A handful of diaries and comments over the past few days have motivated me to set up a new Group here named Cursus Inhonorum to discuss the "experts" whose claims are so beloved by right-wing media and politicians.
My points of reference:
1) the intro to BruinKid's diary from Monday:
Fox News terrorism "expert" Steven Emerson made quite a splash when he made this bizarre claim.
2) the intro to
News Corpse's
diary from this morning:
Earlier this week Fox News hosted Steven Emerson, an alleged terrorism expert, who claimed that the entire city of Birmingham, England was occupied by radical Muslims and was inaccessible to anyone else.
3) Jeremy Scahill's articulation of a "Terrorism Expert Industrial Complex," discussed in this diary from Tuesday by
xxdr zombiexx:
Scahill: "You have people on as paid analysts that are largely frauds who have made a lot of money off of portraying themselves as terror experts, and have no actual on-the-ground experience.”
4)
Hunter's typically delightful mockery of Louie Gohmert in Wednesday's
America's Dumbest Congressman praises Egyptian dictator, still thinks Obama is a secret Muslim.
That last one, Hunter's diary on Gohmert, may at first glance seem a strange fit with the three other clear references to purported/alleged/self-proclaimed "experts." Yet when I followed some links to Gohmert's wild-eyed speechification I came across an additional point: namely, that Gohmert had also read into the Congressional Record that day a piece from PJMedia by another purported terrorism and national security "expert" by the name of Patrick S. Poole.
I discussed Poole—his lack of qualifications and credentials, his rise through the ranks of right-wing groups, his associations with "Fear, Inc." and his theocratic bent—at some length in last year's On the Inexpertise of a Right-Wing Expert and I sincerely believe that similar efforts addressing the stable of purported and self-proclaimed right-wing "experts" would be of tremendous value to this community.
While I absolutely love Hunter's and others' mockery of the right's truth-claims, it seems to me that there's a compelling need to delve below the superficial idiocy of such comments and citations and expose in some detail the biographies and associated discursive communities of "experts" like Emerson and Poole who are, in reality, more "performers" than pundits.
So, anyone up for excavating these bullshit-artists?
Drop a note in a comment, join the group in whatever capacity you'd like, and let's start brainstorming how to make this work!
New Group: Cursus Inhonorum
Profile: Ever wonder how those purported “experts” beloved by right-wing media and politicians gained their claims to authority? Wonder no more! Cursus Inhonorum seeks to publish and republish materials that delve below the superficial idiocy of truth-claims made by such “experts” in order both to lay bare their actual inexpertise (biography) and to expose the networks-of-interest (discursive analysis) whose views they represent (performance) as neutral truth. Welcome to the meta below the mockery.