An interesting problem in mathematics:
How many left wing demonstrators does it take to equal one tea party demonstrator?
Today’s Boston Globe makes Sarah Palin’s tea party appearance, before at most 6,000 people front page news. Okay, the home town paper. So how explain the front page article in today’s Times, earnestly trying to explain the source of this whipped up “discontent”, without mentioning the Republican honchos that whipped it up and without mentioning the obvious: racism.
These tea party rallies have, by and large, attracted anemic crowds when compared with those staged by leftists. You could fit almost everyone who has ever attended a tea party rally in the crowd that was in New York to protest the Iraq war at its commencement, not to mention the number of protestors who showed up in January 2001 to protest the stolen election. And did you know that tens of thousands of people were in Washington last month to rally in favor of immigration reform? Well, you would if you had gone to page A16 of the Times that day, where, by the way, you would have had to go many years ago to read about the millions who were protesting the Iraq war here and around the world (250,000 in New York), not to mention the crowds that show up to protest globalization. Despite the numerical disparity in these numbers, the media has bestowed a legitimacy and importance on these crackpots that is disproportionate to their numbers.
Besides the differences in the amount and placement of the ink spilled on the tea party types, there is a pronounced difference in the way these folks are treated in the media. Despite the fact that they are philosophically incoherent, they are accorded respect, and, by and large, allowed to assert unchallenged that they somehow represent a majority of Americans, despite the fact that the only core belief they seem to share is a belief that the man the majority of us put in the White House is illegitimate. Funny, but Bush really was illegitimate, but anyone who said it was immediately marginalized, as are those against wars, corporations, and globalization.
Perhaps the pundits and the press feel an affinity with the tea partiers. The punditocracy is made up overwhelmingly of people who have climbed ever higher by being ever wronger. Why should they waste their time talking about people who keep turning out to be right, when they can spend their time obsessing about people who are so much like them.
So, how many left wing demonstrators does it take to equal one tea party demonstrator?
I sure as hell don’t know.
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