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This Week In Crazy: A Down And Dirty ‘Squirmish’

This Week In Crazy: A Down And Dirty ‘Squirmish’

Did you know that you can measure your patriotism by the number of times you’ve seen 13 Hours? It’s true. If you haven’t seen 13 Hours yet, it means you hate America. 

Welcome to “This Week In Crazy,” The National Memo’s weekly update on the loony, bigoted, and hateful behavior of the increasingly unhinged right wing. Starting with number five:

5. Michael Pitts

Donald Trump’s enthusiasm for a database tracking American citizens who are Muslim is proving to be a popular notion. South Carolina lawmaker Michael Pitts perhaps took a cue from The Donald when he proposed his own nasty legislation this week that would require all journalists in his state to be entered into a “registry.”

The “South Carolina Responsible Journalism Registry Law” provides that the “Secretary of State’s Office shall create a registry for the registration of persons who qualify as a journalist,” meaning anyone “who in his professional capacity collects, writes, or distributes news or other current information for a media outlet.”

The Post and Courier writes that the bill has “virtually no chance of advancing but is meant to reflect a lawmaker’s personal political statement.”

Pitts told The Post and Courierhis bill is not a reaction to any news story featuring him and that he is “not a press hater.” Rather, it’s to stimulate discussion over how he sees Second Amendment rights being treated by the printed press and television news. He added that the bill is modeled directly after the “concealed weapons permitting law.”

“It strikes me as ironic that the first question is constitutionality from a press that has no problem demonizing firearms,” Pitts said. “With this statement I’m talking primarily about printed press and TV. The TV stations, the six o’clock news and the printed press has no qualms demonizing gun owners and gun ownership.”

Pitts, you’ll recall, is the same Palmetto lawmaker who fought like hell last summer to frustrate the effort to remove the Confederate flag from the statehouse grounds. He did so primarily by introducing a host of amendments, some patently frivolous, in order to obstruct the passage of the bill that would lower the flag. The Daily Caller reported that Pitts also “stymied the debate over the bill by steering the conversation toward the ‘Trail of Tears’ and complications in his marriage, presented by his use of hearing aids.” And The State noted that, as another of his amendments got tossed out, he compared himself to General Robert E. Lee surrendering to Union forces at Appomattox.

While we’re discussing his record, it may interest readers to review what I wrote back in July:

Unsurprisingly, Pitts’ voting record aligns with a constellation of far-right positions. He is opposed to all legal abortion even in the case of incest or rape; he has sponsored a bill that would prohibit any local municipalities in the state from enacting or enforcing their own gun control laws; he opposes marriage equality and the inclusion of gender identity and sexual orientation in South Carolina’s anti-discrimination laws.

At least he’s consistent.

Next: Gary Cass

4. Gary Cass

Meet Gary Cass, founder of the disingenuously named Christian Anti-Defamation Commission, which also maintains the blog DefendChristians.org (a similarly sketchy moniker).

A writer for Patheos — one of the best online resources for those seeking reliable, reasoned writings about the world’s religions — once described Cass as “a sick individual — a little dumb, a lot dishonest, and hateful through and through,” and also a “pro-violence, pro-death guy who wants to kill a billion human beings.” That blogger was referring specifically to a piece Cass wrote in Sept. 2014, entitled “I’m Islamophobic, Are You?” which enjoined Christians to slaughter the global population of Muslims en masse.

This week, Cass is here to educate us on the Biblical underpinnings of our nation’s founding — specifically, he wants us to understand that all of our elected officials must be Christian men.

In a video released Wednesday, Cass insists that “we need a leader who is alive spiritually and who will lead in the fear of God” and also that the “biblical biological requirement for office is you must be male.” This is naturally owing to the fact that “God established man as the head of the woman and the woman as his helpmate,” and our roles in the family ought to find a mirror in our roles in society.

Cass’s brand of Christian extremism may be a step too far for most conservatives, but the notion that we are a Christian nation (or a “Judeo-Christian nation,” the shifty hedge more commonly heard on the campaign trail) isn’t a foreign one. It has remarkably insidious currency among GOP politicians, who have used their faith to bolster policy positions fighting legal abortion and marriage equality. And even a relatively moderate Christian Republican like John Kasich is guilty of making absurdly retrograde comments about “women’s roles.”

So Cass is “out there,” sure. Just not as far out there as we might like to believe.

Hat tip and video courtesy of Right Wing Watch

Next: Fox News

3. Fox News

Ted Cruz devoted his closing statement in last week’s GOP debate to promoting the latest action movie from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen director Michael Bay — 13 Hours, a fictionalized retelling of the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were murdered. The cable network Fox News dutifully picked up where the senator left off, and has been promoting the film as part of their interminable project to shock more life into a scandal that they continue to hope will derail Hillary Clinton’s prospects.

