Gretchen Carlson
On Fox and Friends today, Gretchen Carlson wonders if President Obama will “GBC,” which in Carlson’s world, stands for “Give Bush Credit.” She was referring to Obama’s scheduled speech tonight about the Iraq war.
It’s laughable to think that Obama would give Bush credit for ending the Iraq war. Bush isn’t the president. It’s entirely possible that if Bush were still president, that he would have kicked the withdrawal can down the road for another few more years, despite the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government to end all combat operations this year and to completely withdraw all troops by the end of 2011.
We don’t know what would have happened if Bush were still president, but what we do know that he’s not the president. Obama will rightfully take credit for ending the war. He campaigned to end the war, and he’s making good on that campaign promise.
Gretchen Carlson
There’s no reason to think that Bush, McCain or Palin would have ended this war. And if you’re inclined to think that Bush gives a rat’s ass about the legal aspects of breaking the agreement with the Iraqi government to withdraw, don’t forget that the initial invasion of Iraq was seen by most of the world as illegal. The entire war was illegal, and a violation of international laws and treaties that the US agreed to abide by, such as, the Geneva Convention.
So that little piece of paper that says that the US needs to withdraw from Iraq wouldn’t have prevented a Republican administration from continuing to escalate the war.
Also, just because we’re leaving Iraq doesn’t mean we won. It could mean that we can’t win, and so we’re coming home. The war was a mistake from the beginning and everyone should be happy that it’s finally coming to an end, but to “Give Bush Credit” sounds a lot like right-wing propaganda to me.
Related news about the Iraq War:
U.S.-Iraq Status of Forces Agreement, 2008 (Complete text)
The Iraq War Ending, but Have we Won?
The debate about whether Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf should build Park51, also known as the “ground zero mosque,” is just awful, disgusting and at the end of it, there will be no winners.
But what’s interesting to me is how this story ever got national attention at all. I mean there are mosques in this neighborhood already. There are synagogues, churches and strip clubs, so why did this one story take off? The short answer is Rupert Murdoch, but Salon’s Justin Elliott did some digging and pinpointed where it all began.
Elliott tracked this story to its source and exposed the anti-Muslim hate-mongers that started it and promoted it.
On December 8, 2009, The New York Times wrote a glowing front page story headlined: “Muslim Prayers and Renewal Near Ground Zero.” In the story, reporters Ralph Blumenthal and Sharaf Mowjood quoted Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the cleric leading the project, saying, “We want to push back against the extremists.”
The Times story reported that Mayor Bloomberg, a local Rabbi and a spokeswoman for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum all praised Imam Feisal and the Cordoba House project.
And then on December 21, 2009, Fox News conservative commentator Laura Ingraham interviewed Imam Feisal’s wife Daisy Khan. Ingraham told Khan, “I can’t find many people who really have a problem with it.” At the end of the interview she said, “I like what you’re trying to do.”
In his story, Elliott notes that this Fox News interview is the first time the inaccurate phrase “ground zero mosque” is used.
And then, according to Elliott’s reporting, there’s not another story about the Cordoba House project for five and a half months.
But in May of this year, rightwing nutjobs latched onto the story, Murdoch’s New York Post and Fox News picked it up and things just got way out of hand, really quickly.
On May 2, 2010, according to Elliott:
After a unanimous vote by a New York City community board committee to approve the project, the AP runs a story. It quotes relatives of 9/11 victims (called by the reporter), who offer differing opinions. The New York Post, meanwhile, runs a story under the inaccurate headline, “Panel Approves ‘WTC’ Mosque.” Geller is less subtle, titling her post that day, “Monster Mosque Pushes Ahead in Shadow of World Trade Center Islamic Death and Destruction.” She writes on her Atlas Shrugs blog, “This is Islamic domination and expansionism. The location is no accident. Just as Al-Aqsa was built on top of the Temple in Jerusalem.” (To get an idea of where Geller is coming from, she once suggested that Malcolm X was Obama’s real father. Seriously.)
