Why Kate O'Beirne is a Dangerous Bitch
Some people have been wondering why I don't just ignore Kate O'Beirne, as if paying her no mind will just make her go away. The argument seems to be that to acknowledge her is to empower her.
Not going to happen.
It is a dangerous time to be an American. We live under virtually unchallenged one party rule, and that one party is on a rampage to make torture morally acceptable. Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman invite screaming racist Michelle Malkin to lunch, and today Peter Kirsanow is paraded before the Senate by the GOP as an "expert." Both of these people applaud rounding up American citizens and putting them into concentration camps.
ralphbon said something good in the comments yesterday:
Hate-list books like O'Beirne's, Bernard Goldberg's, and especially Ann Coulter's are the leading edge of something ugly and scary and are softening up the public discourse for increasingly eliminationist rhetoric.These people are given air time far in excess of anything their extreme views justify. And ordinary people who don't think too hard tune in and watch them and are lulled into thinking that these positions are reasonable and that these people are reasonable, because they see them all the time and they are continually granted a legitimacy they do not deserve.
Nazi antisemitism was a ludicrous distraction too, at the start, barely worth the energy to ridicule, much less refute.
The principal target needs to the media who give these scapegoaters the time of day -- from Time putting Coulter on its cover to the endless cable interviews with O'Beirne and Goldberg. The utter lack of shame and judgment by major media scares me far more than the pipsqueak wingers to whom they give a platform.
People of common sense and good will need to be able to do two things at once: smack down the scapegoaters and their media enablers while keeping our eye on the real ball of the Bush administration's fascist power grab.
Now I'm as big a photoshop fan as the next person, but those caricatures on the front of O'Bierne's book look like nothing so much as the hideous caricatures of Jews in Nazi paraphernalia of the Third Reich. Women's rights are under attack in this country, a man is being put forward to sit on the supreme court who will very likely take us even further into the dark ages if given the chance, and it all seems "reasonable" because some asshole who actually knows better doesn't want to sully their fine manicure to scrap with the likes of Kate O'Bierne.
Being virtually manicure-free, this is not a problem for me.
Her book will sell, Regnery will ship it out to all the right-wing book groups and it will climb the charts and angry women-haters everywhere will hail it as the clarion voice of reason in a wilderness of liberalism. But Jesus General's review is at the top of her Amazon page tonight thanks to blogtopia, and maybe someone in Iowa watching Kate on Meet the Press will look her book up on Amazon and see on the biggest bookseller in the world that there is a culture which does not accept her as "okay."
Amazon reviews are prioritized based on how many "positive" ratings they get. There's still one "five star" rated review on the front page and it is my most solemn wish that it get knocked off tonight. It is my second most solemn wish that enough single star reviews are written to knock the overall rating down to an overall single star. Anyone feeling motivated can scroll through the pages of reviews and vote "yes" on all the one-star reviews here, and write their own review as well (one sentence reviews are weighted as heavily as long-winded tomes).
Someone from Regnery is probably calling up Amazon right now wailing like a banshee. Good. Make 'em pay, make 'em spend energy, make 'em fight. If Amazon takes a legitimate review off their site, political satire of an openly political book, I will scream blue bloody fucking murder. It'll give me something to do anyway.
It is not okay to have this foaming fascist omnipresent in the public consciousness, and I'm making it my personal crusade to kick up a stink about it. So I'll say it again for those who weren't offended enough the first time: The bitch is dead meat.
posted by Jane Hamsher @ 1/12/2006 09:46:00 PM
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