Two media outlets defend Howard Dean against George Will's attack.

madfloridian

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Tue Jan-11-11 10:15 PM
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Two media outlets defend Howard Dean against George Will's attack.

And I say good for them. Greg Sargent of The Plum Line and Dave Cook of the Christian Science Monitor call out George Will on what he wrote on Dean's words about the Tea Party.

In fact Dean even wrote a letter to the editor of the Washington Post defending himself.

Good for them. George Will left out so much of what Dean said at the Monitor breakfast that he was in effect telling a lie.

Here's what George Will said:

The charlatans' response to the Tucson tragedy

Three days before Tucson, Howard Dean explained that the Tea Party movement is "the last gasp of the generation that has trouble with diversity." Rising to the challenge of lowering his reputation and the tone of public discourse, Dean smeared Tea Partyers as racists: They oppose Obama's agenda, Obama is African American, ergo . . .

Let us hope that Dean is the last gasp of the generation of liberals whose default position in any argument is to indict opponents as racists. This McCarthyism of the left - devoid of intellectual content, unsupported by data - is a mental tic, not an idea but a tactic for avoiding engagement with ideas. It expresses limitless contempt for the American people, who have reciprocated by reducing liberalism to its current characteristics of electoral weakness and bad sociology.

Talk about twisting words...did I say I don't care for George Will?

Here's what the CSM said in defense of Dean's words.

What Howard Dean said about the tea party and race

Columnist George Will writes that former DNC Chair Howard Dean is guilty of 'McCarthyism on the left' for comments made at a Monitor breakfast. But further quotes provide context for Dean's assertion that the tea party is the 'the last gasp of the generation that has trouble with diversity.'

..."The column has created some controversy here in Washington, with Will accusing Dean of “McCarthyism of the left.” In particular, Will takes issue with Dean’s assertion that the tea party movement is “the last gasp of the generation that has trouble with diversity.”

..."But in additional comments at the breakfast, Dean took pains to emphasize that he did not think members of the “real tea party” were racist.

In comments not in the Monitor article on the event but included in other accounts, Dean said: “I don’t believe these people are racist. Of course there are the people you have on television. There are racists in the tea party. But I don’t believe this is a racist thing. Some would call it racist. You could make the case for that if you wanted to. I don’t see it that way. I see it as an evolutionary thing, of getting used to something that is new and different and unsettling that the country has changed. It is like the gay-rights revolution.”

And then they repeat this paragraph of Dean's.

Other comments included in the Monitor article also sought to provide important nuance to observations about race and the tea party movement.

Suggesting that there are actually three “tea parties,” Dean said: “There is the racist fringe…. There is the Dick Armey corporate tea party, which doesn’t have anything much more to do with the real tea party than the racist fringe. (Mr. Armey is a Republican former House majority leader now active in the tea party movement.) And then there is the real tea party … which is the vast majority – which are pretty socially conservative even though they try to mask that.”

That was a fair description.

And here is Greg Sargent from Plum Line:

George Will smears Howard Dean

It didn't take long to dig up what Dean actually said:

Dean, the former Vermont governor known for his no-holds-barred demeanor, was careful at The Christian Monitor-sponsored breakfast for reporters to add that he didn't view tea party activists as "racist." But he suggested that discomfort with the election of the first African-American president and an increasingly diverse electorate largely fueled the movement.

"I think it's the last gasp of the 55-year-old generation...a group of older folks who've seen their lives change dramatically,'' he said. "The country is not the same...and all of a sudden it's here for them and they don't know what to do...Every morning when they see the president they are reminded that things are totally different than they were when they were born and I think that has a lot to do with it."

"Economic uncertainty fuels this but this is the last gasp of the generation that has trouble with diversity,'' Dean added. "The tea party is almost entirely over 55 and white, and the country has changed dramatically as a result of what happened in 2008 and it's not going back. Every day that goes on, the demographic change continues, and that's what a lot of this is about."

In other words, Dean explicitly didn't call Tea Partyers racist. Rather, he was arguing that demographic change and economic uncertainty are among the factors creating the unease in Tea Party ranks. That's a blunt point, to be sure, but even those who strongly disagree with it would have to agree -- if they're being intellectually honest -- that Will's depiction of it has no basis in reality. I'd say Will's casual misrepresentation of Dean's words does far more to lower the "tone of public discourse" than anything Dean said.

Exactly right.

And here is Dean's letter to the editor:

Howard Dean: 'It's time . . . to stop this cycle of vitriol'

For too long the dangerous propagandist tactic of mixing of truth, half-truths and lies has been used to inflame popular sentiments and fear. It was therefore disappointing to see The Post contribute to this cycle of vitriol in our public discourse with a column by George F. Will that erroneously claimed I called the Tea Party racist ("Charlatans' blame game," op-ed, Jan. 11). In fact, as Post blogger Greg Sargent pointed out by fully citing my comments, I specifically said that I did not consider the Tea Party to be racist.

It's time we each do our part to stop this cycle of vitriol.

Howard Dean, Burlington, Vt.

It's time for all of us to speak out when the media misrepresents. Our side has not done that traditionally, and it is time to start. That is why the right wing noise machine is having a fun time right now trying to blame the AZ shooting on "the left"....because we don't fight back.