Who Weaponized Racism? Part IV

It is still worth repeating, and will remain worth repeating until the culprits come clean. The far left weaponized racism.

And MSNBC has been at the very forefront of it.

Consider this particular episode from earlier this year when Dylan Ratigan exploded on Tea Party Express spokesman Mark Williams, demanding that Williams answer a question about whether or not the Tea Party accepts "racist and Nazis".



Not getting the kind of answer he wanted -- instead being challenged about NBC's record with anti-Semitism -- Ratigan screamed himself hoarse while Williams tried, in vain, to give the following answer:

"We don't embrace racism."

Ratigan then entitled himself to a comically self-righteous flourish after cutting off Williams' microphone so that he couldn't answer the question.

But Ratigan must have simply forgotten himself.



After all, Dylan Ratigan was on MSNBC's Morning Meeting when the network aired selectively-edited footage of a man with an AR-15 assault rifle at an Arizona town hall meeting at which President Barack Obama was present.

The suggestion was that a racially-motivated assassination attempt on Obama was imminent.

The problem was that the man pictured on screen is actually a black man. In fact, he was interviewed by CNN on the very same day.



When Spencer Ackerman suggested, via the Journolist news group, that liberals arbitrarily accuse conservatives of racism in order to deter them from criticizing Barack Obama and his policies, it was one thing. Ackerman was at the time employed by the Washington Independent, and would later go on to be employed by Wired, where he continues to enjoy employment despite his obvious contempt for journalistic ethics.

But it's clear that MSNBC has been following Ackerman's play book and they aren't, by any means, alone.

The weaponization of racism has, in fact, been pervasive and well orchestrated across a variety of forums across a variety of media. Those complicit -- as evidenced by Dylan Ratigan, Janeane Garofalo, Spencer Ackerman and others -- have been utterly shameless about the socially irresponsible and ideologically selfish things they have done in the name of politics.

It's time for those who aspire to being responsible voices among the left to start denouncing the weaponization of racism. Given the stakes, they cannot afford to wait indefinitely.

The Assassination Card

The left is still playing it

With the scope of dissent against US President Barack Obama continuing to intensify, the political elements that worked so hard to win his election have slowly, over time, awakened to the full extent of the nightmare that is confronting them.

On the domestic front, at least, Obama seems well on his way to becoming every bit as unpopular as George W Bush.

There's an irony in this. Many of those who campaigned on Obama's behalf went to some rather bizarre lengths to pretend that, in defeating Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, that they were actually beating Bush. Now Obama is facing the same domestic political troubles that a political environment as polarized as that of the United States inevitably produces for any leader.

The results haven't been pretty.

To date, the definitive response of Obama's supporters has been to play a series of cards. The most prominent of these has been the race card, in which those opposing Obama have been accused of being racists, regardless of whether or not their words or actions actually justify the charge.

Another has been the "assassination card".

An interesting case in point has been that of Chris Broughton.

Broughton first began to flirt with international fame when he committed the inherently foolish act of showing up to an Arizona Town Hall meeting at which Obama would be speaking with an AR-15 assault rifle. It wasn't this act alone, however, which garnered him infamy.

It was, rather, the efforts of MSNBC's Contessa Brewer to use footage of him to suggest that an assassination attempt on the President may be imminent.

"There are questions about whether this has racial overtones," Brewer insisted. "I mean, here you have a man of color in the presidency and white people showing up with guns."

The ironic point was that Broughton is actually African American, and that the footage of him was very selectively edited to obscure this fact. This may have gone entirely undetected if not for the presence of CNN reporters at the same event, who interviewed Broughton.

But the left was unwilling to surrender the assassination card, even under the condition of discredit. So the left-wing machine went back to work, and they discovered that Broughton is a member of Reverend Steven Anderson's congregation.

Anderson will be remembered as the individual who delivered the contemptible "spiritual warfare" sermon in which he prayed for Obama's death.

