Tea Parties

The former Tip O'Neill staffer-turned-political analyst who'd never heard of congressional insider trading until President Obama mentioned it in last week's State of the Union  insists he is unaware of the Bush Derangement Syndrome of many on the Left during the former president's tenure in the Oval Office. What's more, that's not his bias talking, it's just objective reality.

"There's a real level of national hatred of the president that I hadn't seen before. Certainly not under Clinton or under Dubya," MSNBC Hardball host Chris Matthews argued on WMAL radio's Morning Majority program this morning. "The hatred, the Hitler mustaches, all that stuff, I haven't seen that before," Matthews added, prompting co-hosts Mary Katharine Ham and Bryan Nehman to incredulously retort that, no, in fact, the Left used Hitler comparisons against the former president.

So a guy whose contract was terminated by NPR on a phony pretext for not toeing the liberal line enough, including writing a book ("Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It") which indicted the modern civil-rights movement for, well, undermining Black America, now appears to want eliminate "Constitution" and "Founding Fathers" from the lexicon of Republican candidates -- and possibly, it would appear, from political discussion in general -- because, well, they're racial code words. How ironic.

That is what Juan Williams outrageously claims in his latest column at the Hill today (bold is mine):

Right from the start, Trip Gabriel’s account Wednesday of Newt Gingrich’s campaign ride through Florida cast a overdramatic and condescending color on conservatives: “Gingrich Tries to Lure Tea Party Support in Florida.”

CNN's Soledad O'Brien would not brand Saul Alinsky as a leftist radical, and neither would she say President Obama was influenced by his writings – but she had no problem tying Alinsky's controversial beliefs to the Tea Party movement on Monday's Starting Point.

As a community organizer in Chicago, Barack Obama mirrored the tactics Alinsky laid out in his book "Rules for Radicals" – which featured a tribute to the devil Lucifer, "the very first radical." GOP candidate Newt Gingrich has recently tied Obama's name with Alinsky, sparking a media debate over the matter.

Given the underlying story, the following headline to a Thursday story at the Detroit Free Press is either a big mistake or a deliberate attempt to focus blame where it absolutely does not belong: "Man on probation, fined for role in tea party scam." Excuse me while I question whether the Freep deserves the benefit of the doubt.

L.L. Brasler's story is really about how the second of two Democratic Party operatives has been sentenced for running an electoral scam with sham candidates to hurt Republican and conservatives and to blunt the impact of the Tea Party movement:

Diversity, New York Times style. “Bipolar America,” the cover feature for the Sunday New York Times Book Review, compiles reviews of three new books on Tea Party-related politics, one reviewed by veteran liberal journalist Michael Kinsley, two others judged by Timothy Noah, veteran liberal journalist for The New Republic.

Noah says Geoffrey Kabaservice, author of the strongly titled Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party: From Eisenhower to the Tea Party, "argues persuasively that Republican moderates remained a powerful, even dominant, political force well into the 1970s." But, Noah argued:

Times Watch’s end-of-year awards issue celebrates the best of the worst quotes that appeared in the paper or were uttered by Times reporters and columnists during 2011.

The New York Times spent much of the year in pro-Obama defense mode, excoriating the Tea Party and conservative opposition to Obama's agenda. Yet the paper found one movement it could embrace wholeheartedly – the leftist campouts known as Occupy Wall Street. And sometimes - as when China-loving columnist Tom Friedman spouted, "If this were China they would have walked to the game in the snow, and doing calculus along the way," Times journalism was just too ridiculous to take seriously. Paul Krugman made his usual sterling showing as well, using the tragedies of 9-11 and the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords to attack conservatives.

This year there were three categories of bias:

NPR marked Christmas morning by whacking at the Tea Party. NPR anchor Audie Cornish handed over her Weekend Edition Sunday microphone to American Enterprise Institute scholar Norman Ornstein, who gave the Tea Party a B if the goal was to “try and keep government from functioning,” but in “actually trying to make things happen in a constructive fashion, we’re down in the D-minus level, and that’s being generous in the Christmas season.”

Ornstein was much happier a year ago. On the morning of December 23, 2010, he told NPR’s David Welna the country had the “most productive lame-duck session” since the 1940s and Welna added “Ornstein says this lame-duck session was a fitting climax for an amazingly productive 111th Congress.”

During a roundtable discussion on CBS's Face the Nation on Sunday, after asserting that in past years divided government had "produced some really remarkable pieces of legislation," correspondent Nancy Cordes blamed the presence of Tea Party Republicans for less congressional success in enacting legislation this year. (Video below)

Anchor Bob Schieffer raised the difficulty Congress has had in 2011 in making accomplishments, prompting Cordes to observe:

Time magazine's editor-in-chief Richard Stengel was asked on Sunday's Reliable Sources to respond to NewsBusters criticizing the inclusion of the Occupy Wall Street movement into Time magazine's "Person of the Year" award, given to "The Protester." In contrast, the Tea Party which helped the Republicans win a landslide election victory in 2010 earned only runner-up status in Time that year.

CNN host Howard Kurtz asked Stengel straight-up about criticisms of the magazine's bias: "Now, some of the criticism of this cover selection comes from the right, the conservative site, NewsBusters saying, 'Time is so liberal that it could not consider the Tea Party protest as a 'Person of the Year' entry, but that's not true with Occupy Wall Street.' Your response?" [Video below the break.]

Appearing as a guest on Wednesday's Piers Morgan Tonight on CNN ,as he discussed the Occupy Wall Street protests, former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw warned that a "class war" could develop unless "income inequality" is addressed. Brokaw:

"You know, we have a saying in the military: You don't receive flak unless you're over the target," retired Army colonel Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) told NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell in an interview earlier this week.

"I think that too often on the Republican side of the House" that conservatives have been gun-shy about "taking the flak" from the liberal media for their conservatism. "When you start to water down your message, when you start to say I can maybe get the other side to really like me, then you get yourself in trouble" and the liberal media are "going to hate you anyway," West added. [see video of the interview embedded below the page break]

Kate Zernike, whose reporting on the Tea Party for the New York Times is often hostile, on Wednesday devoted a full story to an outside poll, from the Pew Research Center, claiming falling support for the Tea Party “may be dragging down the Republican Party heading into a presidential election year." (“Support for Tea Party Falls In Strongholds, Polls Show.”)

Yet the Times has ignored recent polls from firms it has cited in the past showing a sharp decline in support for the left-wing Occupy Wall Street, which show OWS's public appeal well below that of the Tea Party. (By contrast, the Times trumpeted its own earlier poll showing favorable results for Occupy Wall Street on the October 26 front page.)

Kevin Boyle reviewed two new books on the Ku Klux Klan for the Sunday Times Book Review under the heading “The Not-So-Invisible Empire.” Boyle, an Ohio State University history professor and frequent contributor to the Times Book Review, compared the Tea Party to the Ku Klux Klan. Boyle's review started and ended offensively:

Bill Randall is a candidate for Congress, running in North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District.  Mr. Randall also happens to be an African-American.  In early October, Randall had a campaign billboard vandalized with a spray-painted, vulgar phallic symbol, accompanied by the letters "KKK”. It was the kind of message that would normally launch the media into full-blown racial apoplexy. 

One small problem.  Bill Randall is a Tea Party Conservative Republican.

Despite filing a report with the Wake County Sheriff’s Department on October 9, holding a press conference regarding the incident, issuing a press release, and having a local news report linked at the Breitbart.tv website, nobody in major media outlets in Raleigh have covered the story.

Tea Party beat reporter Kate Zernike was back on the reporting scene in a Thursday afternoon “Caucus” post, “A Tea Party ‘Hearing’ in the Senate That Wasn’t.” Zernike surely used up her monthly quota of sarcastic quote marks in this snarky post mocking the unofficial hearings (sorry, “hearings”) held by congressmen who support the Tea Party.

By contrast, Times reporter Scott Shane was quite respectful of an unofficial hearing held on June 16, 2005 by a far-left anti-war fringe aimed at impeaching President George W. Bush.

This one's utterly predictable, but still needs to be noted.

As Edwin Mora at CNS News reported on Wednesday, California Congresswoman Maxine Waters, after a Congressional Progressive Caucus-sponsored event at the Capitol, “when asked to comment ... about the deaths and crimes that have occurred around Occupy protests being held across the country, … said 'that’s life and it happens.'" What's also happened, or actually not happened, is that the Associated Press and the New York Times have failed to note what Waters said, as shown in the following search results on her first name at AP and on her full name (not in quotes) at the Times:

Chris Matthews, who has repeatedly denounced the "hateful" Tea Partiers and once compared them to the Muslim Brotherhood, admitted on Thursday that the conservative protesters have "a point." The admission came during an attempt to suggest that both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street have failings. [MP3 audio here.]

The Hardball host conceded, "I may surprise some people with this, but both of the movements, right as well as left, had a point, a good point to make. Both of them. Government is spending too much money. If you mean it's spending more than people are willing to finance in taxes." Could it be that Matthews is souring on the Occupy crowd, now that there are reports of defecating on cars and rapes?

In a recent interview, Time magazine's Richard Stengel asked former President Bill Clinton why he was not a Tea Party "hero." Stengel's "criteria" were that Clinton oversaw a balanced budget and cuts to the rate of growth of the federal government.

