Buzzfeed: Hey, Romney Drove Past a Confederate Flag, He Must be a Racist

-By Warner Todd Huston

Before we get any further into this story, I have to warn you that this is not satire. That having been said, Buzzfeed’s Zeke Miller perpetrated one of the worst attempts at guilt by association ever made. Miller attempted to intimate that Mitt Romney is a racist because his motorcade drove past private property that had a Confederate flag flying on it as he campaigned in Virginia.

You read that right. All Romney did was sit in a car that drove past a Confederate flag and that was something that Miller thought was “news.”

Miller made this trenchant observation on his Twitter feed on October 5.

Romney motorcade just passed a hill flying a large confederate flag in rural SW VA

Wow. Imagine, driving past a Confederate flag in a state that makes millions in tourist money off its intimate connection to American history! Imagine the sheer luck of finding a Confederate flag flying in the one state most associated with the Civil War! Why, the absolute craziness of finding a Confederate flag flying in the state that hosted the Capitol of the Confederate States of America!

What are the chances?
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Buzzfeed: Hey, Romney Drove Past a Confederate Flag, He Must be a Racist”


The Desolate Wasteland of Post-Apocalyptic Television

-By Warner Todd Huston

Many TV critics and commentators like to say that you can judge the way this nation is feeling about itself and its times by looking at the sort of shows that are playing on television. They say that our mood and our outlook about our present and our future can be understood through the collective programming on the TV.

Well, a look at some of the popular shows now playing or those about to debut on the boob tube might make you wonder if TV has noticed that the country ain’t feeling so great? In fact, it’s downright post-apocalyptic.

That’s right, we’ve gone from 2008 and hope-n-chngiesness to the depths of post-apocalyptic cynicism.
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The Desolate Wasteland of Post-Apocalyptic Television”


Buzzfeed Buries Story of Obama Supporter Punching Romney/Ryan Volunteer

-By Warner Todd Huston

Now, if you had a story about GOP veep candidate Paul Ryan’s first Iowa rally and an Obama supporter rushed the stage after punching a Romney/Ryan volunteer, would your headline read, “Ryan Heckled At First Solo Event“? Or would you maybe want to rather highlight the whole punching thing?

Well, to Buzzfeed’s Zeke Miller “heckling” is far more newsworthy than punching, I guess. In fact, it was so low on the list of important points that Buzzfeed threw it away a few paragraphs into the story, with a lone line, effectively giving it little notice.

It seems that some wild-eyed, violent Obama supporter rushed onto the stage upon which Ryan was speaking on August 13 and was snared by the police who were on hand as security. As she charged the stage, police are reported as having yelled, “She just punched a volunteer.”

One might think that an Obama supporter violent enough to punch people on the way to rushing the stage where an opponent of the President is speaking would be the focused aspect of this story of Ryan’s fist visit to Iowa. But, no, the headline goes for “hecklers” instead.
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Buzzfeed Buries Story of Obama Supporter Punching Romney/Ryan Volunteer”


Buzzfeed Using Anonymous Source to Slam Paul Ryan as a ‘Sarah Palin’ Pick

-By Warner Todd Huston

Plainly the long knives are out among the left-media already. All media hands have been called to rush out to cut Rep. Paul Ryan to pieces before he sets one foot on the campaign trail. For Buzzfeed they’ve stooped to using unnamed “sources” to attack Ryan, calling him “no Sarah Palin.” But it’s a strawman argument pushing the left’s narrative.

This Buzzfeed smear job is clearly an effort to both try and influence conservatives that love Palin to turn against Paul Ryan by invoking Palin’s name and to push the false narrative that Ryan’s pick is a “controversial” pick, one meant to shore up Romney’s “flailing campaign.” Buzzfeed is attempting to turn conservatives both against each other and against Paul Ryan.

