The age-old shaming of men by likening them to women... and I know the built-in out is that the negativity is only in the reader's mind.

This is how my mom dances. pic.twitter.com/tI1c25OXoE

— andrew kaczynski🤔 (@KFILE) October 25, 2020

Shocking CNN threat aimed at a private citizen.

This is Andrew Kaczynski at CNN, who doesn't seem to have any idea how bad this is:

CNN is not publishing "HanA**holeSolo's" name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.

CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change....

So the human being behind the ridiculous pseudonym HanA**holeSolo should cringe for the rest of his life and never publish anything that CNN could possibly deem "bigoted" or "racist" because it would trigger CNN's delusional duty to destroy him.

Absolutely despicable.

This person is a nonentity. We shouldn't even have heard about him in the first place. Who cares who originally posted the video clip of the CNN logo stuck on the face of the guy Trump was wrestling? Trump passed along the clip the way most of us pass things along, by deciding we like that one thing. We don't search for who started it and then all the other things that person has said or done.

CNN drains the political talent from Buzzfeed.

What will happen now to the once-vibrant, genre-crushing force that is Buzzfeed? Will CNN successfully jazz up its brand or is it just extracting the political vigor from Buzzfeed?

The NYT reports:

Andrew Kaczynski, the BuzzFeed reporter whose scoop about Donald J. Trump’s early support for the invasion of Iraq surfaced in the presidential debate last week, is leaving to join CNN, just a month before the election.

The two other members of BuzzFeed’s political research team, Nathan McDermott and Christopher Massie, and Kyle Blaine, the deputy politics editor, are also going to CNN, leaving BuzzFeed short-handed for the final stretch of the campaign.

Short-handed! (Funny to see that word again after delving into its significance yesterday, the first day of the new Supreme Court term, with the Court said to be "short-handed," something I problematized here and here.)

Back to the NYT:

The departures, which come only weeks after BuzzFeed said it was formally dividing its news and entertainment divisions, are also likely to resurface questions about the company’s plans for its news operation.... The moves... leave a void at BuzzFeed, which has built its news reputation on its political coverage and is gearing up for what will probably be a frenetic last month of the campaign....

The departures could also feed the apparent feud between Jeff Zucker, the president of CNN, who recently said he did not think BuzzFeed was a “legitimate” news organization, and [BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith], who said that CNN had given too much airtime to Donald Trump in the interest of ratings....

On Monday, Mr. Smith said in an email: “I guess this means that CNN has seen the value in doing the kind of tough reporting on Donald Trump that BuzzFeed News has been doing all presidential cycle, and we wish Andrew good luck.”

A letter from The Unabomber ridiculing Lawrence Wright — a writer at The New Yorker — for believing he'd received a letter from The Unabomber.

The letter, below, was sent to Buzzfeed's Andrew Kaczynski, who just happens to have the same last name as The Unabomber (Ted Kaczynski).

"Over A Year Before 9/11, Trump Wrote Of Terror Threat With Remarkable Clarity."

Andrew Kaczynski (at Buzzfeed) is reading from Trump's 2000 book "The America We Deserve." This is all Trump, writing in 2000:

“I really am convinced we’re in danger of the sort of terrorist attacks that will make the bombing of the Trade Center look like kids playing with firecrackers... No sensible analyst rejects this possibility, and plenty of them, like me, are not wondering if but when it will happen... One day we’re told that a shadowy figure with no fixed address named Osama bin-Laden is public enemy number one, and U.S. jetfighters lay waste to his camp in Afghanistan... He escapes back under some rock, and a few news cycles later it’s on to a new enemy and new crisis.... I may be making waves, but that’s all right.... Making waves is usually what you need to do to rock the boat, and our national-security boat definitely needs rocking. Let’s point fingers. The biggest threat to our security is ourselves, because we’ve become arrogant. Dangerously arrogant. It’s time for a realistic view of the world and our place in it. Do we truly understand the threats we face? And let me give a warning: You won’t hear a lot of what follows from candidates in this campaign, because what I’ve got to say is definitely not happy talk. There are forces to be worried about, people and programs to take action against. Now.... We face a different problem when we talk about the individual fanatics who want to harm us... We can kid ourselves all we want by mocking their references to the Great Satan, but also keep in mind that there is no greater destiny for many people than to deal the Great Satan a major kick in the teeth... Our teenage boys fantasize about Cindy Crawford; young terrorists fantasize about turning an American city (and themselves) into charcoal... Yet it’s time to get down to the hard business of preparing for what I believe is the real possibility that somewhere, sometime, a weapon of mass destruction will be carried into a major American city and detonated.... Whatever their motives — fanaticism, revenge — suffice it to say that plenty of people would stand in line for a crack at a suicide mission within America... In fact the number of potential attackers grows every day. Our various military adventures — some of which are justified, some not — create new legions of people who would like to avenge the deaths of family members or fellow citizens.... It is one cost of peacekeeping we should keep in mind. I am not a hard-core isolationist. While I agree that we stick our noses into too many problems not of our making and that we can’t do much about, I strongly disagree with the idea that we can pull up the drawbridge to hide from rogue nations or individual fanatics.”

This material puts a foundation under Trump's recent criticism of George W. Bush. 

Why Al Gore is an impossible, horrible alternative to Hillary.

Buzzfeed has this, by Andrew Kaczynski: "Al Gore Insiders 'Figuring Out If There’s A Path For Him To Run."

But in recent days, “they’re getting the old gang together,” a senior Democrat told BuzzFeed News. “They’re figuring out if there’s a path financially and politically,” the Democrat said. “It feels more real than it has in the past months.”...

A member of Gore’s inner circle asked to be quoted “pouring lukewarm water” — not, note, cold water — on the chatter. “This is people talking to people, some of whom may or may not have talked to him,” the Gore adviser said....

Gore has had other focuses in recent years. In particular, Gore and a business partner are suing Al Jazeera, which purchased Current TV from him, over $65 million dollars held in escrow during the deal; Gore and his associate contend the money belongs to him. The Qatar-based network acquired Current in early 2013 in a deal reportedly worth $500 million.

We're supposed to figure that mess out in public? Just the fact that he's embroiled in a lawsuit with Al Jazeera seems toxic.

The former vice president has taken a step back from the climate change advocacy groups he helped to found, focusing instead on his business ventures and being a public climate change expert, if not the active lobbyist he once was. 

Imagine this hashed out in the space of a presidential campaign — how the man pushed a cause and then turned it into obscene personal profit. How would that work with the Democrats' economic justice issues?

But Kaczynski doesn't mention what I think makes Gore impossible: women. The Democrats depend on "war on women" and gender justice themes. There's so much invested in the ineffable feeling that this is the party for women. Al Gore lost his wife Tipper — why? And there's that awful accusation of a sexual assault on a masseuse — was that ever resolved? How could Al Gore possibly get into proper women-friendly condition to suddenly throw himself onto the presidential stage?

ADDED: Isn't it obvious? They're going to have to play the Elizabeth card.

"Rand Paul’s First Two Books Are Full Of Fake Founding Fathers Quotes."

A Buzzfeed article by Andrew Kaczynski.

Here's a Wall Street Journal article from 2012: "To Quote Thomas Jefferson, 'I Never Actually Said That'/Librarian Tracks Sayings Misattributed to Founding Father; 'A Fine Spiced Pickle.'"

Ms. Berkes acknowledges she has her work cut out for her. "Jefferson is a figure that just is ever present in the American mind," she says.

Jefferson might agree. "If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed," he supposedly said.

Actually, he didn't.

The man who got Mary Burke into that "plagiarism" trouble comes forward one with of the most ludicrous exercises in self-justification I have ever read.

Published in that venerable journal, The Atlantic, it's Eric Schnurer. He kept quiet during the campaign, after he got fired, which happened after he advised Burke's people that they should fire him, because, you know, they needed him for ideas, for that jobs plan and then for what to do when the jobs plan looked like a lame cut-and-paste job. And now he has this new idea to blame others for the blame he carried only exactly as long as there was a political stake in shifting the blame onto him. He's got a career to rebuild, after all. 

