We've Hit a New Low in Campaign Hit Pieces
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
22 May 19
Recent efforts to sandbag Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard are crude repeats
of behaviors that helped elect Trump in 2016
Last week, the Daily Beast ran this headline: Tulsi Gabbards Campaign Is
Being Boosted by Putin Apologists
That was followed by the sub headline: The Hawaii congresswoman is quickly
becoming the top candidate for Democrats who think the Russian leader is
misunderstood.
The Gabbard campaign has received 75,000 individual donations. This crazy
Beast article is based on (maybe) three of them.
The three names are professor Stephen Cohen, activist Sharon Tennison and
someone using the name Goofy Grapes, who may or may not have once worked
for comedian Lee Camp, currently employed by Russia Today.
This vicious little article might have died a quiet death, except ABCs
George Stephanopoulos regurgitated it in an interview with Gabbard days
later. The This Week host put up the Beast headline in a question about
whether or not Gabbard was softer on Putin than other candidates.
Gabbard responded: Its unfortunate that youre citing that article,
George, because its a whole lot of fake news.
This in turn spurred another round of denunciations, this time in the form
of articles finding fault not with the McCarthyite questioning, but with
Gabbards answer. As Politico wrote: Fake news is a favorite phrase of
President Donald Trump
Soon CNN was writing a similar piece, saying Gabbard was using a term Trump
used to attack the credibility of negative coverage. CNN even said Gabbard
did not specify what in the article was fake, as if the deceptive and
insidious nature of this kind of guilt-by-association report needs
explaining.
Stephanopoulos shamelessly implied that because I oppose going to war with
Russia, Im not a loyal American, but a Putin puppet, Gabbard told Rolling
Stone. It just shows what absurd lengths warmongers in the media will go,
to try to destroy the reputation of anyone who dares oppose their
warmongering.
Gabbard has had some controversial views, having been raised in a
conservative religious home, the daughter of a right-wing radio personality
in Hawaii who once described homosexuality as not normal and morally
wrong. She later wrote of a political conversion on issues like LGBT
rights, but still angered Democrats in the Obama years by invoking an
infamous Republican criticism, i.e. that the president refused to use the
term radical Islam.
Frankly, all the Democratic presidential candidates have controversial
statements in their pasts, in some cases boatloads of them (see here, for
example). The difference with Gabbard is her most outspoken positions cross
party orthodoxy on foreign policy, particularly on war she is staunchly
anti-intervention, informed by experience seeing a failed occupation in Iraq
up close and are therefore seen as disqualifying.
Shes Exhibit A of a disturbing new media phenomenon that paints people with
the wrong opinions as not merely controversial, but vehicles of foreign
influence.
This is how they control self-serving politicians whose only concern is
their career, Gabbard says. Unfortunately for them, I am a soldier not a
career politician.
A transparent hit piece came out as Gabbard was announcing her run. NBC
reported the Russian propaganda machine is now promoting the presidential
aspirations of a controversial Hawaii Democrat. The article among things
was sourced to New Knowledge, a cyber-analysis firm claiming it had caught
Russian chatter about Gabbards usefulness.
This was after the New York Times did a piece outing New Knowledge as having
faked exactly this kind of activity in an Alabama Senate race between
Democrat Doug Jones and Republican Roy Moore. In that incident, the paper
got hold of a memo in which the firm admitted it had orchestrated an
elaborate false flag operation that planted the idea that the Moore
campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.
For NBC to use New Knowledge as a source after this was bad enough. The
Daily Beast piece is something beyond, rhetorically. Even during the depths
of War on Terror hysteria, we didnt see Fox headlines stating: JOHN KERRY:
TOP CANDIDATE OF PEOPLE WHO THINK BIN LADEN IS MISUNDERSTOOD.
The tactic of making lists of thought criminals first reappeared a few years
ago, when the shadowy PropOrNot group was profiled in the Washington Post.
In this case, the definition of what the Daily Beast calls people pushing
the Russian government line overlaps with views that are merely
anti-interventionist or antiwar in general.
They smear anyone who is against regime change wars, says Gabbard.
This applies really to all of the people mentioned in the Beast piece, even
Camp, whose inclusion is also ridiculous because its not 100% clear Goofy
Grapes even has a connection to him (and if he does, are we in
guilt-by-association-by-association land now?).
