May 05, 2009

Another Botched DHS Report

This one was recalled, perhaps because almost any human capable of forming an opinion was declared an extremist:


A "left-wing extremist" is described as someone who opposes war or is dedicated to environmental and animal rights causes, while a "right-wing extremist" is someone who is against abortion or for border enforcement.

I've got an idea: why don't we go ahead and correctly label the employees of the Office of Intelligence and Analysis as hyperbole extremists?

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 08:58 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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May 04, 2009

Daily Beast Lies Again

More outright fabrication from The Daily Beast (my bold, of course):


At the gun show in Reno, I witnessed the sale of rocket-propelled-grenade launchers and bazooka guns; I watched a California-based dealer demonstrate how rapidly he could field strip his .308-caliber sniper rifle, then stash it in a deliberately innocuous-looking backpack and a briefcase that "looks just like a camera case."

Mr. Blumenthal, I'll make you a deal.

Produce a functional gun show-purchased RPG-7 launcher and grenades or a functional "bazooka gun" (whatever that is), and I'll either eat it, or let you shoot at me with it. The simple fact of the matter is that such weapons are not available at guns shows, though replicas— non-firing essentially 1:1 scale models—sometimes are.

The take-down rifle design he shows with forboding isn't particularly innovative and has been around for over a hundred years. I just watched the Clint Eastwood classic Joe Kidd over the course of a weekend, where a western set in 1900 featured a scene where the title character assembled a similar weapon transported in a compact presentation case, and then used it to kill a rifleman sniping from a ridge hundreds of yards away.

As for Blumenthal's crockmentary, I'm less than impressed with tired leftist tactic he used of finding a small number of crackpots from multiple events and presenting them as being a fair representation of the overall group. Whether used by Blumenthal or Riefenstahl, it is purposefully dishonest.

You'll note that though he claims to have attended two shows, he came back to the same 2-3 guys for the bulk of his interviews, most prominently the old Alex Jones fan and the young Paultard. Those interviews were culled from out of what must have been thousands of potential attendees he could have chosen to talk to. I have little doubt his intention was to isolate and fixate upon those he thought would be most useful fodder for a smear out of what was sure to have been thousands (for example, there were 8,000 people attend a gun show in Raleigh over the course of the weekend, and I suspect I could find several dozen conspiracy theorists or more that would give similar stories to what he culled, but that doesn't make them representative of the larger group).

It's a smear job from a shameless propagandist, and yet another blow to the credibility of Tina Brown's Daily Beast, which seems to be trying to emulate the kind of journalism that is leading the New York Times into both irrelevancy and bankruptcy.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:53 PM | Comments (58) | Add Comment
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