Tea Parties, Violence, and Politics (And, Yes, This is a Serious Post)

Warner Todd Huston, RedState.com, 16 April 2009: "It may seem ominous, but violence is sometimes acceptable depending on the cause."

Well, it's been a lot of fun with the Tea Parties this week. The too-blatant manipulation, by certain political groups and media outlets, of a "revolution" was well-suited to parody, even beyond the unfortunate double entendre of the protest's chosen beverage.

Today, however, the fun gives way.

I had refrained from commenting on the supposed political agenda of the protests, largely because there was no coherence and no attention to the financial/economic crisis beyond "Cut Our Taxes". There was no recognition, for example, that the Obama Administration's stimulus package rests in part on tax cuts, let alone that any solution to the current economic mess has to go beyond simply slashing the tax bill further.

(As always, Jon Stewart and the Daily Show team rode the wave. First, Stewart declared,  "if there's one thing I know about American people, they love baseball, kicking ass, and paying taxes to the Government". Then, the Daily Show's next item was on the investment company Goldman Sachs and its $1.5 billion profit.)

At the same time, I did not want to comment on elements of the wider, visceral protest which went beyond hate-Government to hate-Obama and which were beyond-borderline racist and Red-baiting. It would be too easy to highlight the single poster who compared Obama's economic policy to Hitler's treatment of the Jews, ignoring the majority of demonstrators  who --- however much I may disagree with their politics, however much I believe they were expressing anger or fear rather than a constructive politics --- were there from genuine concern for the future.

In short, I was hoping that this whipped-up Tea Party would pass and that, in the aftermath, we could return to the serious, ongoing engagement with the state of the American and international economic systems.

Then, yesterday afternoon, I read this blog by "freelance writer" Warner Todd Huston on RedState.com:

A dispassionate review of where we are today would tend to say that tax day violence is not justified in any way. But are future tax protests as off limits to violence if government does not heed the warnings delivered now? Even more to the point does a flat refusal to ever employ violence encourage recalcitrant government to ignore protests safely assuming that no real consequences for their actions will ever be imposed on them?

RedState.com is stridently pro-Republican and stridently opposed to Obama's policies, but it is not an "extremist" website. So I was shaken by this far-from-implicit call to discuss the possibility of violent protest: "It may seem ominous, but violence is sometimes acceptable depending on the cause." Huston had crossed a line that had been tight-roped for weeks by demagogues such as Fox News's Glenn Beck and politicians such as Minnesota Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann as they tried to whip up "resistance".

Of course, the majority of yesterday's demonstrators are unlikely to be contemplating the violence that Huston discusses. At the same time, violence can occur and escalate not from the decision of a majority, but from a minority's stoking of the fear and anger that was too-clearly evident yesterday.

I am conscious as I write, though, that identifying that seed of violence is not enough. Otherwise, it risks the appearance of countering fear-mongering with fear, of point-scoring by tsk-tsking how the protests are destructive rather than productive.

Zephyr Teachout wrote in The Nation yesterday, "[The] tea parties represent a genuine, authentic civic anger." I'm not as sure that this is an "anger that the public has been largely shut out of the most important public decisions of our time" --- it seems more anger both from not understanding the complex economic mal-functions behind the current crisis and from following the easy "answers"/images of bad/evil/"left" Obama and the current Administration.

Yet the lesson remains: as fun as it was, the tea-bagging parody doesn't shoo away that anger and it certainly doesn't banish the polarising and manipulative groups behind the protests. Emotions will continue to be fraught, so politics must be fought through engagement rather than dismissal.

President-is-a-Muslim Coverup: CNN Replaces "Obama Bow" with White House Dog

Related Post: Obama ‘Bowing Down’ to Saudi King? But Conservapedia Fails To Deliver.

Enduring America can exclusively reveal that CNN, well-known propaganda arm of the Obama Administration, bumped the very important story of Obama's bow to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia for in-depth coverage of the White House arrival of Bo, the Portuguese water dog.



David Corn of The Nation had Twittered this week that he was going to be discussing the controversy. So how did Kurtz open Reliable Sources on Sunday?

I never thought I'd be leading off this program with a dog story. All right. It's not just any dog. It's the new Obama family dog. But it's also about White House media manipulation.

Media manipulation? Quite right, Howard. For several minutes, guests Chrystia Freeland of the Financial Times, Tara Wall of The Washington Times, and David Corn pondered how "all the CNN people...were saying, 'Oh, look at the dog. It's so cute.'"

Post-dog story, Kurtz did put up Obama's statement, "We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation or a Jewish nation or a Muslim nation." He even played the criticism of Fox's Sean Hannity, "We're an arrogant country and we're not a Christian nation and we bow before the Saudi king."

But did CNN show the bow? It did not.

Instead, Kurtz let Freeland --- who is quite clearly not an American and quite clearly works for a left-wing British newspaper --- bury the incident, "[Obama's comments] were picked up by some of the more shrill right-wing critics of the president, but what I thought was really interesting about those remarks...was how smoothly that went over in the U.S."

Now some readers may think we're making too much of a fuss of this obvious conspiracy between the mainstream media and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to keep the real news from us. But please consider....

What was the closing world-shattering story, even more important than Bo the White House Dog, that Kurtz and Reliable Sources pondered?

The father of Bristol Palin's baby speaks out on the television circuit, but do we really need to feast on the uncomfortable details of a teenage breakup?