GINGRICH: I think that both Ed Royce and Michele Bachmann, who are here today, are going to end up being chairs, probably in January of 2011.

Watch it:

When Gingrich steered Republicans to victory in the 1994 midterms, he similarly bypassed seniority and appointed his most trusted lieutenants to powerful committee chairs. Bachmann, who is popular among conservative partisans, has spent much of her tenure on the Financial Services Committee attacking financial reform, while concocting conspiracy theories about ACORN and a “one world” currency.

Yesterday, the Politico’s Ryan Grim contacted Hayes’s spokeswoman, Amanda Little, who said that the congressman denied making the comments:

Hayes spokeswoman, Amanda Little, says that Hayes absolutely denies making the comments that appear in the Observer article. She noted that other national reporters were at the event and didn’t pick up on what the Observer reported. [...]

Hayes spokeswoman Little is still denying it and accuses The Crypt of “irresponsible journalism.”

Horowitz stood behind his story, saying that the reason most national reporters didn’t cover the remarks is because they weren’t there; the national media’s plane hadn’t yet arrived. “I wasn’t on the plane,” explained Horowitz. “I don’t know if they were aware the national press wasn’t there, but they were staying stuff.”

Audio of the event recorded by Lisa Miller of WFAE in Charlotte, NC now definitively shows that Hayes has been lying about not saying that “liberals hate real Americans.” Here are his exact comments:

Sarah Palin — she’s a lady that can get ‘er done. She’s been in Alaska. She got ‘er did! Folks, there’s a real America, and liberals hate real Americans that work, and accomplish, and achieve, and believe in God. That’s a great comparison.

Listen here:

In 2006, Hayes said, “Stability in Iraq ultimately depends on spreading the message of Jesus Christ, the message of peace on earth, good will towards men.” As recently as 2005, he was still insisting that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11.

Now, the AP has learned that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agrees with the ISNA. A recent DHS report has concluded that linking Islam to terrorism offends moderate Muslims and gives extremists “religious legitimacy,” adding any such language should be avoided:

Such words may actually boost support for radicals among Arab and Muslim audiences by giving them a veneer of religious credibility or by causing offense to moderates. [...]

U.S. officials may be “unintentionally portraying terrorists, who lack moral and religious legitimacy, as brave fighters, legitimate soldiers or spokesmen for ordinary Muslims,” says a Homeland Security report. [...]

“We should not concede the terrorists’ claim that they are legitimate adherents of Islam,” the report said.

The report also stressed that “lingo like ‘Islamo-fascism’ is out, too,” a term that conservatives — including President Bush — consistently use to rally the country around a militant response to terrorism and terrorists. For example:

– Rush Limbaugh: “Patriotism is rallying behind the country, regardless of party affiliation, to defeat Islamofascism.”

– David Horowitz: “The term ‘Islamo-fascism’ describes the agendas of the jihadists with perfect accuracy.”

– President Bush: Terrorists “try to spread their jihadist message – a message I call…Islamic radicalism, Islamic fascism.”

Muslim leaders in the U.S. have long argued that such language “offends the vast majority of moderate Muslims,” but the McCain campaign thinks it knows better. Senior adviser Steve Schmidt recently said “the reality is, the hateful ideology which underpins bin Ladenism is properly described as radical Islamic extremism. Senator McCain refers to it that way because that is what it is.”

We’ve had many distractions this semester, and I guess I’m one of them. A recent one was an unfortunate incident of a noose being put on a professor’s door. I think that the campus is right to be concerned about that. But I detect a somewhat of double standard at this university and other’s that I’ve been to, in that nooses have been put figuratively on the doors of the College Republicans here who have invited me. Of course, there’s always a noose over my head by a national hate campaign which has been organized by radical Muslim groups and radical leftist groups.

Watch it:

Apparently for Horowitz, being accused of racism is the equivalent of being the target of racism.

Horowitz is claiming that it will be “the biggest conservative campus protest ever” and “a wake-up call for Americans on 200 university and college campuses” about “the enemy.” But on CSPAN’s Washington Journal this weekend, Kareem Shora, the Executive Director of the American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee, said that Horowitz was dramatically overstating the number of participating schools:

We contacted those institutions, alerting them to the fact that their name was being used, and wondering what exactly was taking place. … It’s important to note though, after we contacted those institutions, most of those institutions indicated that no such events is taking place on those campus. And many contacted the sponsors and told them, “do not use my institution’s name in your campaign,” including some very renowned universities such as Yale and Princeton.