For Buzzfeed, McKay Coppins writes that Romney’s pick is somehow “just like” McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin.
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Buzzfeed Using Anonymous Source to Slam Paul Ryan as a ‘Sarah Palin’ Pick”


Buzzfeed Furthers Myth of Obama’s Small Donor Dominance

-By Warner Todd Huston

Ben Smith of Buzzfeed recently wrote about campaign donations — both Romney’s and Obama’s — for this presidential election. In an otherwise fairly informative piece, Smith feeds into one of the myths about the 2008 election, the claim that Obama’s small donor base was bigger by far than that of any other candidate in history.

Smith begins his campaign finance piece with his first paragraph touting Obama’s “perfection” of “small-dollar politics.”

The 2008 election marked the perfection of small-dollar politics, as Barack Obama fueled roughly half of his campaign with the email-driven, impulse-based solicitation that had been pioneered by Howard Dean four years earlier and technically perfected by smaller campaigns and advocacy groups.

It has been said repeatedly that Obama’s 2008 election campaign brought in more small donors of $200 or less than any other candidate, however this is not true. In fact, even the George Soros-funded Campaign Finance Institute says that this claim that Obama had more small donors than any other candidate is false.

In 2008 the CFI found that Obama had just about the same small donor record as George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign. The study found that Bush’s total campaign donations broke down to 25% from small donors. Obama’s 2008 take was 26% small donors. No real statistical difference, there.

“The myth is that money from small donors dominated Barack Obama’s finances. The reality of Obama’s fundraising was impressive, but the reality does not match the myth,” said CFI’s executive director Michael Malbin.
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Buzzfeed Furthers Myth of Obama’s Small Donor Dominance”


Buzzfeed Misleads on Job Loss of U.S. Merchant Marine, Blames Tea Party

-By Warner Todd Huston

Now that Congress passed and the President signed the highway bill, Buzzfeed has jumped in to decry the loss of as many as 10,000 jobs in the U.S. overseas shipping sector. Naturally, since it’s Buzzfeed we’re talking about here, only the left side of the story is being told. Worse, Buzzfeed tries to pin this “job loss” on the Tea Party — as if millions of Tea Partiers nation wide are dead set on causing job loss to our Merchant Marines.

For Buzzfeed, former The Hill employee John Stanton seems to have simply rejiggered a Democrat Party press release to cry about the “jobs loss” he and the left think they see in the Highway bill. He spends no time at all worrying about any Republican response, quotes only Democrats, and also seems to be just regurgitating press releases from lobbyists for the Merchant Marine. Of course, there really isn’t any explanation of what really happened.

One of the claimed “unexpected” results of the highway bill, Stanton tells us, was the reduction in federal funding of the shipping by sea of foreign food aid. Until this bill, 75% of this food aid was shipped aboard American ships. The new bill cuts that to 50% for a savings of some $108 million a year in taxpayer’s funds.

This, Buzzfeed says, is a result of those darn Tea Partiers being so staunchly against earmarks.
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Buzzfeed Misleads on Job Loss of U.S. Merchant Marine, Blames Tea Party”


Buzzfeed’s Hastings Slams Dinesh D’Souza as ‘A Hack’

-By Warner Todd Huston

Apparently Buzzfeed’s Michael Hastings has trouble understanding the discourse of the deeper philosophical concepts in which author Dinesh D’Souza has engaged over the years and, like many people that don’t understand something, he just waves off D’Souza’s work as “loony tunes” stuff.

On a recent appearance on the little seen Current TV show The Young Turks with host Cenk Uygur, Hastings attacked best selling author D’Souza as a “hack” writer, one that “lives in a fantasy world” based on his various books on such high concepts as the existence of life after death and how the cultural left bears some responsibility for the attacks on Sept. 11. Hastings so ridiculously and childishly over simplified D’Souza’s points that one might wonder who is the real hack, D’Souza or Hastings?

