Demonic (12 page)

Acciardo:
No. I’m not aware.…

The next night, Rachel led with “brand-new details which do not all dampen the worry that Bill Sparkman’s death was what we first worried it appeared to be—violence against a federal employee, because he was a federal employee.”

The “new disturbing details” were that Sparkman’s census ID had been taped to his body. Rachel reminded viewers over and over again that “of course, with the confirmation from the coroner today that the word ‘Fed’ was written across Mr. Sparkman’s chest and then this new information about the ID being taped to his otherwise naked body at the time, this is what’s leading us to worry that he was killed in fact because he was a federal employee.” Again, she reminded viewers, there’s “a strong suspicion of government generally among people who live in that area.”
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Rachel Maddow owned the Bill-Sparkman-was-murdered-by-right-wingers story.

With law enforcement authorities still refusing to say whether they even believed a crime had been committed, Rachel complained that it was taking them too long to rule out suicide or accident. “We’re starting to get to a point,” she said, “where it’s hard to imagine that this could be anything other than a homicide.”
³²

When investigators announced a month later that Sparkman had committed suicide as an insurance scam, Rachel’s guest host Howard Dean made the brief announcement, sparing Rachel the humiliation.
³³
From that moment on, the story of the census worker was buried in a
lead casket and dropped to the bottom of the ocean, as Maddow returned to regaling her viewers with hilarious stories about conspiracy-theorist right-wingers.

Even after having been taken in by the dummied Bush National Guard documents, the collapse of the Mississippi River bridge, the laughably false intelligence report on Iran’s nuclear program, and the alleged right-wing murder of the census worker, Rachel didn’t pause before issuing the breathless claim, in the middle of Wisconsin’s budget crisis in February 2011: “I’m here to report that there is nothing wrong in the state of Wisconsin.”

Contrary to what everyone else was reporting, Rachel assured her viewers that “Wisconsin is fine. Wisconsin is great, actually. Despite what you may have heard about Wisconsin’s finances, Wisconsin is on track to have a budget surplus this year.”

She continued the breaking news: “I am not kidding. I’m quoting their own version of the Congressional Budget Office, the state’s own nonpartisan ‘assess the state’s finances’ agency. That agency said the month that the new Republican governor of Wisconsin was sworn in, last month, that the state was on track to have a $120 million budget surplus this year.”
³⁴

Unfortunately, Rachel hadn’t bothered to read the entire memo. In that same January 31, 2011, memo, Robert Lang of the Legislative Fiscal Bureau went on to describe an additional $258 million in unpaid state expenses, including a $174 million shortfall in Medicaid services and $58.7 million owed the state of Minnesota in a tax reciprocity deal. Those were just two of the debits that had to be set against the $120 million “surplus.”

The result was—as Lang concluded—Wisconsin was facing a $137 million shortfall, which, oddly, was very close to the $137 million shortfall Republican governor Scott Walker had claimed.
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Rachel had confused “0” with “$137 million.” Next up on
The Rachel Maddow Show
—a story you haven’t heard anywhere else: How Big Foot stole government workers’ pensions!

A promotion for Rachel’s program shows her sitting on the floor surrounded by index cards, with a Magic Marker in her mouth, as she says in a voice-over that news is about “what’s true in the world.” The
promotion ends with Rachel at her anchor desk, opening her show with: “Good evening. We begin today with a story that
no
one is talking about.”

Given her record, there’s probably a reason no one is talking about it.

MSNBC’s celebrated African-American guest, Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell (now, Harris-Perry), has made a career as an eye-roller about Americans who, in times of economic insecurity, fear “the Other”—immigrants, Muslims, and black presidents. This is the sum total of left-wing social science from the 1960s to the present. And it’s manifestly untrue: Some of the most comfortable, cosseted people in America will apparently believe anything.

Unemployed mine workers in West Virginia, clinging to their guns and religion, for example, have shown more skepticism about Obama’s alleged Kenyan birth than Melissa Harris-Lacewell showed toward innocent Duke lacrosse players falsely accused of gang-raping a stripper in March 2006.

By May 20, 2006, the liberal legal reporter at the
National Journal
, Stuart Taylor, had written that the available evidence about the case left him 85 percent sure that the rape charge was a lie.
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Among the evidence that was then publicly known was the fact that not one speck of the DNA taken from the stripper’s body, clothes, or fingernails belonged to any of the lacrosse players, who had allegedly raped her anally, orally, and vaginally in a small bathroom.

It was also known that one of the three defendants, Reade Seligman, had an airtight alibi for virtually every minute of the only time period when a rape could have occurred—midnight to 12:31 a.m. on March 13. Phone records proved that Seligman was on his cell phone from 12:05 to 12:14 and that his last call was to a cabdriver. The cabdriver, who happens to be black, said he picked Seligman up at 12:19, drove him to an ATM, where a receipt showed that Seligman used his card at 12:24 a.m., then took Seligman to a fast-food restaurant, and finally drove Seligman back to his dorm, where his key card was swiped at 12:46 a.m.

It was also known that the accuser had a criminal record and had repeatedly changed her story about the alleged rape.
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More than a month after all this information had been released to the public, Harris-Lacewell wrote about what she called the “Duke Rape
Case” on her blog and accused Duke athletes of “pervasive misogyny” and “brewing hostility.”

Everything about this story resonates with my experience.… The pervasive misogyny that clung to the men’s athletics programs and the thinly veiled racism of the university culture were palpable. I distinctly remember a crushing sense of vulnerability and dread when I interacted with some white males on campus. Although many were the model of respectable, genial behavior on the surface, I often sensed a brewing hostility beneath the surface. When I first heard the allegations in this case I wept because it felt like someone had finally revealed that unspoken anxiety I so often felt.
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Apparently, she perceives Duke athletes as “the Other.”

