The Media Understands The Coffee Baggers (Updated)

For those of you who don’t know, the brown baggers or coffee breakers or coffee baggers or whatever they call themselves held a rally yesterday in which the entire American progressive left tried to show that it could bring out more people (paid and volunteer) than Glenn Beck. They failed. More interestingly, however, the MSM didn’t seem to have any problems understanding their “message.”

After the Tea Party brought hundreds of thousands of real Americans (not professional protestors) to the Mall last year, the left became obsessed with trying to discredit those people. The professional left scoffed at the protesters and tried to denigrate them with an obscure homosexual reference. Obama pretended not to notice the 500,000 people camped out on his lawn. Pelosi saw Nazis under every sign, and a vast right wing conspiracy. She wanted these people investigated and those who funded them given the McCarthy treatment. The black lobby fabricated claims of racism. And journalists trolled the crowd looking for the one guy with the flat earth sign.

Indeed, try as they might, journalists just couldn’t bring themselves to figure out what it was that had upset this Tea Party crowd. Did they want socialized medicine? Maybe. Maybe they wanted Obama to go farther? Were they upset we had a black president? Probably. Some seemed to want a bigger stimulus, some a smaller stimulus. Some wanted Lyndon Larouche let out of jail. . . or put back in, and no doubt some of them wanted a return to slavery, the gold standard, and the monarchy. . . after all, they kept talking about something called a "Constitution"?? One thing was for sure though, this Tea Party “fad” had no message these journalists wanted to hear, and thus they were quite happy to declare that the Tea Party had no idea what it really wanted.

Armed with this self-imposed confusion, these journalists spent the next few months struggling to find the right words to marginalize the Tea Party. While ostensibly trying to solve this riddle of what these strange people wanted, journalists wrote books, commissioned polls (and recommissioned them when they didn’t like the results), hired leftist experts, and hypothesized a series of horrors and ambiguities, all with the intent of suppressing the message of the Tea Party movement. If you didn't know what the Tea Party stood for, you certainly weren't going to get infected with that knowledge from these journalists!

Yet, despite this elitist embargo on the obvious, the popularity of the Tea Party continued to grow because it was in fact sending one message, and that message resonated throughout America: government needs to be reined in.

As the progressives saw the public slipping away from their vision of utopia (a vision the public never even flirted with if we’re being honest), they set out to prove that they could be as relevant as the Tea Party. Hence they tried to form the brown baggers (later renamed the coffee party, and now one nation). And when Beck held his rally, to much lower turn out than the prior Tea Party rally, the progressives saw their chance. If they could beat Beck, they could declare themselves more important than the Tea Party! So they picked yesterday as the day for a rally. They chartered busses with union dues and arranged for paid leave for their protestors (at least the few with jobs) -- the unions even paid for the hotels for their members. And slowly, this collection of misfits made their way to the capital.

So what was the message put forth by this group of 400 different progressive groups? Pro-gay marriage, pro-green jobs, anti-global warming, pro-raising teacher pay, pro-union card check, pro-affirmative action, pro-reparations for blacks, pro-amnesty for illegals, anti-banks, anti-IMF, pro-world peace, pro-magic environmental technologies, anti-nuclear power, anti-oil, anti-corporation, pro-welfare, pro-tax hikes, pro-third world debt forgiveness, pro-world tax on banks, anti-genetically modified foods, anti-Big Pharma, pro-marijuana, anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian, pro-Iranian, anti-military, anti-War, pro-abortion, anti......... You get the idea. The Communist Party USA was there, so was The War Resisters League, The Freedom Socialist Party, the NAACP, and every union you can name. You literally had 400 whiner groups, all specializing in very small single issues, without any care in the world for the other 399 groups’ causes.

And how did the media see this? Let’s quote the Politico: “The ‘One Nation Coming Together’ rally at the National Mall touched on themes of immigration reform, more funding for schools and equal rights for gays. But more than anything else, the day was about jobs.”

Yep, there you have it: the Eines Volk rally was about “jobs.”

It’s funny how 500,000 Tea Parties could speak with a united voice, but the media gets confused and distracted by three guys standing on the fringe of the rally who admit they really aren’t with the Tea Partiers. Yet, the media sees these 60,000 factionalized idiots screaming about 400 different issues and somehow clearly makes out one unified message: Jobs.

This is called advocacy, not journalism. The media is carrying the water for these groups by stripping out the pedophile groups, the eco-terrorists, the pro-socialist-“anarchists,” the militant feminists, and the militant racists, and instead packaging this collection of misfits as concerned about only one issue. . . the same issue the voters say is their primary concern. Yet, simultaneously, this same media acts intentionally blind to a genuinely public movement that is expressing a clear, single idea. That is how you sell one set of ideas over another.

Of course, we didn’t really expect anything different, did we? But it's still an excellent reminder of why the media has a lower trust rating with the American public than al Qaeda.

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As a final aside, now that even the AP has noticed that the crowd was "visibly smaller," didn't cover as far on the Mall, and wasn't as dense, the organizers claim that this rally was not in response to Beck and that they had no intention of trying to beat his numbers. Of course, that's a lie. Here is a quote from NAACP president Ben Jealous from just before the rally: "We believe that our satellite photos will stack up nicely to his satellite photos." Think about this. . . the entire American left couldn't beat the turnout produced by one entertainer, even though they paid people to be there. How pathetic.

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Check out this photo comparisons and then ask yourself how the MSM could describe both as "tens of thousands."