It must be the most derivative argument ever. Larry Johnson makes up…flat out makes up…an incident where Michelle Obama appeared with Louis Farrakhan and said something nasty about white people. In his telling, there’s no clarity about what she is alleged to have said or in what context she might have said it. All he knows is that she used the word ‘whitey’ and that when we all get to see the video tape we’ll be shocked for sure.
This desperate and pathetic last ditch attempt to hold the superdelegates in line succeeds in going viral just before the last two primaries. It’s clearly just the kind of ratfucking job Larry was trained to carry out by the Central Intelligence Agency. Only Larry’s supposed to stick to doing it in foreign countries against Soviet-leaning parties, and then only upon receiving specific orders.
This decision, on Larry’s part, is the last straw as far as I am concerned, and I know the tape doesn’t exist and that Larry can’t produce it. So, I copy someone else’s snarky comment and write it up as if it is a transcript. Instead of the tape having Michelle Obama saying ‘Whitey’ it has her saying ‘Why’d he?’
You see, it provided an explanation that rendered a non-existent tape harmless, and Larry couldn’t refute it because he made it up and he doesn’t have a transcript. This leads to quite a bit of embarrassment and pressure on Larry to prove he wasn’t just peddling racist bullshit. But Larry’s caught on the flypaper. He’s already said he hasn’t seen the transcript, so he can’t say with any assurance that I’m not telling the truth. He can’t admit he made it up and that he knows I haven’t seen the transcript, so he attempts to contact me by email, by calling my ex-wife, etc., to see if he can get me on the record as not having seen the non-existent transcript.
Meanwhile, my server dies under all the pressure from incoming hits and I can’t respond online. It works for me because all I want is to undermine Larry’s fantasy until the polls close in Montana and the superdelegates throw their support to Obama. It’s called ratfucking the ratfucker, and it broke my heart to have to do it.
But it is weeks later now and I’m still getting tons of incoming hits from morons that think there is a tape out there of Michelle Obama calling people ‘Whitey’. There’s not. And there never was. It was a dirty trick. It was desperation.
But the story is still so vibrant that the Chicago Tribune is discussing whether ‘whitey’ is a racist or merely prejudiced term. And idiots at Protein Wisdom are deconstructing the Chicago Tribune’s ‘piece of Foucaultean dross’. It’s too much to take. Shut the hell up about the non-existent only-in-Larry Johnson’s-bag-of-dirty-tricks-fantasy ‘Whitey’ tape. Jackasses.
I wrote a diary about a conversation I had with my father-in-law on Saturday. He was actually looking for a reason to like Obama (despite his often-Republican leanings) and wanted me to explain the “tape” that he had heard about at bingo.
I still think there’s a possibility that some tape from a completely different source has been altered as a party joke. Of course, it can never surface since the doctoring would be easily identified (even with a public domain program like Audacity.)
But Johnson has given up every bit of his credibility with thinking people. How can he push “Publish” on his keyboard any more.
I think there was a tape of Michelle speaking (somewhere in the South around February — or perhaps it was a swing to LA around the time of the MS primary) and the reason Johnson won’t produce it is because it would end all doubt. BooMan nailed it, and it was the often heard (for us Midwesterners) contraction of ‘why did he?’ The problem is that you can’t reconcile the grammatic construction of asking ‘why’d he?’ in series of rhetorical questions regarding Bush’s behavior with Johnson’s imaginary desired epithet.
I thought I saw this on the news, but maybe I’m just confabulating things. The created transcript rang a bell, however.
I don’t doubt that there may have been some doctoring to enhance the effect. This is what ‘they’ did with her “very proud comment. The “very” was clumsily removed (this was part of the North Carolina group’s commercial). Removing the superlative adjective was necessary to reach the desired meaning, i.e., ‘not proud’ (instead of) ‘extremely proud’ (her actual meaning). Creating a meaningful lexical construction is the problem. It also doesn’t help that “whitey” is more a line from a Blaxploitation flick. Only in someone’s imagination can this epithet exist — and that’s why Johnson hopes to weave a trail of debate concerning its usage. It’s apocryphal, like many stories, but it gains life in the argument over its existence.
Another example of an apocryphal story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spitting_Image
Another apocryphal story was the one of — ostensibly — Nixon being rated even in his debate with Kennedy when the listener heard the debate on the radio, whereas he lost — again, ostensibly — when viewed on TV. It has a truthy feel, since Nixon was rumored to shave twice a day and reportedly eschewed makeup for the debate, all of which made him look relatively haggard next to the virile Kennedy.
I made it up, colinski. That’s what I’m telling you.
