The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

If You Don’t Like Avatar and Anderson Cooper, You’re a Kook

Posted on | February 10, 2010 | 13 Comments

That’s the basic message of Jonathan Kay’s Newsweek column:

Like all populists, tea partiers are suspicious of power and influence, and anyone who wields them. Their villain list includes the big banks; bailed-out corporations; James Cameron, whose Avatar is seen as a veiled denunciation of the U.S. military; Republican Party institutional figures they feel ignored by, such as chairman Michael Steele; colleges and universities (the more prestigious, the more evil); TheWashington Post; Anderson Cooper; and even FOX News pundits, such as Bill O’Reilly, who have heaped scorn on the tea-party movement’s more militant oddballs.
One of the most bizarre moments of the recent tea-party convention came when blogger Andrew Breitbart delivered a particularly vicious fulmination against the mainstream media, prompting everyone to get up, turn toward the media section at the back of the conference room, and scream, “USA! USA! USA!” But the tea partiers’ well-documented obsession with President Obama has hardly been diffused by their knack for finding new enemies. . . .

Read the rest. Kay goes on to list his own enemies — Joseph Farah, Roy Moore, Pat Robertson — and seems to proceed on the assumption that all populist resentment of the elite is equally baseless and illegitimate, without regard to either (a) how the elite gain their influence, or (b) what the elite do with their influence.

Grassroots protest movements often attract “militant oddballs.” Opportunistic charlatans will seek to piggyback their narrow agendas on popular movements. This is nothing new.

But have you ever seen Newsweek (or any other major media outlet) make a big deal about the Marxist organizations who turn out at every left-wing protest event? Ten years ago, I covered the “A26” anti-globalization demonstration in Washington:

Once you got past the Socialist Workers, there were still more entrepreneurial leftists, hawking the Worker’s Vanguard. Then there was the guy selling yellow “Mumia Must Live” buttons for a buck each. . . .
The place was positively brimming with rage against corporate capitalism, from T-shirts (“Mean Corporations Suck”) to handmade signs (“Corporate Press Is Not Free”). At the International Socialist Organization table, you could get a nice blue-and-white sign reading, “Workers of the World Unite and Fight.” Another group distributed red T-shirts lettered in black: “Abolish the World Bank! End the IMF! Dissolve the WTO! Socialist Party USA.” . . .
I’m not up to date on the various Marxist outfits represented at the A16 rally — League for the Revolutionary Party? International Action Center? — so I don’t know which ones are Trotskyists, which ones are Mensheviks and which ones are Maoists, but I know the original Big Red when I see it. The colorful banner proclaims, “People & Nature Before Profit$ … Young Communist League USA,” and the kids at the table are handing out the People’s Weekly World, official organ of the CPUSA. The Bolsheviks — who seized power from a backward czarist regime and actually managed to make things worse, who spent more than seven decades proving the murderous futility of revolutionary socialism — are still at it.

The major media never mentioned the kooks and commies who infested the anti-globalization movement, who also infested the anti-war movement during the Bush years. Yet Newsweek‘s columnist insists that the Tea Party movement is defined by kooks and conspiracy theorists.

And the media elite wonder why we don’t like them . . .

Category: Media Bias, Tea Party

Comments

13 Responses to “If You Don’t Like Avatar and Anderson Cooper, You’re a Kook”

  1. JSF
    February 11th, 2010 @ 12:12 am

    Looks like some ivy league newsweek reporter forgot to read about Queen Antoinette and King George III.

    We yokels have started the revolution without the Upper Crust of the Uopper West Side (and the Westside of Los Angeles) and they don’t like it.

    It’s hard out the for the Left — how can they runwith populism when you’ve been running it since 2007?

    Instead, to quote Mel Brooks, they run with Mucus. (History of the World Part I)

    Reap the whirlwind.

  2. JSF
    February 10th, 2010 @ 7:12 pm

    Looks like some ivy league newsweek reporter forgot to read about Queen Antoinette and King George III.

    We yokels have started the revolution without the Upper Crust of the Uopper West Side (and the Westside of Los Angeles) and they don’t like it.

    It’s hard out the for the Left — how can they runwith populism when you’ve been running it since 2007?

    Instead, to quote Mel Brooks, they run with Mucus. (History of the World Part I)

    Reap the whirlwind.

  3. Live Free Or Die
    February 11th, 2010 @ 12:26 am

    Joe Biden likes ‘Avatar’, even if he can’t name it, and never watched it; even if Andrea Mitchell spots him the A-v-a-t-a-r.

