Osborne Ink || News that's fairly liberal, but never unbalanced.

Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com (home of the high-tech ACORN lynching) is now on about the White House Christmas tree ornaments. Seriously! This half-inch, painted-over picture of Mao isn’t collage-kitsch, it’s “evidence” of rampant communism in the halls of power oh noes!!!

(BTW…Know who else admires Maoist ornamentation? Sarah Palin!)

And what’s this? Transvestite Hedda Lettuce? OMFG the White House has turned into Saddam an’ Gomorrer!

(Senator David Vitter’s Christmas tree reportedly includes hanging diaper decorations, but I digress.) This one plays into that whole Obama-the-narcissist meme they love so much in wingnutland:

Never mind that Obama didn’t paste his own head onto Mt. Rushmore; it was this guy. But why let facts get in the way of a good Obama Derangement Syndrome conniption fit?

Brought to you by Andrew Breitbart’s very serious journalism.

Oral Roberts, inventor of the “prosperity gospel” movement, is dead. He was 91. Roberts began his evangelist career with the common, hackneyed huckster-healing act; but through national television broadcasting, Roberts would command the faithful to send him tens of millions of dollars.

Roberts himself was never as angry as John Hagee; he never led the cultural right in the same way as Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. Yet he was just as conservative — and equally famous, especially after declaring in 1988 that God would “call him home” unless viewers donated $8 million to his educational foundation.

At that point, Roberts had been asking viewers to donate money in return for prayer for decades. God, Roberts promised, would reward the donors with material prosperity. He called this “seed faith,” and it certainly seeded something. As Roberts was building his eponymously-named diploma mill, his form of tithing grew more popular in the charismatic movement. By the 1990’s it had bloomed into the prosperity gospel, with tens of millions of adherents.

Besides the theological problems posed by the prosperity gospel, there are the rational implications of superior piety rewarded by material abundance. As someone on WikiPedia has put it so well,

It implies both that people who are favored by God will be materially successful, and also that materially successful people are successful because God favored them. (Emphasis mine)

Surprisingly, this idea of wealth as a sign of divine approval resonated with Objectivism, the latter-day cult based on the science fiction rantings of atheist and sociopath Ayn Rand (real name Alisa Rosenbaum). The resulting mutant offspring are Michelle Malkin, Andrew Breitbart, and other major culture warriors of the wingnutosphere.

Roberts probably never saw, and certainly never addressed, the mating of Objectivism and the prosperity gospel. He was retired in the final decade of his life as the two dissonant gospels of selfishness mixed in cyberspace. Nor did he initiate or encourage the pairing; Randists and gospel believers met through the auspices of Koch Industries, arch-funder of Kulturkampf organizations. Challenged, Roberts might have disowned the Randists.

Yet we must recognize him as the grandfather of a pernicious right-wing meme that contributed to the 2008 financial meltdown. Prosperity gospel lies at the heart of deregulation ideology; its blatant disregard of empiricism, like so much else in the wacky world of the right, is a dangerous delusion of faith-based politics. Roberts may never have wanted to be a culture warrior, but Kulturkampf is his legacy.

Sesame Street tries a pun on the word “Fox:”

Over at Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood, blogger Stage Right complains:

Later in the episode, Anderson Cooper from 4th place CNN, guest stars as a reporter for GNN. He interacts with “Walter Cranky” and “Dan Rather-Not” — Muppets representing real-life liberal news personalities — and they talk about “Meredith Beware-a” and “Diane Spoiler.” But no affectionate nicknames for Fox News personalities; no Spill O’Reilly or Brittle Hume — nope, and the only disparaging characterization of real-world news is reserved for Fox: Fox is a POX. It is trashy. They didn’t even attempt to try “MessyNBC.”

