{"id":1183,"date":"2006-08-14T03:55:28","date_gmt":"2006-08-14T03:55:28","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:09:50","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:09:50","slug":"why_not_slander","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=1183","title":{"rendered":"Why Not Slander Them? They’re Just Troops…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at one of my favorite local blogs – it’s iconoclastic to the max – “Mayor Sam’s Sister City” (for Sam Yorty, a dead former mayor of Los Angeles) I tripped over this image<\/a>:
\n\"SPLC_HP_IR122_cover.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Do you find this picture as offensive as I do? Can you imagine an image more insulting to the people who serve in our military than this one?<\/p>\n

\nLet me tell you where it comes from: the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The post is about SPLC’s position – as reported by one reporter – that various anti-illegal immigration groups are “hate groups”.
\nThe image is the head on a SPLC expose on white radicals in the military<\/a> – it’s cropped, and the full image is here:
\n\"ir_122_intelmasthead.jpg\"<\/p>\n

\nThe Mayor Sam’s blog posts’ author, Walter Moore, needs to use Google more.<\/p>\n

Back in 2000, SPLC was the subject of an article in Harper’s. You’d assume an anti-hate group would get plaudits from a progressive magazine. Assume again.<\/p>\n

Here’s the article<\/a> (reprinted at Freep, but the substance is exactly as I recall reading it).<\/p>\n

Ah, tolerance. Who could be against something so virtuous? And who could object to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Montgomery, Alabama-based group that recently sent out this heartwarming yet mildly terrifying appeal to raise money for its “Teaching Tolerance” program, which prepares educational kits for schoolteachers? Cofounded in 1971 by civil rights lawyer cum direct-marketing millionaire Morris Dees, a leading critic of “hate groups” and a man so beatific that he was the subject of a made-for-TV movie, the SPLC spent much of its early years defending prisoners who faced the death penalty and suing to desegregate all-white institutions like Alabama’s highway patrol. That was then. Today, the SPLC spends most of its time–and money–on a relentless fund-raising campaign, peddling memberships in the church of tolerance with all the zeal of a circuit rider passing the collection plate. “He’s the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement,” renowned anti- death-penalty lawyer Millard Farmer says of Dees, his former associate, “though I don’t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye.” The Center earned $44 million last year alone–$27 million from fund-raising and $17 million from stocks and other investments–but spent only $13 million on civil rights program , making it one of the most profitable charities in the country.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s profitable because they work at it.<\/p>\n

Morris Dees doesn’t need your financial support. The SPLC is already the wealthiest civil rights group in America, though this letter quite naturally omits that fact. Other solicitations have been more flagrantly misleading. One pitch, sent out in 1995-when the Center had more than $60 million in reserves-informed would-be donors that the “strain on our current operating budget is the greatest in our 25-year history.” Back in 1978, when the Center had less than $10 million, Dees promised that his organization would quit fund-raising and live off interest as soon as its endowment hit $55 million. But as it approached that figure, the SPLC upped the bar to $100 million, a sum that, one 1989 newsletter promised, would allow the Center “to cease the costly and often unreliable task of fund raising. ” Today, the SPLC’s treasury bulges with $120 million, and it spends twice as much on fund-raising-$5.76 million last year-as it does on legal services for victims of civil rights abuses. The American Institute of Philanthropy gives the Center one of the worst ratings of any group it monitors, estimating that the SPLC could operate for 4.6 years without making another tax-exempt nickel from its investments or raising another tax-deductible cent from well-meaning “people like you.”<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now I like a good hate-group bashing as much as the next guy. But when I wrote my posts on “Skybox Liberals”, this article was a part of what I was thinking about. Doing well by doing – kinda – good.<\/p>\n

Raising tempests in teapots appears to be their stock in trade. Slandering the troops is just the latest marketing communications from their ad shop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Morris Dees’ SPLC leads a story with an image that slanders the troops. What a shock…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1183"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1183\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}