This is the report that is dominating the news coverage of yesterday's protest at the Capitol. I have no idea who was the source of any saliva and nasty words, but it's important to realize how easy it is for someone who isn't typical of the group or who is even its adversary to do things like this. It's one of the oldest dirty tricks.
It's also important to distinguish "angry protesters" from particular individuals who cross the line into the kind real ugliness or violence that should be condemned. There's nothing wrong with showing anger at the thing that motivates you to protest. That's what protests are for! The members of Congress have a lot of power, and they ought to have to hear the anger their exercise of that power is causing. It's outrageous for them to pose as victims without very good cause. So what if some idiot said a bad word? That's a trivial distraction compared to the power they are about to exercise in the face of such strong opposition to what they are about to do. [ADDED: I'm not approving of ugly epithets, just emphasizing the comparison between an individual ordinary citizen, who might not be very sane/smart/educated, and a member of Congress, who wields great power. The member of Congress should not pretend he's weak, when he is in fact strong. It's also exceedingly lame — and, frankly, racist — for white people to be so quick to think of powerful black politicians as vulnerable and besieged. I assume the black politicians laugh at them in private. The willingness of black politicians to make power moves in racial terms suggests to me that they know exactly what they are doing: leveraging patronization.]
From what I heard — from Meade, who was there — the people at yesterday's protest were unusually nice and friendly and well-behaved. Still, the Washington Post uses the term "angry protesters." That's a journalistic device to delegitimitize the demonstration by merging everyone into the few persons who said something racist/homophobic. That's not fair and it's not accurate, but it has been the stock MSM treatment of the Tea Party movement all along.
ADDED: Here's the video I'm seeing. Is there any more video than this?
Because what you hear there is: 1. Booing, and 2. the chant "Kill the bill." Playing the race card for nothing? Shame!
ADDED: A member of Congress said he was spit on? Guards were right there. Was no one detained? Show me the person who was arrested. Otherwise, I'm assuming it's a lie.
UPDATE:
Tea Party protesters [say] they never heard racially charged language in the crowd. The man detained for allegedly spitting at Cleaver was also let go after, according to Capitol Police, Cleaver was unable to positively identify him.
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234 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 234 of 234Condemn me because I refuse to be blindsided by you.
So dumb. Just condemn it and move on.
Do you have ANY proof of this, AL?
No, you have the word of a liar that the Capitol Police are saying is a lie.
Keep thrashing. The race card is the only you have left.
Heck, what was the Leftie protest with zero arrests?
Protesting when black congressmen walk by is RACIST. You know that everything a black person does must be praised to the skies by white people, because without our approval they just fall to pieces. Much like a liberal's life if he ever finds out we don't care what he thinks of us. Which is also RACIST because everything bad is RACIST including the cavity in my back molar and the clouds that are piling up in the sky outside my window. Bad weather is RACIST.
Garage, why condemn what didn't happen?
You silly people.
If you play the video backwards you will hear all that you want to hear. The racist taunts are hidden and encoded for those who have the chi and karmic purity to hear.
Koo coo ca choo.. I am the walrus.
Well....it worked in the acid hippie dippie days anyway.
Make that "utterly hilarious" to at least one conservative.
Actually, I think it's clear that you have learned nothing today. Because the question is what is racism, and your personal opinion, as expressed in this thread, is quite clearly a couple sigma to the left of where everybody else is.
Me, I've been called a racist for decades on no better evidence than my Republican affiliation. The charge lost its power to bother me a long time ago.
Some day you'll get educated and you'll look back on these days with amazement that you could have been quite such an idiot.
Stupak announcing the hostage crisis is now over. Terms of the ransom forthcoming.
I heard a few weeks ago from some commentator on NPR that the real virtue of the current health care debate was that the main "players," meaning the insurance industry, the hospital corporations and the AMA, were all agreed on it for the first time, even if nothing passed immediately.
I do not want the insurance companies and the rest to agree.
I want them erased from the face of the earth.
That's because I'm in favor of a single-payer system, horrible as may be, simply because it looks like the only plausible way to control costs where market forces have long been pushed aside. It would be nice to be able to bring some real market discipline to our insane system, but I think that is now a pipe dream.
The current bill, from my analysis, will not save me or my employer a penny. In fact, according to my employer (who is, BTW, a staunch Democrat, also opposed to the bill), when fully implemented, Obamacare will cost about $4600 MORE to insure me and my family, with about 15% less coverage, than it might if nothing at all were done.
This is ridiculous. And, like my Harvard MBA employer (and even little me with nothing more than Excel and a few economics classes), lots of people have done the numbers and have come to similar conclusions. They may want different solutions ultimately, but they know bad legislation is about to be enacted NOW.
And so you see the frayed remnants of the soon-to-be ruined middle classes shaking their fists at Members of Congress, who have been payed off in every conceivable way to vote for this monstrosity, and you think it's about race?
Really?
Some day you'll get educated and you'll look back on these days with amazement that you could have been quite such an idiot.
Or not.
Some people never learn.
Stupak proves there is no such thing as a "moderate" Democrat. They are all progressive when the chips are down.
