Playing hide-the-bratwurst

1997: SOCCCD trustee Steve Frogue holds up an IHR publication

     According to Gustavo Arellano, Steve Frogue’s favorite club—the notorious Institute for Historical Review—is hosting a rally with Holocaust denying historian David Irving tomorrow, but because anti-racists plan to protest the gathering, the IHR is playing hide-the-bratwurst re the location:

…Irving always swings by OC to adoring crowds of neo-Nazis and skinheads, but the location is always kept secret.… Activists claim Irving will speak at the IHR's offices at 7 p.m. tomorrow and plan a protest outside during that time—but I remain skeptical. Irving's personal email list has yet to disclose his whereabouts mañana, and I don't think he's so lazy as to just have it at the IHR offices. Anyhoo, people should protest those Nazis, whether they're there or not. See you there!

     Gosh, this reminds me of the time, back in 1998, when the OC Weekly named “SOCCCD meetings” one of Orange County’s Scariest People:

22. SOCCCD meetings
     Otherwise known as public meetings of the South Orange County Community College District. And we're not even talking about silent-but-deadly trustee Steven J. Frogue. We're talking about the people who come to see him, to defend or attack him. Like the guy who called an opponent in the audience "subhuman" and "a lower life form." Or the guy who singled out someone else as "a self-admitted Hitler-lover." Or these creative epithets we hesitate to publish in a family newspaper but will anyway since we don't work for one: "convicted child-molest offender," "pervert," "garbage-mouthed idiot," "piece of garbage," "nuts case," "sweathog," "toad," "fruitscake," "no, you're the fruitcake," "most unpleasant man" and "creep." MITIGATING FACTOR: When the Green Party finally takes power and destroys all televisions as a source of violence, greed and evil, we'll still have the South Orange County Community College District's board meetings. (Scariest People)

     #28 that year was Mike Schroeder—the Republican who sent Marilyn Davenport’s Obama-chimp image to the OC Weekly:

     ...Schroeder, head of the California GOP, is a lawyer, an Irvine resident and last year's Scary Person No. 21 (step it up, Mike). Actually, it's a tossup who's scarier: the Times Orange County for printing Bob Dornan's groundless attacks on Latino voters? Or Schroeder, Dornan's lawyer and the man who played the Times like a piano throughout the controversy and then-stupidly-bragged about it before a Republican audience in northern California.

Schroeder and wife at recent Lady GaGa concert

ALSO Don Wagner has announced a “Free Tax Seminar for Non-Profit and Faith Based Organizations.” Read all about it, I guess

Don "Spanky" Wagner wants to bring back spankings

And the bleat goes on

     APEGATE: In an update, R. Scott Moxley now reports that

     The executive committee of the OC Republican Party voted today 10-2 to send the Marilyn Davenport matter to the ethics committee, says … Jon Fleischman, a prominent local Republican who supported the motion. He identified the two "no" voters: Pat Shuff, a GOP activist in Fullerton, and the party's first vice chairman, Deborah Pauly, who caused a huge mess earlier this year when she made anti-Muslim statements in public. The ethics group will meet on Saturday.

     Moxley also noted that Davenport (and her handler, Tim Whitaker) showed up today on conservative talk-radio bloviator Larry Elder’s talk show. Evidently, Elder, who is African-American, encouraged Davenport to go on the offensive

     [She blamed] Democrats for having a "double standard" about racism and Republicans for not keeping her email a secret from the media.
     Elder, a prominent black conservative talk radio host based in Los Angeles, got Davenport to agree that the "real racists" are Democrats and to credit Republicans for insisting on the nation's civil rights advancements.
. . .
     Tim Whitacre, the fellow Orange County Republican Party official and former U.S. Marine who is aiding Davenport with the media, also appeared on the show, defended the email as a non-offensive joke, called Davenport "of sound mind and reason," and declared, "We are not going to let the [political] Left dictate this."….

     Earlier this week, Davenport acknowledged that, when she sent the chimp-Obama image, she knew that it likely would offend some—to whom she therefore did not send it. She also seemed to acknowledge that, in view of the use of ape images in the country’s racist past, the image should not have been sent—to anyone, I guess.
     Davenport is mighty confused.

The OC: "an incubator for grotesque political ugliness"

Scott Moxley connects the dots over at the OC Weekly in his article,
Marilyn Davenport: the Evolution of a Scandal.

excerpt:

   For decades now, OC has been an incubator for grotesque political ugliness. For some reason, this is where the darker side of right-wing American politics routinely emerges in gloriously shameful fashion. A brief, partial history...
   ...The scandal certainly isn't earth-shattering. Yet, if you are looking for evidence of progress in OC, here it is: In the long list of right-wing kooks who have turned the county into a political punch line during the past 50 years, none of them ever apologized and asked for forgiveness. Indeed, most of them shamelessly reveled in their nastiness. For Davenport, conceding that her email could have offended people—even if it appears she doesn't quite understand why—makes her footnote in the annals of the 2012 presidential campaign perhaps slightly less damning.

To read the rest, click here.

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