Ellis Washington: Flamboyantly Wrong

From the beginning of his WorldNetDaily column, Ellis Washington has had several hallmarks: florid classical and literary allusions, nasty insults, and false or misleading information. That hasn't changed -- if anything, Washington's writing has gotten more floridly allusive, nasty and inaccurate.

Having pretty well exhausted his bag of Obama smears -- Nazi, fascist, devil, gangster, etc. -- in the first few months of the Obama presidency, Washington was forced to scrounge up a more obscure insult in his April 25 WorldNetDaily column:

Returning to Orwell's "1984," which character would Obama be if instead of "1984" Orwell wrote "2009"? While most would probably answer Big Brother, I would disagree, for Big Brother was the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent machinery of the State. Obama, the transcendent, messianic, FDResque figure is more akin to Goldstein, the minister of propaganda who with the help of his fascist legions spent day and night following one credo: Your liberty, your money, your property, your soul all belong to the State (federal government).

Washington doesn't remember "1984" that well, because Goldstein was not the minister of propaganda. As World O'Crap summarized:

In that same column, Washington seemed to be trying to walk back some of his previous smears. He goes on to insist, "No, Obama is not a Hitler" -- thus contradicting his own previous endorsement of a student who likened Obama to Hitler.

But Washington is still prone to the hyperbolically overblown attack. At one point, he asserts: "Indeed, Obama is a pathological liar. Every speech, every domestic and foreign policy, every executive order, every economic policy, every political appointee and every future Supreme Court nominee -- all LIES!" At no point does he even bother to support his claim, which he must surely know is, er, less than true. Then again, he works for a liar and is published alongside many more lies, and lying and smearing is arguably what WND pays him to do.

Ironically, in a column designed to brand Obama as a liar as part of his desperate bid to prove Obama has violated every single one of the Ten Commandments, Washington demonstrated yet again that he himself is a liar. And to top it all off -- as well as an apparent effort to suck up to his WND bosses -- Washington officially buys into the Obama birth certificate conspiracy, another thing he must surely know is a lie and a fraud.

Washington needs to look past his near-pathological hatred of Obama to keep in mind another biblical truism: let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

"1984" is not the only work of fiction Washington has managed to miss the point of. In his May 20 column, which is yet another love letter to Michael Savage, Washington writes:

In the 1991 movie “Silence of the Lambs,” based on a novel by Thomas Harris, Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), a brilliant but evil psychiatrist, begins a game of quid pro quo with Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster), a young FBI trainee seeking the advice of the imprisoned Lecter on capturing a serial murder with the alias, "Buffalo Bill." In one telling scene, Starling tells of how she was orphaned, relocated to an uncle’s farm, discovered the horror of the lambs going to the slaughterhouse and unsuccessfully tried to save one of the little lambs.

That horrific, indelible scene that haunted her all those years was the lambs’ seeming indifference and silence in the face of utter slaughter.

It is the Savage silence of the lambs.

But as World O' Crap pointed out, "the point of that 'indelible scene' was that Agent Starling was haunted by the screaming of the lambs, and hoped that by helping a kidnapped young woman escape death at the hands of a serial killer, she could finally silence their screams."

Nevertheless, Washington repeated his incorrect interpretation in his Aug. 8 column, complete with the melodramatic howl, "All I can hear is the hypocritical, unconsoling Savage silence of the lambs!" To which World O'Crap responded: "Oh, sorry, Prof, I couldn’t hear the silent lambs. I had John Cage’s 4'33" turned way up."

Washington also gets facts wrong outside the world of fiction. For instance, he wrote in his Nov. 7 column:

What was Obama doing the night the election returns were coming in? According to his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, Obama was enjoying a sycophantic HBO documentary about himself and his presidential campaign rather than watching the election returns.

If the Roman despot Nero fiddled while Rome burned, then surely it can be said that Obama watched TV while the Democrat Party crashed and burned in the special elections Nov. 3.

In fact, Gibbs never said that. Fox News reported the claim but later retracted it, with Major Garrett claiming he had "misheard" Gibbs and that Gibbs was pointing to the HBO documentary as evidence that Obama does not routinely watch election returns.

In his June 27 WorldNetDaily column, Washington whined that "Iran has come to America," citing a case where "a federal judge has recently upheld a decision by festival organizers in Dearborn, which is about 30 percent Muslim, to ban a Christian ministry from handing out religious tracts on public sidewalks." Washington added: "If America wasn't already a benign dictatorship, Congress would have immediately drawn up articles of impeachment against this renegade judge for so blatantly abridging freedom of religion and freedom of association protected by the First Amendment."

Related articles on ConWebWatch: Obama Hate Central Ellis Washington's Obama Derangement Savage Sycophancy

Washington, unfortunately, got his information from his employer, linking to a June 19 WND article by Bob Unruh on the issue. Washington left out numerous facts in his reference to the incident, making it sound much worse than it is. The ban applies only to streets occupied by an Arab festival -- not to all "public sidewalks," as Washington suggests -- and the Christian ministry would still be permitted to hand out its tracts, just in a designated area.

