Fair & Balanced As Always, Not to Mention Not at All Ironic
Fox New’s coverage of the Stewart/Colbert rally:
I’d have to check, but I’d be willing to bet good money that they didn’t cover Beck’s rally that way… or with that small a postage-stamp sized story box. One of the stories next to it: about how a Democrat is going to lose his Senate race.
Not that the Rally today is not somewhat political… but it certainly is no more political, and probably somewhat less political, than Beck’s rally. Watching it, I hear nothing coming from the stage that’s political. In fact, right this moment Stewart is awarding a Medal of Reasonableness to Velma Hart, the woman in the Obama town hall who took him to task and asked him incredibly tough questions.
And let’s not forget that this coverage is coming from an incredibly biased politically biased news network, so much so that they are virtually the propaganda arm of the Republican Party, even going beyond that with tea Party candidates–but which at the same time insists that they are fair, balanced, and non-political.
Riiighht.
I will also be very interested to see the crowd estimates–that looks like a pretty darn huge crowd.
“Sanity will always be and has always been in the eye of the beholder”
“These are hard times, not end times”
vs.
“The poll also found that 41 percent of Americans believe Jesus Christ will return to Earth by that time [2050]”
Christine O’Donnell is polling 39% — NOT a coincidence.
There are deep divisions in this country. “Working together” simply is not possible on many things.
Religious nutballs are the base of the problem, and they’re a pretty big base — 20-30%. Add in the bigots, racists, homophobes and other flavors of cultural conservatives and you get 40%-50% — enough to create surprises like Prop 8.
The pro-Israel neocons (10%), pro-life/pro-family theocrats (~15%), hereditary wealthy (2-5%) substantially overlap the big groups, but that’s the Republican base.
Insane doesn’t begin to cover it.
My vision of “sanity” here is change towards social systems that demonstrably work better than what we have now — what we can find in eg. Norway, Japan, Canada, New Zealand.
But perhaps such a large and divided nation as ours simply can’t be mobilized well enough to defend progressivism from the great coalition of forces that oppose its secular worldview and redistributive agenda. Perhaps it is hopeless in the long run.
I wonder about how good a “lifeboat” Japan will prove to be this century.
They are about the right size as far as nation-states go . . . massive cities that run more efficiently than spread-out rural areas. 100M+ people is plenty of societal capital to form a solid technocratic laboring and government class, but thankfully not half as divided by mindless religious eschatology as we are. AFAICT, just to be publicly religious in Japan is to be a nutball — the way it should be.
(Except for all the ceremonial shinto things, but mitigating that is that shinto doesn’t have holy texts people pull their fallacious reasoning from — modern Christianity wouldn’t be a political issue if it stuck to baptisms and funerals).
Japan does have its internally-pointed cultural bigotry against zainichi, eta, and other “non-Japanese” . . . maybe this century they will begin to become more American-like, where if you speak the language and are acculturated enough you can be an American (S.I. Hayakawa and Daniel Inouye being examples of “Japanese-Americans”).
Economics 1990-2010 aside, things do seem to be getting better in Japan and worse in the US.
I hope this rally is seen as partisan by Fox News because it looked as if the crowd size could give Glen Beck’s a run for his money, and that should be very distressing for them. But isn’t the claim that the far left is equally nutball as the far right as blatant an example of “false equivalency” as anything Fox has posited?
that should be very distressing for them
The point is not to rally, the point is to put your people into power.
The TP seized the narrative over the past year-plus. The Dems were caught flat-footed, and the present rally is pretty late in the game.
The damage has been done, and this rally isn’t going to save the House from being lost. It might, however, save the Senate, which is on the knife-edge.
But isn’t the claim that the far left is equally nutball as the far right
Who made that claim about whom? I’m not sure there is a far left in this country. The Tides Foundation actually fits the bill to some extent, but I don’t see what they do as “far left”.
“Far left” to me means going beyond the left, which already is rather isolated if not extreme in US politics. Obama’s 2009 “communist takeover of national health care” was similar to Romney’s 2006 reform and is actually a very conservative approach towards a national health insurance program, something many conservatives in the Senate co-sponsored in 1993:
http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2010/February/23/GOP-1993-health-reform-bill.aspx
Part of the problem in communicating is that people don’t understand political history and pure bullshit is the common understanding of everything now.
I think the situation is irretrievable, really. It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any bette.r