I previously posted about the latest rash of scandalous photos coming out of Afghanistan showing U.S. military atrocities under Obama’s command, and wondering if the media would pick up on it the way they did when it was Bush’s army… Well, here’s a twist I wasn’t expecting: yes, one of the U.S. media, Rolling Stone, [...]
Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for the Atlantic, cast a spotlight on yet another disgustingly overt example of pure bias in the mainstream media, particularly at the anti-Semitic Reuters newswire. He points to a Reuters news item which contains the following despicable sentences: Police said it was a “terrorist attack” — Israel’s term for a Palestinian [...]
In the [sparse] reporting of the Palestinians’ massacre of the Fogel family, several newspapers stand out with their distorted sense of “balance”, i.e., where they feel overwhelmingly uncomfortable describing the barbarity of the Palestinians without at least taking a swipe or two at the Israelis, no matter how patently irrelevant or disgustingly disrespectful it comes [...]
Democrats On The Receiving End Of Their Own Tactics
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For the duration of the Bush years (or a good majority of them), the left had practically turned character assassination into an art form. Countless political cartoons depicting Bush as Hitler, countless citations of countless forms of demonization of Cheney, Gingrich, Limbaugh, and other Republican leaders.
This ploy has served the left well; cut off the head of a distinctive organism, as the Republican party was at one point, and keep the attack up from the grassroots level, giving the Republicans a vague and elusive target for retribution, and you can then watch the party powerlessly thrash around for a bit before finally dying.
PULLQUOTE:
Taking a page from the Democrat playbook, the right has been organizing from the grassroots: tea parties, town hall protests, blogs—all sending the Democrats scrambling for damage control with no real outlet for retribution
What they didn’t count on, though, was that this tactic could just as easily be used against them after the power shift. Had they learned from their own tactics, they would have seen how easy it is to target one individual, or a small handful of individuals, rather than a broad motley collaboration of individuals and groups. They would have then not put so much importance in one single individual or small handful of individuals, but rather left the power in their collective party, in their grassroots, in those individuals and organizations that made them what they are, like moveon.org, Daily Koz, etc., and in their ideas.
Instead, though, they allowed Obama to embody those ideas and to replace those individuals and organizations in terms of power and importance, thereby giving the opponents a new, suddenly cohesive and distinctive target. Now, all the right has to do is to make Obama look bad, or Pelosi, or Waxman… and the Democrat party’s lifeblood quickly starts to drain out uncontrollably. And, that is exactly what is happening now.
What’s more, these attacks have not been coming from a clear target; instead, taking a page from the Democrat playbook, the right has been organizing from the grassroots: tea parties, town hall protests, blogs—all sending the Democrats scrambling for damage control with no real outlet for retribution (the best they could come up with was to label these citizens exercising their patriotic right to protest as “an angry mob”).
This was written up really nicely yesterday in James Taranto’s Best of the Web Today, which was my inspiration for this post.