5 Big Political Stories from this Decade the Left-Wing Media (Intentionally) Got Wrong
5 Big Political Stories from this Decade the Left-Wing Media (Intentionally) Got Wrong
So, what is the most memorable part of the United States invading Iraq? The first thing you should say is the hunt for WMDs. The story we all got was that the US went before the UN and convinced them Saddam had WMDs and was ready as ever to use them for terrorism. Then we invaded with a coalition of countries and as it turned out, surprise, no WMDs! Literally the image given us was our marines crushing schools and public buildings, blowing up houses and running over citizens on our way to Baghdad only to open a giant vault and find nothing in it in one big, "oops, our bad," moment. Not unlike when Giraldo Rivera openned up Al Capone's vault to find nothing but a chair and some other trash. Oh, and an old stop sign, perhaps a hidden omen telling Giraldo to Stop now before it gets any worse.
But What Actually Happened...
For those actually bothering to pay attention to updates sent from the field commanders and the press events no one cared to talk about more than 12 hours, we actually did find WMDs. Say what? No one expected that twist!
But here's the scoop. During the Baghdad invasion the Bush Administration released photographed and documented files from Iraqi field commanders catologuing all the WMD's they found. What they found were indeed stashes of chemical weapons and labs with prepared chemicals to create them. In 2004 they found a lab with several agents in Fallujah, then again in 2005 in Mosul, where a large cache of items had been gathered.
Oddly, this story was played the same way by just about every major news organization and only ran once before being archived to non-existence. They all throw in the same line about how the Bush Administration used WMDs to justify going into Iraq, these WMDs are owned by the Insurgents, no weapons were found in the "18 month search" (which just happens to be from the beginning of the war till the first cache is found) for WMDs. THOSE WMDs were never found.
Now I'm no lawyer, but that sounds a little bit like what they call in the legal proffession, a "carefully worded statement". Its technically not a lie but it just leaves out key information such as, a) Saddam Hussein ran the insurgency up until his commanders lost communication with him, and b) many of those weapons found were totally identified as weapons left over from Saddam's crusade against the Kurds in the 80's.
Ironically Saddam's chemical weapons go "underground" after 1991. Gee, I wonder why, it wouldn't have to do with the US invasion in the Gulf War would it? Certainly not about the countless inspections for weapons by the UN which he oddly turned away. The US went into Iraq because a) Saddam's regime had used weapons on civilians, b) Saddam was denying UN inspectors right up to the war, c) he'd been documented expressing an interest in selling weapons to terrorists, and d) confirmation of WMDs had been given to the CIA by undercover operative "curveball."
Still baffling is that sometime after the invasion the definition of WMDs and their expectation went from Chemical to Nuclear. Which, no one ever thought Iraq had nuclear capability. So how this happened is beyond me. The only time it was mentioned was in the context of "we don't want Saddam to acquire nukes," "we are fearful he might get nukes and like his chemical weapons, sell them to terrorists." That's it.
But even after the chemical weapons were found there were people under the assumption that we were looking for nukes all along. In fact, the media asked Bush about nukes so much that he had to come out and say "we didn't find any WMDs," in a statement that was presented as an admission of failure and a PR maneuver. What is so odd is that the administration had previously already said it had found WMDs in the form of chemical weapons, the same that it had presented in its evidence to the United Nations. This all means that even somewhere along the way in Bush's mind the term WMD had been changed to mean nukes. In that regard it was a search he was destined to fail because the definition of what we were using to justify going into Iraq with changed after we went in.
My theory as to how this so easily caught on is that around the same time the US was dealing with nuclear program threats from China who suddenly had nukes for no reason. Also in the next few years America was dealing with specifically Iran and North Korea, the other two on Bush's list of a new "Axis of Evil" and both countries were tussling with the US over specifically nuclear weapons. Really, that's the true story. How on earth it got to where it did is like in gradeschool and you do that game where a message has to be whispered from one kid to the next and by the time it goes through 30 kids is totally messed up. In this case, intentionally to help John Kerry win an election in 2004.
4. Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the biggest disasters in American modern history. The most destuctive hurricane in history it literally levelled a whole city. It didn't help that that city was literaly underwater as levees broke. I remember it vividly as I watched it. But I was not surprised that since news crews were down there from the beginning that after the first day, when it was still winding down, pictures of victims and chaos and people struggling to survive were put on the screen. Quickly there was a political overtone, because, there's always a political overtone.
Literally within 12 hours of the apex of the storm TV crews and news corporations were asking "where's FEMA" and "what is president Bush doing to help?" I am not kidding you. Very quickly as it was discovered that FEMA was struggling to get there and local officials were still trying to even organize a post apocolyptic wasteland and that it wasn't happening right away, people were dying and it was certainly all Bush's fault.
