Political Irony

Some coverage from CNN featuring a protestor calling Obama a fascist and holding a sign depicting Obama as Hitler. The reporter asks him several times why he thinks Obama is a fascist, and his reply is only “because he is”.

A more accurate answer to her question might have been “because Fox News tells me he is.” In this coverage from the “we report, you decide” cable news channel, their reporter Cody Willard calls the stimulus bill a “fascist” piece of legislation, and exhorts viewers to “wake up and start fighting the fascism that seems to be permeating this country.”

See also this video, which shows Fox’s Neil Cavuto blatantly lying. On the air he claims that the crowd size at a protest in Sacramento as “easily” 10,000 to 15,000 people, while just before that (but off the air) he and his producer estimated the crowd at 5,000. The California Highway Patrol independently estimated the crowd to be 5,000 at its peak. Crowd numbers were expected to be higher in California than most other states, because anti-tax sentiments are running especially high after Governor Schwarzenegger and state lawmakers made a budget deal in February that included temporary increases to sales, income and vehicle taxes.

Thanks to DailyKosTV.

UPDATE: OMG! View this clip from the Fox affiliate in Boston:

UPDATE 2: The Fox News blog features an article by Peter Roff titled “Tea Parties — Mission Accomplished”. Do these people really not get the irony of this? It was bad enough that they kept calling it teabagging.

UPDATE 3: Good summary of the whole thing: “Fox News-driven “tea parties” fail to ignite popular uprising among U.S. conservatives“. Of course it is not in a US newspaper.

The term “astroturf” was coined to refer to “grass-roots” events that are faked — typically organized and financed secretly by a hidden organization to promote their political goals.

One of the most famous examples of astroturfing was the “Brooks Brothers Riot” that succeeded in stopping the Florida recount during the 2000 presidential election. That somewhat violent riot was designed to appear to be spontaneous, but was actually organized by Republican congressman John Sweeney, and the protestors were Republican congressional staffers who were flown in specifically for the event.

Today, on Tax Day, we are seeing essentially the same thing in the “Tea Bagging” parties that are being promoted by various well-financed conservative organizations, including Fox News. What makes these events particularly ironic is that they are being organized and paid for by the very people that the tea baggers should actually be protesting.  As Matt Taibbi puts it “You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit.”

Doubly ironic is that the “tea bagging” parties are supposedly protesting high taxes, but a new Gallup poll shows that more Americans say that their tax rate is “about right” than say that it is “too high”. In other words, there is no groundswell of protest against tax rates, other than perhaps among the rich — who of course are the people financing the tea bag events. Not only that, but the tea parties are targeting their rage at Obama, even though he is actually cutting taxes for anyone making less than $250,000 per year.

But those events are just practice for what might turn out to be the largest astroturf in history — the coming sham “grass-roots” campaign against the reform of the health insurance industry. Already, health insurance lobbyists have hired a PR firm to send phoney letters to the editor. In fact, the PR firm is sending in letters using the names of actual senior citizens, without their consent or even knowledge. The PR firm even called up a newspaper to see if a letter supposedly sent by Gloria Gosselin was going to be printed, and pretended to be her grandson. Except Gosselin didn’t write a letter, and the caller wasn’t her grandson.

The health insurance industry was able to derail reform during the Clinton administration, and as a result we now pay more for health care than any other nation, and get less in return. Will we get fooled again?

UPDATE: PopCrunch has a list of some of the worst examples of Astroturfing that is worth a read.

Despite their claim to be “fair and balanced”, hardly anyone is surprised at the stupid antics pulled by the Fox News Channel anymore. Nevertheless, some people complained when FNC started actively promoting anti-Obama “tea party” protests across the country, even inviting their viewers to participate in “FNC Tax Day Tea Parties” featuring their top stars:

FNC’s Neil Cavuto bristled at those complaints, claiming:

We are are going to be in the middle of these protests because at Fox, we do not pick and choose these rallies and protests. We were there for the Million Man March, even though, as I pointed out, it turned out to be well shy of a million men.

What’s really hilarious about this is that the Million Man March took place in October 1995, while Fox News first went on the air a year later, in October 1996.

Even ignoring that ginormous faux pas, reporting on protests is not the same as promoting and sponsoring them. Somebody please take away their press credentials.

Glenn Greenwald has a stunning article about Obama’s complete about-face on the issue of habeas corpus and enemy combatants. Habeas corpus is one of our fundamental rights, which says that a government cannot simply arrest you and toss you in jail without at least telling you for what you have been arrested and giving you a chance to protest your innocence. When you travel, habeas corpus is what protects you from the petty foreign official who decides he doesn’t like you and throws you in jail to rot.

This was a big issue during the presidential campaign, and Greenwald’s article has numerous quotes from Obama, but I’ll include just one short one that he said after the Supreme Court overruled the Bush administration and declared that enemy combatants do indeed have habeas corpus rights:

Today’s Supreme Court decision ensures that we can protect our nation and bring terrorists to justice, while also protecting our core values. The Court’s decision is a rejection of the Bush Administration’s attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantanamo – yet another failed policy supported by John McCain. This is an important step toward reestablishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law, and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus. Our courts have employed habeas corpus with rigor and fairness for more than two centuries, and we must continue to do so as we defend the freedom that violent extremists seek to destroy.

Which is why it is extremely surprising that now that Obama has been elected president, his Justice Department is fighting tooth and nail to preserve the right to abduct anyone they don’t like and throw them in jail, without charges or any legal rights of any kind.

We aren’t talking about people captured on a battlefield here. These are people who were abducted from their homes or workplaces, transported to places like Guantanamo or Bagram, Afghanistan, and disappeared. And we know that at least some of them were innocent victims of mistaken identity, but without habeas corpus rights they had no way to resolve the mixup.

Ignoring for a moment whether you think the government should imprison suspected terrorists without any legal rights at all, this is a complete reversal for Obama. During the campaign, Obama repeatedly declared that:

abducting people and imprisoning them without charges was (a) un-American; (b) tyrannical; (c) unnecessary to fight Terrorism; (d) a potent means for stoking anti-Americanism and fueling Terrorism; (e) a means of endangering captured American troops, Americans traveling abroad and Americans generally; and (f) a violent betrayal of core, centuries-old Western principles of justice. But today’s Barack Obama, safely ensconced in the White House, fights tooth and nail to preserve his power to do exactly that.

I and many other Obama supporters were dismayed during the election when Obama voted for the FISA bill to give retroactive immunity to telecoms for tapping the telephones of American citizens, in contradiction to his earlier promises, and I never felt like we received a reasonable explanation as to why he reversed his position. But reversing his position on habeas corpus is even more confusing.

Making this even worse is how quiet the mainstream media is being about this issue, even news organizations that reported this in the past. The Columbia Journalism Review has an article about the coverage (or lack thereof) on this issue.

Doesn’t one of our fundamental rights deserve more attention than this?