It’s too early to tell if the anti-tax-and-spend “tea party”
movement will fizzle or develop into a serious opposition to
President Obama’s domestic policies. But at the very least, it is
newsworthy when thousands of Americans gather around the country to
demonstrate against a liberal president’s policies. Whereas the
left has a well-entrenched protest culture, mass demonstrations,
notably excepting those against abortion, are a rarity on the
right.
Yet whereas news coverage of antiwar and other left-wing
demonstrations is generally respectful, even deferential, coverage
of the tea parties has at times been confrontational and mocking.
Here’s the lead paragraph of an April 15 Associated Press
dispatch:
Whipped up by conservative commentators and bloggers, tens of
thousands of protesters staged “tea parties” around the country
Wednesday to tap into the collective angst stirred up by a bad
economy, government spending and bailouts.
Good luck finding an AP story on a left-wing protest that begins
by telling readers who “whipped up” the demonstrators.
The worst offenders were on CNN. NewsBusters. org, a blog of the
conservative watchdog group Media Research Center, described the
scene when CNN correspondent Susan Roesgen covered a tax-day tea
party in Chicago:
Roesgen asked a man holding his toddler, “Why are you here
today?” The man started to respond saying, “Because I hear a
president say that he believed in what Lincoln stood for. Lincoln’s
primary thing was he believed people had the right to liberty and
they had the right...”
But Roesgen cut him off, saying, “But sir, what does that have
to do with taxes? What does this have to do with your taxes?” She
continued asking questions over him as he asked her to “let me
finish my point.” One crowd member was heard to yell “shut up” to
Roesgen.
When the man finished his statement about people having the
“right to the fruits of their own labor” and “government should not
take it,” Roesgen began arguing with him again and other protesters
began to get upset.
Roesgen backed away, claiming that “you get the general tenor of
this” tea party. “Anti-government, anti-CNN since this is highly
promoted by the rightwing conservative network Fox, and since I
can’t really hear much more and I think this is not really family
viewing. Toss it back to you, Kyra [Phillips],” Roesgen
concluded.
In her exchange with the man, Roesgen argued forcefully on
behalf of Obama’s fiscal policies. “Do you realize,” she asked him
in a tone more hectoring than inquisitive, “that you’re eligible
for a $400 tax credit?”
Then, in the same tone, “Wait! Did you know that the state of
Lincoln”—Illinois—“gets $50 billion out of the stimulus? That’s $50
billion for this state, sir.”
Another NewsBusters item described a scene from CNN’s
Anderson Cooper 360:
After CNN’s senior political analyst David Gergen remarked that
Republicans were “searching for their voice” after two electoral
losses, Cooper quipped, “It’s hard to talk when you’re
tea-bagging.”
The reference might have been lost on many viewers, but
“tea-bagging” is a slang term for a type of oral-genital contact.
It seems to have been introduced into popular culture by the 1998
John Waters film Pecker, in which it was a frequent
pastime among patrons at a Baltimore gay bar. Thus Cooper was
suggesting via innuendo that critics of Obama’s economic policies
are homosexual. (At a lecture in May, Cooper responded to an
audience question by acknowledging that his comment was “stupid”
and “silly.”)
In addition to being both biased and vulgar, Cooper’s comment
violated a liberal rule of civility, one set forth by
comedian Wanda Sykes in a TV public service announcement for the
Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. In the spot, Sykes
lectures a group of teen boys in a pizza parlor after overhearing
one of them say, “That’s so gay”:
Don’t say that something is gay when you mean that something is
dumb or stupid. It’s insulting. It’s like if I thought this pepper
shaker is stupid, and I said, “Man, this pepper shaker is so
16-year-old boy with a cheesy mustache.”
Somehow, though, liberal rules of civility are relaxed, if not
disregarded entirely, when liberals are attacking conservatives. In
May, performing at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Sykes
herself benefited from this double standard. President Obama
grinned widely as she told the following joke:
Rush Limbaugh said he hopes this administration fails, so you’re
saying, “I hope America fails,” you’re like, “I don’t care about
people losing their homes, their jobs, our soldiers in Iraq.” He
just wants the country to fail. To me, that’s treason.
He’s not saying anything differently than what Osama bin Laden
is saying. You know [addressing the president], you might want to
look into this, sir, because I think Rush Limbaugh was the 20th
hijacker. But he was just so strung out on OxyContin he missed his
flight.
Rush Limbaugh, I hope the country fails, I hope his kidneys
fail, how about that? He needs a good waterboarding, that’s what he
needs.
With this joke, Sykes ran afoul of at least five taboos: She
equated dissent with treason. She likened a domestic political
opponent to a foreign enemy. She made fun of the disabled
(Limbaugh’s past addiction to painkillers would entitle him to
protection under the Americans with Disabilities Act). She made
light of a form of interrogation that some people consider torture.
And she wished somebody dead.
Possibly excepting the last one, these are all specifically
liberal taboos. If a conservative violated any one of them, he
would be on the inside track to be named “Worst Person in the
World” by MSNBC blowhard Keith Olbermann—as CBS Sports golf analyst
David Feherty had been a few days earlier for this joke, which he
told in a column for Dallas’s D Magazine:
Despite how the conflict has been portrayed by our glorious
media, if you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it,
and he found himself in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid
and Osama bin Laden, there’s a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would
get shot twice, and Harry Reid and bin Laden would be strangled to
death.
CBS Sports issued a statement saying that the joke was “an
unacceptable attempt at humor and is not in any way condoned,
endorsed or approved” by the network. Feherty himself later made a
written apology: “In retrospect, it was inappropriate and
unacceptable, and has clearly insulted Speaker Pelosi and Senator
Reid, and for that, I apologize.”
Sykes, by contrast, did not apologize. Her joke drew only mild
mainstream media criticism, along with cheers from many quarters on
the left. Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, did try to
distance his boss from the joke—but he criticized Sykes only for
making light of 9/11, which he called a subject “better left for
serious reflection than comedy.” (This is a taboo that fell long
ago. As a presidential candidate in 2007, Joe Biden disparaged the
GOP’s then front-runner: “Rudy Giuliani—there’s only three things
he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11.”)
In a 1992 decision striking down a hate-speech ordinance,
Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that the government may not “license
one side of a debate to fight freestyle, while requiring the other
to follow [Marquess] of Queensberry rules.” It’s still an apt
description of how our politically correct arbiters of taste
operate.
