Gawker vs. Christine O’Donnell: The Left Takes the Politics of Personal Destruction Seriously
Do you "pick your nose with a rubber hose"? If you're a Democrat, that's an endearing trait. But if you're right of Pol Pot, it disqualifies you from public office! Says who? Says the leftwing Gestapo that publicizes the most intimate details of the lives of both their opponents and other people who were just minding their own business. And as Christine O'Donnell and others have learned, if the Gestapo can't find anything embarrassing about you, they'll just make something up.
Gawker is a popular, Democratic Web site “edited” by Remy Stern and published by Nick Denton that specializes in the race and sex-baiting of anyone whom its bosses consider insufficiently racist, sexist, heterophobic or anti-American, while simultaneously censoring its discussion threads, so as to fabricate a fake consensus. (Stern permits the occasional criticism, in order to make the threads look legitimate.) However, it has rigorous content requirements: The attack must be a pure ad hominem, and thus have no intellectual or moral substance. Given those ground rules, a personal attack on Christine O’Donnell was bound to come. And now, it has.
O’Donnell, you see, is running for the U.S. Senate in Delaware on Tuesday. On the Republican ticket. She’s a Tea Partier, running against Democrat Chris Coons in the special election to fill Joe Biden’s old seat. And although Coons has maintained a 9-11point lead in the polls (with one 21-point outlier) over the last two weeks, Nick Denton is terrified that she might just squeak to victory, and that the GOP might take back not only the House, but the Senate, as well.
The most important thing about this kiss-and-tell, as far as I could tell, was that its title is misleading. Without knowing anything about the author or his credibility, simply taking his words at face value, I concluded that he had not had a one-night stand with Christine O’Donnell, i.e., they hadn’t had sex. As in, nothing. After getting drunk together one Halloween night three years ago and making out, they’d slept together for about two hours in the author’s bed (as in knocked out, snoring, farting, whatever) after which he got her up, and drove her to her car (parked at a friend’s house—the particulars aren’t worth the space), and headed off to work.
The author seeks to insinuate that he had sex with O’Donnell, via the title and some vague language:
I won't get into the nitty gritty details of what happened between the sheets that evening.
Of course, not. Because nothing happened.
Gawker has so little sense of decency that it would have had no compunctions about printing graphic, hard-core pornography about every sexual detail, had there been any details to recount. As it is, “Anonymous” tries to give himself credibility by insulting an aspect of O’Donnell’s cosmetic practices that, if true, was not at all wanting. The insult merely reflected negatively on the writer’s manhood in two ways: That he would have a problem with a perfectly normal practice, and that he would mention it at all. Unintentionally or no, his very insult proves that he did not have sex with O’Donnell.
Obviously, that was a big turnoff, and I quickly lost interest.
I believe that the weasely language was designed to avoid a libel lawsuit. ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, at no point in his kiss-and-tell did my client ever state that he had had sex with the plaintiff.’
So, why bother? Leftists today tend to rationalize any act, no matter how despicable against their opponents, by maintaining that their target is somehow a “hypocrite.” Once upon a time, lefties might have made some pathetic, half-baked attempt to show how the target of their hatred was somehow a phony, but typically today, they simply shriek “hypocrite!” or “racist!,” “sexist!,” “homophobe!,” or “xenophobe!”), without explanation.
But Gawker is classier than that, and so in “Why We Published the Christine O’Donnell Story,” it returned to the gold standard of asserting that O’Donnell failed to meet a saintly self-imposed standard for sexual behavior. But just to be extra, extra careful, yet another anonymous Gawker author redefined the “one-night stand” into “a naked sleepover.” What a coward. Had the original title been, “I Had a One-Night Naked Sleepover With Christine O’Donnell,” people would have variously yawned and chuckled. After all, the typical Gawker fan probably doesn’t read more than the title, while the big scholars in its audience might read the first few paragraphs.
Much of the criticism leveled against us is based on the premise that we think hopping into bed, naked and drunk, with men or women whenever one wants is "slutty," and that therefore our publication of Anonymous' story was intended to diminish O'Donnell on those terms. [NS: Nonsense.] Any reader of this site ought to rather quickly gather that we are in fact avid supporters of hopping into bed, naked and drunk, with men or women that one has just met. [But according to Gawker anti-ethics, one is supposed to have sex with them!]
Our problem with O'Donnell—and the reason that the information we published about her is relevant—is that she has repeatedly described herself and her beliefs in terms that suggest that there is something wrong with hopping into bed, naked and drunk, with a man or woman whom one has just met. So that fact that she behaves that way [but she hadn’t just met him], while publicly condemning similar behavior, in the context of an attempt to win a seat in the United States Senate, is a story we thought people might like to know about. We also thought it would get us lots of clicks and money and attention. But we thought it would get us clicks and money and attention because it was exposing her lies. [What lies? She didn’t have sex with him.]
