CBS and the rest of the MSM have decided the Tea Party movement is racist and hostile to non-whites, and it’s a mantra they’re going to illustrate whenever they see an opportunity. Reporter Nancy Cordes saw a “nearly all-white crowd” at Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally in Washington, DC, as she (at least an off-camera female voice) demanded of two black women who weren't afraid to attend: “I'm noticing that there aren't a lot of minorities here today. Why do you think that is?” One of the women shot back: “They're probably over there with Al Sharpton.”
In her story for Saturday’s CBS Evening News, Cordes had a very specific attendee number: “According to a tally commissioned by CBS News, roughly 87,000 people gathered here at this event today, thronging both sides of the reflecting pool, stretching all the way to the World War II memorial. That's the largest gathering here on the mall since President Obama was inaugurated.”
NBC anchor Lester Holt was more generous with his crowd guesstimate (“tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands”) before he described the Beck rally as “steeped in patriotism, rooted in the nation's cultural divide and greeted by suspicion.”
Holt opened the August 28 NBC Nightly News:
Good evening. Tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people from all over the country gathered at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington today for a rally steeped in patriotism, rooted in the nation's cultural divide and greeted by suspicion. It was organized by provocative conservative talk show host Glenn Beck who was joined on stage by Sarah Palin. And if that wasn't enough to trigger reaction from activists on the left, the timing and place of the rally certainly was – the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr's “I Have a Dream” speech delivered from those same steps 47 years ago today.
Back to the CBS Evening News and Cordes, a little of what led into the exchange quoted above:
NANCY CORDES: Beck, who is a converted Mormon, likes to call himself a clown, but today he played the role of ring-master, preaching racial tolerance to the nearly all-white crowd. A change in tone from the Fox News host who notoriously called President Obama [Beck: “a racist.”]
CORDES (or at least a female voice) TO TWO BLACK WOMEN: I'm noticing that there aren't a lot of minorities here today. Why do you think that is?
WOMAN: They're probably over there with Al Sharpton.
(There was no World News on ABC on Saturday night, at least in the EDT and CDT zones, because of the Little League World Series Texas v Hawaii playoff game. Hawaii won.)
I watched just about every major political talk show on television this weekend, and the funniest thing I heard was a comment by David Boaz of the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute.
In the predictions segment of "The McLaughlin Group," the Kentucky native spoke of the hotly contested race for Senate in that state between Tea Party candidate Rand Paul and Democrat Jack Conway.
What ensued left the entire panel laughing - except, of course, Newsweek's Eleanor Clift (video follows with transcript and commentary):
DAVID BOAZ, CATO INSTITUTE: In Kentucky, the Democrats are calling Rand Paul an extremist. Rand Paul is responding by calling his opponent a Democrat. In the end, the voters will be more scared of a Democrat.
Pop-star and courageous anti-toilet-paper crusader Sheryl Crow apparently has a new political concern: Tea Partiers.
The country crooner told CBS journalist Katie Couric that Tea Party members are uneducated, angry and potentially dangerous in an interview with Glamour magazine this June.
After Crow complained in the interview that Americans have become too blasé about politics, and that nobody has taken to the streets to cause "a riot or a revolution," Couric correctly pointed to the Tea Party as an example of modern day activism.
"What do you think of the Tea Party movement? Because that is the specific sort of group of people who would say we're out there, we're getting involved in the process...," asked Couric.
"I appreciate the fact that those people are out there and that they are fired up," responded Crow, before adding that Tea Partiers "haven't educated themselves...they're just pissed off."
"My main concern is that [the Tea Party is] really fear-based," said Crow, a cancer survivor and environmental activist. "What's coming out of the Tea Party most often, especially if you go onto YouTube, and you see some of the interviews with these people who really don't even know what the issues are, they're just swept up in the fear of it and the anger of it."
"They're not sure what they're angry at," Crow continued. "[T]hey don't understand what's happening on Wall Street."
The singer also worried that the "uneducated" and "angry" Tea Partiers could even become dangerous. "[K]nowledge is power, and anything less than that when it comes to anger can be dangerous," said Crow.
But before she snubbed the education level of Tea Partiers again, maybe Crow should have checked out this New York Times poll, which found Tea Party members to be "more educated than the general public."
The Grammy-award winning songstress could also serve to learn a thing or two from the Tea Partiers - in the past she's come under fire for her own bone-headed remarks. In 2007, Crow was mocked across the political spectrum for suggesting in a Huffington Post column that people should use "only one square [of toilet paper] per restroom visit" in order to conserve trees.
Other ideas in Crow's 2007 column included using a reusable "dining sleeve" instead of a dinner napkin, and a creating a "greenest lifestyle" contest for aspiring musicians.
Crow later backed away from her statements, claiming they were merely brilliant satire written in order to bring attention to the dire threat of climate change.
Later in her June Glamour magazine interview with Couric, Crow slammed Karl Rove and other conservatives for harping on her toilet paper idea. She claimed this was done "[j]ust to discredit me and to make me look silly."
The great Pat Caddell and Kendra Stewart survey the recent South Carolina elections over at Real Clear Politics:
Soon-to-be Congressman Tim Scott
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the historic change brought on in these June elections than the nomination – and all but certain election – of Tim Scott. In the first Congressional District – the very cradle of the Confederacy (a.k.a. the “Fort Sumter” district) – the over 90% white GOP primary runoff voters, elected the black conservative Scott in a 68-32% landslide over the son of South Carolina legend Strom Thurmond who was endorsed by all of the unsuccessful white candidates from the primary including the son of former governor Carroll Campbell. For South Carolina it was truly a “when hell freezes over” moment.
Clearly change and reform are in the saddle – and boy does this state need it. For a state seemingly inured to its multitude of problems of terrible schools, an under supported higher education system, the nation’s 7th highest unemployment rate, and undisputedly dysfunctional state politics this moment has not come too soon. Despite its many attributes and resources, South Carolina has stagnated for three decades while its coastal neighbors, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia have achieved startling progress.
For decades, first as a one-party Democratic state and now as a one-party Republican state, South Carolina has been ruled by a self-serving good-ole boys power structure which has blindly catered to the demands of special interests and insider deals. Nothing better illustrates its contempt for reform than the continued resistance of the legislative barons to the radical notion of recorded votes. From the era of segregation to the latest day, the good-ole boy system has protected its power by winning elections with the twin weapons of fear and smear. Enter Nikki Haley.
The amazing triumph of Nikki Haley was achieved despite multiple allegations of sexual affairs on the eve of the first primary and an occasionally overt and a truly ugly whisper campaign as to her religious beliefs and Indian heritage. Palin’s endorsement of Haley doubtlessly brought her attention, but we are convinced that her natural charisma, substantive grasp of issues and appealing message of change that in this South Carolina electoral hurricane the voters would have found her anyway. If successful she clearly has the potential of becoming a national political figure (indeed some people believe that Nikki Haley may actually have the substance that they feel Sarah Palin is lacking).
But it is Nikki Haley’s advocacy of reform that has earned her the enmity of the good-ole boy insiders. As a result they unleashed their consultant cadre of professional slime merchants against her. All to no avail. For the first time in memory, these tactics backfired and helped fuel her momentum. The heyday of dirty politics may have passed in South Carolina – hallelujah!
The nominations of Scott and Haley have dealt a crippling blow to the smug assertion that the public revolt against the political class in general and the Tea Parties in particular are nothing but the manifestation of narrow-minded, bigoted racists.
Violent protesters set fire to police cars and shattered store-front windows at the Group of 20 economic summit in Toronto this weekend. How did the New York Times, so skittish about the hypothetical threat of non-existent Tea Party violence from the right, react to actual violence committed by political protesters by the left-wing and anarchist groups? With more snort-worthy apologias for left-wing protesters being overwhelmingly "peaceful" in numerical terms
Reporter Randal Archibold made a similar claim in his April 24 story from Phoenix at a protest against Arizona's anti-immigration law, claiming that "hundreds of demonstrators massed, mostly peacefully, at the capitol plaza." Local news in Phoenix reported three people were arrested during the immigration rally, including two seen throwing water bottles at police, and videos showed more lawlessness on display.
The same defensive tone is present in Monday's Business section story from Toronto, with the ludicrous headline "Police in Toronto Criticized for Treatment of Protesters, Many Peaceful," by Ian Austen. Austen's story is illustrated with a photo from the European Pressphoto Agency showing two policemen arresting a woman, but not photos shown elsewhere of burning cars, like the Associated Press photo by Frank Gunn above.
Austen managed to fault the police both for initial passivity and subsequent overreaction:
An escalation of aggressive police tactics toward even apparently peaceful protests at the Group of 20 summit meeting led to calls for a review of security activities.
After allowing a small group of people to burn police cars and smash windows unimpeded on Saturday afternoon, many of the 20,000 police officers deployed in Toronto changed tactics that evening and during the last day of the gathering.
There was a notable increase in both the numbers of police officers who surrounded demonstrations as well as more use of tear gas and rubber or plastic bullets. At the same time, there was a visible drop in the number of demonstrators in the city streets.
As a result, the violence by some demonstrators that marred the opening of the Group of 20 meeting did not reappear on Sunday, and more than 600 people were arrested Saturday and Sunday.
The Times seemed to miss the obvious connection: More police and more arrests = less crime. It's one the Times has missed before, most notoriously in this headline from September 28, 1997: "Crime Keeps On Falling; but Prisons Keep On Filling."
Unlike Archibold's Arizona coverage, Austen didn't ignore the violence on display in Toronto, though he did offer the same ludicrous apologia to this group of left-wing protesters that Archibold did to the ones in Arizona, writing that "the overwhelming majority...were peaceful."
The violence was not exceptional compared with problems at previous international meetings, like the World Trade Organization's gathering in Seattle in 1999. Toronto's shopping district sustained the greatest damage but quickly became something of a tourist attraction.
But it was nevertheless extraordinary for Toronto, a city with little history of violent protests. David Miller, the city's mayor, was among the many who swiftly condemned it. "Does today send signals about Toronto that I wish weren't sent?" he said on Saturday evening. "Absolutely."
....
William Blair, the city's police chief, did not respond directly to the widespread criticism over the lack of police response during the period of violence. But at a news conference, he suggested that officers were deliberately held back.
The protesters, the overwhelming majority of whom were peaceful, promoted a variety of causes. Many were challenging the legitimacy of the Group of 20 and proposing that governments work through the United Nations. Others championed specific issues, particularly in relation to human rights and the environment.
It's well known liberals don't particularly care for Fox News host Glenn Beck, but wouldn't be comparing him to al Qaeda be a bit much?
On Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center claimed the lives of over 2,700 people. So what does that have to do with Glenn Beck? Well according to liberal talker Bill Press, Beck's plans to hold a rally at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28 are somehow akin to al Qaeda's worldview. Press demanded the National Park Service revoke permission for Beck to hold a rally where Martin Luther King had given his "I have a dream" speech 47 years earlier. (h/t Outside the Beltway)
"In a slap at both President Lincoln and Dr. King, not to mention the American people, the National Park Service has given Glenn Beck permission to hold a Tea Party rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28 - 47 years to the day after Martin Luther King gave his magnificent ‘I Have A Dream' speech," Press wrote in a June 16 post on his blog. "If you ask me, that's like granting al Qaeda permission to hold a rally on September 11 - at Ground Zero. What the hell were those bureaucrats at the Park Service thinking?"
Press made similar remarks on his June 15 radio program, arguing the Lincoln Memorial was sacred and that it should not be "rented out like a cheap suit." But even some of Press' liberal audience had disagreed with the host, one suggesting if they had Press' mentality 47 years ago, King might not have had the opportunity to speak at the memorial.
"Being a suicide bomber is the new political role model," Chris Matthews told his Friday "Hardball" audience. "Just kill everything, destroy everything, blow it up, nothing gets done. You're dead, but who cares?" he added, referring to conservative Republicans running against Democrats in the 2010 midterms.
The comment came at the end of a segment featuring Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.) and Politico's Jim VandeHei. Matthews had complained to the latter that the congressional minority Republicans were intent not merely on tinkering around the edges of the majority Democrats' policy proposals but on "destroy[ing] the United States government every time it gets up in the morning" all to the applause of "its cheering section back home say[ing] good work, keep trying to destroy the government."
VandeHei didn't agree with Matthews's "destroy the government" rhetoric about the GOP, although he agreed that the GOP was intent on "destroying" policies that President Obama supports.
For his part, the Politico writer argued that the political system as it stands now is just geared towards extreme partisanship because in part moderates had been "purged" from the GOP but also because "right now we have an entire system, we have a media system, we have a culture, we have technology that really rewards the incendiary, [that] rewards conflict."
Given Matthews's hyperbolic invective about "The Rise of the New Right," VandeHei might unwittingly be on to something, at least when it comes to the incendiary media.
Whether we like to actually admit it, the youth of our nation voted en masse for President Barack Obama. Exit polls indicate he won as much as 66% of voters under 30 years old. Enchanted by the word “change” entering into the prospective definition of their future, Obama calmed this worried, young sector of [...]
Newsweek blogger Ben Adler thinks the national media are giving the Tea Parties gentle treatment.
"Unfortunately," Adler wrote in a June 21 post, "what appear to be false notions of objectivity - or perhaps a lack of interest in policy - is preventing that coverage from illuminating what the movement actually represents and what it would do if empowered."
Adler complained that a recent Associated Press article, "Enraged to Engaged: Tea partiers explain why," failed to examine the ideology of the demonstrators in the grassroots conservative movement.
"The piece examines how and why a variety of individuals became involved in the Tea Party movement without once asking what precisely the platform consists of," Adler said, leading one to wonder if he even read the article.
The 2,300-word "stemwinder," as Adler called it, written by reporter Pauline Arrillaga, presented various segments of Tea Party ideology on five separate occasions.
In the third paragraph, Arrillaga notes that the purpose of the Tea Party-affiliated Lincoln Club in Yucca Valley, Calif., is "to promote educate and advance conservative principles of fiscal responsibility small limited government, free enterprise, the rule of law, private property rights, and the preservation and protection of individual liberty."
Eric Odom, widely regarded as a founder of the Tea Party movement, told Arrillaga said the group's purpose was, "to make sure that we're represented by people who are looking out for our rights and upholding the Constitution... And if they don't, to make sure we have an infrastructure to really take them out rather than have these thugs that are in there for 30, 40 years."
As Adler put it, Tea Partiers are "vehemently opposed" to raising taxes. "But when it comes to specifics, suddenly every program seems worthier than when demonized in the collective abstract. Which politician wants to cut spending on Homeland Security? Education for students with special needs? (Surely not Sarah Palin!)," Adler said in a reference to Palin's son, Trig, who was born with Down syndrome.
Adler complained that the AP would dare characterized Tea Party demonstrators as "concerned Americans trying to find their voices, and a way to channel their disgust." He suggested they aren't motivated by love of country or concern for the future, but by ignorance.
Arrillaga's article refuted the notion that Tea Party activists are "ignorant," however. Bill Warner, Lincoln Club member, ran his own engineering firm for three decades. Hildy Angius is currently running the Republican Woman's Club, and is a staunch Tea Party Activist. She is an ex-PR agent with a degree from New York State Albany. Eric Odom started the Tea Party movement fresh out of college. Tea Partiers come from all walks of life and have diverse academic backgrounds.
Adler also predictable recycled a tired media-drive stereotype that Tea Party members are racist. He suggested they are too dumb to realize they're racist.
"Might it be possible that the Tea Partiers who profess no racial motivation are, let's say, not entirely aware of their own visceral motivations? I'm sure if you asked the Southern voters who switched to Republican voting habits why they did so, many would say race had nothing to do with it. But why should journalists take that at face value?" Adler said.
Adler's assertion that the media have been soft on the Tea Parties might come as a surprise to anyone who's paid attention to media coverage of Tea Parties.
From the very first demonstrations in April 2009, reporters have attacked Tea Party members. According to a Media Research Center study, the media at first tried to ignore the demonstrations, but quickly moved into attack mode, portraying Tea Party protestors as extremists. Just last week, MSNBC's Chris Matthews aired a "documentary" about the Tea Party portraying its members as racists, terrorists and conspiracy theorists.
From day one of the spill, we have seen that it has left more than tragedy and waste in its path but also a magnifying of exactly what our White House holds: Zero real leadership and continuous degradation of the U.S. Constitution. While many political experts have said time and time again that our Commander [...]
Actress and author Carrie Fisher, revered for her role as Princess Leia in the Star Wars movies, granted an interview to the website Pop Eater. Late in the interview, they asked "Is there anyone you haven't met that you've always wanted to?" She said Barack Obama. They expressed surprise she hadn't met him. "I know. I love him. Hopefully I'll meet him sometime. I'm just happy he exists." Then came the rant against conservative Obama opponents:
Do you think Tea Party is just people who are pissed that there is an African American president?
Yup, and the fact that they chose to call themselves "teabaggers," which is slang for a certain act involving b***s. It sort of says a lot. I would say a mouthful. Looks like it's very upsetting for them, but he's brilliant. The thing is, he's half white but that's still not enough -- for them it's all white or f**k off. I think we don't deserve him and certainly teabaggers don't deserve him. [Asterisks theirs.]
Fisher also is a little candid with Pop Eater about how her father cheated with Elizabeth Taylor, as well as her electro-shock therapy.
Yesterday, Representative Joe Barton issued an apology, first on behalf of the nation and then of himself and called the recent acceptance of the Obama Administration’s orders for BP to pay $20 billion dollars in order to compensate for damage from the spill a “shakedown”. This apology was a horrid utterance by a man who [...]
BP is deserving of no apology; the real apology, should be to the American people. What is the real “shakedown” are the actions taken by the Obama Administration in order to milk whatever they can get from the BP spill aftermath. While they are happily having speeches cloaked in actions toward BP when in reality [...]
Some Tea Party leaders are calling for conservatives to boycott MSNBC's advertisers, after the network ran a documentary on June 16 that they say unfairly slandered the movement.
Two of the Tea Party leaders interviewed in the Chris Matthews-narrated documentary are asking supporters to write, call and fax the offices of Dawn and its parent company Proctor and Gamble and request that they cease giving advertising dollars to Matthews' "Hardball" program on MSNBC. FreedomWorks chairman Dick Armey and Kitchen Table Patriots member Ana Puig jointly called the documentary a "propaganda piece" and urged Tea Party groups around the country to boycott Dawn products.
"The program ‘Rise of the New Right' was low-ball journalism at its worst," said the Kitchen Table Patriots in a statement released today. "Chris Matthews and his Hardball program slandered the Tea Party movement, and misled the American people by distorting facts about the Tea Party movement, its motivations and its history." (Videos at the bottom of post.)
Brendan Steinhauser, a grassroots director at FreedomWorks, noted that other groups like the American Grassroots Coalition, the National Tea Party Federation, Tea Party Nation and Liberty Central have also signed on to the boycott.
Critics say that Matthews' documentary smeared Tea Partiers as "violent," "conspiracy theorists," and "racists" by relying heavily on insinuations, heavily edited sound bites, and allegations from left-wing activist groups.
The introduction of the video splices back-to-back shots of militia members firing guns with Tea Party protesters holding up signs criticizing President Obama's policies, as ominous music droned in the background.
In one segment, Matthews appeared to insinuate that FreedomWorks leader Armey is supportive of "birthers," a group of fringe conspiracy theorists who believe President Obama wasn't born in the U.S.
"While not embracing birthers, many conservative leaders refuse to separate from them," said Matthews in a voiceover that led in to an interview Matthews held with Armey.
"Barack Obama's citizenship, is that a real case or not?" asks Matthews.
"There's a venue for that. Probably in the courts," Armey replied.
But Steinhauser, who organizes FreedomWorks' national events, says that any suggestion that Armey sympathizes with birthers is "just ridiculous."
"[The documentary] obviously didn't give his full answer," said Steinhauser. "At our events we've been approached by just about every birther in the book. We kept [birthers] Allan Keyes [and] Orly Taitz as far as possible from our big September 12 event. I told them ‘that's not who we are - go have your own rally.' The movement out and out rejects that."
And other facts presented in the documentary don't appear to stand up to scrutiny. At one point in the video, Mark Potok, a director at the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) warned Matthews' that "we've gone from numbers like, you know, 170 militias to well over 500." But the SPLC's most recent report on right-wing groups released in Spring 2010 claimed that it only defines 127 organizations in the U.S. as "militias."
Steinhauser said that getting the message out about the boycott is just the first step in the campaign. "This is just the beginning stages. We've got some other things planned down the road in the days and weeks to come," he said.
For further analysis of Matthews' documentary, see Lachlan Markey's Newsbusters report.
Latest NewsReal Post:
Last night, MSNBC aired a Chris Matthews special, labeled a documentary, called The Rise of the New Right. I decided to take a quick break from my radical right wing extremist acts like bitterly clinging to my guns and my Bible, [...]
What do Tea Partiers, Truthers, birthers, Birchers, militias, Pat Buchanan, Jerry Falwell, Barry Goldwater, Joe McCarthy, Father Coughlin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Ronald Reagan, Strom Thurmond, Rand Paul, Alex Jones, Orly Taitz, and Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh all have in common? Approximately nothing, but don't tell Chris Matthews.
The MSNBC "Hardball" host spent the better part of an hour last night trying to associate all of these characters with one other. Of course he did not provide a shred of evidence beyond, ironically, a McCarthyite notion that all favor smaller government, and are therefore in league, whether they know it or not, to overthrow the government. Together, by Matthews's account, they comprise or have given rise to the "New Right."
The special was less a history of the Tea Party movement than a history of leftist distortions of the Tea Party movement. As such, it tried -- without offering any evidence, mind you -- to paint the movement as potentially violent. Hence, after Matthews tried his hardest to link all of these characters, he went on to paint them all as supporting, inciting, or actually committing violence.
Matthews trotted out Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center to claim that "one spark" could set the militia movement off into a violent frenzy. But Matthews used the statement not to indict the militias Potok was discussing, but rather as evidence that the Tea Party movement at-large is a violent one. Set aside for a moment the fact that Potok is nothing but a partisan hack with a pathetic track record of predicting violence, the B-roll footage while the thoroughly-discredited Potok was making these predictions was footage of the 9/12 Tea Party rally in Washington.
This is what Matthews did throughout the special: splice together clips of militias firing weapons with Tea Party protesters in order to create a mental association between the groups. That there is no evidence whatsoever linking Tea Parties to militia groups, nor incidents of violence occurring at rallies, did not dissuade the former Jimmy Carter staffer. Matthews simply chose the unseemly route of trying to associate the numerous characters in his special without any evidence to back up his claims.
The only connection that Matthews managed to legitimately draw between the Tea Party and militia groups -- indeed, between any of the long list of characters mentioned above-- is their aversion to government intervention in their daily lives. That's right, in the same segment in which Matthews ragged against the late Joe McCarthy, he associated Tea Parties with the Hutaree Militia because both have a distaste for big government (the latter much stronger than the other, obviously).
By Matthews's logic, every American who has qualms with some element of capitalism is complicit in, and supports, openly or not, radical anarcho-socialist violence perpetrated at the G-8, or any other incident of leftist violence (and there have been many of late). Matthews himself has touted the wonders of the "social state." So he must support, or at least acknowledge the justifiability of folks who wish to violently overthrow the government and impose a socialist system. That is the only logical conclusion, if we accept Matthews's premises.
Such hypocrisy is rife in the special: if folks associated with the Tea Party use words like "revolution," they must be literally advocating violence, whereas when mainstream leftists literally advocate violence, they are not worth mentioning.
The special's rank hypocrisy continues right through Matthews's final monologue. "Words have consequences," he states. "You cannot call a president's policies 'un-American,' as Sarah Palin has done," he claims. Or, Matthews forgot to add, as Salon Editor Joan Walsh and Time columnist Joe Klein have done, the former on Matthews's show and the latter on another MSNBC program.
Given that the special really offered no new insight into the Tea Party movement -- just the same cliches the Left has regurgitated since the fall of last year -- it is hardly surprising, though worth mentioning, that neither Matthews nor any of his cohorts seem to remember their total lack of concern over the potential for anti-government violence during the Bush administration.
Chris Matthews definitely took a "hard look" at the Tea Party, on Wednesday's "Morning Joe," in anticipation of tonight's MSNBC documentary "The Rise of the New Right." Tying the whole Tea Party movement together, the MSNBC "Hardball" host defined it as "McCarthyite," possessing a "fundamental questioning of authority," and viewing the federal government as an occupying force.
"It believes that this government is verging on tyranny," Matthews complained, pointing to the movement's use of the Revolutionary War-era Gadsden flag -- "Don't Tread on Me" -- in an ominous light.
When asked by Joe Scarborough if he would link members of the Michigan Militia featured in tonight's documentary (seemingly characterized in the preceding video clip as a radical fringe group), to Tea Party members who have campaigned for Scott Brown and Marco Rubio, Matthews answered that the various groups are all part of one movement.
"I'm tying the whole movement together," he asserted. "Because what you hear is that they all fly the same flag."
Matthews said that the use of the Gadsden flag by Tea Partiers "scared" him. "They are basically looking at the federal government now as an occupying force, basically a foreign occupying force, a tyranny," he said. "And that justifies a lot of bad behavior, I would say."
"What you hear, Joe, is the fundamental questioning of authority," Matthews claimed. He also alleged that the movement is pointing to the Second Amendment to justify armed force against the federal government "when the time comes."
Not wanting to be left out of the fun, advertising executive Donny Deutsch, chairman of Deutsch, Inc., threw the race card onto the table.
"Chris, along those lines, would the Tea Party be having the same verve if this was not an African-American President?"
But Matthews wouldn't bite. "I don't know," he said. "You make those kinds of charges, you get into trouble. I have no idea."
However, Matthews did accuse the movement of being "McCarthyite," referencing accusations by Dick Armey and Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.) of Democrats and administration members of being un-American.
The transcript of the interview, which aired on June 16, at 7:45 a.m. EDT, is as follows:
WILLIE GEIST: Chris, as far as you can tell, what is the new right? And how influential is it?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Well, it believes that this government is verging on tyranny. The federal government of the United States, which was honestly elected, is more like a British occupying force of colonial days. They look at it as illegitimate. Many of them believe that Barack Obama is not an American. They believe they need their Second Amendment rights–as Sharon Angle said the other day–to perhaps carry out remedies when they think that Congress is going too far. Very strong on Second Amendment as a way of fighting the federal government, when the time comes; very concerned about the legitimacy of Barack Obama as whether he is an American or not. And, in fact, if you listen to Dick Armey, they wonder whether anybody in the administration has any pro-American attitudes. And Michelle Bachmann would go right through the Democrats in Congress, and have the media investigate them for anti-American attitudes. It's very much McCarthy-ite, it gets back to the days of questioning other people's loyalties, and it questions the President's very legitimacy. And what scared me, if you want to get scared, was the use of the flag from the American Revolution–the Great Gadsden flag from South Carolina, with the coiled rattlesnake. They are basically looking at the federal government now as an occupying force, basically a foreign occupying force, a tyranny. And that justifies a lot of bad behavior, I would say.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Chris, though, you're not connecting, though, Tea Party members that Mike interviewed in Massachusetts that helped Scott Brown get elected, or Tea Party members that may be supporting Marco Rubio in Florida, or Tea Party members who are supporting other conservative candidates across America–you're not tying them with members of the Michigan Militia, are you?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Yes, I am. I'm tying the whole movement together. Because what you hear is that they all fly the same flag. Certainly there are people that straggle along and show up at meetings of any political party, whether it's mainstream or French. People show up and join. I'm not talking about the joiners. I'm talking about the leadership people themselves. Listen to Sharon Angle. Listen to Rand Paul. Listen to their basic questioning of federal authority. It's very fundamental, and their absolute focus on the Second Amendment over and over again–that guy in that militia uniform with his fatigues on said that he speaks very much the same language as the Tea Party people. He says it. If you listen to people like Michelle Bachmann, they question the legitimacy of the government, they question whether it's a tyranny or not. You got to hear the words tonight, Joe. These people–wait till you hear Dick Armey talking about "There's nobody in this administration who is pro-American." I mean they're saying it. I'm not saying it.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: I'll be watching. I know that the guy in the camouflage said that the Tea Party people tell him that they're not connected. But are you connecting–let me be more specific. This is fascinating. Are you connecting Rand Paul with these Michigan Militia members that run around with guns, that–
CHRIS MATTHEWS: You know, I think you have to see the absolute resonance of the sound. What you hear, Joe, is the fundamental questioning of authority. You have people who believe that the federal government–look. Joe, I know you saw those Congress people waving the Gadsden flag off the balcony of the Capitol on the House side. They were waving that revolutionary flag. They were the ones inciting those people to look upon the federal government as a tyranny, as perhaps illegitimate. They're the ones using the language of revolution. It's not us. In fact, the documentary, all through it, you hear a very similar voice: this government is not legitimate. 32 percent of the Republican Party now believes that Barack Obama is not an American. And that's the latest CBS Poll. These are not things that are arguable, Joe, these are facts.
