Publicist Howard Bragman, whose good gay graces can be purchased with a monthly retainer fee, reserves his most biting (and Nazi-infused) vitriol for gay people who come out without his paid services. Like Ken Mehlman.
“From a PR standpoint, the announcement was executed flawlessly, but I still don’t believe it,” Bragman says when prompted to weigh in on a homosexual who isn’t paying to come out. “Ken Mehlman has never shown anything but instincts for protecting Ken Mehlman, and I wouldn’t expect him to do anything but a brilliant unfolding where he has wonderful people speaking out for him and how he’s helping gay marriage. That’s all fine and good… but I really hope there’s a special place in hell for Ken Mehlman. This man [through his campaigning for George W. Bush] was the architect of this homophobia, teenagers killed themselves, families split apart as a result of what he did. Horrible things happened. He’s as good as a Jew that collaborated with the Nazis.”
Now listen: This website hasn’t had nice things to say about Mehlman (pictured, left) — whose anti-gay activities continue — either. And for good reason: The guy helped the GOP terrorize LGBT Americans and those who support them. But Bragman has proven he has no credibility in this arena, since he regularly represents scum so long as he’s getting a check. Take, for instance, San Diego hotelier Doug Manchester, who donated $125,000 to keep gay Californians from getting married. Californians like, say, Howard Bragman.
In an op-ed, Bragman once wrote, “To my brothers and sisters in the GLBT movement and our friends, I urge you to use every legal and moral tool at your disposal to change hearts and minds. Peaceful protests, boycotts and community organizing are the tools of our trade and ultimately the things that will win this struggle.” But as soon as Manchester put Bragman on his payroll, the publicyst orchestrated Manchester’s scheme to hand $125,000 in blood money to gay groups as a means of saying sorry.
How about we take this to the next level?
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Lesson learned? Bragman will enjoy shredding you if you’re an anti-gay jerk who comes out without paying him for the privilege.
Bragman’s for-profit tactics are so wretched they’re starting to make — gasp — Mehlman look like a saint. (And make that possible working relationship with GOProud look all the more sensible.)
Bareback Hussein Osama
I am glad no one noticed how I profited from your Hope for Change!
Jon B
@Bareback Hussein Osama: Are you going to keep doing that? It’s annoying. Go blow yourself (up).
L.
I’m not trying to defend or attack anyone, but saying things like, “Bragman’s for-profit tactics are so wretched they’re starting to make Mehlman look like a saint” is about as relevant as one comparing the other to a collaborationist Jew.
Whatever Bragman’s sins, they can hardly ever attain the level of someone in Mehlman’s position doing what he did.
Short of actually mowing down gays with a submachine guns, little *anyone* could do would ever make him look remotely saintly.
jason
If money is driving Bragman, it’s disgusting. You don’t make money off other people’s souls. Bragman needs to have a good look at himself.
Mike
Bragman may be a greedy opportunist but his misdemeanours fade to nothing compared to Mehlman’s vicious homophobic terrorism
Gew
@Jason: Of course you do. It’s called capitalism. All big business does it with nary a twitch or eye blink.
L.
@Mike: (That’s what I said too, and look where it got us :))
Jack E. Jett
I don’t think this has anything to do with money for Howard. The man has more than he needs.
I think that Ken Mehlman is a unique case and totally different from your everyday sports figure or actor coming out.
Mehlman is the worst of our enemies. He is the lowest of the low. He was making a shit load of money while kicking sand in our face…….AND doing it not only with DADT, DOMA, hate crimes but ignored HIV/AIDS.
However, you can bet your sweet gay ass that HRC and GLAAD will be bending over backwards to kiss his rich white scrawney ass.
Ryan
Mr. Bragman should know there’s a special place in hell for people who compare their political enemies with Nazis or Communists. He’s right of course that Melman’s an anti-gay bigot, but he insults the memories of Jews and gays who were murdered during WWII by comparing our struggle to theirs.
WalkderDC
Are you joking?! Bragman might be a bit of a whore for trying to rehab some guy who is paying him, but comparing somebody trying image rehab for profit and somebody who presided over a campaign and an organization responsible for trying to put an anti-gay constitutional amendment together, and responsible for putting multiple anti gay amendments on state ballots over the course of 8 things are to different levels completely. Watch the Hyperbole.
WalkderDC
@Ryan: Melman is actually the very definition of a collaborator.
