Conclusion: The Principled Protester
I had been put in contact with Dan Borchers through a mutual friend. He was going to CPAC to protest Ann Coulter's plagiarism, her vitriolic hate speak, and the corrosive effect that it has on honest Conservative positions and principles.
Here's a pretty good background blog on it.
Please note: we are, first, citizens, and integrity and honesty are the only guarantees that we have, ultimately, of making this system work. Besides, I was pretty much kicked out of the Democratic party for making the same stand: rules and principles matter, and you can't mouth one thing and do another without paying a price.
Robert Bluey commented:
Bluey continues with an oracular (Delphic) parsing:
BUT, he links to this posting, featuring a delightfully rude depiction of Ann Coulter -- certainly tit for tat.
Which is the same Lydia Cornell as is this (hybrid cross-postings)
I'll be more than happy to wait until you go and read Ms. Cornell and Mr. Borcher's riveting account, and, well, make up your own mind as to the ironies involved. But it is most assuredly the portion of the Ann Coulter "Princess of Hatespeak" media darlinghood that you haven't seen rehashed in The Situation Room. Or read Mother Jones magazine's terse blognote on the affair.
In some ways, Dave Weigel's photo of the "beleaguered ACLU volunteers" says it all. (scroll down past Jeff Gannon stalking the CPAC)
What is truly typically somnambulent is that, for all the ink and phosphors spilled over Coulter's misfiring "faggot" joke (one thinks of the same gibbering chimps screeching about Kerry a couple months ago), Nobody much bothered covering Borchers' ejection by Coulter's thugs!
Go ahead, Google news "borchers coulter" and see what you get. Four hits. Google "coulter faggot" and you get 1,357 hits. Wasn't ANYbody paying attention? Why is Coulter's dumbass and hateful (but covered by the First Amendment) speech worth over a thousand stories, but the CPAC management's collusion with her bodyguards in physically ejecting a perfectly well-behaved CPAC attendee because Ann doesn't like him, WHY is that not worth mention?
And some Coultergeist even FILMED it!
There is something deeply insane about the press these days. A word to the wise is sufficient, but any fool gets ten thousand hits.
However, before being ejected, Dan managed to get these two pictures for THIS blog at the event -- making this "virtual" attendance even moreso. And I very much THANK Dan for taking them, and for his permission to use them:
Here is the Sam Adams Alliance booth, with Sam Adams bobbleheads to be given away. Pay special attention to the arrows. They point to the two posters that are also the "wallpapers" released on the Sam Adams website on March 1: Sam's Desktop Wallpapers.
And here is the Americans for Limited Government booth, giving away candy and free pens.
But, Dan Borchers' experience, and Ann Coulter's slur, Michelle Malkin's ascendance, Newt's rock stardom, Mitt's Gott-Uns and Rudy's surprise manage to put Howard Rich and the Cato gang back into proper perspective: a nasty, perhaps infected zit on the face of the hard-core conservative movement, perhaps, but merely a blemish.
As -- Dan Borchers please note -- Coulter is a blemish on the face of the movement. "Conservatism" is a reasoned philosophy, in its highest manifestation, whose premises I disagree with. But premises are matters of experience and belief, and it needs to be understood that, while we may disagree, two fundamentally differing points of view have ALWAYS been the dipoles within which the United States live, and which WE EMBRACE as healthy and necessary for our democracy to operate.
It is in aberrations, like Coulter, like Howie Rich & Gang and their manipulative, stealth tactics that our democracy is threatened. For too many years, those who would represent themselves as "Liberal" or "Conservative" have, like Ann Coulter, been reflexively coddled by one side or t'other.(I'd come up with a "Liberal" counterpoint, but the vicious snarking of the Right, like Malkin, is SO pervasive and constant that it would be an act of betrayal of moderation to toss even ONE more rock on that unstable cairn.)
And, the grand rollout of "The Sam Adams Alliance" supposedly free of "Americans for Limited Government" was nothing if not a mild aberration, like a zit.
Paul Jacob moved his "Common Sense" radio commentary/two-minute-speech transcript webpage over to SAA a long time ago, merely by changing his logo.
But, as Becky pointed out at Preemptive Karma back in August, Jacob was deeply involved in the failed "Oklahomans in Action"s "Stop OverSpending Oklahoma" initiative (Jacob is president of "Citizens in Charge," headquartered at his house in the Washington, D.C. suburbs). And as confirmed by the Oklahoma Supreme Court's draft opinion of the December 12, 2006 decision denying OIA's last appeal of striking SOS Oklahoma from the ballot -- they literally call it TABOR - Paul Jacob was an active participant in the petitioning process, a petitioning process that the Oklahoma Supreme Court notes was felonious.