Further, both Unruh and Washington failed to note, as the Detroit Free Press did, that Dearborn officials had been working with the group to accommodate it, that the city was never notified of the lawsuit when it was filed by right-wing legal group Thomas More Legal Center, and that the city viewed the controversy as a publicity stunt.

Washington's reign of error continued in his Nov. 14 column:

The second policy America has launched against itself is the infamous "Gorelick Wall." What is the Gorelick Wall? It is a policy developed by Clinton appointee and former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, who after the first terrorist bombings of the World Trade Center of Feb. 26, 1993, was placed as the head of a blue-ribbon commission to find the causes in our internal security that allowed these bombings to occur.

In March 1995, Gorelick cowrote a radical and treasonous memo that, in the words of Attorney General John Ashcroft, goes "beyond what is legally required ... [to] prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation."

What does this mean? It means that the FBI cannot share intelligence with the CIA, the NSA, the DEA, ATF, the military or any other security agency in America. It is a unilateral, self-binding policy reminiscent of the proverbial saying, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing.

As ConWebWatch has repeatedly pointed out, Gorelick didn't create the so-called "wall"; it was created in 1978. Her 1995 memo merely detailed procedures that she said permitted a freer exchange of information between criminal and counterterror investigators than had been allowed under the Reagan and first Bush administrations. Additionally, she said, then-attorney general John Ashcroft's own deputy attorney formally reaffirmed the 1995 guidelines just a month before 9/11.

Further, Gorelick's memo applied only to the FBI and the Justice Department, not military and defense operations, so it had no bearing on whether or not information about alleged Fort Hood shooter Nadal Malik Hasan was shared between them, as Washington suggests.

Oddly, contradicting his rant, Washington acknowledged some of this later in his column; he repeated Sen. Slade Gorton's statement that "Nothing Jamie Gorelick wrote had the slightest impact on the Department of Defense or its willingness or ability to share intelligence information with other intelligence agencies," then adds that "I realize that we can't put all the blame on poor Ms. Gorelick," going on to attack "the treasonous 'Church Committee' of Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, in 1975. Church was one of the many enemies within that virtually destroyed the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies under the pretext of protecting Americans from being spied on, forcing the agencies to comply with the restrictive strictures of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. Thanks, President Carter!"

The Church Committee was an attempt to rein in the excesses of the FBI and CIA, such as trying to assassinate foreign leaders and rifling through people's mail without a warrant.

But Washington then flip-flopped again, stating: "I lay Maj. Hasan's murderous treachery directly at the feet of the Church Committee, for leading to FISA in 1978, the 1995 Gorelick Wall memo and, finally, to the 'manmade disaster' policies of Obama in 2009." He curiously hold Ashcroft harmless, even though his office reaffirmed Gorelick's guidelines a month before 9/11.

He concludes: "To paraphrase President Ronald Reagan's 1987 speech at Berlin, 'Mr. Obama tear down this Gorelick Wall!'" This is nonsensical because it is already torn down; the Patriot Act effectively removed it.

Washington has also been keeping up the Obama smears as well. In his Sept. 26 column, Washington attacked Obama's speech to the United Nations, which he claimed "was delivered with the dispassionate indifference of a man who was handed a speech others wrote for him and loaded into his teleprompter for him to read like a robot" and insists "could just as easily been written by Col. Moammar Gadhafi." Washington goes on to claim that Obama's goal of a Palestinian state -- a goal not unlike that of most previous U.S. presidents -- contains "perhaps the most evil, anti-Semitic language I've ever heard from any American president against Israel."

Washington then veered into Godwin's Law territory -- where he has been before -- attacking Obama's goal of Middle East peace: "What 'goal' does Obama wish to pursue for God's chosen people? Is Obama's 'goal' tantamount to Hitler's 'Final Solution' regarding the nation of Israel?"

Then Washington claimed he's trying "[n]ot to be histrionic here." Feel free to take a few moments to laugh your head off.

Ah, but Washington wasn't done with his histrionics. He concluded:

The Muslim world has dreamed of this day when a weak, Quisling leader in America like Obama would seek to curry favor of the Muslim nations to bolster his own universal reputation. The price? – a revival of Hitler's "Final Solution" and the genocide of the independent nation-state of Israel.

And, thus, Washington achieves the full Godwin.

Obama's not the only non-conservative Washington likes to smear. He devoted his Oct. 3 column to attacking two "doyens of liberalism," Gore Vidal and Garrison Keillor. Washington described Vidal as "a petite Leni Riefenstahl," and made a big deal out of noting that Vidal's first book, "The City and the Pillar," was "a sexual tome that infuriated mainstream critics in that this was one of the first major American novels to feature conspicuous homosexuality." He went on to call Keillor "a petite Walter Duranty." Washington concluded by declaring: "Indeed, Mr. Gore Vidal, Mr. Garrison Keillor and President Barack Obama, your replacements have arrived and they are – God, America's Founding Fathers and We the People."

But for Washington in full hate effect, it's hard to top his May 9 column. He began by quoting his own earlier erroneous assertion that the character of Goldstein in George Orwell's "1984" was Big Brother's "minister of propaganda." Here's the first actual paragraph: