Flashback: When the Left Protested Bush, the Media Saw Only "everyone from grandmothers and students to veterans and mothers pushing strollers"

I cite this as an example, and I trust not even a liberal will dispute that when it came to anti-war protests, the protesters were unfailingly described as "just normal folks," spontaneously animated to gather without, apparently, any organization at all; somehow, it seems, they psychically intuited where their fellow "just normal folks" might be banging their drums and shaking their paper mache effigies of Bush and Cheney.

Ah, but that was when dissent was patriotic.

After the meeting, everyone from grandmothers and students to veterans and mothers pushing strollers marched along Lake Merritt to Oakland City Hall for an afternoon rally at which Lee again spoke.

That's noted leftist anti-american firebrand Rep. Barbara Lee. She spoke with Sean Penn.

I searched for "grandmothers" for this because I remembered just about every story about the wonderful anti-war protests mentioned the grandmothers by the fourth paragraph.

Here, a grandmother (absolute moral authority conferred by wisdom of long years) instructs us how important it is for citizens to accept the claims of their president at face value and in respectful silence and with absolutely no back-talk or sass-mouth whatsoever.

Wait, that's not what she said at all.

"The only thing this government needs is for the people to be silent and then they can do whatever they want," said Joan MacIntyre, a 74-year-old great-grandmother from Oakland. "As long as the government keeps doing what it's doing, I'll be out in the streets."

At some point, the article does mention that these protests actually were (gasp!) organized, but seems quite unbothered by this fact. No nefarious machinations are imputed.

At the rally, which was organized by a coalition of Oakland community groups, folk singers led the crowd in song and a rapper rapped about violence in the streets.

Of course, omitted from that -- and omitted from nearly all of these "everyone from grandmothers to students to veterans to mothers pushing strollers" stories -- is that most of these protests were organized, in whole or in part, by radical socialist anti-american organization ANSWER.

So, in the case of a leftist protest, the protesters are depicted sympathetically, the reporter striving to stress their diversity and normalness so that any reader can see himself or herself in the protests.

And there is no hint of disrespect for the fact that yes, at some point, an email alert went out and people were told where to assemble.

On the other hand, when Obama opponents assemble (and that includes Democrats in good standing), the press strives to paint the protesters as not only weird and possibly dangerous ("carrying swastikas") but also deceptive, in that they're somehow "faking" their anger, or have been paid to be there.

Well, to be fair, some people are in fact paid to be at these protests. Some people belong to a hierarchical organization and are, in fact, part-time paid profession protesters, trouble-makers, and intimidators. Some people know exactly what to do and what to yell and who to push, because they do it every three or four months and it is, effectively, part of their job description.

But these people -- these people -- the media "forgets" to mention.

SEIU & Castor organize a townhall and announce it at the last minute as to reduce opposition voices. The townhall was packed 1/2 w SEIU people.

When supporters of healthcare freedom (ie, anti-BigGovHealth demonstrators) were prevented access to the townhall they began to shout, bang windows & doors.

Some of these people are even told specifically to show up just to provide "cover" to the Congressmen they're trying to support and influence:

Another one of Ms. Jorge’s tips is to “Address the [member of Congress] directly with a positive message: Remember, and they are getting beaten up by right wing zealots in these meetings.”

HCAN Communications Director Jacki Schechner said protecting elected officials who support their favored reforms was necessary given the contentious nature of some town-hall meetings.

Ms. Schechner said conservatives are baiting lawmakers into holding town-hall meetings, “so [lawmakers] can get yelled at and they don’t want to feel unsafe and uncomfortable.”

In fact, the media will go so far as to rewrite their stories to omit damaging admissions made in the first published version. Here, Tampa Bay Online originally included this admission from the SEIU...

Asked earlier today about possible disruption at the event, Kim Diehl of SEIU said, "We're prepared. We have strategies to deal with it if it should come up."

...but then deleted it. After all, violence broke out, and you can't have people getting the wrong -- right -- idea that maybe the "strategies" the SEIU contemplated included physical intimidation.

The media also suddenly stops reporting specific details when those specific details damage the the crowd they're trying to portray as "everyone from grandmothers to students to veterans to mothers pushing strollers:"

Ironically, the only photographic evidence of a physical encounter that the paper published showed a woman, later identified by Henke as local Democratic operative Karen Miracle, shoving an Obama critic in the face.,

Identified by Jon Hencke, a conservative-leaning blogger, not the media. I don't want you to get the impression the MSM pointed this out.

And so it goes on. Union thugs show up at rallies to "provide cover" and engage in rough-house "strategies," but the media makes no mention of it (or, having made mention if it, quickly deletes it from the record).

And meanwhile opponents of Obama are all apparently on the payroll of insurance companies or otherwise illegitimately... um, informed of protests (apparently it's illegal for conservatives to talk to each other and organize themselves) and are furthermore just there to make trouble and carry swastikas.

It is breathtaking. It is breathtaking.

I wanted to write this last night but it was so enormously... breathtaking, it's the only word I can think of, I wasn't able to do so.

I'm still not.

I am literally stunned.

I cannot believe the MSM's new heights of double-standards, hypocrisy, and frankly anti-American behavior -- yes, anti-American behavior; the MSM is attempting to rule that 50+% of the American public is per se illegitimate and entirely excludable from the public debate.

50% + of the public disagrees with them, and there is no getting around that, so they've simply decided to make overt and a binding "rule" what they've long believed silently -- 50% of the public will simply need to be disenfranchised if we're ever to "get things done" and impose our progressive agenda.

Breathtaking.

Semi-Correction: I got a bit careless in conflating the MSM with the Democratic Party. Nancy Pelosi, for example, "reported" people "carrying swatikas" (and suspiciously upscale and stylish swastikas, one imagines, according to Barbara Boxer's "too well dressed to be real citizens" thesis); that wasn't the MSM, per se.

Although they did not demand her evidence for this assertion nor debunk it.

So I did conflate the two bodies a bit, but given that the MSM simply regurgitates talking points directly from DNC faxes, I hope people can forgive me for forgetting the two are, nominally, separate entities.

If they were actually separate entities, one would imagine the media would eventually ask an administration accusing opponents of "astroturfing" about the fact that Obama's campaign manager was the acknowledged "gold standard of Astroturf organizing." And he was called such not by a partisan operative, and not even after he became Barack Obama's chief strategist.

He was called that by Business Week, and his mastery of Astroturf was acknowledged long before Obama was anything more than Bill Ayers' beard.

posted by Ace at 12:53 PM

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