John on April 18, 2010 at 2:34 pm
Byron York has a must read piece:
With the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing Monday, former President Bill Clinton is playing a starring role in the liberal effort to draw what the New York Times calls “parallels between the antigovernment tone that preceded that devastating attack and the political tumult of today.” The short version of the narrative is: Today’s Tea Partiers are tomorrow’s right-wing bombers.
[...]
What Clinton and his supporters do not talk about is the way in which Clinton, aided by pollster/adviser Dick Morris, exploited the bombing to make a political comeback from what was the lowest point in Clinton’s presidency to that time. (The Lewinsky scandal was still three years in the future.) In the days after Oklahoma City, Clinton and Morris devised a plan to use the bombing to discredit and outmaneuver the new Republican majority in Congress.
Click over to read the details. This isn’t supposition. They really had such a plan and it worked.
Starting last Summer there were reports that Democratic staffers were passing out press releases painting Town Hall attendees as Nazis. Then you had the bogus DHS report on right wing extremism. Since the Town Hall groups coalesced into the Tea Parties, we’ve had endless attempts to label them racist and tie them, however possible, to violence. This included labeling anti-Bush, anti-religion, pro health reform, pro communist Joe Stack a “tea party terrorist.” Joe Bedell who was a 9-11 truther and a registered Democrat was also painted as a case of right-wing violence.
Then, immediately after health care passed, we had the spitting story (bogus), the gay-slur story (true) and the N-word story (unproven). We also had a high profile raid on a militia made up of 8 people (one of whom was a registered Democrat).
Is it just possible that Obama (or more likely Axelrod) is coordinating all of this in order to dig out of the hole they are in? Yes, I know George Tiller was shot and killed. That’s genuine right wing violence and I’m not denying or ignoring that. But don’t forget Jim Pouillon who was shot and killed while holding a pro-life sign in Flint, Michigan. One of these incidents got a whole lot more press coverage than the other.
Category: Politics |
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Morgen on April 17, 2010 at 12:52 am
With all the ginned up media concern over the potential for tea party fervor to morph into acts of domestic terrorism, just wait until the media catches wind of this virulently anti-government song published by a very prominent political activist (LANGUAGE WARNING):
Fuck the government, they never done shit for me
For my people their defeat is a victory
“The man” wants the whole world under his thumb,
Plunders the globe and tries to buy us off with the crumbs…That’s not your flag, not your government
Not your war, not your President
Now is not the time to be silent
Raise your voices, raise your fist
Against the real terrorist – Uncle Sam.
Whoa – the American government is the “real terrorist”? “Their defeat is a VICTORY”? Now I’d say that this is going beyond reasonable political discourse. Except of course this song was not published by any tea party activist. And far from generating any concern within the mainstream media, they completely ignored it when the discovery of this song spread like wildfire throughout the conservative blogosphere just a few short months ago. In fact, far from being condemned, the man most responsible for financing and promoting the album in which this song appears is now a senior fellow at the most prominent liberal think tank in the nation, and will soon be teaching at Princeton. Oh, and he was also recently awarded the highest honor given by the NAACP.
I’m referring of course to former White House green jobs czar Van Jones.
The Ella Baker Center, founded and run by Van Jones, was the “sponsoring non-profit” for Freedom Fighter Music which in 2003 produced and published an album entitled “WarTimes: Reports from the Opposition”.
An album narrated by convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, and which also featured an interview segment with Van Jones himself.
Just in case there remains any question as to Van Jones’ direct involvement in this effort, he acknowledged his ownership of the Freedom Fighter record label in this 2003 interview with USA Today Weekend. Furthermore, the act which performed the song highlighted in this post was called The Red Guard, and consisted of artists Ying-sun Ho and Jakada Imani who were both on staff at the Ella Baker Center at the time. In fact, after Van Jones’ departure, Imani became the Executive Director of the Center, and Ho is now an attorney on staff with Green for All, another organization founded by Jones.
In other words, this was Van Jones’ crew.
I’ve embedded the entire track below for your listening (dis)pleasure, and you can find an MP3 of the entire WarTimes album and a highlight video here. But I want to close by expressing what an outrage, and glaring hypocrisy it is for so many members of the media to continue to give credence to fabricated accusations against the tea party for racism and fomenting violence. (Case in point, the media’s shameful coverage of former President Clinton’s propaganda campaign against the Tea Party on Friday). All the while, virtually ignoring Van Jones’ sordid history of genuine anti-Americanism, while openly aiding in the effort to rehabilitate his image after he abruptly left the White House last Fall.
