To some media professionals whom I admire because you don’t let anyone tell you to sit down and shut up, please keep making the idiots’ heads spin. Thank you for not taking our Freedom of the Press for granted, you bold and patriotic, fair and balanced media folks. Keep calling it like you see it: Amanda, Andrew, Ann, Bill(s), Bob, Cal, Dennis, Dick, Eddie, Fred, Glenn, Greta, Hugh, Joey, John, Jonah, Larry, Laura, Lou, Mark, Mary, Michael, Michelle, R.A.M., Rich, Rush, S.E., Sean, Tammy, Walter… and there are more. I join you in standing up for what is right. Remember that as your voice is heard and your spine is stiffened, the spines of others are stiffened, too.

Who’s who? Here are my best guesses for most of them: Amanda Carpenter of The Washington Times, Ann Coulter, Bill Kristol, Bill O’Reilly, Cal Thomas, Dennis Miller, Fred Barnes, Glenn Beck, Greta Van Susteren, Hugh Hewitt, Jonah Goldberg, Larry Kudlow, Laura Ingraham, Lou Dobbs, Mark Levin, Michael Reagan, Michelle Malkin, Rich Lowry, Rush Limbaugh, S.E. Cupp, Sean Hannity, Tammy Bruce, and Walter Williams. Why not use their whole names? Good question.

Since the 2008 election, with the exception of Oprah Winfrey, it’s really just conservative talkers and stars who’ve gotten sit-downs with Palin. And even in an excerpt of “Going Rogue” put online today by Matt Drudge, Palin dramatized how much she wanted to do tough media interviews by reporting that she got in touch with “folks like Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity and someone I thought was Larry Kudlow but turned out to be Neil Cavuto’s producer.”

– Rush Limbaugh, reacting to news accounts placing Ft. Hood murder suspect Nidal Malik Hasan at a Virginia mosque that hosted an extremist imam.

Audio after the jump:

“Take Bill’s opponent,” said Biden, referring to Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman. “I’m sure he’s a nice guy, but imagine him being able, if he won this election, to take issue with any position that Rush Limbaugh has.” Biden said that the idea of letting “Rush Limbaugh hand-pick” the successor to John McHugh, the Republican congressman who became the Obama administration’s secretary of the army, was unbelievable.

Biden’s speech veered between reminiscing about his college days in Syracuse, N.Y., and bemused attacks on conservative leaders like former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and Sarah Palin, who’d backed Hoffman.

“The fact of the matter is, Sarah Palin thinks the answer to energy is ‘drill, baby, drill,’” said Biden. “It’s a lot more complicated, Sarah!”

After some loud laughter at Palin’s name, Biden dialed down that rhetoric and went after The Wall Street Journal, asking whether Hoffman would go along with the laissez-faire policies of its editorial page. “I wonder what Bill’s opponent would have done when we extended unemployment insurance,” he said. “I ask you, when you pick up the paper, to ask yourself — what would Bill’s opponent do about that?”

Biden sounded almost plaintive when he told the crowd that Hoffman’s backers were “the people who created this mess” with deregulation and free-market economics. He explicitly asked moderate Republicans to follow Scozzafava’s lead and back Owens — and he singled out Scozzafava’s husband, Ron McDougall, who was present at the rally.

“I know what all these guys are against,” said Biden, taking another swing at Hoffman and his backers. “I don’t know what they’re for.”

I don’t think anything that Rush Limbaugh said was offensive, but with Fergie and with J-Lo, they have, between the two of them, alleged that the CIA are terrorists and liars, they’ve promoted sexual abuse of women, they’ve used the N word, verbal pornography, recreational drug use, etc. And they are owners of the Dolphins. And it’s also ironic that Fergie was approved as an owner on the very day that you made your statement on Rush Limbaugh.

It’s probably worth mentioning that the House Judiciary Committee hearing was titled “Legal Issues Related to Football Head Injuries.”

Here’s the video:

The problem: It was a hoax, actually marked as a satire, as Klein blogged earlier today. Ledeen apologized.

[H]e got me, and lots of others. It worked because it’s plausible.

Here’s some of what Ledeen and Limbaugh considered plausible:

The subject of this paper, which totaled 44 pages, was American government. Entitled Aristocracy Reborn, this paper chronicled the long struggle of the working class against, as Obama put it, “plutocratic thugs with one hand on the money and the other on the government.”

In the paper, in which only the first ten pages were given to the general media, Obama decries the plight of the poor: “I see poverty in every place I walk. In Los Angeles and New York, the poor reach to me with bleary eyes and all I can do is sigh.”

Without spending too much more time on this, it seems a piece of the persistent rumors that, surely, the young Barack Obama must have relied on smarter white radicals to write his first memoir.

UPDATE: Via Media Matters, I see that Limbaugh discovered the hoax midway through the show, and used what used to be known as the “fake but accurate” defense.

The commentators are part of the coalition, not the whole coalition. The party needs to be about addition, not subtraction — but not at the expense of watering down its principles.

Nonetheless, I think the story misses something about the party’s Glenn Beck problem. It’s not just that conservative pundits like Beck, Rush Limbaugh, et al., are unpopular and controversial. It’s that they drive the GOP into very strange places.

The Democrats are in worse political shape than they were a year ago because unemployment is at 9.8 percent, the war in Afghanistan has grown less popular, and the bailouts of struggling banks are seen as wastes of money that haven’t worked. Republicans benefit when they talk about this stuff. But Beck and the others don’t let them talk about this stuff. For the past few months, they have moved the discussion onto fantasy terrain, accusing the president of reaching for dictatorial powers and surrounding himself with “radicals” who want to destroy capitalism.

In retrospect, the successful campaign against Van Jones, the former green jobs czar who resigned in September, was the turning point in the relationship between commentators and Republicans. Elected Republicans were not really talking about Jones until after Beck, with material from WorldNetDaily and conservative groups, had spent weeks pounding Jones for old, on-the-record quotes about how he’d once considered himself a “communist” and how Republicans were “a-holes.” When Beck discovered, via conservative blogger Jim Hoft, that Jones had signed a “9/11 truth” petition, Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) became the first Republican to demand his resignation. And when Jones quit, Beck and the conservative commentary class gained clout. Since then, Republicans have obsessively gone after the president’s “czars” (a nonsense issue I’ve dealt with in the past) and after specific members of the administration, like “safe schools czar” Kevin Jennings and White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, whom conservative commentators were attacking for their past statements and associations.

This isn’t to say Republicans have been distracted or unsuccessful in Congress. They’ve certainly scored victories during this period. And by paying attention to these conservative witch hunts, they’ve definitely kept their base revved up. But in the current political context, it seems like they’re missing the forest for some shrubs. It’s as if Democrats tried to press their advantages in 2005 not by going after the Iraq War or the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, but by spending weeks attacking mid-ranking members of his administration and claiming that President George W. Bush was driving the nation toward fascism. And remember, one of the huge political mistakes of 2005 was the Republican decision to do a full-court press on an issue that had come from conservative activists and pundits: the fate of Terri Schiavo.

There are people who can act holier-than-thou about ghostwriters. Rush Limbaugh is not one of them. His first book, “The Way Things Ought to Be,” was famously written by John Fund of The Wall Street Journal. His second book was ghostwritten by Joseph Farah, who then became editor-in-chief of WorldNetDaily. And to complete the circle, WND has been a main source for Jack Cashill’s numerous articles about the Obama-Ayers book conspiracy.

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Rush Limbaugh (WDCpix, Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office)

Smelling blood in the water as Democrats made contradictory statements about what a Senate health care reform bill might contain, Republicans spent Tuesday pushing back against a possible compromise–non-profit health insurance cooperatives, an idea that Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) had pushed for months before the debate centered on a Medicare-style “public option.” Inside the Senate and inside the conservative third-party groups that have been working against the White House, “co-ops” are being framed as an attempt to engineer a stealth government takeover of health care.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

“It doesn’t matter what you call it,” Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) told reporters on a Tuesday conference call. “They want it to accomplish something that Republicans are opposed to. That is the step towards government-run health care in the country. The president himself said you can imagine a cooperative meeting that definition of a public option.”

