More: The Vicious Babushka: Jewish Journal of LA Publishes ‘Teahadi’ Cartoon, Teahadis Seethe & Rage

The Tea-Hadi that caused Ben Shapiro to lose it.

L.A. Jewish Journal reports:

Steve Greenberg is a political cartoonist. This week, he chose to lampoon the Tea Party with an editorial entitled “Tea-Hadist,” and we, The Jewish Journal, chose to print it.

The purpose of political cartoons is to comment on both deep and topical political and social issues via satire. They almost always offend someone. Political correctness has about as much place in an editorial cartoons as a bacon-cheeseburger has in a kosher market.

This is not simply my opinion, but that of our publisher, Rob Eshman, as well:

“Steve is a satirist. His point was that in pursuing their ideology, the Tea Party conservatives in the House are actually destroying gov’t for others, as well as the GOP and ultimately their own movement. It’s a point many Republicans have made: John McCain, Peter King and many others. (washingtonpost.com

“Greenberg makes his point via a medium that doesn’t reward subtlety.

Meanwhile, Ben Shapiro, a “nice Jewish boy” at the right-wing Breitbart site, seethed with righteous rage:

On Friday, October 11, the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, which is handed out free to virtually every synagogue in the city of Los Angeles and which has a circulation of 50,000 copies and 150,000 weekly readers, ran a cartoon by Steve Greenberg, who does editorial cartoons for the paper each week. Greenberg’s cartoon, labeled “Greenberg’s View,” depicted a suicide bomber with a Republican button and a Tea Party tri-corner hat, a suicide vest around his waist, a detonator in his hand. “Of course I don’t feel any regrets about the cost everyone will pay for my beliefs! After all, there are 72 virginsawaiting me!” The drawing was titled, “THE TEA-HADIST.”

You know what is despicable, Ben? A small cadre of right-wing extremists in Congress who are threatening to put this nation into default because they do not like the results of the 2012 election. Do you know what can happen in a default? The U.S. Treasury will not be able to pay debts that it already owes: this includes Social Security and Medicare and veterans’ benefits. You know, those veterans you care so much about, because they can’t visit their war memorials?

The U.S. defaulting on its debt will have global repercussions. The national debt will grow even larger as interest rates skyrocket. Families will lose their investments and their life savings. International corporations, which employ millions, will crumble as consumer confidence fails. Unemployment will mushroom in addition to the 800,000 “non essential” federal employees whose unpaid leave you and your cohorts cheered. You think the 2008 financial meltdown was bad? Stick around and see what happens in a default.

And you are angry because JJ compared this to a suicide bomber who blew up a pizza parlor?

Have another one.

THEIR ARE MOAR.

Via Buzzfeed

Several conservative bloggers repeated talking points given to them by a proxy group for the Ukrainian government — and at least one writer was paid by a representative of the Ukrainian group, according to documents and emails obtained by BuzzFeed.

The Ukrainian campaign began in the run-up to high-stakes Ukrainian parliamentary elections last year, and sought to convince skeptical American conservatives that the pro-Russian Party of Regions, led by President Viktor Yanukovych, deserved American support. During that period, articles echoing Ukrainian government talking points appeared on leading conservative online outlets, including RedState, Breitbart, and Pajamas Media.

The emails and documents, which include prepackaged quotes from election officials and talking points that some writers copied nearly word-for-word, offer a glimpse into how foreign governments dodge tight Justice Department regulations on foreign propaganda to covertly lobby in the United States: The payments were routed through a front group in Belgium to an American consultant, who has urged writers not to cooperate with a reporter investigating the campaign.

The source who provided BuzzFeed with the emails and documents said that other writers involved in the Scoville campaign had included Breeanne Howe of RedState and Warner Todd Huston, a freelance conservative writer. The source estimated that around five or six writers were on the October 26 conference call.

Writers involved in the campaign had been individually warned by Scoville not to talk to BuzzFeed during the reporting of a story on this subject that appeared in March, and to deny any payment if asked, according to the source…

Other writers who were producing incongruous pro-Party of Regions stories at the time include Ben Shapiro of Breitbart and Seton Motley, a conservative blogger.

