I WANT THE KIMBERLIN TRUTH TO PUT ON ITS BOOTS

On Friday I wrote about the right blogosphere's group attack on Brett Kimberlin, an ex-con who's now a lefty activist and, the righties say, a dangerous serial harasser of his enemies. As I said on Friday, if their claims about him are accurate, he absolutely deserves the attention of authorities -- someone who's done what they say he's done ought to be locked up. But they're the only ones telling us this stuff, and (as I also said on Friday) they seem to be doing it primarily to attack liberals and Democrats, and only secondarily to protect their ideological soul mates.

The latest, from one of the self-proclaimed harassees, Robert Stacy McCain, is that Kimberlin is pursuing a "peace order" against another person who says Kimberlin harassed him. That may mean the story is more nuanced than the righties want you to believe it is -- or it may mean that Kimberlin is following the classic pattern of a spouse-beater who tells the authorities he's the one being abused. We just don't know.

And this gets me back to a subject that's come up in the lefty blogosphere in the past, notably during the James O'Keeffe ACORN brouhaha. Back then, Clark Hoyt, at the time the public editor of The New York Times, asserted that the non-right-wing press pursued the ACORN story too tardily, and therefore the Times "would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies." This was met with some outrage and disgust on the left -- but I've always believed that following the stories right-wingers are ranting and raving about is a good idea for the mainstream press, if it's done with the goal of getting the truth out rather than with the goal of appealing to the right-wing audience. In fact, I think it hurts our side -- and the country as a whole -- if the non-right-wing press ignores these right-wing stories. The Kimberlin story could be another example.

Let me explain.

You know the saying ascribed to Mark Twain: "A lie goes halfway around the world before the truth puts on its boots." That's pretty much what happens when the right pushes and distorts a story, while the mainstream press says nothing. That's what happened, for instance, with the "Ground Zero mosque." The right-wing media and blogosphere pushed the story for months before the rest of the media took notice of the right's distortions. The mainstream press eventually pointed out that the "Ground Zero mosque" was not a mosque and was not being built at Ground Zero, that it was being planned with the help of an adviser from Manhattan's Jewish Community Center, that there were already mosques near Ground Zero, and that there were prayer rooms for Muslims in the Twin Towers themselves. But it was too late once all that came out -- the right had successfully turned the Islamic cultural center into a political football.

That's what must be prevented in the case of Brett Kimberlin. In addition to convicting him in the media, the right is already trying to tie him to the Obama administration, and, by inference, to every liberal and Democrat in America. That's only going to continue.

Let wingnuts be the mainstream press's assignment editors? I say yes, but just in order to tell the truth. At worst, we learn that Kimberlin really was a nasty guy; the fact appears to be that liberals and Democrats who may have allied with him simply didn't know that. (Yeah, he's an ex-con, but so is Don King, who once killed a guy, which didn't stop the GOP from expressing delight as his endorsement of George W. Bush in 2004.) Or we may find out that behavior is being ascribed to Kimberlin and his friends that's someone else's doing, or that's being exaggerated and distorted, just to score political points. Either way, the right is prevented from owning the story for the next several months and presenting it in a way that exclusively helps the right. If these hissyfits are ignored, they don't go away.

EVERYTHING IS FOR THE CAUSE

Right-wing bloggers are having a group event today: they're all blogging about a guy named Brett Kimberlin. Years ago, Kimberlin was convicted of involvement in a series of bombings; he spent many years in prison. While he was locked up, he claimed to have once sold pot to Dan Quayle, who was then running for vice president; he charged that prison authorities isolated him illegally after the story became public. That was the last time I ever heard his name, but I guess he's been peripheral to my world since -- I gather he was involved with the news site Raw Story and in investigating voting irregularities as a colleague of Brad Blog's Brad Friedman. (Here's a 2007 Time story about the guy.)

The right-wingers who are blogging about him now are blogging about him because, if I understand their story correctly, he's a nasty piece of work who (among other things) has driven righty blogger Robert Stacy McCain into hiding and who's engaged in several forms of harassment against Patrick Frey, aka Patterico; the tactics, Patterico says, include "swatting": you spoof a phone number, call as the person you're targeting, say you just killed someone at your house, then the SWAT team shows up and maybe arrests the target ... or opens fire. Patterico says it happened to him (and he was taken into custody) last year.

Oh, and (wheels within wheels) Andrew Breitbart is involved, because he talked about this in an interview he gave not long before he died, as Patterico notes.

What's the truth here? I have no idea. But several thoughts come to mind.

If this guy is as nasty as the righties say, then I, as a lefty, have no use for him, even if he's doing work I approve of. Call the cops if you think you've got a case against him. Lock him up -- I don't care.

