i don't care which side of the aisle they call home.

sP

almost no integrity at all. there are, of course, pockets of it out there, but it seems to be ignored for the glitz and rush of the lies we are told.

sP

and actually what i thought when i was writing it...

was there a time when liars and frauds were shunned? not trying to be flippant... but it just seems it has been this way for a long while.

sP

When he went on Saturday Night Live and made a serial liar "funny."

BTW, Lovitiz is now a right-winger.

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/jon-lovitz-to-megyn-kelly-people-have-called-me-a-nazi-for-anti-obama-rant/

"He/she did it first!" Is laughable.

I remember that from elementary school.

was a way to escape whatever issues she had, and found it paid reasonably well.

Not much different from MJ, who went far beyond anything Rachel Dolezal could dream of. Billo is the opposite, he loves himself far too much. And yeah, there are double-standards in the way we judge liars.

about her parents and child abuse set her above those named. Even though "O Reilly and Barton lied through their teeth they didn't tell lies about others...oh well except the guy O Reilly dragged out of the street...but he didn't blame him.

In the past or are now passing for white folks

It's not like what Rachel Dolezal is some new thing, she just did it in reverse.

Agree with the last paragraph and hope she didn't use her privilege to participate in programs meant for AA's or minorities either.

just placed on medical leave and psychologically helped.


rocktivity

You're right.

It's just their audience doesn't give a shit about credibility. Going by that standard you can give a pass to most any fraud.

considering the examples you gave, I wonder why nobody mentions Hillary Clinton's narrow escape from sniper fire in Bosnia when discussing similar incidents of "fibbing".
The HRC example is more similar to Brian Williams and Bill O'Reilly than Dolezal (in fact are the same, being false war credentials aggrandizement) - and no doubt more egregious since HRC is a politician running for president then and now.

Yet the ownership of DU supports HRC. No problems. Markos Moulitsas supports HRC. No problems. HRC has her own group at DU. No problems. HRC has numerous supporters at DU. Again, no problems.

Is HRC treated "more fairly" because she's a famous and powerful Dem?

If someone wants Dolezal, Williams and O'Reilly fired, how can they justify a vote for HRC?

How about the right-wing Concerned Women of America? As I recall, at least one of their heads was a full-blown XY chromosomed, anatomically-correct male, an inconvenient datum the wing-nuts will try very hard not to remember.

As for Rachel Dolezal and the NAACP, this particular post-middle aged white guy is staying out of it.

Mostly those whose reps really don't depend on the lies.

I have no idea who David Barton is. But he doesn't touch any hot topics in American politics, and from a cursorily glimpse at Wikipedia they're irrelevant to what he is and how he got there.

Dolezhal is more akin to the U. Colorado professor or Warren who claimed to be more Native American than they were. While Warren allegedly benefited from her status--something I honestly don't know or case about--Ward Churchill, however, seriously did benefit and leveraged it into a fraudulent career. The "smallpox blankets" canard is pretty much his baby. Even the incident he refers to along the Mississippi was taken rather wildly out of context, and only a desire to believe the story kept people from looking at the actual records ... which didn't agree with Churchill. Helping to confirm this was the use of making the claim under a pseudonym, which he then was able to confirm. Voila: Two sources agree, that's enough for most "I wanna believe" people.

There was also the anti-gun advocate's research that turned out to be, um, wrong. But widely accepted for a while. Not because of his great research methodology, but because it was useful research.

Those matter a great deal more than O'Reilley, Barton (whose work, apparently, was retracted as well and who was punished in a sense, just not by "his own&quot , Warren, or Dolezal.

However, O'Reilley and Barton touch upon the right/left divide. They must be punished to the greatest extent possible, all the more so if any of ours is.

And Dolezal dares, from what I've read in some posts, to usurp in the most uppity way possible a black identity that she didn't earn and doesn't deserve. While black Americans passing as white happens, a white American passing as black seems to undermine a crucial bit of a counter-narrative and that undermining has to be explained away.

I don't much care about Dolezal. I do find the negative reactions to her intriguing, though--there are a number of them, and trying to sort out the basis for them is fascinating. In some cases there's almost a genetic identicalness between culture and race; in another, blackness is a worldwide thing and all blacks have some cultural traits that make them unique and special; in others, there's like a badge to be earned, a pride that cannot be shared. With the need to derogate her that speaks more to the writer than it does to Dolezalova. (Then again, many African-Americans that assimilate to "whiteness" are also derogated, so there is symmetry--not a pleasant symmetry, mind you.)