Ocassional Thoughts of an Independent Progressive Atheistic Humanist
I hate watching election news on TV or reading it in certain publications. It makes me angry. In a futile quest to make elections interesting, the drummed up fake balance reporting is in fact hurting our democracy.
From Media Matters:
I am not a fan of the Sunday pundit shows. I rarely watch them so I might see a segment or two presented on a website I visit. It was announced yesterday that Chuck Todd would take over for David Gregory on ‘Meet the Press’ on NBC. Giving ‘Meet the Press’ Gig to another non-journalist doesn’t change my negative view of Sunday pundit shows.
At least up until the 1990’s, these shows tried to give the viewer ‘both sides of the story’ and you could count on the host to ask tough questions. These days it is just an opportunity for the guest (normally a Republican or other conservative) to answer softball questions in between giving their latest talking points. There just is not journalism on these shows. They are just a long infomercial for the guest.
Earlier on Thursday, Republicans in the Senate filibustered a bill meant to replace the “dreaded” sequester due to take effect today (March 1st). I mentioned to my friends on Facebook that I guess the The GOP didn’t want to stop the sequester. My Republican friends complained that President Obama didn’t want to end the sequester cuts either and offered an out of context video clip from 2011. The actual facts show that Republicans have no incentive to change the sequester because they got exactly what they wanted back in 2011.
Here is a clip of the article I posted on Facebook:
I’m sure everyone has seen the video of Mitt Romney talking about never getting the vote of the so-called 47% of Americans who pay no income taxes and who will vote for the President to keep the checks coming. My amusement came from the fact that what he said is how people like Romney actually feel about the rest of us regular people. Some have called it a gaffe and then Republicans trot out gaffes said by President Obama at different times as if it’s the same thing as what Romney did. It’s a false equivalency, the Republican whine shows they are missing the forest for the trees.
It started with a tweet and brought out how some are misinformed about history. One has to wonder why people tell or repeat lies that can be refuted so easily.
I heard about the Tucson shooting victim who was arrested for making a death threat to a Tea Party person at a taping for the ABC News Sunday news show “This Week” and sent off a flippant tweet:
Violent words from Right 20 from Left 1 – Death threat at ABC-TV Town Hall event Saturday
I wrote it because I knew that the people on the right and by extension the corporate media would hold that event out as proof that “both sides do it” which is actually a false equivalence. The violent rhetoric from the right far outstrips any coming from the left – if any from the left even exists.
Later a few of tweets pop up in my mention file:
@cadfile Keith Olbermann praised a man for threatening the life of a Tea Party member here
@cadfile As far as violent words. The left seems to confuse political metaphor with reality calling it violent words
@cadfile I see violence as a left-wing thing. The guy that flew airplane into IRS building was a Communist & SEIU beating a man up
And that was from just one person @m4zdaman
The truth is that Olbermann praised the man on his Friday show – a day before the incident as the article and a check of the show’s website shows. That means that m4zdaman thinks that Olbermann is clairvoyant. Nice trick – then why didn’t he stop it before it happened?
The IRS plane crasher wasn’t from the left and the SEIU beating was found to be a hoax.
Of course my question has always been why does the right have to use violent “metaphors” in political discussions. All I know is some men use violent words to compensate for a small penis or a questioning of their sexuality. I wonder if that is true for those on the right that use those unnecessary words. It just seems that those on the right want to be dicks for the sake of being a dick – kind of like Biff Tannen was in the Back to the Future movies.
Next I get a few tweets from @Weirdodo and @joegallant who like @m4zdaman seem to think flooding people with tweets somehow “proves” your intelligence or correctness. Here are the more ridiculous ones:
@cadfile Violent actions from left, 1000 to 1, http://tinyurl.com/the-real-KKK Gee, looks almost like current events!
@cadfile Um… KKK was the paramilitary arm of the pre-war southern Democrat party
@cadfile “The Klan attacked black members of the Loyal Leagues and intimidated southern Republicans and Freedmen’s Bureau workers”
So the false equivalence they are drawing is that the Democratic Party of the 1950’s and 1960’s is the same party that elected President Obama in 2008 and the KKK from the 1950’s and 60’s would support a black President.
