#PeterTheTweeter

Look, Peter Kinder tweeted something dumb.

As you can see in the chart pasted here from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, our unfinanced wars are a major cause of our current deficits. And unless Kinder and his pal Fred Barnes want to talk about the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts as "spending," it's doubly hard to see how "the cause is spending at levels never before seen in peacetime."

UPDATE: He's back! 
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To fill the void left in all of our lives by @PeterKinder's absence from the twitternets, we bring you @PeterWeMissYou, a sort of public service project featuring some Our Lieutenant Governor's greatest hits.

Peter Kinder tweeted out a link this morning -- with his initials appended as an endorsement -- to Rep. Allen West (R-FL) complaining about Barack Obama's apparent "Marxist Demagogic Rhetoric" on Fox News.

In the clip shared by Kinder, West accuses Obama of spewing "Marxist, demagogic rhetoric," and stands by his recent claim that Obama displayed a "third world dictator-like arrogance" during a speech last week (!).   Later in the same interview, West states that Obama is a "low-level, socialist agitator."  The excerpt shared by Kinder comes from this interview on the Greta Van Susteren program.

When one NPR employee who's already on his way out the door says there's a “radical, racist, Islamaphobic" element of the Republican Party, that's national news. 

When a statewide official in Missouri says NPR has a racist and fascist agenda, that's not news at all.

As you might expect, Lt. Governor Peter Kinder has continued his ferocious defense of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's dishonest efforts to use the state's budget crisis to take away some collective bargaining rights for most public unions, including the state teachers union.  And yesterday, he began criticizing legislators in Indiana for their tactics to stall an union-busting bill in that state.  In both states, Democratic legislators left their Capitols to deny Republican majorities the quorums they'd need to ram their anti-worker legislation through. 

It's a tactic that Kinder professes to find extremely offensive, and he's spent a considerable amount of time trying to convince unknown followers in the Badger and Hoosier states that they should get behind their local efforts to further reduce workers' rights.   For instance, Peter the Tweeter spewed the following at just before noon yesterday:

I served in #MoSenate minority 8 yrs. Lost countless battles. Never occurred to me 2 quit my duties, cut-and-run, leave #MO #Wisconsin #pdk

It is true that Kinder would never "cut-and-run" or "leave" Jefferson City as a negotiating tactic, or even because he's an immature little man.  Except when he did, of course.

Lt. Governor Peter Kinder continued his deluge of tweets through the weekend for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's dishonest move to use his state's budget crisis to attack to try to deny collective bargaining rights to the state's public employees.

There's a lot I don't understand about Kinder's decision making process. I don't understand why he cares so little about facts, for instance. But one of the recurring questions that gets lost in all of the outrageus, false and disturbing things he spews is why does Peter Kinder demonstrate so little interest in the issues facing Missouri famlies and the State of Missouri?  

He does want to be in charge of said state, right? 

An uninformed follower could easily be forgiven for not knowing that this man is a statewide elected official and candidate for governor in the Show-Me State.  Since last Wednesday, for instance, Kinder has been almost entirely focused on the unfolding drama in Wisconsin. 

Another day, another brilliant tweet from the highest ranking Republican in Missouri, Lt. Governor Peter Kinder:

Quick history lesson: The Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed for the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide if they wanted to allow slavery, with the hope that such a move would take the heat off of Congress to make the decision.  

Obviously, this isn't a very apt comparison. (But that didn't stop Birther Rep. Tim Jones from retweeting it in approval.)  The health care reform law may not even be the "most divisive" issue of 2011.  And even if the cynical astroturf operations got folks ginned up again, I'm relatively confident that civil war (!) wouldn't be on anyone's agenda. 

Lt. Governor Peter Kinder continues to focus on the big issues facing Missourians, demonstrating the judgment and maturity that will inspire millions to put him in charge of lots of stuff. 

Yesterday was a Wednesday, which means Lt. Governor Peter Kinder embarrassed himself on the twitternets.

Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission approved new net neutrality rules that are intended to prevent internet service providers from discriminating with different kinds of content.   The goal is to make sure companies don't block (legal) services from competitors, and to prevent corporations from censoring or controlling what their customers are doing.   Activists on the left have expressed concern that the rules don't go far enough, and Republicans have coalesced around vapid 'government control' rhetoric. 

But Kinder -- obviously an expert on federal telecomm policy -- has decided that it's just time to defund and abolish the FCC entirely.  