Kyl, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, took advantage of a political opening created by a rift between Democrats in Congress. Unlike a public plan, the co-ops idea remains, as one Senate GOP staffer told TWI, “nebulous.” What began as a trial balloon from Conrad, to facilitate the formation of consumer groups that could purchase health care plans at a lower cost, has not been fleshed out since then. In June, when Conrad proposed the concept, it was promoted as a way to get the votes of moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats, based on a model that had worked in very different industries. “The co-op model has proven very effective across many different models,” Conrad argued in a June interview with The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein. “Ocean Spray in the cranberry business, and Land of Lakes in the dairy business, and Puget Sound [Health Alliance] in the health care business.”

Since then, Democrats have used the co-op concept as an out from the tougher aspects of the health care debate. Shortly after Conrad floated the idea in June, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who said that the idea “doesn’t come close to satisfying anyone who wants a public plan,” could meet some of the Democrats’ goals if a $10 billion start-up fund was created to launch the co-ops. In July, President Obama told Time magazine that some sort of public plan could survive Senate negotiations even if the “public option” didn’t, because “in theory you can imagine a cooperative meeting that definition.”

That statement from the president, which didn’t draw much attention at the time, was the basis of Kyl’s argument that co-ops were a “Trojan Horse” for “government-run” health care. Republicans and conservative activists are mining other statements in that vein to build the case that co-ops would be no compromise at all, and they’re doing it quickly.

“Three months ago, I think you could have had a compromise on co-ops,” another Senate GOP aide told TWI. “Today? No, forget about it. I think both parties have gotten wise to how things work, and Republicans see this for the fig leaf that it really is.”

Senate Republicans are getting help from conservative media on defining the co-ops. On his syndicated radio show, Rush Limbaugh blasted the co-ops idea as a unconvincing cover-up for the Democrats’ real plan to nationalize health care. “These co-ops, like we’re too stupid to know what that’s all about,” Limbaugh said. “Co-op? Why don’t they just call them communes? Look, I know liberal lingo when I hear it. A co-op? Yeah, let’s go to the farmers market. Let’s go to the community garden! What, do they think we’re idiots?”

That’s the message coming from the groups and activists who have defined the political battlefield this month with noisy protests and speeches at congressional town hall meetings. “It is a trick by the Democrats,” said Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, via email. “It’s a cosmetic change that’s not meaningful. It’s not in any way something that changes things for us. It’s something to try to give ‘moderate’/Blue Dog/terrified Democrats an excuse to support Obamacare.”

At a Tuesday meeting of conservative bloggers, held at the Heritage Foundation, Matt Kibbe, the president and CEO of Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, speculated that “government-run co-ops” with mandates might have been what Democrats had wanted from the outset of the health care fight. “It’s possible that the so-called public option… has always been a disposable item in the legislation,” Kibbe said, “and what the proponents of government-run health care really wanted to do was throw it out there, have us all attack it, and go for the co-ops.”

According to Eric Odom, the web guru whose TaxDayTeaParty.com became an organizing and information hub for anti-tax rallies, “Tea Party” activists are primed to attack co-ops as another phase of a plan to take over health care. “I don’t anticipate that anyone in the free market movement can support this idea,” said Odom, whose group is readying for a nationwide bus tour to train conservative activists. “It’s a back door for government to get control of the [health care] system. The proposal you’ll get from Democrats is going to have boards made up of government officials. It’ll be the same thing as government run health care, except it won’t be owned by the government.”

A Senate GOP aide brushed aside the theory that a co-op compromise could bring Republican votes on board. “When [Sen. Chuck] Grassley (R-Iowa) says that he won’t vote for a bill that doesn’t have substantial Republican support, you can read that as him saying he won’t support the bill,” the aide told TWI. “The problem right now is that we have a large Democratic majority that Americans don’t trust. They don’t think something passed in this Congress would be helpful to them. We can start over two years from now, after we have a new Congress.”