There is no tape.
There never was any tape.
But how do you refute a nasty rumor about something non-existent? You say it does exist but it’s completely innocent. It’s the only way I could have defused it.
All the nervous superdelegates were able to breath a sigh of relief and reassure themselves that their endorsement wouldn’t be met the next day by some tape of Michelle Obama appearing with Farrakhan and spewing racist crap.
I just wanted to shoot a big hole in Larry’s operation that would undermine his whole effort to keep the superdelegates paralyzed on election night.
Once they committed the nomination was won. Larry knew it and I knew it. He played the race card so I went after him.
There’s no tape.
Yeah – I’m disappointed in the comprehension. You made it clear you were making it up – and STILL people refuse to read and would rather believe instead. THAT is scary!!!
It’s like those people who believe, ALL facts to the contrary, that Obama is a muslim.
Good, dueling apocryphal stories.
I always found the Thomas Theorem profound.
Except my apocryphal story has definitely outlived its usefulness.
And let me add, it was BRILLIANT, and so clever, and damn, you’re so my hero for that. It doesn’t get any better than beating them at their own game, does it?
I understand that. Are you sure you’re not psychic, cause there was a speech where she did say something like that?
I freely admitted in the previous post that it could be a confabulation on my part (perhaps the sniper fire a Tuzla traumatized me), but we Midwesterners do use “whitey” as a contraction for “why did he?” FULL DISCLOSURE: I was born somewhat well north of Chicago — in wis-SCON-sin, the “eat cheese or die” state.
I’m not psychic. I just knew that the only way to defuse the virus was to explain it away.
What puzzles me:
This was completely obvious to me from the construction of your original story. The way I read it, you weren’t saying “this is the way it is”, you were saying “wouldn’t it be a gas if this was Larry Johnson’s big hit piece?” I was totally confused a few weeks later when I ran across comments of people who thought you had an actual transcript. I’m not sure how anyone went from a post that was (to me) clearly wild speculation to solid fact.
I suppose this is why it was truly was a masterful piece of social engineering. A demand to release the tapes would have fed his hit job, as he’d have been able to use it as “the enemy has something to fear!” But he couldn’t refute your speculation without providing the one thing he didn’t have (due to the tapes being fictitious): more concrete information.
Hats off, man. I hope you’re this effective against the 101st Fighting Keyboarders in the months to come.
well, you understand what I did and why. But I purposively left the impression that there was a tape and a transcript without actually lying and saying that there was one. It’s a balancing act and I had to be willing to shed some credibility. I felt I’d earned enough to be able to spend a little.
yeah, to catch a wolf you goto be a wolf. Larry Johnson wonder how much Hillary paid $ for that post.
He probably got a big IOU…
I doubt Hillary paid or promised Johnson anything. Larry Johnson has been spreading false rumors about Obama on his blog his own reasons.
it’s always best to stay as close to the logical as possible 😉
The fact is, if someone hasn’t doctored a tape yet, they will soon…especially since your “explanation” went viral. But of course, would have happened anyway. We’ve already seen the “very” cut off of “proud of our country.”
If MSM had any cajones, they’d be tracking this stuff and comparing the befores and afters. It would probably make Abrams’ show interesting.
Booman,
Sorry for your loss of friendship over this and how upsetting it’s been for you.
Johnson and Susan’s rationale escapes me. Because, by hurting Obama’s chances, they’re only working to help elect another Bushie. And I can’t believe how NQ has devolved. It’s really sad. I don’t get it.
There is no tape Colinsky. You may have heard Roger Stone on Fox News alluding to a tape, which he hadn’t seen or heard, but there is no tape. If there were a tape it would’ve been produced by now.
Of course, that hasn’t stopped Larry Johnson from touting this for weeks. So where is this elusive tape no one has actually seen or heard, which no one has a transcript for, but Johnson, Stone, and others swear up and down exists? Where is it?
aHA! Is this another smear to add to the list? Keep’m coming boys, we’re ready for ‘m.
Ingrid
Why be surprised when mu’fuggers fug mothers? It’s who they are; it’s what they do.
It’s their nature.
I’ve got transcript of a videotape leaked to me of Larry denouncing white people at a church in Chicago.
He said “Whitey order anchovy pizza. Whitey not use his coupon.”
You can’t prove I don’t have this.
Well Larry has a lot of company. Hillary’s unemployed campaign manager here in Texas is still writing hit pieces on the Obama campaign instead of supporting him as Hillary said. I am so fucking sick of the Hillary supporters who will not or cannot grow up.
We voted Larry off the island at Tribal Council at SLB.
Bravo!!!!!!!!!
Hillary has been sitting on her butt and sulking for 10 days now. It’s time for her to act, and reign in pieces of stinking shit like Larry Johnson. The Hillaryis44 crowd, all those PUMA assholes, Larry Johnson, all sitting out there and damaging Hillary and the Democratic Party.
She unleashed and empowered these assholes. She needs to get in their faces and tell them to sit down and STFU.
I wonder who sue and larry are working for.
I don’t know about Susan, but Larry is working for himself.
Here’s his email:
LCJohnson@BERG-Associates.com
If he got 100,000 emails, that would make it very hard to get paying work.
No it won’t. That’s pointless. Do you think the Obama administration is going to give him any work?
No, of course not. NO ONE will give him work if he has to sort thru 100,000 emails.
It’s an email version of a DOS attack.
Just sayin’
Oh yeah . . . and not only that, it won’t work as you want it to. Sysadmins earn their money by cleaning up and working around stuff like this.
Just enjoy the fact that BooMan has turned the tables on him.
Yeah, dumping a few thousand mail messages on someone’s server is unlikely to do anything but attract a civil suit, or possibly a slap on the wrist by the FBI. Thank goodness they have better things to do than seriously prosecute pranks like this, like finding teenagers who’ve downloaded Justin Timberlake’s latest song off the intartubs and throwing them in Gitmo.
It’s time for clients to realize the consequences of blatant lies. It’s time to link Berg to Johnson, and to the farce that was.
heh…he’s been taking lessons from these guys.
what’s that old adage? something about shit floating to the top…
Well, I believe the only EX-CIA person is a dead CIA person. Larry’s not dead, so….
Larry Johnson’s tape is now available.
http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=10570
ROTFLMAO!!!!
and actually it does not involve Michelle speaking at all. Some David Bowie look-a-like singing some stupid song and some girl dancing around. The only connection to Obama is a very nasty picture of Michele squished down to make her look ugly.
Weird.
Gasp! You don’t Rick Astley?
I haven’t clicked the link, but I’m assuming it’s last weeks RickRoll.
Yes, how shocking, Rick Astley. Obama is doomed, doomed I say.
bloggers to do IMO is to simply ignore things like this from this point – starve them of oxygen. They’ve been refuted multiple times, multiple places. Let the Obama campaign site do the official refuting, it will always outrank the smear posts themselves, or if you must, just link to posts that give good rebuttings in order to keep their google rank up and never link to the smear stories themselves. Treat the whole game as simply boring. Traffic is life – the only life – for stories on the internet.
This also goes for all the whining Clintonistas still holding out for, what?, Obama to implode and Hillary to take his place?, who are still grousing and whining and trying to stir up whatever trouble and nastiness they can find, as if it’s all about them and their massive wounded egos. They’re boring. Stop linking to them, stop talking about them, even stop mocking them. Though that last one will be hard, I must admit.
So many of Larry’s claims are so far fetched that it is difficult to take anything he says seriously anymore. Like, trying to claim that Obama has terrorist connections because he once sat on a board with someone who, when Obama was a child, was a member of the Weather Underground? Come on! And then there are the repeated attempts to connect him with Saddam Hussein because he supposedly knows someone whose second cousin knew someone who was once in the same room with Saddam. Among everything else, with this nonsense Larry brings guilt by association to a new low.
I think Larry has destroyed his own reputation. Susan as well. Before he got himself caught up in this anti-Obama insanity he was beginning to appear as an authority on national security affairs on the better cable news shows. Now he’s simply a freak. I check in on the site periodically because I used to post there before he went nuts. He actually tried to incorporate Booman’s version into his own speculations. He’s simply building a smear out of thin air. While the short-term impact is that Obama has to spend some time and effort refuting this nonsense, I think the long-term impact is that Larry and Susan are now the proud proprietors of a racist, tinfoil website. If they want to add the Illuminati and the Trilateral Commission, they’ll be complete.
What surprises me, and disappoints me most is that Susan has enthusiastically joined the madness. Of the two of them I always thought she had the steadier temperament.
I must say I really miss the old site, and especially the group of people who commented there, nearly all of whom appear to be gone (glad to see a few of you here). I really gained a lot of perspective from discussing, and arguing with them. Didn’t change the fundamental principles I operate on, but it broadened my view quite a bit.
It’s really terribly sad, and quite baffling.
Classic CIA. Guilt out of thin air.
BHO’s denial seems a bit lawyerly, leaving room for tapes that, for instance, weren’t shot at TUCC.
