The RW extremists are full of crap, as always.... Very little craziness. No tension. Festival communal atmosphere.... The strangest guy I saw there was a chemtrail advocate in a purple suit. (shudder) Oh and the Communist party has a booth. No big deal.
the moment was so inspiring to him he couldn't stop issuing commentary about it.
99 RightwingconspiratorSometimes it's just all about seeing for yourself. I could get behind this thing. I really could....
despite being mesmerized by the historical moment, rwc has really only one conditioned response to a protest demonstration, and so he posts the picture of the "chemtrail nut" in a fashion meant to be ironic, one supposes. charles jumps in with a dose of double-reverse self-unaware irony, saying:
See, there's proof! They're all loony chem-trail weirdos!
it's your choice after that: was charles' unintentional self-burlesque the instance of lgf mbf-ing itself, or was it when gus802 shot back as if the photo had issued from the "wingnut blog-o-sphere", ...
Yeah. Luckily for the Tea Party folks they don't have any chemtrail kooks.
No wait! They do.
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and they'd be correct. i bet i could search and search all day and not turn up a single instance of a progressive remarking "here i present you with this single image of a single tea party protester holding this single sign and so it follows that the entire tea party movement should be understood in light of the least charitable interpretation possible of the same." this is where the rhetorical tools of the unqualified assertion and the generalization and pluralization of anecdotes perform their magic, because i can easily find you thousands of examples of progressives issuing pronouncements similar to "they are motivated by racism" or "they are nostalgic for a time when minorities and women knew their place" because "they hold signs with the n-word on them".
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some facts:
during the entire first eight months of the tea party movement, the news divisions of abc, cbs and nbc did 13 stories on the tea party. so far, in the initial ten days of this ows protest movement, the same three major networks have done 33 stories on the ows protests, not including briefs and mentions. that’s a quantitative point: if we assume all other things to be equal, we can say affirmatively that the mainstream media deliberately tried to starve the tea party movement of oxygen for as long as it could while, in contrast, the mainstream media began promoting the ows protests as soon as it could.
there are many qualitative points to be made (when the mainstream media did begin to cover the tea party movement, it was from the outset with an agenda to characterize the movement as “angry” and “extreme”) but if we must further indulge this narrative about “the rightwing media” being hypocritical in it’s differing coverage of the tea party and the ows, i’d prefer we stick to quantifiable metrics like the one i produced above.
there is nothing more pathetic about the left’s phony charade at being the underdogs of the media narrative than the fact that the charade is only sustained for as long as one can pretend that the only news network in existence is fox.
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i absolutely agree. there have been just about zero clashes with police at tea party demonstrations. there have been many arrests of ows protesters. in one case, an ows protester stuffed his foot under a parked police motorcycle and wailed around on the pavement in a clownish pantomime of "don't taze me bro!", adjusting his foot from under the front wheel to under the rear wheel in the course of his display. this was meant to manifest evidence of police brutality, a necessary component in any fantasy narrative of a noble peasant's twilight resistance struggle against the king's legions. the tea parties have forgone this sort of risible nonsense not because they fail to grasp the potency of theater, but because they are, like most ordinary folks, put off by public disorderliness. they never required a michael moore to remind them that the police are people too.
it seems like you're suggesting that it was an error on the part of the tea party movement to secure permits for their demonstrations and avoid defecating on police cars; that locking arms and charging at the police makes for exciting camera-bait, and i don't doubt you're correct for a certain set of circumstances. however the strategic wisdom of not misbehaving seems to have been the prudent choice for the tea party movement. being as it is a movement identified with conservatism, the mainstream media was eager to portray them as, at first, "angry" and then subsequently, "extreme", "crazy", "racist" and finally, violent and nascent terroristic, despite having behaved themselves scrupulously.
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