Please point me to a quote of mine where I said this was my best (or worst) example. Thank you.
Is there a time limit on the examples of liberal lies, bigotry and hate that we’re allowed to use?
Your reading comprehension can be drastically improved. As I mentioned in my original post, the “journalists” who came up with this hoax, continued to defend this story years after it first aired. Who do they blame for the whole fiasco? Why, “the far right blogosphere bully boys”, of course.
But continuing with the topic of institutionalized hate and racism in the liberal press, we must turn our attention to (soon-to-be) 25th anniversary of a Jewish pogrom in New York City. If you were to take a wild guess and guess that one of its main ideologues and the man, also responsible for numerous racial hoaxes, became a host of a prime time MSNBC show, you’d be (unsurprisingly) correct.
It’s the one you brought up front and center. Got any others?
I dunno, I think that if I was asked “What’s the last major republican screw-up you can think of” and my answer was “Whitewater” (I wanted to say “Iraq” but then I realized that the analogy would no longer work), I’d feel pretty fuckin’ silly! You know, given that many of those involved are no longer in politics and have little to no influence on the national discourse. Got anything more recent?
Personally, I don’t care if Dan Rather clings to this story like it’s his last lifeline. The man ceased to be a relevant part of the national conversation almost immediately after the story was retracted. He failed to fact-check his claims, he lost credibility, and is no longer the figurehead he once was. Whether or not he holds that the story was legitimate now is neither here nor there; the news network in question has removed him from any position of power or legitimacy.
I really feel the need to highlight this. After a storied career winning numerous emmys and peabodies as well as being inducted into the television hall of fame for his decades of work as a newscaster and journalist, he lost his credibility over one bad report and basically became a nobody overnight. After 43 years with the network, he gets dropped like a rock over one fake story.
And of course, Rather didn’t cling to the story.
Note that the date on that is the 20th of September, less than two weeks after the initial segment ran and still a solid month before election day. So… source on your claim that the journalists involved held it up as true years after the fact?
But since you brought up this example, I wonder - is there anything in the right-wing sphere that’s somehow analogous to this? Well, I mean, we could talk about FOX News’s coverage of the Iraq war. How many people lost their jobs at FOX when we found out that there were no WMDs in Iraq, and that the whole story was a complete sham? Oh, right. Nobody. Judith Miller got fired… From the New York Times, because her reporting on the subject was awful. You may recognize Miller as a member of the FOX News team, and that’s because FOX picked her up in 2008.
The Dan Rather segment really is illustrative of the difference here. Republicans love to bring up the Killian documents as an example of the failure of the leftist media and of liberals lying, but once you get past the surface level and look at what actually happened, what you find is a bogus news story that was retracted almost immediately after it was ran with great fanfare, followed by one of America’s most beloved news anchors essentially dropping off the face of the planet as a result. Compared to FOX, Rather and CBS were fucking saints.
(And this isn’t even going into the long-standing suspicion that Rove had something to do with it, that this was entirely his “style”, and that this completely took all the attention away from Bush’s legitimately embarrassing real war record.)
Also, just for shits and giggles:
Body count (Killian Documents): 0
Body count (Iraq War): >200,000
It’s possible for more than one person to bear responsibility for an event. And in fact, person X can be responsible for an event, and person Y can also be responsible for the event, without that decreasing person X’s level of responsibility.
As I’ve posted several times already in this thread:
What’s your response to that?
(And Alkash, what’s your response to it?)
I’m a very passionate defender of free speech. But that’s speech free from governmental intrusion. There is zero reason to think that the US government would try to stop me from drawing cartoons of Mohammed.
There are groups of people who wish I would not do so, and might respond with violence. So? That’s been true about some random things I could say or draw since the founding of the nation, and is no no way a sign of impending censorship, or anything of that sort.
It’s absolutely positively 100% a bad thing that some Muslims would react with actual violence to something drawing a cartoon. But it’s not a free speech issue, it’s a some-people-are-dicks issue.
Remember when that pastor was going to burn a Koran? If he had gone through with it, and some Muslim had been angered by that and driven to his church and planted a bomb which killed a third party, the bomber would be 100% legally responsible for that death, and should be punished to the full extent of the law, with the provocation having no legal weight. But the Pastor sure as hell should feel some moral and ethical guilt for that death. Those two things are NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE.
