Angry Tea Partiers are not the Moral Equivalent of Compassionate Democrats (Juan Cole)

[kpete]

Angry Tea Partiers are not the Moral Equivalent of Compassionate Democrats
Posted on May 19, 2010 by Juan

Just to enter an objection to the increasing tendency of the mainstream media to equate the Tea Party on the American right wing with supposedly “angry” activists on the left wing of the Democratic Party. And moreover to point out that the Corporate Media pet narrative of the Rise of the New New Right and the decline of the Democrats was not borne out by the primaries held on Tuesday. The Dems kept Murtha’s seat. The left of the party defeated Arlen Specter and forced Blanche Lincoln into a run-off. But the Tea Party in Kentucky will get all the press.

Are the people who elected Sestak as Democratic candidate for senator in Pennsylvania really like the Tea Party that backed Rand Paul for the senate in Kentucky?

When is the last time you saw leftwing Democrats taunting disabled people, or weeping, or shouting that “their” country had been stolen by “those people”?

What did the Democratic left want? Universal health care with a public option. That is angry? Isn’t it just common decency? But the Tea Party opposed both measures, largely because they feared that some white money might get spent on minorities. (It is apparently not enough for them that the economic gap between blacks and whites has quadrupled since the Reagan administration.)

more:
http://www.juancole.com/2010/05/creeping-apartheid-as-costello-boycotts-israel-and-israel-expells-noam-chomsky.html

[livetohike]

1. Thanks for posting this

:hi:

[OHdem10]

2. Good Post

[EFerrari]

3. No kidding. The corporate media is trying to equate the left with these hateful people.

With not inconsiderable help from the centrists.

[laughingliberal]

4. +1000 nt

[pinboy3niner]

5. More false (moral) equivalence. K&R

:kick:

[FSogol]

6. K & R. n/t

[MisterP]

7. equation of "far left" and "far right" is part of the 50s hegemony:

it had a "vital center" against those wicked ideologues, and let the Cold-War liberals applaud Guatemala, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, and the neocons of Team B (and later Nicaragua and Iraq), since we were fighting those dastardly foreign-controlled democracy-destroying Reds

everyone was a big happy liberal-conservative family under the consensus of democracy, conformity, and white primaries; Fordist social capitalsm would "create wealth" and bring prosperity to all. then came OPEC, the neoliberals, and then the neocons, and Dems who say that if you're angry, vote for us more often (and then STFU). in reality, what is correct isn't somewhere "between what the liberals say and what the conservatives say," it instead trends strongly to what the left (as opposed to even the liberals) says (though some leftists have shortcomings of their own, like provincialism, simplification, unwilligness to criticize proletarians, and naive materialism)

[chill_wind]

8. K & R. n/t