If you thought talking about Julian Assange was terrible last week, welcome to today, when Keith Olbermann re-emerges to drastically lower the standards of debate, and Naomi Wolf says siding with Assange’s accusers is “not respecting women.”
Let’s start with El Olbermann, who dramatically flounced off Twitter last week, claiming he was being bullied by Tweeters using the #mooreandme hashtag.That hashtag was part of a campaign to demand an apology from him and Michael Moore about misrepresenting and dismissing the sex assault charges against Julian Assange. In Olbermann’s case, Twitter was part of the issue: He had retweeted Bianca Jagger’s link to a piece written by a Holocaust-denying anti-Semite (and Wikileaks’ representative in Russia) suggesting that one of Assange’s accusers has CIA ties because she once interviewed a Cuban opposition group. (In other words, proof that the “honeytrap” plot alluded to by Assange’s lawyers was real.)
The #mooreandme crew, more or less led by Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown, pressed on with hundreds of tweets throughout the weekend, despite trolling and emotional turmoil.
While Michael Moore hasn’t responded beyond this Huffington Post entry that was addressed to Sweden, Keith Olbermann just responded via Twitlonger:
I endorse, sympathize with, and empathize with, the rape consciousness goals of #mooreandme, and have already apologized accordingly. But I cannot defend and will not accept their tactics which mirror so many of the attitudes and threats they fight. I do not know of what Julian Assange is guilty, if anything, and neither does anybody else. But given the extraordinary efforts by Sweden to extradite him, to say he is benefiting from some form of rape apologism is not fact-based. It is also unfair to condemn as anti-feminist those who merely address the juxtaposition of this prosecution to the fact that Assange threatens the secret and nefarious activities of dozens of governments. And I will not engage those who suggest that those who do not prioritize one issue to the exclusion of all others should succumb to forced financial contributions, or should ‘kill themselves’ (examples of each will be retweeted shortly, along with my previous apology). The #mooreandme attacks do not help those who fight against rape, they hurt them. And indeed they feature something larger than anti-feminist. This is, to use a clunky phrase, anti-personism.
It’s easy enough for both sides of an Internet discussion to point to the worst on either side — the one person who used the hashtag to suggest that Olbermann off himself can be matched up with the Tweeters who clogged the #mooreandme hashtag to make threats or complain about “angry lesbians.” Moreover, Olbermann didn’t address the actual concerns of the campaign — the parts that pertain to his own behavior, that is, though he did reiterate his “previous apology”: