As Kathy Shaidle likes to say, the credo of what passes for 21st century “liberalism” boils down to, “It’s Different When We Do It”; James Taranto sees it as a case of, “Heads I Win, Tails You Lose:”
If there was a media conspiracy to discredit the rally–and we don’t think there was, but after Journolist, who can be sure?–the chief tactic was to cast patriotism as racialism, if not racism. “Overwhelmingly white” was the buzz word of the day–as if that is anything unusual in a nation whose population is 79.6% white.
Our favorite example of the media’s attempts to play the race card, though, came from the “CBS Evening News” and again was caught by NewsBusters:
Nancy Cordes: Beck, who is a converted Mormon, likes to call himself a clown, but today he played the role of ring-master, preaching racial tolerance to the nearly all-white crowd. A change in tone from the Fox News host who notoriously called President Obama–
Beck: –a racist.
This is followed by footage of Cordes at the rally, where she finds two black women and informs them: “I’m noticing that there aren’t a lot of minorities here today.” (And at these prices . . .)
Cordes’s characterization of Beck’s statement is astonishing. Beck has said he shouldn’t have called the president a racist, and we agree. Making baseless charges of racism against political opponents is a low tactic. But liberals do it all the time, and we are supposed to believe that proves how tolerant they are. Now we learn that conservative’s doing exactly the same thing is evidence of his intolerance.
Steve Benen of The Washington Monthly, a liberal-left magazine, proclaims himself “confused” by the rally: “I still haven’t the foggiest idea what these folks actually want.” Is he really this clueless, or is this just a pose? He considers various possibilities and then shoots them down, beginning with this:
This is about “freedom.”
Well, I’m certainly pro-freedom, and as far as I can tell, the anti-freedom crowd struggles to win votes on Election Day. But can they be a little more specific? How about the freedom for same-sex couples to get married? No, we’re told, not that kind of freedom.
It’s all in this vein. They can’t be for American liberties, because they are offended by the Ground Zero mosque. They can’t be for opportunity, because they oppose ObamaCare. They can’t be for “the values of the Founding Fathers,” because they lack a “steadfast commitment to the separation of church and state.” They can’t be for sacrifice, because they oppose the Bush tax increase. They can’t be for truth, because they do not accept doctrinal liberal positions on global warming, ObamaCare, Social Security and judicial philosophy.
“The folks who gathered in D.C. today were awfully excited about something,” Benen concludes. “The fact that it’s not altogether obvious what that might be probably isn’t a good sign.”
Not a good sign for Benen, we’d say, because it shows him to be so doctrinaire and intellectually lazy that he cannot even conceive of a reasoned point of view that differs from his own, whether over a longstanding philosophical question like the role of the judiciary or a transitory controversy like the Ground Zero mosque.
Increasingly, it seems that “Heads I win, tails you lose” is the creed of the contemporary liberal.
Indeed. Speaking of which, as we’ve written before, nobody tell the left that Father Coughlin played for their team:
Note that this clip from MSNBC’s Scanners-like exploding heads freak-out over Beck’s rally on Saturday begins with the head of the Democratic National Committee essentially calling half the country insane, a far cry from Bill Clinton’s Oprah-ish “I Feel Your Pain” treacle. It ends with a “journalist” from the self-described “Paper of Record” blurting on-camera that Glenn Beck assassinated Martin Luther King on Saturday.
Rhetorically, of course.
And speaking of comparisons to 1960s civil rights leaders, after discovering that “Glenn Beck is the White Malcolm X” according to Reihan Salam in the Daily Beast, all I can say is that I’m really looking forward to Denzel Washington playing Beck in his Hollywood bio-pic.
As the tagline on Salam’s article notes:
Glenn Beck’s weekend speech was reminiscent of the radical 1960s black separatist leader: Both terrify mainstream liberals and shed politics for a message of spiritual uplift.
Which highlights the Mobius-loop conundrum the MSM finds themselves in, best described — or at least best tweeted — by Jim Treacher:
“If you’ve spent the past week insisting Obama is a Christian & now complain about the religious nature of Beck’s rally, [you might be a liberal.]”
Ed Morrissey spots far left talker Bill Press riding the Mobius Loop about as successfully as Press would the mechanical bull at Gilley’s, if you’ll pardon a Dan Rather-ish analogy.
And with the midterms coming up fast, what does all this mean?
At the moment, this.
Related: “Truth 1, Sorosphere 0.”
Update: “I don’t know about you, but all this genuflecting to the god of identity politics has me needing a knee replacement.”
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