Some left-wing commentators have claimed that the incident is evidence of how "conservative Christian hate speech" (evidently without considering that "Christian hate speech" is an oxymoron) could incite assassination attempts against the President.

Yet those individuals have clearly chosen to overlook the fact that, regardless of how contemptible Anderson's definitively un-Christian sermon is (and it most certainly is), Anderson also called for Obama to die of natural causes.

"I don't want him to be a martyr, we don't need another holiday," Anderson later explained. "I'd like to see him die, like Ted Kennedy, of brain cancer."

Broughton would later state that he "concurs" with Anderson's words.

Certainly, this confirms that race doesn't form the basis of the hatred Anderson worships.

One may recall that, to Contessa Brewer, race was initially supposed to be at the heart of the alleged assassination plots against Obama. Until it turned out that it wasn't race. Then, it was religion.

All of this without an assassination plot in the first place.

But this, it seems, may all be immaterial. What matters most to many of these activists isn't whether or not such claims are truthful, but whether or not they can use them to help demonize any conservative opposition whatsoever, regardless of whether that comes from extreme conservative elements -- like Reverend Steven Anderson -- or from more moderate conservative elements that are simply alarmed about the direction in which Barack Obama is trying to take their country.

The assassination card, as any rational individual knows, isn't about fear of an assassination. It's about fear of dissent, and about doing anything possible to marginalize it.

Yes, This Spanking Will Continue...

...Until these children smarten up

Last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart addressed the matter of the controversy surrounding the Obama administration and its recent comments on Fox News.

"What I think is fair to say about Fox -- and certainly it's the way we view it -- is that it really is more a wing of the Republican Party," White House communications director Anita Dunn had told CNN. "They take their talking points, put them on the air; take their opposition research, put them on the air. And that's fine. But let's not pretend they're a news network the way CNN is."

This, of course, has attracted a great deal of scrutiny regarding MSNBC and its cozy relationship with the Democratic Party and the Obama administration.

There's very little question in the minds of most people that MSNBC has been acting as the pro-Democrat version of Fox News. But some people want to pretend otherwise.

The Daily Show clip, featured only in part above (and more on this later) sheds some light on not only how Fox News has synergized its news and opinion reporting, but how many other news networks do as well.

As his case study, Stewart uses insipid the school song controversy that erupted last year.

The story was drug up months later by Matt Drudge, at which point Fox took up the issue.

The story was reported in the morning during the network's news cycle, then commented upon later by the likes of Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck (Alan Colmes was not available for comment).

The next news cycle -- back to reporting again -- would then report upon the commentary offered by the network's pundits.

Curiously enough, this is where the Media Matters video ends. But the segment continued after the portion that Media Matters chooses to show viewers, and what followed was every bit as enlightening -- about MSNBC -- as the rest was about Fox.

The segment continued with a CNN interview with White House advisor Valerie Jarret. When asked if Fox News was biased, Jarret explained that "of course Fox News is biased." But when asked about whether or not MSNBC was biased, Jarret began to soften up and back off. "I don't want to just generalize all Fox is biased or that another station is biased."

There may have been a reason why Jarret suddenly became so reluctant to declare any news network to be biased. After all, Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow had recently met privately with US President Barack Obama. When challenged on this, Olbermann essentially defended the meeting as koscher because George W Bush had done the same thing with Fox News personalities.

Olbermann had previously criticized the cozy relationship between Fox News and the Bush administration.

Stewart suggested that Jarret should of said "of course MSNBC is biased, but they agree with us so we're not fighting with them."

When Jarret later suggested that the administration was going to "speak truth to power", Stewart could only muster an incredulous "what the fuck!?" (Watch it, Stewart, that's our bit. I'm looking at you too, Olbermann. -ed) It's almost as if the Obama administration doesn't understand that they're the power.

But there's a reason why Media Matters cut the clip before getting to this point. They decline to report on MSNBC's ideological excesses because they share MSNBC's bias.