DONNY DEUTSCH, Chairman, Deutsch, Inc.: Chris, along those lines, would the Tea Party be having the same verve if this was not an African-American President?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I don't know. I think–I don't know. That's something you got to get into people's souls, and you make those kind of charges, you get into trouble. I have no idea. I do think that–
DONNY DEUTSCH: I'm not making charges. I'm asking a question. I just want (Garbled)
CHRIS MATTHEWS: I think the fact that so many of the people are–Orelly Tates is out there with the birther movement, which has very much been part of this, saying that the guy's not an American, that he should be out of office because he was born in Kenya. Challenging that–Alan Keyes, those kinds of people. All those voices are out there on the Right.
"You have been weighed in the balances and found wanting." That's how the biblical prophet Daniel interpreted the writing on the wall that heralded the imminent demise of the Babylonian Empire.
It could also sum up journalist Sarah Pulliam Bailey's take on Lisa Miller's "Saint Sarah" piece in Newsweek (emphases mine):
Journalists have long been puzzled over Sarah Palin’s popularity. In November, Newsweek took a stab at the trend with its provocative cover of Palin in running clothes: “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Sarah Palin: How Sarah Palin Hurts the GOP And the Country.”
[...]
Lisa Miller’s thesis is compelling if it is true, but journalists usually rely on hard facts, polls, maybe interviews with political scientists to prove their points. Unfortunately, Miller’s article contains none of these to support her theory that Palin is somehow the new leader of the Christian Right. Instead, she strings together a bunch of anecdotes and quotes to prove what she thinks is happening.
Pulliam Bailey devoted most of her June 14 Get Religion blog post to fisking Miller's argument. Here's just a sample (emphases are the author's):
The story leads with Palin’s classic story of how she decided to give birth to her son Trig.
Palin has already overshared: nothing makes a person, let alone a politician, appear more vulnerable, more ordinary, and more unambiguously female than a scene in a bathroom where she pees on a stick. But then she defies a generation of pro-life activists who preached that the life of the fetus is sacred, no matter what an individual woman wants.
Is there any indication that Palin doesn’t think the fetus is sacred? Lots of women who chose to give birth give testimonies about their decision-making process. Is she actually defying other activists?
Let’s face it: the Trig story is a women’s story, the kind girlfriends share over coffee or in church. It has all the familiar elements of evangelical testimony: tribulation and dread; trust in God; and, finally, great blessings. Many Christian women loathe Palin,
Who? Why?
of course, and many men love her,
Who? Why?
but a certain kind of conservative, Bible-believing woman worships her.
Who? Is it only Bible-believing women who worship her? And really? Worships her?
To a smaller number, she is a prophet, ordained by God for a special role in the cosmic battle against the forces of evil.
What forces of evil? Who thinks she was ordained by God? Does this smaller number think the political arena is the cosmic battle?
Perhaps the biggest failure on Miller's part? Pulliam Bailey notes that Miller insisted that
Palin has her faults, but the left is partially to blame for her ascent. Its native mistrust of religion, of conservative believers in particular, left the gap that Palin now fills.
The GetReligion.org writer then argued that, "Perhaps Miller should have spent more time writing about this part of the story. It would be more compelling to read more about the left’s mistrust of religion that left a gap."
Given Newsweek's cutesy take on "Saint Sarah," it was only fitting that an analysis critical of it should end with a biblical allusion. Pulliam Bailey didn't disappoint with the observation that the financially-struggling magazine is intent on "making Palin in its own image":
If Palin is really leading the religious right, has anyone captured photo evidence of Palin’s flock? The accompanying slideshow, titled “Cult of Palin,” features Palin condoms, porn movies and strip clubs. The slideshow does nothing to back Miller’s thesis about Palin’s new found leadership of the religious right. Maybe that’s because Newsweek is making Palin in its own image.
Well, she’s a former alcoholic, drug addict, washed up actor, shock therapy patient (no, really) and one-time princess to the universe, but now Carrie “Princess Leia” Fisher can add one more calumny to her long list of off-kilter, personality deficits: she’s a “teabagger” hater. So, she’s got that going for her, which is nice.
Hawking another [...]
CNN's Jack Cafferty ripped the Democratic-controlled Congress for their inaction to pass a budget during a commentary on Thursday's Situation Room: "The Democrats in Congress can't be bothered to pass a budget for next year. That's their job....It's simply outrageous." Cafferty also channeled the Tea Party and strongly condemned the federal government for "taking us down the road to financial ruin."
The CNN commentator began his 5 pm Eastern hour commentary by highlighting the "skyrocketing federal deficits and a national debt that just passed $13 trillion," along with the Democratic congressional leadership's stalling in passing next year's budget. He continued that "efforts to pass a budget have stalled in the House because Democrats can't agree on what and how much to cut. See, it's an election year and we can't be seen cutting things in an election year."
After using his "outrageous" label, Cafferty actually complimented the Republicans in Congress: "Republicans say the Democrats are making a huge mistake by not passing a budget, and they're right."
Other than lumping in "the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," the CNN personality's condemnation of federal spending near the end of his commentary sounded like it could have been taken from a Tea Party protester:
CAFFERTY: Meanwhile, our government just keeps spending and spending, from the Wall Street bailouts to the economic stimulus, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, health care reform- on and on and on. They're bankrupting the country by running up an astronomical bill. The national debt is now estimated to be $19.6 trillion in less than five years, and that's a debt that can never be repaid. Our government is in the process of destroying this country, and despite warnings of the dire consequences of their actions, they continue undeterred, taking us down the road to financial ruin.
The full transcript of Jack Cafferty's commentary, which began 13 minutes into the 5 pm Eastern hour of Thursday's Situation Room:
CAFFERTY: At a time of skyrocketing federal deficits and a national debt that just passed $13 trillion, the Democrats in Congress can't be bothered to pass a budget for next year. That's their job. Congress is supposed to decide how to spend the taxpayers' money. They are mandated to pass a budget, and presumably, to stick to it- but that's a whole other story. Yet, efforts to pass a budget have stalled in the House because Democrats can't agree on what and how much to cut. See, it's an election year and we can't be seen cutting things in an election year. It's simply outrageous.
Republicans say the Democrats are making a huge mistake by not passing a budget, and they're right. House Minority Leader John Boehner suggests President Obama should find someone's 'ass to kick' when it comes to the budget deficit. He says the GOP will be relentless on this issue. One Democratic congressman, Gerry Connolly from Virginia, calls budgets 'inside baseball'- that's a quote- suggesting that it's not something the public is interested in. Hey, it's our money!
Meanwhile, our government just keeps spending and spending, from the Wall Street bailouts to the economic stimulus, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, health care reform- on and on and on. They're bankrupting the country by running up an astronomical bill. The national debt is now estimated to be $19.6 trillion in less than five years, and that's a debt that can never be repaid. Our government is in the process of destroying this country, and despite warnings of the dire consequences of their actions, they continue undeterred, taking us down the road to financial ruin.
Here’s the question: why is the Democratic Congress refusing to pass a budget? Go to CNN.com/ CaffertyFile, post a comment on my blog.
One of the New York Times's favorite themes is the ever-impending Republican civil war that will ruin the party's chances in whatever election that's coming up. Former chief political reporter Adam Nagourney is a past master, but he's now covering the West Coast. Luckily, Times contributor Matt Bai was there to fill the gap Thursday, explaining how the Republicans may blow a great opportunity through ruinous infighting in the primaries.
A front-page, above-the-fold teaser distorted one of Bai's already premature judgements, leaving out his qualifier to suggest Republican prospects are already sunk: "Some critics are already asking Republican leaders how they managed to let a promising election season get so mightily out of control."
Bai wrote:
Primaries are a wonderful thing -- or at least that's the standard line among Republican leaders these days. "Primary campaigns can be healthy," said Ken Spain, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, "because they prepare the eventual nominee for how to aggressively campaign in November and provide the candidate with an opportunity to familiarize himself or herself with the electorate." What doesn't kill you makes you stronger! Let democracy flower!
Of course, Republicans have little choice but to see it this way, since nearly every nonincumbent Republican running for Congress this year has had to endure a primary, often with enough candidates to field a softball team. This disorderly sorting out of candidates, a process that in many cases features establishment types with good hair against ideologues in search of a Bastille to storm, will not matter much if Republicans can regain a majority in at least one chamber in November. If they do not, however, Republican leaders will have to answer the question some critics are already asking, which is how they managed to let a promising election season get so mightily out of control.
A front-page, above-the-fold teaser distorted Bai's already premature judgement by leaving out his qualifier: "Some critics are already asking Republican leaders how they managed to let a promising election season get so mightily out of control."
By last summer, though, public meetings on health care were erupting in fury and the phrase "Tea Party" was entering the political lexicon. Suddenly, more conservatives were jostling for a chance to challenge incumbent Democrats and their own party, and to promote ideological purity. Stunned Republicans in Washington were reluctant to rescind their tacit endorsements of what they saw as electable candidates, but the last thing they wanted was to square off against newly energized Tea Party types.
Instead, the party basically tried to slink off to the sidelines, which only emboldened more primary challengers. A lot of establishment candidates, meanwhile, ended up in the worst of all worlds, branded as instruments of the party but running without much practical help from Washington.
Focused on potential Republican problems, Bai didn't even mention the bloodbath in Tuesday's Arkansas Senate primary pitting supporters of center-left sitting Sen. Blanche Lincoln and Bill Halter, backed by the far-left and national unions.
MSNBC's Chris Matthews's ratings lag far behind those of his competition, Fox News' Glenn Beck, on a regular basis. So is he perhaps trying to become the anti-Glenn Beck to bolster his stature in the cable news world?
"You know that Gadsden flag, the ‘Don't Tread on Me Flag' with a rattlesnake is so important," Matthews said. "They believe, a lot of people in the right - that the federal government has replaced the British as the occupying force in North America and they have to be ready to fight it. It's serious business."
But the scary thing, according to Matthews, is these people he has caricatured have guns.
"Some have the guns, some don't," Matthews said. "Some have the Tea Party aspect. But it's always that flag, ‘Don't Tread on Me.' They believe Washington is London."
And while it has been documented that the media have repeatedly - and unsuccessfully - tried to correlate violence with the Tea Party movement, Matthews continued to play the "scary business" card - that this movement was trying to circumvent the role of the Supreme Court as prescribed by the U.S. Constitution.
"The scary part of this is, do they really believe in self-government in the end - self-government?" Matthews said. "Or is the government always going to be the enemy? And the other scary part is the Supreme Court doesn't get the right to determine what's constitutional. They do. And they've got guns. Serious business."
Possibly the best news regarding yesterday’s primaries comes from Nevada, where Sharron Angle — endorsed by the Great One himself — has earned the job of displacing Dingy Harry Reid. Angle is a solid countermoonbat. As the Daily Caller observes, her win represents the increasing clout of the Tea Party movement:
Republican voters in Nevada on [...]
On Wednesday's CBS Early Show, Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer provided analysis of Tuesday's primary elections across the country, describing the South Carolina gubernatorial race "where they continue to draw their political plot lines from, you know, 'Desperate Housewives' or something" and how Nevada Democrats were "very happy" with the victory of tea party candidate Sharron Angle.
Speaking to Early Show co-host Maggie Rodriguez, Schieffer ran down the most watched races in Arkansas, California, South Carolina, and Nevada. When he got to South Carolina, he described gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley as "very conservative." After making the 'Desperate Housewives' comparison, he remarked how the GOP primary in the state was "providing some entertainment, as it were, for the rest of the country. I mean, you had Governor Sanford down there and his adventures. And now these allegations against Nikki Haley." He quickly added that the allegations of adultery against Haley were "without foundation" and that "Nobody has proven anything."
Rodriguez then asked if "Harry Reid is happy or fretting the fact" that tea party-backed Sharron Angle won the GOP senate primary in Nevada. Schieffer declared: "I suspect that Democrats in Nevada are very happy about this....I think the Reid people think that he would have a much better chance beating her than some of the other Republicans in the primaries."
Here is a full transcript of Rodriguez's June 9 discussion with Schieffer:
7:04AM EST
MAGGIE RODRIGUEZ: Let's bring in CBS News chief Washington correspondent and host of Face the Nation Bob Schieffer. Good morning, Bob.
BOB SCHIEFFER: Hey, Maggie.
RODRIGUEZ: So there's been this anti-establishment sentiment for awhile in this country. But now – I'm sure it's not helping that no one seems to be able to solve this BP oil spill. Do you think that played into last night's results at all?
[ON-SCREEN HEADLINE: Primary Politics; What Message Did Voters Send?]
SCHIEFFER: It probably did. I mean, you know, there's just this general feeling that the government is sort of impotent to do much of anything about anything. And I think there's no question that has something to do with the voter frustration that's being felt out across the country. But it really is hard to draw much deep analysis or deeper meaning from these races last night, because they were all so different.
I mean, Blanche Lincoln barely eked out a primary win over her opponent, who was challenging her from the Left. He was well-financed by labor unions. It's not all that easy for a labor-backed candidate to win in the South, and this time we saw that once again, a labor-backed candidate did not win. But she is still the underdog going into November. She's going to have a very difficult time there.
Out in California, it was just all a question of money. And that's all there was to it. I mean, Meg Whitman, who won out there, won by spending nearly $80 million. Money still talks in politics. And we saw a real example of that.
Down in South Carolina, where they continue to draw their political plot lines from, you know, 'Desperate Housewives' or something, you saw again a very conservative candidate win. I mean, these campaigns down in South Carolina are really providing some entertainment, as it were, for the rest of the country. I mean, you had Governor Sanford down there and his adventures. And now these allegations against Nikki Haley. We should underline and point out, totally, totally-
RODRIGUEZ: Allegations.
SCHIEFFER: -without – without foundation.
RODRIGUEZ: Right.
SCHIEFFER: Nobody has proven anything. But it just shows, I mean, kind of the nature of politics down there this year. It's really, really kind of extraordinary.
RODRIGUEZ: We've been talking a lot about the tea party. And in Nevada, we had the tea party favorite Sharron Angle win last night. Do you think that majority leader Harry Reid is happy or fretting the fact that she won?
SCHIEFFER: I suspect that Democrats in Nevada are very happy about this. She was the tea party-backed candidate. The other part is, she is one of the few people in the state of Nevada who has endorsed, I understand, storing nuclear waste in Nevada. Nevada politics has always been about putting the nuclear waste someplace else. Now she has endorsed that. That's going to be very difficult for her. I think the Reid people think that he would have a much better chance beating her than some of the other Republicans in the primaries. Still going to be very, very close. He has a lot of work to do out there.
RODRIGUEZ: Alright. Bob Schieffer, as always, thank you so much, Bob.
On Tuesday’s World News, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos touted how “we've got a new poll out tonight that shows the Tea Party may be losing steam nationwide” as its unfavorable rating has “gone up eleven points in the last couple of months to 50 percent. Their favorable rating has gone down.”
Stephanopoulos and ABC, however, didn’t find time, in multiple stories on the oil leak, to inform viewers how the same ABC News/Washington Post survey, released Tuesday morning, found that by 49 to 44 percent the public disapproves of President Obama's handling of the disaster. In addition, “the number of Americans who think the President ‘understands the problems of people like you,’ at 51 percent, is down from 56 percent in a Washington Post poll in late March; and at 57 percent his rating as a strong leader is down from 65 percent in March.” (PDF of poll results)
Stephanopoulos raised the Tea Party’s standing in a preview of Tuesday’s primary elections. Anchor Diane Sawyer wondered: “And what does this mean, the outsider momentum for the Tea Party? Does it roll straight to November?” Stephanopoulos answered:
Not entirely clear. We've got a new poll out tonight that shows the Tea Party may be losing steam nationwide. Look at the unfavorable rating. It's gone up eleven points in the last couple of months to 50 percent [from 39]. Their favorable rating has gone down [41 to 36]. So the Tea Party still has enough juice to win these primaries, but they may be putting their party in a position of making it harder to win those seats in November.
Tomorrow, Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) along with Young Americas Foundation and other conservative political organizations will be joining together to contact their Senators against Obama’s current Supreme Court Nominee Elena Kagen.
Citing factors such as her actions against the military’s right to be on campuses, her Princeton thesis lamenting the decline of socialism [...]
Despite punishing 107° heat, an impressive crowd turned out across from the Arizona State Capitol Saturday for the Phoenix Rising demonstration in support of countermoonbattery, American sovereignty, the rule of law, and in particular, SB1070. Not even the blazing sun could melt the festive spirits.
As with most Tea Party type events, there was no shortage [...]
With Memorial Day weekend signifying a semi-defeat of the Obama Administration as they admitted offering a position to Democrat Senatorial candidate Joe Sestak in exchange for dropping out of his race against Democrat Golden Boy Arlen Specter, before the event could even attempt to reach the news archives a related admission was raised. Former House [...]
The Miranda Rights and what they entail has been a topic of both legal and political debate. However, recently there has been a development in the aspect of when the right to speak is waived. In the recent Supreme Court decision involving the criminal case of convicted murderer Van Chester Thompkins’ questioning, the Court determined [...]
Cross-posted from RedState:
I didn’t address State Sen. Jake Knotts’ “raghead” comments earlier, because I had little to say to the refuted man, save for some rather colorful words. Today, he proved himself even more odious than even first thought. Via Hot Air (emphasis theirs):
He claims she is hiding her religion and he [...]
“Up next, why some Republicans are starting to wish the Tea Party was over,” Katie Couric teased Friday night as CBS feigned concern over how Tea Party candidates are too “extreme” to win. CBS News political analyst John Dickerson delivered the usual media warning, just with a new entity to blame for pushing Republicans too far to the right: “The passion that was so important in primaries for Tea Party candidates doesn't play often so well in a general election where you're trying to go after moderate and independent voters.”
Reporter Dean Reynolds cited Nevada Senate candidate Sharon Angle who “wants to end the federal income tax and Social Security,” so incumbent Democratic Senator Harry Reid “wants to run against her because he believes her extreme views make her easier to beat.” In a North Carolina House race, “the Tea Party's Tim D’Annunzio has a shot at the Republican nomination even though divorce papers called him a ‘messianic drug user’ who worries that ‘a gigantic pyramid will descend on Greenland’ one day” and, even more appalling to CBS, “he recently held what he called ‘a machine gun social.’”
Unmentioned by Reynolds, how Tea Party leaders no longer consider him their candidate. Politico reported on May 27: “After a damaging Charlotte Observer story about D’Annunzio’s past run-ins with the law and alleged drug history, six tea party leaders in the 8th Congressional District are switching their support to D’Annunzio’s opponent.”
KATIE COURIC: Mitt Romney was in Arizona today to campaign for his former rival John McCain who's facing a tough primary challenge from a candidate endorsed by the Tea Party. Dean Reynolds now on a political movement that's vocal and voting.
DEAN REYNOLDS: There's no question that the Tea Party has become a potent political force in little over a year. A CBS poll says one in five Americans supports the movement now. Republican Scott Brown's victory in the January Senate election in the Democratic stronghold of Massachusetts symbolized Tea Party clout.
SCOTT BROWN, JANUARY 19: Tonight, the independent voice of Massachusetts has spoken!
REYNOLDS: But while Republicans initially welcomed the Tea Party, in recent weeks the embrace may be a bit too close for comfort.
JOHN DICKERSON, CBS NEWS POLITICAL ANALYST: The passion that was so important in primaries for Tea Party candidates doesn't play often so well in a general election where you're trying to go after moderate and independent voters.
REYNOLDS: Take Nevada, where Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is considered vulnerable. Establishment Republican Sue Lowden is a in a close race against Tea Party hopeful Sharon Angle to run against Reid.
SHARON ANGLE: When socialism takes over, all they need to do is look here.
REYNOLDS: Angle wants to end the federal income tax and Social Security. Reid wants to run against her because he believes her extreme views make her easier to beat. Tea Party candidates have already expelled prominent Republicans from races in Florida and Utah. And the race in Arizona involving John McCain, no less, and Tea Party opponent J.D. Hayworth has dismayed Republican officials.
STUART ROTHENBERG, ROTHENBERG POLITICAL REPORT: They're not sure that these untested candidates over the long haul are politically savvy and astute enough to win tough general elections.
REYNOLDS: In North Carolina's eighth district, the Tea Party's Tim D’Annunzio has a shot at the Republican nomination even though divorce papers called him a “messianic drug user” who worries that “a gigantic pyramid will descend on Greenland” one day. He recently held what he called “a machine gun social.”
TIM D’ANNUNZIO: We talked about issues and let people shoot fully automatic MP-5 and Uzi submachine guns.
REYNOLDS: In Kentucky, Tea Party favorite Rand Paul defeated the Republican Party establishment choice for the Senate nomination. And then Paul's views on the Constitution and civil rights quickly raised Republican doubts about the Tea Partier's electability. Republicans know that passion and energy are terrific, but they also know that without electability you don't win elections. Dean Reynolds, CBS News, Chicago.
“Up next, why some Republicans are starting to wish the Tea Party was over,” Katie Couric teased Friday night as CBS feigned concern over how Tea Party candidates are too “extreme” to win. CBS News political analyst John Dickerson delivered the usual media warning, just with a new entity to blame for pushing Republicans too far to the right: “The passion that was so important in primaries for Tea Party candidates doesn't play often so well in a general election where you're trying to go after moderate and independent voters.”
Reporter Dean Reynolds cited Nevada Senate candidate Sharon Angle who “wants to end the federal income tax and Social Security,” so incumbent Democratic Senator Harry Reid “wants to run against her because he believes her extreme views make her easier to beat.” In a North Carolina House race, “the Tea Party's Tim D’Annunzio has a shot at the Republican nomination even though divorce papers called him a ‘messianic drug user’ who worries that ‘a gigantic pyramid will descend on Greenland’ one day” and, even more appalling to CBS, “he recently held what he called ‘a machine gun social.’”
Unmentioned by Reynolds, how Tea Party leaders no longer consider him their candidate. Politico reported on May 27: “After a damaging Charlotte Observer story about D’Annunzio’s past run-ins with the law and alleged drug history, six tea party leaders in the 8th Congressional District are switching their support to D’Annunzio’s opponent.”
KATIE COURIC: Mitt Romney was in Arizona today to campaign for his former rival John McCain who's facing a tough primary challenge from a candidate endorsed by the Tea Party. Dean Reynolds now on a political movement that's vocal and voting.
DEAN REYNOLDS: There's no question that the Tea Party has become a potent political force in little over a year. A CBS poll says one in five Americans supports the movement now. Republican Scott Brown's victory in the January Senate election in the Democratic stronghold of Massachusetts symbolized Tea Party clout.
SCOTT BROWN, JANUARY 19: Tonight, the independent voice of Massachusetts has spoken!
REYNOLDS: But while Republicans initially welcomed the Tea Party, in recent weeks the embrace may be a bit too close for comfort.
JOHN DICKERSON, CBS NEWS POLITICAL ANALYST: The passion that was so important in primaries for Tea Party candidates doesn't play often so well in a general election where you're trying to go after moderate and independent voters.
REYNOLDS: Take Nevada, where Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is considered vulnerable. Establishment Republican Sue Lowden is a in a close race against Tea Party hopeful Sharon Angle to run against Reid.
SHARON ANGLE: When socialism takes over, all they need to do is look here.
REYNOLDS: Angle wants to end the federal income tax and Social Security. Reid wants to run against her because he believes her extreme views make her easier to beat. Tea Party candidates have already expelled prominent Republicans from races in Florida and Utah. And the race in Arizona involving John McCain, no less, and Tea Party opponent J.D. Hayworth has dismayed Republican officials.
STUART ROTHENBERG, ROTHENBERG POLITICAL REPORT: They're not sure that these untested candidates over the long haul are politically savvy and astute enough to win tough general elections.
REYNOLDS: In North Carolina's eighth district, the Tea Party's Tim D’Annunzio has a shot at the Republican nomination even though divorce papers called him a “messianic drug user” who worries that “a gigantic pyramid will descend on Greenland” one day. He recently held what he called “a machine gun social.”
TIM D’ANNUNZIO: We talked about issues and let people shoot fully automatic MP-5 and Uzi submachine guns.
REYNOLDS: In Kentucky, Tea Party favorite Rand Paul defeated the Republican Party establishment choice for the Senate nomination. And then Paul's views on the Constitution and civil rights quickly raised Republican doubts about the Tea Partier's electability. Republicans know that passion and energy are terrific, but they also know that without electability you don't win elections. Dean Reynolds, CBS News, Chicago.
Timothy Egan, liberal New York Times reporter turned very liberal Times online columnist, thinks that Americans will be better off when the old, tired, hypertensive Tea Partiers depart the scene for good and let the lively youth take over saving the world, in "Save Us, Millennials," also featured in Friday's print edition.
When an electorate is red-faced and fist-clenched, when the collective national blood pressure is 160 over 100, when the big issues of the day are mired in tired minds, it's time to turn to the great, renewable resource of any vibrant democracy: the kids.
The millennials, that echo boomer generation born after 1982, have not been heard from of late, ever since proving that they could pull away from their Facebook pages long enough to help elect a president.
....
We've been led to believe that the grumpy, the cranky and the bitter will drive the midterm elections in the fall. You would never know, with nightly images of jowly Tea Partiers and their inchoate discontents, that people ages 18 to 29 years old made up a larger percentage of the 2008 electorate than those over 65.
Because they gave their hearts to Obama, by an overwhelming margin, the young have a proprietary interest in this president. And now, at Obama's moment of peril, when people who are losing their heads want him to lose his, we need the cooler minds of a generation that grew up with endless wars and color-coded terrorist alerts.
After classily comparing Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell to a turtle, Egan plumped for the Obama-care provision that lets these brave, forward-thinking, independent-minded millennials stay like children under their parents wing until they're well into what used to be known as adulthood:
Let [Republican Rep. John] Boehner take away from millions of fresh-minted adults the provision in the new law that allows dependent children to stay on their parents' health insurance until age 26.
Say, won't some of those helpful parents be old, tired, grumpy, and cranky themselves?
Egan sounded like he'd just as soon see old-time Republicans like war hero Sen. John McCain shuffle off the scene so the millennials can hurry up and let gays serve openly in the military:
Or look at the exhausted fight over gays in the military. More than any other generation, millennials see this as a nonissue. But a week ago Senator John McCain threatened a filibuster to keep gay men and lesbians from being able to openly serve their country in uniform. He is a man of his age.
Can we just press the fast-forward button a decade or so into the future, or have McCain debate his eminently more sensible daughter, Meghan?
Egan concluded with one last blast of immaturity urging the young to get off the web and get into action:
Besides, with news that George W. Bush is now on Facebook, what better time to leave the digital den?
After starting to settle into the idea that the issue regarding their offer to Democratic Candidate Joe Sestak was starting to see the road to the archives and out of the current events sections of newspapers and news programs, The White House awoke to another hit. Current Colorado Democratic Candidate Andrew Romanoff, it has been [...]
PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler on Tueday addressed Tavis Smiley's claim that Christian terrorists commit far more violence than Muslim ones. Smiley also issued a statement that defended his comments, though it misrepresented what those comments actually were.
"I don't think he made his case, or even came close," Getler said. He rightfully noted that the 2000 Columbine massacre, Smiley's only example of supposed Christian terrorism, "had nothing to do with Christianity." In fact, as Brent Bozell noted in his column today, the shooters even "mocked students who cried out for God to save them."
Though Getler should be applauded for noting Smiley's total failure to offer a convincing argument, he seems to suggest that a convincing case could be made, but simply wasn't in this instance. "One would think," Getler states, "that Smiley would have been better prepared to make what was certain to be a controversial case."
But the point of objection is not that the case is controversial, it's that there is no case to be made in the first place. There are no grounds whatsoever to claim that more Christians than Muslims commit terrorist acts (motivated primarily by their respective religions) in the United States. Whether by the sheer number of attacks, body count, scale of destruction, or impact on policy and our way of life, Muslim terrorists have wrecked havoc on the United States on a scale far beyond the occasional Scott Roeder.