You can read the whole thing. I'm just highlighting what I struck me as ludicrous:

[Mary Burke's] opposition spent a good deal of time attacking her for not “having a plan” until she issued the obligatory document. It was to be expected, however, that whatever she released would be subjected to merciless and unfair attack, because that’s how we conduct campaigns nowadays. 

So, presumably, that's what you're doing now, since that's what we do nowadays. It's all always "merciless and unfair," according to you.

Burke faced the competing demands of putting together a “plan” as quickly as possible and making it as perfect as possible. That’s where I came in....

You, with your reputation for speed and approximate perfection. By the way, why was this person running for governor without a plan? Why did this emergency exist in the first place? 

Reading the subsequent coverage of what occurred, you’d get the impression that my staff and I lazily cut-and-pasted our way through the project. In fact, the Burke jobs plan went through at least a dozen drafts and near-endless rewrites.... This was no cut-and-paste job. The Burke jobs plan went through at least a dozen drafts....

But if they had only rewritten the verbatim material from other sources, there would never have been a Buzzfeed exposé.

We knew better than simply to mail in work we’d completed elsewhere, acutely aware of the kind of cheap shots a candidate would incur if we did. 

You didn't know better than to make the plan a target for a Buzzfeed journalist. It wasn't a "cheap shot" from Scott Walker. It was a journalist, Andrew Kaczynski, doing his job. And it wasn't "cheap." Hypocritically, you are taking a cheap shot.

"Large portions of Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke’s jobs plan for Wisconsin appear to be copied directly from the plans of 3 Democratic candidates who ran for governor in previous election cycles."

Andrew Kaczynski reports (at Buzzfeed).

A spokesman for the Burke campaign told BuzzFeed News an “expert” named Eric Schnurer who also worked on the other campaigns as responsible for the similar text, a case of self-plagiarism.

The problem of plagiarism isn't just the loss (if any) to the person who wrote the text. It's also that the taker feels a need for that material. So even if Schnurer was only cutting and pasting his own text and thus doing himself a favor, avoiding needing to do additional work, there's still a question of why the candidate was not the source of the ideas that were being presented in her name.

BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski is at it again, providing yummy tidbits for lefties.

I'm not linking to BuzzFeed — no links for you! — but to Memeorandum.

Instapundit threatens to link-starve BuzzFeed.

"The Buzzfeed folks should also be concerned that folks on the right will be less willing to link them in the future, if they’re perceived — as I believe they increasingly are — as lefty agitprop shills."

They put "feed" in their name. Links are the food.

UPDATE: Instapundit objects to my paraphrasing.

Shameful, lowly race-baiting... but who's doing it?

So somebody got a picture of the back of a man — no face, no name — in a T-shirt that says — on the back — "Put the White Back in the White House." BuzzFeed posts the photo with the information that it's a "Getty Images" photo. So we don't even get the name of the photographer. We're told "The Getty Images photo was taken at a Romney/Ryan campaign event in Lancaster, Ohio on Friday." We can't see much of the context. Who's around this guy?

Why put this picture up? Well, obviously, it gets hits for BuzzFeed, which doesn't need any more motivation than that. It does need the utter lack of ethics and decency it takes to throw something this unfair into the public debate. The BuzzFeed staffer who did this post is Andrew Kaczynski, whom we've seen before. (He was behind "Paul Ryan Gets Testy and Walks Out of Interview.") Presumably, he's doing his job of attracting links, and I'm exacerbating the dynamic by linking. But I'm doing this because I have recently criticized Romney supporters for injecting race into presidential politics.

I said it was a mistake for Rush Limbaugh and others to play that Obamaphone lady over and over. Even with no mention of race, I thought the recording was used — with deniability — to stir up racial feelings. My post — "Just How Racist Is the 'Obama Phone' Video?" — got very strong pushback from commenters. People did not want to acknowledge that race had been injected at all. I participated in the comments at first. For example:

Look, those of you who don't see the racial problem are already probably going to vote for Romney. For Romney to win, he has to influence people in the middle who are sensitive to this kind of racial ugliness. You may say my sensitivity is set to[o] high, but I'm saying that I believe the people with my level of sensitivity are much more likely to determine the outcome of the election.

But my commenters fought on, passionately, which showed, I think, how deeply they — like me —  object to racial material. The objection took different forms. I was saying don't use powerful material when it will feel racial to some people, and they were resisting seeing it as racial. Within our disagreement, there was an intense agreement: We object to racial material.

Back to that T-shirt. Who should be condemned here? There's that bald-headed, no name guy. I assume he is a Romney opponent. The reasons for that assumption are oozingly obvious. (Here, Robert Stacy McCain spells them out for you.) He deserves condemnation, whether he's for or against Romney. The photographer deserves condemnation if he has thrown this crap into the public space without giving us a name, a shot of the man's face, or even a broader shot of the people around him. We are deprived of the context we need to think about whether other people at the rally saw it, approved, laughed, shunned him, confronted him.

But Buzzfeed and all the Romney opponents who chose to link to Buzzfeed should be ashamed. They lowered themselves. They saw an opportunity go racial and they took it. Here's Caroline Bankoff at New York Magazine:

This photo of the not-so-subtle look, taken at Friday's campaign rally in Lancaster, Ohio, doesn't really require further description. 

It sure as hell does require further description! Who was that bald man? How long was that shirt-back displayed? Is this a false-flag effort to smear Romney? And why don't you care? Just go ahead and stir up racial fears and ugliness, Caroline Bankoff. Shame on you and everyone else who slavered at the opportunity to serve up this racial obscenity.

Let's judge Paul Ryan.

Buzzfeed's Andrew Kaczynski put this up yesterday with the title: "Paul Ryan Gets Testy and Walks Out of Interview."



Buzzfeed has now changed the title to "Paul Ryan Gets Testy And Ends Interview," because he obviously doesn't walk out, and they've also put this up now:

The reporter knew he was already well over the allotted time for the interview when he decided to ask a weird question relating gun violence to tax cuts. Ryan responded as anyone would in such a strange situation. When you do nearly 200 interviews in a couple months, eventually you’re going to see a local reporter embarrass himself.

So... not only doesn't he walk out, he doesn't end the interview.

Maybe Kaczynski is straining to win back lefty friends after he called "handkerchief" on the Romney "cheat sheet" conspiracy theory.

Anyway, let's focus on "testy." Did Ryan get testy? Ryan speaks eloquently about guns and crime and a need to restore "civil society" to the inner cities, which prompts the reporter to ask "And you can do all that by cutting taxes? By — with a big tax cut?" It's not a terrible question, really, but it does reveal the reporter's liberal mentality. Ryan's civil society — the basis for individual "discipline" and "good character" — is "what charities and civic groups and churches do." That's standard conservative ideology, but the reporter, presumably thinking in terms of government finding ways to rebuild individual good character, leaps to the issue of tax cuts. He can't envision the private groups — charities and civic groups and churches — building civil society. He's got the "you didn't build that" attitude.

So he asks a tax question and Ryan responds as if the reporter had made the assertion implied in the question and says "Those are your words, not mine." That's abrupt. He could have said your question shows that you don't understand what civil society is and explained the deep ideological difference between conservatives and liberals, but the reporter isn't his ideological opponent. He's a reporter, supposedly asking neutral questions, and the implied argument about the role of government would need to be spelled out before it could be refuted.

It's late in the interview, and the off-camera voice says, "Thank you very much." Ryan, yanking out his microphone, says "That was kind of strange," as if the question were a complete non sequitur. And then: "Trying to stuff words in my mouth," as if it were not a question. I read this as a dominating tactic, and the reporter goes beta: "I don't know if it's strange." Ryan mellows slightly: "No, but it sounds as though you're trying to answer my question for me. That's a little odd." And the reporter meekly agrees.

Ryan could have been a bit nicer, but I liked this display of dominance in managing the reporters who are looking to get their sound bites out of him. I'm sure this reporter would have loved to show Ryan stymied by contradictory aspirations about fixing the inner cities and cutting taxes. The reporter tried to get on top and got schooled. I'm okay with that.