Motley Moose – Archive

Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

A Christmas Eve Outing

Subtitled: Cautionary Tales from the Great Orange Satan.

Well I’m home from my holiday day trip to Philadelphia, but much of my Christmas Eve, and time in the last week was taken  up with a strange and twisted adventure in blogging over at GOS.

Since I’m still wide awake (too much turkey dinner and desert) I thought this might be of interest to those of you who still follow GOS and for those of you who remember a certain savage PUMA who created much ugliness at MyDD.

A very short time  ago at GOS a new diarist arrived on the scene, and shot almost immediately into the realms of rec list fame and fortune with this diary.

Poverty, Principles, Tribalism & Tax Cuts

Said diarist – using the nick “RainbowGirl” introduced herself as a “poor ethnic minority” who “lives in the projects” and who felt compelled to write her very first shiny diary to attack Obamas tax compromise which was disturbing “the blacks” in her housing project.

This is my first diary on Daily Kos. As I have told others since I joined around a week ago, though I am a new registered user here, I have been around, lurking, for years. I suffered through Lamont/LieberFraud, watched the Primary Wars (when I supported Obama) and have been here since. Reading and watching.

I signed up a week ago after I learned about the proposed tax “compromise” by Barack Obama. That was my breaking point, so to speak. I realized I had to start speaking out against what I was seeing.

I am a very poor person of ethnic minority status. I live in the projects and am unemployed. I have been unemployed well beyond the 99’ers and probably won’t be employed again anytime soon. I live day to day, week to week, check to check.

I have never owned a car, or any other means of transportation save a bicycle. I live in a region of the United States where winter is bitter. I have to take the bus pretty much anywhere, and that includes to Wal-Mart (I hate it, but it’s the cheapest) to buy groceries. I often have to do just this in the dead of winter and navigate a considerable walk back to my apartment building while watching I dont fall on ice in the street and sidewalks.

My apartment is around 575 square feet or so. I have lived here around a decade. I’ve seen the rats, dealt with the unending drafts that come from living in a high-rise and have endured the looks that come when I tell people I live in “one of those places.” You know, the ghetto.

Bundled into this marvel was her assertion that there was possibly a dark conspiracy afoot – masterminded by two conspirators well versed in manipulation of tribal blacks – trained community organizer Barack Obama and his Svengali David Axelrod.

A conspiracy to stifle white progressive voices by guilt tripping them about Obamas race…spread throughout the blogosphere by black plants and their allies.

Here’s part of her “concerns”:

Do you think David Axelrod, a man who has apparently specialized in working with black candidates, and a man who hails from a city that is known for its racial politics, understands the political utility of the White Guilt concept?

Do you think that the purported master of AstroTurfing would understand the value in sending out people to various sites on the internet to “rein-in” those damned progressives — many of them white — who are incredibly upset that the man he advises, President Obama, wants to give $700 billion to the rich when people like me have nothing?

Do you think Barack Obama, the community organizer, would know if his team/supporters were using pressure tactics against supposed allies?

She repeated her meme of her poverty over and over in her diaries and in the hundreds of comments she managed to rack up  in a very short space of time she continued to bemoan  her poverty and continued unemployment.

She assured everyone  white that she had come like Saint Joan to speak out on their behalf – since as an ethnic minority she was not constrained by either guilt nor the underhanded playing of race cards.

Her admirers applauded her courage, tipped and rec’ed profusely and she coyly accepted their tribute, and egged them on in the relentless pursuit of ridding “us” of Obama.

This tale doesn’t have a happy ending – for her.

Or mayhap it does – I’ll leave you to be the judges.

There were some folks at Dkos who smelled something rotten in Denmark at the first outing.  

A majority of folks – black, white and brown who hang out at Black Kos.  A certain well known diarist named Bob Johnson.  A white sociologist named hepshiba.

The push-back and questions started in her first diary and continued as she posted more, but the voices raising questions about the Rainbow woman were either ignored or hiderated.

She followed with another diary – and then a strange one:

On Being Keyser Soze

In which she defended herself against attacks and questions from diarists like hepshiba and questions I raised about her purported “ethnic minority” status, and other comments from those who hadn’t bought her wares.

Her Christmas Eve Gift to us all was her final opus on Daily Kos.

President Obama & Poor Americans of Color

Which shot to the top of the rec list.  

Her opening statements are heart wrenching :

Being poor is never enjoyable.

There are times, though, when the pain of poverty is even more acute.

One of those times is the holiday season.

When others are gathering with friends and family, poor people feel even more isolated than they usually do. They can feel more shame and powerlessness than that which they experience on a daily basis.

She tore at the heartstrings of good Kossaks.

Excuse me  if I say that I refused to shed a tear or grab for a hankie.

But then I had decided by diary 1 that she was a ringer.  Diarist ThisIsMyTime wrote a rebuttal

Which she entered.

But he also updated his diary after an interesting turn of events.

BREAKING UPDATE: My Criticism To The Diary “President Obama & Poor Americans of Color”

Which contained this interesting bit of news:

UPDATE: PER Meteor Blades, THE DIARIST, RainbowGirl, AUTHOR OF THE DIARY BEING DISCUSSED HAS BEEN FOUND TO BE A ZOMBIE AND IS NOW RE-BANNED!

Hat tip to Bob Johnson for bringing this to everyone’s attention first. Thank you MB for your due diligence work in getting to the bottom of this.

Bob Johnson in this thread identifies our new ethnic minority poor girl from the projects

Linfar.

Notorious PUMA, banned from Dkos for racist screeds, removed from MyDD and then re-instated.

Several other folks had done a linguistic analysis of her text which was inconsistent with the persona she had adopted.

Others found inconsistencies in her copious comments

Many of us just didn’t buy the bullshit from jumpstreet.

For questioning her about her  purported “ethnic minority” status, on Christmas eve I was accused by one of her admirers  of threatening her with violence by  attempting to pressure her to drop her anonymity, as well as “wilding”.  Duh.

No matter.  She is banned.

But I raise this sordid little bedtime story here as a cautionary tale.  There are some sick people on the net – and some are still out there in cyberland plotting revenge for past perceived wrongs..  

That a twisted angry white woman would adopt a faux “colored” persona to manipulate and enflame Obama detractors and play on their own racial ineptitudes does not surprise me.

There are now a few mea culpa diaries.  There is also this recap by a black diarist:

Barack Obama, Race Traitor! with a snark headline.

But there are still too many people defending Linfar, and attacking those who outed her.

What do we learn from this bedtime story?

Beware of strangers bearing shiny gifts to torpedo the Presidency.

Especially those who use blackface to do so.

Are there legitimate critiques of the administration.  Yes.  

But not when wrapped in malodorous racism.

I suppose Linfar found a lump of coal in her stocking.

Appropriately black.


Categories: Uncategorized.

/ 107 Comments

107 comments

  1. John Allen

    There was some speculation about linfar by some of the people here. I missed all of that. About the only time I go to dkos is when one of you drags me there. I also missed linfar’s brief return to the Moose.

    I think two of the most vocal anti-Obama voices on the left are from PUMAs, who have always hated him, and some Edwards supporters who need to take out their anger over the loss of their populist utopia on someone other than their flawed hero.  

  2. Rashaverak

    I did not follow the rise and fall of RainbowGirl on DK as it was happening.  I came across a mention of it after the fact, and then went back and read most of the acts of the play.

    One thing that struck me at the outset was this aspect of RG’s self-description.

    This is my first diary on Daily Kos. As I have told others since I joined around a week ago, though I am a new registered user here, I have been around, lurking, for years. I suffered through Lamont/LieberFraud, watched the Primary Wars (when I supported Obama) and have been here since. Reading and watching.

    It seemed very odd that someone who was:

        (a) interested enough in the political process to “suffer” through the Democratic Senatorial primary in Connecticut; and

        (b) as skilled a writer as she is,

    would not have registered at DK during the Primary Wars and thrown her two cents in the ring.

    It seemed very odd that the most recent events would finally compel her to give up the life of a lurker, to register at DK, and to start posting diaries, especially the hand-grenade-in-the-middle-of-the-Christmas-dinner-table type of diaries that she started to post.

    I would have thought that the Primary Wars would have brought such a person out of the wings and onto the stage, front and center.

    Although I read DK and MyDD during the primary wars, I did not engage in discussion with the likes of Linfar, Allegre, TexasDarlin’, etc.  The first and only exchange that I had with Linfar was right here, in these Purple Precincts.  She posted a diary in which she likened herself to Shirley Sherrod.

    http://www.motleymoose.com/sho…

    Huffpo Sherroded Me

    I was asked by the Huffinton Post during the Primary Campaign to follow Hillary Clinton on the west coast–using my own dime–since this is when Huffpo was promoting ‘citizen journalism’– and write stories demonstrating she was a liar by writing that in different places she slanted her message to the audience.

    Huffpo is screaming NoNoNo this morning at Jim VandeHai of Politico who yesterday asserted that the HuffingtonPost trained Andrew Bretibart, the guy  who recently slimed Shirley Sherrod and suckered the Obama Adminstration into firing her from her job.

    So Politico’s VandeHai is asserting that the Huffington Post uses Breitbart methods of distorting and slanting the news.

