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Newsflash: Wingnuts are Liars

Jill

Dahlia Lithwick learns the hard way that right-wing zealots like Charlotte Allen will straight-up lie in order to suit their agendas. Luckily, Lithwick has a sense of humor, and she’s asking you to re-write her columns as a right-wing blowhard. If I didn’t have three papers and two articles due this week, I’d do it myself (this also explains why I’ve been MIA lately). So have at it — and if you do well, you might just win a copy of right-wing Dahlia’s book, “How the Duke Lacrosse Team Is Responsible for Global Warming, 9/11, the Death of Anna Nicole Smith, and the Black Plague of 1347.”

Also, has anyone read the March issue of Vanity Fair? There’s a horribly frightening article about Pat Dollard, a former Hollywood agent turned right-wing lunatic, but I can’t seem to find a copy of it online. If anyone can track it down, it would be much appreciated. If it’s not reproduced anywhere, I’ll post on it later today and just type out excerpts. As a teaser, I’ll say that Pat Dollard is a scary, hateful, blood-thirsty man, and, unsurprisingly, his pals on the right are already defending him.

10 thoughts on Newsflash: Wingnuts are Liars

  2. This is the first I’ve heard of Lithwick. I like the way she thinks.

    I’m surprised she’s popular around here with articles like this.

  3. Raging Moderate, you do realize that the article you linked to is the one that Charlotte Allen “edited” that Jill is referring to in her post?

    Just making sure.

  4. Mnemosyne,

    I didn’t even bother with Allen’s article. I’m sure it’s not worth the time.

    The original Lithwick article about the Duke case is the one I linked (unedited by Allen). I like it. It mirrors my own view about the case.

  5. i was just reading the latest vanity fair issue. there’s a whole bevy of letters to the editor about the christopher hitchen’s “why women aren’t funny” piece. hitchens’ response (printed in the magazine under the letters)? “I took care to distinguish females from female comics. some of these chicks can’t even read.”

  6. I didn’t even bother with Allen’s article. I’m sure it’s not worth the time.

    The original Lithwick article about the Duke case is the one I linked (unedited by Allen). I like it. It mirrors my own view about the case.

    I know. I just thought the circularity of recommending the article that Jill is pointing out that Charlotte Allen re-edited for her own purposes was amusing. And Lithwick links to it in her post about Allen’s “fixes” anyway.

  7. Raging Moderate:

    I’m surprised she’s popular around here with articles like this.

    Why, exactly, do you think that article would make her unpopular at Feministe?

  8. we still have no idea what really happened between Kobe Bryant and his accuser, between Michael Jackson and his accuser, between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill.

    Subtle distinctions between consensual sex and date rape, between coercion and force, between silences that sound like “yes” and silences that sound like “stop,” are difficult for the parties themselves to work out. How can a juror really divine what went on in the mind of another person?

    The same thing happened after the Kobe Bryant accusations surfaced. People made instant judgments—based on their own experiences, or what they read in the paper, and what they knew to be true in their bones. People thousands of miles from that resort in Colorado knew for certain that Bryant’s accuser was a liar and a tramp. Women who had never even heard of Kobe Bryant knew absolutely that he was a rapist.

    As was the case with O.J. Simpson, Bryant, and Jackson, this is very quickly becoming an ink-blot test, not a legal proceeding: We look to the facts to confirm our own pre-existing suspicions about what inevitably happens between men and women, rich people and poor people, black people and white people.

    our colleges are hotbeds of polarizing identity politics

  9. Raging Moderate:

    The original Lithwick article about the Duke case is the one I linked (unedited by Allen). I like it. It mirrors my own view about the case.

    Lithwick’s article was dated April 22 and was fair for the information that was available to the public then. I hope your views of the case have changed in light of what has become public since then.

  10. I hope your views of the case have changed in light of what has become public since then.

    Yes and no.

    Yes: at first I thought they probably raped her. Now I believe they didn’t.

    No: I still believe that most people (both the “she’s a lying slut” crowd, and the “they’re rapist scum” crowd) did not rely on facts to form their opinions.

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