Getler chastised Smiley's "equating the occasionally deranged individual in this country with religiously fanatic suicide bombers and those like Maj. Nidal M. Hasan at Fort Hood in Texas." Smiley did conflate murderers who are Christians with people who murder in the name of Christianity--a logical fallacy in itself.
But the larger issue is Smiley's primary argument (though he apparently considers it a given) that Christian terrorism is more widespread than Muslim terrorism.
That is an argument that should be dismissed outright, but Getler subtly avoids it. Instead, he notes that "there are no doubt people who kill in the name of different religions" and shifts the issue to whether Smiley's examples served to support his argument. But the argument itself is invalid.
For his part, Smiley replied to his critics in a statement that completely misrepresented both his exchange with Ali and the argument that riled up his critics. Smiley stated:
Ms. Hirsi Ali and I were talking about violence perpetrated in the name of religion or by people who claim to be religious. We agreed that there is extremism in Christianity just as there is in Islam and other faiths. We agreed that people have always found ways to use religion to justify heinous acts. Where we disagreed was that followers of any one religion are predisposed to violence. Unfortunately, history has shown us that believers of all stripes have been misguided.
Actually, the disagreement arose not out of a claim that any one religion is "predisposed" to violence, as Smiley disingenuously states. Ali told Smiley "I think you and I disagree" on Smiley's contention that "There are so many more examples" of acts of terrorism perpetrated by Christians than Muslims.
Either Smiley does not understand his viewers' objections, or he realizes how outrageous his statement was, and is trying to shift attention to a completely different argument (that there are violent followers of all religions).
Without a mention from Smiley or Getler, however, was the former's claim that Tea Party activists are comparably dangerous to jihadists. Their collective silence is quite troubling.
Though Smiley made the comment towards the end of the segment in question, he clearly meant to suggest that Tea Partiers--who, he claimed, "are being recently arrested for making threats against elected officials, for calling people 'nigger' as they walk into Capitol Hill, for spitting on people"--can justly be compared to Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Ft. Hood shooter, and Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber.
I'll let Bozell take point in dismantling that assertion:
Put aside the thoroughly unproven accusations, now that Rep. Emanuel Cleaver has backed off the story of conservative spitters, and there is no audio, or corroboration of the accusation of N-words being thrown. Had those events actually happened, would they in any way have been comparable to murder?
A recent USA Today article discussed how there is a great disconnect between American families and military families on the holiday which should result in immense thankfulness to our nation’s soldiers. As it summarizes the issue with Paul Rieckhoff of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America stating “The average American family…goes to a barbecue [...]
Three noteworthy quotes from journalists I tweeted over the holiday weekend:
Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, author of the ‘The Promise: President Obama, Year One,’ on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday night, placing himself with Obama against conservatives:
When Obama said “we are the ones we've been waiting for,” we didn't show up. It was the right-wingers at the town meetings.
Jake Tapper to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, on ABC’s This Week:
Before this crisis occurred, you were perhaps best-known nationally as a critic of big government, as a critic of big spending. And here you are, desperately asking for big government, big spending.
During the roundtable on that Sunday show, Salon's Joan Walsh offered up a weak defense of Obama on the Sestak bribe: “People who supported him didn't expect him to be Jesus in the White House.” Tapper interjected: “Some might have.”
For over a year, America's media have been depicting Tea Partiers as homophobic racists citing inflammatory signs at rally events as evidence.
On Saturday, pro-illegal immigration supporters in Phoenix, Arizona, carried signs quite similar to what our press found repulsive and extreme when present at conservative protests.
Will swastikas and the Arizona governor being referred to as "Adolf Brewer" be equally unacceptable to America's media?
Before you answer, consider the following news segment from NBC12 in Phoenix wherein an anti-SB 1070 protester was interviewed holding a sign emblazoned with swastikas claiming "Republicans Breed Ignorance," and the reporter didn't even bat an eye (video follows with commentary and additional pictures):
As HotAirPundit reported Sunday, these were some other signs at the event:
Here's one depicting Sheriff Joe Arpaio as a Klansman:
And another one calling Arizona a Nazi state:
Will media be as offended by these signs as they were when such things showed up at Tea Party rallies?
“The adults are in charge now.” That was a much-repeated phrase after the 2008 election all around the Left. It never seemed right to me; like when you’d overhear a thirteen-year old girl calling a boy “immature.” But now there is scientific evidence of something I suspected long ago.
It doesn’t make sense that the party who stresses personal responsibility could really be less mature, than the party of entitlement. The entire Democrat platform is structured to give away things that most adults find for themselves.
Republicans thinks people are better of finding their own way in the world, the Democrats want a government who pays for college, gives them an allowance, and helps out with the groceries and rent. Things that we consider privileges, they consider rights. (Is the Left’s push for public transit really about the environment, or is it more like borrowing dad’s car on date night?)
The new health care bill will force health insurance companies to cover adults unable to leave their parents, which certainly doesn’t seem mature. On the bright side, 27 year old “children” still living with mom, will no longer have to make the difficult choice, between paying for Health Care, or unlimited texting.
Our protests are definitely more mature. At Tea Parties, we often pick up the trash that was left behind from the Earth Day rally. Leftist protests are full of screaming, rock throwing, and the ultimate end when the protesters drop on the floor and refuse to move, like a spoiled kid who has decided that he will not go to bed. Of course when the police finally take the protestors into custody they start kicking and screaming in full-on tantrum mode.
The left loves their name-calling too. For the eight years of the Bush Administration, we were exposed to every variation of Nazi that could be added into the name of a Republican. Leftists spent the better part of those years treating names in the Administration like the Daily Jumble. It reminded me of the way a high school kid purposefully misspells a teacher’s name, into something vaguely pornographic. To this day, the comments of the Huffington Post are strewn with references to Rethuglicans, Repugnants, and Repukes.
In the eyes of leftists, it was the previous Administration that acted childish. Meanwhile the Democrats have run up the National debt like a college kid, who got his first credit card on five-dollar pitcher night. The previous Administration was by no means fiscally conservative, but compared to the Democrats they look tighter than a European calculating a gratuity.
The adage goes: If you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative at forty you must be a Teacher. All this was verified for me in the May 28 issue of Science Magazine. A study (brought to my attention by Lene Johansen) was performed by Ingvild Almås, Alexander W. Cappelen, Erik Ø. Sørensen, and Bertil Tungodden of the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration. They used a Dictator Game, where one child is allowed to split prize money with their team-mates. They found that older children don’t split the money evenly, proving that children lose their socialist tendencies as they mature. According to the abstract, as children “enter adolescence, they increasingly view inequalities reflecting differences in individual achievements, but not luck, as fair.”
While this experiment suggests that Socialism is based on childish notions; it also illustrates the reason why it will never work. As Children grow up they want to keep what they’ve earned. Apparently, normal kids grow out of Socialism around the same time they realize it’s stupid not to score soccer games.
There is something innate to human nature that everyone wants the most for himself. Few Leftists think they’re making too much. The problem, seen through Leftist glasses, is there are some people making more than they do, and people who don’t have as much. The solution of course (based on a childish supposition) is to take from the people with too much, and give it to the people who don’t have it. Even out the cookies so everyone has the same.
Socialists continue to cling to a childish version of fairness. Just like your teacher told you in school: If you didn’t bring enough for everyone, than you’re not allowed to have any for yourself.
TeaPartyHD.com has now gone live and to celebrate its inauguration on the Web as THE place to go for conservative information and content, TeaPartyHD.com is presenting “An Evening With Ann Coulter” streaming live from Nashville this evening, May 29 at 5:30 PM central time.
The broadcast will begin with interviews and news about primary candidates [...]
A promo for a new Chris Matthews special on the "Rise of the New Right" is pretty much what you'd expect: Rand Paul, 9/11 Truther Alex Jones, and lots of militiamen shooting guns. That is the doctrinaire leftist snapshot of the Tea Party movement, so it stands to reason that Matthews will extrapolate it into some dire warning about our political future.
"There is a rising tide on the right," Matthews's ominously declares. "The tea party is determined to take power, what does that mean for America?" A claim by a militiaman that "the government's too big" is immediately followed by gunshots - a not too subtle way to paint Americans who favor less government (a majority, by the way) as extremists ala the infamous Hutaree Militia.
The promo opens with Rand Paul's "message from the Tea Party: we've come to take our government back." Paul's recent gaffe - he said he would not have voted for Title II of the Civil Rights Act - will probably give Matthews an easy segue into discussion of the horrible racists that make up the movement. The presence of Alex Jones suggests that Matthews will try to paint Tea Partiers as conspiracy theorists as well (video below the fold).
Like I said, pretty much what you would expect. After all, this is the same Chris Matthews who wondered, "What are the Tea Partiers really angry about? Health care reform, or the fact that it was an African American President and a woman Speaker of the House who pushed through major change?"
This is the same Chris Matthews who misquoted Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers in an effort to downplay his fond memories of bombing federal buildings; the same Chris Matthews who told radical anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan, "you sound more informed than most U.S. congresspeople so maybe you should run."
The movie "Prince of Persia" hit theaters this week. And although it's based on a decades-old video game and set in the sixth century, reviewers across the nation have identified a very contemporary link: The Tea Party.
McClatchy Newspapers's Connie Ogle writes that Alfred Molina, in the role of Amar, "plays a sort of cross between Han Solo with dental-hygiene issues and a Tea Party supporter." According to the Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips, the character "spews anti-government and tax rhetoric straight out of a tea party rally." The Catholic News Services's John P. McCarthy notes: "Only the anti-government chatter of a mercenary sheik named Amar (Alfred Molina) elicits a few chuckles, since it echoes the contemporary Tea Party movement."
At gwinnettdailypost.com, Michael Clark views the Molina character as "an ancient conspiracy-theory fearmonger who would fit in quite well with today’s tea party mind-set." Los Angeles Times film critic Betsy Sharkey observes: "between this (movie) and 'Robin Hood,' you would think Hollywood was run by the 'tea party.'" Christopher Lloyd of Florida's HeraldTribune.com reports:
Alfred Molina turns up as a shady sheikh who runs an ostrich-racing operation, has a deadly African knife guy as his best friend, and delivers a lot of angry tirades about the government taking all his money through taxes to spend on stuff he doesn't like. I think the Tea Party just found its Adam.
Writing at Salon.com, Steven Boone finds "Molina is just this side of heaven flashing a gold tooth while dispensing Tea Party rhetoric and conspiracy theories."
We know that many in the media hold the Tea Party movement and its goals in contempt. Apparently, though, they just can't stop thinking - and writing - about it.
State lawmaker Raul Labrador beat party establishment pick Vaughn Ward to win the Republican nomination for U.S. Representative for Idaho’s 1st District this week. While Ward was supported by the national party, Labrador received the support of Idaho’s largest Tea Party Group, Tea Party Boise. The question that immediately comes to mind is just what [...]
The New York Times's former Middle East Bureau Chief thinks violent revolt is a laudable response to economic woes, and that murder is at least acceptable in pursuit of a far-left agenda. The media so concerned with the potential for violence from conservative groups are completely silent.
"Here’s to the Greeks," wrote Chris Hedges at Truthdig.com. "They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country." Riot, by Hedges's account, is the correct response. That the riots in Greece have so far killed three innocent people doesn't seem to bother him.
Oh but it's not violence borne of a frustration with an unsustainable welfare state that finally reached the inevitable conclusion of skyrocketing public benefits coupled with a fast-shrinking population. No, the riots are "a struggle for liberation" against the oppressive bourgeoisie (capitalists). Hedges is advocating in no vague terms mass political violence. The response from the media: crickets.
Greeks, Hedges writes,
know what to do when Goldman Sachs and international bankers collude with their power elite to falsify economic data and then make billions betting that the Greek economy will collapse. They know what to do when they are told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay corporate banks, which screwed them in the first place. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare—the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it.
Language really does not get much more violent and incendiary than that. Hedges is a rhetorical bomb-thrower, but by the mainstream media's standards, he might as well be an actual bomb-thrower.
Journalists have condemned language for less, after all. For months, we have heard that heated rhetoric at tea party rallies could dangerously provoke protesters -- despite the total absence of violence at those rallies. Now we have actual violence taking place across the Atlantic, and an American journalist advocating its importation -- all at a time when populist tensions are dangerously high in the United States.
Hedges isn't holding a sign demanding that we "water the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants." The utterance of that Thomas Jefferson quote at a tea party was enough to send media liberals into hysterics. He is condoning the murder of innocent Greeks, and suggesting that Americans whip up some populist violence of their own.
Along the way, Hedges manages to regurgitate every leftist cliche concerning capitalism, globalization, conservatism, and the evil corporations devised since 1960. His opinions are his, and the piece at Truthdig is commentary. He is wrong in virtually all these areas, but it is not the job of the news media to debunk every wackjob conspiracy theory and accusation of white collar crime uttered by the liberal intelligentsia.
It is the media's self-appointed duty, however, to report fairly and accurately, regardless of political considerations. Yet even after condemning rhetoric on the right for supposedly inciting violence, major media outlets -- beyond Hedges's former employer -- have not only been completely silent on his advocacy of violence, but have even given him a platform to voice his radical views.
In short, memebers of the the journalistic establishment continue not only to give Hedges's opinions fair hearings, but even to lend their respective megaphones and give awards to a man who believes that fatal political violence is commendable, and should be replicated on the home front.
Reporter Devin Dwyer’s May 25 ABCNews.com profile of Andrew Young reported the civil rights leader’s derisive remarks against the Tea Party without giving the movement a chance to defend itself.
Despite the liberal activist’s claim that “ethno-centrism runs so deep in America” and that the Tea Party is “motivated by a nativism,” at no point in the piece did Dwyer include a response to the charges.
Instead, Dwyer devoted the rest of the piece to praising the “civil rights legend” for his myriad achievements.
“Young, who has spent a lifetime fighting to change American society for the better, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his decades-long career in public service, which included working as an aide to Martin Luther King Jr., serving as a Democratic congressman from Georgia, and later becoming U.N. ambassador and mayor of Atlanta,” gushed Dwyer.
Later in the piece, with the Tea Party still left unspoken for, Dwyer lauded Young’s new book, “Walk in My Shoes,” which extols the virtues of a liberal vision of “social justice.”
“Interwoven with anecdotes about love and faith, politics and policy, Young mentors the 25-year-old JPMorgan investment banker [Kabir] Sehgal on the importance of making money–a lot of it–to create sustainable solutions for ‘environmental preservation, ending poverty, feeding the planet and healing the sick,’”raved Dwyer.
With three paragraphs devoted to tearing down the Tea Party movement and the rest spent uncritically boosting Young’s liberalism, Dwyer’s piece crosses the line from being a sympathetic profile piece to an outright advertisement for Young’s latest book.
--Alex Fitzsimmons is a News Analysis intern at the Media Research Center. Click here to follow him on Twitter.
On Monday’s Tonight Show on NBC, Meet the Press host David Gregory appeared as a guest, and, while Gregory seemed to initially defend Tea Party activists against suggestions by Jay Leno that the movement has had a double standard in its treatment of President Bush and President Obama, Gregory also questioned the ability of its members to take part in "governing" as he asked: "How do you have a movement predicated on not governing and then seek to govern?"
Gregory also seemed to agree when Leno asserted that deregulation policies which he alleged that Tea Party activists would agree with have led to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico:
JAY LENO: Well, to me, BP is a perfect example. BP seems to have done this on their own. They don't pay attention. They essentially make their own rules because they pay off everybody. That's what the Tea Party wants. That's unregulated and look what happened.
DAVID GREGORY: Right, but in this case, right, you have a breakdown of regulations that led to getting contracts and their technology breaking down. But, right, I mean at some point, the government is the only entity that can clean up after a huge mess...
Below is a transcript of relevant portions of the Monday, May 24, Tonight Show on NBC:
JAY LENO: Well, let me ask you something about this whole Tea Party thing. And here's the part I don't get because it seems like this had been brewing for a while. I watched before Obama, like, the eminent domain law, where the government – the Supreme Court decided we can just take your property. That was one of the, since the beginning of American history, a man's home was his castle. That went away. We can wiretap citizens without warrants. I never saw these Tea Party people before. Why weren't they there for that? All of a sudden, now they show up.
DAVID GREGORY: Well, I think part of it is that they just weren't as well organized. The Tea Party in this incarnation, this is not a new idea that you had deficit hawks out there, and that, I think, is what animates them. I think after the Bush administration they were really concerned about their own party and too much government spending, and then with President Obama and health care and the expansion of government. And the other big thing was the bailout package. It was the TARP that really got them animated. And it's so interesting because there's all this railing against the Obama administration – what they’re really upset about it TARP, and that was under President Bush.
LENO: But yeah, but it's like, people don't understand, like, my favorite thing I saw a guy, an anti-health care guy going, "I don't want the government messing with my Medicare." That's what the sign said. (AUDIENCE LAUGHTER) And I go, "What are you doing?"
GREGORY: Right. And the other is, how do you have a movement predicated on not governing and then seek to govern?
LENO: Yeah.
GREGORY: How is that actually going to work? And I do think it's a real question – it's like with Rand Paul. I mean, he doesn't believe in one aspect of the Civil Rights Act, that you can tell and mandate to a private business that you can't discriminate. Well, where is the line between what government should do and what it shouldn't do? Should we have OSHA laws, workplace safety rules? What about the ban on child labor? Is that something the government shouldn't be involved in? So the question of what is the role of government, I think, is actually an important debate right now. And we're seeing it like with BP, you know, what should the government be doing?
LENO: Well, to me, BP is a perfect example. BP seems to have done this on their own. They don’t pay attention. They essentially make their own rules because they pay off everybody. That's what the Tea Party wants. That's unregulated and look what happened.
GREGORY: Right, but in this case, right, you have a breakdown of regulations that led to getting contracts and their technology breaking down. But, right, I mean at some point the government is the only entity that can clean up after a huge mess...
LENO: Let me ask you this. Is this Tea Party movement bigger than the Ross Perot deal first time around? Because that was really big.
GREGORY: That was big, but you also had to channel into a candidate who actually got votes and who ran for the presidency, but, I mean, certainly fueled similarly in government not working into debt. There's no obvious leader of the Tea Party. We don't really know what impact it's gonna have on the election beyond what's happened in Kentucky so far.
LENO: Okay, now, Sarah Palin, a couple of months ago was, "Drill baby, drill." – now President Obama's too close to the big oil company. It's so great. It's hilarious. I don't get it. It's one or the other. What is it?
GREGORY: I guess the criticism of the President has been that somehow he's been too deferential to BP in terms of what they want to do and how they're gonna use the – I mean, the problem is that BP has the better technology to take care of this thing, but government ultimately has to step in if the thing still hasn't been solved.
LENO: Let me ask you about this-
GREGORY: I feel like I have to keep watching this guy.
RUSSEL BRAND: I'm over here. (AUDIENCE LAUGHTER) You don't need to worry. Just "drill, baby, drill," Sarah Palin says. I agree. (AUDIENCE LAUGHTER) Just keep drilling.
LENO: Well, let me ask you about this, like, these politicians lying-
BRAND: I got stuck with an ice cube, Jay. I don't know what to do with it. It got it in my mouth. I can't put in back in the drink now. I mean, eventually it will naturally disappear.
LENO: Exactly, it's a problem that will solve itself. It will take care of itself.
BRAND: I'll put it here.
LENO: This Richard Blumenthal case, this guy lying about his Vietnam service-
(AUDIENCE LAUGHS AT RUSSELL BRAND)
BRAND: I am listening.
LENO: I appreciate that.
BRAND: You thought I was getting distracted by the melting ice.
LENO: I think we all need a a drink. David, can you come back and see us again?
Media Research Center Vice President for Business and Culture Dan Gainor told “Fox & Friends Sunday” May 23 that attacks on Rand Paul aren’t about skin color, but another kind of race: the 2010 elections.
Paul, the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky (and son of U.S. Rep. Ron Paul), has come under fire from the media – particularly MSNBC – for comments he made suggesting he would not have supported parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In an interview with MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, Paul criticized policies including those mandating desegregation in private business because he believes they infringe on Free Speech. He also stated that he believes discrimination and racism are “horrible” and that he doesn’t want government-sponsored discrimination in the public spehere.
Gainor told “Fox & Friends Sunday” that the attacks on Paul were primarily about race – but not skin color. Instead, they’re about the 2010 political race for control of Congress.
“This isn’t about race, this is about the race, the 2010 race, the 2012 race,” Gainor said. “They don’t care if they take down Rand Paul whatsoever. They care if they take down Republicans. They want to make their caricature of Rand Paul, not who he really is but just what they say he is, they want to make that the poster child for the election in 2010 and so they can use it to wreck the GOP – and the media are just buying into it hook, line, and sinker.”
Washington Post humorist Gene Weingarten is working in his hatred for conservatives in his Sunday Post Magazine column. The column is mostly a whimsical review of a George Bernard Shaw play and how Britain in Victorian times had a very uptight morality, and characters like pimps could only be portrayed as "loathsome deviants who would roast in Hell." Then he veered into this digression:
This sort of unwritten literary convention may seem quaint today, but such subtle rules are still practiced. For example, American journalists know they can write about the Tea Party, but only if it is presented as a serious ideological movement instead of as a posse of ignoramuses carrying signs such as the one in the second photo on this page [above].
But I digress!
The column is written as a letter to Akiva Fox at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, who apparently has brought in outside experts to review plays for the company newsletter. Weingarten predictably joked that the moral guardians of the Victorian age were "persons with names like Sir Percival Wussingham, Lady Plushbotham-Harrumphton and Geoffrey Stammerblush, second Earl of Priggington."
Washington Post humorist Gene Weingarten is working in his hatred for conservatives in his Sunday Post Magazine column. The column is mostly a whimsical review of a George Bernard Shaw play and how Britain in Victorian times had a very uptight morality, and characters like pimps could only be portrayed as "loathsome deviants who would roast in Hell." Then he veered into this digression:
This sort of unwritten literary convention may seem quaint today, but such subtle rules are still practiced. For example, American journalists know they can write about the Tea Party, but only if it is presented as a serious ideological movement instead of as a posse of ignoramuses carrying signs such as the one in the second photo on this page [above].
But I digress!
The column is written as a letter to Akiva Fox at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, who apparently has brought in outside experts to review plays for the company newsletter. Weingarten predictably joked that the moral guardians of the Victorian age were "persons with names like Sir Percival Wussingham, Lady Plushbotham-Harrumphton and Geoffrey Stammerblush, second Earl of Priggington."
The best that can be said of the Travel Channel's Anthony Bourdain when he had No Reservations about making a fool of himself on Friday's Anderson Cooper 360 is that perhaps it was really one or more of the various substances he has abused over the years that was really talking. Here is the Travel Channel host spouting off in reply to a question from Anderson Cooper about if he ever attended a Tea Party:
You know, I was just reading "Hellhound on His Trail," a book about the -- about the assassination of Dr. King and about -- particularly about the Wallace-for-president campaign in California back then. And you're looking at, I think, at basically the same demographic: a lot of marginal, very angry white people.
I'm pretty happy about the Tea Party, because I think they're ensuring that no reasonable electable Republican will be -- will be president. They're taking over the party in a way that makes them look more or less crazy. If I were a conspiratorially-minded person, I think that Michele Bachmann, for instance, was a creation of some evil Democratic group to make them all look like loony tunes and dumb as a sack full of hammers.
Speaking of looking like loony tunes and being dumb as a sack full of hammers, this seems to be a case of the chef's pot (and he smoked a lot of it) calling the kettle black. Here is Bourdain speaking out on a subject with which he has a lot more expertise in Celeb Stoner:
Everybody smokes dope after work. People you would never imagine. There has been an entire strata of restaurants created by chefs to feed other chefs. These are restaurants created specially for the tastes of the slightly stoned, slightly drunk chef after work.
...We were high all the time, sneaking off to the walk-in refrigerator at every opportunity to 'conceptualize.' Hardly a decision was made without drugs. Cannabis, methaqualone, cocaine, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms soaked in honey and used to sweeten tea, secobarbital, tuinal, amphetamine, codeine and, increasingly, heroin which we'd send a Spanish-speaking busboy over to Alphabet City to get.
And how clueless does one have to be to even try heroin even once since it is known to hook the user almost immediately? One horrible side effect is to make a fool out of yourself on national television on a topic about which one is completely ignorant.
John Fund on Friday smacked down Bill Maher for calling Tea Partiers "teabaggers."
As the panel discussion of HBO's "Real Time" convened, the host said, "The teabaggers I guess think they had a big win Tuesday."
He then asked the American Spectator's Fund, "Why are they so silent on financial reform?"
After Fund answered the question, he said, "I think people should be called by the term that they use themselves...Using 'teabaggers' is equivalent to, I have atheist friends. They don't like to be called 'Christian haters.' They prefer to be called atheists (video follows with partial transcript and commentary):
BILL MAHER, HOST: The teabaggers I guess think they had a big win Tuesday. Why are they so silent on financial reform? Why is that?
JOHN FUND, AMERICAN SPECTATOR: They're not. They're against it.
MAHER: Really? [...]
MAHER: Very good, John, you got the crowd here to applaud teabaggers. That's not a, that's not a, that's a pretty neat trick I must say.
FUND: Well, here's an even neater trick: I think people should be called by the term that they use themselves. You know, pro-Choice people...
MAHER: Oh, give up on that.
FUND: Using "teabaggers" is equivalent to, I have atheist friends. They don't like to be called "Christian haters." They prefer to be called atheists.
MAHER: Whoever called them Christian haters?
FUND: Oh, you should go to some churches.
MAHER: I shouldn't. I never heard that.
FUND: So, let's, let's call them, let's call them the Tea Bag Movement.
MAHER: Okay, like that's the most important issue. But, let me ask about, I mean, Libertarianism, because this is a big part of Rand Paul's victory. This is a big part apparently of the Tea Bag Movement's movement.
Nice. Reminds me of when Tucker Carlson did the same thing to the Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel on ABC's "This Week" back in January.
Frankly, I think more conservatives should correct liberals in the media every single time they refer to members of this movement so disparagingly.
On the day after his historic primary win, National Public Radio rabidly went after Rand Paul, newly minted GOP nominee for Kentucky Senator, trying to make him out to be a KKK sympathizer or perhaps a racist that would have agreed to keep Jim Crow alive and well in 1964. This rabid, left-wing attack is [...]
A persistent meme of the liberal mainstream media this election year is that the Tea Party is steeped (pun not intended) in racism and/or neo-Confederate sympathies. Howard Fineman is more than happy to breathe new life in that storyline in yesterday's attack leveled at Kentucky Republican senatorial nominee Dr. Rand Paul in particular and Bluegrass State conservatives in general.
In his May 20 "Rand Paul and D.W. Griffith," blog post, the Newsweek staffer not-too-subtly compared Kentucky's Tea Party contingent of 2010 with the more racially-charged elements he perceived among some anti-busing opponents in the 1970s:
If Americans think of Kentucky at all, they tend not to regard it as part of the Deep South on racial matters: no history of water cannons fired at civil-rights demonstrators; the kind of place that gave the world a proud and defiant Muhammad Ali, not a brutal and racist Bull Connor.
But there is another Kentucky, one I witnessed as a reporter starting out there when court-ordered busing began in the 1970s. It is a border state with a comparatively tiny black population, and which, as a result, is way behind the times in accommodating itself to the racial realities of modern America.
There was little violence when busing started, but there were Klan rallies and smoldering anger along Dixie Highway and a Republican Party ready to rise on those emotions.
Some of that old-time, race-based attitude—a Kentucky mix of romantic benevolence and cruel disdain (immortalized in D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation)—has seeped into the groundwater of the Tea Party. I attended one of its first rallies, in Louisville more than a year ago, and I saw on the ground some of the anti-busing elements of old there.
Fineman then indicted Paul on two charges for which he called for a swift apology:
If Dr. Rand Paul doesn't immediately apologize for holding his victory rally at a private club—and doesn't abandon his opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act—then he will not only pollute the Tea Party, he will severely damage the GOP's chances of winning control of either the House or Senate this fall.
Of course the first item is more about the "optics" of campaigning than any questions of substantial policy. I agree it's probably foolish to hold a victory rally at a country club, especially when you're a Republican and the media are quick to jump on "party of the rich" stereotypes, but it's hardly an issue that will be in voters minds in November. As for the Civil Rights Act, Fineman is being disingenuous about Paul's attachment to the matter as a campaign issue.
