Matt Drudge

Here’s Matt Drudge’s headline (which was, for hours, just below the huge Murdoch story on top of the page): “Obama donor arrested as ‘Pakistani agent’…”

Free Republic used the same headline, along with “Pakistani accused of masking contributions to US politicians.”

Leaving aside the fact that “Pakistani agent” sounds more like “spy” than “unregistered foreign lobbyist,” it’s true that Syed Ghulam Fai gave $250 to Barack Obama, making him an “Obama donor.” He’s also given $6,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee and at least $10,000 to Representative Dan Burton, a Republican from Indiana.

And it looks like the ISI bought itself a very good friend!

Burton has been very active on the Kashmir issue. Shortly before receiving a donation from both Fai and Ahmad, Burton announced the formation of a Kashmir caucus in the U.S. Congress. He has traveled to Kashmir for events sponsored by Fai’s Kashmir Center and has spoken in favor of resolve the standoff between Pakistan and India over the territory in Pakistan’s favor.

It’s obviously a complex story, and we won’t know all the details for some time, but Matt Drudge does have the important keywords: PAKISTAN AGENT OBAMA ARREST. (And here’s the Fox Nation story! OBAMA PAKISTAN ARREST AGENT. Just get those keywords out there, no one will read beyond the headline.)

After everyone else began calling the story dumb and pointless and inane, the Post… ran a poll. Now the people can decide if Michelle Obama is “a hypocrite” for eating a hamburger! In order to justify the newsworthiness of “Michelle Obama eating a hamburger,” the Post’s Tim Carman Googled “Michelle Obama” and “hamburgers,” and discovered that she has eaten at least five hamburgers in the past.

Type in “Michelle Obama and salads” into Google, and you gets tons of hits about her introducing salad bars into schools. But few hits of her ordering salads in public.

It’s not actually an example of hypocrisy for someone who advocates a healthy lifestyle to eat a hamburger. And a shake. If you eat a balanced diet and get some exercise, a hamburger and shake every now and then is fine. Any educated adult understands this. The Washington Post understands this. But because the conservative movement has decided that the first lady’s anti-childhood obesity campaign is actually an attempt to ban all delicious food in order to force-feed your child organic arugula, this was presented in the original item as a “gotcha.” Michelle Obama says kids shouldn’t eat garbage all day, every day, but she ate a meal that has a bunch of calories! What a “mixed message.” She should eat only carrots in public, or else children will think it is OK to have a bowl of “Tacos After Midnight” Doritos for breakfast and then play Xbox games for 18 hours straight. (Plus, Jesus, people, this is Shake Shack we’re talking about — the vegetables are all fresh and organic and the cow was fed better than kids on school lunch programs.)

The Post probably just ran the stupid story to begin with because they know Obama’s anti-childhood obesity campaign is catnip for the right wing. Matt Drudge is obsessed with Michelle Obama and his weird fantasy idea of her as a threatening, angry, anti-white black woman (who is also a liberal nanny-state tyrant). Glenn Beck’s “The Blaze” quickly picked it up.

Fox Nation, too, jumped on the story. Their comments section is a mostly unfiltered (the most blatantly racist comments, of which there are plenty, are eventually flagged and removed) peek into the hatred and resentment that feeds Michelle Obama stories on the right-wing Web:

What’s especially insane about this is that Michelle Obama has worked very hard to not give people any reason at all to hate her. She made one ill-advised statement on the campaign trail — the misinterpreted bit about being proud of her country for the “first time” in her “adult life” — but since then she has been precisely as “controversial” a first lady as Laura Bush. She entertains. She travels. She wears nice clothes. Her sole policy issue is healthy children.

She’s a well-educated, successful woman from a blue-collar background who took a break from her successful career to basically raise their adorable children while her husband is president. She is not “threatening” like Hillary Clinton, who actually wanted to be president herself. Or, at least, she’s not “threatening” unless you’re just “threatened” by… successful, powerful, black women. (I’m sorry, I meant to say “uppity.”)