Shora also said that the president of Liberty University, the evangelical school founded by Jerry Falwell, also had their name removed from Horowitz’s list. Watch it:

Horowitz’s efforts have come under fire from critics, who say it will spread “racism and religious hatred” through the use of a loaded political phrase like Islamo-fascism. Others, such as Middle East expert Juan Cole, say that “Fascism is not even a very good description of the ideology of most Muslim fundamentalists.”

Former CENTCOM Commander Gen. John Abizaid has said that “even adding the word Islamic” is counterproductive to keeping extremism “from becoming mainstream.”

The tactics encouraged by Horowitz and his followers, however, are intentionally fashioned to stoke negative reactions from moderate Muslims “as evidence that they’re on the side of ‘our terrorist adversaries.’” For instance, Horowitz is distributing a “student guide” that encourages participants to draft offensively-worded petitions in an intentional effort to stir divisiveness on campuses by forcing groups to “declare their allegiances“:

Perhaps most importantly, a petition forces students and faculty to declare their allegiances: either to fighting our terrorist adversaries or failing to take action to stop our enemies. For this reason, we encourage you to make a special effort to bring this petition to those groups who might be least likely to sign it, for example to campus administrators, student government officers, and the Muslim Students’ Association.

As Ali Eteraz notes, “this ‘awareness’ week is not about awareness at all, but using anti-Muslim animus to achieve political ends” by attacking Horowitz’s true “enemy”: “the political left.”

UPDATE: Campus Progress has a crib sheet for debunking conservatives during Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.

UPDATE II: Today’s TPMtv runs down the “clownish” background of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.

UPDATE III: At the conservative blog Blackfive, Uncle Jimbo gives Horowitz’s speech yesterday a very negative review after Horowitz berated the audience by telling them, “I guess you just aren’t able to read” and “I don’t know what to do if you can’t add two and two and get four”

Digg It!

Bloomberg host Peter Cook asked Giuliani, “If General Petraeus comes back in September and says, we can win this thing, but it’s going to take more U.S. troops, could you support the notion of adding even more U.S. troops to Iraq?”

Giuliani said he could support escalating Bush’s escalation, provided Petraeus believed he “need[ed] more troops to make it work in order to get Iraq to a situation where Iraq is stable.” When Cook noted that many Americans would strongly oppose such a plan, Giuliani said, “Hey, you know, leadership is about sometimes doing the things you know are right.” Watch it:

During the most recent presidential debates, Giuliani said that invading Iraq was “absolutely the right thing to do,” and claimed the war would “help reduce the risk for this country.” Giuliani’s current foreign policy advisers include retired Gen. Jack Keane, the architect of the Iraq escalation, and former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton.

But Giuliani often doesn’t wear his support for Bush’s deeply unpopular war policy on his sleeve. A widely-publicized document Giuliani released this week detailing his “12 Commitments” to America doesn’t contain a single reference to Iraq.

Digg It!

Transcript:

COOK: Let me ask you about some other issues, if I could. Iraq – you’ve supported the president. You’ve said the United States cannot lose in Iraq. I want to ask you, if you were to become president – or even before that. If General Petraeus comes back in September and says, we can win this thing, but it’s going to take more U.S. troops, could you support the notion of adding even more U.S. troops to Iraq?

GIULIANI: If that – if he came back and he said, we’ve had success. It’s working, the strategy is working. We need more troops to make it work in order to get Iraq to a situation where Iraq is stable. And Iraq isn’t – really, the ultimate goal here is, Iraq is an ally of the United States, a reliable one in the war against terror, rather than a headquarters for terrorism. Of course I’d look at that, and I’d consider that. What do we have General Petraeus there for but – we have great confidence in him.

COOK: You know there would be significant resistance to the notion of sending any more Americans there.

GIULIANI: Hey, you know, leadership is about sometimes doing the things you know are right, and then it’s your job to educate the public, as opposed to just, you know, taking a CNN poll or a Bloomberg poll or a Fox poll and let that run the country. I mean, there’s been too much of that. We have too many politicians who are poll-driven to excess. Polls are important. You’ve got to know what the public is thinking, but you can’t let them drive you completely. If Abraham Lincoln were driven by polls, he’d have pulled out of the Civil War in 1863, but I guess they didn’t have polls then, so …

Former Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca lambastes the Bush administration in his new book. “Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening?” Iacocca writes. “Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. … But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, ‘Stay the course.’”

Gov. John Corzine (D-NJ) was seriously injured yesterday in a hit-and-run car accident, hospitalizing him “with fractured ribs, a broken leg, and chest injuries.” Corzine did not “appear to have suffered life-threatening injuries.”

Rudy Giuliani’s (R) current foreign policy advisers include retired Gen. Jack Keane, the architect of President Bush’s Iraq escalation policy, and former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton.

“Four years after Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was deposed by U.S.-led troops, an international panel charged with recommending invitations for an exclusive meeting of the world’s democracies” has ruled that Iraq is “not invited,” the same status the country had under Hussein’s rule. Last year, Iraq had observer status at the Community of Democracies meeting.

“President Bush is threatening to veto a Senate intelligence bill that’s laced with provisions that would force the White House and spy agencies to be more responsive to Congress.”

Advocacy groups are scoring a “surprising success in an effort to link the Olympics, which the Chinese government holds very dear, to the killings in Darfur, which, until recently, Beijing had not seemed too concerned about.”

$100,000: The legal fees paid this year by Rep. Rick Renzi (R-AZ), who is wresting with separate investigations probing whether Renzi “introduced legislation that benefited a military contractor that employs his father,” and whether he “helped promote the sale of land that netted a former business partner $4.5 million.”

As many as 6 million prepared meals worth more than $40 million that were “stockpiled near potential victims of the 2006 hurricane season spoiled in the Gulf Coast heat last summer when the Federal Emergency Management Agency ran short of warehouse and refrigeration space.”

And finally: Some Connecticut lawmakers are pushing the state to adopt Connecticut Fun, a 1983 tune by the band Punkestra, as the state’s official punk song. Peter Detmold of the punk band New London’s Reducers is “amused” by the whole idea: “Well, I just wonder if that sort of recognition is true to the punk ethos. I guess it seems wrong-headed or oxymoronic for a punk-rock song to be official anything, and you wonder what (the legislature) is supposed to be paying attention to.”

A look at some of the things this “leader” has said:

Guns don’t kill black people, other blacks do. [Salon, 8/16/99]

Black Africans and Arabs were responsible for enslaving the ancestors of African-Americans. [FrontPage, 1/3/01]

The so-called ‘peace movement’ today is led by the same hate-America radicals who supported America’s totalitarian enemies during the Cold War…They are the friends in deed of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. [FrontPage, 4/7/03

Now Horowitz is taking on professors. His new book lists 101 professors he considers “dangerous” based on false allegations, smears, and manipulations of fact. Last week he called one student who questioned his conclusions “deaf and brain-dead” and told another, “You do not have the mental capacity to understand.”

Truly a man worthy of a senator’s salute.

For more information on Horowitz and his misguided campaign, check out Campus Progress’s Horowitz Watch.

– Adam Jentleson

Watch at Crooks and Liars

BILL O’REILLY: All of these people are far left fringe players, but they know their money is going to smear merchants. They know it’s going into character assassins, correct?

JAKOB LASKIN, FRONTPAGE MAGAZINE: It’s actually interesting. That’s exactly what it was meant for. One of the biggest contributors to Media Matters is the Center for American Progress.

O’REILLY: That’s Podesta’s group.

LASKIN: Exactly. They operate out of Washington, DC. Basically it’s a partisan group that — what they do is rapid response to anything that offends them as far as the Republican or conservative agenda is concerned, which is just about everything. And so Media Matters operates in exactly the same way except for where the media is concerned. So it’s perfect.

O’REILLY: It is a very well-oiled, effective character assassination machine. There is nothing that exists on the right that I know of that can compare. Do you know of anything?

LASKIN: No. And one reason is because that right-wing publications have been very effective at getting out their message. They don’t need to smear.

O’REILLY: There was some smearing going on in the Clinton years to be fair.

Maybe Laskin isn’t exactly the right person to be throwing stones. The website he writes for, David Horowitz’s Frontpagemag.com, currently features an article entitled “George Galloway: Fascist Pimp and Prostitute.” Horowitz has also published a guide to the left that featured CAP president John Podesta next to the American Taliban, John Walker Lindh.