Got that? Sesame Street is unfair and unbalanced because they didn’t come up with silly pun names for Faux Noise anchors. Which if they had, would simply be taken by Stage Right as further evidence of his thesis (see: the Samsara of Wacky™). That MSNBC wasn’t a subject of parody is proof of bias, but that CBS personalities were parodied is not proof of balance. See how that works?

“If Mom and Dad watch cable news,” the pseudonymous blogger continues, “it’s better than 50/50 they watch ‘POX News.’” Who knew there was so much demographic crossover between sex-addled Faux Noise and culture-addled PBS?

So what gives? PBS — a network partially funded with my tax dollars — has the right to tell my kids that their parents watch “trashy” news? The message is clear, I can’t even sit my kids in front of “Sesame Street” without having to worry about the Left attempting to undermine my authority. And don’t tell me, “If you don’t like it change the channel.” There are no channels left! It’s everywhere. Just last week I had Obama’s service and volunteerism promoted on every single major network, including Disney and Nickelodeon. (Emphasis mine)

After the ancient “taxpayer-funded TV” charge, Stage Right provides context with the usual assortment of long-debunked evidences, including the president’s back-to-school speech. But the reference to “service and volunteerism” is a giveaway that Stage Right, like most of Breitbart’s bloggers, is a devotee of the Ayn Rand cult.

Stage Right hedges a bit, reminding readers how the Teletubbies nontroversy damaged Jerry Falwell’s credibility — and then proceeds to resurrect the nontroversy by asking: “He DOES seem a little gay, doesn’t he?” Thereupon Stage Right pulls this new nontroversy into the sweep of history:

The fact that this is a re-run from an episode written during the Bush Presidency only reinforces that this is nothing new. The Left has been doing this for years now. All of us have seen it and felt powerless to mention it, because if we do, we’re ridiculed and dismissed (thank you, Mr. Alinsky). (Emphasis mine)

As it happens, I’m writing about Alinsky right now, and I’m impressed by how much the real Alinsky differs from the straw man erected by wingnuts. He was a man with little patience for communists, idealists, or militants; but listening to the right use his name as a curse, you’d think he was an original Bolshevik. Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals seems prescient on this point:

RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions. (Pretty crude, rude and mean, huh? They want to create anger and fear.) (Emphasis mine)

And that is exactly what Stage Right and Andrew Breitbart do: manufacture anger and fear. They project their hypersensitive reactions onto the media they revile and then attack the resulting straw men.

This is what passes for intellectualism in the modern conservative movement.

Breitbart gave a 26-minute interview Thursday morning. Among the things I learned watching this interview is how an admitted C-student can get by on borrowed notes.

Breitbart says “a lot of people in Hollywood are center-right, they’re just silent about it” as if this were news. Having lived through the Reagan years, I’m always amused when movement conservatives gripe about actors’ opinions and then applaud Britney Spears, Victoria Jackson, and Jon Voight.

Among other hilarious claims: most journalists are liberal because they want to save the world. (Breitbart hangs out with Ayn Rand cultists.)

But as HuffPo blogger, what made me actually LOL was his accusation that Media Matters and Huffington Post of acting as a “firewall to protect the media from covering legitimate stories.” What he means to say is that both organizations debunk his nontroversies and try to keep his “successes” marginal to Faux Noise.

Breitbart’s Big Government site is carrying allegations that NBC producer Jane Stone sent a vicious anti-Semitic email:

When Stone received an email urging Congress to defund ACORN from Alex Rosenwald, director of media outreach for Americans for Limited Government, the following sentence came back to Rosenwald from Stone’s account: “Bite me, Jew Boy!”

The problem? NBC says it’s not true:

Stone’s response email—provided to POLITICO—did not have any anti-Semitic comment. In fact, it had just one line: “Take me off this list!”

“Somebody, on the other end, I’m assuming, took the return stamp from the email and then put in this hateful message,” Capus said. “I don’t know who did it. It’s outrageous to suspect that somebody from NBC News would do it.”

