I woke up to find this posted on one of my threads.
Storobin Responds to Gatemouth: http://gestetnerupdates.com/2012/02/03/video-gop-nys-senate-candidate-david-storobin-interview/. To save 15 minutes of your life, start at 15:00.
Actually, I’d start at 11:00 or 12:00.
First let’s talk about me:
STOROBIN: My articles are still very much available.
GATE: I guess that depends upon what your definition of “very much available” is. Many are very hard to find. I’m pretty sure a few I looked at in December, when I first took up this task (before the two data bases which contained a fully indexed list of what appeared to be most of Storobin’s articles were either wiped or closed), are gone entirely.
Of the articles which still do exist, many were extremely hard to locate. For instance, Storobin’s surprisingly sympathetic article about Russian collaborators with the Nazis, “Pro-Axis Russians: Terrorists … and Democratic Capitalists,” is seemingly only available in English on the white supremacist hate site; the Vanguard News Network Forum, where I think it belongs.
And Storobin’s full throated defense of Vladimir Putin’s poaching players from the National Hockey League seems to appear only on what seems to be a very strange sports discussion board.
STOROBIN: The person who is doing the main attack dog for the Fidler campaign said he had a year to read them, he’s read all of them, and he found them to be quote “boring.”
STOROBIN: Their person has said, their person has said that he’s read everything and this is all they could find…
GATE: Well. Woof woof. This is a lie almost from whole clothe.
I am not “doing the main attack dog” for the Fidler campaign. As I’ve admitted, I wrote Fidler a couple of check. My family also attended a rally for him on MLK day (in between us buying Dybbuk a Mario game at J&R, and having a dim sum lunch at Jing Fong). I think I may have also emailed Fidler a link of the article where Storobin gives Putin a full “around the world”, including a rim job, but typical of Fidler, he could not open the link, and I had to paste it.
I will also note that I was the first writer to criticize Fidler for going too far when he attacked Storobin (at what he thought was a private party) by linking Storobin to white supremacists, and that I’d also criticized another blogger for doing the same thing a few days before.
As to Storobin’s other assertions.
I first head of Storobin in May, 2011, which is considerably less than a year ago, and noticed almost immediately that his articles attracted links from hate sites, but I did not read any more than one or two at the time. In fact, I probably never would have read Storobin again, had it not been for the fact that a couple of GOP bloggers called me out on a thread for mis-portraying Storobin’s views.
Stung, I went a searchin’ and found the motherload on a blog which Mr. Storobin had founded called Global Politician, where, using the site’s search function, I located dozens of pieces of Mr. Storobin’s writings. There was also an ad from Mr. Storobin’s law firm.
In answer to my critics, I promised to do a full parsing of Mr. Storobin's voluminous published writing.
As I then noted:
“Since I indicated my interest in exploring Storobin’s writings, the ad from his law firm seems to have been taken down. Moreover, a search today using the same search function I used before indicates that Mr. Storobin has published nothing in Global Politician, even though a Google search indicates otherwise. So, I cannot share with you the original postings of part one and part two of Mr. Storobin’s series spotlighting the leaders of The Afrikaner Independence Movement.
Sadly, I’ve done only the most glancing survey of these articles before Mr. Storobin’s articles (and seemingly nothing else on the site), were thoroughly scrubbed.
Luckily, many of Mr. Storobin’s pieces were reprinted elsewhere, including more than one on white supremacist hate sites.”
Then, as luck would have it, I again hit the motherload. About a week before the New Year, I found a site called “International Analyst Network” which contained over 40 pieces of Mr. Storobin’s work.
Not his entire legacy, but a good start. As I then noted.
“I promised myself I would start New Year’s weekend on what promised to be a long and painful slog in order to be able to deeply parse the mysteries which awaited me.
However, to my shock, when I returned to the same site on 12/30/11, this is what I found in their stead.”
Even worse, I tried using the links on the contents page I cached above, only to discover that only one of them worked, and that was the link to Storobin’s law firm.
According to the site, they’re “closing our doors for a little while to make some much needed improvements to our network.
We'll be back in 2012 with a new look, feel and focus.”
Perhaps this is just a coincidence; although it is now 2012 and they are still not back.
But I suspect that they won’t be. As I’ve noted the evidence indicates that Storobin founded this site as well.
