Harry Reid recently made a joke about Sarah Palin having written crib notes on her hand (you remember those, right?) after she attended (for a generous fee I assume) a Republican fundraiser in Nevada last week. Here’s what he said:
“I was going to give a few remarks on the people who were here a week ago Saturday but I couldn’t write it all on my hand,” he said, as the crowd laughed and applauded. “You betcha.”
This rather tame attempt at humor did not go over well with the folks at Fox News. Apparently they had a bit of a hissy fit over Reid’s rather harmless remarks from the women who recently said Republicans need to “reload” and who drew crosshairs on the Congressional members who voted for health care reform on her website:
“Democrats have got to be careful about how they demonize and try to marginalize the Tea Partiers,” [Steve Doocy] warned, referencing a new Gallup poll that found ideological and partisan splits within the movement. “A majority of Tea Party supporters are not Republicans,” Doocey [sic] said.
First Mr. Doocy, who knew Sarah Palin was as a member of the “Tea Party” (actually one doesn’t exist as an officially registered political party, it’s a loose movement organized and supported by GOP astroturf organizations at best). So how could a mild joke about Sarah Palin’s skin writing obsession demonize the entire Tea Party Movement?
But more importantly, what right do you have to claim that Democrats are demonizing the Tea Party at all? Methinks thou doth protest too much. Not with the ranks of your fellow Fox newscaster/opinion maker/clown Glenn Beck who can’t make up his mind whether Obama is a socialist, a fascist or simply someone with a deep seated hatred of white people? Or suggested that poisoning Nancy Pelosi would be great fun (stealing Ann Coulter’s rancid comedy routine).
Or what about Bill O’Reilly who spent years calling Dr. George Tiller “Tiller the baby killer” until the day anti-abortion fanatic Scott Roeder walked into a church and shot Dr Tiller at point blank range assassinating him. Or how about the time O’Reilly invited Al Qaeda to nuke San Francisco because they were insufficiently supportive of Bush’s meat grinder war in Iraq?
Or what about the conservative attacks on children who dared to support health care reform or the extension of existing health care benefits one of the slimiest attack campaigns I’ve ever seen?
Two weeks ago, the Democratic response to President Bush’s weekly radio address was delivered by a 12-year-old, Graeme Frost. Graeme, who along with his sister received severe brain injuries in a 2004 car crash and continues to need physical therapy, is a beneficiary of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. […]
Soon after the radio address, right-wing bloggers began insisting that the Frosts must be affluent because Graeme and his sister attend private schools (they’re on scholarship), because they have a house in a neighborhood where some houses are now expensive (the Frosts bought their house for $55,000 in 1990 when the neighborhood was rundown and considered dangerous) and because Mr. Frost owns a business (it was dissolved in 1999). […]
[A]n e-mail message from the office of Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, sent to reporters and obtained by the Web site Think Progress, repeated the smears against the Frosts and asked: “Could the Dems really have done that bad of a job vetting this family?”
That’s right Mr. Doocy, your side attacked a brain injured child and one whose mother died from lack of health care. Children, dammit!
And then who can forget this sickening video …
… where Tea Party protesters at a rally angrily mocked and insulted a former nuclear physicist who has Parkinson’s disease who had attended the rally to support extending health care to millions of people who can’t afford it or are shut out by the restrictive and abusive policies of insurance companies:
And I am not even scratching the surface of the demonization campaign Fox and other conservative media and politicians have waged for years against Democrats and liberals in which eliminationist motifs (i.e., “jokes” about murdering or exterminating liberals, Democrats, minority groups, LGBT communities and disabled people) were used to create a constant drumbeat of hate against anyone not white and conservative.
Demonize, Mr. Doocy? Demonize? I think, to quote Inigo Montoya : “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Besides Mr. Doocy, we on the progressive and liberal side of the American political spectrum side don’t need to demonize the Tea Party. Its members have already done a perfectly fine job of demonizing themselves:
Not to mention all the cries for “revolution” and “watering the tree of liberty” and using the “ammo box” if the ballot box doesn’t result in the correct political result for those who oppose the Democrats and president Obama?
Maybe, you and your Fox News hate mongers and propagandists ought to go back to school: Elementary school. Clearly your vocabulary and understanding of the English language is sorely lacking. And you, Mr. Doocy, have no right to play the “demonize card” sir. None whatsoever. Not when your team’s hateful words, slanders, slurs and lies have led to this:
The FBI is investigating a severed gas line at the home of Rep. Tom Perriello’s (D-VA) brother. A local tea party group had posted the brother’s address online, thinking it was Perriello’s and calling for a protest there.