One of Shapiro’s Ukraine posts, “Hillary Sides With Anti-Semitic Ukrainian Opposition,” is nearly identical to a post that appeared four days later in a different publication under Huston’s byline: “Clinton Dept. of State Backing the Anti-Semitism Party in Ukraine?”

Shapiro said he hadn’t been paid by anyone other than his employers to do the posts.

Scoville “was not the one pitching me as far as I recall,” Shapiro said.

Over on Right Wing Watch they have documented the case of American Decency Association’s Lisa Van Houten claiming this, among other bizarre things.

2. Homosexuality will be a protected class by the government. Christian school teachers and administrators, pastors, business owners, etc. could be charged with discrimination if they speak out against or refuse to embrace homosexuality.

3. Organizations such as our own American Decency could easily lose their (c)3 tax-exempt, non-profit status as we continue to call homosexuality what it is - SIN

It does beg the question, why do hate groups think they are entitled to tax-exempt status? Also, why doesn’t the American Decency Association care about non-Christian religious types that could be fired? Where’s the decency in that?

This could be a new talking point among the religious right though, seeing how Ben Shapiro stated this very lie in a June 26 post on Breitbart.

Based on Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling, in which the Court majority determined that the Defense of Marriage Act’s federal definition of marriage had to incorporate state-based same-sex marriages, Internal Revenue Service regulations could be modified to remove non-profit status for churches across the country.

The DOMA decision makes clear that marriage is a state-to-state issue, meaning that religious institutions that receive non-profit status on the federal level but do not perform or accept same-sex marriages in states where it is legal could have non-profit status revoked. Furthermore, should the IRS move to revoke federal non-profit status for churches, synagogues and mosques that do not perform same-sex marriage more generally, the Court could easily justify that decision on the basis of “eradicating discrimination” in religious education.

At least Ben was kind enough to include other religions in his ramblings.

Media Matters has refuted Shapiro’s nonsense.

1. The DOMA Decision Had Nothing To Do With Tax Exempt Statuses For Churches. The Supreme Court’s decision in Windsor v. United States dealt exclusively with whether the federal government should be allowed to deny federal benefits to same-sex couples who are legally married in their state. Allowing married gay couples to file joint tax returns has nothing at all to do with whether churches are required to perform same-sex weddings to maintain their tax exemptions.

2. Every State With Marriage Equality Already Has Exemptions For Churches. In every single state that’s legalized marriage equality, churches are exempt from having to perform same-sex weddings. No church in America has ever been forced to perform a same-sex wedding. Laws like DOMA only deal with the civil definition of marriage, not the religious celebration of weddings.

When do Breitbart News and io9 have something in common? When there’s a kids’ cartoon about a gender-swapping superhero, of course.

io9:

In SheZow, a 12-year-old boy accidentally puts on a magic ring that turns him into a female superhero, known as SheZow. It’s an excuse for lots of fish-out-of-water comedy and some personal growth. Or, if you’re Breitbart News, it’s a left-wing conspiracy. We talked to SheZow’s creator about the controversy.

Breitbart:

Nothing says “child-appropriate material” quite like gender-bending underage superheroes.

…

The chief executive of the Hub, who may or may not have been high (and leftist) when she greenlit this project, is Margaret Loesch. Loesch commented, “When I first heard about the show, my reaction was ‘Are you out of your minds?’ Then I looked at it and I thought, ‘This is just funny.’”

The target audience for the Hub is children aged two to eleven.

And here Ben Shapiro was probably just trying to watch something highbrow for once.

The comments go about the way you might expect:

Liberals abort their children so they have to try to indoctrinate ours.

Regardless of the intention of the Hub’s senior executives, this is the begining of teaching our children that a male, becoming a female is cool. There is a progressive LGBT activist behind this somewhere, we only need to follow the trail to its inevitable conclusion.

If you want this sort of thing on television, move it to the Logo network and run it during the after school hours. This is the way the Soviets controlled children and got children to turn in their parents. This is the mechanism used on television in the middle east to teach anti-semitism to young children.

And so on, and so forth.

