Andy Breitbart enjoys Larry Flynt's protection

Now that the tempest has passed and passions have cooled, it's just about time for Shirley Sherrod to file a libel lawsuit against Andrew Breitbart.

To refresh memories, Sherrod was the Georgia State Director of Rural Development for the USDA when, back in July, journalist and blogger Andrew Breitbart libeled her by calling her a racist. As "proof," Breitbart released what he alleged was a video of Sherrod, a black, telling a meeting of the NAACP that she'd discriminated against a white southern farmer by not offering all of the assistance her office could have offered. Breitbart's defamation resulted in Sherrod being fired by an all-too-timid Obama administration, a firing that was later reversed when the Obamites realized they'd been had by a master manipulator and flagrant liar.

Mainstream media journalists and other liberals claimed that the episode marginalized Breitbart and other crazy-conservative blowhards by showing the lengths some will go to in their attempts to discredit liberalism. And they dropped the subject there, knowing full well they are wrong, that Breitbart will recover and will regain what dubious credibility he has among American fascists, and, like Dracula, will drain the lifeblood of American politics until a stake is driven through his heart.

That stake would be a libel suit, filed against Breitbart on Sherrod's behalf and with her consent, proving that Andrew Breitbart's sole purpose in blogging is to harm the reputations and careers of any well-intentioned, patriotic, and God-loving American who isn't exactly like him. Of course, mainstream media isn't going to call for such a lawsuit because of what I call the Larry Flynt Syndrome. That's a condition suffered by all mainstream media that causes them to tolerate and even rationalize outrageous and harmful behavior in others so their own behavior appears moderate in comparison. I named it after Flynt because of the way the media leapt to Flynt's defense during his legal battles in the pre-Internet days of the 1970s and 1980s. While we knew Flynt and his drugstore pornography was a disgusting aberration, we rationalized his existence by saying that as long as Flynt was fighting for his First Amendment right, the rest of us were safe. Flynt occupied the forward-most trench in the war against the Huns who would erase the words "freedom of the press" from the First Amendment. At one point in the early 1980s, the Society of Professional Journalists even contributed cash to Flynt's defense fund. "Better Larry fights the fight and takes the hits than us," was our justification. As long as the battle for freedom of the press was being fought way out there on Larry Flynt's filthy frontier, we on Main Street were relatively safe, never mind that Flynt was hiking the skirts of the Statue of Liberty and charging a penny a peek.

Now the mainstream media is being quiet for the same reason and, in its reticence, giving someone every bit as disgusting and filthy as Flynt a pass to the First Amendment. The worst thing Breitbart was accused of, by High Priest of Professional Liberalism Keith Olbermann, was being "a pornographer of propaganda." (Aside: Yes, I know I can link to it; do it yourself, search YouTube for it, it's there. Do a little of your own thinking for a change.) But Breitbart is more than a "pornographer," for even pornography isn't actionable, as Flynt proved by getting away with suggesting in print that a devout, if somewhat monomaniacal, Christian fundamentalist banged his own mother in an outhouse. So much for the conservatism of the Reagan-appointed SCOTUS.

Breitbart will get away with his libel, too. And libel it is. Any sophomore journalism student knows that libel requires three conditions: Publication, identification, and defamation. That is, the damaging text must be publicly circulated (in one God-awful miscarriage of justice, the U.S. Supreme Court even ruled that potentially defamatory memos and emails within a newspaper's news department constituted "publication"); it must unmistakably identify the victim; and it must damage the victim's reputation or otherwise cast the victim in a socially unfavorable light.

Even those three tests aren't enough, however. Slanderers of public officials are often free to spread their lies (thus the protected rise of the American Tea Party, among others) unless their victims can prove something called "actual malice." Actual malice is the publication of libel or slander with the full knowledge that the defamation is false, and with the intent to harm the victim despite the falsity of the slanderer's claims. And this is where Breitbart falls into the realm of actionable libel.

As the media fully and frequently reported in the aftermath of "Sherrodgate," Breitbart deliberately edited a video of Shirley Sherrod's speech before the NAACP to make it appear that she said things she, in fact, did not say. Breitbart has openly admitted he knew Sherrod was no racist, but edited the video to make it appear she was anyway. There can be only one reason for this: Andrew Breitbart was so consumed with hatred for liberalism that he broke the law to defame a woman who had worked hard to protect and assist America's independent farmers for over two decades. By any legal measure, Andrew Breitbart is a slanderer and a libeler and a liar.

Because of the Larry Flynt Syndrome, however, there will be no media outcry to have Breitbart hauled into court. Some have called Breitbart a "blogger, not a journalist," a comment I find personally insulting after a quarter-century of journalism experience. Besides, Breitbart is a columnist for the Washington Times. If the Times is a newspaper (and I would question even that assertion) then Breitbart is a journalist. Otherwise, the media have simply shut up and sat down on the subject, fearful that any agitation for having Breitbart charged with libel would somehow be a betrayal of the First Amendment.