This disparity represents either a disgraceful level of partisan bias, or a complete lack of journalistic courage to expose the truth about the personal history and views of a leading liberal voice in the “green jobs” movement. I suspect both factors are at play. But it is no wonder that so many media organizations continue to struggle in the market-place, while the tea party movement continues to gain momentum as we head into the mid-term elections.
[LANGUAGE WARNING]
The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and The Red Guard, present “United We Stand”:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Update: In the speech of President Clinton’s from Friday that I referenced above, he accuses conservative activists of fostering an environment ripe for political violence by “demonizing the government“. Clinton gave this speech at the liberal Center for American Progress, where Van Jones is now on staff as a senior fellow.
Category: MSM & Bias |
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John on April 16, 2010 at 11:21 am
Jonathan Chait has some observations and conclusions about the tea parties based primarily on this NY Times poll:
The New York Times poll of the movement finds that people sympathetic to the Tea Party movement, aside from being generally conservative, are far more likely than the general public to believe that “too much has been made of the problems facing black people.” (52% of Tea Party sympathizers say this, compared with 28% of the public as a whole.)
Relying on Matt Yglesias, Chait adds that this is in keeping with research which suggests that “ethnocentrism” leads some whites to very specific policy positions:
[W]hites with ethnocentric attitudes are more hostile toward means-tested government programs [welfare], which they clearly see as benefiting other, non-white people. Meanwhile, ethnocentric whites are more likely than non-ethnocentric whites to support social insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security.
Let’s assume the research on this is correct and that the Times’ poll is sound. If so, then we should find that Tea Partiers are against welfare but support big social programs. Do the theory and the poll line up? Not really.
Chait and Yglesias jump right over the evidence in the poll and point to some “exit interviews” that suggest Tea Partiers would rather focus on cutting waste than cutting Social Security or Medicare. That’s fine, but not really part of the poll proper. Question 22 asks tea partiers if they prefered smaller or larger government. Not suprisingly, 92% said smaller. Of those who so answered the follow up question asked:
Suppose a smaller government required cuts in spending on domestic programs such as Social Security, Medicare, education or defense — then would you favor a smaller government or not?
73% of Tea Party respondents said yes vs. just 58% of Americans. So it seems that 3/4 of the tea party people are willing to cut big social programs in order to reduce the size and scope of government. In fact, they are much more likely to say so than the general public.
It may well be true that, as individuals, they are happy to receive the checks which they did in fact pay into much of their lives. You can call that hypocrisy if you want, but it remains true that at least on principle they are open to reducing these programs. Since the ethnocentrism research Chait and Yglesias rely on suggests that ethnocentrics will favor these programs–not just getting the checks for themselves, but conceptually for everyone–there is a mismatch here. Something doesn’t fit.
Secondly, the poll indicates that one of the specific policies driving the Tea Party anger at government is health reform. Tea Partiers are against it. So the obvious question is for Chait’s theory is this…Does health reform represent a new entitlement (which ethnocentrics should support) or a means tested welfare program (which they should oppose)?
Clearly it’s the former more than the latter. The whole push for reform was “universal care.” There was even a moment when the Congress sought to replace the public option with a Medicare extension. There is some means testing in the program but no one is excluded. If Chait and Yglesias are right about Tea Partiers being “ethnocentric” then we should see them supporting ObamaCare. In fact, we see just the opposite, all of which suggests to me that the data and the theory don’t line up as they claim.
There is another group noted in the social science results Chait and Yglesias mentioned (see the book here), those who support “limited government.” Limited government types support cuts in welfare spending and, to a lesser degree, in social insurance programs. This not only fits with the actual profile of the Tea Party presented in the poll questions mentioned above, but with responses to other questions in the poll.
For instance, 62% of Tea Partiers have read “a lot” about the federal deficit compared to just 30% of Americans (Q#26). Then there’s question #43, Do you think Obama has expanded the roll of government? 89% of Tea Partiers said “too much” vs. 37% of Americans. Do you think Obama is moving the country toward socialism (#49)? 92% said yes vs. 52% of Americans. There are many more, all of which seems to support an interest in limited government or, put another way, a concern about out of control government.
Some questions, like #52 which shows that 25% of Tea Partiers believe Obama favors blacks over whites (vs. 11% of Americans) suggest some level of ethnocentrism. But even here, 74% say the administration treats the races the same or doesn’t know. In effect, Tea Partiers are 14% more likely to see blacks favored over the general public. That’s not insignificant but it’s also not an overwhelming shift like the responses to the scope of government questions above.
Ethnocentrism probably exists to some degree within the Tea Party but it is not the hidden hand that Chait and Yglesias seem to think it is. It seems more likely, based on the data at hand, that a genuine concern for out of control government is driving the movement.
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