Hastings slammed D’Souza for not only being a graduate of Dartmouth, but for being crazy enough to believe in religion and for thinking that the cultural left might be a bad influence in the U.S. (Transcript below)
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Buzzfeed’s Hastings Slams Dinesh D’Souza as ‘A Hack’”


Twitterings: Buzzfeed’s Hastings Calls ‘Neocons’ Gay

-By Warner Todd Huston

The journalist Buzzfeed assigned to cover Barack Obama for this campaign season, Michael Hastings, recently took to his Twitter account to claim that “neocons” are gay. I guess accusing people of being homosexual is what passes for serious journalism these days.

Hastings was responding to a Tweet by Richard Grenell, who was taunting the Buzzfeed journo. You may recall that Grenell is an openly gay Republican who served in the George W. Bush administration and for a time was on Mitt Romney’s advisory team.

In his Tweet, Grenell said, “Aren’t u covering Obama for BuzzFeed? Put your big boy pants on & get to work. MT @mmhastings: a “duck call” for trolls.”

In reply, Hastings went for the very name calling tactic that liberals say should never be used: he called Grenell and “neocons” gay.

@RichardGrenell ric, your tweets often appear to reveal insecurities about your own masculinity. is that a neocon thing?

Hastings’ Tweet has caused eyebrows to raise.

Also on Twitter, Stephen Gutowski then asked Buzzfeed’s chief, Ben Smith, for his reaction to this outrageous Tweet made by his “reporter.”

It seems that Ben Smith just blew it off as a joke.
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Twitterings: Buzzfeed’s Hastings Calls ‘Neocons’ Gay”


Buzzfeed’s Most Dishonest Headline Attacking Romney

-By Warner Todd Huston

Buzzfeed sure seems to be just another arm of the Obama re-election campaign with a piece today attacking Romney over Bain outsourcing… even though Romney did not work at Bain when the outsourcing happened.

One of Obama’s most cynical campaign tactics of late has been to try and link GOP candidate Mitt Romney to jobs outsourcing that the company he once worked for undertook after the candidate left the company. Buzzfeed is simply following the Obama game plan by aiding the President with these outright lies.

Today the popular site posted a misleading headline about Bain outsourcing, illicitly linked that outsourcing to Romney, then buried the truth that Romney really didn’t have anything to do with it at the bottom of the story.
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Buzzfeed’s Most Dishonest Headline Attacking Romney”


Buzz Feed Tries to Make Fun of Romney Over Telephone Photo

-By Warner Todd Huston

This is the kind of ignorance that you see from the left, the kind of bull crap political attack that they pretend is just “funny,” but is really just the sort of low-down lies that the left loves to indulge. In this case, Andrew Kaczynski of the website Buzz Feed tried to push a photo that he intimates shows that Mitt Romney doesn’t know how to use a land-line telephone.

Kaczynski’s caption at twitpic was, “Romney holding the landline upside down.”


Click for larger view

Now, it is obvious that Romney had picked up the phone but was talking to a person in the room, one not on the phone. Yet here is Buzz Feed trying to lead people to laugh at the out-of-touch Romney who doesn’t know how to use a telephone.

You might recall the photoshopped picture of George W. Bush supposedly using a phone upside down that was faked by the left? This photo appeared on every liberal website known to the Internet tubes. Well, Andrew Kaczynski is just trying to get that same effect but by just lying in a caption instead of going to the trouble to fake the photo entirely like liberals did in Bush’s term.

Yep, this is the sort of ignorant, political hackery that we’ve come to expect from the issues-ignoring left. They’d rather try to make up false narratives about Republicans using misleading captions on photos than talk about how bad Obama’s stewardship of this country has been.

When I first tweeted this, Kaczynski tweeted me back trying to claim that he just thought the photo was “funny.” He said, “Its just a funny photo. You don’t really think I’m implying Romney was talking on the phone backwards?”

The answer? Of course he was.
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Buzz Feed Tries to Make Fun of Romney Over Telephone Photo”