Yes the Democratic party was in general made up of a large number of southern people who supported Jim Crow laws and segregation. Although it was a southern Democratic President who supported and got the Civil Rights Act passed. The KKK was a domestic terrorist group that was anti-minority, anti-immigrant, pro-white, right wing nationalists. They also supported Jim Crow laws and segregation.
Leading Democrats of the time were racist such as Strom Thurman, Jesse Helms, and Robert Byrd. Back then many white Southern politicians championed racial segregation. Thurman switched to the GOP in 1964 to support Goldwater and oppose the Civil Rights Act. Helms switched to the GOP in the early 70’s while Byrd stayed in the party but moderated his views.
The main reason the GOP changed to more conservative and racist was the Southern strategy where Republicans like Richard Nixon scared white voters in the south and they voted for Republicans. The more liberal Democrats then took control of the party and evolved as the opposite of the GOP. However there are still some conservative members just as there use to be more liberal Republicans back in the day.
So if we were going to humor @Weirdodo and @joegallant we could say that if the KKK existed today like they did in 60’s it would be the paramilitary arm of the GOP since it seems the GOP has the worst problem with a black President and a liberal agenda for health and social programs.
I think it’s funny that someone on the right has to go back to the dark days of the Jim Crow south which makes the false equivalence so obvious and striking.
Again in the past two years, coinciding with the Obama administration, the amount of actual violence coming from the right is off the chart. He is just a brief summary:
July 2008: A gunman agitated at how “liberals” are “destroying America” kills two and wounds four at a Unitarian church.
October 2008: Two neo-Nazis are arrested in Tennessee for a plot to murder Barack Obama and dozens of other African-Americans.
December 2008: A father-son team involved in the “patriot” movement try to extort a bank with a homemade bomb; they end up killing two police officers.
January 2009: A white supremacist in Brockton, Mass., rapes a black woman, kills her sister and a homeless man, and is captured while en route to a Jewish community center.
April 2009: A white supremacist and gun nut kills three Pittsburgh cops because he believed conspiracy theories about President Obama taking away his guns. He had been posting Glenn Beck videos on a neo-Nazi website.
May 2009: Another right-wing crazy in Okaloosa County, Fla., also fearing his guns would be confiscated, kills two cops before being shot dead.
June 2009: A Holocaust denier and right-wing tax protester kills a security guard at the Holocaust Museum.
July 2009: A woman takes a break from posting Glenn Beck videos on her MySpace page to case an Air National Guard Base in Long Island. Upon her arrest, authorities find an assault rifle, a shotgun and 500 rounds of ammo in her car.
August 2009: A man in Collier Township, just south of Pittsburgh, walks into a women’s aerobics class and kills three women. His diary states, “Good luck to Obama! He will be successful. The liberal media LOVES him. Amerika has chosen The Black Man. Good!”
February 2010: An anti-government tax protester flies his plane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas, killing himself and one other.
March 2010: Seven militiamen in Michigan and Ohio are arrested for plotting to assassinate local police officers to spark a new civil war. This is also the month that an anti-government extremist walks into the Pentagon and opens fire, wounding two, before being shot dead.
May 2010: A mosque in Jacksonville, Fla., is firebombed.
July 2010: A Glenn Beck fanatic loads his car with weapons and drives to the Bay Area to attack the offices of the Tides Foundation and ACLU. He is wounded in a shootout along with the patrolmen after they intercept him on a routine traffic stop.
September 2010: A Concord, N.C., man who refers to himself as the “Christian counterpart to bin Laden” is arrested and charged with plotting to blow up an abortion clinic.
The corporate media meanwhile is quick to downplay these events and other threats directed at Democrats or liberals.
I don’t really care if you are a Democrat or Republican but what does jerk my chain is if someone is obviously ignorant – especially about something so easy to check out.