For example, Media Matters makes no mention whatsoever of Contessa Brewer's own adventures in creating the news. Brewer's famed race-baiting episode in which MSNBC edited news footage to conceal the race of a man with a gun is not mentioned on the Media Matters website.

One of the two mentions of Brewer from August 2009 -- when the incident occurred -- however, provides a telling point about Media Matters and their complaint that Fox News creates its own news.

In the story, Brewer interjects her own political views into an interview concerning an op/ed article written by Nancy Pelosi. Brewer's interview addresses complaints by Fox News that Pelosi was accusing opponents of health care reform of being un-American.

In this particular sense, Fox News commentators don't just create Fox's news. They also create MSNBC's.

From a marketing perspective, this actually makes perfect sense. As Stewart notes, Fox News has news anchors, but nobody knows who they are. They aren't marketable. The real bread and butter of the Fox News network is their commentators.

So -- for good or ill -- this synergy is a natural extension of the for-profit news industry. News anchors report the news. Commentators offer their opinion. Then later news anchors, because the ad sales for highly-rated commentary shows are so lucrative, report on the commentary taking place to lure viewers back to watch the pundits offer their take.

MSNBC does the same thing -- commenting on Fox News' commentary, so their pundits can later offer their take on the matter, as they so often do during segments such as Keith Olbermann's "Worst Person in the World".

But MSNBC creates its own news, too. Of course, MSNBC has different methods of creating the news. Returning to Brewer and her race-baiting episode, MSNBC concealed the race of the man in question (as mentioned previously, he was black) in order to mix it with sensationalist implication in order to insist that white racists were planning an armed insurrection or assassination attempt against the President.

When called to account for the incident, MSNBC didn't issue a mea culpa, but rather stated that Brewer was commenting not on the specific incident at hand, but rather on a general state of affairs.

For the record, here's Brewer once again, putting her news anchor-y on public display once more:



Because with the American economy in the midst of a full-on meltdown at the time (February 2009), the real story is the guy standing next to Rick Stantelli and whether or not he has a YouTube channel.

Naw, There's Nothing Wrong With MSNBC!

Hateful Left won't admit sorrowful state of MSNBC

A nonsensical (and one-line, to boot) blog post at Enormous Thriving Plants has prominently revealed, once again, the blinkers that any ideologue must don in order to justify and promote their worldview.

At issue was a recent appearance on ABC News by Laura Ingraham, in which she was her usual demagogic self. She went so far as to suggest that Barack Obama's administration was more "impassioned" about Fox News than about Islamic terrorism.

It's not shocking that Ingraham would make such an inherently stupid argument. While any Presidential administration's commentary about a news organization is inappropriate and quite possibly even unethical, it isn't as if Fox News hasn't earned its scorn. It most certainly has.

But then there is the other side of the coin.

As the Obama administration plods further and further through its mandate it becomes more and more apparent that they've settled into Fox's old role as the sychophantic attack dog of the government.

Many left-wing ideologues will go to spectacular lengths to pretend that this isn't so, and that Fox News is still worse than anything MSNBC has ever imagined becoming. Take the spectacularly self-"unaware" serial annoyance Sparky, who insists the difference between Fox and MSNBC is that MSNBC just reports the News, while Fox creates it:

"Yeah, 'cause the MSNBC commenters get their left-wing talking points pushed onto the MSNBC news shows...
Media differentiate Beck's 'opinions' from Wallace's 'news,' but record shows Wallace repeatedly echoes Beck
Oh wait, that's FOX?
Oh right, Patrick makes another false equivalence--unshocking how he does that again.
Wanna back up any of your crap, Patrick? Show how 'MSNBC have become everything FOX was'?
Or are you comfortable in making yet another baseless accusation, have it disproven (again) and add it to your ever growing list of wrongs.
You just love being wrong, don't you? You might want to seek help for that."

No one with any sense would ever accuse Fox News of being a paragon of journalistic integrity.