The differing versions of this email:

From: Stone, Jane (NBC Universal)
Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2009 1:57 PM
To: ‘arosenwald@getliberty.org’
Subject: Re: ALG Calls on Congress to “Put Up or Shut Up” on Defunding ACORN

Take me off this list!

————————–
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

From: Stone, Jane (NBC Universal) [Jane.Stone@nbcuni.com]
Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2009 1:57 PM
To: Alex Rosenwald
Subject: Re: ALG Calls on Congress to “Put Up or Shut Up” on Defunding ACORN

Bite me Jew boy!

————————–
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

I’m not sure what it means that an email address appears in the “from” line of ALG’s version but in the “to” line of NBC’s copy, but I mean to find out.

I’m HALFWAY to $500 for investigative journalism with twelve days left — Click here to help!

“I would encourage you to pick something whether it’s health care, education, the environment, you know, there’s four key areas that the corporation has identified as the areas of service.”

–Yosi Sergant

Well, Andrew Breitbart’s Big Hollywood website (home of the lunatic Victoria Jackson self-parody blog) has posted its second “big scoop” about supposed politicization of the National Endowment for the Arts, complete with full audio. If there’s any news here, it’s that Patrick Courrielche has backed away from saying there’s anything at all illegal here:

These may both be coincidences and I am not suggesting that the NEA or these groups definitively violated the law in these efforts. That’s for others to discuss and investigate. As I’ve stated in various television interviews, the organizers never discussed any specific policies. (Emphasis mine)

The thrust of his argument is that art groups take money from the NEA, which asked them to please, pretty please, think about ways they could possibly promote the reform agenda. Sergant again:

“And then my ask would be to apply artistic, you know, your artistic creative communities utilities and bring them to the table.”

Accusing the NEA of “tainting the creative process by encouraging the art community to address highly controversial political issues,” Courrielche describes the conference call as “government overreach:”

Many on the phone call may say and believe that this was a worthwhile effort. “What can be more inspiring then the NEA encouraging national service,” they may say. I would say that while it might sound like a noble cause, the big hand of government often enters the scene well manicured, but in times of desperation it all too often takes on the shape of a fist accessorized with brass knuckles. (Emphasis mine)

There you have it: asking artists to consider making art about controversial topics is the slippery-slope to Orwellian dystopia! Courrielche spends almost as many electrons on Glenn Beck doom-bunker nonsense as he does on his “scoop:”

Were there artists on the call that would create imagery extolling the benefits of offshore drilling? Were there any musicians who’d drop an electro dance anthem warning of the Road to Serfdom that awaits us if we let government create universal health care? Or how about artists that would wheat paste posters throughout urban areas, featuring a miner named Cole entirely sanitized, sitting in a clean room with the subtitle “Clean Coal.” If this was truly a bipartisan effort, why was I not invited to any conference calls held after the publication of my initial article?

Are there many artists who would create imagery extolling offshore drilling and the oxymoron known as “clean coal?” How many DJs are Glenn Beck fans? And why would anyone invite Courrielche to return for a conference call he obviously doesn’t agree should take place at all?

“This practice has never been the historical role of the NEA,” Courrielche says. Except it HAS BEEN the historical role of arts, and it appears the NEA did nothing more than arrange the call. Non-partisanship is not the same thing as non-advocacy.

Courrielche has another complaint: the NEA

forgot its role to the arts, a community currently in dire straits. If this arts group should be rallying around anything, it should be to directly help the arts community.