Paul has not campaigned on repealing or altering the historic legislation, he simply answered a question raised by a journalist in an interview, and in the story to which Fineman linked, it's clear that Paul's concerns are based on his libertarian read of the limits of the power of the federal government, not a hatred of persons of color. In that sense, one may say Paul is very much a Barry Goldwater Republican.
Of course, Fineman seems unable to countenance that more charitable conclusion. Instead, the Newsweek staffer seems intent on painting Paul as cravenly appealing to some racist undercurrent in Tea Party politics, and worse, aiming to re-fight the Civil War, at least metaphorically speaking:
Tea Party philosophy runs smack into the wall of rights the Constitution creates, and if Paul doesn't want to recognize that, he will turn the entire election into a referendum on racial discrimination.
We fought a war 150 years ago about that. Paul wasn't born in Kentucky, but he should know the local history. Brother fought brother; both Lincoln and Davis were born in the state; Kentucky's government was Union, but many of its citizens were rebels.
That war is over. It's not in anyone's interest—especially Paul's—to revive it.
On Wednesday’s Joy Behar Show on HLN, Kentucky Republican Senate nominee Dr. Rand Paul appeared as a guest, and, after host Behar brought up examples of people with racist messages who have shown up at some Tea Party events whom the mainstream media have been fond of highlighting as if they were representative of the movement, Dr. Paul recounted that he had never seen such activity at Tea Party events he has attended, and charged that the media are "captivated" by "outlandish behavior"rather than the mainstream message of the movement:
JOY BEHAR: Right, but does it bother you at all, Rand, about seeing those kind of racist images that we`re all seeing that are connected to these Tea Party events?
RAND PAUL: Well, it`s interesting, you know, I`ve seen them on the national media, but I haven`t seen them at any of the rallies I`ve gone to. I`ve probably been to 50, 60 Tea Parties. I`ve been to interview with their inner circle, with their committees. I`ve not met anyone who's racist in the movement. I think when you gather 100,000 people together, there will be a few outliers, and it`s like anything else, I think the media seems to be captivated more by the outlandish behavior as opposed to the 99 percent there that are people who just believe in limited government or believe that deficits are bad.
After Behar did not seem to accept his answer and started to change the subject to Dick Cheney, the exchange continued:
BEHAR: Let me quote Dick Cheney.
PAUL: It doesn`t sound like I convinced you.
BEHAR: Well, because I think that the Tea Partiers such as yourself and the good people in the Tea Party need to really get those people out and prohibit them from any kind of voice in the party because it`s getting a bad name. And lot of the things you say are very appealing to all Americans, and yet it`s alienating to people like me to see that.
Behar took a couple of shots at Cheney during the segment, most notably as she asked Paul about his disagreement with the Bush administration on the war in Iraq when she contended that Cheney "likes to start" wars:
I`m familiar with your father, your father`s positions, too. I thought that a lot of what he said in the primaries made a lot of sense to a lot of different people, but let me read you something that Dick Cheney said, and he endorsed your opponent. He said, "We need Senators who truly understand radical Islam and al-Qaeda and who will work to strengthen our commitment to a strong national defense and to whom this is not just a political game." He`s sort of implying that you, because you believe in small government maybe and you`re not interested in the wars that he likes to start will not be able to handle the military issues that confront America. How do you respond to that?
Below is a complete transcript of the interview from the Wednesday, May 19, Joy Behar Show on HLN:
JOY BEHAR: Tea Party candidate Rand Paul won the GOP senate primary race in Kentucky last night, either in spite of or because Dick Cheney endorsed his opponent. We`re not sure.
DR. RAND PAUL, KENTUCKY REPUBLICAN SENATE NOMINEE: I have a message, a message from the Tea Party, a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words: We`ve come to take our government back.
BEHAR: Paul knocked out GOP establishment-favored Trey Grayson. With me now is Dr. Rand Paul. Hi, congratulations on your win last night, Dr. Paul.
PAUL: Thank you, thank you. Glad to be with you.
BEHAR: Okay, you say you want to take the government back. From whom do you want to take it back?
PAUL: That`s a good question. I say from the special interests that seem to use government like it`s their own personal ATM. I also get annoyed by politicians that come to my state with big oversized checks with their name emblazoned upon them as if it`s their money, you know, that they’re giving, and they name parks after themselves, they name roads after themselves. For goodness sakes, it`s our money. It`s not their money, and I think they’re doing a disservice by spending a lot more money than they’re actually receiving, and I think the deficit ultimately leads to grave problems for countries.
BEHAR: So you don`t, you`re not talking really about the Obama administration then. Who are you, I don`t get that. You`re not talking about that.
PAUL: I`m talking about, yeah, I`m talking about overblown government and deficits, but, you know, what I tell people is we doubled the deficit under Republican control, but now we`re tripling the deficit, so it`s, to me and to the Tea Party, if you go to any of these things, it really is about bipartisan blame over the deficit. We`re unhappy a lot of times with the spending from both parties, not just from the current administration.
BEHAR: So I see that. That`s true. Do you identify with the Tea Party or the GOP then? Where are you?
PAUL: Well, it`s interesting, you know, I went to the 1976 Republican convention, and so I`ve been a Republican my whole life. But I tell people, you know, Jefferson talked about that every generation must renew its defense of liberty. I think also every generation must redefine and define what their political parties mean. I mean, look, the Republican Party in 1920 got 90 percent of the African-American vote. Not anymore, so something happened. People either changed or the parties change. And so every generation we get to redefine what the party is, and that`s what a little bit of this Tea Party is. It`s a struggle for defining what the Republican Party means.
BEHAR: Right, but does it bother you at all, Rand, about seeing those kind of racist images that we`re all seeing that are connected to these Tea Party events?
PAUL: Well, it`s interesting, you know, I`ve seen them on the national media, but I haven`t seen them at any of the rallies I`ve gone to. I`ve probably been to 50, 60 Tea Parties. I`ve been to interview with their inner circle, with their committees. I`ve not met anyone who’s racist in the movement. I think when you gather 100,000 people together, there will be a few outliers, and it`s like anything else, I think the media seems to be captivated more by the outlandish behavior as opposed to the 99 percent there that are people who just believe in limited government or believe that deficits are bad.
BEHAR: Let me quote Dick Cheney.
PAUL: It doesn`t sound like I convinced you.
BEHAR: Well, because I think that the Tea Partiers such as yourself and the good people in the Tea Party need to really get those people out and prohibit them from any kind of voice in the party because it`s getting a bad name. And lot of the things you say are very appealing to all Americans, and yet it`s alienating to people like me to see that.
PAUL: Yeah, and I think the reason for it also is the Tea Party has kind of been open mike night. Everybody shows up and voices their grievances, and so some are overblown and overwrought, but what I hope is by my victory I get to help to define what the Tea Party becomes. To me its term limits, which I think have universal appeal, Democrat, Republican, independent.
BEHAR: Yeah.
PAUL: To me it`s also making them balance the budget. I think as a class of people Congress is just untrustworthy with a few exceptions, and that they need to be forced to balance the budget by law.
BEHAR: Right.
PAUL: So it`s really about reform. I think they should read the bills. I think there should be a waiting period before they pass any bills. I think that when they pass bills, they should apply them to themselves. I think the Tea Party is unhappy about a certain arrogance in Washington that says, "You know what, we`ll pass Social Security taxes on everybody else, but then we`ll set up our own pension plan that`s a little better than everybody else`s."
BEHAR: Okay, I`m familiar with your father, your father`s positions, too. I thought that a lot of what he said in the primaries made a lot of sense to a lot of different people, but let me read you something that Dick Cheney said, and he endorsed your opponent. He said, "We need Senators who truly understand radical Islam and al-Qaeda and who will work to strengthen our commitment to a strong national defense and to whom this is not just a political game." He`s sort of implying that you, because you believe in small government maybe and you`re not interested in the wars that he likes to start will not be able to handle the military issues that confront America. How do you respond to that?
PAUL: Well, the interesting thing is he also said deficits don`t matter, and so I`m not sure he would win a lot of votes in the Tea Party right now, so we do think that deficits do matter. I also think that the number one priority of the federal government is national defense, but you have to define what that means. You have to have a good and long debate over what is national security, when is it threatened. And when we go to war, I think we go to war by declaring war not willy nilly with some sort of use of force resolution that people debate and say it meant one thing or another thing. We haven`t declared war since World War II. I think when you go to war, we should declare war formally, and it should be the most important vote that any Congressman or senator ever takes. And if I ever have to make that vote, I vote on it based on my three sons going to war or myself going to war.
BEHAR: Well, thank you very much, Rand, and good luck in the election that you`ll be running in, okay.
In Missouri, a high school student was assigned Michael Moore's documentary "Sicko" to analyze for 50% of her grade in her senior Literature and Composition class. Perhaps more shocking is that the teacher who assigned the movie also denounced the same student in front of the class as a "teabagger".
Every Democrat I know likes to act as if it were the GOP that fights dirty. Of course, every time I ask them for an example they just stare back blankly at me — I know, it’s their normal state, but this question gets particular blankness. On the other hand, I can give reams of [...]
New York Times movie critic (and Michael Moore fan) A. O. Scott is obsessed with the right-leaning politics and anti-French attitudes he glimpses in the new "Robin Hood" movie, starring Russell Crowe. His Arts section review is titled "Rob the Rich? Give to the Poor? Oh, Puh-leeze!"
You may have heard that Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor, but that was just liberal media propaganda. This Robin is no socialist bandit practicing freelance wealth redistribution, but rather a manly libertarian rebel striking out against high taxes and a big government scheme to trample the ancient liberties of property owners and provincial nobles. Don't tread on him!
So is "Robin Hood" one big medieval tea party? Kind of, though that description makes the movie sound both more fun and more provocative than it actually is. The film's politics, in any case, are more implicit than overt, so that the filmmakers can plausibly deny any particular topical agenda. Which is fair enough: the fight of ragged warriors against sniveling and sadistic tyrants appeals across tastes and ideologies. In our own minds, at least at the movies, we are all embattled underdogs standing up for our rights against a bunch of overprivileged jerks who won't leave us alone.
Scott, always quick to sniff out political themes in unlikely places (he found references to imperialism and the Vietnam War in the science-fiction thriller "Aliens") continues his odd defense of all things French:
The anti-French animus of "Robin Hood" is amusingly over the top -- the French monarch is first glimpsed slurping oysters -- but also perhaps a little anachronistic, belonging less to 1200 than to 2003, the height of the Freedom Fries era. But somebody has to be the villain, and "Robin Hood" has a pretty good one in Godfrey (Mark Strong), a two-faced courtier whose diabolical scheme is to foment civil war between John and the northern nobles so that the French can conquer England all over again, just as they did in 1066.
Scott labors under the impression that the thousand-year animus between Britain and France was invented in 2003 by Bush to enable the British-U.S. alliance for the Iraq War. From his July 18, 2003 review of Rowan Atkinson's comedy "Johnny English." (The Iraq War launched in March 2003.)
Inevitably, someone will raise the issue of geopolitical relevance. (Don't you hate that?) Here is a movie set in England and opening all over America on the Friday after Bastille Day, in which the villains are French. A stirring tribute to Anglophone solidarity in the face of Gallic treachery, or yet another arrogant slander against La Belle France?
NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd seemed astonished by how a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll confirmed solid agreement with Arizona's immigration enforcement law – “a whopping 64 percent support the law,” Todd marveled, “and we read them the law verbatim exactly as it's been written” and still, he repeated, “64 percent approve of it.” NBC also treated as surprising the majority backing for racial profiling to prevent terrorism, while Todd didn't mention what NBC's polling partner, the Wall Street Journal, found most newsworthy. Lead of the WSJ.com post:
Republicans have solidified support among voters who had drifted from the party in recent elections, putting the GOP in position for a strong comeback in November's elections, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.
In his limited air time, Todd used the video wall at 30 Rock to highlight the public's belief the government and BP haven't done enough to address the Gulf oil spill, but he didn't note another finding which counters the media's preferences and narrative, that despite the accident, 60 percent support “more drilling for oil off the coast of the United States.”
MSNBC.com, however, headlined its poll summary, “Poll: Despite spill, support for oil drilling high”
Brian Williams cued up Todd on profiling, suggesting it has, or at least should have been, a topic of hot debate: “I know after this attempted bombing in Times Square, you asked a question every family has debated about racial profiling.” Todd recounted what the survey determined:
We did, and we asked it specifically on the issue of: Would you be in favor of racial profiling when it comes to combating terrorism? And guess what: A majority said yes. It's a slim majority, but a majority nonetheless: 51 percent would approve of it; 43 percent disapprove of it. Clearly, this issue of terrorism is something that people, they're willing to give up some of their own personal rights, and they're willing to see some racial profiling, Brian.
On the attitude toward the two parties and the Tea Party movement, Todd conveyed:
Both political parties viewed negatively. The Democrats, 37 percent positive rating, 42 percent negative. Republicans, a lesser positive rating [30%]. But check this out. The Tea Party – it's not an official political party – but there are more people have a positive view [31%] of the Tea Party than of the Republican Party. And fewer people have a negative view of the Tea Party than either of the two major parties [30%].
The Wall Street Journal saw a lot more positive for Republicans. From the story posted Wednesday night, presumably what will run in Thursday's newspaper, by Peter Wallsten, Naftali Bendavid and Jean Spencer:
Republicans have solidified support among voters who had drifted from the party in recent elections, putting the GOP in position for a strong comeback in November's elections, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.
The findings suggest that public opinion has hardened in advance of the 2010 elections, making it harder for Democrats to translate their legislative successes or a tentatively improving U.S. economy into gains among voters.
Republicans have reassembled their coalition by reconnecting with independents, seniors, blue-collar voters, suburban women and small town and rural voters—all of whom had moved away from the party in the 2006 elections, in which Republicans lost control of the House. Those voter groups now favor GOP control of Congress.
"This data is what it looks like when Republicans assemble what for them is a winning coalition," said GOP pollster Bill McInturff, who conducts the survey with Democratic pollster Peter Hart. He said the Republican alliance appeared to be "firmer and more substantial" than earlier in the year....
A big shift is evident among independents, who at this point in the 2006 campaign favored Democratic control of Congress rather than Republican control, 40% to 24%. Now, independents favor the GOP, 38% to 30%.
Suburban women favored Democratic control four years ago by a 24-point margin. Now, they narrowly favor Republicans winning the House. A similar turnaround has happened among voters 65 and older....
As noted above, Todd pointed out that on Arizona “we read them the law verbatim exactly as it's been written.” Here's that question, #34:
The Arizona law makes it a state crime to be in the U.S. illegally. It requires local and state law enforcement officers to question people about their immigration status if they have reason to suspect a person is in the country illegally, making it a crime for them to lack registration documents. Do you support or oppose this law? (IF SUPPORT/OPPOSE, THEN ASK) And, do you strongly (support/oppose) or just somewhat (support/oppose) this law?
(46 percent “strongly support,” nearly double the 24 percent who “strongly oppose.”)
In fact, the statute requires a prerequisite lawful reason for stopping someone before the law enforcement officer can check their immigration status:
For any lawful stop, detention or arrest made by a law enforcement official or a law enforcement agency of this state or a law enforcement official or a law enforcement agency of a county, city, town or other political subdivision of this state in the enforcement of any other law or ordinance of a county, city or town or this state where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien and is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made, when practicable, to determine the immigration status of the person, except if the determination may hinder or obstruct an investigation.
The poll rundown provided on the Wednesday, May 12 NBC Nightly News, transcript provided by the MRC's Brad Wilmouth who corrected the closed-captioning against the video:
BRIAN WILLIAMS: We have new numbers tonight, a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. And it's a revealing one – everything from politics to oil to racial profiling. Our chief White House correspondent and NBC News political director Chuck Todd is with us here at the board with the numbers. And, Chuck, we asked about a lot of subjects this time.
CHUCK TODD: We did. A lot's happened since the last time we went into the field. And let's begin with the oil spill and what folks think of the federal government's response so far. And it's a mixed bag: 45 percent believe the government is not doing enough; 43 percent believe they are doing enough. Of course, BP is the one that a lot of people blame a lot more right now than the federal government.
How about that new immigration law in Arizona? Well, a whopping 64 percent support the law. And we read them the law verbatim exactly as it's been written – 64 percent approve of it; 34 percent oppose it. But look at this number among Hispanics: It's reversed – 70 percent of Hispanics oppose it; 27 percent support it. It is something that is going to be a political hot potato for probably the next couple of years.
How about the President? Well, look at this. There's sort of a polarizing view of the President these days – 51 percent, a majority, actually now disapprove of his policies. And yet he's still well liked: 69 percent like him personally. So this polarized view, he's sort of Teflon personally, but he's having a hard time selling his agenda.
How's this translating to the political parties? Well, look at that. We know there's an anti-incumbent atmosphere out there. Both political parties viewed negatively. The Democrats, 37 percent positive rating, 42 percent negative. Republicans, a lesser positive rating. But check this out. The Tea Party – it's not an official political party – but there are more people have a positive view of the Tea Party than of the Republican party. And fewer people have a negative view of the Tea Party than either of the two major parties. It's a conservative movement for now, but it is something that seems to be catching on.
So what is this anti-incumbent atmosphere all about? Why is it that everybody is so angry? Well, look at these numbers. We'll start with this. Large majorities, 56 percent, say the country's heading the wrong direction. It's been that way for six months; 58 percent, for instance, believe the stock market is not a fair and open process to them. Look at this one: 75 percent believe that they don't trust anything that comes out of Washington; 81 percent are dissatisfied with the economy. And now you have 83 percent that believe the two-party system has real problems, and a large chunk of those voters would like to see an actual creation of a third party, the largest we've seen yet. And, Brian, this explains why Republican Bob Bennett lost in Utah, a Democratic Congressman lost last night in a primary. We may have two Senators this Tuesday both lose. It's an angry and pessimistic public.
WILLIAMS: And I know after this attempted bombing in Times Square, you asked a question every family has debated about racial profiling.
TODD: We did, and we asked it specifically on the issue of: Would you be in favor of racial profiling when it comes to combating terrorism? And guess what: A majority said yes. It's a slim majority, but a majority nonetheless: 51 percent would approve of it; 43 percent disapprove of it. Clearly, this issue of terrorism is something that people, they're willing to give up some of their own personal rights, and they're willing to see some racial profiling, Brian.
It's the American way, right? It is patriotic to exercise the 1st Amendment by petitioning the government for a redress of grievances - unless of course your effort has a tie to some corporation or lobbying interest. Then regardless of its size, it's phony baloney Astroturf activism.
While groups like the George Soros-funded MoveOn.org have managed to elude the "Astroturf" moniker, from its inception, the Tea Party movement has taken shots from its critics. One of the most popular left-wing charges was to call it "Astroturf," meaning it was presented as a grassroots efforts, but wasn't really grassroots. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi labeled the Tea Party movement "Astroturf" back during the original Tax Day Tea Party protest on April 15, 2009.
"This initiative is funded by the high end - we call it Astroturf," Pelosi said. "It's not really a grassroots movement. It's Astroturf by some of the wealthiest people in America to keep the focus on tax cuts for the rich instead of for the great middle class."
That attitude has been widely echoed in media coverage of the Tea Party, as if it were a corporate effort to subvert the U.S. government's ability to collect revenue and redistribute wealth through public works and social program. Meanwhile, environmental causes, like Earth Day or global warming with their own corporate sponsorship - are rarely labeled Astroturf.
Green Movement Openly Corporate Sponsored, But Never Labeled 'Astroturf'
For many companies, environmental causes and saving the planet have become a clever way to market or advertise a product. It's a common phenomenon for retail outlets to use the environmental mantra to promote what they're selling. In fact, it's not only promoted by corporate interests, but it's something the federal government encourages businesses do to sell their product, according to the U.S. Small Business Association's Web site Business.gov.
"If you are already competitive in terms of price, quality and performance, adding ‘green' claims and eco-labels to your marketing strategy may enhance your brand image and secure your market share among the growing number of environmentally concerned consumers," the SBA Web site says. "Start your green marketing campaign by ensuring your green claims are credible. Do this by having your product certified that it was produced in an environmentally sound manner. Once certified, use the eco-labels from the certifying organizations to help consumers make educated choices."
And one has to look no further than Earth Day 2010 to see the corporate fingerprint on so-called green activist efforts. Major U.S. corporations like Proctor & Gamble, Siemens, Wells Fargo, AT&T, UPS, Philips and Ford all had a major presence at the so-called Earth Day "Climate Rally" on the National Mall back on April 25. That's in addition to a sponsorship from NASA, a federal government entity and media outlets, including the Washington Post and Gannett's USA Today.
So you have all the components - corporate interests and government bureaucracies collaborating to push a political agenda. Isn't that the textbook definition of "Astroturf?" Yet that label has failed to become a part of any green efforts.
But was that label ever applied by any media outlet to describe this particular Earth Day event? A Nexis search of the last 90 days reveals no media outlet has used the "Astroturf" marker for Earth Day.
And it goes much further than just a clever marketing gimmick or effort by big corporation to appease an activist movement. On Glenn Beck's May 4 program, he explained how the leaders of the green movement are actually set to profit off of environmental policy. Global warming is lucrative, and regulations that would make carbon usage a commodity will profit some, perhaps even much-maligned Wall Street boogeyman Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS)
"The global warming hoax continues to be one of their best tools," Beck said. "We've shown you the CCX, the Chicago Climate Exchange, a carbon-buying and selling business that has been estimated to become potential $10 trillion gold mine - that's if cap-and-trade is passed. Barack Obama invested via the Joyce Foundation. He was on the board. He helped the Joyce Foundation invest in CCX. And then, it just turned into a money mechanism for cap-and-trade. CCX potential attracted the attention of the London-based generation investment management. By the way, have you seen his new house? Al Gore. Yes, Al Gore decided to invest along with Goldman Sachs. Didn't we just see the protests? Aren't these guys all angry at Goldman Sachs because they're so evil? Why would they be here?"
Framing the Tea Party as 'Astroturf'
Speaker Pelosi and her ilk on Capitol Hill have had help from the media pushing the "Tea Party-as-Astroturf" idea. For example, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow has regularly labeled it Astroturf, disputing the movement's natural origins.
"See, we will form our own people's tax collecting bureaucracy or something," Maddow said on her April 15 MSNBC broadcast. "The annual April 15th ‘I hate paying taxes' tantrum this year took the form of an online tax revolt that was sponsored by all sorts of conservative organizations like our friends at the Astroturf group FreedomWorks and the National Taxpayers Union - taxpayers union and the Republican tea party group, the Tea Party Express. In addition to those folks on the street, they were meeting online."
That is a claim that was parroted by David Weigel, who now covers the Republican Party and the conservative movement for The Washington Post. In late 2009, when Weigel was a reporter for the progressive Washington Independent, he used the terminology to describe the movement and its alleged ties to organizations like FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity. On Rachel Maddow's Oct. 5, 2009 program, Maddow and Weigel had this exchange:
WEIGEL: You were asking questions of Tim Phillips and pointing out where the funding came from, sort of like you just did right now. There's a - there's a bit of a discrepancy here. Americans for Prosperity does not hide where the money comes from. But when these activists are told that the money's coming from oil companies, when the implication that their "Astroturf" gets out there, they get very angry. And they don't - they don't like you very much. I'm sorry to have to break it to you. MADDOW: Well, I don't - I'm not trying to make either important enemies or unimportant enemies, but I do recognize that they've taken great pain sort of to try to convince people they're not Astroturf. They bring that up all the time. They've really tried to seem like they're not just a corporate-funded P.R. exercise.
So, that's why it strikes me as so strange that David Koch of Koch Industries took this victory lap, took credit for everything they've done. Did that seem weird in the room?
But that "Astroturf" claim is one that has even made its way onto the less blatantly liberal CNN. On the network's Feb. 18 "American Morning," co-host John Roberts questioned the movement's grassroots authenticity in an interview with Karin Hoffman, a Florida Tea Party activist.
"Let me ask you about this idea of the grassroots movement, because the Tea Party calls itself the grassroots movement," Roberts said. "But there are other folks who are little more skeptical about that, saying it's not grassroots, it's Astroturf. It's actually being funded, being led, at least behind the scenes, by some current or former members of the Republican Party. Can you talk about that? How much of this is grassroots and how much of it is organized by people on the Republican side of the fence?"
Hoffman defended the movement as a sincere one and pinpointed the source of these so-called Astroturf allegations.
"So, also, the interesting perspective too is that it - there's been communication on the side of the Democrat Party as far as who we are as a grassroots movement, as Astroturf, you know, just derogatory terms that really doesn't help endear us to have that conversation," Hoffman said.
The recent Utah Republican primary defeat of incumbent GOP Sen. Bob Bennett should put to rest the speculation that the GOP establishment is behind the Tea Party. Bennett has been a mostly reliable conservative and an important lieutenant of minority leader Mitch McConnell. He was bested by a tea party candidate.
Challenging 'Eco-Astroturf'
Despite the one-sided treatment of global warming and climate change in the media and a reluctance to call it "Astroturf," there is another perspective. Hundreds of scientists and policy professionals will be in Chicago May 16-18 for the 2010 International Conference on Climate Change calling attention to dissent in the scientific community over assumptions that modern warming is man-made or that it is a crisis.
The conference is being hosted by The Heartland Institute and the Business & Media Institute is one of several co-sponsors. The Heartland Institute conference will address the "one-sided" debate that is "dominated by government scientists and government organizations agenda-driven to find data that suggest a human impact on climate and to call for immediate government action, if only to fund their own continued research."
Don’t you just love the Democrat loving, not-so-concealed bias of the press? Today, they’re seen priming the pump for tax increases:
Federal, state and local taxes — including income, property, sales and other taxes — consumed 9.2% of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reports. That rate [...]
The European Union and the International Monetary Fund to the rescue! The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) soars and investors breathe a sign of relief. But where's this $1 trillion in bailout funds for Greece coming from?
"On one thing, Rick - because you started the whole thing where you said, ‘Are you listening, President Obama?' about paying for your neighbor's mortgage," Kernen said. "Are you, could you really tell the American taxpayer, you can connect the dots between them and Greece? I mean are they paying for some lavish benefits in Greece right now?"
Santelli agreed, but warned there would likely be a call by the IMF for more U.S. tax dollars.
"Well there's no connect-the-dots," Santelli replied. "I mean it is a fact. We contribute a little less than 18 percent to the IMF. And the IMF is pretty much using its entire piggy bank, of course to pledge up to €250 billion, no matter how you slice it, Joe. Eighteen percent of that money, or more, because you know, if they go much beyond this, they're going to have to replenish the coffers."
Kernen asked why Santelli and the CME Group traders that were instrumental in stirring up the Tea Party movement in early 2009 weren't more visibly concerned.
"You now what - it's not been a variable recently," Santelli said. "They've been paying attention to the IMF's presence in this for the last month and a half. It doesn't necessarily present the same anxieties as it did the first time around because you know, once you get kicked in the shins every hour for a dozen hours, the 13th hour just isn't as shocking and doesn't hurt as much."
Kernen tried to instigate a more impassioned response from Santelli, but noted that it's likely a lot of Tea Party activists aren't realizing American tax dollars are a component of the IMF bailout.
"I don't think the average Tea Partier knows we're paying for lavish benefits in Greece for public employees over there, Rick," Kernen said. "I think maybe you need to tell them."
CNBC senior economics reporter Steve Liesman suggested if these measures hadn't been put in place by the IMF, it could indeed be worse for everyone. But Santelli suggested this bailout may not work and we'll find out what happens when "too big to fail" actually fails.
"We're going to probably end up seeing the alternative, anyway, Steve," Santelli said. "Because remember, this is in many ways, we all hope it works. But if it isn't, there is no grander plan than this. So we might end up finding out what it's like to let institutions fail in this case."
Which is more newsworthy: hearsay accounts of racial slurs unsupported by video evidence of the alleged incident, or video of a protester calling for violent revolution against the federal government, the imposition of socialism, and the annexation of the Southwestern states for Mexico?
If you chose the latter, you're probably not a journalist of the self-proclaimed "mainstream" variety. The legacy media has been largely silent on video of Los Angles schoolteacher at a La Raza protest of the recently-passed Arizona immigration law literally calling for the violent overthrow of the United States government.
"There's 40 million potential revolutionaries north of the border, inside the belly of the beast," Los Angeles high school history teacher Ron Gochez told a frenzied crowd, referring to the 40 million Latin Americans in the United States. He went on to claim that teaching or writing a book "is not part of the movement," and that his followers needed to go a step further -- to literal revolution (video embedded below the fold - h/t Jawa Report).
Does this man represent a fringe element of the pro-illegal immigration protesters? Probably. Has an individual's fringe status ever stopped the media from reporting on the outlandish things a couple Tea Party attendees have said? Of course not. Often those statements are taken as evidence that the movement is nothing more than a bunch of potentially-violent racists clinging to their God and guns.
The clip above shows a man actually advocating violence. There is no ambiguity about it. He obviously has a deep hatred of capitalism -- which can reasonably be described as far more radical than a deep hatred of socialism. And this man is a high school history teacher!
The response from the mainstream press: [crickets].
Where are the journalists that were so worried about political violence stemming from the Tea Party?
Where is Bill Clinton to pontificate on the dangers of heated rhetoric and the potential that it could spill over into actual violence? And where are all the media talking heads that were so eager to parrot the former president's politicized warnings?
The alleged spitting incident on the steps of the Canon House Office Building was enough to whip media liberals into a frenzy. With the N-words supposedly hurled at Rep. John Lewis, it made for a perfect anti-Tea Party media meme, despite the total lack of evidence supporting the claims.
MSNBC's prime time lineup was one four-hour doomsaying sermon on the dangers of "right-wing extremism." But so far that channel is eerily silent on this man's heated calls for a violent uprising.
Pictures of a sign at a Tea Party rally quoting Thomas Jefferson's famous "water the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants" statement were paraded around as an undeniable sign that the Tea Party movement was out to overthrow -- violently, if necessary -- the political order.
Leftist accounts of the Tea Party are replete with accusations of racism. But where is the outrage over this La Raza protester's use of the phrase "frail ... white people"?
Even Sarah Palin's use of crosshairs on a map of November's target congressional districts was touted by many media liberals as a sign that conservatives have an inherently violent attitude towards politics. And yet, the same journalists haven't drawn any similar conclusions about the radical pro-illegal immigration movement that, as we've just seen, actually calls for violent revolt.
For those who have been paying attention, this double standard is hardly shocking. But the video of this man literally fomenting revolution and advocating violent imposition of socialism -- and the media's virtual silence -- serve as a powerful reminder of the legacy media's never-ending quest to discredit conservatives.
On the April 22 Larry King Live on CNN, which was rebroadcast on Saturday, magician and comedian Penn Jillette – who is a self-described libertarian – challenged assertions by actress Rachael Harris that the Tea Party movement is motivated by "racism" against President Barack Obama. Jillette: "Well, that's the magic word. Once you say ‘racism,’ the other side loses automatically. And I don't think we have very much evidence that that's what it is. Don't they have to be doing racist things besides you just saying that they're racist?"
Harris cited the racial makeup of the Tea Party movement as evidence of its racist motivation: "No, but they're looking at the number of people that are in, like, the majority of the people that are in the Tea Party," leading Jillette to respond: "So the race that they are makes them racist by definition?"
After Harris and Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane joked for a moment that they had gotten together and created the movement, Jillette and Harris continued their debate over whether Tea Party members were motivated by racism:
RACHAEL HARRIS: Yes, but I think it's very anti-Obama. You know, it's very, like, it's-
PENN JILLETTE: But there are groups that were anti-Bush, too. I was really anti-Bush.
HARRIS: Yes.
JILLETTE: And yet no one called me racist.
HARRIS: Well, that's right, but Bush wasn't the first black President either.
JILLETTE: So once he's the first black President, if you're against him, you're a racist?
Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Thursday, April 22, Larry King Live on CNN, which was repeated on the Saturday, May 8 show:
LARRY KING: Tea party movement. Are you going to make fun of it yet?
SETH MACFARLANE, CREATOR OF FAMILY GUY: I think it kind of does that on its own. I-
KING: It is what it is?
MACFARLANE: Yeah. You know, the Tea Party movement is, I always have a problem with people who say, "You know what, it's not the Republicans, it's the Democrats, it's all politicians. They're all the problem." And I don't think, in this case, that's true. I think you had one party that actually was trying to affect change, particularly this health care bill. You had 60 percent of the people in this country who wanted a public option. It was ignored.
KING: So you're saying it's right-wing Republicans?
MACFARLANE: And another side that filibustered everything that stands to lose big if Obama does anything right or anything productive. And I think, in a lot of cases, it's just kind of laziness when it comes to knowing the facts and knowing what's really going on out there.
KING: What do you think of the Tea Party?
PENN JILLETTE, MAGICIAN AND COMEDIAN: I, there's a lot I disagree with them on, and I'm not really part of it, but I always think that a distrust of the government is the healthiest thing Americans can have. I think that the country was built, the most American thing you can have is a distrust of leaders. Don't follow leaders, watch your parking meters.
KING: Rachael?
RACHAEL HARRIS, ACTRESS AND COMEDIAN: Yeah, well, I don't completely share the same opinion with Penn. I feel like the Tea Party group in particular isn't really, I mean, they can sort of mask themselves as saying that it's about taxes and it's about all these other issues. But I really find it to be sort of this upper middle class white-run organization that's not really, that's not really about affecting change. It's about this sort of, I do tend to think it's more-
KING: Class?
HARRIS: I wouldn't say class, I do think it's more about racism as opposed to being a really political-
JILLETTE: Well, that's the magic word. Once you say "racism," the other side loses automatically. And I don't think we have very much evidence that that's what it is. Don't they have to be doing racist things besides you just saying that they're racist?
HARRIS: No, but they're looking at the number of people that are in, like, the majority of the people that are in the Tea Party-
JILLETTE: So the race that they are makes them racist by definition?
HARRIS: Well, no, I don't think the race that they are by nature makes them-
MACFARLANE: If you want to, like, if you want to legitimatize them for a moment, you know, some of their gripes are legitimate. The average American has not had a pay raise adjusted for inflation since 1973 while guys like us have gotten richer and richer-
JILLETTE: '73? I was making like $4 an hour.
MACFARLANE: But the problem is, they're misdirecting it. It's always been fascinating to me that they, that groups like this will direct their anger at the left. And you know, I think it's, it should be noted that-
KING: Because they’re not getting mad at the right?
MACFARLANE: Yeah. Well, did you have-
JILLETTE: They're pretty mad at the right.
MACFARLANE: -the $100 million or $1 billion Koch family that funds FreedomWorks, which supports the Tea Party. They benefit by getting these guys riled up about this guy who’s trying to affect health reform as opposed to getting mad at the rich guys themselves.
JILLETTE: But is it, is it rich people telling them what to do or is it white people-
MACFARLANE: I think it's a little bit of puppeteering, yeah.
JILLETTE: Which one is it? Are they a racist organization or are they a puppet organization?
HARRIS: Well, when Seth and I got together and created the Tea Party-
JILLETTE: Okay, that's what I'm wondering. That’s what I’m wondering. Which is it?
HARRIS: We had a big, yeah.
KING: It's finally come out now.
HARRIS: Right, exactly.
JILLETTE: It might also be people who have different opinions that you, that have different opinions than me. That’s possible, too.
MACFARLANE: It was supposed to be a stitchery group.
HARRIS: Yes, but I think it's very anti-Obama. You know, it's very, like, it’s-
JILLETTE: But there are groups that were anti-Bush, too. I was really anti-Bush.
HARRIS: Yes.
JILLETTE: And yet no one called me racist.
HARRIS: Well, that’s right, but Bush wasn't the first black President either.
JILLETTE: So once he's the first black President, if you’re against him, you’re a racist?
HARRIS: No, I’m not saying that, but I do think if you (END OF SENTENCE DIFFICULT TO HEAR)
New York Times columnist Charles "Minstrel Show" Blow was at it again Saturday accusing Tea Partiers of being racists.
I guess for Blow, a day without calling some conservative a racist is like a day without sunshine.
Whatever the pathology, his "Trying to Outrun Race" made it crystal clear right from the get go what unfortunate readers were in store for:
Racist. Tea Party.
Not surprisingly, it was all downhill from there (h/t Hot Air headlines):
The Tea Party is a Frankenstein movement - an odd collection of factions, loosely stitched together, where the head, to the extent that it exists, fails to control the body.
It has attracted hordes of the disaffected with differing interests, including some who've openly expressed their dark racial prejudices and others who polls suggest harbor more subtle and less visible biases. Opposition to President Obama triggers a political Pavlovian response among some of these people, and they want to ally themselves with others around a common enemy.
Also by no means surprising, Blow cited poll numbers to support his position:
However, widely cited polling, like the multistate University of Washington survey released last month, has found that large swaths among those who show strong support for the Tea Party also hold the most extreme views on a range of racial issues. The fringe theory is a farce.
Ah yes, UW's WISER poll the media so adored last month.
As Cathy Young wrote on April 25, the data the press jumped for joy over conflicted with numbers that mysteriously went unpublished:
The lead investigator, political science professor Christopher Parker, graciously provided me with the fuller data -- which strongly contradict the notion of the Tea Parties as a unique hotbed of racism.
Thus, while only 35% of strong Tea Party supporters rated blacks as hardworking, only 49% described whites as such. While the gap is evident, these responses are close to those for all whites (blacks are rated as "hardworking" by 40%, whites by 52%). While whites who are strongly anti-Tea Party seem free of bias on this item -- blacks and whites are rated as "hardworking" by 55% and 56%, respectively - this is not true for intelligence and trustworthiness. Whites in every group are less likely to rate blacks than whites as "intelligent" by similar margins: 14 points for Tea Party supporters (45% vs. 59%), 13 points for all whites (49% vs. 62%), 10 points for Tea Party opponents (59% vs. 69%). On "trustworthy," the gap is smaller in the pro-Tea Party group (41% vs. 49%) than in the anti-Tea Party group (57% vs. 72%). One could write headlines about the "racial paranoia" of white liberals who consider blacks less trustworthy than whites!
Fascinating. I wonder what Blow would say about that. But I digress:
The endurance of racial stereotypes in this day and age is disturbing; but Tea Party supporters differ little in this regard from mainstream Americans. (It is also worth noting that, as in many other surveys, Asian-Americans in the UW poll are rated much more positively than whites.)
Compared to middle-of-the-road whites, Tea Party supporters show far more agreement with the statement that blacks should work their way up "without special favors" the way other minorities such as Italians and Jews did, or that blacks would be as well off as whites if they worked harder. The standard left-of-center view, shared by the UW researchers, is that such attitudes represent a subtler form of racism, or "racial resentment." In some cases, that is surely true. Yet these sentiments may also reflect a genuinely race-neutral belief in self-reliance and self-help -- or the view, shared by many black commentators, that the black community's problems are partly rooted in damaging behavioral and cultural patterns.
So, if you believe that blacks should work their way up "without special favors," or that they'd be just as well off as whites if they worked harder, according to the poll Blow cited, you're a racist.
Any wonder why this survey concluded Tea Partiers are racists?
But it goes deeper than this, for as NewsBusters reported two days later, the political science professor behind this poll has a history of finding racism where and whenever he wants:
Parker was involved in in 2008. Back then, Parker accused Republicans of "thinly veiled allusions to Obama's race" and insisted that "race was a consistent narrative used by Obama's opponents."
What did Parker and his colleagues cite as examples of this? Code words, of course:
We begin this article by proposing that although Obama ultimately won, we cannot reject that race-and in particular racism-played a significant role in the outcome. During the campaign, race was a consistent narrative used by Obama's opponents. His primary opponents, particularly Hillary Clinton, and Republicans in the general election used racial references to attack the Illinois senator, citing him for his perceived inability to connect to "real working Americans" ~Bazinet and McAuliff, 2008; Canellos 2008; MacGillis 2008. A Republican in Georgia used the term uppity to describe Obama, a clear racial reference ~Los Angeles Times 2008. Even the infamous "Joe the Plumber" charged Obama with seeking to redistribute wealth, raising age-old stereotypes of African Americans as radical, welfare dependent, and not as hardworking as the White working class. In short, he accused Obama of seeking to take money from hardworking "real Americans" to give it to "those people" ~Rohter 2008.
So you see, calling someone uppity is a "clear" racial slur. Saying that someone doesn't understand "real working Americans" is some kind of code for saying they don't understand white people. Oh, and calling attention to President Obama's own self-proclaimed plan of wealth distribution means you think black people are lazy.
With such a lax definition of racism, it's no wonder Parker sees it everywhere.
Indeed, and the same can be applied to Blow.
In the end, just as there are people who have racist views, there are also folks who see racism in all human behavior.
Consider that Blow a few weeks ago referred to the tax day Tea Party in Dallas as "a political minstrel show devised for the entertainment of those on the rim of obliviousness and for those engaged in the subterfuge of intolerance."
In reality, it is Blow that is clearly oblivious and intolerant.
Unfortunately for us, he has a column at the New York Times to express his undeserving hatred for all those he disagrees with, which would be far more acceptable if he'd try to stick to the facts AND leave race out of it.
New York Times columnist Charles "Minstrel Show" Blow was at it again Saturday accusing Tea Partiers of being racists.
I guess for Blow, a day without calling some conservative a racist is like a day without sunshine.
Whatever the pathology, his "Trying to Outrun Race" made it crystal clear right from the get go what unfortunate readers were in store for:
Racist. Tea Party.
Not surprisingly, it was all downhill from there (h/t Hot Air headlines):
The Tea Party is a Frankenstein movement - an odd collection of factions, loosely stitched together, where the head, to the extent that it exists, fails to control the body.
It has attracted hordes of the disaffected with differing interests, including some who've openly expressed their dark racial prejudices and others who polls suggest harbor more subtle and less visible biases. Opposition to President Obama triggers a political Pavlovian response among some of these people, and they want to ally themselves with others around a common enemy.
Also by no means surprising, Blow cited poll numbers to support his position:
However, widely cited polling, like the multistate University of Washington survey released last month, has found that large swaths among those who show strong support for the Tea Party also hold the most extreme views on a range of racial issues. The fringe theory is a farce.
Ah yes, UW's WISER poll the media so adored last month.
As Cathy Young wrote on April 25, the data the press jumped for joy over conflicted with numbers that mysteriously went unpublished:
The lead investigator, political science professor Christopher Parker, graciously provided me with the fuller data -- which strongly contradict the notion of the Tea Parties as a unique hotbed of racism.
Thus, while only 35% of strong Tea Party supporters rated blacks as hardworking, only 49% described whites as such. While the gap is evident, these responses are close to those for all whites (blacks are rated as "hardworking" by 40%, whites by 52%). While whites who are strongly anti-Tea Party seem free of bias on this item -- blacks and whites are rated as "hardworking" by 55% and 56%, respectively - this is not true for intelligence and trustworthiness. Whites in every group are less likely to rate blacks than whites as "intelligent" by similar margins: 14 points for Tea Party supporters (45% vs. 59%), 13 points for all whites (49% vs. 62%), 10 points for Tea Party opponents (59% vs. 69%). On "trustworthy," the gap is smaller in the pro-Tea Party group (41% vs. 49%) than in the anti-Tea Party group (57% vs. 72%). One could write headlines about the "racial paranoia" of white liberals who consider blacks less trustworthy than whites!
Fascinating. I wonder what Blow would say about that. But I digress:
The endurance of racial stereotypes in this day and age is disturbing; but Tea Party supporters differ little in this regard from mainstream Americans. (It is also worth noting that, as in many other surveys, Asian-Americans in the UW poll are rated much more positively than whites.)
Compared to middle-of-the-road whites, Tea Party supporters show far more agreement with the statement that blacks should work their way up "without special favors" the way other minorities such as Italians and Jews did, or that blacks would be as well off as whites if they worked harder. The standard left-of-center view, shared by the UW researchers, is that such attitudes represent a subtler form of racism, or "racial resentment." In some cases, that is surely true. Yet these sentiments may also reflect a genuinely race-neutral belief in self-reliance and self-help -- or the view, shared by many black commentators, that the black community's problems are partly rooted in damaging behavioral and cultural patterns.
So, if you believe that blacks should work their way up "without special favors," or that they'd be just as well off as whites if they worked harder, according to the poll Blow cited, you're a racist.
Any wonder why this survey concluded Tea Partiers are racists?
But it goes deeper than this, for as NewsBusters reported two days later, the political science professor behind this poll has a history of finding racism where and whenever he wants:
Parker was involved in in 2008. Back then, Parker accused Republicans of "thinly veiled allusions to Obama's race" and insisted that "race was a consistent narrative used by Obama's opponents."
What did Parker and his colleagues cite as examples of this? Code words, of course:
We begin this article by proposing that although Obama ultimately won, we cannot reject that race-and in particular racism-played a significant role in the outcome. During the campaign, race was a consistent narrative used by Obama's opponents. His primary opponents, particularly Hillary Clinton, and Republicans in the general election used racial references to attack the Illinois senator, citing him for his perceived inability to connect to "real working Americans" ~Bazinet and McAuliff, 2008; Canellos 2008; MacGillis 2008. A Republican in Georgia used the term uppity to describe Obama, a clear racial reference ~Los Angeles Times 2008. Even the infamous "Joe the Plumber" charged Obama with seeking to redistribute wealth, raising age-old stereotypes of African Americans as radical, welfare dependent, and not as hardworking as the White working class. In short, he accused Obama of seeking to take money from hardworking "real Americans" to give it to "those people" ~Rohter 2008.
So you see, calling someone uppity is a "clear" racial slur. Saying that someone doesn't understand "real working Americans" is some kind of code for saying they don't understand white people. Oh, and calling attention to President Obama's own self-proclaimed plan of wealth distribution means you think black people are lazy.
With such a lax definition of racism, it's no wonder Parker sees it everywhere.
Indeed, and the same can be applied to Blow.
In the end, just as there are people who have racist views, there are also folks who see racism in all human behavior.
Consider that Blow a few weeks ago referred to the tax day Tea Party in Dallas as "a political minstrel show devised for the entertainment of those on the rim of obliviousness and for those engaged in the subterfuge of intolerance."
In reality, it is Blow that is clearly oblivious and intolerant.
Unfortunately for us, he has a column at the New York Times to express his undeserving hatred for all those he disagrees with, which would be far more acceptable if he'd try to stick to the facts AND leave race out of it.
In Friday's 3PM ET hour of live coverage on MSNBC, anchor Peter Alexander asked black Republican congressional candidate Allen West of Florida about "aligning" with the tea party movement: "the Tea Party has raised concerns that it may have, I guess, racism built within it. We have seen some racist signs at past events...are African-American candidates aligning themselves with the tea party?" [Audio available here]
West responded: "The principles and values that I espouse, limited government, lower taxes, individual responsibility, and accountability, liberty, and honoring the traditions of our constitutional republic, are connecting me with those grass roots Americans that attend tea party rallies. And I've spoken at four to five of those rallies and I've not seen any racist type of signs."
On Wednesday, Alexander talked with correspondent Luke Russert about the fact that 32 African-Americans are running for Congress as Republicans. Russert noted with surprise how "these candidates are actually soliciting support from the tea party, a group that a lot of folks have claimed to be racist against African-Americans."
In the Friday interview, Alexander referenced a recent quote by Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele that African-Americans "don't have a reason to" vote Republican and asked West: "What's your response to that?" West replied: "Chairman Steele is totally wrong....go back and look at the legacy of the Republican Party, being the establishment of the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments....I think that Chairman Steele should do a little bit more research before he goes out spouting his mouth like that."
Earlier, Alexander wondered: "Do you think the Democrats presently, with an African-American as President, take for granted the African-American vote in this country?" West declared: "Well, absolutely they do. I think that I believe they've come to depend upon a 21st century plantation." He went on to observe that "a lot of the black community...really has some conservative principles and ideas at its root core."
Here is a full transcript of the segment:
3:24 PM EDT:
PETER ALEXANDER: President Obama's rise to the presidency has inspired many across this country, but no one may be more surprised than the President, himself, to find out that 32 African-Americans are running for Congress this year as Republicans. Republicans in the House have not had an African-American member since the man on your screen, J.C. Watts of Oklahoma. That was in 2003, after he finished serving eight years. Retired Lieutenant Colonel Allen West is running for Congress as a Republican in Florida and he is joining me live from the sunshine state. Lieutenant Colonel, nice to visit with you. Thank you.
ALLEN WEST: A pleasure. Good afternoon to you.
ALEXANDER: I was reading some of the articles that have quoted you recently. You said that in 2008 you raised a half million dollars and 'the state party didn't support me and the national party didn't support me.' This time around, you've raised $2 million, $838,000 alone in the first quarter, so what has changed?
WEST: Well, I think the fact in November of '07 I had just gotten back from Afghanistan and I was new to the political scene and we had an eight-month campaign in 2008. So it was a matter of proving yourself and getting your message out and people getting to know you. And we finished up with 45.3% in the 2008 election and that set the conditions for us to have a lot of success this cycle.
ALEXANDER: Well so, Lieutenant, then let me ask you – Lieutenant Colonel, more specifically if you can, about the Democrat versus Republican idea here, the fact that most African-Americans for years have voted for Democrats. Do you think the Democrats presently, with an African-American as President, take for granted the African-American vote in this country?
WEST: Well, absolutely they do. I think that I believe they've come to depend upon a 21st century plantation. But if you go back and you look at one of the key indicators in the 2008 presidential election cycle, you had a same sex marriage amendment that was out in California and also Florida that failed in both states, especially here in my home state of Florida, because you did drive out a lot of the black community which really has some conservative principles and ideas at its root core.
ALEXANDER: Lieutenant Colonel, let me read to you what your RNC Chairman Michael Steele said just last month he was asked why African-Americans should vote Republican. This was his quote. He said the following: 'You really don't have a reason to, to be honest, we haven't done a very good job of really giving you one.' What's your response to that?
WEST: Well, I think that Chairman Steele is totally wrong. I think that if the Chairman Steele would go out and talk about the principles and values and go back and look at the legacy of the Republican Party, being the establishment of the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, some of the early civil rights legislation that was done in the Reconstruction era. The first congressmen and senators were Republicans, so there is a great history that was connecting the Republican Party to the black community and I think that Chairman Steele should do a little bit more research before he goes out spouting his mouth like that.
ALEXANDER: Lieutenant Colonel, our time is limited, but my last question to you, the Tea Party has raised concerns that it may have, I guess, racism built within it. We have seen some racist signs at past events, people have said that that is not a part of the tea party movement, but are African-American candidates aligning themselves with the tea party?
WEST: Well, I don't think it's so much aligning yourself with the tea party. The principles and values that I espouse, limited government, lower taxes, individual responsibility, and accountability, liberty, and honoring the traditions of our constitutional republic, are connecting me with those grass roots Americans that attend tea party rallies. And I've spoken at four to five of those rallies and I've not seen any racist type of signs.
ALEXANDER: Understood. Lieutenant – retired Lieutenant Colonel Allen West joining us live from Florida, thank you, sir. We appreciate your time.
Yesterday, Keith Olbermann called me out for my post shaming President Obama for using the derogatory term “tea bagger”. Here’s the video [thanks Tab Hale, for the help]:
As usual, Keith is wrong.
First, when the Tea Party folks used the term “tea bag”–as in, let’s send tea bags to Congress, they meant literal tea bags. [...]
CNN and the Associated Press on Wednesday and Thursday touted how the tea party movement apparently didn't get motivate voters to turn out and "throw out the bums" in Republican primaries in Indiana, North Carolina, and Ohio. Both outlets, however, omitted how senate candidate Rob Portman ran unopposed in his primary race in Ohio.
Anchor Rick Sanchez brought on CNN national political correspondent Jessica Yellin during a segment 21 minutes into the 3 pm Eastern hour of his Rick's List program on Wednesday. After noting how Democratic Representative David Obey, a "partisan brawler," was retiring, and how "Sarah Palin and tea party influences" might be "running some of these rascals out of office," Sanchez turned to Yellin and asked her about the results: "Those allegedly angry voters could have stormed the polls in droves and thrown out the bums. They would have all been there in big numbers, and they're going to get rid of the incumbents, get rid of the old hacks. So, did that happen?"
Yellin gave a very generalized answer, indicating that the tea party activists just didn't show up:
YELLIN: It's interesting, Rick. Yesterday's elections showed that there was very limited turnout. One of the things we have heard is that the tea party movement was going to energize the base, stoke up turnout, especially on the Republican side. And in the key Republican races- there were two in Indiana especially- the incumbents won. Now, their margin of victory was more narrow, but the tea party movement didn't throw the bums out, as you said. So, it's still to be determined whether they will have a huge influence in November.
She continued that the winners of the primaries were "either...incumbents or were already officeholders in a different office. The big difference is, none of these folks...was targeted...by the tea party as one of their top people they want to take down....[I]t is very meaningful and worth noting that the two targets they did [target] have survived...and so, you got to ask, how much muscle are they going to have come November, when they say they're going to take down some Democrats?"
Later on Wednesday, just after the beginning of her 8 pm program, CNN anchor Campbell Brown highlighted the "signs that tea party candidates may not quite be voters' cup of tea. Two of three hard fought Senate primaries yesterday in Indiana and Ohio went to mainstream Republican candidates- Ohio's race yet to be decided, but the Republican establishment not breathing a sigh of relief just yet." She then played clips from the earlier Sanchez/Yelling segment.
All three CNN personalities mentioned Ohio, but didn't mention anything specific about Portman going unchallenged. They also omitted that another "incumbent," former Indiana Senator Dan Coats, who is runnng for Evan Bayh's old seat, has a lifetime ACU rating of 90%, so he's not exactly unfriendly to the stances of the tea party movement.
Mark the first round down, shakily, for Republican incumbents and party establishment favorites.
With one race in Ohio yet to be settled, tea party-backed challengers and other outsiders were shut out in competitive House and Senate primaries across three states on Tuesday, the busiest night so far in an election season of optimism for Republicans.
While some of Tuesday night's Republican primary winners struggled to prevail — former Indiana Sen. Dan Coats' comeback bid advanced with 40 percent of the vote in a five-way race — the results renewed a debate about the clout of the insurgents in the remaining primaries and on elections this fall....
Six months before the midterm elections, and with the country trying to shake off the effects of a deep recession, polls show a disaffected electorate, angry at incumbents and highly skeptical of government's ability to solve their problems. As a result, even Democrats concede Republicans are in line to make gains this fall, when 36 seats in the Senate and all 435 in the House are on the ballot.
"The big question is whether the tea party is a tempest in a teapot. Do they have the organizational capabilities to compete with the Republicans?" said John Feehery, who advised former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and is a Republican strategist.
"They're not organized and it's unclear to me whether they are going to be a force that is going to challenge the more establishment Republicans in primaries," he added.
The night the NYC car bomb attempt went down, I was so grateful that, once again, the diligence of the public and the swift action of the NYC Police thwarted yet another potential attack. Shortly thereafter, while still incredibly grateful obviously, [...]
On Wednesday, Newsweek's Andrew Romano celebrated news out of Indiana that "establishment" Republican Dan Coats fended off two conservative opponents in the Senate primary.
Romano's obvious delight came through loud and clear starting with the headline, "The Tea Party is Now Irrelevant in Indiana." You see, one loss in a Senate primary was enough to declare the movement DOA - and Romano was anxious for the rest of the media to play along.
The real headline in Indiana was that 52 percent of Republicans went in favor of Tea Party challengers, but two of them in the mix was enough to split the vote, and Coats squeaked by at 39 percent.
A few media sources, including Politico, reported that Coats limped out of the primary "bruised" by anti-incumbency. Romano, however, insisted that 39 percent was a clear victory. Why the stark difference in coverage? According to Romano, some in the media were glorifying Tea Parties to apparently advance some selfish narrative.
Try not to cough from the smell of irony as you watch a Newsweek writer complain about dishonest narratives being perpetrated by the media:
My point here is that, for the national (and often, local) press, analyzing these primaries contest often has more to do with establishing or cementing a media narrative than actually saying something about the races in question. In truth, both sets of headlines are correct. Coats was the establishment candidate-he succeeded his former boss Dan Quayle in the Senate way back in 1989 and was recruited by the NRSC this go-round-and he did, in fact, win. But he didn't win all that convincingly; Stutzman and Hostetler combined for 52 percent of the vote, suggesting that if one Tea Partier had dropped out of the race, the other might have come out on top.
Then again, ascribing too much significance to the supposed narrowness of Coats's 9 point victory is kind of beside the point. First of all, 9 points isn't all that narrow. Secondly, second place is first loser. Conservative purity types have shown fairly well in a number of races so far this cycle, but they haven't won many: in Illinois, the moderate Mark Kirk won the GOP nod; in Texas, all 11 of the incumbent House Republicans facing challengers emerged victorious. Despite the dominant media narrative-Republicans beware! Here comes the Tea Party!-the continued failure of the movement to do much more than split its own vote says more about its disorganization than its potency.