Windows were broken across the country, at Rep. Gabrielle Gifford’s Tucson office, Rep. Louise Slaughter’s district office, and Democratic Party offices in Ohio, western New York and Kansas. (Someone also spray-painted the word “dorks” on one party office in Ohio.) House Minority Whip Eric Cantor also claimed someone shot a bullet into his campaign office, but local police say it was a random bullet that struck the office window.
Pictures of nooses were faxed to the offices of Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC), who is black, and Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), who is white.
Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) said his office in Kew Gardens, New York, received an envelope containing white powder and a threatening letter.
Protestors showed up to Rep. Russ Carnahan’s (D-MO) home with a coffin over the weekend after he voted in support of the health care reform bill.
Rep. Betsy Markey (D-CO) said she received two threatening phone calls after announcing that she would switch her vote on health care from no to yes. One caller said to a staffer, “Better hope I don’t run into you in a dark alley with a knife, a club or a gun.” Another said, “Better tell your boss that she better be careful when she comes back here to Colorado.”
You, Mr. Doocy are beneath contempt. You should apologize to Senator Reid for your outrageous comparison of his gentle mocking of Sarah Palin to the manner in which your Fox News colleagues, Rush Limbaugh and other right wing talk show hosts, conservative commentators, Republican politicians and wealthy right wing movement financiers have spent decades demonizing and putting the lives of innocent people at risk of death because of your lies and hate speech.
Jim David Adkisson wanted to leave no doubt of his motive in opening fire inside a West Knoxville church last year.
“This was a hate crime,” Adkisson wrote in a four-page “manifesto” he had left inside his truck and intended to serve as a suicide letter.
Adkisson, 58, wrote that he wanted to kill the “generals” of the liberal movement, citing Democrats in Congress, Supreme Court justices and then-candidate for President Barack Obama.
But he said he couldn’t get to those in power so he opted instead to attack liberalism’s “foot soldiers,” specifically citing the members of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church.
[…]“This was a symbolic killing,” Adkisson wrote. “Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate and House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book. I’d like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I knew these people were inaccessible to me.
You sir, and those of your fellow travelers are terrorists, and yes, I know the meaning of that word. You and your buddies fill the same role in America as that of the media hate mongers on the radio in Rwanda in the days leading up to the genocide which resulted in the slaughter of nearly a million people.
RTLM reported the assassination of the Burundi president in a highly sensationalized way to underline supposed Tutsi brutality and heighten Hutu fears of Tutsi (RTLM transcripts: 25 October; 20, 29, 30 November; 12 December 1993). The president was actually killed by a bayonet blow to the chest, but RTLM reported details of supposed torture, including castration of the victim. In pre-colonial times, some Tutsi kings castrated defeated enemy rulers and decorated their royal drums with the genitalia. The false report of the castration of the Burundi president was intended to remind Hutu listeners of this practice and to elicit their fear and repulsion; it did so with great success.
From late October on, RTLM repeatedly and forcefully underlined many of the themes developed for years by the extremist written press, including the inherent differences between Hutu and Tutsi, the foreign origin of Tutsi and, hence, their lack of rights to claim to be Rwandan, the disproportionate share of wealth and power held by Tutsi and the horrors of past Tutsi rule. It continually stressed the need to be alert to Tutsi plots and possible attacks and demanded that Hutu prepare to ‘defend’ themselves against the Tutsi threat (RTLM transcripts: 25 October; 12, 20, 24 November 1993; 29 March; 1, 3 June 1994).
In addition to the increasingly virulent propaganda against Tutsi, the radio spewed forth attacks on Hutu who were willing to continue cooperating with them. In some cases, the radio moved from general denunciations to naming specific people, including the Hutu prime minister, as enemies of the nation who should be eliminated one way or another from the public scene. It used increasingly violent language, saying, for example, that the Interahamwe militia might rip into little pieces those thought to support the RPF (Article 19 1996: 92–3, 96–7, Sénat de Belgique 1997: 70).
You incite hatred and violence. To claim that we, your political opponents are to blame for the actions of your side of the political divide in this country, and to further claim that we are the ones demonizing the haters and radical extremists is beyond ludicrous. It is a lie sir, and you are a liar.