    Is there anyone who things [sic] otherwise? Fox is the conservative shoutfest, Huffpo the liberal fog machine. And both slant, distort and sensationalize the shortcomings of those they oppose

    I objected to what I considered her misappropriation of the good name of Shirley Sherrod.  I felt it was inappropriate in the extreme for her to liken what HuffPo may have done to her — deciding not to publish any more pieces by her — to what Breitbart, Fox news, Limbaugh and the rest of the Mighty Right-Wing Wurlitzer did to Ms. Sherrod.

    I felt that it was especially inappropriate for Ms. Farley to claim victimhood and to metaphorically link herself to Ms. Sherrod, considering that Ms. Farley, back during the Primary Wars, had made what one might call, with the utmost charity, comments of very questionable taste and propriety about then-Senator Barack Obama and his wife, and about Oprah Winfrey.

    Dispensing with charity, one might call the statements in question overtly and disgustingly racist.

    The nature of those comments prompted me to quote some of them in my comments to her diary, whereupon she accused me of cyberstalking her.

    That one experience was enough to last me a lifetime.  So, I’m happy to say that I did not enter into dialog with “RainbowGirl” on DK.

    It is particularly icky (to use a scientific term) for someone with such a history to pretend to be a poor, struggling Black woman who lives in “the projects,” to voice her feelings of having been sold down the river by Barack Obama, the race traitor.

    It is evident that Ms. Farley is an intelligent person, and that she knows how to write well.  It is also evident that she is shrewd, has studied or is subconciously attuned to her audience, and knows what buttons to press to really get things rolling.  Whether she did this for pay or simply for twisted enjoyment, or for both, I don’t know.

    It certainly stands as an abject lesson in the dynamics of on-line individual and group behavior.  Her yarns were pure gold — polished gold — to a good number of the more vocal DK members.  Their reactions to those who questioned her bona fides are also telling.

    It will be interesting to see what lessons, if any, those who swallowed the chum that “RainbowGirl” threw out may draw from this incident.

    I have not done any formal or algorithmic analysis of RainbowGirl’s postings, but my gut tells me that Bob Johnson and Meteor Blades have her pegged, dead to rights.

    She should channel her not-inconsiderable talents in a more productive direction.

  3. spacemanspiff

    I’m pretty sure you and maybe fogiv have figured out it’s me by now. I mostly rec and for some reason have lost my rating privileges. It’s strange because barely commenting means I might have 30 to 40 comments in 3 years. I do rec a lot of diaries though. Which makes me wonder if this is why I can’t rate comments. I have never broken any rules nor recieved any type of warning. I don’t really care so I haven’t emailed anybody about it over there. But I sometimes read over the top and downright nasty comments by people who get away with anything. I believe the stalkosrazzi must have complained about this dude who only rates and recs sane people on that site.

    Linfar? Fuck her.

    What are your thoughts on the new Dkos hermanita? I’ve been meaning to ask you about it.  

  4. louisprandtl

    I cannot say what prompted LinFar’s latest impersonation.  Bob Johnson pointed out that she could’ve made some valid points with the quotations from Cornell West and Bob Hebert. But in order to circumvent the GOS ban (because of her past racist comments) she created her new sockpuppet RainbowGirl. The self victimization aspect(that Sricki and you had pointed out before) was also apparent in her vain attempt to masquerade as part of the ethnic minority. LinFar used to be a talented writer, (her book on sexual harassment of women in workplace in 70s did pioneer the field) unfortunately now is a mere shadow filled with blinded hate. I hope she finds peace and understands why what she had written was so offensive and plainly racist.

  5. sricki

    non-PUMA online to still feel pity for linfar. Though I butted heads with her on MyDD, I also corresponded with her privately a few times when she was dealing with some caretaker issues that I understood all too well. At that time, my recent experiences and what she said she was going through engendered a certain amount of empathy. That is lost to me now, and it never fully developed in the first place since I am, as some of you may know, rather hesitant to trust people — even people I know “in real life.” It may be that she used the “mom is sick” line on MyDD to gain sympathy and then attempted to manipulate me with it further due to experiences she knew I’d had with my grandmother. Who knows.

    Back to pity, though. I do pity her, even now, but note that I draw a very clear distinction between pity and sympathy. She is indeed a pitiable figure, but not in my opinion a sympathetic one. I missed the whole “Rainbow” kerfuffle (and I am not sorry for it), but I do not believe she was paid to engage at dKos in that manner. Linfar is fueled, in my view, primarily by bitterness. Such is the case with many PUMAs, the “legitimate” ones having placed all of their hopes and dreams in a candidacy (Hillary’s) which would somehow in their opinion “right the wrongs” perpetrated against them by a society hellbent on oppressing women. And some of them, like linfar, have — by virtue of their age — likely indeed endured far more sexism than I have as a much younger woman.