Head over to MediaMatters and form your own opinion about Mr. O’Reilly.

I don’t think agreeing with Sheehan on the need to pull out of Iraq makes you akin to Nazis or racists in any meaningful or significant way.

That’s reassuring. Goldberg goes on to make further comparisons between Sheehan and white supremacists:

But, I think Sheehan’s PR operation — including her water-carriers in the liberal press — should no [sic] be surprised that they’re attracting a broad Popular Front which includes a lot of disreputable and unpleasent elements. If you leave yourself no room, rhetorically speaking, between yourself and the crazies don’t be surprised if the crazies respond to your rhetoric.

So Goldberg’s argument is that Sheehan isn’t like the Nazis, she just uses the exact same rhetoric. Nice. In a subsequent post, Goldberg reprints a letter from a fan who says Goldberg is being too “defensive about your original reference to Cindy.” Goldberg includes a link to an article on David Horowitz’s website which notes “Cindy Sheehan’s newfound, seemingly mutual love for anti-Semitic, racist, and neo-Nazi extremists.”

Goldberg’s strategy is to feign an apology to insulate himself from criticism. At the same time, he continues to advance his smear against Sheehan.

“The last six months [have] been kind of a watershed for the academic-freedom movement,” says Bradley Shipp, national field director for Students for Academic Freedom, a group founded by conservative activist David Horowitz in 2003. “It is going to filter itself down to the K-12 level.”

It’s an important battle front, proponents say, because younger students are more impressionable.

Online groups like ProtestWarrior.com are already equipping youngsters with the materials they need to fight against “the liberal, bureaucratic, public school indoctrination machine.”

Apparently the group — the International Freedom Center — that’s designing part of the 9/11 memorial has turned to a “radical leftists,” the “anti-American left,” the “Who’s Who of the human rights, Guantanamo-obsessed world” — in other words, the ACLU, Human Rights First, George Soros, and university academics — for advice on the memorial, which is going to be a “history of freedom.” And that’s especially bad, since…

…the IFC is getting 300,000 square feet of space to teach us how to think about liberty, [while] the actual Memorial Center on the opposite corner of the site will get a meager 50,000 square feet to exhibit its 9/11 artifacts, all out of sight and underground.

In the first place, a 50,000 square foot memorial is hardly “meager.” That’s thousands of square feet more than either the World War II or Vietnam memorials. The new Pearl Harbor memorial will be just 24,000 square feet. And does anyone consider it an insult to Thomas Jefferson that his artifacts are placed “out of sight and underground” in the museum beneath his memorial statue?

But that’s beside the point. The hysterics of Malkin and others have focused entirely on who the International Freedom Center has turned to for advice. Here’s an idea: how about looking at who the International Freedom Center has actually endorsed.

Turns out the IFC has been one of the great champions of Nathan Sharansky. Yes, that Nathan Sharansky: President Bush’s foreign policy guru, who was offered an hour-long meeting with Bush in the Oval Office, and who has been praised in the pages of the National Review and on David Horowitz’s FrontPageMag. Earlier this year, Bush told “opinion makers” they should put Sharansky’s book, The Case for Democracy, on their “recommended reading list.” “If you want a glimpse of how I think about foreign policy, read Natan Sharansky’s book,” Bush said.

And it gets better. Guess who turned Bush on to Sharansky? The co-founder of the IFC, Tom Bernstein, who sent Bush excerpts of the book shortly after his reelection, and “who was a financial partner with Bush in the Texas Rangers.” And guess who the IFC featured at its very first public program? Good ol’ Nathan Sharansky.

So the “zealots” and “radical leftists” designing the “anti-American” 9/11 memorial actually helped shape the very core of President Bush’s foreign policy. We’re speechless.

But let’s explore his argument. Here is a good summary:

As a highly educated former Marxist intellectual-turned-conservative, Horowitz uses political and ideological labels with precision. An “actual liberal” is different from a progressive and different from a leftist.

Horowitz claimed we were wrong because in his book he “praises American liberals and Democrats like Bill Clinton.”

But on his website Horowitz lists Clinton as a “moderate leftist” on the same page as Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman who was “convicted of hatching a plot to bomb the United Nations, FBI offices, and other New York landmarks.” So much for using “political and ideological labels with precision.”