Hey, why not? 

Over the next week and a half, we’ll be bringing you ten 10 Top 10 lists looking back on the year that was.

With the self control and emotional maturity of a high school freshman, Lt. Governor Peter Kinder has spent copious amounts of free time in 2010 tweeting vile, dishonest and outrageous messages to his online followers. Sadly, our mainstream media outlets have ignored his garbage as often as Kinder has ignored the truth, and very few Missourians have been informed about the hate and insanity that flows with regularity from one of their statewide politicians. Here are the ten tweets or twitter tantrums that left us the most dumbfounded.   

#10: Kinder declares that Wall Street Reform legislation is a catastrophic "socialist takeover of the financial sector."
This first question one asks when reading the Lt. Governor's response to the Wall Street reform legislation passed in June is, "Does he know what the words 'socialist' and 'takeover' mean?"   The new law passed 60-39 with Republican support in the Senate, in part because it some of the original consumer protection proposals were beat back by Wall Street lobbyists.   Here's a summary of what's actually in the law -- none of it even comes close to a collectivist takeover of our financial industry.

For posterity:

http://twitter.com/#!/PeterKinder/status/17034370969

Stop me if you've heard this one:  Peter Kinder, our Lieutenant Governor and the top-ranking Republican in Missouri, sees something on these here internets about how libruls are bad people, and he then tweets it out out to his followers with his initials attached as an endorsement of the content without checking to see if the allegations are true or reasonable in any way.  The press, in turn, yawns and never asks him to explain the garbage coming out of his Twitter account because...well... I have no good explanation as to why reporters wouldn't ask a statewide public official to explain his or her statements just because they happen to have been made through an online social networking service that didn't happen to exist 5 years ago.  (But did you hear that he might run for governor!  You know, like he announced 10 months ago?!  That story they'll write, even if no one will go on the record to confirm or deny the speculation.)

Anyway, here are two tweets from Wednesday that should have received some attention and push-back, but didn't: 

Here are my guesses as to why Peter Kinder's consultants, staff and friends don't stop him from tweeting about how NPR is a fascist and racist organization, his theories about "lefty Jew hatred," his belief in #deathpanels and all sorts of other crazy stuff, in no particular order:

1. They agree with him
2. He throws a tantrum if you take away his Blackberry
3. He refuses to listen to staff or advisors about the wisdom of letting the public know what he really thinks
4. Twitter?  What's Twitter?
5. They assume that the mainstream press won't ever really report on what the Lieutenant Governor is spewing
6. They don't actually want him to win another race for anything ever again

I've struggled all day to really care about NPR's firing of Juan Williams.  But thankfully, Lt. Governor Peter Kinder has made me aware of public radio's true fascist, statist and racist agenda. 

All of the following are real tweets from a real statewide elected official. 

• 5:54 pm: MT @BrentTeichman: Dear @NPR: Congrats. U have finally exposed urselves 4 the statist, fascist outfit u really are #AllThingsDistorted #pdk
   
• 7:27 pm: Laura Ingraham makes a great pt: NPR Firing of #JuanWilliams is abt intimidating minorities, to make them fearful of speaking the truth #pdk

Just...wow.

Maybe a reporter from KBIA, KWMU, KCUR or KSMU can follow up and ask the Lieutenant Freaking Governor to expand upon his theory that they work for a "statist, fascist outfit?"

Earlier today, I posted an excerpt from a column by Tony Messenger in the Post-Dispatch that dealt with the frosty relationship between Lt. Governor Peter Kinder and Gov. Jay Nixon, and included several sentences about Kinder's infamous tweets.  But those words have already been changed on StLToday.com, and were completely removed from the print version of the piece (see the scan below the jump).   

There are no editorial notes on the online version explaining the changes.  But the changes are substantial.

Why is the mainstream Missouri media so reluctant to report the facts about Kinder's dishonest, extreme, bizarre and immature Twitter messages?   He's a statewide elected official broadcasting offensive, false and absurd garbage in a public forum -- this can and should be reported to the news-consuming public.