Contradicting Harris-Lacewell’s broad generalizations about white men at Duke were actual facts adduced by a Duke faculty committee two months earlier. Led by liberal law professor James Coleman, who, again, happens to be black, the committee had reviewed the conduct of the entire Duke lacrosse team for the previous five years. The committee found a few alcohol infractions, but concluded that none of the misconduct by the lacrosse players—again, going back
five years—
had “involved fighting, sexual assault or harassment, or racist slurs.” The committee also reported that “current as well as former African-American members of the team have been extremely positive about the support the team provided them.”
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But Harris-Lacewell was too busy inventing a myth about innocent men accused of rape to bother with the facts. In an interview on the Duke lacrosse case, she told
BlackAmericaWeb.com
that the “sense of entitlement and privilege at Duke is nauseating.” She also accused the Duke women’s lacrosse team of supporting the accused players because “given the entire history of white men sexually assaulting black women, we always know that white women have been on the side of white men.”
⁴⁰
The actual history of interracial rape—according to FBI crime statistics—is that, since the seventies, approximately 15,000 to 36,000 white women have been raped by black men every year, while,
on average, zero black women are raped by white men. (The Department of Justice uses “0” to denote fewer than ten victims.)
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As Harris-Lacewell has said (when she’s psychoanalyzing Tea Partiers), we know “that there are individuals [who] have sort of a predisposition towards intolerance.” When “things start changing very rapidly,” people experience “this anxiety, and it creates precisely the kind of intolerance that we’re seeing.”
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Harris-Lacewell was understandably confused and anxious. She was upset that no one asked her to replace Starr Parker on
The View
—as she had proposed on her blog. She was exhausted from carrying that Princeton backdrop around with her for every TV appearance. She couldn’t understand why Rachel Maddow was always showering her with sickening praise that was not afforded Rachel’s white guests. All this may explain the intolerance we’re seeing from Harris-Lacewell.

As she might explain herself—at least when she’s talking about conservatives—Harris-Lacewell evinced a “certitude” about her own position and worried that her “way of life” was “under attack.” She showed a “capacity to dehumanize” white male athletes because she believes that “they are not as good as” she is. Those were factors 1, 2, and 3 in her explanation to MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann of the (nonexistent) “move to violence” among Tea Partiers.
⁴³
(There was never any
actual
violence by Tea Partiers—
but they were moving that way!
)

MSNBC’s other black guest, Eugene Robinson, was also a rape truther, long after the evidence suggested otherwise. (I’m going to embarrass Eugene by pointing out that he’s won a Pulitzer Prize. Why? Because it’s the law.) Invoking classic liberal stereotypes of “preppy privilege” and students who were “downright arrogant in their sense of superiority,” Robinson said, “It’s impossible to avoid thinking of all the black women who were violated by drunken white men in the American South over the centuries. The master-slave relationship, the tradition of droit du seigneur, the use of sexual possession as an instrument of domination—all this ugliness floods the mind, unbidden, and refuses to leave.”
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It having been established that the accuser had once stolen a taxi, led the cops on a high-speed car chase, and tried to run down a police officer with the cab, among her other prior crimes, and that none of the
lacrosse players’ DNA could be found on her person or effects, a rational person would find it quite possible to avoid thinking of drunken white men raping their slaves two hundred years earlier. Me? I thought of Tawana Brawley. But the mob is immune to facts, preferring myths and images.

Liberals are the “some of the people” you can fool all the time. It’s easy to implant myths in the minds of mobs because they only grasp ideas in terms of images. As Le Bon explains:

Crowds being only capable of thinking in images are only to be impressed by images. It is only images that terrify or attract them and become motives of action.

For this reason theatrical representations, in which the image is shown in its most clearly visible shape, always have an enormous influence on crowds. [S]pectacular shows constituted for the plebeians of ancient Rome the idea of happiness, and they asked for nothing more.…

Nothing has a greater effect on the imagination of crowds of every category than theatrical representations.
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Cut to: Maureen Dowd writing in the
New York Times
that a movie about Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson “makes clear that Plame was not merely ‘a secretary’ or ‘mediocre agent’ at the agency, as partisan critics charged at the time, but a respected undercover spy tracking Iraqi W.M.D. efforts.”
⁴⁶

The movie says so!

Not only that but Dowd noted that
the movie
“reiterates that Plame did not send her husband, who had worked in embassies in Iraq while Saddam and Bush Senior were in charge and was the ambassador in two African countries, on the fact-finding trip to Niger about a possible Iraqi purchase of 500 tons of yellowcake uranium.”

Dowd’s citation of a movie as proving this or that aspect of the Wilson-Plame fairy tale resembles Le Bon’s description of a theater manager who “was obliged to have the actor who took the part of the traitor protected on his leaving the theatre, to defend him against the violence of the spectators, indignant at the crimes, imaginary though they were, which the traitor had committed.”
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Precisely because of Plame and Wilson’s lies, the Senate Intelligence
Committee was forced to hold hearings on these very topics. During those hearings, not only did the CIA’s inspector general testify that Plame herself told him she had “made the suggestion” that her husband go on the Niger trip, not only did the CIA reports officer testify that Plame “offered up his name,” but the committee actually obtained the memo in which Plame recommended her husband for the job. Indeed, there was no job until Plame came up with the idea of sending someone—perhaps her husband—to Niger.
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The movie may tout Wilson’s illustrious diplomatic career as reason enough for his being considered for a mission to Niger, but—as the
New York Times
reported back in 1990—Wilson’s so-called diplomatic career consisted of his being an administrator, “someone usually more concerned that the embassy heating and plumbing work than with what is going on in the host country.”
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Of course, the
Times
didn’t have the benefit of a Hollywood movie before reaching that conclusion.