Jim Miller
Well-Known Member
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/election-2012/wp/2012/08/29/rnc-animals-incident-inexcusable
They say you reap what you sow. For over half a century now the Republican Party has cultivated conservatives in its ranks and appealed to the worst conservative prejudices. Nowadays, “Republicans” are likely to be sexist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-intellectual, anti-government Christian fundamentalists. That is the crop which the Republican Party of yore planted in its fields.
It’s the “racist” (and perhaps “sexist”) part that makes the headlines today. At the Republican National Convention, a couple of attendees threw peanuts at a black, female cameraperson for CNN. Then they shouted at her, “This is how we feed animals!”
CNN used to be the premiere cable news network, but today they’re a vestige of their golden past. Their problem is that, because they perceive Fox-News as right-slanted and MSNBC as left-slanted, they have decided to be “center-slanted.” They treat every controversy as having two (and only two) sides, and they treat both those sides as being equally valid. Thus CNN prevents itself from ever reporting conclusively on anything controversial, which is pretty much all of politics and anything else that politics cares to touch, such as science. MSNBC actually is left-slanted, but because in the present-day United States the truth often happens to coincide with a U.S. left-slant, MSNBC sometimes ends up reporting things truthfully despite its own bias. Fox News never does, and CNN hardly ever does either, because they keep giving credence to the crazies out there.
I wouldn’t be surprised if their response to this little debacle would be to have someone from the NAACP come on one of their shows, along with the attendees who threw the peanuts (or their Tea Party supporters), to have a “proper debate” on the issue and “present both sides of the story.”
In case you were wondering, the conservative reaction to all of this has been to speculate that the peanut-throwers were Democratic plants.
(Get it? “Plants”? I figured I'd end on a light note.)
[This post has received an infraction.]
They say you reap what you sow. For over half a century now the Republican Party has cultivated conservatives in its ranks and appealed to the worst conservative prejudices. Nowadays, “Republicans” are likely to be sexist, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, anti-intellectual, anti-government Christian fundamentalists. That is the crop which the Republican Party of yore planted in its fields.
It’s the “racist” (and perhaps “sexist”) part that makes the headlines today. At the Republican National Convention, a couple of attendees threw peanuts at a black, female cameraperson for CNN. Then they shouted at her, “This is how we feed animals!”
CNN used to be the premiere cable news network, but today they’re a vestige of their golden past. Their problem is that, because they perceive Fox-News as right-slanted and MSNBC as left-slanted, they have decided to be “center-slanted.” They treat every controversy as having two (and only two) sides, and they treat both those sides as being equally valid. Thus CNN prevents itself from ever reporting conclusively on anything controversial, which is pretty much all of politics and anything else that politics cares to touch, such as science. MSNBC actually is left-slanted, but because in the present-day United States the truth often happens to coincide with a U.S. left-slant, MSNBC sometimes ends up reporting things truthfully despite its own bias. Fox News never does, and CNN hardly ever does either, because they keep giving credence to the crazies out there.
I wouldn’t be surprised if their response to this little debacle would be to have someone from the NAACP come on one of their shows, along with the attendees who threw the peanuts (or their Tea Party supporters), to have a “proper debate” on the issue and “present both sides of the story.”
In case you were wondering, the conservative reaction to all of this has been to speculate that the peanut-throwers were Democratic plants.
(Get it? “Plants”? I figured I'd end on a light note.)
[This post has received an infraction.]