In the shorter term, Republicans are working to brand “co-ops” as another toxic “public plan,” a scheme to take over health care. Appearing on Fox News Monday, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) blasted the Democratic plan, “Now, they — they may try to call it a co-op. They can call it a public option. But you know they are all on record saying they want a single-payer government system. So, any Republican now that helps them pass a bill is helping them pass a government takeover of health care.”

At the Heritage Foundation, Kibbe warned conservative bloggers that even if congressional Democrats view the removal of the public plan as a defeat, conservatives have to be ready to defeat co-ops.

“We need to be careful,” said Kibbe, “not to declare victory when they throw the government-run option off the side.”

Protesters outside a health care town hall meeting held by Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) in Tampa last Thursday (YouTube)

Michael Patrick Leahy’s self-published conservative manifesto is coming off the presses this week, and not a moment too soon.

“The timing is crucial,” said Leahy, the Nashville, Tenn., activist who founded the Top Conservatives on Twitter hashtag and played another founding role in the anti-tax “Tea Party” movement. “I’m trying to get these principles out there for conservatives this month, as people attend these town hall meetings with their members of Congress. These are principles that conservatives need to know.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

Those principles are the ones that the late left-wing activist Saul Alinsky outlined in his 1971 book “Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals.” Leahy’s book, “Rules for Conservative Radicals,” boils them down and scraps Alinsky’s more “amoral” suggestions. “The problem that conservatives have with Alinsky is that, for him, the ends justified the means,” explained Leahy. “I’m suggesting that we take the successful Alinsky rules, we update them and apply them to new social networking technology, and we execute them in the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

Thirty-eight years since the publication of his handbook and 37 years since he died, Alinsky has found a thriving and surprising fan club in the modern conservative movement. Leahy is one of many “Tea Party” activists who have latched onto “Rules for Radicals” as a blueprint for a counter-revolution, a campaign of robust challenges to President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress that is playing out nearly every day of the August recess in noisy town hall meetings. “Alinsky-cons” have taken the union organizer’s “13 rules for power tactics” and “11 rules to test whether power tactics are ethical” and found a strategy that, they believe, is chipping away at the momentum for national health care reform. When they flummox representatives with chants, or laugh out loud at their attempts to explain their votes, many “Tea Party” activists say they’re cribbing from Alinsky.

The most obvious beneficiary of the surge of interest in Alinsky has been Random House, which publishes the book through its Vintage imprint. According to Nielsen BookScan, “Rules for Radicals” has sold 15,000 copies since the start of this year — it only sold 35,000 copies from 2000 through 2008. Since the start of August, it has sold 1,000 copies. At Amazon.com, “Rules” is safely nestled in the Top 75 on the retailer’s bestseller list, and it’s No. 1 in the “radical thought,” “civics,” and “sociology/history” categories. Most tellingly, the people who snatch up copies of Alinsky’s book at Amazon don’t go on to buy more liberal texts. Instead, according to the online bookseller, they purchase Michelle Malkin’s “Culture of Corruption,” Glenn Beck’s “Common Sense,” and Mark Levin’s “Liberty and Tyranny.”

“I picked up the book after the [November 2008] election,” said John O’Hara, a staffer at the conservative Heartland Institute who helped plan anti-tax “Tea Parties” in February and April. “There really is no equivalent book for conservatives. There’s no ‘Rules for Counter-Radicals.’”

Amazon.com

There’s a reason why “Rules for Radicals” became the go-to book for would-be Tea Party and town hall activists. Alinsky-cons can trace their inspiration back to 2008, when it became clear that Obama would win the nomination and Republicans looked deeper into his past for clues about his hidden, not-so-centrist beliefs. Attacking Alinsky was easy; Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had been pilloried for writing her senior thesis on the organizer, and in his influential 2008 book “Liberal Fascism,” Jonah Goldberg placed him firmly in the totalitarian tradition: “substitute the word ‘fascist’ for ‘radical’ in many of Alinsky’s statements and it’s sometimes difficult to tell the difference.” In the conservative muckraker Jerome Corsi’s “Obama Nation,” published one year ago this week, Alinsky (whom Obama never met) was singled out as a malign influence in the candidate’s education. Alinsky had “extreme socialist objectives,” explained Corsi in an August 2008 Fox News appearance, as “a radical leftist organizer who said that his goal was redistribution of wealth from the haves to the have-nots.”