Media Matterswrites:

In addition to using the movie to push the debunked “stand down order” myth, Fox has argued that Bay’s film could “pose a threat” to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Fox’s Andrea Tantaros argued, “if anyone sees this movie … and then goes on to vote for Hillary Clinton, they’re a criminal.” Prime-time host Megyn Kelly, during a segment that pushed multiple Benghazi myths, said the movie “reintroduces Benghazi as a potential campaign issue that cannot be helpful to Mrs. Clinton.”

The Washington Post‘s Erik Wemple wrote on his blog Tuesday that, in their relentless (and dubious) reporting — nominally on the question of whether or not the film will influence the election — they are, in fact, transparently shilling for the film. Wemple distinguishes between the film and the book on which 13 Hours is based, which he has praised for digesting on-the-record testimony “into a format that explains a great deal, like how vulnerable Stevens and other State Department were at their Benghazi outpost and how CIA and State Department bureaucracy inhibited crisis decision-making.” The movie is another animal though, and Fox News is using its release as a pretext to inflame passions about Benghazi all over again.

“Fox News isn’t acting as a news organization, which reports events as they arise,” Wemple writes. “It’s acting as an advocacy organization, verily rooting for the movie to tilt the contemporary political debate.”

Media Matters was more pithy in their headline: “Fox Called Out For Abandoning Any Pretense As A News Organization.”

Next: Ted Nugent

2. Ted Nugent

Gun nut Ted Nugent all but suggested the president should be lynched. Oh, okay, I’m sorry — he only said that President Obama “should be tried for treason & hung. Our entire fkdup gvt [sic] must be cleansed asap.” In what court he should be tried, and by what means the “fkdup gvt” should be “cleansed,” he did not say. I’m guessing there would be a high demand for ammunition, though.

Nugent is incensed that, as he wrote in a Facebook post Wednesday, “[o]ur unholy rotten soulless criminal America destroying government killed 4 Americans in Banghazi. [sic]”

This is the same man who responded to events like the Sandy Hook massacre by insisting that the whole idea that innocent children were being gunned down was just a “Big Lie,” yet here repeats the thoroughly debunked conservative media myth that President Obama and/or then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a “stand down” order. The “stand down” order, like much of the conservative rhetoric on the subject of the Benghazi attack, does not align with reality, according to PolitiFact. Yet it does apparently make an appearance in 13 Hours, which, as I noted, conservative pols and pundits have been discussing and promulgating with the reverence they usually accord to Holy Writ (or the Second Amendment, minus the “well regulated” part).

Nugent always files his vile syndicated column from a reality of his own making: He has insisted that gun-free zones are “slaughter zones” that should be outlawed, and that living without a gun is an “irresponsible, suicidal choice that will get you killed.” So I suppose getting his gospel from the director of Armageddon isn’t a huge leap.

Hat tip Media Matters

Next: Sarah Palin

1. Sarah Palin

At the risk of giving her more attention than she deserves (which is to say, any at all), it cannot be denied that Sarah Palin is back in the limelight this week. And she has been in rare form.

After some mercifully quiet wanderings in the politico-media wilderness, the once (and perhaps future) VP candidate cannily re-entered the news cycle on Tuesday by hitching her wagon to the Trump train, in the form of a much-heralded, much-more-talked-about endorsement.

Palin’s enthusiastic (and often nonsensical) speech in support of The Donald has been the subject of much mockery, head-scratching, and literary analysis. Suffice it to say, the Hockey-Mom-in-Chief is in her element, playing some of her old ’08 hits (Remember “Drill, Baby, Drill”? How about “community organizer”?), as well as some new accidental coinages. (From the bard who brought you “refudiate,” here’s “squirmishes,” a new Palinism that she used to describe the conflict in the Middle East.)

The fact that the original Tea Party darling has wholeheartedly embraced a onetime registered Democrat from Gotham has baffled and aggravated pols and pundits of the Right, who still insist that Trump is a GOP interloper. But the truth is, their union is a meeting of the whatever-qualifies-as-their-minds: Palin’s and Trump’s brand of crazy transcends party affiliation and religion; it dissolves the cultural differences between the Big, Bad City and The Last Frontier; it’s a sad fraternity whose only criteria for admission are a thirst for violence and the cultivation of a loud, defiant ignorance.

And they’re here to stay.

—

Illustration: DonkeyHotey via Flickr 

Check out previous editions of This Week In Crazy here. Think we missed something? Let us know in the comments!Get This Week In Crazy delivered to your inbox every Friday, by signing up for our daily email newsletter.