Hey Alpha, is your purple shirt pressed for the march tonight? Are you and the Nazi SEIU thugs going to march in celebration- "Health Care will Make You Free? Do you have your purple SEIU flag with the Swaztika already? You practicing your goose step in your pretty purple tights?
Have you learned the p[roper way to say Heil Pelosi! Heil Stern!
Who cares? These people are voting to take away your liberties, bankrupt the country and distroy our health care industry. Most of the black politicians I know are definitely racist and use slang terms for whites. We are no longer in a civil political process. People are beginning to arm themselves and are considering the most extreme of means of restore their liberty. We are not playing games.
Peter, its unfair to paint all health care advocates by the actions of a few while its fair to smear protestors based on incidents that never occurred.
Ironic, huh?
Frankly, I think they walked into the crowd specifically to set up the story.
Why else would a lawmaker venture into that protest march??
credible witnesses
Hardly. Congresspersons have been abusing their power for decades by lying about honest people. Lies from the left about racism are pandemic.
Alpha obviously believes in guilty until proven innocent. Police detained someone. Big deal. Cleaver's some sort of kind, compassionate person for not pressing charges. Yeah, right. He's covering his own ass. He's done the damage and reinforced the image that bigots like Alpha have of conservatives and anyone else with whom they disagree. Cleaver doesn't want to risk a "not guilty" verdict.
Doyle loves Gandhi so much that he doesn't even know how to spell his name.
Good rule of thumb: All accusations of racism and violence by democrats are lies.
In fact, an accusation of violence by a democrat *probably* means their staffers roughed up a nosy reporter instead.
Sorry dear, they're your people You own them.
The only difference between the Republican Party and the Ku Klux Klan is the thread count of their sheets.
"Frankly, I think they walked into the crowd specifically to set up the story.
Why else would a lawmaker venture into that protest march??"
Sure. You're absolutely right. They're balck -- what right to they have to walk through the halls of congress.
We get the picture, Pat.
Alpha Liberal: It would be helpful if the conservatives could address my comments on complicity with racism, at 2:05 PM.
Glad to be of service. Your comments on complicity with racism at 2:05 PM are characteristic of an ovine, hysterical mentality, wholly emotive and irrational, indicative of a desperate clinging to a self-flattering if extremely brittle and simple-minded, and hence fundamentally unsatisfactory and unsustaining view of life, utterly incongruent with habits of logic, reason, and objectivity necessary to the citizens of a free society, and hence representative of the dangers to liberty emanating from those untrained minds seeking from politics satisfactions that are not properly derived from that field.
You're welcome.
Not all TeePees are racist.
But all Racists are TeePees
Troll-O-Rama!
Hilarious thread. Dan Rather states Obama couldn't sell watermellons at a Hwy stand and you guys need to fabricate a tea party racial incident. Laff riot! Pass this bill so I can see all you liberal motherfuckers crying your eyes out in November. Do it! Jump already.
Day by Day's Chris Muir must have been reading all this crap today too!
@Moira Breen:
Brava!!!!!!!
Good gravy, Ms. Althouse. This is the most embarrassingly dumb thing I've ever read.
Let me break it down for you: It's the racial and homophobic slurs, stupid.
Say, Ann, are you aware that your conservative tea party friends just revealed the real reason for their anger? There is a reason they stayed silent regarding Bush's fiscal antics.
You really don't get it, do you?
Anyway, I expect you conservatives to squirm and bob and weave and avoid a sad truth: There is a good possibility that the tea party crowd has just handed the DNC their daisy ad.
Alpha Liberal, that's why these people won't address what you say. They know.
Beth wrote, "Everyone who opposed the Iraq war was a commie pinko stooge for ANSWER...."
That was another example I had in mind. Not just the idiots that connected every protester back to a numskull selling World Workers Daily, but the idiots who accused all pro-war advocates of being an idiot of the type first mentioned.
The end result of mutual demonization is an appalling spectacle. Is that a mote in your eye or a chip on my shoulder.
somefeller,
CBC IS a racist group. There was a white guy elected in a majority black district. He wanted to join the CBC so that he could better serve his district. They refused to accept him because he was not black. That is racist by definition.
So I guess Ms. Outhouse doesn't mind if I call her a drunken fascist hag.
This post is an embarrassment. It criticizes the MSM for a lack of facts, yet makes its own counter-assumptions on the basis of almost nothing. It then accuses a congressman of lying for an absurd reason, and allows all kinds of nasty, personal attack comments to go unanswered and uncriticized. I give it the full treatment it deserves at:
http://wordinedgewise.org/?p=951
"It totally absolutely never happened - & even if it did, so what?" isn't exactly the most convincing argument I've ever seen.
Sticking up for Teabaggers (THEIR original chosen label, let it be noted) after all their months on end of falsely calling an elected majority doing what it promised to do a fascist/communist/socialist/granny-killing dictatorship in the name of "patriotism" isn't edgy or contrarian - it's just flat-out pathetic.
Yes, who could possibly believe that the same people who put a Hitler moustache on pictures of their president - or paste his head onto pictures of a witch-doctor - could ever possibly call gays or blacks bad names? Yes, I'm sure the man calling for a "window war" & the person who cut that man's gas line or the ones sending death-threats are ALL "infiltrators" making those poor innocent patriots look bad.
Pay no attention to that year's worth of political context behind the curtain!
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