    Although linfar may fight for women’s rights in her own way, that way is contaminated by bitterness. Bitterness is always a pollutant, and it taints her attempts to fight for a good cause which I think she really believes in. She shoots herself in the foot, so to speak. I, on the other hand, am no warrior woman. The cause of my life will be trying to help people on a much smaller — and perhaps more personal — scale. And though I do believe that all behaviors have, at a most fundamental level, some roots in selfishness even when it is not wildly apparent, I would like to hope that my reasons are less selfish than linfar’s. Linfar may say that she is fighting for “women’s rights,” but the truth is that she is seeking large scale vengeance and vindication.

    But I do pity her. Bitterness and rage are unhealthy emotions, and no life fueled by such feelings can be a happy one. I hope that one day the demons within her are quieted and that she learns to soothe whatever wounds brought her to where she is.

    As an aside, why does everyone praise linfar’s writing as if it were something special? Most well-known people on political blogs are reasonably articulate, and I don’t understand why linfar is consistently lauded (or at least acknowledged) for being especially talented. This is not to say that I think she is a “poor” writer, but I do not, for example, consider her nearly as well “spoken” as most here on The Moose. Much of her writing is too… what’s the word… well, too hokey or campy (like a B grade movie) for my tastes. Am I mistaken in thinking that her prose falls rather short of spectacular?

  6. Peter Jukes

    …I missed this outing because of the prolonged vacations here around Christmas. I would have loved to have been part of the great detective work by Bob Johnson and others. We got back a way. One of the reasons I got banned from MYDD in the first place was because of publicly upbraiding Jerome for his banning of Bob: so it was nice to see him back in surly truculent action. Linfar I also knew of old from MYDD.

    This whole sorry episode just convinces me further that some of the DKOS meltdown is PUMA led. Obviously, the main fractious fraction is the Chomskyite left, but I’ve been amazed how quickly they’ve fallen, out of sheer defensiveness, for the PUMA meme of ‘reverse racism’ and ‘chicago politics’ and the idea that Obama’s blackness is used oppressively.

    Regardless of whether I pity or despise Linfar as a person, we’ve got to see the damaging effect of identity politics here, which once again fractions off the left into a myriad of competing sub-groups and special interest claims. Linfar thinks her form of 70s feminism trumps other considerations such as race. Like many PUMAs, she’s fallen for the idea that group rights for feminists, latinos, blacks, white working class etc. are at the expense of another group. It’s as if rights were akin to money, and can only be dished out according to limited budgets, when in fact rights are universal.

    So this leads Linfar from Hillary support to an avowed sympathy for Sarah Palin. Regardless of Palin’s politics, her vagina and faux ‘working class’ credentials trump any kind of policies that may come into her head. In this celebrity driven idea of politics, a female president is good for you because you identify with her. As McDonnell said “I am you.”

    This mixture of identity politics and celebrity culture is very dangerous across the US political spectrum. Linfar is no exception in this, and represents a toxic historic trend. Like a wannabe Hamsher, Huffington, Greenwald etc. she can’t bear to be out of the limelight, and is willing to risk exposure as a fraud for the celebrity satisfaction of being heard, getting on the rec list, receiving the ego stroke of acolytes.

    Add to that her extreme identification with women of a certain age, class and ethnic background: her anger at anyone who threatens the unique victimhood of her self identified group: and Linfar represents a quite potent political force. She is a classic Palinite, and I’m quietly grateful at the way she unconsciously reveals the psychological mechanisms at work here.

    Denise, Bob J, Sricki and Kysen have dissected and demolished this mentality in different ways. But whether their diagnosis comes from pity to anger, they’ve done us all a service. They’ve given us the tools to understand this phenomenon which I truly think will play a large role in the next two years. They have forewarned and forearmed us for the larger struggle to come.  

  7. HappyinVT

    Last night, bored at work, I paused at GOS and noticed at the top of the wreck list a story about Obama going after teacher’s unions.  Didn’t bother to click because, knowing the diarist, I figured it would devolve into a bunch of back and forth.

    Went back this morning and saw this diary:  How to start a flame war with bullsh*t (w/ video!) in response to that first diary.

    Because, lo and behold, the first diary is 1) based on a cnn.com story about all the teachers at a RI school being fired ~ in February 2010 because it was a very poorly rated school.  Additionally, the diarist claims that Obama and Duncan “applauded the move” but offers no proof.

    Someone, again, did some homework and updated the story to include those teachers have been rehired and are being paid to take professional development classes.

    Again, there are legitimate issues with the Administration’s education policies but, come one, let’s be honest in the discussion.

  10. canadian gal

    firstly happy holidays to all.

    this story is just so unbelievable – not in the sense of believability, but well… who has time for this nonsense? i read this diary and the great comments attached and don’t have enough time to fierce them all let alone set up multiple false personas online.

    on a personal note – if this is all accurate and it is indeed linfar… it makes me really very sad. i can’t quite put it into words right now.

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