But no one can realistically claim that MSNBC only reports the news in a "just the facts" fashion. In fact, when MSNBC recently couldn't find sufficient evidence for their claims that a racially-motivated assassination attempt on Barack Obama was imminent, they simply made it up:



If MSNBC promoted Brewer as a commentator or pundit, that would be one thing. But they don't. They promote Brewer as a News Anchor, and that brings with it certain expectations, which Brewer -- and MSNBC as a whole -- consistently flaunt.

In fact, MSNBC's efforts at creating a story didn't stop there. When Ingraham's partner-in-demagoguery, Rush Limbaugh recently made a bid to become part of an investor's group purchasing the NFL's St Louis Rams, MSNBC stirred up outrage by reporting quotes attributed to Limbaugh that he apparently has never uttered.

And while some MSNBC anchors have clearly crossed that line between reporting the news and creating the news, some of them have just mastered the art of asking stupid questions:



That's Contessa Brewer asking John Ziegler why Sarah Palin was offended by David Letterman's Top 10 list. After Ziegler explained to Brewer that Letterman calling her "slutty" and suggesting that Bristol Palin was publicly impregnated by Alex Rodriguez while Palin herself watched, Brewer actually asked the question again.

So not only has Brewer mastered the art of asking stupid questions, she's mastered the art of asking stupid questions twice.

At the end of the interview, Brewer complains that Ziegler has insulted her and asks for his mic to be cut off -- and it is.

It's unsurprising that neither Audrey nor Sparky will admit to the sorry state of MSNBC. Both have consistently shown that the only factor that truly determines if they'll applaud or oppose almost anything is whether or not it comes from a source reputed to share their extreme ideological bent.

That MSNBC will prove troublesome for the Obama administration's newly found desire to serve as the arbiter of which networks are and aren't "real news" networks isn't exactly a secret, nor is it even a marginal opinion.

Look Hard Enough For Something And You Will Find It

The quest to discredit conservative activism continues

In an op/ed column for the Tallahassee Democrat, Florida State University Associate Professor Dr Andy Opel offers an "anatatomy of a photograph" that he believes is quite damning of opponents of US President Barack Obama's health care reform package.

In the photo, pictured left, a man is shown speaking with Opel in what appears to be a quite angry tone. Opel treats it -- and his experiences at a Town Hall meeting on health care -- as evidence that those protesting Obama's health care reforms are using "intimidation and threats of violence" to advance their agenda.

This despite the fact that the man in the picture seems to be pointing at Opel with sheet of paper clutched between his middle and ring fingers.

Even through his own reporting, the story that Opel presents does not materialize. What materializes in its stead is a story about the desperation with which advocates of health care reform are attempting to marginalize and demonize their adversaries.

As with most such stories, it isn't a pretty picture. It begins with Opel going looking for a confrontation:

"On Tuesday, I went to Tallahassee City Hall to attend a forum on health care reform that featured Congressman Allen Boyd as a panelist. The hall was full when I arrived, but outside I found a large group of people participating in a rally sponsored by Americans for Prosperity and the James Madison Institute. Some were carrying signs ranging from a swastika with a red line through it to another that read, 'Government Healthcare makes me sick!'

As someone who supports health care reform and would like to see universal coverage in the US, I was curious to find out what was motivating the resistance to health care reform and why anyone would be so hostile to proposals that will provide health coverage to the 46 million people who currently lack access to medical care."

To most people, this would actually be perfectly evident: one way or the other, these people simply do not see this issue the same way Opel does. Opel, like many committed ideologues, doesn't seem to understand this, let alone does he understand how someone may see the issue differently.

But, as it stands, Opel doesn't really seem interested in it at all. He seems perfectly content to portray opponents of health care reform as base brutes.

"What I found, and what the photo I was pictured in on Wednesday's front page revealed, was that many people who are resisting the current government initiatives would rather use intimidation and threats of violence instead of rational debate to advance their agenda."

The picture does seem rather tense, but still a far cry short of impending violence.

It's also perfectly evident from Opel's body language in the picture that he doesn't feel the slightest bit intimidated by the man with whom he is arguing. If anything, his body language is every bit as confrontational.