I'll pause for a moment so you can finish rolling on the floor in laughter. Romano actually thinks the mainstream media have taken up the Tea Party banner.
He must not have paid attention just two weeks ago when Politico was on his side and reported on the movement's "exaggerated importance." For a fun stroll down memory lane, observe what Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith had to say on April 22:
In Washington, about 10,000 people showed up on the national Mall last week - a rally worth covering but far fewer than the tens of thousands who marched in support of immigration reform in March.
"If I organized a rally for stronger laws to protect puppies, I would get 100,000 people to Washington," Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell cracked on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday. "So, I think the media has blown the tea party themselves out of proportion."
ABC News's Rick Klein found that piece so "provocative" he featured it on The Note, and MSNBC likewise promoted it online. That's at least three examples of news outlets that downplayed the movement's popularity while simultaneously complaining that the media exaggerated its popularity.
So when did all of this exaggerating actually happen? Was it in January? Wait, back then the NY Times said "Some Republican Party officials say privately that they are not yet certain whether the Tea Parties will prove to be a real force or simply the loudest voices."
Maybe it was in February. Oops, it was on February 17 that Politico decried "weak" polling data designed to artificially boost the Tea party's influence.
What about March? Not so much. Check out what Newsweek had to say on March 21:
It's hard to describe the gathering as anything other than a prototypical angry mob. The group is overwhelmingly white and skews older. And they're mad, some cruelly so. If you listen to Republicans, you'll hear that the health-reform bill outrages the overwhelming majority of Americans. But if this group of just a few hundred people who are angry at the government is the best the GOP could muster, then that claim looks pretty weak.
That's what Ed Rendell had in mind when he said "the media has blown the tea party themselves out of proportion." That's what Politico had on tap when it accused news outlets of "exaggerating" the movement's popularity.
No word on what coverage would look like if they were trying to downplay.
It wasn't until late April, when Florida Governor Charlie Crist became independent, did the media pause to acknowledge the Tea Party's influence. In a clear case of success, conservative enthusiasm boosted Marco Rubio so far ahead in polling that GOP darling Crist was forced to go third party.
On April 29, a surprised Time magazine covered the development. Writer Tim Padgett was clearly frustrated on behalf of Crist, accusing the Republican establishment of "bowing to the conservative Tea Party movement" at the expense of a well-known politician.
Anyone depending on the mainstream media for news would have been equally surprised by that report. For months the narrative had been a smattering of a few hundred, maybe few dozen, angry fringe activists trying hopelessly to get attention from Congress. When that didn't work and establishment Republicans began losing, the narrative predictably changed, and now we're told that Tea Parties are powerful because the media made them that way.
If Romano wants to criticize someone for hyping a bogus movement that fizzled out, maybe he should write about his own magazine's absurd coverage of Coffee Parties. On the very same day that Politico was writing about exaggerated Tea, Newsweek was gushing over the size of the Coffee Party in an article that didn't even try to sound neutral.
Conservatives in Indiana might have lost one battle in a primary, but by no means does that mean they are irrelevant. A bankrupt magazine clutching to a left-wing slant even as its parent company seeks to sell it off? Take it away, Associated Press:
The 77-year-old magazine, hobbled by sagging ad revenue and circulation, is being put up for sale by The Washington Post Co., which is bowing out of the struggle to keep the genre relevant.
There's a cynical theme growing in the media that Faisal Shahzad, the man accused of attempting to set off a car bomb in New York's Times Square Saturday, was driven to violence by the loss of his job, the loss of his house, and his anger towards former President George W. Bush.
In all of this theorizing -- or what some might call psychobabble -- those making the assertion have yet to ponder if six years of Bush Derangement Syndrome might also be involved.
For over a year, Americans have been warned that so-called "hate speech" directed at Barack Obama and Democrats by conservative talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity, as well as others at Fox News, is going to manifest itself in violent acts against elected officials and/or our nation.
With this in mind mightn't years of "hate speech" directed at Bush and Republicans by liberal talk radio hosts and MSNBC in particular have incited Shahzad's anger to such an extent that he decided to become a domestic terrorist?
Consider what the Wall Street Journal wrote Wednesday (h/t Jennifer Rubin, photo courtesy AP):
Faisal Shahzad was losing his Connecticut home to foreclosure, disliked President George W. Bush, and was an almost invisible presence at the American university where he earned two degrees. [...]
Igor Djuric, a broker who showed Mr. Shahzad the 1,356-square-foot home he eventually bought, said he remembered that Mr. Shahzad was quiet about himself, but was openly critical of President Bush in the aftermath of the Iraq war.
"I didn't take it for anything, since a lot of people didn't like Bush," Mr. Djuric said, "but he was a little bit strong about expressing it."
Shahzad's behavior sometimes seemed odd to his neighbors, and he surprised a real estate broker he hardly knew with his outspokenness about President George W. Bush and the Iraq war.
"He mentioned that he didn't like Bush policies in Iraq," said Igor Djuric, who represented Shahzad in 2004 when he was buying a home.
Djuric said he couldn't remember the exact words Shahzad used about Bush but "something to the effect of he doesn't know what he's doing and it's the wrong thing that he's doing." "I don't know if he mentioned 9/11," Djuric said, "but something like that, Iraq has nothing to do with anything."
Like so many others, he lost a house to foreclosure - a real estate broker who helped him buy the house, in Shelton, Conn., in 2004 remembered that Mr. Shahzad did not like President George W. Bush or the Iraq war.
"I didn't take it for much," said the broker, Igor Djuric, "because around that time not many people did."
In Shelton, Conn., real estate broker Igor Djuric, who represented Shahzad when he bought a home there in 2004, said Shahzad made it clear that he did not like then-president George W. Bush or his war policy in Iraq. Djuric said that Shahzad's comments were not hateful but that they were surprising because the men hardly knew each other.
This realtor's quote is now all over the media, and it seems just a matter of time before the Bush-hating press on television take the baton.
But when they do, will they look themselves in the mirror to examine their own roll.
Maybe they should consider what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said last September:
I think we all have to take responsibility for our actions and our words. We are a free country, and this balance between freedom and safety is one that we carefully balance. I have concerns about some of the language that is being used because I saw -- I saw this myself in the late `70s in San Francisco. This kind of rhetoric was very frightening, and it gave -- it created a climate in which we -- violence took place. And so I -- I wish that we would all, again, curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements that are made, understanding that some of the people -- the ears that it is falling on are not as balanced as the person making the statement might assume. But again, our country is great because people can say what they think and they believe. But I also think that they have to take responsibility for any incitement that they may cause.
Readers are reminded that just two weeks ago, the press were falling over themselves on the fifteenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing to once again tie conservative talkers to that event.
This even led to an interesting give and take between Limbaugh and former President Clinton about who was really to blame for Timothy McVeigh's diabolical behavior.
As such, if media want to include Shahzad's apparent dislike of George W. Bush as a precipitating factor in his failed terrorist attempt in Times Square, shouldn't they take some responsibility for inciting his anger?
Or can "angry rhetoric" only be tied to acts of violence when it comes from the mouth of a conservative?
Editor's Note: NewsBusters Publisher and Media Research Center President President Brent Bozell released the following statement today regarding the broadcast and cable news media's silence about President Barack Obama's use of a crass sexual slang term to refer to Tea Party members.
If President George W. Bush had slurred the gay-rights movement during his presidency, it would have immediately dominated the news of every single national media outlet. Reporters would have pummeled the Administration and demanded an explanation and apology for the offense, and rightly so. You don’t smear anyone – let alone fellow Americans who elected you to office – regardless of your political differences.
Yet ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN haven’t even lifted an eyebrow since news broke that President Obama used the raunchy ‘teabagger’ slur to demean the hundreds of thousands of Americans who comprise the Tea Party movement. Reporters should be asking questions like:
• Does this fly in the face of Obama’s mantra of respect for diversity? • Does he stand behind likening these Americans to a derogatory slang for oral sex? • Is this hypocritical coming from the same Administration that was too squishy to use the phrase “War on Terror?”
Instead, they spike coverage. Not because they didn’t know about it, but because it comes from the same radically liberal President whom they worked so hard to elect and it offends the same conservative group of Americans they have worked so hard to characterize as violent, racist, and homophobic.
"Tea party groups battling allegations of racism," reads a May 5 page A3 Washington Post print headline. The online version header softened the word choice a tiny bit, substituting the word "perceptions" in for "allegations."
The underlying poll data which prompted the story tells us more about the Post's prism through which it views the Tea Parties than how the public at large does.
After three paragraphs pounding readers with the meme that "the [Tea Party] movement is struggling to overcome accusations of racism," the Post's Amy Gardner and Krissah Thompson quickly dispatched with the fact that most Americans see Tea Parties fueld by distrust of big government and opposition to the Obama/congressional Democratic agenda before highlighting how a minority of poll respondents think race is a motivating factor:
In a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, most Americans see the movement as motivated by distrust of government, opposition to the policies of Obama and the Democratic Party, and broad concern about the economy. But nearly three in 10 see racial prejudice as underlying the tea party.
Of course, in the very next paragraph we learn that:
About 61 percent of tea party opponents say racism has a lot to do with the movement, a view held by just 7 percent of tea party supporters.
That disparity seems to show that liberal Democrats and liberal independents who despise the Tea Party movement are, shall we say, prejudicial in their view of Tea Party activists.
But instead of calling into question how liberal voters unfairly tarnish their fellow Americans of a conservative persuasion as racist, the Post puts the conservatives and Tea Parties on the defensive.
Gardner and Thompson closed their article by citing Nigel Coleman, a black TEA Party Patriots leader from Danville, Virginia complaining that
"As long as people who oppose us can frame the debate that way, then they can get people to stop listening to us," Coleman said. "The charge of racism is one that can be thrown out there, and it really doesn't have to be proven. But it has such a negative connotations that it can pretty much halt the debate."
The way that the Post is reporting its own poll data shows that the Post is part of the mainstream media chorus amplifying the racism charges that liberals have "thrown out there."
Listen to the surprise in Luke Russert's voice as he reports that many African-American Republican candidates for congress are seeking support from the Tea Party. After all, says Luke, the Tea Party is a group that "a lot of folks have claimed to be racist against African-Americans."
Russert expressed his amazement on MSNBC this morning, discussing a New York Times article that reports that at least 32 black Republicans are running for Congress.
If "a lot of folks" have accused the Tea Party of racism, I'd say many of them come right from the MSM itself. Luke might as well have pulled a Pauline Kael and said "I can't understand why black Republican candidates are seeking support from the Tea Party. All my media friends think they're racists!"
Chris Matthews, on Tuesday's Hardball, brought on two former CIA officials to discuss the latest terror attack, and the MSNBC host agreed with Tyler Drumheller that the most recent attacker was motivated by his house being foreclosed on and also agreed with Robert Baer who feared another attack could lead to "The Tea Party being strengthened" which could lead to "people blaming the White House for a situation it didn't create." Baer also hit Matthews' sweet spot of talking points when he went on to warn that the last successful terror attack "got us into a war in Iraq we didn't need to be in." [audio available here]
ROBERT BAER, FORMER CIA FIELD OFFICER: But what I'm really afraid, Chris, is the next time one of these guys are going to get through. And what's it gonna do to this country? It's gonna rip it apart. Because people are gonna be looking for quick, immediate answers.
MATTHEWS: How so?
BAER: You know, they're gonna, they're gonna look, you know, crack down on, you know, who knows where it's gonna to end up? You're gonna see the Tea Party being, you know, being strengthened. You're gonna see people blaming the White House for a situation it didn't create.
MATTHEWS: Yeah.
BAER: It could affect the, you know it could affect the United States for a long time. Look, it got us into a war in Iraq we didn't need to be in...
MATTHEWS: Yeah well I agree.
The following exchange was aired on the May 4 edition of Hardball:
CHRIS MATTHEWS: You know, Roger Cressey made a point earlier, Tyler, along the lines you're talking about, about how they recruit overseas. We've been very successful in American and I know we are, about assimilating people, it's our great strength. You can become an American in very few years. You learn a bit of the language, you make an effort to really become an American, you get into our culture, you get into our values, you're an American damn quick. And the danger, of course, is some people don't have that motive. That they may be doing all kinds of things to us. In this case, this guy radicalized, how do you figure? How do you figure the radicalization occurred?
TYLER DRUMHELLER, FMR CIA EUROPE OPERATION CHIEF: Well I think this is, I think the, the assimilation of, of the Islamic community in the United States has protected us to this point. But I think as things go along. I mean in his case it could be, it could be an economic problem. It could be, it could be all sorts of things.
MATTHEWS: Yeah I think you're onto it. I think you're on to the economic problem.
DRUMHELLER: And, and he, his house was being foreclosed on. It's the same thing if you, what you saw in Europe. And I keep going to that because that's what I - I think that's an important lesson to learn. You have a group of disgruntled people or a disgruntled guy and all they need to do is run into one person that's a serious recruiter or a trainer or something like that. And then like Bob said, they end up in a camp, they get a, they get a degree of training, they go back. And for the Pakistani, and for the people in Pakistan there, they see this as a war with us. I mean we, we, we should not think that we can attack them and they're not going to retaliate. And so this, it's, I think it would be a mistake to think that we're looking for a specific plan. Like go to Times Square and blow it up. But I think the, what they said was, probably train him and said, at an opportunity do something like this. Which makes it much more dangerous. It would be easier if it was a highly-organized thing because that's easier to penetrate.
MATTHEWS: You know Bob everybody knows about people that emigrate, some successfully, and others not. A lot of people came here from Ireland, for example, and most made it in America and some had to go home. They didn't make it here, they didn't fit in. Is this an opportunity for recruitment?
ROBERT BAER FMR CIA FIELD OFFICER: Oh absolutely! With the, immigration is going up, we're getting a lot more people. The State Department effectively does not screen people immigrating to this country. And it's barely cursory. We don't know who's inside our borders. We're nothing like Israel who keeps track of people for obvious reasons. We're still very non-militarized, liberal country. But, you know, we simply don't know who's within our borders. A lot of people still don't speak English. And their primary loyalties are outside the country.
MATTHEWS: Yeah but people coming from Pakistan, generally do speak English. That wouldn't be the problem here, would it?
BAER: A lot of them don't. A lot of them just speak Urdu and Pashtun. They don't speak it very well. And they're not integrated. They're moving out into communities in Connecticut and New Jersey, and they're, they're, they're sticking together, and we don't really know who they are. This is a, this is a big statement. But we, the FBI, let's put it this way, cannot keep track of every immigrant in this country. What happened in Times Square was not an intelligence failure. In fact it was, it was a brilliant wrap-up of this guy and - but, but what I'm really afraid, Chris, is the next time one of these guys are going to get through. And what's it gonna do to this country? It's gonna rip it apart. Because people are gonna be looking for quick, immediate answers.
MATTHEWS: How so?
BAER: You know, they're gonna, they're gonna look, you know, crack down on, you know, who knows where it's gonna to end up? You're gonna see the Tea Party being, you know, being strengthened. You're gonna see people blaming the White House for a situation it didn't create.
MATTHEWS: Yeah.
BAER: It could affect the, you know it could affect the United States for a long time. Look, it got us into a war in Iraq we didn't need to be in...
MATTHEWS: Yeah well I agree. And by the way, I think coming up on airplanes, I thought this with the Christmas bomber. Tyler, you on this. I thought there was gonna be, well I'll predict it right now. We get a real bad airplane situation in the next couple of years, we're gonna have all kinds of stuff going on about who gets on airplanes, we're gonna be so close to Israel in the way that they do it, don't you think?
DRUMHELLER: I think it's gonna...
BAER: Oh absolutely! People are gonna demand it.
MATTHEWS: Your thoughts Tyler?
DRUMHELLER: I think it's gonna go more and more in that direction. And I think the other thing to worry about is the reaction. Again this is going back to your. This is the reaction of the extreme right to the, where you have a counter reaction against these communities. And that just adds to bring in more recruits for these-
MATTHEWS: Yeah explain how that happens?
DRUMHELLER: Well it's because, as, as, as these attacks occur, it feeds a certain, a certain part of the, of the extreme right that looks on immigration as a threat to the American identity and then they react, and a violent fringe of that reacts violently against Moslems in some part of the country. And the next thing you know, then the recruiters or the people on the Internet, who if they're doing it remotely, play on this and say "See, this is America, hates Moslems." I mean you hear that more and more when you talk to young, to young Moslems. That it's not, it's not a majority, but it's and Bob knows more about this, about that part of the world than I do.
MATTHEWS: Yeah I know, I know. You know Bob, the problem is really not so much people who have a lot of contact with people from the Middle East or from South Asia, like I do. It's, it's people who don't meet anybody. So they make the generalization, I assume.
BAER: Yeah.
DRUMHELLER: Yeah.
MATTHEWS: Obviously they can't differentiate among the 99 percent that are wanting to become Americans and the, and the small element is just are misfits, basically and are open to recruitment. It's a, it's a situation that takes a little bit of thought to put into it. But I'll tell ya, when it comes to airplanes, people aren't gonna be so discriminating. They're gonna want to know who's going to be getting on that airplane if we another problem like Christmas.
About 45 minutes ago, Red State's Caleb Howe reported that a package filled with a white powder was sent to the office of Arizona Governor Jan Brewer. Brewer, picture right in a file photo, has become a controversial figure since she signed into law a bill giving state authorities more power to determine an individual's immigration status.
Andrew Staubitz, the chief of Phoenix's Capital Police Department, told Howe that a state employee opened an envelope addressed to the Governor and found a "powdery white substance." The first floor of the Arizona Capitol was closed for about half an hour. Paramedics were called, but the employee required no further medical assistance. The powder was sent to a lab where it is undergoing tests.
Will the media report this event as vehemently as they have other instances of purported political violence? Will they extrapolate a larger threat posed by opponents of the new immigration law as they repeatedly have with the Tea Party movement (even though it has been completely devoid of violence)? Or will they apply the journalistic scrutiny to this incident that they failed to apply to the claims of members of Congressional Black Caucus who said protesters had shouted racial slurs at them? We will see.
How long after the Capitol steps alleged spitting incident was it before talking heads were running with the Democrat and Shepard Smith talking point that tea partiers were becoming violent? How many times in the last year, from the town halls through today, has MSNBC had panels and pundits discussing the "violent rhetoric" and increasing danger from the right? Can you imagine if Governor Brewer had declared a Arizona a sanctuary state and then received white powder in the mail? The uproar? The outrage? The utter ALARM!??!
Howe correctly notes that speculation about the motives of the perpetrator in this instance is almost irrelevant to a commentary on the media's role in the incident. Due journalistic diligence requires that reporters not jump to conclusions one way or another.
But this diligence has consistently been denied the Tea Party. In fact, the media seem bent on lending creedence to voices that are routinely incorrect in their accusations of violence against conservative activists (see Sparkman, Bill), and hardly bother concealing the political motivations that undergird their charges.
NewsBusters will monitor the media's coverage -- or lack thereof -- of this incident. You can help by reporting coverage if you see it. Is the incident being reported? If so, how? Are the media parroting the tired "lone wolf" claim to insulate the far-left from any possible connection? Is the incident being used to play up popular opposition to the Arizona law?
*****UPDATE: In anticipation of critics' claims that this story is not really worth significant coverage since signs point to the white powder being innocuous in this instance, I'll note the following. In three instances of similar white powder hoaxes at the Harlem office of former President Bill Clinton, a Kerry/Edwards campaign office in 2004, and at the Washington office of former Republican Senate Leader Bill Frist.
In allthreecases, a major media outlet devoted significant time or space to the incident. We will see if the mainstream media do so in this instance.
A number of media outlets continue to hold water for the weekend's pro-illegal immigration protesters, as NewsBusters has reported, painting violence at many rallies as somehow unexpected or not representative of the larger movement.
While that characterization may be fair, the benefit of the doubt afforded to immigration protesters by some of the nation's leading media outlets stands in stark contrast to the coverage of Tea Party protests by those same outlets. Tea Parties rallies are guilty until proven innocent in the eyes of the mainstream media.
"[W]hat started as a peaceful immigrants' rights march in downtown Santa Cruz turned violent, requiring police to call other agencies for help, authorities said," read the lede of an Associated Press report. Since no Tea Party rally has turned violent, we can't make a direct comparison. But it is safe to assume that a Tea Party protest looking like the one at top right -- and involving numerous incidents of vandalism and other crimes -- would be characterized simply as "violent" or some other ugly adjective.
The AP also labeled the protests as initially "harmonious" and parrots the possibility that infiltrators were actually responsible for the violence.
Close to 20 businesses were damaged after what started as a peaceful immigrants' rights march in downtown Santa Cruz turned violent, requiring police to call other agencies for help, authorities said.
Police spokesman Zach Friend said an estimated 250 people started marching through the city around 10:30 p.m. Saturday.
It was a harmonious but "unpermitted and unsanctioned event," he said, until some in the crowd started breaking windows and spraying paint on retail shops that line the downtown corridor.
Friend said he wasn't sure if the damage was caused by people marching in support of immigrants' rights, or if the group was "infiltrated by anarchists."
Anarchy signs were spray-painted on some of the buildings.
"They're a group of people who seem to fancy themselves as revolutionaries, but what they really are are a group of morons," Friend said.
So in all, the "harmonious" and "peaceful" protest for "immigrant rights" tragically "turned violent," possibly due to nefarious anarchists (also "morons") who had "infiltrated" the protest. And of course anecdotal evidence of all of this is repeated without serious challenge.
The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto compares this AP story's lede to that of an AP piece on the Washington DC ObamaCare Tea Party protests. The first paragraph of that story read,
House Democrats heard it all Saturday--words of inspiration from President Barack Obama and raucous chants of protests from demonstrators. And at times it was flat-out ugly, including some racial epithets aimed at black members of Congress.
As Taranto notes, "the claims of racial epithets have since been disputed and were never substantiated,"
but let's give the AP the benefit of the doubt and assume that at the time, the reporter knew of no reason to doubt the word of the congressmen making the claims.
Even so, had the tea-party protesters gotten the Santa Cruz treatment, the AP would have noted that the rally was completely nonviolent, even if it featured some ugly words; that there was no ugliness at all until the protest "turned ugly"; and that the people who (allegedly) shouted the ugly words might well have been infiltrators.
If the Santa Cruz protesters had gotten the tea-party treatment, by contrast, the AP would have described the event simply as a riot and would not have distinguished between the peaceful protesters and the violent few who might be infiltrators anyway. What's more, conservative politicians and commentators would be sounding a constant refrain--echoed by the mainstream media--that politicians are inciting the violence with "antigovernment" statements…
We don't think that journalists should give the Santa Cruz protesters the tea-party treatment or the tea partiers the Santa Cruz treatment. Both sides ought to get the same treatment--fair treatment--from those whose job is to cover the news impartially.
Yes, they ought to. Maybe some day they will. Today is not that day.
As NewsBusters reported Sunday, a May Day rally turned ugly in Santa Cruz, California, Saturday when some attendees started a riot breaking windows and defacing property.
City officials estimate that at least $100,000 worth of damage was done.
A little north in San Francisco, three people supporting Arizona's new anti-illegal immigration law were attacked at that city's May Day event.
Despite the violence, the reporter for ABC-TV affiliate KGO used an offshoot of "mostly peaceful" to describe the festivities (video follows with partial transcript and commentary):
LISA AMIN GULEZIAN, REPORTER: Allan, for the most part the event was peaceful, but just about an hour ago, three people were attacked and two others were arrested. The people who were assaulted were part of the Minutemen demonstration in favor of Arizona's new immigration law.
They said a large group of immigrants' rights supporters followed them to the BART station on Market Street and started punching and kicking them, and calling them names.
PARKER WILSON, BAY AREA ANARCHIST: They said we were racists, and that we were against them, and against their town, and against San Francisco, and what they were saying. They said we needed to get out and they called us racists, and that we need to go home. And then they just attacked my friends and me.
Readers are reminded of what NewsBusters reported last Monday about "mostly peaceful" immigration protests.
I guess this reporter got the memo from 3,000 miles away.
That said, KGO did a follow-up report Sunday on the aftermath and cleanup of the riot in Santa Cruz the previous day. The reporter on the scene, Cecilia Vega, surprisingly described what happened as "ugly":
As these protests are likely to continue across the country, some with "ugly" behavior, will reporters still call them "mostly peaceful" or more honestly use Vega's description?
Comments on two Sunday shows reflected an emerging new liberal line of reasoning, which uses the lack of opposition to Arizona’s new immigration enforcement law, as a means to discredit conservatives and Tea Party activists as hypocrites and/or racists. HBO’s Bill Maher on ABC’s This Week:
Government intrusion, government power is something that really bothers conservatives, unless it's directed toward people who aren't white, you know, I mean it does seem like there’s some of that going on there.
Chrystia Freeland of Reuters on the McLaughlin Group:
What I think is really important to notice here is the hypocrisy, the intellectual hypocrisy because we have...a lot of the same people who are very exercised right now...about big government and pointing out the American tradition of liberty, of individual rights, are also the people who are on the side of allowing the government to intrude much more into individuals' lives on immigration.
There’s nothing insistent, however, since while some conservatives do oppose the Arizona law (host Jake Tapper quoted Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, for example) conservatives aren’t against all government authority; they just think it should be limited to that delineated in the Constitution – and that would include defense of the borders and a recognition those here illegally should not enjoy the same rights as those who are citizens.
Maher, regurgitating a line from his HBO show, soon slimed Republicans as racists when it is liberals and Democrats who advocate a racial spoils system and race-based college admission policies (and as Maher spoke he was sitting beside long-time race hustler Al Sharpton):
I would never say, and I have never said because it’s not true, that Republicans, all Republicans are racist. That would be silly and wrong. But nowadays, if you are racist you're probably a Republican. [scoffing laughter from Matthew Dowd and George Will] That is quite different.
(Earlier in the show, Tapper asked Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, who was on to discuss the oil spill: “Your family has been in this country since the 1500s, from Spain originally, I believe. Do you worry that as a Hispanic-American that if you went to Arizona you might be racially-profiled because of this law?”)
The reasoning from Freeland, formerly of the Financial Times, in full (and gives me space to place a screen shot of her):
What I think is really important to notice here is the hypocrisy, the intellectual hypocrisy because we have, as Eleanor [Clift] was pointing out, a lot of the same people who are very exercised right now – I think quite rightly about big government and pointing out the American tradition of liberty, of individual rights – are also the people who are on the side of allowing the government to intrude much more into individuals' lives on immigration.
KOTA TV newsman Shad Olson will be back on the air soon, following a disciplinary suspension from his news anchor duties in the Rapid City coverage area because of his speech at a tea party rally.
Olson was taken off the air locally a few days after his April 15 speech at the Citizens for Liberty tax day rally in Memorial Park.
"Shad's speech to the tax day rally was a lapse in ethics, so we took appropriate action," KOTA news director John Petersen said.
On April 15, The Dakota Voice reported what Olson said at the event:
Shad Olson followed Howie with an inspirational speech about the exceptionalism of American values. He said he wasn't there to pick on Democrats, Independents or Republicans. "They all deserve a little TEA, in my book," said Olson. "Especially the ones who are drinking the Koolaid that's currently being handed out inside the Beltway in Washington D.C."
Olson said there is a misunderstanding among some that we should feel patriotic about paying our taxes, but that it is being done in a way that founding fathers never intended.
Olson referenced something that had been on the socialist interloper's sign in small letters "Tax millionaires not the middle class" and said that it was truly patriotic to call for a reduction in taxes not just on the middle class but on millionaires as well because it is the wealthy who use their wealth to pursue their talents, creating corporations and industries that produce jobs...which means greater prosperity for all, including the middle class.
Olson made it clear that he is well informed about America's history and our founding principles, and left the crowd of patriots even more excited about their great country than when the [sic] came.
Doesn't sound inflammatory enough to warrant suspension, does it?
This seems especially the case since Olson's political views have never been a problem in the ten years he's worked for Rapid City's ABC affiliate. As the Journal reported:
[Olson said] that people who believe that his tea party speech reflects a political bias that could affect his news work should watch and judge for themselves.
"The fact that they didn't realize until now the passionate feeling and beliefs I hold about the history of our country and its values should be evidence enough of my ability to provide an unbiased news account day in and day out," Olson said. [...]
