Nerve damage
March 18, 2010, 9:22 pm
Posted by David Gibson
The degeneration of the political/populist right has provided no end of hilarious and pathetic spectacles that could provide fodder for every other blog post — and often do over at Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, which is where I just saw this. I usually resist, but this video by the Columbus Dispatch of a Tea Party rally and the treatment of a man who says he has Parkinson’s and wants health care reform is really shocking. They make drunken frat boys look like angels. What the hell is happening to us?
David, you entirely overlooked the fact that one of the Tea Party’s contingent gave the man two bills for just sitting there doing nothing. What kind of fair and balanced reporting is this?
David
You should have resisted.
If you would like, I can link a score or so youtube videos of the “degeneration” of the political left with union thugs intimidating senior citizens who had the timerity to protest the president’s health care plan or Obama supporters saying some astounding stupid things.
This kind of garbage does no one any credit. Particularly if it is couched as “evidence” of your opponent’s “degeneration.”
Shall we have a war of the youtube videos?
Knock yourself out, Sean.
Now that the CBO numbers came out today (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/cbo_health-care_reform_bill_cu.html), I hope all the scaremongers will publicly apologize for the ways they have lied throughout this whole process, but I’m not holding my breath waiting for them to now speak truth.
Palin especially ought to apologize (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5HgfwPtxLw)
Trying again. Let’s see if the links work.
Now that the CBO numbers came out today (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/cbo_health-care_reform_bill_cu.html ), I hope all the scaremongers will publicly apologize for the ways they have lied throughout this whole process, but I’m not holding my breath waiting for them to now speak truth.
Palin especially ought to apologize (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5HgfwPtxLw )
Rick
The CBO “scored” a description of the potential bill provided by the Democrat leadership. And they have to accept the assumptions in it – oh like taxing the bejeebers out of some taxpayers investments won’t result in lower growth and therefore lower revenue in the future. There will be no actual CBO score until after a vote.
They even admit its little more than a WAG.
On the videos, rather than waste time you can search on “union thug” and “Obama supporters” on youtube and find plenty of fodder.
The point is that I would have thought better of this blog. Stupid people do stupid things on both sides of this issue. Showing a group of angry people hardly demonstrates the “degeneration” of an entire group of people.
I agree that advocacy tactics (by both the left and the right) seem to have degenerated in recent years and the level of personal venom seems to have increased. But, I’m actually finding myself more disturbed about the priorities of some advocacy groups rather than their tactics.
Yesterday, I received a beleaguered-sounding blast e-mail from the Girl Scouts of Eastern Pennsylvania refuting attacks on the organization from a group called C-FAM, a Catholic advocacy group of some kind. Apparently C-FAM was unhappy with a conference co-sponsored by the UN and the International Girls Scouts organization; C-FAM says one thing happened, Scouts say another.
I just find it very hard to believe that the Girl Scouts are high enough up on the list of anyone’s social evils to merit being targeted in an organized campaign. What’s going with all of this?
Irene, the Girl Scouts, look innocent with their little cookie boxes and badges, but, unlike the Boy Scouts, they do not have any restrictions on participation by homosexual individuals. Plus anybody who participates in anything involving the UN is suspect of one-world-government sympathies in the minds of some.
I know nothing of C-FAM, however, or their specific beefs.
Sean makes a thoughtful point, but you have to admit this is hard to watch.
We had a Tea Party here in our little village last summer. It was an interesting (and maddening) mix of thoughtful conservatism (they did a fundraiser for the school) and self-serving know-nothing rants. The chief organizer is a guy in the next town over is trying to block our town’s new police and fire station, because building the new facility will raise taxes on his rental properties in our town.
These people have always been around. They have always represented a dark undercurrent in American society. The Klan in the 1920s, The civil rights opponents in the 1960s. The tea partiers today. The rhehotic is the same – emotional, tinged with an undercurrent of violence; passionate denunciations against the “other”; dire warnings of “socialism” and other un-American ideologies. And the underlying problem is a religious one – they embody a false theology centered on culural Calvinism and American exceptionalism. The genius of Obama is that he has a knack for drawing these people out into the open.
“Now that the CBO numbers came out today…I hope all the scaremongers will publicly apologize for the ways they have lied throughout this whole process, but I’m not holding my breath waiting for them to now speak truth.”
Why is that? What do the CBO numbers mean?
I’m not sure what the news value is in a couple guys at a rally thinking someone was pretending to have Parkinson’s disease as part of a publicity stunt. What I did find sad was the shoddiness of the journalism. Based on all my years in the business, you either got the story, or you ain’t got the story. If all you got is “apparent” and “well, he says he does”, then you ain’t got the story–and you shouldn’t go with it.
If all you got is “apparent” and “well, he says he does”, then you ain’t got the story–and you shouldn’t go with it.
Mark Proska,
I agree. You have a perfect right to harass someone who claims to have Parkinson’s disease unless he has a doctor’s note to prove it.
