Steve M. on Why Friends Don't Let Friends Read Politico
It takes years of training and practice to be this clueless and blind to reality.
Steve M.:
No More Mister Nice Blog: It was the front page of Politico a little before 7:30 this morning.... Notice what was shown as an illustration of "rage"? Peaceful marchers demanding the reinstatement of Shirley Sherrod. Could any demand be more reasonable at this moment?
Oh, but they're from Code Pink.... [B]ut this picture shows what seems to be the epitome of peaceful protest.
And, oh, the person in the center of the photo is clearly supposed to be read as an Angry Black Man. Eeek! Eeek! (Though to me he looks far more thoughtful than angry.)
The article, by John Harris and Jim VandeHei... engage[s] in the usual willful refusal to apportion blame accurately. Everyone is at fault, or the culture is at fault, not the left or (heaven forfend) the right (although the linguist Deborah Tannen is quoted and we're told, with some bafflement, that she "puts the emphasis on conservative ideological activists as much as on the new media environment," though according to the authors that's clearly because she's "a more liberal voice" and not because she's right)....
I guess it's all the same, then, over four presidencies, and there's no point examining any of it further. Anger at George W. Bush's inept, bloody, and ruinously expensive war in Iraq is morally equivalent to Andrew Breitbart's anger at Shirley Sherrod and the NAACP. Anger expressed in purely verbal form on a private listserv is equivalent to a deliberate (and successful) act of personal destruction waged with depraved indifference to the facts. What's the diff, hunh?
