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To Paraphrase Another President: 'Is Our Media Learning?'
Let's see how we're all covering a series of protests that are approximately as spontaneous as the Rose Parade.
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
APR 20, 2020
To paraphrase the previous Republican Worst President of All Time, is our media learning? Its hard to say. Some elements of it seem to be the walking embodiment of the old joke about getting the mules attention with the 2x4. On the vaguely positive side, it seems that the Washington Post is somewhat determined not to be fooled by the AstroTurfed protest groups protesting the stay-at-home ordersdemonstrations that are approximately as spontaneous as the Rose Paradethe way that everyone pretended that the Tea Party demonstrations were grassroots enterprises back in 2010.
The online coordination offered additional clues about how the protest activity is spreading nationwide, capturing the imagination of the president and of Fox News even though it represents the views of a small minority of Americans. Trump himself tied the protests to gun rights a primary cause for the Dorr brothers in telling Virginians that the Second Amendment was under siege as he urged them to liberate the state.
These protests are tiny. Five states is not coast to coast, even if small groups of bored loons flocked together in Florida and Washington state. Every scrap of polling data indicates that massive majorities support continuing the measures that seem to be working to flatten out the pandemic. To inflate these small gatherings of angry shut-ins as a national movement is profound journalistic malpractice....
That last sentence may be the funniest sentence ever to appear in the pages of the NYT. Those concerns havent been an animating force in the Republican Party since Reagan and, maybe, since Eisenhower. The only animating force in Republican politics is to make life miserable for people who dont vote for Republicans, and to shove as much of the countrys wealth upwards as possible. Starving The Beast and Owning The Libs are two sides of the same coin. Its all they have left.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a32209760/lockdown-protests-media-coverage-tea-party/
Bernardo de La Paz
(48,787 posts)The astroturf was pre-positioned. Ask Pascale for a list of 100,000 zealots on any topic and he can sell it to you instantly. Mercerized.