Lesley Stahl Mocks 'Out of Mainstream' GOP; Joe Klein Smears Tea Partiers as Racist
60 Minutes journalist Lesley Stahl is apparently concerned about how such "out of the mainstream" Republicans ran in the 2012 presidential primaries, given what a "centrist" country America is.
Stahl moderated a New York Historical Society discussion on the state of the race. Time journalist Joe Klein appeared at the May 3 event to smear conservative groups as racist. After noting that he attended a Tea Party rally in Arkansas, Klein mocked the organization's fears at this: "And there are Mexican Americans all over the place and their grandchildren are marrying out of their race or becoming gay. The President of the United States doesn't have the good sense to be either black or white and his middle name is Hussein."
He condescendingly added, "And as a New Yorker, I have to say that the things their most afraid of are the things I love the most about the country."
Earlier, Klein described going around the country and discussing the Tea Party with other Americans. He swore they told him, "We know who those folks [Tea Partiers] are. They're the ones who show up at the city council and complain about fluoridation."
In a bewildered tone, Stahl admitted, "I keep hearing we're a centrist country... And yet, you have a Republican Party that is in no way in the center, in terms of their issues. They're clearly out of the mainstream in rolling back...70 years of legislation."
The panel was televised by C-SPAN and video can be found here.
A partial transcript of the event can be found below.
New York Historical Society Forum on 2012 Presidential election
05/12/12
12:07
[on taxing the rich]
LESLEY STAHL [On raising taxes on the rich]: I covered an election two years ago in Washington State. It was an initiative on the ballot to just tax the very- top one percent in the state of Washington. Both Gates- Bill Gates and his father were supporting this initiative to put a surtax on multi-millionaires. And it didn't pass. And I was astonished it didn't pass. But, I mean- Isn't it counter-intuitive.
13:08
[On the left/right divide in America]
STAHL: Okay, here's another issue that I'm confused about. I keep hearing we're a centrist country and that candidates, after they get through their primaries have to pivot back to the center, because that's where we all are. And yet, you have a Republican Party that is in no way in the center, in terms of their issues. They're clearly out of the mainstream on rolling back, on really rolling back 70 years of legislation.
16:13
[On the Tea Party]
JOE KLEIN: And believe me, I go out into the country and talk to actual civilians on road trips and they're all kind of astonished at the power we in the media have given the Tea Party folks. They say, "We know who those folks are."
STAHL: They win elections.
KLEIN: "We know who those folks are. They're the ones who show up at the city council and complain about fluoridation." They- These
STAHL: They're running Congress.
KLEIN: Well- That's in part because if you give people a choice between nothing and more government, they're going to choose nothing.
1 hr and 6 minutes
KLEIN: You know, you go to a Tea Party meeting and you see a forest of people who are scared to death because this country has changed underneath them. You go to a Tea Party meeting in Arkansas, which I did, and all of a sudden they're looking at a country that- where South Asians run all the mini marts and motels. And there are Mexican Americans all over the place and their grandchildren are marrying out of their race or becoming gay. The President of the United States doesn't have the good sense to be either black or white and his middle name is Hussein. The economy sucks. The jobs they used to be able to hold without having a high school diploma have disappeared. And as a New Yorker, I have to say that the things their most afraid of are the things I love the most about the country.
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Comments
Boy, is she gonna be
Submitted by texastommy on Wed, 05/16/2012 - 12:56pm.
Boy, is she gonna be surprised come election day.
How quickly they forget the 2010 election shellacking..........
Submitted by merly1 on Wed, 05/16/2012 - 2:57pm.
Who is out of step? I think the MSM is reading the polls, and getting massive indigestion.
Agreed
Submitted by UltraC on Wed, 05/16/2012 - 3:17pm.
If the Republicans/Tea Party are so "out of the mainstream" and "out of touch" with the voters, what are they worried about?
If Obama and the Dems lose big in November, I won't hold my breath waiting for Stahl and her like-minded peers to report that the center is not where they thought it was.
In the immortal words of Fonzie..
Submitted by ant on Wed, 05/16/2012 - 7:57pm.
...exactamundo!
Orwellian NewSpeak to American dialect
Submitted by neutron on Wed, 05/16/2012 - 6:15pm.
Lezzie Stall said the GOP is "out of the mainstream."
What this really means is that the GOP disagrees with the small circle of friends that Lezzie Stall knows, and the 23.5% of America that agrees with her views.
These are the same people that believe that George "W" Bush and Dick Cheney planned and helped to execute the airplane attacks on the World Trade Center in NYCity and the Pentagon, and a corn field in the mid-west.
Listen, Lezzie, over 70% of America is NOT WITH YOU. You have NO IDEA what "the mainstream" actually is. Claiming to be it IS NOT ENOUGH. You actually need the numbers to be "the mainstream."
Leslie is Stalled, Stunted and Vacant
Submitted by Motormouth KOS on Wed, 05/16/2012 - 1:25pm.
Dear Leslie,
Let's talk about you, shall we?
Your face looks like a clown with your bright red lipstick smeared like chocolate over your chickenlips and the short skirts that serve to show too much of your bony, hideous legs.
Why is this relevant to your craft?
I think it says quite a bit about you, and that goes to the issue of how much we should value anything you think or say. You are 60+, you look like a hag, but you paint yourself like a clown and wear skirts that are inappropriate. I reach two conclusions off this:
1. You have an extreme lack of self-confidence, and/or...
2. You are delusional in thinking you can use this costume to distract us from your insipid commentary.
In either case, your "analysis" is of no interest.
Shut.
Your.
Cakehole.
The Obamination... A crisis leading to a catastrophe..(please donate to MRC)
The problem with Leslie and Joe is their own prejudices/biases.
Submitted by drsamherman on Wed, 05/16/2012 - 1:33pm.
Joe readily admits "as a New Yorker...", giving us a very nice taste of the ignorant arrogance that limits his ability to see that there is life beyond the Hudson. He also mentions his trip to a Tea Party in Arkansas. Follow me, for a moment, what we call in psychiatry the "cognitive bias" theory. While there are many manifestations of this, essentially cognitive bias in Joe's context can be deemed to be a result of his own narrow-minded New Yorker viewpoint. When he talks about going to Arkansas, he forms the opinion that the people attending the tea party event are scared, racist, bigoted, etc. He went there with the pre-existing belief that the Arkansas residents were racist, bigoted and narrow-minded and that he considered himself to be their antithesis. Years of living in New York and maintaining that narrow-minded view of those who live outside the city did not permit him to perceive anything else. He found what he was looking for, whether it was really there or not. His had preconceived notions that could not be broken because his mind, as cognitive bias theory predicted, allowed him only to reach those conclusions which he had already drawn. He relied upon a already false premise to reach a false conclusion. In this case, the two negatives don't make a positive. Instead he affirmed his own narrow-mindedness and bigotry.
As for Leslie, I honestly think she is getting a bit senile. She keeps referring to a mainstream that never really existed except how the former 3-channel media described it. They held all the cards in terms of information transfer, along with the waning influence of newspapers and other print media as electronic media replaced them. She goes back and forth on what this mythical center point in American political life is, yet in the past thirty years it has been anything but central. She keeps yelling about the Republicans being out of the mainstream, yet the mainstream has become polarized and she doesn't have the wherewithal, intellectually or personally, to admit it. It means she either has a cognitive dissonance going on, or she is losing her ability to separate the fictional American political center as she and her colleagues used to be able to dictate versus the reality that the power to control discourse, as she and her colleagues once had, is gone and will not return.
I doubt his story.
Submitted by NeoKong on Wed, 05/16/2012 - 2:10pm.
I doubt he seriously went to any significant Tea Party events but he obviously knows what he would find if he did go to one.
He is speaking in cliches that all Tea Partiers go to rallies and complain about "all dem' damn gayzers and Mexicali's runnin' round' speaking that damn gibberish"
He is telling us what he would see if he went one but since he already knows he need not bother.
He is probably just talking about that documentary Pelosi's daughter showed on Letterman where she found the most toothless fat hillbilliyish uneducated Southerners she could possibly find and portrayed them as the typical white Tea Partier.
He was describing cartoon characters.
From what I have seen from some of these groups they are very organized, educated, and internet savvy. They are not a bunch of rednecks with pickup trucks and gun racks.
I am cracking up at the "Mexicans" part.