Movie Review: ‘13 Hours’ Is A Lot Of Blood And Guts, But Little Politics

Movie Review: ‘13 Hours’ Is A Lot Of Blood And Guts, But Little Politics

By Colin Covert, Star Tribune (Minneapolis) (TNS)

There’s no kill like overkill. If sheer film combat bloodshed were an antiwar commentary, 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi would win the Nobel Peace Prize. Watching Michael Bay’s 2½-hour exercise in machismo porn is like experiencing the death of 1,000 cuts, except that the hemorrhaging is inflicted by bullets and mortar fire. It turns the armed militant attack against the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, and the weaponized crossfire from its hired security team, into an endless loop of The Shining elevators’ blood flood.

The film’s limited focus is in some ways a good thing. All it looks at is the fog of war. No one in Washington is blamed for the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, State Department communications specialist Sean Smith, or security operators Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods. The film doesn’t dwell on complexities of U.S. foreign policy in the increasingly volatile Middle East. It doesn’t pander to those still stirring controversy about the events, beyond noting several lapses in security. There’s no reference to what the region might be like if the U.S. had not invaded Iraq. Bay sees the point of the story as intensely, aggressively violent chaos, and he delivers it almost nonstop.

Adapted from the nonfiction account 13 Hours by Boston University journalism professor Mitchell Zuckoff, the film is a pure Special Ops genre action thriller. Bay is largely apolitical here. His attention is laser-focused on swarthy menacing natives, Harvard and Yale dweebs collecting Mideast intelligence, and the half-dozen professional security men fighting the barbarians at the gates. This is a classic story of 21st-century tragedy told by a guy who loves to play Call of Duty on his Xbox.

Bay, whose fetish for big, buff dudes is boundless, is much more excited about the scrappy thick-necked defense team than the CIA squad inside the compound, and more interested in their brothers-in-arms camaraderie than character development. John Krasinski and James Badge Dale play a pair of the security contractors, a new arrival in Libya and a veteran, roughly sharing the low rank of the film’s protagonist. As in most action video games, the character’s identity is really in the eye of the player. The virile defense crew members speak tech almost exclusively, and their family connections get the sort of bored, faraway attention that a spy drone gives to a one-horse village.

A juicier, disagreeable role goes to David Costabile as the compound’s CIA chief, an overweight bureaucrat with the personality of a reptilian vampire. Matt Letscher, as the visiting Ambassador Stevens, offers a respectful presentation of a good diplomat trying to piece together the rapidly disintegrating map of the Middle East, but it’s little more than a walk-on part.

As Krasinski’s inexperienced Libyan bodyguard quickly learns, it’s a place where people unable to tell enemies from allies will not be viable long-term. Everyone there has loaded weapons, demands American cash and speaks gibberish. Quoting Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, one of the security crew offers the insight that life is an endless learning experience: “All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.” It’s a sentence others repeat twice between scenes where forearms are blown apart with visual snap, bodies are bisected and fallen bodies are run over by speeding cars in close-up.

In the right hands, a battle film can make seemingly accidental events like those into a sort of consistent order or cosmic plan. Here the carnage seems of so little moment — until matched scenes at the end showing locals weeping over their fallen militia and 100,000 of Libya’s 6 million citizens taking to the streets to condemn the attack — that the horror scarcely matters.

‘13 HOURS’

2 out of 4 stars

Rating: R for strong combat violence throughout, bloody images and language. In English and Arabic.

©2016 Star Tribune (Minneapolis). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Theatrical release poster via Wikipedia

How Fox News Plans To Use Michael Bay’s Benghazi Film To Sink Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Run

How Fox News Plans To Use Michael Bay’s Benghazi Film To Sink Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Run

This post originally appeared on Media Matters.

—

“Breaking tonight. A Kelly File exclusive on the gripping new film that may pose a threat to Hillary Clinton’s hopes for the White House.”

That’s how Megyn Kelly fired the first shot in Fox News’ campaign to use a Michael Bay movie on the Benghazi attacks to prevent Hillary Clinton from winning the presidency. After their much-hyped Benghazi select committee fizzled, they’ve now pinned their hopes on the director of The Rock.

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi opens in theaters January 15. Based on a 2014 book written by journalist Mitchell Zuckoff and five former CIA contractors who defended the diplomatic post and nearby CIA annex during the 2012 assault, the film aims to provide a dramatic eyewitness portrayal of the attacks and the heroism displayed that night.

Based on the 20 minutes Kelly spent on the film during her broadcast Monday night, Fox thinks it can be something more: a way to redeploy all the shoddy reporting and conspiracy-mongering they’ve pushed for the last three years as a weapon against Clinton’s campaign. Interviewing three of the former CIA contractors about the movie based on their book, Kelly sought to revive long-debunked myths about the Obama administration’s efforts to respond to the attack.

In the weeks to come, we can expect the network to devote significant time and attention to the “questions”supposedly raised by the film.