James Taranto, who not only writes a column for the Wall Street Journal but also edits its opinion website, rightfully became the most hated man on Twitter yesterday afternoon for questioning whether former congresswoman Gabby Giffords could have possibly written the New York Times Op-Ed she published last week shortly after a gun control bill died in the Senate, considering how injured she remains after getting shot in the head two years ago.

Here’s Taranto parsing the forensics of her column-writing abilities on an NRA radio show Friday, caught by Media Matters’ Timothy Johnson yesterday:

TARANTO: One fascinating thing about this is this piece was published no later than 9:03 PM on Wednesday evening, because that’s when it first appears on the New York Times’ Twitter feed. The last Senate vote on amendments to the gun bill was a bit after 6 [PM]. Giffords appeared at the White House at 5:35 [PM] when we saw that enraged rant by the president. The Manchin-Toomey [background check] provision was the first vote. That was at 4:04 PM. So if you read this piece it’s presented as a cry from the heart, as Giffords’ personal reaction as somebody who’s been wounded by gun violence to the betrayal of these Senators. So we are supposed to believe that somehow in less than five hours a woman who has severe impairments of her motor and speech functions was able to produce 900 publishable words and put in an appearance in the White House in the course of it. So I think that’s a little bit odd.

Ironically, in a column Thursday, Taranto wagged his finger at Giffords for practicing “incivility and unreason.”

But it’s not just Taranto. From Sen. Rand Paul to small-time radio hosts, gun rights absolutists seem eager to dismiss gun violence victims and condemn them for daring to speak out.

The National Review’s Kevin Williamson criticized Giffords in a particularly ugly way, saying, “It should be noted that being shot in the head by a lunatic does not give one any special grace to pronounce upon public-policy questions.” A Washington Times editorial said that Obama was “exploit[ing] the grief” of the Newtown families by “using them at every opportunity as props to make a political argument.” Breitbart’s Ben Shapiro likewise decried Obama for “exploitation of victims of violence using guns.” Another conservative blogger accused Giffords of “emotional bullying.”

More: Gun Zealots: Shooting Victims Should Stay Out of Debate

Youtube Video
Ben Shapiro, the editor-at-large wunderkind at Breitbart.com, guest-hosted for the Hugh Hewitt radio show on the day of the Chuck Hagel’s confirmation as defense secretary in late February. The Hagel news really tipped the teeter-totter for Shapiro, burning a few more cards out of a deck that was already missing several face cards. This video distills eight minutes from the three hour program, eight minutes of prime frustration, projection, hectoring, complaining, accusation and moral posturing, all delivered in Shapiro’s rapid-fire nasal whine.

Shapiro suggested that Hamas was “handing out candy in Gaza” to celebrate the Hagel nomination, bluntly tried to smear Hagel as “an open anti-Semitic guy,” a “defense secretary for Islamists,” an “anti-Semite” who is “the worst nominee…in American history” and, for good measure, bleated that Obama is a “jerk,” “bully” and “morally deficient human being” who has “come out of the closet” in terms of pretending to care about people. Meanwhile, in Shapiro’s world, “Mitt Romney…is legitimately one of the most honorable men, maybe the most honorable man, ever to run for high office in this country” and Noam Chomsky “is not really Jewish,” is “Jewish in name only.” He simultaneously accuses everyone but the man in the mirror of being “whiny” and doing “smear jobs.”

In the middle of the tirade, Shapiro’s self-awareness bloats to the point where he can ask “How can (Obama) possibly say this with a straight face?” and to end with this: “Democrats, they live in a world of unreality. They live in magic unicorn land…They don’t deal with reality. It’s up to us to deal with reality.”

Shapiro’s high-energy angst, his fevered finger-pointing at “moral deficiency” and other faults of those who “don’t deal with reality” is eerily reminiscent of the long line of disgraced fire-and-brimstone evangelists, from Jimmy Swaggart romping with prostitutes to Ted Haggard doing meth with his gay masseuse, who work so hard to hide the fact that they are guilty of all the sins they preach against. How long until Shapiro cracks?

