Spare me the "bipartisan rage" crappola!

A sad and sorry commentary on the corporo-media has occurred as the tea bagger outrages reached fever pitch- including cutting gas lines, and tossing bricks through windows. The corporate media then switched into false balance or “the incivility is bipartisan” mode, as it dredged up incidents of past leftist abuse and attempted to place both right extremists and its concocted left extremists on the same spectrum of misbehavior.

The most recent embodiment of this malarkey emerged in today's Wall Street Journal from columnist Peggy Noonan ('The Heat is on: We May Get Burned') wherein she insists: "political rage is a national problem not a partisan one". Actually, lady, you are correct - it IS National, but also totally partisan - on the RIGHT!

Mayhap the lady was misled when Repug House Minority whip Eric Cantor came out in the media asserting "a bullet had been fired into his office". (leading people to suspect an irate leftie did it). I suspected, and Salon.com confirmed in its lead story for March 26, 2010 (‘Eric Cantor’s Phony Victim Story’) that it was all a ruse designed to distract from the ongoing right wing violence and portray conservatives and the GOP as much victims as the Democrats.

See:

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/sarah_palin/index.html?story=/opinion/walsh/politics/2010/03/26/phony_eric_cantor_story


Meanwhile, the Richmond, Va. Police confirmed the bullet was a stray. Salon also noted the building was totally nondescript so there was no indication that Cantor or anyone else lived there. Cantor invoking his "Jewish heritage" made his spurious charges even more reprehensible, painting the putative “angry leftist” as also anti-Semitic.

But the kibosh was delivered on this mutual rage idiocy long before the tea bagger displays of “intermittent explosive disorder” appeared[1]. In a special issue of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report [2], the extent of right wing hate groups throughout the country was firmly documented- including their locations by code (for Patriot Groups, White Nationalist, Ku Klux Klan, neo-Confederate-Secessionist, Racist-Skinhead, Neo-Nazi and Christian Identity). A total of 932 hate groups – all on the Right- documented by the SPLC staff.

See:

http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2010/spring

Never mind the efforts of both Salon.com and the SPLC, the predictable punditocracy of the Right – which trades in specious neutralizing and false balance – would not be denied, except for one voice crying in the wilderness, that of David Frum. To his credit, Mr. Frum warned that the energized GOP effort to demonize Obama and the Dems would backfire electorally, and become their Waterloo in November. He was immediately fired from the American Eneterprise Institute for his willingness to exercise his free speech rights, as opposed to mouthing FOX propaganda.

Others haven't been so forthcoming, like Peggy Noonan - seeking to lay blame on left and right - when I saw no leftie using the N-word and spitting on any black Republican House reps . Oh wait, there aren't any!

Chris Matthews Ignorant Faux Pas:

To his credit, Hardball commentator Chris Matthews – on his March 25, 2010 show- did aver that when Bush passed his mammoth tax cuts in 2001 the “Left didn’t lose it” like the Right’s tea bag contingent since the health reform bill passed four days earlier. According to Matthews, they “sucked it up”. Well, in truth we did – with a sigh – because we also knew it would blow a hole in the deficit the size of an Apollo asteroid, as well as make many domestic programs almost impossible to enact in any future Dem administration. And note, this was even before Bush and Cheney launched their pre-emptive invasions to eat up another trillion and a half in tax money.

In the next breath, however, he brought up the extreme Right’s brutal treatment of Adlai Stevenson in Dallas, in October, 1963 (which originally prompted Stevenson to warn JFK to call off his visit there) and how he was smacked with placards, spat upon etc. To his eternal discredit, Chris then hung himself out to dry by saying:

“Well, you had this raging reaction of the Right in Dallas, but then….a Leftist went and killed Kennedy”

Showing Matthews had invested in the false reality map of the “Oswald / leftist = lone nut assassin” mulch- indicating his knowledge of the asssassination is nada. With this single remark, Matthews nearly ruined all the other accurate statements he made.

At least Newsweek journalist Kenneth Crawford, in ‘The Enemies He Made’ in Newsweek, Dec. 2, 1963, p. 35 , had the perceptiveness to acknowledge:

“the suspicious irony inherent in a lone-pro-Castro gunman being fingered in a city (Dallas) regarded as a ‘citadel of right wing strength".

Maybe the immediacy in time – Crawford wrote his piece within a week of the assassination, afforded him a superior insight to the one on offer from the MSNBC Hardball host. Crawford had the benefit of viewing the event before it had been contaminated with the Warren Whitewash, the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird spin cycle, and the corporate media’s 40-year cooperation not to trouble fragile American minds with a conspiracy- replacing it with the fiction of a lone nut.

Who had probably the best take of all on the tea bagger outbursts and outrages? Undoubtedly political analyst Bill Schneider, who was quoted in The Financial Times (March 24, p. 4) as saying:

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen an opposition party so unified under the banner of its radical wing”.

Lest we forget, however, the radical right did exist back in Kennedy’s day- it’s just that they were confined to a small extremist niche or enclave and mostly called "nuts". This faction (including the States Rights Parties, John Birchers and Minutemen) were never taken very seriously, and certainly not to the extent of forming a wing of a major political party- far less taking it over. However, despite being cubbyholed, their venom did become legendary - especially againt Kennedy[3].


[1] IED, or “intermittent explosive disorder” is one of the new syndromes documented in the newest Diagnostic and Statistics Manual (DSM-V) of the psychotherapy profession.

[2] ‘Rage on the Right’, in The Intelligence Report (SPLC), Spring 2010 (Issue137), page 43. The documentation includes not only geographical distributions but the websites as well.

[3]Historian Arthur Schlesinger documents the then hate and vitriol of the radical right in his book, A Thousand Days, 1965, Houghton-Mifflin, p. 755. As he observed(regarding the Radical Right’s response to JFK):

“Not since the high point of the hate-Roosevelt enthusiasm of the mid-thirties had any President been the target of such systematic and foul vilification.” The Right not only found fault with JFK’s appearance, but his “religion, wealth, wife, brothers, his support of Negroes and his refusal to drop the bomb”.