Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

It is clear that the media hates the Tea Party movement.

When you consider that the media never treated the anti-Iraq War movement with the same venom or even skepticism, you have to wonder why people who oppose excessive taxing and federal spending are feared and loathed by the media more than the rabble that turns out to protest our troops in the field.

Seriously, who are the loons in these two movements?

I just don't understand why so many on the left side of the aisle think the press is not tilted decisively to the left.

UPDATE: Now we're talking "inciting violence" in protests. Funny how that wasn't a crisis of society. Not for our reporting class, anyway. I wonder why? Indeed, I seem to recall a lot of claims that it was downright patriotic to do all that stuff.

UPDATE: I guess guilt by association is ok now, too. So about those Ayers and Wright chaps ...

UPDATE: More memories from the age of patriotic "dissent." And a story from the MSM where the reporter actually remembers those days of protest from the height of the war in Iraq. Amazingly (well, not really amazing), however, the reporter apparently recalls the dissenters with sympathy:

Five years ago, though, it was liberals who were on the defensive. Many liberals said conservatives were trying to cast them as "unpatriotic" simply because they didn't fall into lockstep with President Bush's post-9/11 antiterror policies.

No. I never complained about lack of lockstep. Nor did conservatives who backed the war. Plenty of those conservatives had complaints about the war effort. Neither they nor I were "in lockstep" with Bush. The complaint was that protesters often seemed to side with the enemy. "Dissent" was an effort to lose--not to change policies to win.

Why didn't the article emphasize what the practitioners of patriotic dissent back then actually did and said? Why focus on how the protesters of each age felt? If the Tea Parties start looking like those anti-war hippie/hate-fests, let me know. Otherwise, go whine to someone who cares.