But that, sadly, isn't Opel's only argument. Despite the folly of recent efforts to invoke racism as part of the health care debate, Opel conflates concerns about illegal immigrants and where they would get their health care into evidence of some kind of white supremacist agenda -- much like MSNBC concealing the race of a man with an assault rifle in order to suggest that he's white.

"Among the people to whom I did talk at length, a number of themes emerged.

One thing that quickly became clear was that this is not really a debate about health care. Within a matter of moments, multiple conversations turned to the issue of 'illegal immigration.' These individuals mistakenly believed that their tax money would be paying for the health care of 'illegal immigrants.' This was followed by criticisms of US immigration policy, border security and a slew of racist comments against non-English speakers and the poor."

Interestingly enough, the question of illegal immigrants and how they would access health care can't be as easily separated as Opel would like to believe.

After all, it isn't as if amnesty for illegal immigrants -- who, for the record, have broken the law by virtue of their method of entry into the United States -- is a cause that has never been championed by the Democratic party.

Concern over illegal immigration, and the massive security risk it poses to the United States not only in terms of terrorism, but also in terms of issues such as organized crime and drug smuggling, is a legitimate issue. Trying to delegitimize that concern is a service to no one.

Of Dr Opel's legitimate concerns is the misinformed nature of many health care reform opponents:

"I also discovered that there are parallel worlds when it comes to statistics about health care. When I asked individuals if they were content to let 46 million people go without health care, I was met with the repeated line, 'It's not 46 million.' I would then ask how many were uninsured, and the repeated answer was that most of the 46 million were 'illegal immigrants' and that the real number was fewer than 10 million and those people could pay for insurance but choose not to.

These opinions contradict data from the US Census Bureau, which documents 46 million uninsured American citizens in the US in 2007.

A similar disconnect occurred around my attempts to compare US health care spending and outcomes with other developed countries. According to the people I spoke with, health care systems in Canada, England, Germany and elsewhere are all on the verge of collapse and those countries are looking to replicate the current US model. These ideas challenge World Health Organization data that rank overall US health care as 37th in the world, 24th in life expectancy, all while we pay nearly twice as much in health care costs per person as any country in the world. Paying more for less is not an indication of a healthy marketplace, but these protestors were ready to defend the current system at any cost.

Finally, the number of senior citizens protesting 'government run health care' stood out with great irony. When I asked a man holding an 'Obama = Socialism' sign if he wanted to give up his Medicare, I was told that Medicare was underfunded."

Certainly a great many more Americans would share Opel's enthusiasm for health care reform if they were aware of the facts surrounding the state of health care in the United States. They may not necessarily be eager to embrace the health care models of Canada, Britain or Germany, but they would almost certainly be in favour of some kind of structural reform.

But the greatest irony of Opel's column is only about to emerge:

"These intellectual and ideological disconnects are a reminder of the power of niche media to create echo chambers that allow us to live in isolated worlds where our own views are rarely challenged and demagogues offer bumper-sticker slogans instead of policy solutions. Examples include Sarah Palin, who spread the 'death panel' lie; Fox News host Glenn Beck, who has called President Obama a racist and joked about poisoning Nancy Pelosi; and Rush Limbaugh, with his ongoing accusations of Obama's policies paralleling those of the Nazis."

To be fair, the reporting of media outlets such as FOX News on a great many topics -- including health care reform -- has been of rather dubious merit.

But then again, so has the reporting of outlets such as MSNBC. For Opel to decry the "intellectual and ideological disconnects" of Palin, Beck and Limbaugh is one thing. What of the "intellectual and ideological disconnects" of Contessa Brewer, Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann?

Not only is Opel content to ignore them -- conflating concerns over the costs of health care reforms, whether or not citizens will provide the benefits of such to non-citizens, and the scope of reform with racism -- Opel is more than content to embrace them on his own.

It seems that, as far as echo chambers go, Opel is more than content to be just another voice ringing through the chamber.