Bush came out within 24 hours of the storm dissipating and literally said it looked like there were several failures and things that could be done better on the federal and state level. Then it was game-on for sure as things were said that would seem completely absurd in a non-biased context. The feds were accused of not trying, of letting people die, of committing ethnic genocide and presumably being nazis. The list went on. Survivors are expected to say those things sometimes, just depending on how much they project responsibility on the government, but news reporters and rival politicians? The event went down as a monstrous failure on the part of the Federal and State governments and a PR nightmare for the Bush Administration and New Orleans Mayor Nagin.
What Actually Happened...
The day after the hurricane there were emergency crews trying to help. Within 24 hours of the end of the storm there were rescue choppers delivering aid and collecting survivors. They had organized relief shelters and ran in supplies. To many that sounds stupid because people for some reason expected the government to have boots on the ground, shelters set up, food in trucks, alternative housing made, and to be pumping water back into the sea within a few hours of the storm ending. The news agencies certainly did. But here's a fact that will shock you.
Despite its overwhelming scope of dustruction, chaos, and difficulty in accessing key areas due to them being underwater; the FEMA response time during Katrina was "the quickest and largest in United States history" for a major hurricane. Don't believe me? Of course you don't, because no one told you otherwise.
Hurricane Andrew struck Florida and Louisianna in late August of 1992. Then president Clinton did not even address the hurricane as an issue until well after the event. FEMA took 4 days to have anyone in place. Wait, say that again? That's right, it took 4 days before FEMA was there. And unlike New Orleans, these parts weren't under water. FEMA put some improvements in place and by the time Hurricane Charley rolled around they had a couple of first aid camps in place around 24 hours after the hurricane ended and assistance in place 3 days after, which was considered an amazing improvement. There was no criticism of the federal government in the media at all. People were just jazzed that the government was able to help.
So why on earth was Katrina so different? Considering the difficulty in actually getting aid into New Orleans, why such harsh criticism for faster response times? Shouldn't this be a mavel? Well, apparently not. The only thing that forseably changes from the instances is mere expectation, and how it was reported.
Also consider that the most unusual part of the incident was the what happened at the Superdome where people began running out of supplies and there was looting and violence. Althought all those things happen in hurricanes it was specifically pronounced with so many evacuees there huddled together. What took place there was an excess of people for what they'd prepared for. The marvel is that it was prepared in advance. The tradgedy happened when there was a a loss of utilities and an vast number of refugees they couldn't prepare for. The National Guard had enough food and water for 36 hours, and that just wasn't enough for the 20,000 that ended up there.
When evacuations to safe place and supplies were made available even ahead of the timeframes of easier challenges in other disasters, it didn't matter. What happened would forever be considered the State's fault for not having everything ready and the civil violence would be thrown on them as well. Don't get me wrong, what happened there was a tradgedy, and this isn't an article about how things were not tradgedies, this is an article about how the story was told wrong. Consider the federal response to previous disasters the next time someone uses Katrina as an example of government incompetance. In reality, FEMA had been sharpened into an oiled machine by the time Katrina hit, and it was a good thing too. Had it been the same response time as under Clinton in 92' the toll would have been catastrophic.
3. The Arab Spring
During the initial reporting of this stream of uprisings in the Middle East there was no doubt in anyone's mind that the first uprising in Tunisa was pro-Islamist. That is, people rising up against the seccular government in favor of a more exclusively Islamist one. But after it the Algerian uprising was seen as very pro-democratic and western and from that point on, they all were.
News agencies all across Europe and the US began reporting on the rising of democrocy in the Middle East and how this was a pro free-thinking, pro-secular, pro-western movment of young people just like, say, Occupy Wall-Street, standing up against tyranny. It was affectionately dubbed the Arab Spring and everyone criticizing it was billed as demogogues and hate-mongerers. The rise of democracy and open-mindedness was a win for the global community.
What Actually Happened...
All you have to do is pay attention to the "revolutionaries" burning American flags to know what's wrong with that picture. As it turns out, the movments of the Arab Spring were hardly pro-western or pro-personal freedoms. It is true that many of them are pro-democratic, but certainly not pro-civil rights, or pro-equality...so, domocracy for some.
In Libya and Tunisia the rising regimes were unabashedly Islamist but some billed them as very western. It was similar in Egypt where they were actually assisted and orchastrated by groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. A group definitively tied to terrorists and jihadist views. Freedoms for minorities had been taken away, not given. Under Mubarak Egyptian Christians were actually guarded against violence and oppression, the Muslim Brotherhood seems to care nothing at all and is in direct opposition to the Chrisitan groups. With the Brotherhood now in control (as predicted) its hard to see how this attitude was missed during the uprising.
