Heather Digby Parton

Salon Pundit: Americans With ‘Violent Desires’ Might Get ‘Inspiration’ to Attack From ‘A Republican Presidential Debate’
By Tom Johnson | December 6, 2015 | 12:17 PM EST

In a column posted last Monday, two days before the San Bernardino massacre, Heather Digby Parton warned of Americans with “violent desires” who might find “inspiration” to stage mass-casualty attacks not in jihadist propaganda, but in rhetoric used during “a Republican presidential debate.”

Parton linked the fatal shootings at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs to remarks by GOP presidential candidates and declared that those politicians “should have paused before they…exploited [the Planned Parenthood sting videos] for political gain. After all, gory illustrations of dismemberment and mutilation are the propaganda stock in trade of our most hated enemies. They are considered the gold standard for terrorist recruitment. You would think mainstream American politicians would think twice about going down that road…But they don’t.”

Salon: Ted Cruz Encourages Domestic Extremism and Terrorism
By Michael McKinney | October 16, 2015 | 2:06 PM EDT

On Friday, Salon featured two articles taking fire to presidential candidate Ted Cruz. Authored by Heather Digby Parton, one piece was titled, “Paranoid Rise of the Militant Right: Inside the Growing Threat of Domestic Extremism” and examined the Department of Justice’s new focus on domestic extremists, and the author zeroed in on right-wing extremism. The second was written by Simon Maloy, who offered the slippery-slope argument against Cruz under the title, "Ted Cruz's Crazy 'Jackboot' Talk: When Inflammatory Rhetoric Starts Getting Dangerous."

Bloggers Say Goodbye to Scott Walker, Who Didn’t Connect With GOP’s ‘Increasingly Disreputable Base’
By Tom Johnson | September 23, 2015 | 10:13 PM EDT

A few months ago, many liberals, including much of the bloggerati, were afraid that Walker had a good chance to win not only the Republican presidential nomination but also the presidency. Now that Walker’s out of the GOP race, several lefty pundits have weighed in on why.

Salon Pundit: Media Coverage of Hillary E-Mail Uproar Helps Republicans ‘Do Their Dirty Work’
By Tom Johnson | August 25, 2015 | 9:51 PM EDT

Democrats typically argue that almost all of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s mistakes have been molehills that Republicans have done their best to make into mountains. Heather Digby Parton thinks that the GOP has been aided in that regard by the mainstream media.

“One of the major effects of the patented ‘Clinton Scandal’ that’s become a fixture of political conversation over the past two decades is the helplessness in engenders in Democrats,” wrote Parton in a Monday piece. “They know it’s not a real scandal, and yet the press is blatantly aroused by the opportunity to speculate wildly about ‘what it all means’ while the Republicans smugly repeat their talking points with robotic military precision.”

Salon Pundit: Walker Messed Up By Aligning Himself With ‘Hardcore Neo-Confederates’ on Immigration
By Tom Johnson | April 22, 2015 | 9:24 PM EDT

Four Aprils ago, polling showed Donald Trump in or near the lead in the race for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. In a Wednesday column, Heather Digby Parton suggested that Scott Walker could wind up as the Trump of this election cycle: the guy who peaked when he wasn’t even an official candidate.

Parton admitted that she’s never understood why so many Republicans think Walker’s great or why so many Democrats believe he’d be a tough opponent, given that he supposedly “makes epic gaffes over and over again.” In any event, she argued that now he’s hurt himself badly by going hard-right on immigration, thereby displeasing libertarian conservatives like Charles and David Koch who “tend toward a more moderate stance” on the issue and, of course, donate megatons of money to political causes.

Salon Writer: Conservatives Who Routinely ‘Peddle False Narratives’ Shouldn’t Gloat Over Rolling Stone 'Debacle'
By Tom Johnson | April 8, 2015 | 3:08 PM EDT

When it comes to false media narratives, the typical right-winger should be more concerned with the plank in his own eye than with the speck in the eye of a liberal. That, minus the allusion to the Sermon on the Mount, was the essential argument from Heather Digby Parton in a Wednesday column.

Parton sees Rolling Stone’s debunked, retracted University of Virginia rape story as one component of the right’s “new meme about liberal lies and false narratives.” This meme, she suggested, is wildly overblown (for example, even though “hands up, don’t shoot” was discredited, “young black males being unfairly targeted by police” still is a major problem) as well as hypocritical (e.g., Fox News has “peddle[d] false narratives” about matters such as the Benghazi attack and made a ton of money doing so).

Salon Photo Implies That George Wallace Was a Republican
By P.J. Gladnick | September 12, 2014 | 5:14 PM EDT

Salon publishes article  chock full of historical inaccuracies including photo that implies George Wallace was a Republican.

Historically Illiterate Salon: JFK's Assassination Is 'a Monument to Right-Wing Ignominy'
By Connor Williams | July 25, 2014 | 4:14 PM EDT

In a historically illiterate Salon piece, writer Heather Digby Parton argued that “right-wing hatred” of John F. Kennedy ultimately led to his death, and that a climate of hate is once again growing because of the right’s reaction to President Obama. Of course, the entire premise of Parton’s piece is false because JFK was not assassinated by any crazy ‘gun nut’ right-winger, as she might have you believe.

Lee Harvey Oswald was a proud Communist who adored the Soviet Union. But one wouldn't know that from the article. In fact, the words "Lee Harvey Oswald" are never mentioned. Parton cited some evidence that there was extreme rhetoric directed toward Kennedy from the right, and connects that to the fact that he was ultimately killed. She asserted that “The right-wing hatred for John F. Kennedy was in some ways as extreme as the hatred for Barack Obama and nowhere was it more energized than Dallas in 1963.”