Ryan
Walkder DC: if you feel comfortable equating a Constitutional Amendment banning gay marriage to the burning and gassing of millions of gays and Jews, by all means go right ahead. But it doesn’t make you right. It just makes you a really terrible person.
TGC
“teenagers killed themselves, families split apart” “terrorism”
Oh Mary! These same buzz words keep popping up over and over again like they’re cut & pasted from the same talking points memo. Exactly how many teenagers killed themselves and named Bush and/or Mehlman in their suicide letters as the reason? How many families, exactly, were “split apart”? And liberals are too scared to use the word “terrorism” because they’re afraid it might hurt somebody’s feelings so I call shenanigans on that.
Envelopes of white powder mailed to Mormon churches = Meh.
The people freely expressing their opinion at the ballot box = “terrorism”.
Seems slightly out of whack, don’t it?
TGC
Say, found those “gay concentration camps” next to the FEMA camps yet?
WalkderDC
@Ryan:
You need to go to school.
First off, the post said “Nazi Infused” Meaning that the techniques and the arguments he was using were from a similar playbook. The Nazi’s started their campaigns by dehumanizing the Jews. They first started passing laws that split the jews off from society, then they had to be identified as different, then they passed laws against their businesses. Any Jews that went along with that were collborators.
Ken Melman presided over the RNC at a time when they were pushing state level anti-gay initiatives across the country. Initiatives designed to de-humanize us, to separate us from our civil rights. Before you have your little frak out session you need to learn the difference from an non germain ad hominem attack and a somewhat appropriate comparison.
WalkderDC
@TGC:
you said ”
Envelopes of white powder mailed to Mormon churches = Meh.
The people freely expressing their opinion at the ballot box = “terrorism”.
Seems slightly out of whack, don’t it?”
If by “Freely expresing their opnion” you mean voting to take civil rights away from a group of people then yeah. Remember, the Mormon Church wouldn’t allow Blacks to be members until 1978. They wouldn’t allow blacks to enter the temple, they wouldn’t allow them to speak in church, they wouldn’t allow them to be considered full humans. So please stop trying to act shocked that they are being called out for their long standing bigotry.
As for a packet of white powder supposedly mailed to the church, it was probably sent by one of their own church to help them continue to play the Momon victom card. But even if it wasn’t, lets look at it this way.
One packet of harmless poder mailed to a Mormon church
tens of millions of people nationwide denied their civil rights because the Mormon church will spend millions to allow them to continue to engage in the bigotry for which they are famous. They have just moved from Blacks to Gays, and once again they are on the wrong side of history.
TGC
@WalkderDC: You still have your “civil rights” sweetie. You can marry whomever you want. Further Gay Inc. needs to move beyond marriage as a “right”, civil or otherwise, because it’s not and you know it. It’s not even a “right” for heterosexuals.
And I suppose blacks planted a guy in WeHo screaming “nigger!” in the streets to help them continue to play the black victim card. Speaking of which, how come Gay Inc. didn’t issue a Fatwa against the blacks of California? They were against it probably more so than the Mormons. Likewise, I still don’t get how Bush was a homophobe for opposing gay marriage and supporting civil unions but Chairman Obama is not.
TGC
Again, how many teenagers killed themselves and named Bush and/or Mehlman as the reason?
Ryan
Walker DC: the post didn’t say “Nazi infused”. Howard said, “he’s as good as the Jews who collaborated with Hitler”. Those were his exact words. Defend them if you like, but don’t pretend I’m reading into things. TCG: Your post is factually wrong in multiple places. First off, Bush has never publically supported gay civil unions, and neither has any Republican President or nominee. Second, in 2004 Bush called for a Constitutional Amendment banning gay marriage, he didn’t simply oppose it personally like Obama does. A Constitutional Amendment would negate any Supreme Court ruling. So those are two very substantial different views on gays and gay rights between this President and the last. Also, the Supreme Court has in fact ruled that marriage is a civil right, so you’re wrong yet again. And your racist bullshit is also wrong. Blacks voted for Prop 8 at 56%. Obviously this is much lower than the rate of Christians and Mormons who voted for it. For someone so rude and smug, you’re sure wrong a lot.
TGC
@Ryan: “Your post is factually wrong in multiple places. First off, Bush has never publically supported gay civil unions,”
Really?