All of which begs the question that has dogged this campaign: in virtually every state in which Rich/Jacob/O'Keefe/Tillman/Wilson operated, clearly definable crimes were observed and reported. But in no state, evidently, has ANYone been willing to prosecute those crimes. And the question has NEVER been asked: if the "Howard Rich gang" was the impetus behind every one of those initiatives, isn't that racketeering? Isn't that an interstate conspiracy to commit election fraud? At least, shouldn't SOMEone be blamed for the "pervasive fraud" -- as the Judge in Montana called it?
But, Paul Jacob, fresh from his testimony in the Oklahoma trial and moving his radio show to the Sam Adams Alliance, participated in the rollout with this lickspittle bit of bland treason on Townhall.com (You know, the sunglasses lady's employer), wherein he emits a relentless string, of absolute thigh-slapping howlers, like this:
And this:
ending with the less-than-resounding:
One half expects these geezers to blizzard the campuses of America with Phrygian "Liberty caps" (Which Sam Adams' "Sons of Liberty" wore as "Freedom Caps" and were adopted by the admiring rebels of the French Revolution -- but I doubt that the Sam Adams Alliance, for all their necrophiliac enthusiasm for Sam Adams, would know that).
Remember Howard Rich's statement, "you can be sure that we'll be back, stronger than before"? (See "Unlimited Terms of Endearment" - Epilogue") :
For 2008, they've already started an astroturf organization in North Dakota -- C-RED. And there's one just started up in the last couple weeks of the election in South Carolina: Coalition Against Unlimited Spending (CAUS) . (They LOVE these dopey acronyms: H.O.P.E. in Arizona, P.I.S.T.O.L in Nevada, S.O.S. in Michigan, Oklahoma, Nebraska, etc.)
And add the Sam Adams Alliance, also formed at the end of the campaign, but evidently cooked up or finalized at the ALG action Conference (On November 27, it said: "ARRIVING ON THE WEB IN JANUARY 2007" On November 8, it stated "Arriving on the web in 68 Days")
That would be January 15th.
A mere 45 days later than promised, the Sam Adams website was rolled out, for CPAC. and that's significant: This "new" group is comprised of old operatives with a long history of saying one thing and doing another. It is inauspicious, one would think, to begin one's website with an untruth. Endings are contained within beginnings, after all, and starting with a lie: A lie in the sense of promising something that could not be, in retrospect, delivered -- another term would be 'hubris' -- a quality that Messrs. O'Keefe and Tillman seem to have in abundance.
But, really, what's important here is that the Sam Adams Alliance looks an awful lot like a sexagenarian's idea of what would seem "hip" and "with it" to "young people." No point in pussyfooting around here: the new Sam Adams Alliance is just plain laughably lame.
Once again, here's perhaps the worst wallpaper ever offered on the internet:
Good lord: what can these aging proto-libertarians be thinking? These photoshopped monstrousities wouldn't have worked back in the 'sixties, let alone in the 21st Century. I suppose, in a sense, it's a busted metaphor, kind of like "Skydivin' Sam's neck would be, if the cheesy mashup hadn't been done by somebody's grade school kid, who actually knows how to run a computer. Had these people any sense of shame, they'd be mortified, too embarrassed to show their faces.
Are they KIDDING me? Does ANYbody not afflicted with liver spots and palsy think that photoshopping ONE lousy Sam Adams head onto two stock "extreme" sports shots is KEWL?
Seriously, in the midst of the whole CPAC thing, the Sam Adams Alliance was notable for passing out the most expensive freebie (a close second was the stuffed chihuahua from PETA KILLS Animals dot com).
And they were notable herein for reprinting their astonishingly lame poster from the wallpaper selection, but I doubt that anyone at CPAC noticed. They grabbed their bobbleheads, and their free pens, and their candy and stuffed them into their blue "Conservative Political Action Conference" canvas bags, next to their styrofoam Mitt Romney mitts.
(Hyuck, hyuck. Get it? Mitt mitts! Hoo boy. Maybe he's using the same bunch that came up with the "Extreme Sam" wallpaper. Are these people kidding? Or are they playing to their demographic?)
Well, Sam Adams gave away bobbleheads, and Americans for Limited Government gave away candy -- however creepy that implication might be, considering these septagenarians are trying to attract "youthful activists."
Paul Jacob rolled out Sam Adams. The website finally rolled out Sam Adams. The CPAC bobblehead booth and panel rolled out Sam Adams.
