Show and Stewart basically got him to admit that some winger talking point on Iraq WMD was BS. He then smirked and said so what, Stewart’s audience wasn’t his target audience – they’re never going to vote for bush anyway.

    The important thing is to get the smear out there and spread endlessly on the main stream media. By the time the correction comes around, it’ll be burried somewhere where no one is paying attention. Each one of these smears is sort of silly on it’s own, but the cumulative affect is to build a narrative in the minds of the people who aren’t paying attention like the political junkies are. That is, the soccor moms, etc.

  • I really think you’re underestimating this. It’s not the quality of the smear, it’s the effectiveness with which it’s deployed (I don’t think the wingers have gotten warmed up yet on this one — watch Hannity and Limbaugh in the next couple of days) — and it’s also a question of whether it fits in with memes they’ve already gotten into the mainstream. The New York Times has a truly awful story today about what a manufactured phony Hillary is — this complements that quite nicely.

    Oh, and do you think it’s even possible that Maureen Dowd will fail to cite this soon? Not to mention Chris Matthews?

  • While they are at it getting themselves in a tizzy over faked accents, how about the current asshole, resident of the White House. The dude is from Connecticut for chrissake.

  • We may deride the right-wing noise machine for getting the facts wrong, but do the facts matter when no one is held to account for lying?

    The strategy works anyway. What is Hillary’s strength, love her or hate her?

    She is earnest, sober, sincere, and serious. We might like her to have more of the glad-handedness of Bill, or the charm of Obama, or the articulateness of Edwards, but even if you don’t like her, an honest observer has to see that she speaks and behaves with forethought, and takes up challenges that she believes in.

    So the right is going directly after her strongest suit, the way they went after Kerry’s war record. It doesn’t matter if it is all lies, if no one makes the underlying strategy itself laughable.

  • The only “prinicple” they believe is “show me the money!”

    My missus got pissed at me when I gave Coulter a pass. I said, “it’s her day job, and she’s good at it. Why quit now? As long as the fools throw money at her, she’s not going to give it up.”

    Always follow the money, the trail tells the tale. Drudge, Savage, Coulter, et al, have made an industry slopping the pigs because there is always bacon at the days’ end. Until that changes, nothing changes.

    -GFO

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