No More Mr. Nice Guy!

That's the way the Oreo cookie crumbles

I've previously written about Doug MacEachern, the tenth-rate, no-talent partisan hack who masquerades as a journalist at the Arizona Repulsive. MacEachern is a spiteful little man, full of piss and vinegar, and seized with a blind, overwhelming hatred of liberals and Democrats. He is intent on misusing his position to bombard his unfortunate readers with lunatic-right screeds, more often than not lifted wholesale for extreme-right hate blogs and with nothing added except the flecks of foam from his mouth.

MacEachern's columns are often unintentionally hilarious. Take this one, where he decides to attack Joe Wilson and belittle his trip to Niger. Lacking anything of substance, MacEachern seizes on a casual remark about Wilson drinking mint tea with officials, and writes a whole column sneering about "tea parties."

Now, anyone who has been to North Africa or the Middle East knows that offering tea to guests is an intrinsic part of the culture. Whether you're visiting a president in his palace, or a nomad in the desert, custom dictates that you have several glasses of mint tea together. It's rude to refuse the tea, or even to start talking business before finishing the second or third cup. MacEachern's cheap gibes about "tea parties" serve only to reveal him as an ignorant boor pandering to other ignorant boors. And when you compare Wilson's original article with MacEachern's account of it, MacEachern's dishonesty and willingness to suppress awkward facts become all too evident.

However, MacEachern has never cared about the facts. If some story shows Democrats in a bad light, then of course it is true - in some platonic sense - even if the facts are the opposite of what is alleged. MacEachern's god, George Bush Junior, doesn't do nuance. MacEachern doesn't do facts!

A perfect example is the bogus Oreo-tossing story which has been around for three years, about African-American Republican Michael Steele supposedly being pelted with Oreo cookies at a debate. MacEachern discovered the story, just as it was coming apart at the seams, and decided to go one better; he claimed, on no basis whatsoever, that "[s]ome people - Democratic officeholders, even - say it's OK to toss Oreo cookies at Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele for being Black and conservative." (He repeated the claim the next day.) Presumably this is a reference to former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the Democratic participant in the debate where the Oreos were allegedly thrown. Needless to say, it's a bald-faced lie. Townsend said nothing of the sort, and neither did any other Democrat.

Not only that, but the incident itself almost certainly never happened. Steele and the Maryland Republicans did not make any complaints until almost a week after the alleged event. Since then they've changed their story numerous times. The Washington Times reporter who pushed the story to national prominence wasn't even there.

At one point, the story had Oreos "raining down" like "locusts". Trouble is, the Baltimore Sun could not find any independent witnesses who were present at the debate and saw any cookie-tossing, nor did it appear in the videotape of the debate. So now Steele has backed away from that version of the story, and merely claims that he happened to look down and saw an Oreo on the floor near his feet. Oh my god, the horror! But even this version doesn't fly - the janitors found no Oreo cookies on the floor afterwards, or anything else out of the ordinary.

Back to MacEachern - is he going to issue a retraction, apologize to Townsend, and resolve to do at least some fact-checking in future? Yeah, right. I'll say it again - MacEachern is a tenth-rate political hack, and an embarrassment to a newspaper that is itself a sorry excuse for journalism.