Tennison belongs to a type I saw a lot of in Russia, i.e. people who grew up
under the shadow of nuclear conflict and perceived bad relations between the
U.S. and the Soviet Union to be the worlds biggest threat to security. This
was a big progressive craze in the Reagan/Bush years, when people like CNN
founder Ted Turner were creating the made for détente Goodwill Games.
Tennison has a long history of such friendship activities and is said to
have brought AA to Russia.
Re Cohen: if accepting a check from him is now a treasonous offense, a lot
of Democrats are going to have to send money back. Ive known Steve a long
time and though weve had disagreements, outlets like The Beast have
frequently villainized him for saying things any Russia expert would know
are true, like that the U.S. did meddle in Russian affairs after the Soviet
collapse (particularly in 1996).
The other anti-interventionist candidate, Bernie Sanders, had his own gross
press misadventure of late.
Sanders joins Gabbard in having been tabbed a Kremlin project countless
times since 2016. The latest New York Times piece, about the left-wing
activism of Sanders, hovers around this dreary foreign-subversion theme.
The headline revelation was about a trip Sanders made to Managua in the
eighties, where he may have attended a rally. The Times explains: At the
anniversary celebration, a wire report described a chant rising up: Here,
there, everywhere, the Yankee will die.'
In a subsequent interview with Times writer Sydney Ember, Sanders responded,
when asked about this, They were fighting against American huh, huh
yes, what is your point? He then noted he didnt remember that particular
chant.
This is really silly gotcha journalism (especially since its not clear what
language the chant was in). Ember asked Sanders if he would have stayed at
the rally if hed heard that directly. Elsewhere, she asked why Sanders
once said the Soviets had a good public transportation system and free
health care, and if he believed he had an accurate view of Nicaraguan
leader Daniel Ortega.
Sanders at first didnt respond, then spoke and was short with the reporter,
seeming exasperated as he explained the context of decades of American
interventions in Chile, Guatemala, Brazil and other South and Central
American countries. He tried to explain that his view of Ortega was
irrelevant because he was really protesting the policy of intervention, not
supporting the foreign leader.
The whole episode was a Back to the Future version of the same criticisms
leveled at anyone who opposes regime change in Venezuela today if you
protest the policy, youre not antiwar, you must support the targeted
foreign leader.
This was not about Ortega, Sanders said. Do you understand?
His curt response inspired author and Times columnist Jill Filipovic to
write that Sanders was shockingly rude, adding: We already have a
president who attacks the press, condescends and refuses to answer questions
he deems stupid.
Bernie Sanders is not Trump. Neither is Tulsi Gabbard, nor anyone else but
Trump, for that matter. Its a preposterous take. Its worse than fake-news:
Its self-fulfilling news.
In 2004, Howard Dean was asked repeatedly if he was too left or too
liberal in campaign stops. You would see lines like, addressing concerns
that he is too liberal to be president
in coverage. It was nearly a
mandatory preamble to Dean stories.
On the trail, I watched Dean take in these questions. Over time, you could
almost hear his teeth grind at words like left or liberal. Eventually he
did start to flip out.
When he did, suddenly his testy demeanor and combative,
finger-thrusting style earned write-ups of their own, culminating in the
campaign-ending Dean Scream story. Reporters once reveled in the power to
make or break candidates with these circular, quasi-invented narratives.
These smear jobs dont work the same way they once did. Trump in 2016
clearly used impatience with media tactics as part of his strategy. The more
he brought trail reporters into stump speeches by calling us things like
bloodsuckers (enemy of the people didnt come until later), the better
he did with crowds.
Reporters refuse to see it, but the national media now lives on the
unpopularity spectrum somewhere between botulism and congress. While some of
that is undeserved, some of it isnt. Voters especially resent being told
who is and isnt an acceptable choice, by a press corps increasingly seen as
part of a corrupt and condescending political establishment.
Stories like Tulsi Gabbard Is the Top Candidate of Traitors represent
exactly the kind of thing people hate about the commercial press as an
institution. This scarlet lettering backfired badly in 2016, but were doing
more of it this time around, not less. Dont be surprised if it ends badly
again.
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