Other mainstream liberals and progressives listed as leftists on the same page as Abdel-Rahman: Jimmy Carter, Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, Howard Dean, Barack Obama and John Edwards.

If Mr. Horowitz or any of his associates care to defend themselves, they are welcome to do so in the comments.

Podesta and Think Progress here have an advantage: half the people in America have an I.Q. of 100 or less, and this half tends to vote for Democrats. The Think Progress constituency is easy to fool precisely because it does little thinking and is easily misled by pseudo-intellectual card tricks…

Frontpagemag.org doesn’t like ThinkProgress.org itself much either:

Its unspoken motto seems to be that an ounce of wit or sarcasm is worth of pound of actual facts or intelligence, today’s liberals and leftists often being too dense or hysterically obsessed to notice the difference.

Horowitz et. al particularly dislike this post about Rick Santorum.

It’s good to know we’re getting under their skin a little bit.

The Podesta site gives the following absurd examples of my alleged intellectual defamations and historical inaccuracies:

1. “He has freely compared American liberals to Islamic terrorists”

The statement is a lie. I have never compared actual liberals to Islamic terrorists. The reference link is to the Amazon site where my book Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left is sold. Even the title gives the game away. It’s about Radical Islam and the American left. Is Podesta suggesting that American liberals are actually leftists?

VERSUS

David Horowitz, Now:

Last fall I published a book called Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left, which argued that the progressive left in the West was in a de facto alliance with the Islamic jihadists… I put up a website at www.discoverthenetworks.org demonstrating the links between radical Islam and American progressives organizationally and also their shared agendas (e.g., opposition to the Patriot Act, bleeding heart concern for the terrorists mercifully locked up in Guatanamo etc.) Just as sophisticated liberals (The New Republic comes to mind) ignored my book, so others ridiculed the website.

As it turns out, Horowitz’s tale was almost completely fabricated.

Inside Higher Education revealed today:

1. The question the student answered was not “Explain why George Bush is a war criminal.” Here is the relevant part of the actual question:

Cohen’s research on deviance discussed this process of how the media and various moral entrepreneurs and government enforcers can conspire to create a panic. How does Cohen define this process? Explain it in-depth. Where does the social meaning of deviance come from? Argue that the attack on Iraq was deviance based on negotiable statuses. Make the argument that the military action of the U.S. attacking Iraq was criminal.”

2. The question was optional. The student could have chosen not to answer it at all and written an essay on a completely different topic instead.

3. The student did not receive an F.

4. The professor who asked the question “is a registered Republican and considers himself politically independent, taking pride in never having voted a straight party ticket.”

Horowitz meekly “responds” to the charges on his website today but doesn’t actually try to defend the original facts of the story. Here’s a sample:

Until I hear from the student I have no comment on the matter of the grade but it is conceivable to me that if this were an “A” student and she received a “D” or even a “C” on this exam, in her mind it might as well be an “F.” And, finally, it is quite plausible that since there were two required and two optional questions she might have been confused as to which were which…

Lest you think it’s all just a big joke, Horowitz cautions: “This database reflects links that are not merely caricatures by political enemies but are legitimate indices of a political reality.” It should yield a “new understanding of the forces that define our social reality.”

Check out a few of our favorites pairings –

Sen. Barack Obama appears on the same row as terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi:

Mohammad Atta, the lead terrorist in the 9/11 attacks, shares space with Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi:

John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban, appears next to American Progress’s very own John Podesta:

“This complaint applies to the discriminating nature of grading of my English teacher…On the last one, I wrote about how family values in the books weve read aren’t good. I know the paper was pretty much great because I spell checked it and proofred it twice. I got an D- just because the professor hates families and thinks its okay to be gay.” [sic] — Ohio State, English, 2/9/05

“We were then required to watch an immoral Seinfeld episode dealing with masturbation, an exercise with little sociological value. She then gave a lecture on ‘moral relativity,’ which she defined very closely with ‘cultural relativism.’” — St. Louis University, Sociology, 2/13/05

“Talked about flags as symbols of states and argued that new Iraqi flag was not a result of a transparent and fair process…Claimed AS FACT that other Arab societies had red, green and black in their flags…” — St. Michael’s College, Human Geography, 4/30/04

Remember, these complaints would have to be heard by state governments and courts if Horowitz’s bill were passed into law.