Pamela Geller
Who’s Geller? Pamela Geller is a rightwing nut-job who I wrote a story about her a couple of weeks ago. She has setup a group called Stop Islamization of America (SIOA). Her goal is to scare people into thinking that Muslims are trying to take over America and that we should all hate Muslims. It reminds me of someone I met in the ’80s who was convinced that African Americans were purposely having lots of children so that they can be the majority in America and reap vengeance on white people for slavery. Yeah, pretty crazy right? Well, those people are still out there, but now they have Murdoch’s media empire to spread their vitriol.
On May 8, Geller’s group announced a protest for May 29 to stop the “911 monster mosque.”
In her announcement, Geller said:
It will also serve to remember May 29, 1453, the Ottoman forces led by the Sultan Mehmet II broke through the Byzantine defenses against the Muslim siege of Constantinople. This was the end of the Eastern Roman (a.k.a. Byzantine) Empire. The Muslims entered the city and slaughtered people wholesale. The Sultan entered the Hagia Sophia Cathedral and ordered that it be converted into a mosque. This is known among Greeks and other Eastern Christians as Black Tuesday, or “The Last Day of the World.”
Also at the same time, New York Post columnist and resident loon, Andrea Peyser said a couple of days later, “there are better places to put a mosque.” And then on May 13, Peyser ratchets up the rhetoric about the Cordoba House with a full column dedicated to it. It’s headline: “Mosque madness at Ground Zero.”
Andrea Peyser
Elliott reports that it’s Peyser’s column that brings the anti-Muslim rhetoric to the mainstream. “It’s the first newspaper article that frames the project as inherently wrong and suspect, in the way that Geller has been framing it for months. Peyser in fact quotes Geller at length and promotes the anti-mosque protest of Stop Islamization of America, which Peyser describes as a ‘human-rights group.’ Peyser also reports — falsely — that Cordoba House’s opening date will be Sept. 11, 2011,” Elliott said.
And once Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post had legitimized this story in the minds of the conservative media establishment, the story went national. Fox News went full bore. The New York Post assigned reporters to dig into the Cordoba House. Murdoch’s propaganda machine went into full swing.
Rudy Giuliani called it a “desecration.” Sarah Palin asked Muslims to “refudiate” the Cordoba House. Newt Gingrich compared Imam Feisal to Hitler, and the discussion continues to sink to the lowest depths imaginable.
And for another take on how bad this anti-Muslim fervor is, read Frank Rich’s column.
Fox News Glenn Beck
Rightbloggers, Fox News and conservative politicians are purposely conflating Al Qaeda with Islam. While it’s true that Al Qaeda members claim to be living the lives of righteous Muslims – the fact is that they are terrorists. Members of the Ku Klux Klan make similar claims about Protestant Christianity, but they are terrorists too.
Many religions, particularly Christianity and Islam, attract a lot of crazy fundamentalists – people who claim to be the “real” Christians or the “purist” practitioners of Islam. But these groups are nothing but ignorant terrorists whose hearts are filled with hate.
While this has been going on for a long time, what’s disturbing is that this equating of a terrorist organization to the entire religion of Islam has reached mainstream American politics. The current uproar is over the so-called “Ground Zero mosque,” which isn’t a mosque and it’s not located at ground zero.
Interestingly, when George W. Bush was president, there seemed to be a concerted effort to keep this type of hate-filled rhetoric on the sidelines, but not anymore.
Politicians, rightbloggers and Fox News have latched onto to this ground zero mosque issue to spread hatred of all Muslims. They’re equating Muslims, such as Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf to Osama bin Laden. He’s a radical. He’s a fundamentalist. They’re doing this to spread fear. They’re doing this to divide the nation – to pit us against them. They want Muslims to be seen as the “other,” someone Americans should hate.
Why are they doing? In the short-term, it’s for political gain. They’re trying to get Democrats, and liberals, to appear to be supporting terrorists by standing up for the 1st Amendment so that they can take back Congress this year. In the long-term, they’re banking on this being a great wedge issue, similar to gay marriage, abortion and immigration – something that makes one American hate another American.
Conservatives have always sought policies to divide and conquer. The GOP has never encouraged Americans to work together. The whole notion of the GOP being a “big tent” party was a running joke. They will always embrace divisiveness because it’s easier to manipulate a population that is fighting among themselves, rather than working together to solve actual problems.
If Americans are fighting about abortion, immigration, Muslims, etc, they aren’t organizing for higher wages, health care or better pensions.
Let’s call these haters what they are, they’re cheap labor conservatives.
Cheap labor conservatives want you distracted from the real issues while you fight their phony ones. If you’re doing that, you won’t complain so much, if and when you realize that real wages for Americans have plummeted since the 1950s when one income could support an entire family. It’s worth noting that during the ’50s and ’60s was also when organized labor was the strongest. So while you’re hating Muslims and liberals, you probably won’t notice that income inequality has now reached pre-Great Depression levels, and that those tax cuts, they aren’t for you.
The real enemy isn’t Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, it’s conservatives such as Glenn Beck, rightbloggers like Pamela Geller, and presidential wannabes Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich.
The real problems facing America are jobs, higher wages, health care, tax cuts for the wealthy, affordable education and putting the brakes on a runaway military industrial complex.
Conservatives like things the way they are. They like their money and big tax cuts. They like desperate workers willing to accept low wages, no health care and no pension. They like their kids’ private education. They’re fine with the defense budget funneling trillions of dollars from the Treasury into the coffers of defense contractors. That works well for them, but is it working for us?
Feisal Abdul Rauf
Sooner or later, a lot of the people spreading lies and smearing the reputation of Feisal Abdul Rauf will regret their bellicose rhetoric and feel shame. Not all of them will be capable of humility. Firebrand screamers such as Glenn Beck don’t blink an eye at slamming someone he’s decided is the enemy, but some of them will regret their decision to fan the flames of fear and to try to destroy a good man.
My greatest fear though, is that someone will get hurt or killed because of this unbelievable irresponsible hate-speech that’s coming from the right, so far, we’ve been relatively lucky, but fear is a powerful weapon when directed at the gullible masses.
The current target of the right’s unsubstantiated charges is Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. The right claims that he’s a radical cleric because he’s trying to build a community center a few blocks from “Ground Zero.” It was called the Cordoba House, and it will be open to everyone, but some are trying to make political hay out of its Islamic prayer room. Buckling under the enormous weight of the phony outrage by the right, the Cordoba House has been renamed to Park 51. Some on the right claimed that naming it Cordoba House was an insult to Christianity? Yeah, I don’t get it either.
The real injustice of all of this spurious rage, is that a peaceful and good man, Feisal Abdul Rauf, is being dragged through the mud. He’s being called a radical, an extremist, a terrorist sympathizer.
But nothing could be further from the truth.
Rauf worked with the Bush administration, the FBI, Madelyn Albright, Bush’s friend Karen Hughes, and countless others in spreading peace and cooperation between Christians, Muslims and Jews. But to the Glenn Beck’s and the radical right, he’s a terrorist. But who really is terrorizing whom here?
It’s disgusting how Fox News and other rightwing media outlets have no desire to seek the truth. What they seek are short-term political wins with a complete and utter disregard for the truth.
It saddens me, and it should sadden you too. To learn more about Feisal Abdul Rauf, please read Sam Stein’s story about him on the Huffington Post. Stay informed. Spread the truth. Battle the lies any way you can. You must remain diligent.
Frank Rich’s column today tackles gay marriage and the fight for equality for all men and women in America. Despite the thrashing from the radical right, equality for all may one day soon be a reality – maybe.
On Fox News, Ted Olson asked Chris Wallace a very important question, but not surprisingly, it was left unanswered because it challenged the cable channel’s narrative, which is “Fox News hates gays.”
The attacks on Walker have fizzled fast. With rare exceptions from the hysterical fringe — Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich — most political leaders have either remained silent about the Prop 8 decision (the Republican National Committee) or punted (the Obama White House). Over at Fox News, Ted Olson silenced the states’-rights argument in favor of Prop 8 last weekend by asking Chris Wallace: “Would you like Fox’s right to a free press put up to a vote and say, well, if five states have approved it, let’s wait till the other 45 states do?” (No answer was forthcoming.)
Most of those who do argue for denying marriage equality to gay couples are now careful to say that they really, really like gay people. This, like the states’-rights argument, is a replay of the battle over black civil rights. Eric Foner, the pre-eminent historian of Reconstruction, recalled last week via e-mail how Strom Thurmond would argue in the early 1960s “that segregation benefited blacks and whites and had nothing to do with racism” — as if inequality were O.K. as long as segregationists pushing separate-but-equal “compromises” claimed their motives were pure.
And if you haven’t seen Angels in America, buy it or rent it today.
Bill Kristol on Fox News
I don’t know anyone who actually still listens to Bill Kristol, The Weekly Standard founder and editor, other than Fox News. I can’t think of one single issue he’s ever gotten right. His most recent error was when he fell in love with Sarah Palin and convinced John McCain to pick her as is running mate. Thanks for that one Kristol, I’ve gotten a lot of laughs and a few good stories out of that move.
Well, today on Fox News, with his trademark cocky and ignorantly confident style, Kristol told Fox News viewers that President Obama showed “patronizing condescension” by referring to 9/11 as a “traumatic event.”
That’s all you’ve got Bill, criticizing the president for calling 9/11 a traumatic event? To people who have a soul and who are capable of even a modicum of emotion, 9/11 was a traumatic event you ignorant buffoon.
Kristol must be running out of material. He reminds of the comedian that blows up big with great material, and then when it comes time to keep her act fresh, she can’t do it and fades away.
The difference with Kristol is that he never had any great material. Nope. None. Bill Kristol is the son of Irving Kristol. Like most prominent conservatives he’s never had to work for anything in his life. He was born with a silver-spoon in his mouth and he road his father’s coattails to where he is today.
I don’t know much about Bill’s father, but I’m willing to bet he had twice the intellectual might in his little toe than his son will ever be able to muster. Bill Kristol is on TV because of one thing and one thing only – nepotism. He’s a tool, and anyone that still listens to anything has to say for anything but the laughs is even a bigger tool.
For a good laugh, here he is making an ass out of himself – again.
Glenn Beck
On Wed., Glenn Beck made fun of gays, Islam and 9/11 all in one skit.
On his Fox News show, Beck had on a guy named Greg Gutfield. I think he’s supposed to be a comedian, but he needs to work on his material. I’ve heard people do three minutes on open mic night who didn’t bomb this bad.
The crux of Gutfield’s bantering comedic skit with Beck was that he’s going to setup a gay bar for Muslims at Ground Zero. You know, because Muslims are building a community center called Cordoba House two blocks from the World Trade Center attack on 9/11.
The first rule of comedy is that your jokes need to be believable. If your audience thinks you’re just lying to them, or you’re saying things that are so far-fetched to not possibly be true, you aren’t going to get many laughs.
Well, Gutfield’s, “I’m going to open up a gay bar for Muslims at Ground Zero” fell flat, but Beck played along – he can’t pass up a chance to mock gay people, Muslims and the victims of 9/11.
Some of the “hilarious” names for Gutfield’s Muslim gay bar are: Ji-Hot, Ji-Hunk, Infidelicious and Turban Cowboy. Ha ha ha, “Turban Cowboy” that’s so funny because some Muslims wear turbans and the film “Urban Cowboy” had gay sex in it. Oh it works on so many levels. Hack.
Beck chimed in with Mecca-Me-Hot. Zing.
Gutfield said, there will be no alcohol, because Muslims don’t drink, but there will be 72 virgin drinks.
“But I have a lot of people that are interested in backing me for this,” Gutfield yucked. “And I’m telling you, this is the greatest thing ever, because right now, I contacted the Cordoba House. I wrote them. I e-mailed them. They didn’t respond. But I tweeted them and they tweeted me back.”
The Cordoba House folks said, “You are free to open whatever you like. If you won’t consider the sensibilities of Muslims, you are not going to build dialogue.”
“Yes. And you know I love to build dialogue,” Gutfield said.
“Sure,” Beck said. “Especially — you do that at Grind Zeros.”
Really? “Grind Zeros.” Really Beck, you’re really going to end with a joke about 9/11 victims – calling them “zeros”?
Nice job Beck and Gutfield, go back to the chalkboard and figure out some better jokes, you ignorant overpaid hacks.
–
A transcript for this skit can be found here.
Glenn Beck
Glenn Beck and his followers are convinced that the former shock-jock morning DJ is no racist, he’s just really mad.
On his Aug. 4 Fox News show Beck was flabbergasted by a speech President Obama gave railing against corporate special interests, and thanking the AFL-CIO members for their help. Beck was shocked. He just couldn’t believe his ears – a Democrat was in cahoots with the unions?
“What planet have I landed on?,” he flailed his arms and screamed. “Did I slip through a worm hole in the middle of the night and this looks like America? It’s like the damn Planet of the Apes. Nothing makes sense!”
@StopBeck at StopBeck.com
It just keeps happening over and over again. Another advertiser has pulled their ads from Glenn Beck’s show. This time it’s the dating and social networking site – Zoosk.
More than 100 advertisers have dumped Beck’s show, largely because of the Twitter-based effort of @StopBeck.
Sharron Angle on Fox News
Fox News has long given up any pretense that it’s actually a news organization. Even the cable network’s so-called news portion of the day is ginned up conservative blather, but the network never admits it’s a faux news organization.
Well now Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle of Arizona said on-camera that she’s only interested in doing interviews with people who will just lob softball questions at her. And guess what, Angle has shunned all news organizations but Fox. Oops, I don’t think she’s supposed to say what she said when the cameras are rolling, but she did.
Here’s Chris Matthews discussing the Angle/Fox News debacle on Hardball.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Rep. Anthony Weiner says Glenn Beck has formed an unholy alliance with Goldline
Glenn Beck making a fool of himself
Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) has opened up a full-throated attack on Glenn Beck’s peddling of gold coins from Goldline.
Weiner accused Beck of using his show “to prey on the public’s fears of inflation and socialist takeovers while actively promoting the purchase of gold coins as insurance against this purported government overreach.”
Media Matters for America reported that on Oct. 6, 2009, Beck said this on his Fox News show:
You don’t have any gold, right? This is you. This is you. This is your savings. How much did you lose if you had any money in your 401k? Did you lose, let’s say, I don’t know, 40 percent of it? So, that’s gone. Now, did you know that the dollar has lost nearly 29 percent of its value in the last seven years? Twenty-nine percent. OK, that’s gone. Just gone.
Neil Cavuto
Last Wednesday, Fox News’ Neil Cavuto jumped up on his soap box to rail against efforts in California to boycott Arizona over its anti-immigrant law.
Cavuto’s “guest” was California State Senator Darrel Steinberg (D-Sacremento), but he didn’t get more than a sentence or two in edgewise – Cavuto used the entire segment to spit and sputter about how he thinks California’s boycott is stupid and that the Arizona law rocks.
Glenn Beck
Holiday Inn has joined the long list of advertisers boycotting Glenn Beck’s Fox News show, the boycott effort is being waged by Twitter followers of @StopBeck.
“Last week, Holiday Inn advertisements began running on Glenn Beck’s show,” explained @StopBeck founder Angelo Carusone on his website. “As with other advertisers, participants in the StopBeck effort sprang to action. We informed Holiday Inn that this is not about politics, but about Glenn Beck’s reckless vitriol, sexism and preying on racial anxieties. We kindly requested that they follow the responsible action of well over 100 other former advertisers and remove their ads from Glenn Beck’s show.”