Now a lot of people think that the fact that O'Donnell declined to actually engage in sexual intercourse with Anonymous renders the entire story irrelevant and invasive: She calls herself a virgin, and acts like a virgin, so what's the big deal?
More mental masturbation follows, where Anonymous II seeks to show that Gawker is right, no matter what it does. But Gawker insinuated that O’Donnell did have sex with Anonymous I; now it is furiously backtracking, but without admitting that it is. The reason for that is that the purpose of the initial “story” was to libel and humiliate O’Donnell in the most invasive, intimate, disgusting way possible, while maintaining a legal fig leaf of plausible deniability, in order to shield Denton from lawsuits.
Compared to today, the 2000 election was the Golden Age of October Surprises: There were two that year. The first was an academic hoax committed by a professor named Stephen Klein and his comrades Laura S. Hamilton, Daniel F. McCaffrey and Brian M. Stecher, with the support of Rand President James Thomson.
Klein got the Rand Corporation to pay him and the others to write what was no more than a long opinion paper regurgitating every anti-standardized-testing whopper in the book, and trying to pass it off as a scholarly debunking of the “Texas Miracle” in public education under Gov. George W. Bush. But instead of Klein debunking Bush, I debunked Klein, showing that he had no evidence, with which to support his assumptions, and that he had already decided what he was going to write, before undertaking his “research.”
It wasn’t until 2003 that whistleblower Robert Kimball, a former assistant principal at Houston's Sharpstown High School, exposed the “Texas Miracle” as a fraud, but not based on any of the talking points Klein & Co. had retailed. Bush’s education officials had, by hook or by crook, kept weak students out of the testing sample, in order to inflate average scores. But Klein and his comrades had been too lazy to do any of the gumshoe work necessary to ferret out what was really afoot.
The second 2000 October Surprise came about two weeks later, with the true revelation that in 1976, George W. Bush had been arrested for DWI in Maine. He hadn’t harmed anyone, but he was a Republican, and so that made his infraction worse than Ted Kennedy causing the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, and then engaging in obstruction of justice, gay Democratic Cong. Barney Frank’s boy toy getting caught turning Frank’s apartment into a homosexual whorehouse, or gay Democratic Cong. Gerry Studds having sex with a 17-year-old congressional page.
But now, Gawker publishes the anonymous kiss-and-not-really-tell story of some young loser. It used to be that lefties would scream that conservative Republicans were all closet homosexuals. What now? That they’re closet heterosexuals?! Note that talking publicly about people’s private sexual practices was pioneered by the gay Nazi wing of the Democratic party, both through “outing” actual homosexuals, and by defaming heterosexuals by lying that they are homosexuals.
I hope that Gawker doesn’t catch me engaging in serial murder, or committing a rape-torture-murder. If it stayed true to its “logic,” such as it is, its anonymous writers would then complain,
Much of the criticism leveled against us is based on the premise that we think committing serial murder and rape-torture-murder is "immoral," and that therefore our publication of Anonymous' story was intended to diminish Stix on those terms. Any reader of this site ought to rather quickly gather that we are in fact avid supporters of committing serial murder and rape-torture-murder.
Our problem with Stix—and the reason that the information we published about him is relevant—is that he has repeatedly described himself and his beliefs in terms that suggest that there is something wrong with committing serial murder and rape-torture-murder. So that fact that he behaves that way, while publicly condemning similar behavior, is a story we thought people might like to know about. We also thought it would get us lots of clicks and money and attention. But we thought it would get us clicks and money and attention because it was exposing his lies.
I learned the term "dirty tricks" from Democrats, who were chasing after Republicans, but over 95% of the dirty tricks I've come across were committed by Democrats.
It is the Left, as exemplified by Nick Denton, not the Right, that obsessively peeps into people’s sex lives. It is the Left, not the Right, which obsessively engages in racism, sexism, and even gay-baiting (it was lefty Frank Rich who forced David Brock out of the closet). (But when Republicans tolerate homosexual staffers, the Left considers them hypocritical, not decent.) It is the Left that calls blacks the “n-word” (see also here).
It is the Left that assaults women, e.g., Ann Coulter (here and here). The Left’s constant hate hoaxes, and talk of rightwing “hate” are both projections of, and diversions from its own insatiable hate. Take away the Left’s hate, and little remains.
The sole reason that Denton and Stern ran the defamatory dreck against O’Donnell is because she’s a Republican. The question remains: Will Gawker’s imbecilic, despicable attack harm or help her? Tune in Tuesday night, for the answer.
Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.
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