In recent months the truth about the Arab Spring has become harder to hide as these groups take power and express their intentions. The United States' relationship with Egypt has devoled into global opponents as they get close to Iran, Palestine, and Venezuela. In Yemen the revolution has become opennly extremist and militantly opposed to the United States, actively supporting terrorism. That is important because there was an initial movement that was more pro-western. Overlooked entirely were movements in places like Pakistan that were too tame or organized to be considered revolutions but are certainly still part of an Arab Spring movement. Actively collaborating to build cooperation without the United States and backtracking on human rights, it sounds very little like the Arab Spring we were given in the news reports.
2. Every Domestic Terrorist Attack Since 9/11
Have any idea who John Allen Muhammed was? I would say that for 45% of you who listen to conservative media, you do, while the remaining 55% have no idea. That's because for the first few years after John Allen Muhammed was arrested he was called John Williams and was simply a lunatic gunman or "The DC Sniper."
Now that you remember, you would be good to know that he was a Muslim who was killing specifically out of hate for America. But for some reason, he is not considered a terrorist. Why? Mainly because the media is very careful not to portray Muslims as terrorists. One reason why is its respectful to Muslims who are certainly not terrorist and love America. Two, it would only encourage other American Muslims to express their anger the same way or even help them understand their anger as deriving from the same place John Allen did. Both are good reasons, but it is also disingenuous to do so. There are literally reporters and columnists who keep playing off Islamic terrorists until almost none exist.
Nidal Hasan was an army psychologist at Fort Hood, TX who one day executed a plan to kill two dozen or so of his fellow servicemen and women. In the following days everyone was clearly saying in the news that this was NOT terrorism and that he had simply flipped out or something. I literally watched a news commentator justify him by saying that with having to psychologically council all these marines returning after having killed innocent civilians and muslims for being muslims, that he would naturally respond that way. As if killing people just for being civilians and/or muslims is something that naturally every soldier does. Hasns later was open about his beliefs and anger toward America and his support of a global jihadism.
This effort to suppress these reports culminates in some rather absurb statistics from ridiculous columnists who claim things like right-wing extremists are just as much a threat to terrorism than foreign-born terrorists. Which is a concept so void of actual knowledge it derserves to be referenced.
Don't get me wrong, domestic terrorism and extreme views are a problem and gaining some momentum. They have largely responded to a government crack down on them since the Obama Administration took over. What the government gave them was respect, which was really the only thing keeping them so small over the last decade or so, lack of respect. Some right-wing extremists also may just be angry about black people in the White House, since these groups are neo-nazis and other pro-aryan movements. In either case the threat of native anti-foreigner terrorism is certainly there, but actual statistics show that even with their gain in the past few years that acts of terrorism by non-foreigners of any ideology make up only about a third of attacks since 9/11. Which is ridiculous considering non-foreigners vastly outnumber foreigners domestically. In most cases, these native terror threats are not right-wing at all, but left-wing as you will see.
The fact that these get reported on is not a problem, but how they get reported. As soon as Jeremy Loughner shot Gabriella Gifford it was because he was a right-wing capitalist, and a tea partier. When in reality he was a communist/socialist. The same was said of James Holmes, a psychological mess and anarchist (much like the Joker, his hero).
Political pundants and columnists from every left-wing media outlet talked about the vitriol of conservative commentators and news pundants, even calling for cencorship. (Such a new concept, calling for the cencorship of your political opponents). Joseph Stack flew a plane into an IRS buliding, and immediately it was a right-wing terrorist attack. As it turns out he was actually anti-american, anti-big business, and an overall anarchist, much like the others. In no way were any of them right-wing. If anything, they were all left-wing. But that is still the story we got and you would never know any better unless you actually bothered to read their profiles.
When an actual extreme anti-foreigner neo-nazi like the Sikh Temple gunman arises, the media has no way to up the ante on how they report that. Like the little boy who cried wolf, by the time you actually report a real wolf, people have begun to tune it out, and that is something tragic.
1. Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street Movements
Dating back to its roots around 2005 or so, the Tea Party Movement picked up steam in 2006 and made waves in 2008. With literally tens of millions of activists, supporters or members it is the strongest modern political movement in American history. Compare that with the Occupy Wall-Street movement which has struggled to get even 100 protesters in every city and at its height has had maybe a couple thousand in one place at one time. And its approximately a little over a year old. So how on earth these get presented as equal movements of the people is startling.
When the Tea Party marched on Washington DC in 2009 it was a massive event. According to some respected analysts there were as many as 1.5 million people there. Even the most conservative estimates of photos of the event place the turnout around 750,000. But read any news article or listen to any of the television reports at the time and you heard "tens of thousands" or even "roughly ten thousand or so."
