Known Plaintext

Let’s start off with the preliminaries: I am not a Michele Bachmann fan. I’m not even close. I hold her in slightly lower esteem than I do the President. She’s both more divisive and more of an ideolog. I see little to nothing of virtue in her campaign, and for that reason I’m content to give her as much attention as I give, say, the Natural Law Party — which is to say, none at all.

That said, certain kinds of behavior are wrong, wrong, wrong, regardless of whom they are directed against. Taking a line out of context and deliberately miscaptioning it in order to make her appear racist is one of those things.

Also, for the record: the offender claims he was driven to do this by Bachmann’s signing of the Iowa Marriage Pledge, which — according to the offender — declares that children of black parents were better off during the slavery era. To this, I have two statements:

1. As an Iowan, I find the “Iowa Marriage Pledge” to not be in accordance with the values I learned from my Iowa family and Iowa community, and
2. The Iowa Marriage Pledge never says such a thing: it instead cites a study that claims more black children grow up in single parent environments today than during the slavery era.

Stacy McCain, the journalist whose video was misappropriated to libel Ms. Bachmann, is promising to vigorously pursue copyright infringement claims against the blogger sonufabitch in question. Although I generally have grave reservations about the state of copyright law today, I have no qualms about wishing Mr. McCain luck. Certain things ought be beyond the pale: racist libel ought be one of them.

I also note the blogger sonufabitch is making a libel defense much more difficult: in his apology he outright declares he was motivated by anger over Bachmann’s support of the Iowa Marriage Pledge — making it very difficult to later on claim absence of malice.

If you have more questions about this, please feel free to leave questions here. One of Mr. McCain’s associates, Kevin Trainor, follows me on LJ and DW. I feel pretty confident Kevin (ditching the 'Mr.' because he and I are friends, and I feel comfortable calling him by the familiar) will be happy to answer any questions.