However, as CNN's Wolf Blitzer pointed out to Stengel on Thursday, Clinton did so at the behest of a Republican Congress. [Video below the break. Click here for audio.]

The New York Times continues to treat toublemakers at Occupy Wall Street as a fringe minority, but the Tea Party was "responsible for the behavior of people" at their rallies.

Sunday’s Metro section led with an above-the-fold look at the state of Occupy Wall Street as winter approaches from reporters Cara Buckley and Colin Moynihan, “A Protest Reaches a Crossroads.” They briefly noted the violence and criminal behavior at Zuccotti Park while providing plenty of room for excuse-making on the part of OWS, something reporter Kate Zernike most assuredly did not do for the Tea Party in her 2010 book on the movement, “Boiling Mad." Instead, Zernike suggested the entire movement should hold itself responsible for unsubstantiated allegations of racial slurs at a rally.

As he accumulates his "Occupy Rap Sheet" over at BigJournalism.com, John Nolte has made some excellent points about the nature of the press's coverage which should not be missed. His incident count is up to 151. It will certainly grow based on more recent events which haven't yet made it to his compilation (this is just a sample): A $10 million arson arrest in Fort Collins, Colorado (really; HT The Other McCain); pushing a 78 year-old woman down a flight of stairs (she required a hospital visit); and a lack of basic safety so pervasive at Zuccotti park, the headquarters of the "movement, that "protesters put up (a) women-only tent to prevent sexual assaults."

Nolte's count is clearly an understatement of all that is actually happening. He also notes that the nature of the press's coverage serves to understate the disorder- and violence-based inclinations of the Occupiers (internal link is in original; bolds are mine):

In the New York Times's Thursday Styles section, contributor Helaine Olen talked to some liberal Manhattanites who took their children to Zuccotti Park to enrich them with “teachable moments” (i.e. using them as political props) and "to enlighten them on matters ranging from income inequality to the right to protest":“For Children’s Sake, Taking to the Streets.”

On Wednesday's Early Show, CBS's Erica Hill downplayed the instances of violence and bigotry found at Occupy Wall Street protests as simply "the actions of a few," after GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich denounced the "frightening level of anti-Semitism in some of these gatherings." Hill questioned Gingrich over his supposedly "pretty outspoken words" about the left-leaning movement [audio clip available here; video available below the jump].

The anchor raised the demonstrations towards the end of her interview of the former House speaker, after Gingrich claimed that "people are pretty sick of the lack of civility...they watch Washington, they watch gridlock, [and] they watch a president who's more comfortable on [Jay] Leno than he is in trying to govern the country." Hill replied that "people, too, are fed up, as we know- we see a lot of this with the Occupy Wall Street protests. The latest CBS News/New York Times poll finds that 46% of Americans say that their views reflect a sentiment that most Americans share."

“Almost half of the public” thinks the left-wing Occupy Wall Street movement accurately reflects the views of Americans, claims the New York Times in Wednesday’s off-lead,
“New Poll Finds A Deep Distrust of Government – Anxiety Over Economy – Concentration of Wealth Seen as Key Issue in a Volatile Time.”

Jeff Zeleny and Megan Thee-Brenan played OWS approval high, in paragraph three.

CNN's Piers Morgan claimed on Wednesday that "elements" of the Tea Party are "racist" in an interview with GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain. "You all know there are elements of the Tea Party who are racist," he insisted to Cain.

Morgan again stated it as a matter of fact, in his question to Cain: "How do you deal with that element in the Tea Party that is overtly racist?"

The CNN host also cited black liberals Harry Belafonte and Morgan Freeman as bona-fide experts about the matter, and pressed Cain to respond to them and other "leading black Americans" who think the movement is racist. [Video below the break.]

New York Times reporters Jennifer Steinhauer and Steven Yaccino unfurled a hit piece (accompanied by a severely unflattering photo) on Rep. Joe Walsh of Illinois, conservative freshman congressman and Tea Party favorite, on the front of Tuesday’s National section: “G.O.P.’s Freshman’s Fiscal Message Clashes With His Finances.” It’s not the first time the paper has gone after a Tea Party conservative on such personal terms.

Four days after romanticizing how the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement "star[ed] down the NYPD," Time magazine's Ishaan Tharoor set out on the magazine's Global Spin blog to explain "Why You Shouldn't Compare Occupy Wall Street to the Tea Party."

Tharoor essentially argued that the "occupiers" were a global youth movement, that it was populated by the "have nots," and that, unlike the Tea Party, "Occupy Wall Street still believes in politics and government."