{"id":188584,"date":"2010-08-29T19:18:00","date_gmt":"2010-08-30T00:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/08\/29\/matt-taibbi-has-a-point\/"},"modified":"2010-08-29T19:18:00","modified_gmt":"2010-08-30T00:18:00","slug":"matt-taibbi-has-a-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/08\/29\/matt-taibbi-has-a-point\/","title":{"rendered":"Matt Taibbi has a Point"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I would have invoked <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Der_St%C3%BCrmer\">Der St\u00fcrmer<\/a>, and encouraged invocations of Godwin&#8217;s law, but <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/politics\/matt-taibbi\/blogs\/TaibbiData_May2010\/195177\/83512\">Matt Taibbi is right<\/a>, Fox News, and their fellow travellers are much closer to Radio Rwanda than they are to Julius Streicher&#8217;s oervre:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p>A lot of Tea Party anger is driven by real local issues &#8212; where I  live in central Jersey, for instance, there are a lot of pissed-off  white people crowing over a nutty state supreme court case in which a  Central American drunk driver got off because cops didn&#8217;t explain the  consequences of refusing a breathalyzer in his native Spanish. But  without the constant reinforcement of national 24-hour media, which has  taken these isolated cases and presented them as a coast-to-coast  massive conspiracy, the rage over stories like this would never reach  the levels we&#8217;re seeing.<\/p>\n<p>In fact if you follow <em>Fox News<\/em> and the Limbaugh\/Hannity  afternoon radio crew, this summer\u2019s blowout has almost seemed like<span style=\"font-weight: bold;\"> an  intentional echo of the notorious Radio Rwanda broadcasts \u201cwarning\u201d  Hutus<\/span> that they were about to be attacked and killed by conspiring  Tutsis, broadcasts that led to massacres of Tutsis by Hutus acting in  \u201cself-defense.\u201d A sample of some of the stuff we\u2019ve seen and heard on  the air this year: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>On July 12, Glenn Beck implied that the Obama government was going  to aid the New Black Panther Party in starting a race war, with the  ultimate aim of killing white babies. &#8220;They want a race war. We must be  peaceful people. They are going to poke, and poke, and poke, and our  government is going to stand by and let them do it.&#8221; He also said that  &#8220;we must take the role of Martin Luther King, because I do not believe  that Martin Luther King believed in, &#8216;Kill all white babies.'&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>CNN contributor and Redstate.com writer Erick Erickson, on the  Panther mess: &#8220;Republican candidates nationwide should seize on this  issue. The Democrats are giving a pass to radicals who advocate killing  white kids in the name of racial justice and who try to block voters  from the polls.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>On July 6, the <i>Washington Times<\/i> columnist J. Christian Adams  wrote an editorial insisting that &#8220;top [Obama] appointees have allowed  and even encouraged race-based enforcement as either tacit or open  policy,&#8221; marking one of what would become many assertions by  commentators that the Obama administration was no longer interested in  protecting the rights of white people. &#8220;The Bush Civil Rights Division  was willing to protect all Americans from racial discrimination,\u201d Adams  wrote. \u201cDuring the Obama years, the Holder years, only some Americans  will be protected.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>July 12: Rush Limbaugh says Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder \u201cprotect and represent\u201d the New Black Panther party.<\/li>\n<li>July 28: Rush says Supreme Court decision on 1070 strips Arizonans  of their rights to defend themselves against an \u201cinvasion\u201d: &#8220;I guess the  judge is saying it&#8217;s not in the public interest for Arizona to try to  defend itself from an invasion. I don&#8217;t know how you look at this with  any sort of common sense and come to the ruling this woman came to.\u201d  That same day, Rush says this: &#8220;Muslim terrorists are going to have a  field day in Arizona. You cannot ask them where they&#8217;re from. You cannot  even act like we know where they&#8217;re from. You cannot ask them for their  papers. We can ask you for yours. Not them.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>July 29: The <i>Washington Times<\/i> asks \u201cShould Arizona Secede?\u201d  and says the Supreme Court &#8220;is unilaterally disarming the people of  Arizona in the face of a dangerous enemy\u201d with the aim of creating a  \u201csocialist superstate.\u201d The paper writes: &#8220;The choice is becoming  starkly apparent: devolution or dissolution.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>July 29, <i>Fox and Friends<\/i> host Steve Doocy continues the  Radio Rwanda theme, saying, &#8220;If the feds won&#8217;t protect the people and  Governor Brewer can&#8217;t protect her citizens, what are the people of  Arizona supposed to do?&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div>  There\u2019s nothing in the world more tired than a progressive blogger like  me flipping out over the latest idiocies emanating from the <em>Fox News<\/em>  crowd. But this summer\u2019s media hate-fest is different than anything  we\u2019ve seen before. What we\u2019re watching is a calculated campaign to  demonize blacks, Mexicans, and gays and convince a plurality of  economically-depressed white voters that they are under imminent legal  and perhaps even physical attack by a conspiracy of leftist nonwhites.  They\u2019re telling these people that their government is illegitimate and  criminal and unironically urging secession and revolution.<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>(<span style=\"font-style: italic;\">emphasis mine<\/span>)<\/p>\n<p>There are some deeply evil people out there who are looking to leverage bigotry, racism, and fear for their own profit and power.<\/p>\n<p>Taibbi calls for a boycott, saying that he&#8217;d, &#8220;Like to see at least <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">one<\/span> firm get blown out of business as a consequence of financially supporting the network that is telling America that its black president wants to kill white babies,&#8221; but he misses a part of the dynamic with his call to action: It isn&#8217;t that Fox News, and probably the rest of the media outlets, are driven by cynical economic or political goals, it&#8217;s that many of them, are <a href=\"http:\/\/40yrs.blogspot.com\/2010\/01\/roger-ailes-as-bed-wetting-coward.html\">bed wetting cowards like Roger Ailes<\/a>, and they truly live their lives in terror.<\/p>\n<p>As to the politicians stoking this matter, it&#8217;s pretty clear that they (Newt) are looking at this through the prism of political advantage though.<\/p>\n<p>I won&#8217;t muse on the mental processes of Sarah Palin, that way lies me huddled on the floor, covered in mayonnaise, and gibbering, &#8220;Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I would have invoked Der St\u00fcrmer, and encouraged invocations of Godwin&#8217;s law, but Matt Taibbi is right, Fox News, and their fellow travellers are much closer to Radio Rwanda than they are to Julius Streicher&#8217;s oervre: A lot of Tea Party anger is driven by real local issues &#8212; where I live in central Jersey, &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[967,971,1002,1051,978,1021],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-188584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bigotry","category-civil-rights","category-good-writing","category-hypocrisy","category-politics","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188584"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188584\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}