The clue that this is not related at all to anything Michelle Obama has actually done (or said), but rather who she is, is the legend of the old “Whitey” tape, which various right-wingers promised to produce, and which I, for one, still cannot wait to hear.

Sure, the right-wing Internet nuts and their enablers at every industry-funded think tank in Washington would turn a “kids should exercise” program into a full-on assault on liberty under any Democratic president — it’s what they do! — but the tone of the Michelle Obama coverage, and the commentary it generates, is pretty unmistakably racially tinged. (In addition, obviously, to being usually blatantly sexist.)

But as long as the Post continues policing Michelle Obama’s public appearances for imaginary hypocrisies, and then conducting polls about them, it can either absolve itself of responsibility or congratulate itself for the fuss it kicked up.

“Drudge Report currently resembles CofCC.org,” goes the headline.. (Heads up: link goes to neo-confederate white supremacist site!) “The extremely popular news aggregate Drudge Report appears to be the only major news outlet bringing up the astronomical amount of black crime taking place.” And then there is the link to Drudge’s list of all the “melees” and “chaos” that happened during a holiday weekend when lots of drunk revelers across the nation sometimes get rowdy (and are sometimes shot dead, by police officers).

So: Nice new friends you have made, Matt.

You know how every so often the lamestream media publishes or airs a bunch of stories about how influential and important Matt Drudge is? And it’s proper “news” when he hires right-wing journalists to help him “cover” the elections or even when he simply promotes a friend’s book? How come no one besides a couple commie liberal bloggers has actually said anything about Matt Drudge’s impossible-to-ignore habit of blatant, shameless race-baiting, exactly?

It sort of started with the tale of Ashley Todd, the 20-year-old McCain campaign volunteer who claimed she was attacked by a savage, black Obama supporter, who supposedly carved the letter “B” into her face. She made the whole thing up, but her story’s many inconsistencies and unlikely elements did not stop Drudge from heavily publicizing it, until it all fell apart.

Then there was the tale of the New Black Panther Party poll-watchers who “intimidated” Fox cameras in Philadelphia. You can imagine how much Drudge enjoyed that one.

Since Obama actually took office, though, Drudge has seriously stepped up his “scary black people” coverage. There was, in September of 2009, the story he heavily publicized of a kid on a bus in Illinois getting beaten up. A kid on a bus in Illinois getting beaten up is not really national news — until Drudge makes it so. The fact that the beater was black and the victim white is why Drudge made it national news. Rush Limbaugh made the subtext explicit: “In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering.”

This is the narrative that Drudge is trying to create, especially on slow news weekends when there’s nothing real to aggregate and post: The blacks are rising up and attacking the whites. If that sounds a bit crazy, in a Charles Manson way, then you’re obviously not paying attention. Black people are angry and they’re taking over! When Barack Obama was campaigning to win Chicago the Olympic games, Matt Drudge led with a terrifying photo of (black) gang violence and the breathless, all-caps headline, “OLYMPIC SPIRIT.”

The violent death of a young man is definitely news … in Chicago, where it happened. It had very little to do with whether Chicago is a suitable venue for the Olympics. Violent murders happen in big cities and small towns across the nation every day. But only some of them can be used to stoke paranoia about emboldened, angry black people rising up.

It all came to a head, as John Cook noted, this Memorial Day weekend when Drudge posted 10 separate headlines — including the massive, above-the-logo one — related to violent incidents involving “urban” people at venues like “Black Bike Week” in Miami and “Rib Fest” in Rochester, N.Y. There was an “Urban Melee in Charlotte,” for example. Do you know what makes an “urban melee” different from a regular “melee”? It’s not that it takes place within the city limits of a major metropolitan area. It’s that it involves the world’s most obvious code term for “scary black people.”

Drudge does not collect and attempt to tie together disparate, unrelated stories of crimes committed by drunk, rowdy white kids. And for the record, drunk, rowdy white kids commit a lot of crimes, in a lot of places!