Even if reporters, columnists and editors disagree about the degree of insanity or dishonesty, a public official's public statements intended to influence the public discourse should be reported to and discussed by the public.  Kinder did compare liberals to Hitler. He tried to politicize the hostage crisis at the Discovery Building outside of DC. He tweeted about #deathpanels in August 2010. He tweeted about #trampstamps. He's also tweeted a "socialist takeover of the financial sector," the "explosion of lefty Jew hatred" in America, that Democrats "really [want] $6-7 gas or higher," the EPA's "dictatorial control over the entire US economy," how global warming is a hoax, links to what a Columbia Journalism Review called "the worst kind of smear journalism," and a whole lot more. These are all just facts. Readers and writers can say what they will about Kinder's words and actions, but only if they know about them.

I don't know how the editorial process works at the paper, but this really smells. Bad.

It's hard to argue with any of the following words from Tony Messenger's column in today's Post-Dispatch:

It's easy to see why Nixon wouldn't want to keep Kinder in the loop. The lieutenant governor's Twitter feed is filled with the most far-right Republican conspiracy theories of the day. Kinder has compared liberals to Hitler, politicized a hostage crisis and repeated false claims about "death panels" in the new federal health care law. He even speculated on the worst "tramp stamp" tattoos on women.

It's tough to take Kinder seriously when his daily communication with the public is either purely politically motivated or just plain unprofessional.

Editorial note: Peter Kinder hasn't actually tweeted his thoughts on whether or not the Post-Dispatch is a member of the "state-run media."  He has described the CNN and MSNBC cable networks with those words, along with Ed Martin. He's also publicly stated that "If the day ever did exist when the Post-Dispatch did honest, completely open, above the board, no-agenda reporting of the news, that day is behind us," so I just put two and two together.

What in the world is the point of this tweet, and what does it have to do with the "Tea Party" and the November elections in America? 

Let's assume for a moment that Peter Kinder is correct in describing Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini as "leftists" (he isn't).  What does Kinder hope his followers pick up on with this "Oh yeah" endorsement of this message?  That Democrats aren't all that different than Nazis or Italian Fascists or the Khmer Rouge?   That mass murder is a reasonable possibility if people vote for American "leftists" next month?  

I honestly dumbfounded by this junk from Kinder.  But as a long-time reader commented this weekend upon seeing the message, "Every day, tweet by tweet, #PDK slowly but steadily disqualifies himself from higher office---- as if that’s the plan." 

The good news is that the mainstream press has made of a habit of just rolling their eyes at this stuff and never asking the Lieutenant Governor to explain or defend it.

Yesterday, #PeterTheTweeter promoted a disgusting article in Forbes, attaching his initials to a message from Newt Gingrich about "Dinesh D'Souza's excellent article."

What is this "excellent article" to which Peter Kinder is attaching his reputation? Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review sums it up pretty well.

So it’s come to this: Forbes cover story on “How Obama Thinks” is a gross piece of innuendo—a fact-twisting, error-laden piece of paranoia. This is the worst kind of smear journalism—a singularly disgusting work.

Forbes for some reason gives Dinesh D’Souza the cover and lots of space to froth about the notion popular in the right-wing fever swamps that Obama is an “other”; that he doesn’t think like “an American,” that his actions benefit foreigners rather than Amurricans. It’s too kind to call this innuendo. It’s far too overt for that...

Forbes has shamed itself with this one.

I'm unable to find the tweets Peter Kinder claims said he was a classmate of loony Terry Jones. Whatever the specifics, I'm not sure why Kinder cares enough about this allegedly unimportant tweeter to complain about him or her.  Or why people who dislike Kinder would care enough to make up a fact about the two men being classmates.  There's plenty of dishonesty and extremism in Kinder's record to talk about without making tenuous connections to a crazy dude in Florida. 

Either way, it's good to see our Distinguished Lieutenant Governor come out so strongly against lies on Twitter.  There's no word yet, though, on when Kinder to correct his own #demonstrablyfalse tweets about a "socialist takeover of the financial sector," the "death panels" at the FDA, the "explosion of lefty Jew hatred" in America, that Democrats "really [want] is $6-7 gas or higher," the EPA's "dictatorial control over the entire US economy," etc...

I know it's unfair to expect Peter Kinder to be held accountable for things he tweeted 36 hours ago, but I'd be neglecting my duties if I failed to point out that #PeterTheTweeter's crass attempts to politicize the recent hostage crisis outside of Washington were too disgusting for.... Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin.

Ladies and gentlemen, your Lieutenant Governor.

Note Kinder's personal touches on the retweet. Klassy stuff. Anyway, here are a couple of the lower backs that our distinguished Lieutenant Governor says you MUST see. 

I'm pretty sure this irregular behavior for a statewide public official.