What sanctimonious crap! Breitbart is a journalist. He embodies the purest form of First Amendment freedom, and as such he must be held to the highest standard of journalistic integrity. He has failed on the integrity test and, as such, needs to be charged, tried, and found guilty of libel.

And then we need to go after Larry Flynt.

Pass the ice cream and damn the pedophiles

The shrimp and pasta in alfredo sauce had made its second pass 'round the table, the homemade sourdough bread was being passed for the third time, just to fill in the corners of any bellies that weren't yet full, and glasses were being topped off with a delightfully light pinot grigio from a little Sonoma Valley winery we'd discovered a few years before. Merlot-laced chocolate sauce was warming in the kitchen, to be ladled over butter-crunch ice cream later. In short, it was another Friday night with the Northeast Colorado Liberal Wine Club, and the talk had been of sexual predators.

It may surprise some to find that sexual predation can get a liberal's dander up. I don't mean we attain actual heights of dudgeon like our conservative counterparts, oh no, no, no. No, our dudgeon is of much lesser altitude, and frankly we're just a little nervous about it, and becoming more nervous as time goes on. Oh, sure, we damn to hell all of those infernal priests and their bishops who refused to even consider that a centuries-old, all-male fraternity of celibate mystics just might offer a perfect cover for closet pedophiles. Damn them! Damn them all to Hell! But we come up a little short of the castrate-and-crucify-the-bastards mentality common among the conservative hoi polloi.

It was commonly agreed around the table, however, that there is simply no redemption for pedophiles, that sex offenders cannot help themselves and thus we need to look at some sort of permanent separation from polite society for such offenders. Recent pieces on NPR and PBS were invoked, and I think someone even quoted The Economist, which is a bit high falutin' even for our group. All agreed that there is simply nothing that can be done about sex offenders because, well, it's sex, after all.

Rather, nearly all. I didn't agree. I don't agree. I tried to say that I didn't agree, but the butter-crunch ice cream with merlot-laced chocolate sauce was served, my glass was re-filled with pinot, and talk drifted to our adoration of Barak Obama, at which point we all secretly reached into our pockets and fondled our Koranic scriptures, which is what we liberals do when we communally adore Obama. I tried to tell the story of my first encounter with the concept of a "criminal mind" and how it applied to sex offenders, but the butter crunch was to die for and the pinot was flowing freely.

I didn't agree because I've always been frustrated with the idea that "sex crimes" need special treatment. Never mind the illogical feminist hypocrisy that rape isn't really about sex; I'm talking about the hysterically emotional response the American public has in general to all crimes involving human genitals. Victim advocates cry relentlessly about the psychological scarring endured by molestation victims, as if no other victim of physical assault suffers such scarring. After a few rounds on the analyst's couch, I'm here to tell you that when a child is brutalized frequently and regularly by someone in a position of absolute power, it doesn't have to be sexual to leave scars.

A decade ago, when Colorado's largest prison was still in the CAD/CAM programs of the designer's computer, the man was would open the prison and become its first warden gave me a short lesson on The Criminal Mind. Imagine, he said, that you are at a barbecue. You take your paper plate, you pile on the pulled pork, the beans, the tater salad, maybe some slaw, then you get your drink, sit down and eat your meal. When you're finished, you gather up your napkin, cup and plastic fork, fold it all into the paper plate and throw it in the trash. In the Criminal Mind, the victim is the paper plate. The victim is something to be used for the criminal's personal gratification, then disposed of.

What I think this means is that sex offenders, like all criminals, use their victims as disposable items for personal gratification. Disposal is usually psychological (rationalizing, ignoring the consequences, etc.) but occasionally it becomes a very real and very physical disposal. But what is the difference between the killer who kills in a moment of outrage and the rapist who rapes in a moment of uncontrollable compulsion? What's the difference between the kleptomaniac who cannot refrain from stealing or the addict who cannot refrain from shooting up, and the pedophile who cannot refrain from molesting?

According to people who should know, the answers are "Not much" and "Quite a bit" and even "Well, we really don't know yet." This all from the same definitive paper on sex offender recidivism issues by the U.S. Justice Department. It's called "Recidivism of Sex Offenders" and it was issued in 2001 by the DOJ's Center for Sex Offender Management. It answers very few questions definitively. Yes, sex offenders have a lot in common with other criminals, but in other ways they are a distinct antisocial, even sociopathic, group.

Bottom line: We don't know what to do with sex offenders. I think that's why there cannot be any serious conversation about it, even among liberals who think pretty much alike. We don't even understand the problem well enough to take sides on a solution, or even on an interim response. It occurs to me that, before we do much more research on how aging baby boomers can have great sex into their 70s and 80s, we first need to find out why some people have to use sex to hurt and damage other people. It'd be nice, some day, to be able to settle the issue before the ice cream is served at dinner.