Media Matters has a Who’s Who of the conservatives who will be appearing and/or speaking at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Committee conference. Below is a sampling of the participants and why they should live in infamy, and why conservatism is in deep deep trouble:

Ann Coulter, Conservative Author

Coulter: Bill Clinton “Was A Very Good Rapist.” During an interview with the New York Observer, Coulter responded to the question, “What should we remember about Bill Clinton?” by saying, “Well, he was a very good rapist. I think that should not be forgotten.” [Media Matters, 1/12/05]

Coulter Attacked 9/11 Widows. In her book Godless, Coulter wrote of the women left widowed by the 9/11 attacks: “These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much.” In a subsequent interview, she referred to the 9/11 widows as “cruel.” [Media Matters, 6/8/06, 7/14/06]

At 2007 CPAC, Coulter Referred To John Edwards As A “Faggot.” During CPAC in 2007, Coulter said she couldn’t “really talk about” former Democratic presidential nominee John Edwards because “you have to go into rehab if you use the word ‘faggot.’ ” [Media Matters, 6/28/07]

=====

Ben Shapiro, Breitbart.com Editor-At-Large

Shapiro Started Baseless Rumor That Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel Received Money From Non-Existent “Friends Of Hamas.” Breitbart.com’s Ben Shapiro cited “Senate sources” to claim that then-nominee for Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel may have received money from a group called “Friends of Hamas.” It was later revealed that “Friends of Hamas” does not exist, but Shapiro refused to retract his claim. [Media Matters, 2/20/13]

Shapiro: “Arabs Like To Bomb Crap And Live In Open Sewage.” Shapiro tweeted about the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, writing: “Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue. #settlementsrock.” [Twitter, 9/27/10, via Media Matters]

=====

Dinesh D’Souza, Conservative Author

D’Souza Has Pushed Baseless Theory That Obama Espouses “Anti-Colonial,” “Third-World Anti-American” Worldview. In his book and his movie, D’Souza pushed the baseless theory that Obama adheres to a “failed Third-World collectivism” that is “anti-American.” In a Forbes article, D’Souza claimed that Obama endorses an “anticolonial ideology” that motivates him to “work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West.” [Media Matters, 9/13/10, 10/4/10, 8/27/12]

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

I am dumber for having read or listened to some of these comments. Think of what will happen to the attendees

Breitbart News Editor at Large Ben Shapiro has some groundbreaking insight on why Republicans lost the election last year:

Breitbart News Editor-At-Large Ben Shapiro is out with an innovative and pioneering game plan for Republicans: attack Democrats. Shapiro spoke to Pat Robertson today on the 700 Club where he maintained that Republicans lost the last election because they didn’t try to demonize President Obama, who “painted Mitt Romney as the worst guy since Stalin.”

That’s right, according to Shapiro, Republicans were simply too afraid to criticize Obama during the campaign.

And here’s the money quote (and I advise you to make sure there is no food or liquid in your mouth, because it could very well end up on your computer screen and/or keyboard):

He said that unlike conservatives, liberals “don’t have facts or evidence to back their positions.”

You heard the man. Conservatives like him have as many facts as the day is long to back up charges that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel took money from a group called “Friends of Hamas,” or that Paul Krugman filed for bankruptcy, as his site so defty scooped “the liberal media” on.

And here’s another money quote:

You can’t argue policy with people who are uncivil. Civility is like the Geneva Conventions - once you step out of uniform, it no longer applies. Republicans need to do as President Obama suggested: they need to “punch back twice as hard.” When they are called racist, the proper response is not, “Oh well, I have black friends.” That’s a silly response. The actual response should be, “No, you are racist for boiling racism down to anything with which you disagree. What that does is it demeans racism. It makes racism into something that means nothing. And that’s something Republicans need to do on a more regular basis.

So then Shapiro’s forefather, the late Andrew Breitbart, demeaned racism when he accused Shirley Sherrod of that by posting a video of her seemingly admitting to discriminating against a white farmer when the full video showed her explaining the opposite…yes? Or Shapiro himself is a racist because he has demeaned racism by calling Sherrod’s husband, Charles, a racist in the post-edited-video-fiasco spin because of the Sherrod’s involvement in a class action lawsuit against the USDA (Pigford)? (Tommy Christopher debunked that notion here).

Hat tip - Right Wing Watch

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UPDATE:

LGF reader Gus posted this about the Pigford v. Glickman case back in 2011.