Jim Durbin's Fictions

Right-wing blogger Jim Durbin of 24thstate has a new post out following his usual pattern of inventing comments and ideas and attributing them to me without any justification. As I've documented previously, every step of the way since he first posted comments on this blog, he has been escalating the antagonistic rhetoric against me, from originally calling me a "liar" and an "idiot," to teaming up with Reboot Congress to purchase the domain Stlactivisthub.com, to dropping not-so-subtle hints about "releasing personal information."

His personal attacks against me started when I posted video of tea partiers blaming Maxine Johnson after one of them had ripped a sign out of her hands during the forum in Hillsboro. Durbin then linked to another one of my videos where a tea party person said, "I wasn't telling you to shut up," and acted as if this proved that my previous post was "a lie." The only problem? My post didn't say anything about tea partiers telling Johnson's family to "shut up:" I merely pointed out that they were blaming the victim, which they were.

Durbin's latest post fits this pattern perfectly. He claims that I "posted a roundup of yesterday's press conference," where I "repudiated" most of my previous reporting and "contradicted" my earlier accusations. Once again, he is relying on fiction born of his imagination, his deficits in reading comprehension, or some combination of the two. My post wasn't a "roundup" of a the press conference: it was a detailed examination of the cynical way in which the tea party used conspiracy theories revolving around the Gladney incident to attack all of their political opponents (BTW, Durbin played a central role in this cynical behavior, falsely accusing Patricia Reddington of filing charges without looking at Gladney's medical records, and even inventing a conspiracy theory where Kenneth Gladney's brother was fired from the animal control department because of persecution from the St. Louis County government).

More importantly, his claims that I have "contradicted" or "repudiated" my previous account, which he calls the "Shriver version of events," is based on nothing more than things that he imagined that I said. There really is no "Shriver version of events," because from the very beginning, as you can see in my first post on the matter, I haven't claimed to know what happened at the event. Here is my quote from the first post:

First, let me point out that I was out of town that week, and so couldn't be at the event. So I am not claiming to know what happened. In fact, I feel very similar to how I felt before the Iraq War: I didn't know that Saddam Hussein did not possess WMDs; I just knew that no one had provided me with any good evidence that he did. Likewise, right now I have yet to be provided with any good evidence that Gladney was the victim rather than the instigator (or co-instigator) of last Thursday's events.

At the press conference, I said (approximately) "The video is inconclusive, and unlike the tea party I don't claim to have divine insight into what happened in the moments beforehand." So Durbin's continued fiction that I have some elaborate description of what happened that night is just false. I don't claim to know what happened, and never have; but I think that any rational person who reviews the evidence that's available would see that there are serious problems with the tea party/Gladney description of the events.

Anyone who's familiar with Durbin's blog 24thstate would know that he's meticulous about taking screenshots and saving any evidence he can use against the people he dislikes. So if he had evidence that there was a "Shriver version of events," that was contradicted, he would present it. But he doesn't, so he won't. He'll just continue to argue with the figments of his imagination that arise from his assumptions of what "beard and ponytail types," must be like, and his preconceived notions that all union workers are lazy and immoral.