Welcome to your Thursday open thread. I hope you’re having a fabulous week so far. What’s on your mind?
House Oversight Committee Chair Darrell Issa canceled a hearing on the FCIC at the last minute because to save face. Documents were going to be presented which contradicted Issa’s alternate history of the crisis. Oopsie!
Peter Kadzick, an attorney for FCIC Chairman Phil Angelides, told TPM that Angelides arrived in D.C. on Sunday night for the Wednesday morning hearing but was told by an Issa staffer on Monday evening that “they had found some documents at the last minute that didn’t fit the narrative.”
The Democrats’ report on the committee’s investigation says that Issa’s accusations about the FCIC were “largely unsubstantiated.”
In addition, Democrats said the information uncovered by congressional investigators raises “a host of new ethical questions about Republican commissioners and staff, including evidence that they leaked confidential information to outside parties on multiple occasions.”
It’s always inconvenient when documents contradict your fake history. I guess the committee is not there to find the truth, it exists to tell the stories that Darrell Issa wants to tell.
I barely remember the story of Kenny Gladney. He was involved in an altercation during an anti-HCR rally in St. Louis and became a poster boy for the right. He got his day in court recently.
It took a St. Louis County jury less than 50 minutes to return a not guilty verdict in the assault trial featuring Kenneth Gladney and two union members who were charged with attacking him outside a town hall event during the tumultuous summer of 2009.
The altercation itself was regrettable and was over almost before it began: the type of heated scuffle that happens countless times everyday in this crowded country, and everyday people move on with their lives.
But because this particular clash was captured on tape, and because Tea Party members went bonkers hyping it, and because right-wing media carnival barkers like Dana Loesch and Andrew Breitbart operate with no moral compass, the Gladney story blew up overnight and became a (demented) cause celebre among hardcore conservatives who hatched a weird fantasy about run-away union violence in America, not withstanding what was captured on the Gladney tape.
It’s difficult to capture just how madly the right-wing media overreacted to this story, doing its best to blow it up into a seismic, Rodney King-type of event. Fox News aired at least 20 segments mentioning Gladney, according to Nexis. Glenn Beck obsessed over the story. Breitbart penned a “I Am Kenneth Gladney” column in solidarity for the Washington Times. And CNN’s Lou Dobbs played dumb on a massive scale while hosting Gladney.
In the end, all the right-wing press had to show for their efforts were not-guilty verdicts stemming from misdemeanor charges.
I’m sure you’re shocked to learn that once again, rightwing agitators made mountains out of molehills. That this even went to trial is pretty amazing in itself.