“President Bush endorsed a constitutional amendment Tuesday that would restrict marriage to two people of the opposite sex but leave open the possibility that states could allow civil unions.
Bush also said state legislatures should be left to define “legal arrangements other than marriage,” suggesting that such an amendment would allow states to establish civil unions for same-sex couples. ”
http://tinyurl.com/6btry
“Well I don’t think we should deny people rights to a civil union, a legal arrangement, if that’s what a state chooses to do so. I view the definition of marriage different from legal arrangements that enable people to have rights,” said Bush, who has pressed for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. “States ought to be able to have the right to pass laws that enable people to be able to have rights like others.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6338458/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL5qSiW3LUQ
Please tell me you’re not going to try to use Loving v. Virginia.
“And your racist bullshit is also wrong.”
What “racist bullshit”? What have I said that was racist? Oh yeah. Liberals have bastardized “racist” to the point that it’s utterly meaningless.
“Blacks voted for Prop 8 at 56%.”
Really?
“Most of California’s Black Voters Backed Gay Marriage Ban…
Any notion that Tuesday’s election represented a liberal juggernaut must overcome a detail from the voting booths of California: The same voters who turned out strongest for Barack Obama also drove a stake through the heart of same-sex marriage.
Seven in 10 African Americans who went to the polls voted yes on Proposition 8, the ballot measure overruling a state Supreme Court judgment that legalized same-sex marriage and brought 18,000 gay and lesbian couples to Golden State courthouses in the past six months.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/06/AR2008110603880.html
Seven in ten is slightly more than 56%, at least where I went to school.
For someone so rude and so smug, you sure don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.
southapugh
Yes, marriage is a fundamental American right. The supreme court says so.
Three pre-teenagers stories recounted on AC360 this week were targeted by bullies run amok and abetted by policies promoted by faith based projects funded by your tax dollars under Bush & Co.’s machinations and right wing ideologues like Focus On The Family. These children were unaware whence came their bullies’ protection and were too busy fighting for their lives to notice.
What you don’t understand is that equal rights are already established by the Constituion. It is only tradition and religious brainwashing that has made denial of equality acceptable ’til now. It’s just recently that LGBT folks have enough achieved enough progressive sympathy to be able to claim those rights in spite of continuing public sentiment. It is precisely, by virtue of the Constitution’s protection of the minority from the tyranny of the majority, that it takes the courts to overrule immoral, un-Constitutional and un-American public bullying and political terrorism such as Prop 8.
Contrary to recent propaganda, there is not such thing as an activist judge. Ruling on and correcting miscreant, radical institutionalized bigotry is the courts’ Constitutional mandate. In smaller words, that’s their job.
Your snarky, willful ignorance reveals the nature of your mettle. Please keep exposing yourself with impunity.
TGC
@southapugh: blahblahblah poor attempt to sound smart, blahblahblah something irrelevant about Anderson Vanderbilt blahblahblah…Oh. “Tyranny of the majority”. There’s an overused buzzword. By “tyranny of the majority” you mean how Gay Inc. pretends they’re a “community” and represents us all even though we don’t have any meetings and elect our so-called esteemed “gay leaders”? Or do you mean the tyranny of the majority from whence the 14th Amendment came? Or are those examples of tyranny of the majority acceptable like it’s acceptable when it comes to unions?
You do know, don’t you, that it can be argued that the 14th amendment wasn’t constitutionally ratified?
“Your snarky, willful ignorance reveals the nature of your mettle.”
Oh, you have cut me to the quick. She speaks poniards and every word stabs. Do go on trying to sound smart. It’s entertaining. Don’t forget to copy and paste the old reliable, albeit worn out, liberal buzzwords. It would be a huge disappointment without them.
Ryan
Wow! So, you’re not merely content with being wrong about Bush’s position on Civil Unions and gay marriage, and whether or not marriage is a civil right. Now you would also like to be wrong about the 14th Amendment and what constitutes a minority. Hint: Group meetings are not required. Is there no end to your total wrongness? Gay republicans are so much fun!
TGC
@Ryan: You would have saved some time if you’d just typed what you thought: “Nuh-uh! Neener-neener-neener!”.
Ryan
Um…I pointed out specifically where you were wrong and why. Sorry facts. Bother you so much.
TGC
@Ryan: Ah. The classic liberal narcissistic projection. I provided facts, you didn’t, and you still call me wrong.
TGC
@Ryan: Right. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Ingsoc, baby!