Bruce Parker Speaks Up

Comments on the MSNBC / Olbermann / Garofalo ‘tea party redneck racist’ skit *:Deadpan is a mark of successful comedians. Keith Olbermann fails at it, in his eighth-grade-entendre** in this skit. Janeane Garofalo succeeds, in her vitriol-disguised-as-humor-disguised-as-news-analysis. She delivers a package that simultaneously reinforces prejudices of the left, insults the right, and plants disinformation in political moderates. The skit would appear to be satire, except that the delivery is presented as unimpeachable fact. The insidious part is that many viewers will have the lies planted in their memory – which is what Olbermann and Garofalo had in mind. Dr. Goebbels would be proud.

Garofalo distills her criticism of the tea parties to “this is racism straight up”.

I beg to differ. From the organizers to the attendees at the Oklahoma City rally, race was not the issue. The people attending the tea parties were demonstrating against the government’s fiscal irresponsibility – Obama, Bush, and Congress on both sides. I did not see any signs from the Aryan Nation, or David Duke, or the like. I saw numerous signs decrying federal debt. Where the original tea party decried ‘taxation without representation’, these folks are voicing their disapproval of ‘spending without responsibility’.

The disinformation attempted by O&G:

• The tea party effort is “corporate sponsored” – I can tell you, as a member of the organizers of the Oklahoma City tea party, that we had no corporate sponsorship, and would have refused it. Each tea party group would have to speak for itself, but I suspect this was typical.
• “Republican spending” – same answer as corporate sponsorship. In fact, we made the decision not to allow parties, politicians, or candidates to speak. Their blather is not the solution.
• Seething with hate – I must not have been at the tea party Olbermann describes. I saw none of this, and I got there early and circulated the crowd and talked to people. Disagreeing with Obama’s, Pelosi’s, or Bush’s actions is not hatred.
• “…this is racism straight up” – many Oklahomans have volunteered to help get women, blacks, American Indians, and anybody else who would work responsibly, into office. I can’t speak for everyone, but in this Oklahoma crowd racism is yesterday.
• Right wingers are stupid:
o The Pensacola tea party speaker to whom Olbermann refers, whose Obama tax cut claims ‘weren’t understood’ by the tea party gathering: he was given time to speak; his claims were understood, but were disagreed with by the crowd, in spite of his infantile lead-the-crowd attempts.
o conservatives are Limbic brained, and that interferes with the ability to process rational thought. We’ll chalk that one up to “humor”. But it strikes me as odd that the ‘Limbic brained’ [a genetic, and therefore racist, argument, Janeane], has, in Garofalo’s view, moved to the Republican party from the Democrats, where racism resided for generations. Perhaps that proves evolution, after all. But I will leave humor to the professionals.

Summing up: once I got past the insult reflex and looked at the content, I conclude that neither Keith nor Janeane believe all of what they said, but crafted it to create both the insult and the disinformation. These are callous people acting in intellectual dishonesty. Shame on MSNBC for providing air time for what would instantly be labeled hate speech from a conservative, and then not challenging or illuminating the disinformation.

The truth is that the tea parties are a nationwide expression of dissatisfaction on government spending and debt, to representatives who otherwise appear to listen only to lobbyists.
Bruce Parker

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