The message of the protesters was “no more handouts.” It would seem to me that they did indeed believe the man had Parkinson’s, and they didn’t want their tax dollars to pay for his care.
“I agree. You have a perfect right to harass someone…”
David–
I generally don’t respond to your comments since you seem to take great pleasure in knocking down the straw men you set up, and I don’t want to ruin your fun. But when you are tempted to put words in my mouth as part of setting up your straw men, I must request that you refrain.
BTW, Mark Proska, what business were you in or are you in? Seems like it’s time for some disclosure — just so we’re all above board.
I suspect that most of the Teapartiers are people in that lower half of the intelligence curve who did not get an education that is good enough for them to participate intelligently in a democracy. It must be extremely frustrating and scary when you are told from infancy to work hard and save some for a rainy day and then be told that we are about to go bankrupt so the thing to do is spend money and raise taxes. On the surface that really does look contradictory.
Until this country is willing to spend enough money to educate all the people well, including the slow folks, this democracy is not going to work. But education of the less gifted doesn’t seem to be on anybody’s priority list..
Mr. Proska –
Linkedin has a Mark Proska who is a director at Cigna (one of my insurance companies). Would that be you??
(What’s an internet for, anyway.)
Ah, Ann, you elitist! Actually, Tea Partiers are better educated and wealthier than most Americans, by a good bit. Not that surprising, actually.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/24/opinion/la-oe-ellis25-2010feb25
David Brooks also made the analogy of Tea Partiers to counter-culturalists of the 60s, and that has seemed right to me.
Yes, David, that makes a lot of sense. So I take back what I said — except the part about the less gifted being short-changed in the schools.
But I’m not an elitist. While I can handle some non-arithmetic concepts rather well, numbers are my downfall. I can’t keep my checkbook straight. I gave up balancing it years ago. If you think it isn’t humiliating to have to go to a nice lady at the bank for help with your bank statement, you’re wrong. So I know what it feels like to be bad at some kind of thinking. I also know that doesn’t make me a worthless person, Plus I know that the psychologists have established that slower people, if we get the right sort of personalized education, can learn a very great deal and that we will retain what we learn just as long as those in the upper quartiles do. Democracy is not impossible, contrary to what the elitists think.
I should also note that logic teachers know that many very smart people are just as prone as lesser lights to confuse what they *know* and what they *feel*. It is very difficult to get some people to see, even very smart ones, that having negative feelings and evaluations about something is not the same thing as having negative *information* about it. That has been extremely apparent in our health care bill discussion. Many, if not most people, don’t see that many, many words have affective content besides cognitive content, and so they go merrily on insulting others right and left. So incivility is endemic on the net. Smart people can be dumb.
Weird.
Mr. Proska,
In defense of shoddy journalism, here’s an interview with that Parkinson’s-afflicted gentleman: http://tinyurl.com/yb7d9t5
Did you all see the video of the Tea Party Patriot, an African American, who was beaten by a group of public union thugs at a rally in St. Louis? Yes, just a leeeeetle bit worse than these louts did to this guy. The St. Louis fellow ended up in the hospital. Oh yeah, they were heard to call him the N-word. I must have missed that here at dotcommonweal.
Josue–
Thanks for the update. I’m not familiar with TPM. Do you know where they fit in on the political spectrum assuming, say, the NYT is a 1 and Rush Limbaugh is a 10?
So Mark Proska, you going to let us know who you are?
I’m still waiting for Sean’s links. Sean?
TPM is left of 4.
Jimmy–
Thanks. From reading TPM’s telephone interview, I kinda suspected that.
Um, Mark Proska, you playing hide-and-seek? Tag, you’re it.
Wonder why it is that liberals never get quizzled on their backgrounds and affiliations. Such a silly kind of pressure.
It is silly, Kathy, and a game some of the conservatives here — like Mark Proska — insist on playing. Except of course it is a one-way demand — all reveal on one side, while none from the accusers. Not pretty.
Sorry. I must have missed that. When did Mark Proska demand to know your (and Ann’s) business affairs?
David G–
I might have replied sooner but it never occurred to me you were being serious—my apologies. My experience in journalism is, trust me, nothing to write home about—I thought that was obvious. In fact, that was—perhaps too obscurely—my point. You don’t have to know anything about journalism to know that the Columbus Dispatch did not have the story, and it was sloppy of them to present things the way they did. If you thought I was presenting an argument “from authority”, I can assure you I was not. Wasn’t that clear from the cold steel logic I used to support my conclusion?
Happy spring!
Nice dodge, Mark Proska.
David–
I’m sorry you find yet another of my replies unsatisfying.
I only find it peculiar that you should be so insistent on calling out others to be transparent and accountable in acknowledging their biases and questioning their integrity if they are not — to you satisfaction — yet you give yourself a pass on those same criteria. It’s not unsatisfying; it’s creepy.