The Village Perpetrates Actual Journalism, Film At 11

WaPo's Ann Gerhart discovers the Pretty Hate Machine, Malkinvania edition.

Late last month, Charisse Carney-Nunes fired up the computer at her home in Northeast Washington to check her e-mail. Her brain already was on morning drive time: breakfast for the kids, her day's work at a government agency. She glanced down at her screen, then froze.

"Ms. Carney-Nunes," began the e-mail from Michelle Malkin, a best-selling and often inflammatory conservative writer with a heavily trafficked Web site. "I understand that you uploaded the video of schoolchildren reciting a Barack Obama song/rap at Bernice Young elementary school in June. I have a few quick questions. Did you help write the song/rap and teach it to the children? Are you an educator/guest lecturer at the school? Did you teach about your book, 'I am Barack Obama' at the school? Your bio says you are a schoolmate of Obama. How well-acquainted are you with the president?"

Carney-Nunes looked at the time stamp -- 6:47 a.m. -- and closed the file without replying. She knew Malkin had driven criticism of President Obama's back-to-school speech, streamed nationwide, as an attempt to indoctrinate students. Now Malkin was asking about a YouTube video of New Jersey public school children singing and enthusiastically chanting about Obama from a Black History Month presentation.

By nightfall, Carney-Nunes's name was playing on Fox News and voice mails on her home phone and cellphone were clogged with the furious voices of strangers. The e-mails kept pouring in, by the hundreds, crammed with words spam filters try to catch: She was a "nappy-headed" traitor; she would lose her job and go to jail; she was Leni Riefenstahl, the filmmaker who glorified Hitler.

Once again, to sum up:

Now replace the "normal person" at the beginning there with Michelle Malkin, or Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh, and the "anonymity" with "Obama Derangement Syndrome" and you have the current Winger state of insanity.

This kind of rabid hate has been going on long before Obama, but the fact that he won and the Republicans lost have driven these guys over the edge. It's gotten to the point these nutjobs are going after ordinary people who have the unmitigated gall to not think Obama is the most evil fascist Manchurian candidate in the history of the universe. Much like thugs, bullies, or really crappy supervillains, they're not going after the target, they're going after everyone around him in order to try to terrify the country into refusing to support the guy.

They'll attack anyone who works in the Federal government, for example, or any of the President's supporters. The tactics are classic: if you can get someone to pause and say to themselves "Hey, if I say Obama is a good guy, these whackos will come after me" and then they choose to remain silent, then the thugs here have won.

The nation's political discourse seems sour, angry, even dangerous; "uglier than it's ever been" is a phrase often volunteered -- as if President George W. Bush had never been depicted as Hitler, declared a dunce and heckled by Code Pink during his second inaugural address.

Critics are using the YouTube video of the children's song to argue that Obama is becoming a brainwashing dictator. To raise money for the Republican National Committee, Chairman Michael S. Steele has compared the song to "the type of propaganda you see in Stalin's Russia."

Carney-Nunes, swept up in a viral tornado of vitriol, had nothing to do with the children's song. She was doing an author's reading in the school that day.

We don't have political discourse in 2009 because it takes two sides willing to have discourse in order for discourse to proceed. One side says "We have our problems with Obama but there's much about him to like, let's work together, our country is in trouble here." The other side says "I refuse to recognize he is even legally President or even an US citizen. He is black. He is a Muslim. He is not my President. There's nothing to talk about. I will never support anything he does, and I want to rid the country of him and anyone who does support him."

This is what the Wingers see as discourse: "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome Kenyan?"

One noteworthy change is that the face of the federal government is African American for the first time, a factor that heightens animus in some and protectiveness in others.

"We've come a long way," said civil rights icon Dorothy Height, who attended the Black Family Reunion, which took place alongside the national Tea Party protest on Sept. 12. "But I stood on the National Mall watching people pass by carrying posters of Uncle Sam in blackface and I said, 'There's still a lot of work to be done in this country.' "

"Completely false allegations incubate in the fringe and jump within days to the mainstream, distorting any debate or progress we can have as a society," said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which released a report last month noting a rise in the "militia movement" over the past year. "What's different is that a great deal of this is real fear and frustration at very real demographic and cultural changes."

Imagine that, a newspaper journalist actually admitting that fear of Obama's race, ethnicity and culture is scaring the hell out of the Wingers, and they are attacking back.

Yes. It's about race, as I have been saying since this blog started.

Carney-Nunes, who writes children's books and was a year behind Obama at Harvard Law School, watched as strangers posted her personal information on the Internet. She read, "You're a dirtbag commie propagandist trying to infect children with your failed Marxist ideology." And "your Obama chant is right out of Africa." And "get ready for a massive attack!!!" And "my friend GLENN BECK will also shove this in your face until justice is served." She made copies (which she shared with The Washington Post) and then deleted the messages, hoping the tornado would set her back down.

"I was fearful," she said. "I was looking over my shoulder." The disrespect for the office of the presidency disturbed her. "I won a contest in college and President Reagan gave me an award, and that signed letter is still hanging in its frame in the foyer of my mother's home. We are very proud of that letter, even though my mother didn't vote for him."

After a few days, with the outcry expanding to calls for the school principal and district superintendent to be fired, Carney-Nunes issued a statement through a publicist saying that she "did not write, create, teach or lead the song about President Obama in the video," and that "the song was presented to her by a teacher and students as a demonstration of a project that the children had previously put together." The district superintendent gave the same account in a letter sent home to parents.

Carney-Nunes said an associate of hers videotaped the children's performance and later uploaded it, along with video and photos from other of her readings, to Carney-Nunes's YouTube account.

An e-mail to Malkin Saturday seeking comment was not answered.

Carney-Nunes spends a lot of her free time teaching children how to bridge divides, but she has no idea how to build a dialogue with those who attacked her.

"How can I talk to those people?" she said. "These are people who persist in believing that Barack Obama is a Muslim, that he isn't a citizen of this country. You tell me: Where is the beginning of that conversation?"

And that is the question we have to face, all of us. But in order to have a conversation, both sides have to be willing. One side is. The other side wants no part of an America where we even have that conversation.

[UPDATE 6:20 PM] Jesse Taylor notes that Gerhart missed the entire point of the Malkin story:

Yes, a great number of conservative bloggers and demagogues are terribly, stupidly mean, like cavemen who can’t understand why the rock doesn’t have delicious meat inside. But more importantly, they’re terribly, stupidly dishonest, and it’s the dishonesty that’s the real danger. The Washington Post spent eight paragraphs writing about a conservative scandal and only managed to toss in a single fact-checking line in paragraph nine, at which point they went back to being observant scolds of the political discourse.

And it really is kind of pathetic that this is largely considered an improvement in our journalism in America.