When Lying Right Wing Hacks Attack (or, Patterico the Idiot)
Here we see the unmitigated idiocy that passes for “debunking” in the right wing blogosphere these days, as wingnut hack Patterico attacks me for things I never wrote and do not believe: No, Charles Johnson, Glenn Beck Did Not Tell His Viewers to Shoot Anyone in the Head.
Patterico begins with his patented mind-reading trick:
On Twitter, Charles Johnson excitedly says…
Here’s the tweet he seems to think is “excited:”
Video: Glen Beck ‘You’re Going to Have to Shoot Them in the Head’ clip lgf.bz #LGF #lgfpages #tcot #tlot #p2
Was it the word “video” that gave away my overweening excitement? Or is Patterico just making it up? Answer: the latter.
To start with, I didn’t write that LGF Page he’s attributing to me. It was written by LGF reader “Conservative Moonbat.”
I retweet a lot of the Pages posted by LGF readers if I think they’re interesting, and rarely do I feel “excited” by that. But demonization requires attributing evil intent to your opponents, and that’s the right wing script Patterico is following.
To make it still more ridiculous, the Page by Conservative Moonbat contains no obvious “excitement” either, and certainly makes no claim at all that Beck told anyone to shoot people in the head. Here’s the entire comment he/she posted:
I’ve heard a couple of people mention this in various places but nobody has been able to find the clip. Well, now somebody found it.
Patterico takes this and constructs a complete fantasy around it, summed up in this blatant lie:
Johnson wants you to believe that the “you” is Beck’s audience, whom Beck is inciting to violence. Nothing could be further from the truth.
But Charles Johnson doesn’t care about context or truth any more.
I don’t want anyone to believe anything — I didn’t even write that post. But it gets even stupider, because despite Patterico’s lies, I even posted a link to the complete transcript in the comments for Conservative Moonbat’s Page, so that the full context would be clear to everyone.
Patterico knows this, because I tweeted those links to him last night, and he replied. But he hasn’t updated or corrected his smears, of course, because that’s how the right wing blogosphere plays it these days.
And by the way, it’s ludicrous to try to excuse Beck’s disgusting comments by saying he was “only” talking about Nancy Pelosi shooting her left wing followers in the head. How does that make it better? It’s completely freaking insane either way.
For the record, here’s a longer, fully in-context version (h/t Simoom) of the clip the right wing is desperately trying to make excuses for:
And here’s the full transcript of Beck’s crazed, incoherent rant.