In an era when urban white flight is reversing and violent crime is at record lows across the nation, this world of race riots and constant violent attacks on innocent Caucasians exists only in the imaginations of Matt Drudge and the paranoid suburban and exurban white people he wants to keep terrified. Stoking those racial fears goes beyond cynical political point-scoring. To devote so much energy to attempting to make whites terrified of blacks is just vile.

Trump’s is not the first, and will not be the last political book that was rendered ridiculous or blatantly incorrect before or very shortly after its release. It’s not even the only one released this year! Here are some of our favorite sad, wrong books:

“Where’s the Birth Certificate?” by Jerome Corsi, 2011

Oh, there it is! Sorry, Jerome Corsi, but you couldn’t have realized that your entirely pointless search for the “long-form” birth certificate would end nearly a month before your book’s publication.

Corsi has a lot of other arguments against the president’s constitutional eligibility (he’s British!), but there’s no getting around the fact that the title of the book has been rather definitively answered.

“Condi vs. Hillary” by Dick Morris, 2005

Shameless Republican P.R. guru Jim Wilkinson, inventor of the entirely false Jessica Lynch story, went to work for Condoleezza Rice when Rice took over at the State Department. He did his usual effective if slightly heavy-handed image management. The lowlight was probably when he literally slipped a note to Washington Times editorial page editor Tony Blankley asking if Rice planned to run for president, a thought that had not yet occurred to anyone, because Rice had never run for anything.

While the Beltway press entertained the notion, because it was fun to play pretend, only one man wrote a book about how Condi must run for president, because she and only she could beat Hillary Clinton, who was a 100 percent lock to win the Democratic nomination. That man: Dick Morris, who is wrong so often about so many things that it’s hardly worth pointing it out anymore, except for the fact that this book is such an amazing time capsule of a bizarre time in American politics.

Rice never expressed any interest whatsoever in running, making this book irrelevant before it was ever written.

“The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008,” by Mark Halperin and John F. Harris, 2006

Just go back and read this fawning tribute to the influence and genius of Matt Drudge that ABC News published to promote this book upon its publication. “The Way to Win” posited that a campaign based around sucking up to Drudge and emulating Karl Rove in every way was the key to victory in 2008. A month after this lengthy tribute to his infallible genius came out, Rove suffered the humiliation of the 2006 midterms.

“The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again,” by Peter Beinart, 2006

Peter Beinart is the former editor of the New Republic, and under his leadership, that magazine really, really loved war, a lot. (He is also responsible for the New Republic endorsing Joe Lieberman in 2004, which even sometime owner and all-time nutjob Marty Peretz thought was a bit odd.) Beinart went all-in on the Iraq War, and his magazine spent much more time and energy berating antiwar liberals than it did questioning the Bush administration’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. After John Kerry lost in 2004, Beinart was pretty sure it was the fault of squishy antiwar Democrats, and Michael Moore.

And so he expanded his essay on the subject of how antiwar liberals are as bad as Communists, plus they love terrorism, into a book, about how Democrats must once again embrace complete and total war, everywhere, like they did in the good old days of the Cold War.

Of course, on the way to filling out his Very Important Foreign Policy book, the Iraq War got worse and worse, and the extent of the Bush administration’s malfeasance became clearer and clearer, so Beinart is a bit apologetic about having been dead wrong about the defining foreign policy issue of his time as a serious and respected political thinker. (He is currently a “senior fellow” at the Council on Foreign Relations.)

Being antiwar helped the Democrats generally in the 2006 elections and a candidate who spoke out against Iraq from the very beginning ended up actually winning the presidency in 2008. (Whereupon he began acting a bit Beinartian, so maybe Peter got the last laugh, as the Democrats who take “tough stands” against pinkos usually do.)

Honorable Mention, Finance and Economics division:

“Dow 36,000,” by James K. Glassman and Kevin A. Hassett, 2000.

“The Bush Boom: How a Misunderestimated President Fixed a Broken Economy,” by Jerry Bowyer (foreword by Larry Kudlow), 2003.