Somehow, the claims made by Joy Reid that the ten-plus-year-old blog posts with vaguely homophobic language were fabrications seems to have gotten little attention here on the SDMB, or perhaps my search skills are lacking.
The linked article goes on to disassemble the hacking claims thoroughly. Without quoting at length:
For debate (since “resolved” seems to raise hackles for some bizarre reason): Reid is either deliberately lying, or – and this is a lifeline from the end of the linked article – she “genuinely believes at least some of the posts were planted. After 12 years and tens of thousands of written words, Reid simply may not remember.”
My own view is that it’s unlikely that she doesn’t remember, when the specific posts are in front of her to refresh her recollection.
Based on all the attention she is getting on Twitter, I believe she is firmly on one side or the other of the 2016 Dem primary fight, but I have no idea which.
“I was hacked!” is the “dog ate my homework” of the new millenium.
If you picked some random post I wrote here I wouldn’t remember writing most of them. Unless it was something I had thought particularly clever. It’s always weird when a zombie pops up in the user cp and I see what I wrote.
But my inclination is she wrote it back when people.were less likely to react poorly en masse. iME when social media gets “hacked” it’s usually pretty random and to make you part of some bot nonsense.
Was she someone anyone would have bothered targeting back then?
Her behavior about this is bizarre. She already apologized for this kind of thing, so why on earth wouldn’t she just refer people to her previous statement and shut up?
Ditto - this is the first I’ve ever heard of her. Based on Bricker’s link, I’d have to agree that it sounds likely that she is another bigot that would prefer not to be thought of as one.
Or, she could have been telling the truth the first time she addressed the issue: that was how she thought then, and the intervening ten years have made her aware of many reasons that’s bigoted, and she has evolved a new position. I have no trouble believing that.
She made some bad remarks about gay people in the past, which she has acknowledged and apologized for. Maybe some James O’Keefe/Andrew Breitbart/Alex Jones wannabe saw an opportunity to attack a liberal by adding some more slurs to Reid’s history.
I find that possibility to be as credible as the possibility that Reid is lying.
NBC is sticking their corporate neck out pretty far on this. If they’ve pulled in the FBI, they must think there is compelling evidence on her side. Between this and the Tom Brokaw allegations, they are not having a great week for news people.
Never heard of her, but congrats to Bricker for finding a liberal who is (or at one times was) a homophobe, or at least nasty enough to make disparaging comments about homosexuality as a means of attacking someone she didn’t like.
Find five or six thousand more cases just like it, and maybe it’ll become a significant fraction the size of the comparable hang-ups of the current version of the Republican Party, or ten times that many to take on the Christian right generally. Good luck!
I’ve been following this story a bit. I’m not sure what to make of it. The hacking excuse really doesn’t seem to hold up. But the new stuff that turned up isn’t any worse than the Crist stuff she’s already owned up to, so why lie about it? Also, if she did publish these, isn’t it weird that no one seems to remember having read them? She parlayed this blog into a television gig, right? It must have had an audience, right?
I’m leaning towards the idea that she’s lying, but it’s all really odd either way.
Is he the very model of a modern liberal weenie-man?
Filled to brim with Soviet-era sweeping economic plans.
He goes to court to chant support for all abortions that he can
And is dismayed should Roe v Wade be challenged by some dumb caveman.
He’s very well acquainted with correctnesses political
And gender forms with dual norms are simply unacceptable
Speak free may all except of course when things get too offensible
He shall be curt should feelings hurt because he is quite sensible.
Upset was he that Hillary could not stage a victory show
And horrorstruck he cursed the schmucks who cheered while orange Donald crowed
He claimed that she, compared with he, was clearly a more thorough pro
But secretly and all along, he was much more a Bernie Bro.
On firearms he sees no harm in calling for an outright ban
At nationalists, he’ll gladly hiss and call them members of the Klan,
And chortle at his clever wit before he sits to eat some flan,
In truth the very model of a modern liberal-weenie man.
She’s recently high profile. According to wiki, her first journalism gig was working for a morning show in 1997. In 2000 she began her blog. In 2014 she retired the blog and became a TV personality. In between those 14 years she’s had several jobs and responsibilities within the industry. She’s also apologized for blog entries interpreted as homophobic before.
Here is an example of a thread from the same page as this one where someone noticed that some story was not currently being discussed.
**
So I don’t see this anywhere… What do you think of this Alfie Evans case?**
See what they did there? Just a quick summary of the story. Discussion ensues.
Or you can take your conspiritorial accusatory approach.
For her to have been hacked, it would have had to have been back then. Given how little people seem to know about her now, I suspect she wasn’t important enough back then to have been hacked.
It’s a stupid excuse, and only makes me doubt her claim that her views have evolved. Making obvious lies tends to do that.
She likely didn’t come up because the few people who knew about it knew there was nothing to discuss. It seems unlikely she wasn’t lying.
Brilliant!! Did you write this yourself — As a big Gilbert and Sullivan fan I’m very impressed.
One small critique - as I patter this the 1st line of the 3rd verse doesn’t quite fit. It feels like it’s missing a syllable- big victory show works better . But it’s still brilliant and I’m saving it.