"I want people to fall back in love with their country based on what the founding principles are and the legacy left by the people who fought and bled and died to establish America on this continent," he said.
Olson said he is non-partisan in his advocacy and believes that his personal beliefs coincide with the tea party movement in general.
And Olson has had a stellar career at KOTA up to this point:
During a broadcast career that began when he was 17 at his hometown radio station, Shad's work has consistently generated critical acclaim, garnering more than a dozen awards in both radio and television.
In 2007, Shad was a finalist for a National Emmy Award for his four-part investigative documentary on the life of a child prostitute, entitled, 'Tonya's Story.' That competition pitted Shad's work against teams of multiple people from stations in Nashville, Cleveland and Phoenix. 'Tonya's Story' also captured a Regional Emmy Award (Minneapolis) and an Edward R. Murrow Award, beating out stations in North and South Dakota, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
2007 also brought Shad his eleventh Associated Press accolade in the past eight years, winning 'Best Investigative-Enterprise' for his undercover expose on lax security at Rapid City's two public high schools. With Shad wandering the halls with a hidden camera, the 'Stranger Danger Test,' provided a startling look at how easy it would be for an intruder to invade two buildings filled with hundreds of students and staff. The resulting footage provided a video resource used by school administration in tightening security loopholes on both the Central and Stevens Campuses.
Impressive indeed. But does any of that matter?
Hot Air's Ed Morrissey raised some interesting points on this subject Wednesday:
Dan Rather took a lot of heat for speaking at a Democratic fundraiser in Texas, which conservatives used to paint him as biased. Rather claimed that he didn't know the event was a fundraiser, but as the Washington Post reported at the time, he wasn't exactly contrite about it, either. His management at CBS had a different opinion, but didn't suspend Rather, calling it an "honest oversight."
Olson's appearance didn't involve fundraising, or even partisan identification. However, it still speaks to the basic problem for supposedly objective journalists and political activism. The Tea Party is at least philosophically opposed to the current agenda of the Democratic Party, even if its activists aren't entirely sold on the GOP, either. A keynote speech would not be a problem for an opinion journalist, but for a reporter? I suspect that had we seen Brian Williams as a speaker at an antiwar rally in 2004, he'd still be hearing about it from conservative critics. While reporters are American citizens like anyone else and have the right to participate in the political process, their publishers/editors have the right to consider whether that erodes confidence in their product, too.
Good points all.
As Morrissey noted, since this wasn't a fundraising event or a rally for a political candidate, this shouldn't necessarily warrant suspension.
After all, newscasters make commencement speeches every year. TVNewser just published a schedule of this year's high-profile addresses. Think some of these people will be talking a little politics in front of the graduating class of 2010?
With this in mind, exactly how "unethical" was Olson's behavior?
You have the makings of a New York Times hit piece on conservatism. In the April 27 issue of the Times, a story in its Style section of all places by Patricia Cohen, singled out and accused a number of conservatives of "closed-mindedness" or as the article claimed "epistemic closure."
"It is hard to believe that a phrase as dry as ‘epistemic closure' could get anyone excited, but the term has sparked a heated argument among conservatives in recent weeks about their movement's intellectual health," Cohen wrote. "The phrase is being used as shorthand by some prominent conservatives for a kind of closed-mindedness in the movement, a development they see as debasing modern conservatism's proud intellectual history."
Cohen cited Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute, a libertarian, who attacked Fox News, National Review, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin and Glenn Beck by saying they have "become worryingly untethered from reality as the impetus to satisfy the demand for red meat overtakes any motivation to report accurately."
And Cohen backed up Sanchez's premise by referring to the backlash Jim Manzi received after he recently lashed at Mark Levin for his book "Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto," referring to as "awful" in an April 21 National Review Online post. Cohen also identified Frum and Bartlett's seeming fall from grace among conservatives as well:
David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, argued at frumforum.com on Friday that the problem was not media celebrities, but rather conservative intellectuals.
"They're the ones who are supposed to uphold intellectual standards, to sift actual facts from what you call ‘pretend information,' " he wrote, quoting a friend. "Rush Limbaugh isn't any worse than he was 20 years ago. But 20 years ago, conservatism offered something more than Rush Limbaugh. Since then, the conservative elite has collapsed. Blame them, not talk radio."
However, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., author of "After the Hangover: The Conservatives' Road to Recovery" and the founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator, who is an expert on this matter explained "sniping" at conservatives has been how pseudo-conservatives like Frum and Bartlett have been able to gain acceptance in liberal circles.
"What do my eyes behold?" Tyrrell said to NewsBusters on April 28. "I write in my new book that opportunistic pundits make their way in liberal media by claiming to be conservative while they snipe at conservatives. Here The New York Times has featured David Frum - one of my specimens - in its pages. And for what? Sniping at conservatives. If he keeps this up, he'll be editor of their Style page."
Cohen followed that attack on the modern conservative movement up with another that suggested conservative leaders lack intellectual - from no other than Bruce Bartlett who used his prominence to attack the Bush administration:
Mr. Bartlett, who lost his job at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a conservative research institute, after accusing George W. Bush of betraying the Reagan legacy, said in an interview: "Every intellectual movement needs to constantly question itself; otherwise it becomes stale. But conservatives have sort of reached a position of intellectual closure. They don't think there are any new ideas of particular interest to them. Their philosophy is fully formed. The only question is how best to implement conservative ideas in the political debate."
Nothing says “media bias” like coffee in the morning.
If anyone ever wanted to see an example of the bias of the Old Media no better example can be found than the different ways that it has treated the tea party movement and the coffee party astroturf effort. The tea party movement was initially ignored, [...]
Sam Tanenhaus, editor of “The New York Times Book Review” and “Week in Review,” and the author of the book, “The Death of Conservatism,” went on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC talk show Monday night to discuss her being featured in a fundraising letter from the right-wing John Birch Society. But the friendly chat soon veered off into a comparison of the nationalist John Birch Society to the Tea Party movement, with Tanenhaus confidently proclaiming “there are no serious ideas left on the right.”
Tanenhaus is pretty assured, for a man who published a book called “The Death of Conservatism” months before a conservative resurgence. At least he didn't refer to Tea Party protesters as “tea baggers,” as he did in an exchange on Slate last October. (Watch a clip of Tanenhaus chatting with Maddow at Times Watch).
SAM TANENHAUS: But there were many on the right who actually supported [John Birch Society president Robert] Welch on the principle we're seeing in action today -- no enemies on the right. If they can be useful, you keep them in the tent. Then, by the mid-'60s, as you said before, they'd gotten so far off the grid that Buckley, a guy who kind of trafficked in intellectual circles, particularly in New York, and had a lot of smart liberal friends, like Murray Kempton and John Kenneth Galbraith, got a little embarrassed by them. At the same time, though, as you said, they were forceful. They were useful. In the Goldwater campaign in ‘64, they were the foot soldiers. In some sense, they're the precursor to the tea partiers we're seeing now, so the right is always nervous about evicting people like that.
....
RACHEL MADDOW: There's no way around it except to talk about who they are in the bluntest possible terms, I think. But what does it say to you, Sam, that the John Birch Society is back, after so many years in exile, after conspiracists had to contend with people who are sort of gatekeepers in terms of what counts as mainstream conservatism? What does it mean that the gatekeepers are gone now?
TANENHAUS: Well, it means that it's a movement without serious ideas. Look at poor David Frum, you know, someone who's actually a kind of consequential guy, protégé of Buckley himself.
MADDOW: Yes. (UNINTELLIGIBLE).
(CROSS TALK)
TANENHAUS: Well, more or less evicted from the movement. That's right. He doesn't want -- I don't know. Maybe he has his own conspiracy about you.
MADDOW: Yes.
TANENHAUS: They all do! But, yes, there are no serious ideas left on the right. We see who the great idea people are, the ones who pretend to be – Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and all the rest. This is about as good as it's getting now, so they don‘t have a Buckley or an Irving Kristol or someone like that to call them out. Some -- there's another difference too, Rachel. People like Buckley and Kristol thought part of the job of conservatism was to persuade serious liberals, if not to agree with them, at least to rethink their own ideas, to raise the level of discourse. That‘s not what the extremists do.
Finally, we should never forget what drove the bombers, and how they justified their actions to themselves. They took to the ultimate extreme an idea advocated in the months and years before the bombing by an increasingly vocal minority: the belief that the greatest threat to American freedom is our government, and that public servants do not protect our freedoms, but abuse them.
….
Criticism is part of the lifeblood of democracy. No one is right all the time. But we should remember that there is a big difference between criticizing a policy or a politician and demonizing the government that guarantees our freedoms and the public servants who enforce our laws.
We are again dealing with difficulties in a contentious, partisan time. We are more connected than ever before, more able to spread our ideas and beliefs, our anger and fears. As we exercise the right to advocate our views, and as we animate our supporters, we must all assume responsibility for our words and actions before they enter a vast echo chamber and reach those both serious and delirious, connected and unhinged.
We couldn’t agree with President Clinton more. We must all be vigilant in our efforts to avoid fostering an environment that offers quarter to extremist and violent elements.
How do we know this? Because they wrote about it. Why don’t you know about it? Because the media in this country never bothered to look into whom the people were who organized the marches which repeatedly led to violence and arrests.
If any of the mainstream press had been the slightest bit curious (and why would they be? It was just politically organized rioting on the streets of our country), they could have performed some cursory Google searches that return ample circumstantial evidence of direct coordinating efforts between the clean, presentable, mainstream face of the Progressive-Democrat movement, and the dark underbelly of the Anarchy movement in this country. *
How does this relationship work? It’s simple(ish). Let’s start with the clean face of the Progressive-Democrats: the Congressional Progressive Caucus. This entity was founded and organized by self-described Socialist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, and by an organization called the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
The DSA was founded and supported by many of the same people active in the 1960s radical movement, known widely as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and their domestic terrorist wing, the Weather Underground Organization (WUO).
Key members of the Democratic Socialists of America are principal organizers of two current groups called “Progressives for Obama” and the reconstituted “Movement for a Democratic Society” (MDS).
Progressives for Obama is where the straight face of Progressive unions, non-profits, and educational institutions organized their efforts to elect then Senator Obama to the presidency.
What is a “Direct Action?” A direct action typically (but not exclusively) consists of staging a protest with the predetermined goal of causing a direct confrontation with the police.
While covering the Democrat convention in Denver, and subsequently the Republican convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul, it became clear that there was a distinct and organized pattern at work.
Organizers would stage a rally and/or a concert. These events were planned and permitted through the local municipalities. The goal was almost always the same. Eventually the organizers would breach the boundaries of the permit, and force a confrontation with the authorities. This frequently resulted in extensive damage to property, as well as added expense in resources devoted to dealing with the Anarchists.
What’s the point? It’s three-fold. 1) These events present successful organizing opportunities to collect names and contact info of participants, thus growing the movement. 2) These events radicalize the members, making them more devoted to the cause. 3) Propaganda is produced that depicts the ‘evil police’ being brutal to otherwise seemingly peaceful protesters.
What’s their goal? To end Capitalism, with which they equate racism, sexism, exploitation, terrorism, and murder.
These Direct Action Tendency and United For Justice linked events, (like the RNC Welcoming Committee) represent a modern day Progressive-Anarchy Tea Party. One main difference of course between the Conservative/Libertarian Tea Parties, and the Progressive-Anarchy Tea Parties is the premeditated tactic of breaking the law and getting arrested. Conservatives and Libertarians don’t tend to do that. Progressive-Anarchists have mastered it as a form of political art.
This all begs the question, if a group of Conservative/Libertarian Tea Partiers engaged in an attack on an urban infrastructure with the premeditated goal of shutting down a Democrat political event, would they face charges for federal civil rights violations? Perhaps that would depend on whether or not America is a land where people are guaranteed the right to political expression and peaceable assembly.
On a side note, organizing the Progressive-Anarchy Tea Party movement was no small task. Typically, the Anarchy Socialists and the Democratic Socialists don’t get along. Their achievement in coming together is a testament to the uniting powers of President Barack Obama. People in the center misunderstood when Democrats called Obama a unifier. They didn’t mean he could unite the Left and the Right, as the center assumed. They meant he could unite the Socialist Progressive Left and the Socialist Anarchy Left. Success. He did just that.
This is what the real Tea Party is up against. Do the Tea Party Patriots have what it takes to go up against this unified Socialist-Progressive-Anarchy front? The Jury is still out on that one. Most Tea Partiers have no clue about the forces arrayed against them, and it is pretty hard to best an adversary you don’t fully understand.
Further, just take a look at the differences between the crowds in this movement. One crowd looks old and soft and the other crowd looks young and hard. To illustrate the point, let’s play a little game called, “Name That Tea Party.” The rules are very simple. Just take a look at the following image pairs and guess which Tea Party they fall under, the Conservative/Libertarian Tea Party, or the Socialist Anarchy Tea Party:
Image Pair #1
Image Pair #2
The Conservative/Libertarian Tea Party has a lot to overcome, most of which it is not even aware of yet, but with President Clinton in your corner, condemning the dangerous and inflammatory behavior of radical protesters, anything is possible.
* Disclaimer: I am not a forensic researcher. The conclusions in this article are based on very basic online searches. Imagine the dots that could be connected if a professional researcher/investigator dug into this. Or perhaps if the distributed talent found in the Blogosphere were to take a whack at it, much like the way they outed the egg-throwing thugs in Searchlight.
Fox News's Megyn Kelly Tuesday featured a marvelous comparison of how the media cover Tea Parties versus immigration protests.
As NewsBusters' Scott Whitlock reported Monday, ABC News logged dramatically different reports about the ObamaCare protests on Capitol Hill in March and the virtual riots that happened in Arizona after that state's governor signed a strict anti-illegal immigration law last Friday.
The former was depicted as "very ugly" while the latter, despite the number of riot police and arrests, was described as "mostly peaceful."
With this in mind, Kelly invited liberal talk radio host Mark Levine and conservative talk radio host Mike Gallagher to debate the disparity.
As you might imagine, Levine hysterically saw both reports as being accurate (video follows with commentary):
"
To be sure, we at NewsBusters are thrilled that others saw the same absurd hypocrisy in these reports as we did, but the bigger question is whether those responsible actually care.
Note, too, how the Narrative has subtly changed: Previously the storyline was that those darned tea-party wingnuts could erupt in violence at any moment and now it's shifted to "sure, both sides are mostly peaceful, but..." More narrative-killing immigration protests, please!
Sadly, Allah might get his wish, for if CNN's Jack Cafferty is right, we could be in for a long summer of immigration reform debate on Capitol Hill, which means more protests around the country.
The only questions remaining are how many people will need to be arrested -- and windows broken -- before such demonstrations are called "very ugly," and will Tea Partiers have to wear flowers in their hair while singing 'Kumbaya" to ever be considered "mostly peaceful?"
News outlets across the country have latched on to a survey that suggests TEA party supporters tend to be resentful toward minorities. Newsweek published two different pieces on the same item, while a handful of newspapers also gleefully relayed the findings.
There are just a few problems. First, the survey was conducted by a University of Washington professor bent on proving racism exists against President Obama. Second, his entire sample of white TEA party supporters comprised exactly 117 people. Finally, many of the questions had nothing to do with racial resentment.
But we can't have facts getting in the way of a media narrative.
As soon as the survey was released April 7, news outlets were all over it pushing the survey results as empirical evidence, and many not even pretending to sound neutral on the subject. The leader of the study, Political Science professor Christopher Parker, was not asked about his own political leanings or his apparent pre-occupation with finding racism afoot.
First up to bat was the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, whose blog writer Scott Sunde promoted the survey without question on April 8:
A University of Washington survey has found that Southerners and conservatives are more likely to support the Tea Party.
What's more, the director of the survey says his data show that the Tea Party might also be about race. Those who think the government has done too much to help African Americans are 36 more likely to support the Tea Party.
"While it's clear that the Tea Party in one sense about limited government, it's also clear from the data that people who want limited government don't want certain services for certain kinds of people. Those services include health care," said Christopher Parker, the assistant professor of political science at the UW who directed the survey.
See the sleight of hand there? If someone opposes government-funded "services" such as healthcare, it's obviously because they don't want "certain people" to receive those services.
Yet Sunde didn't challenge that statement or bring up anyone on the right to contradict it. Even worse, Sunde didn't link to the data for readers to see it for themselves. Parker's conclusions were presented as fact with no effort to do vetting of any kind.
Perhaps if Sunde had done some investigating, he'd have noticed that Parker was involved in an almost identical study in 2008. Back then, Parker accused Republicans of "thinly veiled allusions to Obama's race" and insisted that "race was a consistent narrative used by Obama's opponents."
What did Parker and his colleagues cite as examples of this? Code words, of course:
We begin this article by proposing that although Obama ultimately won, we cannot reject that race-and in particular racism-played a significant role in the outcome. During the campaign, race was a consistent narrative used by Obama's opponents. His primary opponents, particularly Hillary Clinton, and Republicans in the general election used racial references to attack the Illinois senator, citing him for his perceived inability to connect to "real working Americans" ~Bazinet and McAuliff, 2008; Canellos 2008; MacGillis 2008. A Republican in Georgia used the term uppity to describe Obama, a clear racial reference ~Los Angeles Times 2008. Even the infamous "Joe the Plumber" charged Obama with seeking to redistribute wealth, raising age-old stereotypes of African Americans as radical, welfare dependent, and not as hardworking as the White working class. In short, he accused Obama of seeking to take money from hardworking "real Americans" to give it to "those people" ~Rohter 2008.
So you see, calling someone uppity is a "clear" racial slur. Saying that someone doesn't understand "real working Americans" is some kind of code for saying they don't understand white people. Oh, and calling attention to President Obama's own self-proclaimed plan of wealth distribution means you think black people are lazy.
With such a lax definition of racism, it's no wonder Parker sees it everywhere.
A year later, Parker is back with a brand new study that relies on the same kind of fast-and-loose method to interpreting Obama's critics.
The day after the Seattle PI piece ran, Newsweek's Arian Campo-Flores picked up the meme for a post at The Gaggle blog. Much like Sunde, Campo-Flores accepted the results at face value and gave Parker a platform to spout more accusations:
So a new poll by researchers at the University of Washington caught my eye. The findings are sure to fan the flames further. "People who approve of the Tea Party, more than those who don't approve, have more racist attitudes," says Christopher Parker, a University of Washington professor who directed the survey. "And not only that, but more homophobic and xenophobic attitudes." For instance, respondents were asked whether they agreed with various characterizations of different racial groups. Only 35 percent of those who strongly approve of the tea party agreed that blacks are hardworking, compared with 55 percent of those who strongly disapprove of the tea party. On whether blacks were intelligent, 45 percent of the tea-party supporters agreed, compared with 59 percent of the tea-party opponents. And on the issue of whether blacks were trustworthy, 41 percent of the tea-party supporters agreed, compared with 57 percent of the tea-party opponents.
35% of the white TEA supporters surveyed? Since there were 117 of them asked, that was a grand total of 41 people. Not even kidding. And the 55% of white disapprovers? Since only 66 of them participated, that was 36 people.
Parker is attempting to prove that white TEA supporters are more prone to see blacks as lazy - based on the difference between 41 and 36.
That's what Newsweek considered empirical evidence.
This NBer was curious to see what else respondents were asked, and to Newsweek's credit there were links this time. However, the survey results offered as proof revealed some interesting methods of questioning. Observe a few of the questions asked of TEA party supporters, taken directly from Newsweek's links:
Irish, Italians, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without special favors. (Agree)
Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class. (Disagree)
Over the past few years blacks have gotten less than they deserve. (Disagree)
It's really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites. (Agree)
TEA party sympathizers think everyone should work hard and not expect special favors based on race! Scandalous!
But Campo-Flores was convinced. The piece ended with him quipping, "The University of Washington study, however, suggests that in terms of their views, the tea partiers aren't quite so mainstream after all."
Apparently in the mind of a Newsweek writer, mainstream America wants "special favors" for certain races not afforded to others, and if you disagree you are obviously racist.
On April 21, Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. joined in the choir. Pitts penned an op-ed that accused conservatives of "yearning for an America that's gone" - that is, the good old days when minorities were persecuted.
Pitts wasn't interested in dissecting the scientific nature of the survey; indeed, he dismissed all possible skepticism by saying "some of us needed no polling data to know this." What followed was a screed against white conservatives who "discovered" an aversion to socialism only after an African-American got elected:
After all, if the tea partiers were truly only concerned about so-called ``tyranny,'' they'd have started howling when President Bush claimed he need not be bound by laws with which he disagreed.
If they were truly only worried about a ``socialist'' takeover of private industry, they'd have yelped when he took over troubled financial institutions.
If they were truly only anxious about the budget, they've have hollered when he spent a $128 billion surplus into a $407 billion deficit.
If they were truly outraged over their income taxes, they'd have screamed at Bush first, given that their taxes are the same as when he was in office.
Of course Pitts didn't care that the legendary battle cry "kill the bill" was used under the Bush administration precisely when conservatives were busy yelping about the bailout.
No no, that simply cannot be, or it would contradict the narrative of racism.
Once again, Parker's study was peddled as matter-of-fact scientific data that only served to prove what the media already knew.
But Newsweek wasn't yet satisfied with the amount of coverage given to the study. On Monday, Campo-Flores returned to write a brand new piece about the same old survey, this time published directly on Newsweek's front page as website exclusive:
Ever since the Tea Party phenomenon gathered steam last spring, it has been plagued by charges of racism. Placards at rallies have depicted President Barack Obama as a witch doctor, denounced his supposed plans for "white slavery," and likened Congress to a slave owner and the taxpayer to a "n----r." Opponents have seized on these examples as proof that Tea Partiers are angry white folks who can't abide having a black president. Supporters, on the other hand, claim that the hateful signs are the work of a small fringe and that they unfairly malign a movement that simply seeks to rein in big government. In the absence of empirical evidence to support either characterization, the debate has essentially deadlocked.
Until now, that is. A new survey by the University of Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race & Sexuality offers fresh insight into the racial attitudes of Tea Party sympathizers.
It is absolutely astounding that Campo-Flores called it a new survey. There was no mention of his own prior blog post, no admission the survey had been making rounds in the media for weeks. All of the information was presented as some fresh discovery - and this time Campo-Flores parroted the points made in the Miami Herald:
If Tea Party supporters are doing relatively fine, what are they so riled up about? These studies suggest that, at least in part, it's race. The country that the Tea Partiers grew up in is irrevocably changing. Last month, new demographic data showed that minority births are on the verge of outpacing white births. By 2050, Hispanics are expected to account for more than a quarter of the American population. The Tea Partiers "feel a loss ... like their status has been diminished," says David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which examines issues of race. "If you listen to [their] language, it's always about 'taking our country back.' But it's really not taking the country back as is. It's taking the country back"-as in time.
Bositis finds the movement's arguments about reckless federal spending unpersuasive. Why, he asks, weren't they up in arms when President George W. Bush launched two costly wars and created a new unfunded mandate with his Medicare prescription-drug plan? Why didn't they take to the streets when he converted a surplus into a massive deficit? "I don't like to be in a position where I'm characterizing people as being racially biased," says Bositis. "But when the shoe fits, what do you do?" Given modern societal norms, "they know they can't use any overtly racist language," he contends. "So they use coded language"-questioning the patriotism of the president or complaining about "socialist" schemes to redistribute wealth.
That sounds almost verbatim like the points Leonard Pitts Jr. forwarded on April 21. Strange how none of that came up in Campo-Flores's first piece or in the Seattle PI just a few weeks before. As soon as Pitts found a way to advance the ball, that became the new angle for the survey.
Add it all up, and this is a classic example of how the media blatantly promote a story that fits their own agenda with little to no regard about the truth.
As Leonard Pitts Jr. succinctly admitted, when it comes to bashing TEA parties, no proof is really necessary anyway.
While America's media continue to depict the Tea Party as homophobic, angry racists, they shamefully ignore the REAL hate speech going on in our nation, namely what's being regularly hurled at this movement by its opponents.
Take for example the absolutely shocking voice-mail messages that have been left at the offices of FreedomWorks, a non-profit organization that has supported the Tea Party since its inception.
In response to a video that fired GEICO announcer Lance Baxter aka D.C. Douglas created last week that included messages he received from non-supporters after his termination, the folks at FreedomWorks on Monday published a collection of their own.
This video contains astonishingly vulgar and hateful voice-mail messages left for FreedomWorks employees that likely would be front-page and headline news if this was a liberal organization (video follows with commentary, STRONG vulgarity and content warning, h/t Right Scoop):
Amazing.
Now, compare that to the messages left for Baxter by FreedomWorks supporters (relevant section at 1:00):
Complaints to be sure, but civil and lacking vulgarity -- a far cry from what Baxter's supporters left for FreedomWorks.
This is itself especially ironic as this entire episode began with Baxter's voice-mail message to FreedomWorks which was also far worse than any left for him.
Not surprising, that didn't get a lot of coverage either.
According to LexisNexis, only two newspapers -- New York's Daily News and the Washington Post -- covered his termination. As for television, CNN did one segment on Baxter, MSNBC did two -- one actually praised him! -- and Fox News did three.
And that, as they say, was that.
Clearly, the voice of a leading insurance company getting fired for leaving a disgusting voice-mail message to a non-profit organization isn't newsworthy in 2010.
Would things have been different if he was a conservative and the non-profit was liberal?
Before you answer, consider what NewsBusters' Scott Whitlock uncovered: on Saturday, ABC's "Good Morning America" reported a rally against Arizona's new anti-illegal immigration law. Despite riot police having to be called in due to protesters throwing bottles, and regardless of arrests having been made, reporter Mike Von Fremd said most attendees were peaceful.
By contrast, when "World News" covered ObamaCare protests on Capitol Hill in March, the treatment by ABC's David Muir was far different:
"Protesters against the [health care] plan gathered on the streets of the capital where late today we learned words shouted turned very ugly, reports of racial and homophobic slurs, one protester actually spitting on a Congressman." Continuing to fret over those [sic] opposed the bill, he complained, "Late word from Washington tonight about just how ugly the crowds gathered outside the Longworth office building have become."
Yes, in the course of about a month, ABC depicted people peacefully protesting a Democrat healthcare reform plan as "very ugly" while a rally against a new law in Arizona where bottles were thrown at police officers and arrests were made was mostly peaceful.
Doesn't make much sense, does it, especially as nobody was arrested at the healthcare reform protest, riot police weren't needed, and there were no reports of anything being dangerously thrown in the air.
This of course was consistent with how Tea Partiers have comported themselves from the onset. As NewsBusters' Candance Moore reported last Wednesday, police have found this movement's rallies to be so well-behaved that they've relaxed security requirements at their gatherings.
Ironically, Tea Parties are more peaceful than anti-war rallies, but you wouldn't know it from the abysmal reporting by America's conservative-hating media.
One week after mocking comedian and Tea Party activist Jim Labriola as "no brain trust, trust me," HLN host Joy Behar brought him onto the Joy Behar Show Monday to discuss his involvement in the movement. Behar was surprised by his contention that he had seen no racism or anger at the events he has attended, except from anti-Tea Party protesters, with the HLN host responding: "No, that doesn`t make sense because we`ve seen the footage of them showing things, woman walking with a monkey, another one having Obama in white face."
After Behar, who admitted last week "I'm scared to go" to Tea Party events, asked if Labriola had seen any African-Americans at events he attended, he asserted that half the people he appeared with on stage were minorities, and criticized the media for ignoring black and Hispanic Tea Party members:"I noticed the news never showed any of the black speakers or the Mexican kid and all that."
The comedian and alum of the TV series Home Improvement had earlier commented on the absence of racism or anger by Tea Party participants at events:
JIM LABRIOLA: I believe they`re for smaller government, and the thing I will say, in my travels with them, this is the God`s honest truth, I did not see any racist, anybody that was racist.
JOY BEHAR: For real?
LABRIOLA: I didn`t see angry people. The only racist and angry people, personally, that I saw were some of the protesters that showed up. And that`s a fact. They even had-
BEHAR: Protesters against the Tea Party?
LABRIOLA: Against the Tea Party.
BEHAR: No, that doesn`t make sense because we`ve seen the footage of them showing things, woman walking with a monkey, another one having Obama in white face. In the strange-
LABRIOLA: I didn`t see any of that.
Also of note, after asking if Labriola had met Sarah Palin, Behar thought it amusing to ask if the comedian had "hit on" Palin's daughter Bristol:
BEHAR: So did you meet Sarah Palin?