Right…which is why the NEA has received a 50% funding boost as part of the stimulus bill. Yet in Courrielche’s capable batshit-factory of a mind, that stimulus funding is now leverage to force artists into voluntary contest submissions. The horror! The NEA thought that art groups operating on government stimulus money might, y’know, want to make art about government stimulus. Courrielche again:

Setting up a propaganda machine is a dangerous precedent. The creation of a machine to address any issues, even ones with noble intentions, can be wielded by the state to create a climate amenable to the policies of those in power. Does anyone believe that once these artists are in place and we move to the election cycle, that the art they create will be bipartisan? (Emphasis mine)

I have no doubt most American artists weren’t going to be bipartisan anyway; there are plenty of good reasons why most artists aren’t Republican. A conference call asking the most progressive demographic in America to “apply artistic, you know, your artistic creative communities utilities and bring them to the table” hardly qualifies as the Yezhov terror.

What’s missing from Corrielche’s much-ballyhooed post about this horrible, awful no-good Stalinist slippery-slope conference call is a reason why anyone but him should care.

The intertubes are all abuzz this morning with rumors about Andrew Breitbart’s “explosive” new story on the NEA and Yosi Sergant, due at 11 AM today my time. Breitbart, who first popularized the ACORN-sting videos, will further the right-wing media campaign to discredit community organizing.

The NEA has been on the GOP’s hit-list for a very long time. Conservative philosophy admits at best a small role for public art funding; as you might expect, this is one reason why few successful artists are Republicans. To be fair, moderate republicans were instrumental in saving the NEA from Newt Gingrich’s chopping-block — but there are no moderates in the GOP anymore.

The arts also thrive on open exchange and education: two elements commonly associated with progressive thought. Artists tend to be politically active, and have been ever since the New Deal, when President Roosevelt included artists in his stimulus effort. Now, the NEA is part of Obama’s stimulus, too:

The $819 billion stimulus package that passed in the House of Representatives contains $50 million in funding for the National Endowment of the Arts, which would increase the agency’s current budget by 50 percent

As you might expect, conservatives are dismayed. Ryan L. Cole at NRO:

(G)overnments, past or present, do not exactly have a stellar record when it comes to patronizing the arts. Those who believe otherwise would do well to look at the painting, sculpture, and architecture of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, or Communist China.

Or Paris. Or Venice. Or London. Public arts funding has a pedigree as ancient as the Sphinx. It is practiced in every modern democracy as a vital part of public works. Indeed, much of that New Deal money went to improving public buildings. There is today an entire field of “Public Art” with real economic and cultural impact:

• An average of 55 million viewers experience public art firsthand every day, approximately 1,000 times the audience experiencing art galleries, museums and theaters combined. The Vietnam Memorial alone is visited by more than 10,000 people daily, and artworks in airports or subways are seen daily by over five million travelers.
• Public art receives ten times the media attention other art forms receive.
• An average public art project provides 50 times the economic impact of arts events in traditional venues, yet the cost to the public for public art is less than 50 cents per taxpayer per year, based on the amount of public funding used to fund public art. In two cases — Christo’s “Wrapped Reichstag” for Berlin, which generated more than $300 million in three weeks for that city, and Chicago’s “Cows on Parade,” which generated more than $200 million for that city — no taxpayer’s dollars were used.

On August 25th, Breitbart’s website broke a story about a conference call:

On Thursday August 6th, I was invited by the National Endowment for the Arts to attend a conference call scheduled for Monday August 10th hosted by the NEA, the White House Office of Public Engagement, and United We Serve. The call would include “a group of artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, taste-makers, leaders or just plain cool people to join together and work together to promote a more civically engaged America and celebrate how the arts can be used for a positive change!”

Breitbart blogger Patrick Courrielche opened his post thusly:

I recently wrote a critique of the art community’s lack of dissent in the face of many controversial decisions made by the current administration. Entitled “The Artist Formerly Known as Dissident,” one of the key points argued in the article was the potential danger associated with the use of the art community as a tool of the state. Little did I know how quickly this concern would be elevated to an outright probability. (Emphasis mine)

These scare words from someone who declined an invitation to participate in the Obama campaign on “philosophical grounds.” Here’s how Courrielche described the conference call:

Backed by the full weight of President Barack Obama’s call to service and the institutional weight of the NEA, the conference call was billed as an opportunity for those in the art community to inspire service in four key categories, and at the top of the list were “health care” and “energy and environment.” The service was to be attached to the President’s United We Serve campaign, a nationwide federal initiative to make service a way of life for all Americans.