Submitted by drsamherman on Wed, 05/16/2012 - 5:34pm.
Joe is a very typical libidiot from New York City. He thinks every Latino who lives south of the Mason-Dixon line MUST be Mexican. He forgets that Latinos come from all over the two American continents and he shows his own ignorance about Latinos. It would be a major insult to call a Venezuelan a Mexican, or a Uruguayan a Chilean and so forth. Contrary to Joe's blatant stupidity, Latinos do hold their national origins to be very important because each is a distinct culture in every possible way. The one thing that unites us as citizens is that first we are Americans. The useless piece of cowchip should just shut his ignorant mouth.
As Tea Party voters continue
Submitted by celator on Wed, 05/16/2012 - 1:39pm.
As Tea Party voters continue cleaning out the radical lefties and RINO's from office, we'll see lots more of this kind of MSM and political attack on the Tea Party, which never "went away", after all. Nov 2012 will indeed be a very big surprise for lots of entrenched politicians.Their internal polls are already sensing the massive "throw the bums out" momentum, and that's why they are in full panic mode.
Obama's motto ought to be "I'm melting!".
who does she think she is
Submitted by Aubrey on Wed, 05/16/2012 - 1:56pm.
Stahl, as a Communist, considers herself mainstream. The difference between her and the true mainstream of America is that the it loves the Nation and her side....not so much.
who does she think she is
Submitted by Aubrey on Wed, 05/16/2012 - 1:58pm.
Stahl, as a Communist, considers herself mainstream. The difference between her and the true mainstream of America is that the it loves the Nation and her side....not so much.
What a stunning moron you are, Klein.
Submitted by ant on Wed, 05/16/2012 - 2:57pm.
"Mexican Americans are all over the place and their grandchildren are marrying outside their race or becoming gay" -Okay, how many times must this simple idea be re-stated? NOONE has a problem with Mexican Americans, or Asian Americans, or their 'grandchildren, or anyone else.....once again, Mr. Klein, we are concerned with 'illegal immigrants'...especially those on the entitlement train, those getting tax refunds for ten family memebers living in Mexico, etc., and those calling for 'Reconquista' (Is that American. Mr. Klein, to want revolution against America in the name of your race?) sigh...so tiring, Mr. Klein.
"The President of the United States doesn't have the good sense to be either black or white.." - Not true, Klein, he's pretty much made up his mind that he's black, and we all know it....what we don't know is his alleged 'genius', whether he's Christian or muslim, how he ended up as the 'turtle on a post',or if he knows simple math.
"The economy sucks. The jobs they used to have without a high school diploma have disappeared. And as a New Yorker these are the things I love about this Country" -uhm, aside from the obvious elitist snobbery of the HS diploma jab, I have to ask if you're really this big an idiot, Klein. THIS is 'what you love about the country'?........a sucking economy and disappearing jobs? Leftists are phenomenally stupid.
No understand
Submitted by bmacdmac on Wed, 05/16/2012 - 3:03pm.
Nope they have no idea of what their talking about. Sadly they believe more taxes will solve everything and never once to stop and think how it will effect any who is retired. A great many of them live on funds that were put away just for retirement but will be taxed at a much higher rate if the Democrats have their way. They simply exclude themselves much the same way as Obama Care would. They care less for the people of this country and it's all about the few.
"...or becoming gay." - Joe
Submitted by forest on Wed, 05/16/2012 - 3:14pm.
"...or becoming gay." - Joe Klein
Homophobe! Get with the times and stay PC Joe Klein. It's not a choice to 'become gay' - Gays are 'born that way'. Try listening to some Lady Gaga or something you square.
Exactly my first reaction
Submitted by CO2Maker on Wed, 05/16/2012 - 3:50pm.
"Becoming gay"? I thought you were "born that way." Drink up all your Ensure, you homophiliac putz. (No, Leslie, that's Klein. You're a homophiliac oma.)
Klein goes on the road and talks to "civilians"?
Submitted by SickofLibs on Wed, 05/16/2012 - 5:44pm.
What unit is he with, and who is his CO?
ha ha ha
Submitted by amyshulk on Thu, 05/17/2012 - 5:45am.
Keep it up libs, have you forgotten the infamous under dog effect?
Ronald Reagan