The Accidental Swiftboater [View all]

[Skinner]

I suspect some of you may have heard about a discussion thread I started yesterday regarding this photograph of Bernie Sanders during the civil rights movement which was alleged to not be Bernie Sanders. It seems that I inadvertently stumbled into something much bigger than I was aware at the time. Here's what happened.

Obviously many of you are news junkies and DU junkies and you have a totally up-to-the-minute awareness of the latest controversies and where they stand, particularly when it is related to politics and the Democratic presidential primary in particular. When I am on DU I usually have a pretty good handle on what is going on, but if I am not on DU I don't actually spend my leisure time following politics. I rarely if ever watch cable news.

And it just so happens that when I posted my infamous thread about the Bernie photo, I was completely unaware of the larger context which the discussion was taking place.

On Thursday I was on DU a fair amount in the early afternoon, and I even participated in some of the discussions about John Lewis and the CBCPAC. My last post was probably midafternoon, and then I logged out for most of the rest of the day -- stopping back in around 11pm to post a little and then go to bed. As far as I'm aware, the story alleging that Bernie Sanders was not the person in the widely circulated photo from the civil rights era broke sometime in the evening, and I totally missed it.

I woke up on Friday morning and briefly stopped into DU, adding some stuff to the homepage, maybe posting a little and then logging off. I had an important conference call at 11:30am that I needed to prepare for, so I didn't spend much time on DU that morning and I didn't have any clue what the controversy du jour was.

After I finished my conference call I logged onto DU and if my memory serves that was when I first heard about the two posts that had been hidden by juries because they referenced this photo controversy. In both cases I thought the posts were fairly innocuous -- they were reporting that there was a story reported by Chris Matthews on MSNBC and Jonathan Capehart of the Washington Post alleging that there was a photo from the civil rights era previously believed to be Bernie Sanders, which might not have been him after all.

This was the first I had heard about this issue.

I looked at the hidden posts and I thought the hides were pretty dubious. I've certainly seen some questionable hides before, but I very rarely if ever see posts hidden simply for sharing (in a relatively civil manner) some information gleaned from a reputable mainstream news source. This troubled me.

In both cases the alerts characterized the posts as vile smears which (at the time) seemed over-the-top for what I thought was a just a case of mistaken identity. Big deal, right? One of the alerts referenced a debunking of the vile smear, which I checked out. It seemed pretty compelling -- similar looking clothing, hair, and glasses -- but not a slam dunk because it did not address why the wife and friends of the guy alleged to be in the picture (someone named Bruce Rappaport) seemed to think that this was their friend Bruce. I checked the Capehart article and an article at Time Magazine and the picture on the University of Chicago website and at the time I checked none of them had updated their stories to indicate that any of the facts of the story might be in dispute.

So this looks to me like some jurors just straight-up voted to hide a legit news story because they didn't want to hear what it said, which would be pretty lame. Keep in mind that at this point as far as I am aware the only thing going on here is that people are trying to figure out who's the dude in the picture. Perhaps the over-the-top alert messages should have been a clue, but I've seen over-the-top alert messages plenty of times before so I tend to discount them.

So, as I said, this troubled me. There had been another thread a couple weeks ago where a jury had voted to hide a legit news story about Jane Sanders' tenure at Burlington College that didn't cast her in a positive light, and that was somewhat eyebrow-raising but I figured it was removed under the unofficial don't-attack-family-members (unless they're public figures) principle. But here it was happening again, people voting to hide a legit news story simply because they didn't like what it said. I was getting concerned that this was now a trend, and we had entered a new phase of primary season in which people were using the DU juries to just censor news stories from reputable mainstream sources because they paint their candidates in a less-than-favorable light.

After thinking about it for a moment I decide to just go ahead and start a thread to ask about this allegedly misidentified photo. My intent was twofold: 1) to find out if there was more to the debunking than I was aware of, and 2) to express my concern that people might be using the juries to straight-up censor stuff for no good reason. I knew there would be some pushback, maybe some people would call me biased or complain about the jury system, but I figured most people would not quibble with my points 1 and 2 above so I went ahead and wrote up the post. I called EarlG to get his opinion before I posted, but he didn't pick up the phone so I just went ahead and posted it.

Again, keep in mind: At this point I still think we're just talking about some old picture and whether the person in the photo is Bernie Sanders. I have not seen any of it on cable news, nor have I read many other threads on the topic. The issue of the mis-identification does not seem like a a particularly big deal to me, except for the fact that some people were getting their posts hidden.

But based on some of the replies I am getting, it slowly starts to dawn on me that everyone else thinks this is some kind of swift boat situation. The reason why everyone else is so invested in the identity of the person in the photo is because they believe this is an effort to cast doubt on Bernie Sanders' history of civil rights activism.

By midafternoon my three boys come home from school. They bring along one friend from school for an impromptu playdate. Then a neighbor brings over her three kids so I can watch them while she runs errands. Then another boy from across the street comes over to play, because our house is the one where all the neighborhood kids come to play. Then I get a last-minute phone call from a neighbor asking if I can watch her daughter because her mother is having complications related to breast cancer. So here I am babysitting nine children between the ages of 3 and 11, entirely by myself, while I've got nearly the entire membership of my website piling on to tell me what an awful person I am. The whole situation is totally surreal.

By dinner time all the children leave and I can focus back on DU and it's totally nuts. It was right around the time when somebody called me a "COWARDLY SCUMBAG" that I decided to call EarlG -- which is what I do when DU is blowing up in my face -- to get his feedback and also to just vent. He has of course already seen the whole thing. And as I'm on the phone monologuing and wondering what the hell is happening, he tells me:

"Dude, don't you realize what's going on? They think you are trying to swift-boat Bernie."

He's actually laughing when he says it, even though he knows it's not funny and I know it's not funny. But maybe it is kind of funny in a way. It's a complete clusterfuck and I feel like crap but at least now it all kind of makes sense. I barely slept at all last night, and I spent most of today obsessing over what happened.

Which is a long way of saying that I think a number of you might have gotten the wrong idea about my post. I was actually trying to find out to find out how (and if) the story had actually been debunked, and to express my concern that people might be using the juries to straight-up censor stuff. I totally didn't get why it seemed so important to some of you that I give you my verdict asap, and then go back and edit my OP to make clear. The whole thing just seemed so surreal and over-the-top.

So, in case anyone still cares at this point, yes, I am convinced that it is Bernie Sanders in the photo. And yes, I understand why some people do actually think this might be a coordinated attempt to swift-boat him. And yes I now understand why this was such a big deal. But no, I am not involved.