It sounded, how should I phrase it…unusual, that the NEA would invite the art community to a meeting to discuss issues currently under vehement national debate. I decided to call in, and what I heard concerned me. (Emphasis mine)

Forty-eight hours after the conference call, twenty-one arts organizations endorsed health care reform. The Washington Times picked up on the story, George Will stovepiped the scandal onto ABC’s This Week, and then the Times reported:

16 of the groups and affiliated organizations received nearly $2 million in grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in the 150 days before the conference call. According to a Washington Times analysis of NEA records, more than $1 million of that total came from the stimulus package

Yosi Sergant, the NEA’s director of communications, was reassigned that same day, causing intense speculation in the right-wing blogosphere. And in fact, the only accusation Breitbart has presented with any merit is that Yosi Sergant was more than a “participant” in the conference call and “lied” about sending Courrielche the email invitation.

In other words, this is a nontroversy.

The crux of this attack is Courrielche’s view that Obama’s NEA “would invite the art community to a meeting to discuss issues currently under vehement national debate.” Yet the “issues” at issue — health care reform, green transformation, etc. — were hotly debated for months; practically all of 2008 was dedicated to a public discussion of these issues. Then an election was held, and Obama won on a platform of change. Moreover, it is bizarre to see a self-described “artist” suggest that his fellow artists should not take sides in controversial issues.

The rhetorical thrust of this attack, that Obama is turning artists into “tools of the state,” is a dog-whistle of Beckian fearmongering. Indeed, Beck has been promoting an “art-is-communist” meme. The arts are once again under attack.

Beck’s incredible ignorance about the art of Rockefeller center is deliberate. It is also a cautionary tale in why patrons of the arts have always reserved some editorial privileges. Quite simply, Congress approved stimulus funding for the arts; the government, like all arts patrons since the Medici family ruled Venice, is allowed to encourage some amount of direction.

Nor is there any visible pressure on artists. Rock The Vote has a “health care design contest,” for example — a voluntary call for submissions, not a command from the Kremlin. But it is precisely that volunteer aspect which invites Courrielche’s attack: he’s from the Ayn Rand School that considers volunteer programs to be a form of slavery.

It is precisely out of self-interest that artists, never held in esteem by movement conservatism, would want to get engaged with such issues. Why wouldn’t they get behind the public option, for example? Few professional artists have an employer providing health insurance; at a guess, I’d say that eighty percent of American artists are forced onto the individual market and would greatly benefit from a public option.

But it isn’t just in the interest of artists that arts play a role in promoting reform. Both the stimulus and the “greening” of our economy are in the long-term interests of every American. Complaining that Obama encourages artists to promote these things is the same as wanting them to fail.

Now, Breitbart’s Big Hollywood site hints at the new scoop:

Among the Obama Administration officials on the call were Buffy Wicks, Office of Public Engagement and the lead White House official on the President’s Serve.Gov initiative to promote national service. Also on the call was Nell Abernathy, Director of Outreach for Serve.Gov. One of their main goals on the call, it seems, was to encourage artists to produce works that would reinforce the President’s call for service; specifically through the Serve.Gov web-portal.

As Dana Loesch recently reported at Big Government, the Serve.Gov portal funnels citizens to volunteer or service projects connected with ACORN and other leftist groups. The taxpayer-funded website is evolving into a cyber-recruitment tool for the progressive movement. (Emphasis mine)

And there you have it: Obama’s administration is up to community organizing — oh, the horror! — which is only a problem if you don’t believe in public funding for the arts, want Obama and America to fail, or belong to the Ayn Rand cult.

UPDATE: The much-ballyhooed post is up. Here’s a review.