  4. Live Free Or Die
    February 10th, 2010 @ 7:26 pm

    Joe Biden likes ‘Avatar’, even if he can’t name it, and never watched it; even if Andrea Mitchell spots him the A-v-a-t-a-r.

  5. uberVU - social comments
    February 10th, 2010 @ 7:30 pm

    Social comments and analytics for this post…

    This post was mentioned on Twitter by rsmccain: @EdDriscoll If You Don’t Like Avatar and Anderson Cooper, You’re a Kook: http://bit.ly/cq3L98 [] #TeaParty…

  6. Chuck Cross
    February 11th, 2010 @ 12:46 am

    My first tea party was the 12/16/07 moneybomb (234th Anniversary of the original tea party), and if the tea parties have taught me anything, is that people with a wide, WIDE spectrum of viewpoints usually fall into two buckets philosophically and politically — authoritarian and anti-authoritarian. Of course, there are varying degrees of both, and there are no bright-lines.

    I still smile when I read about S. 604, the Senate’s version of H.R. 1207, sponsored by Jim DeMint (whose stock has been very bullish with me lately) and Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist.

    Meeting these tea partiers in person always provides a better sense of the population-set, as the internet brings on the most vitriolic and partisan of comments. Those experiences of meeting people that made me raised my eyebrows and go “wow” inside my head when I turned away leads me to not bother when online volleys turn confrontational — they just go nowhere.

  7. Chuck Cross
    February 10th, 2010 @ 7:46 pm

    My first tea party was the 12/16/07 moneybomb (234th Anniversary of the original tea party), and if the tea parties have taught me anything, is that people with a wide, WIDE spectrum of viewpoints usually fall into two buckets philosophically and politically — authoritarian and anti-authoritarian. Of course, there are varying degrees of both, and there are no bright-lines.

    I still smile when I read about S. 604, the Senate’s version of H.R. 1207, sponsored by Jim DeMint (whose stock has been very bullish with me lately) and Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist.

    Meeting these tea partiers in person always provides a better sense of the population-set, as the internet brings on the most vitriolic and partisan of comments. Those experiences of meeting people that made me raised my eyebrows and go “wow” inside my head when I turned away leads me to not bother when online volleys turn confrontational — they just go nowhere.

  8. Andrew Sullivan
    February 11th, 2010 @ 5:39 am

    Even I do not like Anderson Cooper and we…well we have a lot in common.

  9. Andrew Sullivan
    February 11th, 2010 @ 12:39 am

    Even I do not like Anderson Cooper and we…well we have a lot in common.

  10. daveinboca
    February 11th, 2010 @ 6:06 am

    Oh yeah, Anderson Cooper who was among the first to dub the Tea Party Activists “teabaggers” in honor of an obscene gay ritual he commits with his pals probably on a daily basis, Andy Sullivan included.

    And the creepy Newsweak scribbler expects the Tea Party activists to enjoy being labeled obscene by an obscene TV talking head whose viewers and ratings deserted him over the last six months so that Joy Behar outdraws the number of eyeballs AC attracts on CNN. Even the drooling geezer Larry King gets better numbers, in fact Cooper now brings up the rear on CNN, despite his prestige spot on 60 Minutes.

  11. daveinboca
    February 11th, 2010 @ 1:06 am

    Oh yeah, Anderson Cooper who was among the first to dub the Tea Party Activists “teabaggers” in honor of an obscene gay ritual he commits with his pals probably on a daily basis, Andy Sullivan included.

    And the creepy Newsweak scribbler expects the Tea Party activists to enjoy being labeled obscene by an obscene TV talking head whose viewers and ratings deserted him over the last six months so that Joy Behar outdraws the number of eyeballs AC attracts on CNN. Even the drooling geezer Larry King gets better numbers, in fact Cooper now brings up the rear on CNN, despite his prestige spot on 60 Minutes.

  12. Hollywood audience
    February 11th, 2010 @ 1:05 pm

    We’ll consume any amount of Hollywood’s eye-candy crap dumped from the bowels of Kweel Kidz; tasty delusions of grandeur man are like groovy dudes.

    More crap please, we want slap-happy stupid forever.

  13. Hollywood audience
    February 11th, 2010 @ 8:05 am

    We’ll consume any amount of Hollywood’s eye-candy crap dumped from the bowels of Kweel Kidz; tasty delusions of grandeur man are like groovy dudes.

    More crap please, we want slap-happy stupid forever.