Oh, but maybe you can't get the authorities to take the case seriously. Well then, gee, it's too bad you righties don't have a huge news organization on your side, one that could bring the story to light and pressure the authorities to act. If you had a huge news organization on the right, things might be different. But you don't have such a news organization, do you?

If the story the righties are telling is true, there's a guy on the loose who should be locked up. But their blogswarm today doesn't seem to be focused on getting him locked up -- it seems to be focused (as is practically everything right-wingers say and do) on damaging liberalism. On the right, that's Priority #1 -- and #2 and #3 and #4 and #5. The posts and tweets I've looked at are full of references to George Soros and the Tides Foundation and Barbra Streisand (because, you see, giving money to organizations that include a guy you don't know is a criminal is a disgusting, shameful, immoral act, which makes you an accessory to crimes you didn't know had taken place, and haven't been conclusively shown to be the grant recipient's doing).

And, gosh, it's an election year, isn't it -- a few tenuous, strained links to Obama will certainly be discussed on righty blogs in the days to come, no?

I'm hoping a real news organization tells me the truth about this. I'm hoping this guy is put away if he's a seriously bad person committing seriously criminal acts. I almost think I'm more interested in seeing the responsible party face justice than some of the righties are. A lot of them (hello, Michelle Malkin) seem much more concerned about winning one for their side.

Oh, and then there's this guy:

Read all of the incredible, sick-making story -- which includes some perfectly typical and disgusting bile spewed by some of the violence-supporting left-wing animals who think things like this are just peachy -- and gird your loins. Because it's going to come down to shooting with these vermin eventually, if we're to retain any rights at all. Patterico wouldn't like me saying that, I’m sure; I don’t much like having to say it myself. But it's a mere acknowledgment of current reality: we are in a cold war with neo-Marxists who are trying to steal our country, have already done enormous and probably permanent damage to it, and will stop at nothing --absolutely nothing -- to see to it that our voices are silenced. That war must inevitably go hot, unless we're willing to surrender to them.

"[I]t's going to come down to shooting ... The war must inevitably go hot...." Are you expressing your fears, dude -- or your hopes?

YOU WANT TO SEE "SHINY OBJECTS," JENNIFER RUBIN? I'LL SHOW YOU "SHINY OBJECTS"

A couple of weeks ago, in an interview with Fox's Neil Cavuto, Mitt Romney said:

"Well, I think you're going to find throughout this campaign season that the president's team will be doing everything in their power to try and hold up various shiny objects. Many of them will be in regard to me, some will be with regards the president's policies or promises of some new major giveaway.

"All these things designed to take people's eyes off the ball, which is the massive deficit this president has put in place, his inability to develop our energy resources in this country, his ObamaCare, which is not attractive at all to the American people. And an economy which is stumbling along..."

In other words: there are two kinds of things we can talk about in this campaign -- what Mitt Romney wants to talk about ... and distractions.

According to Jennifer Rubin, the insane obsession of one of Romney's chief fund-raisers and surrogates, a man with whom Romney has chosen to appear at more than one campaign event, is a "shiny object":

The notion that Donald Trump's fundraiser is some kind of debacle for Mitt Romney is one more “shiny object” stunt that is a transparent diversion by the Obama campaign so the media will avoid examining President Obama’s record. And it’s yet another indication of just how in-the-tank-for-Obama is so much of the media coverage....

But here's how "shiny objects" work on the other side. The right-wing base isn't really motivated to vote for Mitt Romney, whose full commitment to the Cause is suspect. So the right keeps ginning up stories meant to enrage the base and make sure that the crazies in the base think the whole country is going to hell in a handbasket and the only possible salvation is the defeat of Barack Obama. These things don't even have to be connected to Obama -- the base sees everything to the left of the GOP as one hydra-headed evil octopus, so the right-wing blog obsession of the past few days -- Brett Kimberlin -- serves as a "shiny object" meant to distract from Romney's weaknesses as a candidate (right-wingers are being victimized by the liberal media, and the liberal criminal justice system, and liberal George Soros-funded organizations!). So is the sting video released by the anti-abortion group Live Action, in which a Planned Parenthood staffer who's since been fired agrees to help a right-wing activist posing as a woman who wants a sex-selection abortion. It's all meant to keep the base enraged. It's all meant to advance the Cause. It's all meant to make righties feel outgunned and under siege, with their vote of November being their last chance to avoid extermination or an irreversible totalitarian hell.

When our side talks about Trump, it's because Mitt Romney has done everything in his power to cozy up to Trump short of putting the loutish SOB on the ticket. He's Romney's highest-profile surrogate. Why is Romney's press secretary-wannabe acting as if talking about him and his cockamamie ideas is somehow out of bounds for Obama supporters?