Help support this page.
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
Did Sean Hannity get out from behind a desk and attend the immigration amnesty rally in Los Angeles to which 500,000 people showed up last year? Did Fox News dedicate around-the-clock coverage and nearly unbearable homerism to the Iraq War protests which over a million Americans attended (150,000 in San Francisco alone) five years ago? Did Glenn Reynolds claim that government needs to Listen Up and Get the Message and Pay Attention and all this shit when 800,000 people (NYPD estimate; protesters claimed over a million, but such estimates are inevitably high) marched in New York City in 2004 to protest the RNC? Do any of these hacks wax patriotic about the millions upon millions of people who did something real and substantive in electing the new President - not standing around bitching, not listening to talk radio millionaires give speeches in a park amidst misspelled, homemade signs - last November? Of course not. Why? Because “those people” aren’t Real Americans. See, Real Americans means white people. Angry, middle-aged, rural or suburban white people.
Protests are the best for collecting insanity, regardless of what is being protested.
excerpt...To find extreme sentiments in Lafayette Park, it wasn't necessary to look for the people with the most eccentric tea-bag-themed costumes. You could just pick a protester at random. "I think Obama's plan is to create a catastrophic failure in our economic system, because then people will get desperate, and then you have the ability for a totalitarian government to move in," said J'Neane Theus, 54, who retired from the Navy and now manages investments. She drove about an hour from Clarksville, Md., battling Washington's horrific rush hour traffic to be an official marshal of the tea party (she had a white hat with "marshal" hand-scrawled in red ink to prove it). Her son, a 19-year-old Marine named Galen, stood next to her in a red, white and blue tie-dyed shirt, holding a sign accusing Barney Frank and other Democrats of treason. "I think that sounds very wacko; Americans don't want to believe that. But we've seen this movie before," the elder Theus said. I asked her where. "How about, well, fascist Italy, under Mussolini -- and look at what happened to him, I would remind Obama of that," she said. "Hitler. Stalin. Socialism has been proven not to work."Another seemingly sedate protester, Brian Smith, a marketer from Greenville, S.C., who was in Washington on business and came by the rally, wandered equally off message. "I love my country and I don't like what's going on," Smith said. "Government -- to be honest with you, and this will probably be misquoted, but on 9/11, I think they hit the wrong building. They should have gone into the Capitol building, hit out, knocked out both sides of the aisle, we'd start from scratch, we'd be better off today." I pointed out that "they" did try to hit the Capitol. "Yeah, I know, they missed," he said. "The wrong sequence. If someone had to go, it should have been the Capitol building. On that day I felt differently, but today that's the way I feel."As hard as Fox News, some big-name conservatives and even the Republican Party tried to make the tea parties out to be a mass movement of mainstream Americans, who -- not even three months into the Obama administration -- had already had enough, the group outside the White House seemed to be coming from the same fringey place. There were somewhere between 500 and 2,000 people in the square throughout the day, which was an impressive turnout considering the weather, but not anywhere near the outpouring of public support that organizers had been promising (or maybe threatening). But almost every sign bore witness that the protester who carried it was well to the right of your average swing voter. "Ameristan -- of the gov'nt, by the gov'nt, for the gov'nt, Barack Hussein Obama," read one placard. "Restore the Republic," pleaded another. "They're nothing but Marxist, socialist Communists in there," shouted a man wearing dark sunglasses, in spite of the rain, as he gestured at the White House. Someone standing alone on the grass, about 30 yards from the stage, had a sign calling Obama "Soetero" -- the name of his Indonesian stepfather -- and telling the president he'd have to get through the guy with the sign if he wanted to destroy the country. But the guy with the sign seemed too busy shouting into his cellphone to stop anyone, much less a president whom nearly two-thirds of the country think is doing a good job....excerpt