Fox News Glenn Beck
The Twitter campaign by @StopBeck, as well as efforts by Color of Change, are having a real impact on Fox News and the Glenn Beck Show. According to StopBeck Founder Angelo Carusone, Beck’s show has been running in the UK since February 9 without any advertisers.
“With the assistance of the StopBeck – UK Effort, participants in the StopBeck Effort reached out and urged advertisers to stop sponsoring Mr. Beck’s vitriol, sexism and preying on racial anxieties,” Carusone wrote on Sunday. “Once aware of the reckless vitriol they were associating their brands with, advertisers were quick to flee – some of them leaving Fox News as a whole.”
Fox News Megyn Kelly
Fox News “American Live w/ Megyn Kelly” is supposed to be a “fair and balanced” news program. On Saturday May 8, Kelly did a “news” report on a script for a television show Comedy Central is considering in which the main character is Jesus Christ.
Kelly said that there’s a double standard at Comedy Central, which she says has no problem poking fun of Jesus, but the prophet Mohammed is off-limits.
There’s an extremist element of Islam, Kelly said, that believes that any depiction of Mohammed is blasphemy and they’ve issued death threats to anyone who does this.
“Christians really aren’t dangerous,” Kelly explained, “and they’re not going to go out and hurt people.”
Really? Tell that to all the people that have been killed in the name of Jesus over the last 2,000 years.
Oil Rig Explodes in Gulf of Mexico Dumping Millions of Gallons of Oil into the Ocean
On Wednesday, Fox News’ Neil Cavuto interviewed Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) about the congressional investigation into the British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but Pence was more concerned with the alleged slowness of the Obama administration’s response to the disaster.
Pence said the people “want to get to the bottom of what happened on April 20.”
Evidently, what Pence meant was that he wants to use a congressional investigation to attack what he says was Obama’s lackadaisical response to the crisis.
@StopBeck at StopBeck.com
The grassroots effort by @StopBeck has resulted in yet another advertiser pulling their ads from Glenn Beck’s Fox News show.
“As usual, StopBeck participants reached out to Nestle for clarification and urged them to cease advertising on Glenn Beck’s show,” wrote StopBeck founder Angelo Carusone. “The efforts paid off! Nestle confirmed that they do not advertise on Glenn Beck’s show; they advised that the ads were run in error and that the mistake has been corrected.”
Jon Stewart Goes Preacher on Fox News and Bernie Goldberg
Jon Stewart
I don’t know why Fox News even tries to compete with Jon Stewart. This week Stewart bitchslapped Bernie Goldberg after Goldberg essentially called Stewart a hack and his audience unsophisticated.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Bernie Goldberg Fires Back | ||||
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Hannity Says Tea Partiers Are Tim McVeigh Wannabes and Crowd Cheers
Sean Hannity
On Mar. 30, 2010 at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, Fox News’ Sean Hannity publicly admitted that he thinks the Tea Party movement is comprised of anti-government extremists, or as he said, “Tim McVeigh wannabes.”
“I think we won the debate,” Hannity said. “When you think of the vast majorities that they have in Congress, and they had to bribe, back room deals, corruption; that’s all because of the Tea Party movement – all these Tim McVeigh wannabes here.”
Wow. That’s nothing short of shocking. Of course, Hannity is a total freaking moron, so take what he says with a huge grain of salt, but to call a crowd of people Tim Mc Veigh wannabes and to get cheers in return, that’s amazing.
Tim McVeigh Mugshot
For those too young to remember, McVeigh murdered 168 people in Oklahoma on April 19, 1995. He killed innocent women and children when he blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Building. At the time, it was the single biggest terrorist attack ever in the United States.
Each year, anti-government extremists celebrate this event along with the Waco Seige by the FBI of the Branch Davidian Seventh Day Adventists on April 19.