LABRIOLA: Yes, I did in Boston.
BEHAR: And what did you think of her?
LABRIOLA: Pretty hot looking.
BEHAR: She`s very hot. We all know she`s a beautiful woman.
LABRIOLA: She was very gracious, very friendly, very nice-
BEHAR: Did you hit on Bristol?
LABRIOLA: No.
BEHAR: Okay, just asking.
Below is a complete transcript of the relevant segment from the Monday, April 26, Joy Behar Show on HLN, with critical portions in bold:
JOY BEHAR: Joining me again is Jim Labriola, a comic who went from working in the clubs with me in the day to appearing as a regular on TV`s Home Improvement. These days, however, he can be found entertaining at tea parties. Okay, Jim-
JIM LABRIOLA: How you doing?
BEHAR: How did you get involved with these Tea Parties? I know you`re a member now. I heard it from a real Tea Party person. That`s how come you`re here today. Because I was shocked. I know you for years, and I never knew you had a political interest.
LABRIOLA: This just came about with Victoria Jackson from Saturday Night Live. I have a home also in Tennessee and made a few-
BEHAR: You have a home in Tennessee?
LABRIOLA: Yes, I do.
BEHAR: Where do you live normally? In Brooklyn?
LABRIOLA: No, I live in Florida and have a home in Tennessee.
BEHAR: That`s quite a commute.
LABRIOLA: Yes.
BEHAR: Was this a career move?
LABRIOLA: I did it as a favor. Somebody asked - they were doing it in Nashville, Tennessee. Victoria Jackson from Saturday Night Live asked, would you mind doing time, comedy for them? I drove down a few hours from where I lived and did a little show for them, and the people loved it because, you know, multi-talent. A crowd of 2,000. The rest is history. And they said, "Would you like to do the remaining tour with us?"
BEHAR: I see.
LABRIOLA: And I do believe I would have never done it, but I do believe in a lot of what the people are talking about.
BEHAR: So did you meet Sarah Palin?
LABRIOLA: Yes, I did in Boston.
BEHAR: And what did you think of her?
LABRIOLA: Pretty hot looking.
BEHAR: She`s very hot. We all know she`s a beautiful woman.
LABRIOLA: She was very gracious, very friendly, very nice - see I-
BEHAR: Did you hit on Bristol?
LABRIOLA: No.
BEHAR: Okay, just asking.
LABRIOLA: No, my wife`s got three brothers, please. What happened to Labriola? Looked like a heart attack. Yes, he hung himself.
BEHAR: So Sarah opened for you?
LABRIOLA: Sarah opened for me. She went on first then I closed the show. Right after I went on, everybody left.
BEHAR: So you don`t really know what the Tea Partyers are about? You`re, like, just a thing going along with it?
LABRIOLA: I believe they`re for smaller government, and the thing I will say, in my travels with them, this is the God`s honest truth, I did not see any racist, anybody that was racist.
BEHAR: For real?
LABRIOLA: I didn`t see angry people. The only racist and angry people, personally, that I saw were some of the protesters that showed up. And that`s a fact. They even had-
BEHAR: Protesters against the Tea Party?
LABRIOLA: Against the Tea Party.
BEHAR: No, that doesn`t make sense because we`ve seen the footage of them showing things, woman walking with a monkey, another one having Obama in white face. In the strange-
LABRIOLA: I didn`t see any of that. Now, remember, there`s different Tea Parties that go all over the country. The Tea Party I was on-
BEHAR: Was Alice in Wonderland`s.
LABRIOLA: Yes. Don`t be funny with me. All right?
BEHAR: Look, see, you can see it. Look at this woman.
LABRIOLA: Where?
BEHAR: Okay, "Send Obama back to Kenya."
LABRIOLA: She`s a plant, a plant. Some of these people-
BEHAR: Oh please, a plant?
LABRIOLA: I`m telling you, a plant.
BEHAR: Did you see in your travels, did you see any African-Americans who were Tea Partiers?
LABRIOLA: Yes, I did. As a matter of fact, half the speakers were African-American. They had a Mexican kid called Politics that was a rapper. On the bus I was traveling the only white guy was the bus driver on the bus.
BEHAR: Uh huh, really?
LABRIOLA: I`m serious. I noticed the news never showed any of the black speakers or the Mexican kid and all that. I say this sincerely, the crowds that came out, I didn`t see any, you have a couple of loony bins here and there.
BEHAR: Plenty of loony bins.
LABRIOLA: I didn`t see it.
BEHAR: You want to say something before we go?
LABRIOLA: I wanted to say we just lost a good friend in comedy, Ray Garvey, who booked the-
BEHAR: The Borgada.
LABRIOLA: Atlantic city. Was a doorman there. That`s why I have this shirt. Out of respect-
BEHAR: Sorry to hear that was.
LABRIOLA: It was a great loss. He was a great guy.
On Monday's The O'Reilly Factor on FNC, substitute host Laura Ingraham and FNC analyst Bernard Goldberg discussed the mainstream media's double standard in handwringing over whether peaceful Tea Party protesters will inspire violence while actual violence perpetrated at left-leaning rallies is ignored. After playing a clip of police officers in Phoenix being hit by bottles thrown by protesters who oppose Arizona's planned crackdown on illegal immigration, Ingraham set up Goldberg: "Why are we surprised when we have some thugs out there in Phoenix over the weekend causing trouble? And we don't know who is responsible, but there was thuggish behavior. Meanwhile, still hearing about the Tea Parties that were largely peaceful, of course."
Goldberg summed up the double standard:
If you understand one fairly obvious truth, everything else really fits right into place. And that is that, if the "lamestream" media basically sympathizes with your cause, they're going to treat you one way. And if they don't sympathize with your cause, they're going to treat you another way. So if one idiot at a Tea Party rally throws a stink bomb at a cop, the story is going to be played basically as the guy throwing the stink bomb, there was an unruly crowd and all of that.
But if you have the pictures that you just showed with people throwing bottles at cops and all of that, it's going to be portrayed as a mainly, largely peaceful rally. I don't have a problem with that part. It is mainly a peaceful rally. But so are the Tea Party rallies, and they're not portrayed that way. They're portrayed as bigoted and angry and all of that.
Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Monday, April 26, The O'Reilly Factor on FNC:
LAURA INGRAHAM: And in the "Weekdays with Bernie" segment tonight, as we told you, thousands of people in Phoenix gathered over the weekend to protest a new state immigration law. The crowds got rowdy at times. Check out this video of protesters throwing plastic bottles at police, or this where a man with a camera was attacked by one of the protest organizers. The mainstream media largely ignored these incidents, a stark contrast to the big headlines made by largely peaceful Tea Party protesters. Joining us now from Miami, Fox News analyst Bernie Goldberg, author of the book A Slobbering Love Affair. And Bernie, why are we surprised when we have-
BERNIE GOLDBERG, FOX NEWS ANALYST: I'm not.
INGRAHAM: -some thugs out there in Phoenix over the weekend causing trouble? And we don't know who is responsible, but there was thuggish behavior. Meanwhile, still hearing about the Tea Parties that were largely peaceful, of course.
GOLDBERG: I'm not surprised. If you understand one fairly obvious truth, everything else really fits right into place. And that is that, if the "lamestream" media basically sympathizes with your cause, they're going to treat you one way. And if they don't sympathize with your cause, they're going to treat you another way. So if one idiot at a Tea Party rally throws a stink bomb at a cop, the story is going to be played basically as the guy throwing the stink bomb, there was an unruly crowd and all of that. But if you have the pictures that you just showed with people throwing bottles at cops and all of that, it's going to be portrayed as a mainly, largely peaceful rally. I don't have a problem with that part. It is mainly a peaceful rally. But so are the Tea Party rallies, and they're not portrayed that way. They're portrayed as bigoted and angry and all of that.
INGRAHAM: Well, we look at the review, Bernie, yes.
GOLDBERG: It fits the narrative. It fits the narrative.
INGRAHAM: Yes, we look at that review, whether from CNN or some of the other networks, and they report on the protests, angry protests, because of basically the mean immigration law. So the focus turns to the discriminatory law and why that is compelling people to act out on their, you know, their firmly and rightly held beliefs.
GOLDBERG: That's absolutely true. I read a lot of the stuff. And that's what they do. Even when they acknowledge that there were some people in the crowd that were unruly, they portray them as victims of the people who passed the law. They were only unruly because they're frustrated at the law. There was an old song years and years ago that said "accentuate the positive, de-emphasize the negative." Well, if the "lamestreams" agree with your cause, then they accentuate the positive and de-emphasize the negative. But if they don't -- and they don't with the Tea Party people -- then they do it just the other way around. They emphasize the negative and de-emphasize the positive.
Back during the Bush administration Keith Olbermann made sure to insist that "we must not confuse dissent with disloyalty" and that "conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law". But that standard seems to have fallen by the wayside now that the dissenters are conservative Tea Partiers.
Make sure you visit Broliath and check out their other great videos
On Saturday's Good Morning America, reporter Mike Von Fremd downplayed the violence of protesters against Arizona's new immigration law. He spun, "Riot police were called in to try and control demonstrators protesting outside the capital. Most were peaceful. A handful threw bottles at police and were arrested." Yet, ABC derided March's Tea Party rallies as "very ugly," despite the fact that there were no arrests.
In contrast, on March 20, World News host David Muir scolded, "Protesters against the [health care] plan gathered on the streets of the capital where late today we learned words shouted turned very ugly, reports of racial and homophobic slurs, one protester actually spitting on a Congressman." Continuing to fret over those opposed the bill, he complained, "Late word from Washington tonight about just how ugly the crowds gathered outside the Longworth office building have become."
If Tea Party protesters had thrown bottles at members of Congress, it seems unlikely that ABC would have described them as "mostly peaceful."
Over on NBC's Today show on Saturday, correspondent Jose Diaz Balart played it straight with regard to immigration rallies: "Tensions were high outside the Capitol. Four protesters were arrested." On CBS's Early Show, Chris Wragge made only a quick reference to the protests: "On Friday, there were protests against the bill outside the state capitol in Phoenix."
"You have not had a single, as far as I know, violent action related to the Tea Party activity. For all the bluster or energy or street theater, no one's been hurt. They haven't, you know, they're not the bogeyman that maybe they have been portrayed by many."
So amazingly said Geraldo Rivera to fired GEICO announcer Lance Baxter aka D.C. Douglas Sunday evening.
As NewsBusters reported last week, Baxter was terminated by the insurance giant for leaving a disgusting voice-mail message at the offices of FreedomWorks, an organization that is supporting the Tea Party.
Days later, Rivera decided to question Douglas and FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe separately (video follows with highlights and commentary):
Despite Rivera's point about the lack of violence related to the Tea Party, this was hardly a fair and balanced report.
First off, when you include the introduction which featured Baxter's pathetic video response to FreedomWorks, he was given almost five of the six and a half minutes in this segment.
By contrast, Kibbe was on camera for all of one and a half minutes, and had to put up with the following absurd question from Rivera:
GERALDO RIVERA, HOST: You also went to GEICO, or had your followers go to GEICO and he did get fired. You're saying he's posing as a victim. In a sense, I mean he has been, he has suffered as a result of his intemperate remarks. But isn't that kind of like blacklisting?
BLACKLISTING? A man who is the commercial voice of a large corporation leaves a disgusting message at a non-profit organization, its members complain to said corporation which ends up firing the individual, and Rivera thinks this is blacklisting?
Maybe folks on the Left who constantly point fingers at Fox News as being the voice of the Republican Party should constantly be reminded that this so-called conservative network gave a liberal like Geraldo Rivera his own show.
Rush Limbaugh and a few other radio hosts have made it a center piece of the attack against President Obama, the Tea Partiers have often put such sentiment on their protest signs, and the conservative chattering classes have been abuzz with the question: does Barack Obama want to destroy the United States?
The only real answer [...]
Reacting to news the Obama administration wants to postpone a vote on “Cap and Trade” in favor of immigration reform, on Sunday’s Face the Nation New York Times columnist Tom Friedman despaired: “This is a disaster...This is a travesty. Basically, we were about to send the first bi-partisan legislation for radical move toward more green energy, more green jobs and putting a price on carbon...”
Now, he fretted, “in Beijing, they're high- fiving each other. ‘Oh, yeah, baby, this means the Americans are going to be paralyzed on green tech, okay, for another couple of years.’ China is already leading the world now in wind production, China’s already leading world in solar production.”
While he chastised Democrats and Obama for putting the “raw politics” of trying to save Harry Reid ahead of the energy bill, he saved his real disgust for how only one Republican Senator, Lindsey Graham, was willing to help promote “green energy,” charging: “Shame on the Republican Party. There's one Republican for advancing green energy in this country? One Republican Senator dare step out?”
In his Sunday column, Friedman urged a new direction for the Tea Party movement, a “Green Tea Party” which would declare “the most effective way to advance America’s national security and economic vitality would be to impose a $10 ‘Patriot Fee’ on every barrel of imported oil.”
From the Sunday, April 25 Face the Nation on CBS:
BOB SCHIEFFER: Tom Friedman, I want to ask you about this business now that the administration has decided to postpone bringing up the climate change bill. I know you write a lot about that. What do you make of what’s going on here?
TOM FRIEDMAN: This is a disaster, Bob. This is a travesty. Basically, we were about to send the first bipartisan legislation for radical move toward more green energy, more green jobs and putting a price on carbon. It was all set up for Monday. We had Lindsey Graham, Kerry, Lieberman. Industry was coming down.
The administration for its political reasons decided it wants to elevate immigration. Lindsey Graham is completely isolated on the Republican side. I think he freaked out a little bit here at the end. And the result is, Bob, right now in Beijing, they're high- fiving each other. “Oh, yeah, baby, this means the Americans are going to be paralyzed on green tech, okay, for another couple of years.” China is already leading the world now in wind production, China’s already leading world in solar production. Where an industry goes, okay, research goes. You don't even need an immigration bill, Bob.
SCHIEFFER: Well, help me here. You say the administration for its political purposes. What political purposes?
FRIEDMAN: Well, I think they're worried that Harry Reid is going to lose in Nevada where you have a big Hispanic vote. Hispanics are very concerned about an immigration bill that will bring some legality to illegal immigrants here. Barbara Boxer is vulnerable in California. The President has done and talked a lot on green energy, but I think there are a lot of people in the White House who prefer to talk about that, keep us distracted, shiny object over here. But basically they're interested in the raw politics of this. The raw politics isn’t unimportant-
SCHIEFFER: Larry Summers says they can do both.
FRIEDMAN: You can do both? Well, first of all, good luck. Immigration is probably the most hotly divided issue in the Senate and we already had the House pass an energy bill. It was waiting in the Senate. We have an energy Senate bill. There is no immigration bill anywhere. This is about politics. On both sides, okay? Lindsey Graham, shame on the Republican Party. There's one Republican for advancing green energy in this country? One Republican Senator dare step out? So he's completely isolated and the Democrats are worried about Harry Reid. Have a nice day.
Does anyone out there remember the Coffee Parties?
You can be forgiven if you have forgotten them. They made a brief appearance due to media driven hype over a month ago and then quickly disappeared from view when they inspired a collective yawn from the public. The photo at right shows a typical Coffee Party "rally" from back then. Typical in that few people showed up to protest against private ownership (aka free enterprise). Even the organizer of the Coffee Party non-movement, Annabel Park, seems to have lost her enthusiasm for the cause as evidenced by her Twitter page. After an initial flurry of posts, Park's interest pretty much petered out as you can see.
However, despite the utter failure of the liberal Coffee Parties to counter the popular Tea Parties, the MSM continues to hype them to the point of absolute absurdity. And the latest entry in this category comes from Steve Tuttle of Newsweek with his claim that the Coffee Party now has 200,000 members and that they had 500 meetings one one day recently.
Here is Tuttle in the midst of extreme hype mode. Please be prepared to have your BS meters fly off the scale while reading:
When Annabel Park imagined what it would be like to head a new national political movement, here is what she had in mind: a coming together of engaged, intelligent citizens who had tired of the angry rhetoric and accusations of the Tea Partiers; Americans of all political persuasions joining in a spirit of equanimity to discuss the nation's problems, and maybe even share a laugh. It was this beautiful vision that danced in Park's head on a recent Saturday as she made her way to Busboys and Poets, a cafe in Washington, D.C., for one of nearly 500 Coffee Party meetings taking place nationwide that day.
...All of a sudden Park was a political leader—of what, she didn't quite know—and the target of right-wing fury. Conservative bloggers unearthed—scandal!—that she had once briefly worked for The New York Times and supported Sen. Jim Webb, a moderate Democrat from Virginia. One online commenter accused her of being a "Chinese agent." The notoriety didn't really hurt: the group now has more than 200,000 members, and every status update Park posts gets about a million views.
So where did Tuttle get that 200,000 figure? Hmm... By odd "coincidence" the Coffee Party FaceBook Page (which features photos of no more than about a couple dozen partiers) shows that a little over 200,000 "People Like This." Come on, Steve, 'fess up. Is that where you got your 200,000 figure? From people sitting on their duffs at home and hitting the "Like" button while munching on pizza? While you're at it, please explain to us where that 500 simultaneous Coffee Parties figure came from.
Meanwhile the MSM is doing everything it can to downplay the size of the Tea Party movement. As NewsBusters Alex Fitzsimmons pointed out:
Is the Tea Party movement nothing but a mirage? That’s the impression left by an odd confluence of recent reports.
First, the Christian Science Monitor’s Patchwork Nation blog reported that the entire Tea Party movement consists of just 67,000 members. PBS NewsHour cross-posted the story on its The Rundown blog the same day. The next day, CNN reported the findings on its Political Ticker blog and Politico’s Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith co-authored a piece titled “The tea party’s exaggerated importance.”
Yeah, we are somehow supposed to believe that the nearly forgotten Coffee Party has 200,000 members while the Tea Party Movement (where you can actually see plenty of photos/videos with huge crowds) numbers only 67,000 nationwide. The only question left is whether Steve Tuttle is posting his stories from Fantasy Land or the Bizarro World.
Is the Tea Party movement nothing but a mirage? That’s the impression left by an odd confluence of recent reports.
First, the Christian Science Monitor’s Patchwork Nation blog reported that the entire Tea Party movement consists of just 67,000 members. PBS NewsHour cross-posted the story on its The Rundown blog the same day. The next day, CNN reported the findings on its Political Ticker blog and Politico’s Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith co-authored a piece titled “The tea party’s exaggerated importance.”
“Part of the reason (for the media’s coverage) is the timeless truth in media that nothing succeeds like excess,” explained Martin and Smith. “But part of the reason is a convergence of incentives for journalists and activists on left and right alike to exaggerate both the influence and exotic traits of the tea-party movement.”
The findings in the Patchwork Nation post, as author Dante Chinni admitted, are based on uncertain statistical analysis.
“To get an understanding of how big the loosely affiliated movement is and where it’s based, Patchwork Nation has combed through online directories to find people who have registered with tea-party organizations–not a perfect system but one that captures the overwhelming majority of registered members,” conceded Chinni.
Including “registered members” in the report seems a tactic geared toward arriving at the lowest possible number, as polls show many more Americans sympathize with the movement’s goals and identify themselves as supporters of the movement. Even on the low end, a recent New York Times/CBS News poll that found 18 percent of Americans identify themselves as Tea Party supporters. That puts the number of Tea Party supporters closer to 40 million than 67,000.
The weirdly tiny number, presented as sound statistical analysis, is the latest in the media’s case against the Tea Party movement. Thursday, Newshour on PBS concluded by directing viewers to check out the Tea Party report on the PBS.org website. CNN’s blog not only reported the findings as scientific fact, but juxtaposed the data against the estimations of the RNC. The implication, of course, is that while this “new report by a nonprofit organization” grounded its findings in rigorous analysis, the RNC is just throwing out figures to inflate the movement’s numbers.
The Politico piece did not cite the Patchwork Nation report, but Martin and Smith were no less dismissive of the Tea Party movement.
Citing the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, Martin and Smith concluded that the mainstream media’s coverage of the Tea Party movement has been “steady.” As the Media Research Center detailed in its comprehensive review of media coverage of the Tea Party, “TV’s Tea Party Travesty,” the major news networks have aired a mere 61 stories over the last 12 months, with only 19 stories airing in all of 2009.
This flurry of disparagement spurred by the Patchwork Nation data reflects an assortment of news outlets shamelessly uninterested in honest reporting on the size, scope, and importance of the Tea Party movement.
--Alex Fitzsimmons is a News Analysis intern for the Media Research Center.
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CBS and the rest of the MSM have decided the Tea Party movement is racist and hostile to non-whites, and it’s a mantra they’re going to illustrate whenever they see an opportunity. Reporter Nancy Cordes saw a “nearly all-white crowd” at Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally in Washington, DC, as she (at least an off-camera female voice) demanded of two black women who weren't afraid to attend: “I'm noticing that there aren't a lot of minorities here today. Why do you think that is?” One of the women shot back: “They're probably over there with Al Sharpton.” NANCY CORDES: Beck, who is a converted Mormon, likes to call himself a clown, but today he played the role of ring-master, preaching racial tolerance to the nearly all-white crowd. A change in tone from the Fox News host who notoriously called President Obama [Beck: “a racist.”]
Pop-star and courageous anti-toilet-paper 
Violent protesters set fire to police cars and shattered store-front windows at the Group of 20 economic summit in Toronto this weekend. How did the New York Times, 
Actress and author Carrie Fisher, revered for her role as Princess Leia in the Star Wars movies, granted an interview to the website Pop Eater. Late in the interview, they asked "Is there anyone you haven't met that you've always wanted to?" She said Barack Obama. They expressed surprise she hadn't met him. "I know. I love him. Hopefully I'll meet him sometime. I'm just happy he exists." Then came the rant against conservative Obama opponents: 
What do Tea Partiers, Truthers, birthers, Birchers, militias, Pat Buchanan, Jerry Falwell, Barry Goldwater, Joe McCarthy, Father Coughlin, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Ronald Reagan, Strom Thurmond, Rand Paul, Alex Jones, Orly Taitz, and Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh all have in common? Approximately nothing, but don't tell Chris Matthews.
CNN's Jack Cafferty ripped the Democratic-controlled Congress for their inaction to pass a budget during a commentary on Thursday's Situation Room: "The Democrats in Congress can't be bothered to pass a budget for next year. That's their job....It's simply outrageous." Cafferty also channeled the Tea Party and strongly condemned the federal government for "taking us down the road to financial ruin."
One of the New York Times's favorite themes is the ever-impending Republican civil war that will ruin the party's chances in whatever election that's coming up. Former chief political reporter 
On Wednesday's CBS Early Show, Face the Nation host Bob Schieffer provided analysis of Tuesday's primary elections across the country, describing the South Carolina gubernatorial race "where they continue to draw their political plot lines from, you know, 'Desperate Housewives' or something" and how Nevada Democrats were "very happy" with the victory of tea party candidate Sharron Angle. 
On Tuesday’s World News, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos touted how “we've got a new poll out tonight that shows the Tea Party may be losing steam nationwide” as its unfavorable rating has “gone up eleven points in the last couple of months to 50 percent. Their favorable rating has gone down.” 
“Up next, why some Republicans are starting to wish the Tea Party was over,” Katie Couric teased Friday night as CBS feigned concern over how Tea Party candidates are too “extreme” to win. CBS News political analyst John Dickerson delivered the usual media warning, just with a new entity to blame for pushing Republicans too far to the right: “The passion that was so important in primaries for Tea Party candidates doesn't play often so well in a general election where you're trying to go after moderate and independent voters.”
KATIE COURIC: Mitt Romney was in Arizona today to campaign for his former rival John McCain who's facing a tough primary challenge from a candidate endorsed by the Tea Party. Dean Reynolds now on a political movement that's vocal and voting.
JOHN DICKERSON, CBS NEWS POLITICAL ANALYST: The passion that was so important in primaries for Tea Party candidates doesn't play often so well in a general election where you're trying to go after moderate and independent voters.
TIM D’ANNUNZIO: We talked about issues and let people shoot fully automatic MP-5 and Uzi submachine guns.
PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler on Tueday addressed 
Three noteworthy quotes from journalists I 
The movie "Prince of Persia" hit theaters this week. And although it's based on a decades-old video game and set in the sixth century, reviewers across the nation have identified a very contemporary link: The Tea Party.
The New York Times's former Middle East Bureau Chief thinks violent revolt is a laudable response to economic woes, and that murder is at least acceptable in pursuit of a far-left agenda. The media so concerned with the potential for violence from conservative groups are completely silent.
Reporter Devin Dwyer’s 
Washington Post humorist Gene Weingarten is working in his hatred for conservatives in his 
New York Times movie critic (and Michael Moore fan) A. O. Scott is obsessed with the right-leaning politics and anti-French attitudes he glimpses in the new "Robin Hood" movie, starring Russell Crowe. His Arts section review is titled "
NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd seemed astonished by how a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll confirmed solid agreement with Arizona's immigration enforcement law – “a whopping 64 percent support the law,” Todd marveled, “and we read them the law verbatim exactly as it's been written” and still, he repeated, “64 percent approve of it.” NBC also treated as surprising the majority backing for racial profiling to prevent terrorism, while Todd didn't mention what NBC's polling partner, the Wall Street Journal, found most newsworthy. Lead of the WSJ.com post:
We did, and we asked it specifically on the issue of: Would you be in favor of racial profiling when it comes to combating terrorism? And guess what: A majority said yes. It's a slim majority, but a majority nonetheless: 51 percent would approve of it; 43 percent disapprove of it. Clearly, this issue of terrorism is something that people, they're willing to give up some of their own personal rights, and they're willing to see some racial profiling, Brian.
How's this translating to the political parties? Well, look at that. We know there's an anti-incumbent atmosphere out there. Both political parties viewed negatively. The Democrats, 37 percent positive rating, 42 percent negative. Republicans, a lesser positive rating. But check this out. The Tea Party – it's not an official political party – but there are more people have a positive view of the Tea Party than of the Republican party. And fewer people have a negative view of the Tea Party than either of the two major parties. It's a conservative movement for now, but it is something that seems to be catching on.
Which is more newsworthy: hearsay accounts of racial slurs unsupported by video evidence of the alleged incident, or video of a protester calling for violent revolution against the federal government, the imposition of socialism, and the annexation of the Southwestern states for Mexico?
CNN and the Associated Press on Wednesday and Thursday touted how the tea party movement apparently didn't get motivate voters to turn out and "throw out the bums" in Republican primaries in Indiana, North Carolina, and Ohio. Both outlets, however, omitted how senate candidate Rob Portman ran unopposed in his primary race in Ohio.
There's a cynical theme growing in the media that Faisal Shahzad, the man accused of attempting to set off a car bomb in New York's Times Square Saturday, was driven to violence by the loss of his job, the loss of his house, and his anger towards former President George W. Bush.
"Tea party groups battling allegations of racism," reads a May 5 
train him and said, at an opportunity do something like this. Which makes it much more dangerous. It would be easier if it was a highly-organized thing because that's easier to penetrate. 
About 45 minutes ago, Red State's Caleb Howe 
Comments on two Sunday shows reflected an emerging new liberal line of reasoning, which uses the lack of opposition to Arizona’s new immigration enforcement law, as a means to discredit conservatives and Tea Party activists as hypocrites and/or racists. HBO’s Bill Maher on ABC’s This Week: 
The reasoning from Freeland, formerly of the Financial Times, in full (and gives me space to place a screen shot of her):
So what happens when you put the likes of David Frum, Bruce Bartlett and now apparently Jim Manzi - pseudo-conservatives with 
However, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., author of 
Sam Tanenhaus, editor of “The New York Times Book Review” and “Week in Review,” and the author of the book, “The Death of Conservatism,” went on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC talk show Monday night to discuss her being featured in a fundraising letter from the right-wing John Birch Society. But the friendly chat soon veered off into a comparison of the nationalist John Birch Society to the Tea Party movement, with Tanenhaus confidently proclaiming “there are no serious ideas left on the right.” 
Reacting to news the Obama administration wants to postpone a vote on “Cap and Trade” in favor of immigration reform, on Sunday’s Face the Nation New York Times columnist Tom Friedman despaired: “This is a disaster...This is a travesty. Basically, we were about to send the first bi-partisan legislation for radical move toward more green energy, more green jobs and putting a price on carbon...”
Does anyone out there remember the Coffee Parties? 
Is the Tea Party movement nothing but a mirage? That’s the impression left by an odd confluence of recent reports.