At any rate, while I suspect that my rather comprehensive (in scope) but still glancing (when it comes to the matter of actually reading every word) review of Mr. Storobin’s writings means that I know more about Storobin’s writings than anyone but Storobin, it does not mean that I actually gave more than a glance to a small fraction of those pieces, in the very few days I had before those articles disappeared.
However, though I don’t believe I said this in any column (though I may have in a thread), Mr. Storobin is correct that I did find the majority of his work to be a snore.
STOROBIN: He said all I’m discussing is international stuff like the flat tax in Estonia and the tax policy in Hong Kong and some other stuff.
GATE: What I actually said is: “Before anyone says that Storobin’s views on international affairs should not matter, I have to note (1) it is clear that Storobin’s strange views on international affairs are practically the only thing Storobin really cares about (outside of ending progressive taxation), (2) and it is clear that he sees the State Senate only as a stepping stone for Congress, and (3) his views make him unfit for service in Congress; (4) his views on international affairs shed light on his entire political philosophy; and (5) a lot of his constituents care about Russia, and (6) many of them are militantly anti-Putin.”
Never read, or even mentioned the stuff about Estonia or Hong Kong. I’m sure this is my loss.
But it is not only with regard to me that Mr. Storobin obscures the truth.
STOROBIN: I didn’t even interview with them, with the people who are the real hateful people…
GATE: Storobin does not think the “Minuteman” and the white supremacist Afrikaner Independence Movement are hateful. This is the problem.
STOROBIN (answering why his articles have disappeared): That has nothing to do with me, I haven’t been the editor and I haven’t been the editor in years.
GATE: Right, it’s just a happy coincidence that he was entirely deleted from one website he founded, and that the other site he founded just closed down for repairs two minutes later.
Storobin also shamelessly exploits hatred by attacking Fidler for funding LGTB groups, without noting that the funding was to prevent homeless children from freezing to death on the streets.
And he shamelessly lies about what Fidler has said and implied about his articles and his family.
STOROBIN: This is an insult to the Jewish community and to every decent person out there. To abuse, to abuse the memory of murdered Jews including my relatives is really shameful. It does not belong in politics.
GATE: This is a recurring motif in Storobin’s campaign. In a Talking Points Memo Storobin circulated, it notes “If you can’t trust Lew Fidler’s word on David Storobin’s Jewish faith, you can’t trust anything he says.”
I don’t recall Fidler saying anything about Storobin’s Jewish faith. “If you can’t trust David Storobin’s word on Lew Fidler’s statements, you can’t trust anything he says.”
What Lew Fidler did, and should not have done, was what is known as a “Kinsley Gaffe” A Kinsley gaffe is when a politician tells the truth. Not the objective truth (which it surely was not), but the truth about how he sees the world, without regard to how it will play.
Fidler, an experienced immigration lawyer, and longtime supporter of immigrant causes, including Russian Jews, saw Storobin's 2007 interview with Jim Gilchrist of the “Minuteman Project on Immigration, Terror, and Elections, (a group which had been condemned by the Anti Defamation League), which began with Storobin saying “Today I spoke to Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the Minuteman Project. The most striking part of the interview was how mild his views on immigration truly were. The man has been vilified by most of the Left and even much of the Right, including the White House. He’s supposed to be an immigrant-hating vigilante who dreams of dead Mexicans at night. Instead, he’s an intelligent, mild-mannered person with very reasonable proposals…" and Fidler got justifiably repulsed.
Fidler saw Storobin’s two, count ‘em, two pieces spotlighting heroes of the white separatist Afrikaner Independence Movement, one of which appeared on the white supremacist website American Renaissance, and perhaps Fidler noted that Storobin lobbed them soft balls and never subjected them to tough inquiry, just giving the fringy, white supremacist Afrikaners a forum for their grievances without ever raising the sins of the apartheid society or the great achievement of South Africa in abandoning the rigid apartheid society structure, while avoiding bloodbaths and show trials, and creating an imperfect democratic capitalistic society. Perhaps Fidler noted that the white supremacists were just given a forum for their unfettered hate propaganda. Perhaps Fidler noted that nowhere, either in the interviews or commentary, or in any other article, does Storobin condemn the Afrikaner nationalists, even though Storobin almost universally opposes the national claims of almost every ethnic minority (and sometimes majority) almost everywhere else on the planet earth. Perhaps Fidler noted that a similar pattern infects all Storobin's writing about race. Perhaps Fidler noted that in Storobin’s work, it is always the white man and only the white man who is beleaguered, usually by the most horrifying form of discrimination, oppressive political correctness. Perhaps Fidler noted that there does not appear to be one article in existence where Storobin empathizes with racial minorities.
Surely Fidler thought "If Lew Fidler had the bad taste and poor judgment to interview a white supremacist not once but twice, is there any question that when he was done it would be clear to all concerned that he found the views to be repugnant?” Surely Fidler thought that such an interview done by Lew Fidler would never be linked on a site like Stormfront.
Fidler was probably not going to emphasize such things in his campaign, because there’s really little to be gained by raising such issues in the heavily white 27th SD. A majority of voters there probably do abhor racism, but even among those who do, it’s not like racism is an issue which would drive them to the polls.
But here was Lew Fidler at a private party at a bar in front of a group of drunk young Democrats, speaking from his heart instead of his head, telling them the truth about what he really thought about David Storobin, and since he was speaking from the heart, he was not accurate with his words. He didn’t say “David Storobin is linked by hate sites because they love what he writes” which would have been factually accurate. Instead he said Storobin has ties to hate groups—something which one might reasonably suspect, but which cannot be proven.
Instead of being an intemperate assertion among friends, cell phone cameras turned the remark into a web-posting.
I should note that some respectable people think Fidler said nothing wrong. I quote from an email saying I was too harsh on Fidler
ERIK ENGQUIST (of Crain’s): A link is not a tie?… Yeah, I think what Lew said is OK. Certainly by the current standards of politics
Besides me, few noticed the video, but Storobin kept beating the drum, so that the remarks which had purportedly so offended him and had purportedly caused him so much anguish, but which no one had noticed, and which were not emerging as a Fidler campaign mantra, eventually became noticed by everyone.
The Fidler campaign’s biggest sin here was to initially refuse to back down from Fidler’s impromptu error, sending out a press release trying to prove their candidate’s error was true.
Stupid political machismo, but not “abus[ing] the memory of murdered Jews.”
Abusing the memory of murdered Jews is what Storobin is doing now. In fact, it the number one “issue” in the Talking Points Memo circulated by the Storobin campaign.
STOROBIN: If I had links to Nazis, they’d kill me. These are the people who wiped out all four of my grandparents’ families.
STOROBIN: It’s an assault on free speech, it’s an assault on media, it’s an assault on reason and it’s an assault on logic, and most of all it’s an assault on the Jewish community, and it’s an assault on all those people who died in concentration camps like my relatives.
GATE: I don’t want to overemphasize this, but Domestic Partner, most of whose family was wiped out in the Holocaust (her mother survived in an attic) insisted that I point out that Storobin’s family was not killed in the Holocaust because they were Jews; they were killed in a war because they were soldiers. As Storobin notes in the family album he released the other day, five of his grandfather’s brothers were killed as soldiers fighting the Nazis, a sadly common experience among Russians of that generation, though hardly a specifically Jewish one. However, this did not stop Storobin’s from writing sympathetically about Russian collaborators with the Nazis, “Russian collaborators with the Nazis.”
STOROBIN: He’s engaged in name-calling and he’s engaged in attacks against my family…
STOROBIN: And to attack my mother, my mother [he’s starting to sound like Montgomery Clift in “Judgment at Nuremberg.”] for giving me a perfectly legal donation and to say “why is your mother giving you money is low gutter politics.
GATE: The Fidler campaign had merely pointed out that 50% of the money Storobin had raised consisted of a personal loan made by Storobin to the campaign and a contribution from his mommy.
STOROBIN: We need to get beyond it; we need to get beyond it. Let’s discuss discuss issues.
GATE: Let us discuss discuss.
As City Hall News notes: “A strategist for Republican Senate candidate David Storobin’s campaign passed along a memo highlighting the four main lines of attack the Republican expects to pursue against Brooklyn Councilman Lew Fidler during the rest of their campaign.
These talking points are expected to show up in flyers, mailers and media messaging up until Election Day on Mar. 20…”
The four talking points are ““Spreading Lies About David Storobin,” “Campaign Finance Misdeeds,” “Parking Perk” and ““Extra Income Problem.”
Obviously Storobin does not want to “discuss discuss” issues. He wants to “attack attack.” Fidler personally.
Which I suppose would be step up from campaigning in favor of children being allowed to freeze to death.
Meanwhile, I suggest the press stop taking so seriously every word from this obviously deranged human being the Republicans have chosen to sneeze upon a voting machine.