But CPAC and its conservative attendees seem to have rolled out a yawn. Alas, if the SAA remain true to their roots, their press releases will trumpet how popular and what a big hit they were, after all. Remember, after losing 34 of 35 initiative campaigns, they blithely lied, claiming "nationwide" victories in 9 states. (See "Unlimited Terms of Endearment, Epilogue")
The truth will never set these people free, although it may well end up incarcerating them.
I, on the other hand, am fascinated by the world that CPAC presented, and more than a little surprised at what a low-rent, cheeseball production the big "Sam Adams Alliance" turned out to be -- even though they obviously spent a lot of cash on this rollout.
Did you know that they discovered a psychedelic octopus in the Antarctic?
Courage.
8:03 AM
Correction per Dan, who writes:
Here's a pretty good background blog on it.
Please note: we are, first, citizens, and integrity and honesty are the only guarantees that we have, ultimately, of making this system work. Besides, I was pretty much kicked out of the Democratic party for making the same stand: rules and principles matter, and you can't mouth one thing and do another without paying a price.
Robert Bluey commented:
March 4, 2007
The Ugly Side of CPAC
Filed under: CPAC 2007 - Rob Bluey @ 8:45 pm
Campus Progress actually does a pretty good job covering CPAC - if you're one who enjoys sensationalism and deception.
Meanwhile, The American Mind, Hot Air and Little Green Footballs
have details on Mike Stark's bizarre encounter with Michelle Malkin.
Bluey continues with an oracular (Delphic) parsing:
Stark wasn't the only weirdo at CPAC. Daniel Borchers had to be "wrestled out of CPAC."
BUT, he links to this posting, featuring a delightfully rude depiction of Ann Coulter -- certainly tit for tat.
Which is the same Lydia Cornell as is this (hybrid cross-postings)
... Dan said he was about to interview Mark Smith, an author. Forty-five minutes later, around 12 noon, I got a frantic call from Borchers. He sounded panicked and said, "I've just been assaulted and kicked out of the conference." I said, "What? Why?" He said, "I don't know, they wouldn't say. But I was wrestled out of the hotel by four bodyguards, one I recognized as being Ann Coulter's - and they shoved me and tried to grab my name tag."
I'll be more than happy to wait until you go and read Ms. Cornell and Mr. Borcher's riveting account, and, well, make up your own mind as to the ironies involved. But it is most assuredly the portion of the Ann Coulter "Princess of Hatespeak" media darlinghood that you haven't seen rehashed in The Situation Room. Or read Mother Jones magazine's terse blognote on the affair.
In some ways, Dave Weigel's photo of the "beleaguered ACLU volunteers" says it all. (scroll down past Jeff Gannon stalking the CPAC)
What is truly typically somnambulent is that, for all the ink and phosphors spilled over Coulter's misfiring "faggot" joke (one thinks of the same gibbering chimps screeching about Kerry a couple months ago), Nobody much bothered covering Borchers' ejection by Coulter's thugs!
Go ahead, Google news "borchers coulter" and see what you get. Four hits. Google "coulter faggot" and you get 1,357 hits. Wasn't ANYbody paying attention? Why is Coulter's dumbass and hateful (but covered by the First Amendment) speech worth over a thousand stories, but the CPAC management's collusion with her bodyguards in physically ejecting a perfectly well-behaved CPAC attendee because Ann doesn't like him, WHY is that not worth mention?
And some Coultergeist even FILMED it!
There is something deeply insane about the press these days. A word to the wise is sufficient, but any fool gets ten thousand hits.
However, before being ejected, Dan managed to get these two pictures for THIS blog at the event -- making this "virtual" attendance even moreso. And I very much THANK Dan for taking them, and for his permission to use them:
Here is the Sam Adams Alliance booth, with Sam Adams bobbleheads to be given away. Pay special attention to the arrows. They point to the two posters that are also the "wallpapers" released on the Sam Adams website on March 1: Sam's Desktop Wallpapers.
And here is the Americans for Limited Government booth, giving away candy and free pens.
But, Dan Borchers' experience, and Ann Coulter's slur, Michelle Malkin's ascendance, Newt's rock stardom, Mitt's Gott-Uns and Rudy's surprise manage to put Howard Rich and the Cato gang back into proper perspective: a nasty, perhaps infected zit on the face of the hard-core conservative movement, perhaps, but merely a blemish.
As -- Dan Borchers please note -- Coulter is a blemish on the face of the movement. "Conservatism" is a reasoned philosophy, in its highest manifestation, whose premises I disagree with. But premises are matters of experience and belief, and it needs to be understood that, while we may disagree, two fundamentally differing points of view have ALWAYS been the dipoles within which the United States live, and which WE EMBRACE as healthy and necessary for our democracy to operate.
It is in aberrations, like Coulter, like Howie Rich & Gang and their manipulative, stealth tactics that our democracy is threatened. For too many years, those who would represent themselves as "Liberal" or "Conservative" have, like Ann Coulter, been reflexively coddled by one side or t'other.(I'd come up with a "Liberal" counterpoint, but the vicious snarking of the Right, like Malkin, is SO pervasive and constant that it would be an act of betrayal of moderation to toss even ONE more rock on that unstable cairn.)
And, the grand rollout of "The Sam Adams Alliance" supposedly free of "Americans for Limited Government" was nothing if not a mild aberration, like a zit.
Paul Jacob moved his "Common Sense" radio commentary/two-minute-speech transcript webpage over to SAA a long time ago, merely by changing his logo.
But, as Becky pointed out at Preemptive Karma back in August, Jacob was deeply involved in the failed "Oklahomans in Action"s "Stop OverSpending Oklahoma" initiative (Jacob is president of "Citizens in Charge," headquartered at his house in the Washington, D.C. suburbs). And as confirmed by the Oklahoma Supreme Court's draft opinion of the December 12, 2006 decision denying OIA's last appeal of striking SOS Oklahoma from the ballot -- they literally call it TABOR - Paul Jacob was an active participant in the petitioning process, a petitioning process that the Oklahoma Supreme Court notes was felonious.
... The organization's attitude on residency was that if a circulator came into Oklahoma with the intention of staying only for the duration of the petition drive or could provide some address within the state, the circulator was an Oklahoma resident - a premise not supported by Oklahoma law ...
Just as it is this Court's constitutional duty to determine residency as it relates to elections, the Legislature shoulders the constitutional responsibility to enact laws to prevent corruption in making, procuring, and submitting initiative and referendum petitions. It has done so in three provisions relating to circulators in title 34.
Section 3.153 makes it a crime punishable by a fine of up to $1,000.00 and a year in the county jail for any person other than a qualified elector -- a United States citizen over the age of 18 and a bona fide Oklahoma resident - to circulate an initiative petition.
Section 6 requires circulators to verify every petition by sworn testimony that the circulator is a qualified elector -- a United States citizen over the age of 18 and a bona fide Oklahoma resident -- signing the verification and giving an address.
Pursuant to §23, it is a felony punishable by a fine of up to $500.00, imprisonment up to two years in a state penitentiary, or both to sign or file any certificate or petition knowing the same or any part thereof to be falsely made. Therefore, any circulator signing a verification who is not a qualified elector -- a United States citizen over the age of 18 and a bona fide Oklahoma resident -- or anyone who aides and abets a circulator in doing so commits a felony.
All of which begs the question that has dogged this campaign: in virtually every state in which Rich/Jacob/O'Keefe/Tillman/Wilson operated, clearly definable crimes were observed and reported. But in no state, evidently, has ANYone been willing to prosecute those crimes. And the question has NEVER been asked: if the "Howard Rich gang" was the impetus behind every one of those initiatives, isn't that racketeering? Isn't that an interstate conspiracy to commit election fraud? At least, shouldn't SOMEone be blamed for the "pervasive fraud" -- as the Judge in Montana called it?
But, Paul Jacob, fresh from his testimony in the Oklahoma trial and moving his radio show to the Sam Adams Alliance, participated in the rollout with this lickspittle bit of bland treason on Townhall.com (You know, the sunglasses lady's employer), wherein he emits a relentless string, of absolute thigh-slapping howlers, like this:
Sam Adams, more than any other person, united the 13 colonies into one America, convinced them to battle the biggest empire on the globe, and thus ushered in the greatest period of freedom in the history of mankind.
It's wonderful history. But, of course, Sam Adams is long dead. Now mainly remembered for beer, right?
Wrong . . . or, if correct, not for long.
And this:
"We need a real, grassroots movement across the country, organized locally," says John Tillman, president of The Sam Adams Alliance. "We connect and support citizen leaders who are working to expand liberty and hold the government accountable."
... Tillman believes, much as Adams did, that these local battles are critical, in and of themselves, and also in their ability to impact national politics and policy. The Alliance seeks to be a networking station through which pro-liberty activists can communicate with, learn from and empower one another.
ending with the less-than-resounding:
If you're a modern-day Sam Adams, you should check out this new group.
And join the revolution.
One half expects these geezers to blizzard the campuses of America with Phrygian "Liberty caps" (Which Sam Adams' "Sons of Liberty" wore as "Freedom Caps" and were adopted by the admiring rebels of the French Revolution -- but I doubt that the Sam Adams Alliance, for all their necrophiliac enthusiasm for Sam Adams, would know that).
Remember Howard Rich's statement, "you can be sure that we'll be back, stronger than before"? (See "Unlimited Terms of Endearment" - Epilogue") :
For 2008, they've already started an astroturf organization in North Dakota -- C-RED. And there's one just started up in the last couple weeks of the election in South Carolina: Coalition Against Unlimited Spending (CAUS) . (They LOVE these dopey acronyms: H.O.P.E. in Arizona, P.I.S.T.O.L in Nevada, S.O.S. in Michigan, Oklahoma, Nebraska, etc.)
And add the Sam Adams Alliance, also formed at the end of the campaign, but evidently cooked up or finalized at the ALG action Conference (On November 27, it said: "ARRIVING ON THE WEB IN JANUARY 2007" On November 8, it stated "Arriving on the web in 68 Days")
That would be January 15th.
A mere 45 days later than promised, the Sam Adams website was rolled out, for CPAC. and that's significant: This "new" group is comprised of old operatives with a long history of saying one thing and doing another. It is inauspicious, one would think, to begin one's website with an untruth. Endings are contained within beginnings, after all, and starting with a lie: A lie in the sense of promising something that could not be, in retrospect, delivered -- another term would be 'hubris' -- a quality that Messrs. O'Keefe and Tillman seem to have in abundance.
But, really, what's important here is that the Sam Adams Alliance looks an awful lot like a sexagenarian's idea of what would seem "hip" and "with it" to "young people." No point in pussyfooting around here: the new Sam Adams Alliance is just plain laughably lame.
Once again, here's perhaps the worst wallpaper ever offered on the internet:
Good lord: what can these aging proto-libertarians be thinking? These photoshopped monstrousities wouldn't have worked back in the 'sixties, let alone in the 21st Century. I suppose, in a sense, it's a busted metaphor, kind of like "Skydivin' Sam's neck would be, if the cheesy mashup hadn't been done by somebody's grade school kid, who actually knows how to run a computer. Had these people any sense of shame, they'd be mortified, too embarrassed to show their faces.
Are they KIDDING me? Does ANYbody not afflicted with liver spots and palsy think that photoshopping ONE lousy Sam Adams head onto two stock "extreme" sports shots is KEWL?
Seriously, in the midst of the whole CPAC thing, the Sam Adams Alliance was notable for passing out the most expensive freebie (a close second was the stuffed chihuahua from PETA KILLS Animals dot com).
And they were notable herein for reprinting their astonishingly lame poster from the wallpaper selection, but I doubt that anyone at CPAC noticed. They grabbed their bobbleheads, and their free pens, and their candy and stuffed them into their blue "Conservative Political Action Conference" canvas bags, next to their styrofoam Mitt Romney mitts.
(Hyuck, hyuck. Get it? Mitt mitts! Hoo boy. Maybe he's using the same bunch that came up with the "Extreme Sam" wallpaper. Are these people kidding? Or are they playing to their demographic?)
Well, Sam Adams gave away bobbleheads, and Americans for Limited Government gave away candy -- however creepy that implication might be, considering these septagenarians are trying to attract "youthful activists."
Paul Jacob rolled out Sam Adams. The website finally rolled out Sam Adams. The CPAC bobblehead booth and panel rolled out Sam Adams.
But CPAC and its conservative attendees seem to have rolled out a yawn. Alas, if the SAA remain true to their roots, their press releases will trumpet how popular and what a big hit they were, after all. Remember, after losing 34 of 35 initiative campaigns, they blithely lied, claiming "nationwide" victories in 9 states. (See "Unlimited Terms of Endearment, Epilogue")
The truth will never set these people free, although it may well end up incarcerating them.
I, on the other hand, am fascinated by the world that CPAC presented, and more than a little surprised at what a low-rent, cheeseball production the big "Sam Adams Alliance" turned out to be -- even though they obviously spent a lot of cash on this rollout.
Did you know that they discovered a psychedelic octopus in the Antarctic?
Courage.
8:03 AM
Correction per Dan, who writes:
Thanks for the posting. A correction is, however, necessary. I did NOT go to CPAC to protest against Coulter. I actually went to network, conduct interviews, take photos and evaluate this year's conference. I was politely minding my own business when I was assaulted without cause or justification.Which only makes the unjustified ejection all the worse. - HW
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