Plus, I wonder what happened between his first non-denial denial and the “debunking” post. Did he have someone else review her schedule to make sure she didn’t have a free half-hour in which to rant? Did he have her interrogated? Has he already had someone else write (and teleprompt) for him a “Michelle is not the wife I knew” speech?
Who are you when you post at No Quarter?
Ugh, I just went to No Quarter for the first time. I want to stab my eyeballs with a fork.
I had to look up a term, and found a horribly written wikipedia article – if there’s anybody who would be able to write a more objective, encyclopedic definition of PUMA Democrat, please discuss it on the talk page! Please no vandalism, though.
Those people at NQ are insane. Do you think any of them are republitrolls, or are those real, live Dems?
Larry WAS a Republican, but very critical of Bush et al. to say the least. Don’t know whether he switched parties or not when he decided to lose his mind, and his reputation, supporting Hillary.
Believe it or not that used to be an excellent blog with a great group of commenters from all kinds of backgrounds, and lots with military and intelligence backgrounds. Larry and Susan used to post really interesting and worthwhile stuff there about politics, national security, international affairs, and the discussions were really good, and it really felt like a community. Most of the original commenters have fled, as several of us here have, so they lost the people who helped make the site. Interestingly, since it has deteriorated to all political trash talk all the time the amount of traffic and the number of comments have gone off the charts, but the quality has gone down the sewer. It’s really a huge shame. I don’t see how they will be able to reclaim it, or their reputations.
I completely agree, Hurria. I actually learned a lot from the site when they still did mainly national security and military affairs. I remember at one point Larry discussing changing his party registration from Republican. I can’t remember if he went to Independent or Dem. But he and Susan decided early on in the primary season on this strategy of completely trashing every other candidate but Hillary, and they went downhill from there. They seem to have absolutely no consciousness of what they’ve done to themselves.
Interesting – thanks for the info, guys. I’m sad to have missed its heyday….
I should flee the blog now – I admit to being drunk and commenting. Oh my. Lame!
Booman, you know, that bit about e-mailing you and calling your ex-wife (!!!!!) reminds me of how transparently Larry would show his desperation in certain circumstances. I noticed it a number of times, but never called him on it, because some people there seemed to have a level of esteem for him that bordered on awe, and would jump on my case whenever I challenged him on anything at all, and I wanted to pick my battles. But really! How obviously could he telegraph how desperate he was in this situation? Not a bit subtle or clever, and kind of pathetic, really.
stopping Johnson’s story. Sad thing is that there will probably be more attacks like this when the repub machine gets working.
It’s not about the tape, it’s about the woman. We may have come a long way in that it’s no longer a crime to teach a black person to read, but there is still a need to subjugate females.
For a lot of people, there’s nothing more threatening than a powerful woman. And since we’re usually physically weaker, we can always expect an attack on some level.
I seem to remember Hillary enduring the same kind of bullshit at the beginning of her husband’s campaign for president.
Apparently what didn’t kill her only made her stronger. Michelle has experienced it all because of her race or her sex.
There’s no doubt that these attacks by the truly weak ones will continue, but I have faith that the Obamas have been tempered by the worst of conditions. They are made of the strongest steel.
Cited in today’s Toimes: Link
I’ve been out of touch for a while, and just read this diary about the state of affairs at the No Quarter site where our own Susan Hu made her new blog home after she departed here.
I can only say how profoundly sad I feel seeing the terrible situation that’s devolved over there.
It’s alway tragic when bright and compelling progressive voices are lost to whatever affliction overtakes them, but it is especially sad for me because I always deeply appreciated Susan’s huge and tireless contributions here at BooMan Tribune back in the day.
I do hope her health and vision problems have been resolved and I bear her no ill will, but I really feel badly about the situation she chooses to remain a part of.
I listened to Rush for an hour in the car yesterday. He spent nearly the entire time talking about the MSM was blaming HIM for the tape rumor and that they gave no mention to “left wing internet hack” Larry Johnson as the source of the story.
He denied ever seeing the tape of transcript or whether she actually said “why’d he”.
He blamed the MSM for dusting this thing up and putting it on him, but if it was true “boy would it be a big problem for Obama”
Hannity had almost the exact same talking points last week and spent almost an entire afternoon on it.
It is a little odd the messages are so aligned and it started with a Clinton supporter. In full tin foil hat mode it is almost as if the the Clinton/Bush mafia in tandom can’t stand the thought of both suddenly becoming irrelevant.
… Dude. Booman’s trolled Rush Limbaugh. That’s… Pretty impressive.
And as of this Wednesday, under “Blogs/Media,” Raw Story has a link to this diary and thread!