Tuesday, April 27, 2010

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.

13 comments:

AndrewPrice said...

I remember the Politico article. What crap. They concluded that the Tea Party is a media creation because the media wants a story. Unbelievable.

I remember we had an anti-war protest of 3 bong smoking hippies and the AP called it "mass protest staged."

As for the being nice to the Tea Party and not the anti-war jerks, that's utter crap. The MSM has bent over backwards to give as much aid and comfort to every nut they can find and has done nothing but pour on scorn and false claims against the Tea Party people.

Unknown said...

Andrew: It's amazing how we can see this, but the MSM and the left can't. To listen to the MSM, you'd think the Tea Parties were repeats of the Madison Square rally of the American Nazis back in the Thirties. And they treat violent antiwar, anti-American protests as if they were being peacefully led by a nonviolent Gandhi facing heavily-armed British troops. The disparity in coverage is absolutely breathtaking. As for San Francisco demonstrations, they really are big, but the violence which always accompanies them flees like the morning dew by the time it makes it to the MSM.

StanH said...

You guys should banish Cindy Sheehan, can you do that right? LOL! Her fifteen minutes of fame is really churning on and on and on.

If you want to clean up your Common Space have a Tea Party. The reason is simple the Tea Party people are the ones that actually pay taxes, therefore we take care of the things we own.

The anarchist, leftist, and anti-war droogs, are rich kids and the parasite class, what do they care they have no skin in the game except, “what’s in it for me!”

Unknown said...

StanH: Good idea. With enough Tea Parties, we could have San Francisco cleaned up in no time.

The rich kids and the parasite class are indeed the bulk of the crowds at our leftist mini-riots. And worst of all, lurking behind the whole thing, is the class of professional agitators provided by the SEIU, other large labor organizations, and the George Soros gang.

StanH said...

Quick anecdote: I had the misfortune of having Christmas dinner over at my brother-in-law’s and after dinner we sat down in the family room to watch the NFL. The misfortunate part was I sat next to nephew. I mistakenly asked him how school was coming, as I knew he was attending a very fine law school. He told me that he was going to be and “environmental lawyer,” I gave him a huh…do what? He had been traveling around the country and the world protesting wherever and whenever a gaggle of leftist gathered for the protest du jour. I gave him hell! I heard later he changed his degree and is attending seminary school. Maybe I convinced one spooner too STFU! The point is many of these anarchist are indeed little rich kids with nothing better to do.

Unknown said...

StanH: Well, as long as he's going to worship the earth, he might as well do it from a pulpit. LOL

Individualist said...

Didn't the Tea Party march on Washington number in the hundreds of thousands?

We went to the Tea PArty event in JAx on Tax Day and there were at least 2000 people there.

Unknown said...

Individualist: That's what the MSM doesn't want the public to know. They want their coverage to be about phantom racists, imagined threats, and alleged rubes and ignoramuses. Lots and lots of negative coverage, and as little mention of the true numbers of Tea Party attendance at the rallies as they think they can get away with.

Joel Farnham said...

LawHawk,

There is an article with video spotlighting the difference between the Tea Partiers and the Protestors in Phoenix. It is funny and tragic at the same time.

http://hotair.com/archives/2010/04/27/video-whose-protests-are-more-violent/

The Protestors in Phoenix are described as mostly tame. The video belies that statement. When compared side by side, the Tea Partiers are almost somnolent. Even the ones where Tea Partiers are shouting "Kill the Bill!!"

It is noted at least twice, no one has been arrested at a Tea Party. :-)

Writer X said...

I think Cindy is trying to create a buzz for her failed book. The anti-war movement died when Pres. Obama was elected to office. No doubt Cindy and Code Pink will be back with their tie-dyed t-shirts in 2012 and the MSM will eat it up.

USArtguy said...

It's hard to believe that Sheehan still has not figured out she was nothing more than a convenient puppet used by the MSM when Bush was in office.

I discovered a site called brain-terminal about six years ago. This guy ( Evan Coyne Maloney) has some fascinating video of the Left that somehow never got the MSM's attention. For example, we heard a lot about Obama=Hitler signs at Tea Parties even though the MSM could only produce one or two. And those were suspected to be leftist plants. Evan has numerous videos of protesters with Bush=Hitler signs that I never saw on the news.

I'm not connected to the site or it's author in any way, never even so much as left a comment, but I highly recommend you check it out. Maybe even include it in your "links" section.

Tennessee Jed said...

Hawk - Sadly, I stopped feeling sorry for Cindy a long time ago. One of the reasons she no longer gets much coverage is that Obama and not Bush is president now. The second is, I suspect, is that there are a hell of a lot more tea party protestors than there are Cindy and her fellow crackpots.

Unknown said...

Tennessee: Dear Cindy hasn't figured out that she's now a footnote to history. We have to move on to illegal immigrant mini-riots and the occasional anti-Israel mini-riots. With Bush gone and the Messiah in place, the MSM is no longer interested in the antiwar movement.

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