"When US Senator Chuck Grassley repeats Palin's lies and groups like Americans for Prosperity host two clips of Glenn Beck on the front page of their Web site, we can see the echo chamber at work, propagating myths as political reality and fanning the flames of fear and insecurity in a time of economic crisis and demographic change in the US."

We can also see the echo chamber at work when Opel joins the chorus of those trying to delegitimize those who dissent from their own views. And when people such as Brewer and Maddow make bold predictions that an assassination attempt is imminent, what are they playing to but the politics of fear?

It's one thing to decry the alleged fear mongering of one's opponents. It's another thing to do it while fear mongering on your own.

"As conservative politicians and media pundits exploit fear for political gain at the expense of any real health care solution, we all suffer from the economic drag of an inefficient health care system and the moral failing of a society unwilling to care for its most vulnerable."

One has to imagine that Andy Opel believes he's doing fellow advocates of health care reform quite the favour.

The truth is very different.

When Opel falls all over himself to deligimize his political opponents he reveals himself to be every bit as misguided, dishonest and unprincipled as his ideological adversaries. He shows that he is exploiting the same echo chamber, and he is doing so secure in the knowledge that those within that chamber will not seek any outside information or perspective.

There is a great deal of security to be found in such an echo chamber. For example, Contessa Brewer, Toure and Dylan Ratigan have yet to retract their report in which they edited footage in order to obscure the race of a gun-bearing individual at an Obama rally so they could suggest white racists were planning Obama's assassination. They don't actually need to. Because those viewing their show very likely may have never watched a story about the rally in question on a competing network. Although they know full well they've misrepresented the story in question, they need never admit it. That is the power of the echo chamber.

Just like MSNBC may even find some who are legitimately racist among those opposing Brack Obama's health care reform, Dr Andy Opel clearly went looking for a confrontation with ignorant opponents of health care reform. He evidently looked hard enough to find it. But that is no surprise.

When one looks hard enough for something they want to find, they may even convince themselves they've found it.

What Is It With These People and Racism?

If there's anything many left-wingers have realized over the last few years, it seems to be that they can make race an issue about anything. Ever.

In a recent segment on MSNBC, Contessa Brewer, Dylan Ratigan and Toure attempted to write off protesters showing up to Barack Obama's Town Hall meetings with guns as white racists out to harm a black President.

There was, sadly, only one detail that didn't add up -- the man featured in the newscast wasn't everything its hosts claimed he was.

"There are questions about whether this has racial overtones," Brewer said, as the image of a man wearing a white shirt with an AR-15 assault rifle appeared on screen. "Here you have a man of colour in the Presidency and white people showing up with guns strapped to their waists or to their legs."

"It sounds simplistic when you put it that way, but it is real that there is tremendous anger in this country about government, the way government seems to be taking over the country, anger about a black person being president," Toure added. "Just several upheavals in the country over the last ten years from 9/11, to the economic tsunami, to the black man becoming president and, you know, we see these hate groups rising up and this is definitely part of that."

"Angry at government and racism, you put those two together," later added Ratigan.

Fortunately, MSNBC's cameras weren't the only ones on hand at the Arizona rally.

CNN's cameras were also present, and interviewed this "white man with a gun". Who, unfortunately for Brewer, Ratigan, Toure and MSNBC, wasn't actually white.

Oops.

But portraying conservative activists as racists has recently proven to be the bread and butter of MSNBC. When Janeane Garofalo insisted that protesters at Tea Bag rallies were "about hating a black man in the White House. This is about racism straight-up," host Keith Olbermann could do nothing but nod his head in agreement.

Garofalo has since remained unrepentant about her foray onto the political low road. Olbermann himself has also had remarkably little to say about his participation in a blatant bastardization of racial politics.

So many of those paying attention to the American left-wing media must surely be beginning to wonder more frequently: what is it with these people and racism? If they so desperately need to edit their footage so as to obscure the race of the subject of a newscast, perhaps their fixation has become an evidently unhealthy one.