The attack traveled slowly from Corsi’s bestseller and conservative Websites into Republican talking points. In the final month of the presidential race, when Sen. John McCain’s campaign attacked Obama for befriending reformed Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers and receiving campaign help from the community organizing group ACORN, Alinsky became the hidden influence in Obama’s career, in the eyes of many Republicans. In an Oct. 7, 2008 interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani noted, darkly, that the Democratic presidential candidate had been “educated in the Saul Alinsky methods.” In her infamous Oct. 17, 2008 interview on “Hardball,” which generated a backlash that nearly cost her a seat in Congress, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) accused Obama of hobnobbing with “radical leftists” and called Alinsky “one of his teachers, you might say, out of the Chicago area.”

Obama hadn’t exactly covered his tracks. The candidate had written and spoken extensively about his past as a community organizer; Obama’s old allies had spoken about it in a sympathetic profile piece by Ryan Lizza, published in The New Republic. Still, the idea of Alinsky and “Rules for Radicals” as a skeleton key explaining how Obama rose to power, or why Organizing for America was created after the campaign ended, has proven incredibly powerful. On his Fox News show, Glenn Beck has put up charts that connect Alinsky to ACORN and Obama’s allies. When Rush Limbaugh came under fire for hoping the president would “fail,” he told Mark Levin that he was being “Alinskyed.”

Glenn Beck illustrates Alinsky's influence on the left. (Fox News)

The growth of the “Tea Party” movement has seen Alinky morph from a bogeyman to a possible inspiration to conservative activists. In April, Brendan Steinhauser of FreedomWorks, the conservative group that has provided guidance to many “Tea Party” organizers and town hall rowdies, told TWI that the group was “applying Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’” in its approach to anti-tax “Tea Parties.” In June, he told Eric Kleefeld of TPMDC that “Rules” was the first book handed to new employees of the group.

“That first rule, ‘power is not only what you have, but what an opponent thinks you have’ — that argument is happening right now,” said Steinhauser, “with both sides arguing about which side represents the majority on health care.” The mockery and laughter at town halls struck Steinhauser as an adoption of the fifth rule, which posits that “Ridicule is a man’s most potent weapon.” The old deference to congressmen, out of respect for the office, has “broken down.”

Other “Tea Party” activists have gotten on board; a memo written by Bob MacGuffie of the conservative group Right Principles told conservatives to adopt some of the “Rules” at town hall meetings and hold their representatives to account. “Use the Alinsky playbook of which the left is so fond,” wrote MacGuffie, quoting from the twelfth of Alinsky’s original rules. “Freeze it, attack it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

Some conservative writers have latched onto “Rules for Radicals” to explain the extremist roots of a new Obama policy or explain why a new anti-Obama tactic will work. National Review’s Andrew McCarthy has warned that the Obama administration might “cook the books” on the 2010 Census because it “apportions political count,” and “anyone who has read Alinsky could have predicted that the census would be among Obama’s top priorities.” Joseph Farah, the editor-in-chief of the conservative Website WorldNetDaily, has theorized that the Obama administration mocks “birthers” who push conspiracy theories about the president’s citizenship because it’s following Alinsky’s fifth rule on “ridicule.”

All of this has been quite confusing to Gregory Galluzzo. A veteran community organizer at the Gamaliel Foundation and a disciple of Alinsky (though they never met) who trained the young Obama, Galluzzo has watched with frustration as “over the top and rabid ideologues” on the right stormed town hall meetings, claiming to have flipped Alinsky’s rulebook back onto liberals.

“They polarize,” said Galluzzo. “They’ve got that part down. They do direct action. But that’s not the kind of organizing we do. We end up building relationships with the people we oppose. I’m not going to go up to Mayor [Richard] Daley and say ‘you’re just a Nazi.’ I want to end up working with him.”

But according to Galluzzo, if Alinsky could take a look at the Alinsky-cons, he’d call them “petty protesters” who want to destroy the system without offering solutions. “If you just go around calling people assholes,” Galluzzo said, “you’re not going to get anything done.”