Tactic 1: Make The Movie About Hillary Clinton

Treating a Michael Bay film that focuses on the events on the ground during the September 11, 2012, attacks as if it’s a documentary with bearing on Hillary Clinton’s service as secretary of state doesn’t make a lot of sense. But that’s exactly what Kelly did Monday night.

“The film is introduced as a true story and reintroduces Benghazi as a potential campaign issue that cannot be helpful to Mrs. Clinton,” she explained.

Kelly links the film to Clinton by reintroducing the tired claims that the then-Secretary had falsely tied the attacks to an anti-Islam YouTube video that triggered massive anti-American protests across the Middle East in September 2012. As congressional investigations have found, initial intelligence suggested that the Benghazi attacks had grown out of protests against the video. The CIA later changed its assessment, finding based on video footage and FBI interviews that no protest had occurred outside of the Benghazi facility. As for the motives of the attackers, they reportedly “did tell bystanders that they were attacking the compound because they were angry about the video,” and the assault’s alleged ringleader reportedly said that they were acting in “retaliation” for the video.

Of course, Kelly aired Clinton’s exclamation during her 2013 testimony, “The fact is, we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they’d go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?”

Kelly clipped Clinton’s comment right before the former Secretary explained why she didn’t think that issue was essential: “It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again.” That’s no surprise: Fox has highlighted the comment in scores of segments over the years, frequently taking her out of context to suggest she didn’t care about the deaths of the four Americans killed that night.

Tactic 2: Lie About The “Stand-Down Order”

Much attention has been paid to a scene in the film’s trailer in which the CIA contractors seek to rush to the rescue of the diplomatic post when it came under fire, only to be halted by their CIA superior at the annex who tells them to “stand down.”

Kelly zeroed in on this scene during her interview, depicting it as contradicting the numerous congressional reports finding that the Obama administration did not issue a “stand-down order”:

KELLY: You can hear the radio calls of the State Department personnel saying, we’re going to die, we’re going to die, we’re going to die. The CIA station chief where you were at the time told you repeatedly, according to the movie, stand down. We saw that in the trailer. Used the words “stand down.” Is that how you remember it?

JOHN TIEGEN: Yeah, I mean, it was the chief of base, the deputy chief, and our team leader sitting on the front porch when he told me to stand down.

[…]

KELLY: The Congressional investigators concluded there was no stand down order.

KRIS PARONTO: I don’t know where they got that … That’s just silly. I mean, there was, for us —

KELLY: I mean, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and others rely on those conclusions saying, you know, they’ve really been cleared because investigators concluded there was no stand down order.

There’s no other way to put it: Kelly is lying about the “stand down order.”

On the night of the attack, the CIA contractors sought to immediately respond to the attack on the diplomatic post. Their base chief asked them to wait for approximately 20 minutes as their CIA base chief attempted to contact a local Libyan militia for assistance and to develop a plan. The contractors disagreed — and obviously still disagree — with that order. This is not new information — the Associated Press reported on the disagreement in 2013.

That is not the “stand down order” that Fox News and right-wing politicians trumpeted for years, leading to numerous congressional investigations into the claim. Instead, the myth they latched onto was the idea that Clinton or President Obama had issued the “stand down order” as a deliberate decision to “sacrifice Americans” for political purposes.

Fox devoted scores of segments to this inflammatory claim. According to CIA personnel, the Pentagon, the House Armed Services Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, Tripoli commander Lt. Col. S.E. Gibson, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, nine other military officers, the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the House Intelligence Committee, it did not happen.

Kelly has to know this. But she wants to go after Clinton and the only way she can use the film to do that is by moving the goalposts on what the “stand down order” actually was.

Tactic 3: Lie About Help Sent To Benghazi

“If there’s one theme that emerges,” Kelly said of the film during her interview with the former contractors, “that is it, that they were left alone. There was no one to back you up. Throughout the film, you see heroes assuming, understanding based on their experience that the American military will be there to back them up and support them. And help never came.”

Kelly knows that the military deployed forces to Benghazi, but those troops did not arrive until long after the fighting was over. Kelly knows this because then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta detailed the special operations teams that were ordered to deploy that night from Spain, Croatia, and the United States during congressional testimony nearly four years ago. She knows this because the Pentagon timeline of the Benghazi attack, released in November 2012, says the same thing. She knows this because contemporaneous Defense emails detail the deployments. She knows this because the GOP-led House Armed Services Committee confirmed those orders and concluded that there were no “response alternatives that could have likely changed the outcome of the Benghazi attack.”

But Fox has devoted dozens of segments to the farcical claim that no help was sent, so in the name of the anti-Clinton campaign, Kelly is lying about it.

Originally published on Media Matters.