Antiwar Demonstrators Develop MSM Envy

My favorite San Franciscan has reared her Medusa head to complain that the Tea Party movement is getting too much MSM coverage. Cindy Sheehan, who reveled in the spotlight she got by exploiting her own son's death in Iraq and parlaying it into national attention for her crazed political views is now beside herself about the political coverage given to the Tea Parties.

Sheehan claims that the antiwar movement don't get no respect. Says Sheehan: "They're being treated with a lot more respect than the anti-war movement was." Politico.com quoted her in a sympathetic and ironically long article entitled The Tea Party's Exaggerated Importance. They added: "Now, veterans of those protests--covered largely as spot news and spectacle--wonder why they didn't get the weighty, anthropological (?) treatment assigned to the tea parties."

Where to begin. At least in the early years, the Iraq-Afghanistan antiwar protests got what seemed to be 24/7 coverage. Crowds of two or three hundred were framed by news photographers and network cameramen to look like two to three thousand, while the "reporters" added a zero or two to their reports on the size of the crowds. Talking heads talked solemnly about the deep divides in American thinking, made endless comparisons to the Vietnam war, and used the word "quagmire" at least a hundred times a day.

The pictures shown on TV and the major newspapers were carefully edited to look like genuine political disagreement rather than minor riots controlled by the professionals from every left wing, antisemitic, and just plain crazy group in the nation. The accompanying photo was one of the few I could find in my collection that even hints at just how vile the signage was at those mini-riots. And you weren't seeing the violence at all. Here in San Francisco, bystanders and counter-protestors were assaulted and occasionally beaten by leftist thugs and creeps wrapped in keffiyehs, with other crypto-terrorists wearing the usual masks of Palestinian Israel-bashers. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage was done. And that doesn't include the expense of cleaning up the streets after these scummy lowlives were finished for the day. Major shopping hubs, including the massive San Francisco Westfield Centre, were closed down for hours on end almost every weekend because of bomb threats. The Muni and BART subways were closed almost as often, and for the same reason.

So what is Sheehan complaining about? As James Taranto put it in the Wall Street Journal, "Sheehan has a point. The media did not take her crackpot anti-American views seriously and instead caricatured her as a grieving mother. We even called her, on more than one occasion, a 'fascist fishwife,' which is the sort of thing mainstream media reporters would say about tea-party activists if they had our way with words."

It's possible that Sheehan hasn't noticed that one of the reasons that the Tea Parties get so much coverage is the lack of intimidation and genuine violence that characterized the antiwar demonstrations. It takes a lot of air time and ink to work diligently to find an occasional over-the-top Tea Party sign which would "potentially lead to violence." At the antiwar demonstrations all you had to do is look for smashed shop windows and bloodied faces. It takes even more time and ink to find the incidents of violent Tea Party protests since, well, there aren't any.

Likewise, there's a lot of coverage of great intellects like Janeane Garofalo and Keith Olbermann explaining in detail how Tea Partiers are violent racists. And then there's the equal amount of time given to politicians reading the writing on the wall and making lame apologies for earlier intemperate remarks about the Tea Party protestors. Like Steny Hoyer, the growth on Nancy Pelosi's backside. He regretted calling vocal opponents of health care un-American, but still called the language of the Tea Partiers and Republicans "similar to the fiery rantings of a controversial Depression-era priest sympathetic to the Nazis." As Taranto puts it, "Hoyer doesn't think you're un-American. He's the first to acknowledge you're as patriotic as any red-blooded Nazi-sympathizing priest!"

The formerly conservative now turned liberal Christian Science Monitor took a slightly different tack in its quizzical mystification at the coverage of the Tea Parties. The article was entitled: "Are Tea Party Rallies Given Preferential Treatment by Police?" Well--yes, you idiots. Of course they are. The Tea Parties demonstrate peacefully. They have speakers and prayers and discussions. Unlike the antiwar demonstrators discussed above, they don't crack heads and break shop windows. They even clean up after themselves.

And since the beginning, the only violence has been the thugs who beat Tea Partiers up for having a different view and exercising their constitutional right to free speech. In all fairness, buried deep in the Monitor article, in the penultimate paragraph, the author states: "To be sure, permitting rules and police preparedness are often developed based on past behavior at various kinds of protests. With tea party rallies so far proving more orderly, police have given them more latitude." Indeed.