Media Matters for America’s Eric Boehlert: The Conservative Nervous Breakdown
Media Matters for America
I hate cable news. At least 99 percent of all cable news is a bag of throwaway garbage that serves no purpose other than to confuse, distract, misinform and stink up the room. The same can be said about talk radio. It’s not that broadcasting can’t be used to inform and educate the populous, sometimes it is, but the trend has been to simply chase ratings and fill airtime with whatever is cheap and easy.
And what’s the cheapest and easiest content to produce? Opinion masquerading as news, or as Glenn Beck likes to say ‘Truth.’
Take this story for example. It’s easy for me to sit here and blast out an opinion story bemoaning the horrors of cable news, but if I actually wanted to do an investigative piece about cable news and why it got this way, well, that would take time and money – none of which I have.
But I’m not Rupert Murdoch. He does have money. He could pay people to investigate stories and produce in-depth analysis segments on things like health care reform, the Iraq war or the nation’s struggling education system. So could GE’s MSNBC and CNN, but they don’t do that.
I know, I’m taking a long time getting to my lead, so let’s get down to it.
Today, Eric Boehlert of Media Matters for America, a liberal media watchdog organization, published a story detailing the conservative nervous breakdown we’re watching unravel across this once great nation. The thesis of Boehlert’s story is that conservatives believed their own hype, and now they’re freaking out that they weren’t able to kill health care reform. Now they’re worried about what else they won’t be able to stop the liberals from doing.
What happened was that Fox News, along with other right-wing media, convinced the Tea Partiers that they were winning. They believed Fox News when they said 2 million people rallied in the nation’s capitol last September, even though there might have been 100,000. They believed Fox News and Rush Limbaugh when they were assured that after the gun-touting town hall screamers had shouted down Democratic politicians that health care reform was dead.
I believed them too. Not more than a month ago, I was convinced that health care would not happen.
But what everyone forgot is that the people get to speak in the voting booth and that’s pretty much it. Anti-war protesters couldn’t stop the Iraq war no matter how many people rallied against it because George W. Bush was elected, well sort of, in 2000, and Congress was controlled by the GOP. In a republic, the people vote for their representatives in November and it’s up to those elected leaders to lead. And leading doesn’t mean changing your mind every time the New York Times or Fox News publishes a public opinion poll. Depending on your point of view, that’s either the upside or the downside of living in a republic.
And so now that health care reform has passed, conservatives are losing their shit.
Boehlert said:
After all, late last week the nation stood on the precipice, just three “days away from the United States of America being over as we’ve all known it,” according to Rush Limbaugh, who warned that reform would drive every private insurance company out of business. Glenn Beck also went full tilt, warning that the bill represented a “turning point,” like the Civil War and Peal Harbor, while colleague Sean Hannity pinpointed the health care vote as the ‘very hour’ that America turned ‘completely towards socialism.’
The Washington Times likened reform to the “Black Plague,” and the online reaction was somehow even more unhinged. It was “RIP USA,” because with the vote, America would become “occupied by a hostile foreign power.” Indeed, a “socialist putsch” had been sprung and “America’s Day of Wreckoning [sic]” was at hand. Why? Because the Democrats’ health care legislation “will make every American a POW, strip them of their Freedoms and Liberty and shove them in a meat cellar for cold storage.”
Basically what Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the Tea Partiers want is to run the government regardless of whether or not they win elections. To them, it doesn’t matter who gets elected, what matters is that politicians do what they tell them to do. And because Fox News effectively created the illusion that they were winning the debate, right-wing fringers are now throwing a hissy fit.
When health care reform passed Congress, Boehlert wrote, “It was the sudden and rude realization that, instead, they’d spent the past few months trapped inside an echo chamber, I think, that created the volcanic and unhinged response we’ve seen play out in recent days. It’s the kind of childish and hysterical reaction I didn’t think we’d ever witness from a major political movement.”
So the Tea Partiers and other conservative groups out there need to understand that in order effect change in this country they’re going to have to organize into a political movement. It takes more than a few gun-touting fanatics to pass legislation, and most people would agree, that’s a good thing. So turn off Fox News and actually engage in the process or you’ll be left on the corner shouting to no one.
