Cold Civil War Update

In the most recent edition of Silicon Graffiti, I mentioned how one of the biggest battlefields of any conflict, hot or cold, is the video editing bay, and quoted Gerard Van der Luen, who noted in his American Digest blog in May of 2009:

The Media is how America fights its civil wars. In this war at least half the country is both under-served and is painfully aware it is being under-served and lied to.

Bob Owens writes elsewhere at PJM that you can watch that in action with the latest video from “Think Progress,” which seems to determined to make both of the words in their name oxymorons, with its latest video designed to smear the Tea Parties. As Bob notes:

Activist 2 is a favorite of Think Progress, and no wonder: he says exactly what they hoped to hear a tea partier say, exclaiming: “I’m a proud racist, I’m white.” Think Progress liked this clip so much they played it not once, but twice.

The problem is, Activist 2 isn’t a tea party protester. He is a tea party crasher.

Think Progress is well aware of this, as they pulled the few seconds of video from a nearly six-minute video of actual tea party protesters singling him out for scorn and chasing him away!

Nice outfit, don’t you think? The man is in fact likely a progressive plant, possibly from that day’s failed “Crash the Tea Party” movement. Note that his Nazi shirt is just out of the package, wrinkled and heavily creased across the fold from shipping. This man was isolated by real tea party protesters, holding signs like the one above, from the moment he showed up.

Think Progress pulled the video of him claiming “I’m racist, I’m white” from the 53-second mark of a nearly six-minute video from conservative blog SharpElbows.Net. The video is entitled: “Proof that the Tea Party is not racist.” It consists of real tea party protesters chasing the man away, and provides a link to where the man bought some of his Nazi gear online.

There is literally no way that Think Progress staffers, using a nearly six-minute video of tea party protesters berating a mail order Nazi and likely progressive plant, could watch this video and come to any conclusion other than that tea party protesters revile racism.

And when you’re done with that obfuscation, let’s do the timewarp again:

Activist 4?

He is the reason the original 53-second Think Progress video has shrunk down to an even more anemic 50 seconds.

His brief — inarguably racist — shout of “Go home wetbacks!” is provably a video from 2006.

Years before the tea party existed.

To their credit, Think Progress eventually took down Activist 4’s information.

As Bob concludes:

Reality would not provide them with the propaganda  they sought to exploit for their own political gain. So they invented it.

Real journalists would be fired on the spot for this  behavior. The willful  perversion of the SharpElbows.net video should end careers.

According to Think  Progress’ “About Us” page, Faiz Shakir is vice president at the Center for American Progress  and serves as editor-in-chief of ThinkProgress.org. He sets the  standards for this group.

Lee Fang, the Think Progress  “researcher” that bylines this video, has interned with a similar  propaganda site named Media Matters.

In just 53 seconds, they’ve created  propaganda so blatantly dishonest as to make their termination  mandatory. They’ve abused their readers, and their opponents.

But perhaps that is  what they are paid to do.

As one of Tim Blair’s readers asked last year about similarly far left Media Matters, when they were also caught manufacturing quotes about one of their ideological enemies:

How is it that when Righties quote Lefties, they have video, audio, and notarized confirmation from the Pope, but when Lefties ‘quote’ Righties, they have Wiki entries contributed by ‘Cobra’?

In the conclusion of his recent three-part series at Patheos.com on the Tea Parties, Timothy Dalrymple noted:

Liberals cannot believe that Tea Partiers are actually motivated by the passions and the reasons that Tea Partiers claim motivate them, because liberals in general are alienated from those passions and insufficiently educated in those reasons.It is essentially a failure of imagination. Liberals cannot imagine themselves into a way of thinking in which conservatives do what they do and believe what they believe for good reasons. And since they cannot believe that conservatives are motivated by rational beliefs and admirable motives, they must appeal to darker, more primitive impulses to explain their behavior. The racist motive presents itself as a natural and convenient explanation.

Liberals, in other words, were always going to believe that a movement dominated by white conservatives is racist.

Because as with any religious movement, you start with a deeply held belief and then construct evidence to arrive backwards at that conclusion — even if, in Think Progress’ case, you have to build it in the editing bay (QED, the productions emanating from “Pallywood”, the Palestinians’ video mill, also mentioned in the Cold Civil War video).

In other words, 2006, 2010? Before the Tea Parties came into existence? Afterward? What’s the difference to the left, when the myths are more important than facts?