Here are the differences between me and you:
(1) I respond to the actual things you say, not exaggerated caricatures of them
(2) I don’t claim that you somehow symbolize conservatives as a whole
No it isn’t. It is an established fact that SOME Muslims get very upset, and even murderously violent. Note the use of the word SOME. And that is an established fact, it’s happened enough times that we know it to be true. That is a bad and unacceptable thing. I don’t see how deliberately poking at them with a poking stick is likely to improve that situation. (In fact, it’s not at all clear how to improve that situation, at least in the short term…)
I have certainly never said anything of that sort.
You have the ironclad 100% legal right to draw cartoons of Mohammed. If you choose to do so, you also shoulder partial responsibility for any reactions that occur. Does that mean you should NOT do so? No, it means precisely what I just said.
I disagree at a fundamental level. If something you say riles an unhinged sociopath up enough for them to go on a riot, or a killing spree, then that is not on you. It doesn’t matter if you told him to. It’s simply not my fault if my crude doodle of Mohammed causes a jihadist to kill someone. If an earnest critique of a religion or simply a cartoon in childish mockery is enough to cause you to want to kill someone, you are the problem, and I refuse to consider myself “dickish” because of that.
If you are aware of the risk of provoking violence, and you proceed anyway, you have taken a share of responsibility. That risk should be balanced and weighed against the necessity.
Whenever I choose to participate in an anti-war demonstration, I know it will attract raving assholes. I know that there is a chance that violence will result. Weighing that risk against remaining silent while my country does something wretched and immoral, I go ahead. It is necessary.
What is the necessity to slander and terrorize innocent American Muslims? What is to be gained? A “piss Jesus” is stupid and mean, but are Lutherans and Methodists a persecuted minority, have they reason to fear their neighbors?
Remember OK City? How sure and certain so many of us were that it was Islamic terrorism? How many innocent people suffered that day for nothing?
There’s always Heinlein’s 1950s-style death ray that kills only Chinese.
After cleverly tricking Fox News into a campaign — say a week, two weeks at the outside — stating that Obama is Chinese, it could be modified with a Mylar filter to kill only those who believe it.
It’d be a regular mylar massacre!
Which would lead to massive disorientation.
There’s a big difference to me based on whether the outcome was predictable. If you draw a cartoon of the moon, and it turns out that your next door neighbor has a bizarre thing about moons and he kills a bunch of people, that is certainly not your fault. If it is known that there are thousands of ordinary-seeming people around the world with moon-cartoon-homicidal-rage, then it’s a different thing entirely.
It’s also worth pointing out that you are not necessarily taking risks just for yourself. If you want to publish cartoons of Mohammed because you believe that whatever principle you would be proving is worth the risk to your life, hey, by all means. But what if you do that, and then someone shows up to kill you but accidentally blows up the house next door and 4 totally innocent people die. Are you telling me you would feel not the slightest tiny bit of a twinge of responsibility?
Yeah, the claims that liberals and conservatives are equal is disingenuous to say the least. The left is far more bigoted and hateful than the right. And despite the crying and sobbing of fake progressives, more and more people are believing this 
Cite?
Very typical conservative projection. They can only see the world through the lenses of their own bigotry.
Pop quiz: which ideology wanted to ban gay marriage? Wanted to ban interracial marriage? Wanted to ban integrated schools? Wanted (still wants!) to let shopkeepers ban blacks and Jews from access? Tried to keep women out of the military?
Hint: it wasn’t the left.
Those fucking centrists! I knew it!
The left got to the right place on those positions a few years before the right did. I’m not sure that’s a profile in moral courage.
If the left was serious about civil rights, they’d be for multiple marriage right now, not waiting until public opinion turns in about 20 years…
You have to realize that some conservatives have a special definition of bigoted and hateful.
So if you suggest all religions deserve equal treatment, you’re being bigoted and hateful to Christians. If you suggest all genders and sexual orientations deserve equal treatment, you’re being bigoted and hateful to straight men. If you suggest all races deserve equal treatment, you’re being bigoted and hateful to white people.
Actually, the disagreement is over where the line is between religious practice and secular law. We already establish that churches themselves can discriminate any way they want.