CAJ note: After reading his excellent Pigford series on Big Government and his recent appraisal of the liberal media’s hypocrisy in Madison, WI, we wondered how much longer Lee Stranahan would be able to work at HuffPo.
This article H/T DaTechguy, Huffington Post, one in exile and one abandons them. The entire post is worth reading.
Why I’m Quitting Blogging At The Huffington Post
Lee Stranahan
3/24/2011
…this latest move by The Huffington Post of banning Andrew Breitbart from their front page (because of comments he made to a different website) is both unprecedented, arbitrary and deeply offensive to the intellectual openness that Arianna Huffington has purported to believe in…
…Addendum: One very loathsome aspect of this story is something that Huffington Post editor Roy Sekoff told me in a long phone call about Andrew Breitbart several months ago. Roy knows and worked with Andrew and when the issue of Andrew Breitbart being a racist came up, Roy told me “No, of course Andrew isn’t a racist.”
Roy went on to say that while both he and Arianna Huffington knew that the charges of racism being hurled at Andrew weren’t true based on their years of personal dealings with him that they were in a ‘bad position’ to say anything about it.
Politics is a contact sport, but not defending someone you know personally and know the truth about is pretty poor conduct. To stand by and watch their reputation ruined and do nothing when all you have to do is say ‘I know him and that’s not true” is shameful.
Arianna is also friends with Van Jones so I’d apply the same standard there…and, in fact, Arianna HAS publically defended Van Jones at length. The problem is that defending Breitbart would be much less popular among her liberal friends then defending Jones…
Read the entire post at Lee Stranahan.
Update: This video is from Big Government, Van Jones IS a ‘Cop Killer-supporting, Racist, Demagogic Freak’. Read the article.
Update 2: Ed Driscoll, Meet the New McCarthyism
…basically racism, communism and trutherism, not to mention Mumia-ism, really is the new McCarthyism, to coin a paraphrase.
Naturally of course, Slate sorta-kinda blames the victim (emphasis by P.J. Salvatore of Andrew’s Big Journalismsite):
Andrew has now gotten exactly what he wanted. He doesn’t need to publish his idiocies at the Huffington Post. But getting banned from the Huffington Post proves his thesis about the repressive, anti-free speech liberal media. And he’ll never shut up about it…
And shutting up is what it’s all about, isn’t it?…
Update 3: At Patterico’s Pontifications
…Mickey Kaus, from his new perch at the Daily Caller, observes:
First on the docket: Here’s what HuffPo writer Jason Linkins wrote in 2008 about right wing writer Jerome Corsi:
I want to end today by offering my thanks to Jerome Corsi, white-supremacist Swift Boat turd heel un-American wouldn’t-piss-on-ya-if-you-were-on-fire foamy chancre on the ass of subhumanity extraordinaire. You want to talk about voter enthusiasm? Well, Mr. Corsi, the thought of casting vote against everything you stand for doesn’t just make me feel enthusiastic, it makes me feel ten feet taller, and I get the coppery taste of the gladiator in my mouth. So thank you, pig. [E.A.]
Seems ad hominem to me! It’s almost hard to see how you could be more ad hominem…. Since Linkins clearly violated the tenets of debate and civil discourse HuffPo has strived for since the day they launched, he’s as good as gone from their front page. Open and shut. … Looks like the “nether regions” of HuffPo will be where you have to go to get the juicy stuff. … [Linkins on HuffPo front page right now–ed. That can’t be. Someone tell Arianna.]
No hypocrisy there!…