5. The Iraq War and the Search for Saddam's WMDs.So, what is the most memorable part of the United States invading Iraq? The first thing you should say is the hunt for WMDs. The story we all got was that the US went before the UN and convinced them Saddam had WMDs and was ready as ever to use them for terrorism. Then we invaded with a coalition of countries and as it turned out, surprise, no WMDs! Literally the image given us was our marines crushing schools and public buildings, blowing up houses and running over citizens on our way to Baghdad only to open a giant vault and find nothing in it in one big, "oops, our bad," moment. Not unlike when Giraldo Rivera openned up Al Capone's vault to find nothing but a chair and some other trash. Oh, and an old stop sign, perhaps a hidden omen telling Giraldo to Stop now before it gets any worse.
The sum of the Iraq War as we envisioned it.
In the fallout the Bush Administration was heavily criticized and harassed. For the next several years newspapers and cable news television gave us day by day "bodycounts" in the war, including everyone who happed to die during the next few years due to displacement or just, you know, those that would just die period. The numbers got higher and people got madder and madder overtaken by the obvious fact that we went into Iraq on no evidence, lied about that evidence, and were found it our bumfoolery by the empty vault.But What Actually Happened...
For those actually bothering to pay attention to updates sent from the field commanders and the press events no one cared to talk about more than 12 hours, we actually did find WMDs. Say what? No one expected that twist!
But here's the scoop. During the Baghdad invasion the Bush Administration released photographed and documented files from Iraqi field commanders catologuing all the WMD's they found. What they found were indeed stashes of chemical weapons and labs with prepared chemicals to create them. In 2004 they found a lab with several agents in Fallujah, then again in 2005 in Mosul, where a large cache of items had been gathered.
File Photo: Mosul Weapon's Lab.
Or rather "A photo fewer than 1% of the population has ever seen or heard of."
Oddly, this story was played the same way by just about every major news organization and only ran once before being archived to non-existence. They all throw in the same line about how the Bush Administration used WMDs to justify going into Iraq, these WMDs are owned by the Insurgents, no weapons were found in the "18 month search" (which just happens to be from the beginning of the war till the first cache is found) for WMDs. THOSE WMDs were never found.
Now I'm no lawyer, but that sounds a little bit like what they call in the legal proffession, a "carefully worded statement". Its technically not a lie but it just leaves out key information such as, a) Saddam Hussein ran the insurgency up until his commanders lost communication with him, and b) many of those weapons found were totally identified as weapons left over from Saddam's crusade against the Kurds in the 80's.
Ironically Saddam's chemical weapons go "underground" after 1991. Gee, I wonder why, it wouldn't have to do with the US invasion in the Gulf War would it? Certainly not about the countless inspections for weapons by the UN which he oddly turned away. The US went into Iraq because a) Saddam's regime had used weapons on civilians, b) Saddam was denying UN inspectors right up to the war, c) he'd been documented expressing an interest in selling weapons to terrorists, and d) confirmation of WMDs had been given to the CIA by undercover operative "curveball."
Still baffling is that sometime after the invasion the definition of WMDs and their expectation went from Chemical to Nuclear. Which, no one ever thought Iraq had nuclear capability. So how this happened is beyond me. The only time it was mentioned was in the context of "we don't want Saddam to acquire nukes," "we are fearful he might get nukes and like his chemical weapons, sell them to terrorists." That's it.
But even after the chemical weapons were found there were people under the assumption that we were looking for nukes all along. In fact, the media asked Bush about nukes so much that he had to come out and say "we didn't find any WMDs," in a statement that was presented as an admission of failure and a PR maneuver. What is so odd is that the administration had previously already said it had found WMDs in the form of chemical weapons, the same that it had presented in its evidence to the United Nations. This all means that even somewhere along the way in Bush's mind the term WMD had been changed to mean nukes. In that regard it was a search he was destined to fail because the definition of what we were using to justify going into Iraq with changed after we went in.
My theory as to how this so easily caught on is that around the same time the US was dealing with nuclear program threats from China who suddenly had nukes for no reason. Also in the next few years America was dealing with specifically Iran and North Korea, the other two on Bush's list of a new "Axis of Evil" and both countries were tussling with the US over specifically nuclear weapons. Really, that's the true story. How on earth it got to where it did is like in gradeschool and you do that game where a message has to be whispered from one kid to the next and by the time it goes through 30 kids is totally messed up. In this case, intentionally to help John Kerry win an election in 2004.
4. Hurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the biggest disasters in American modern history. The most destuctive hurricane in history it literally levelled a whole city. It didn't help that that city was literaly underwater as levees broke. I remember it vividly as I watched it. But I was not surprised that since news crews were down there from the beginning that after the first day, when it was still winding down, pictures of victims and chaos and people struggling to survive were put on the screen. Quickly there was a political overtone, because, there's always a political overtone.
Literally within 12 hours of the apex of the storm TV crews and news corporations were asking "where's FEMA" and "what is president Bush doing to help?" I am not kidding you. Very quickly as it was discovered that FEMA was struggling to get there and local officials were still trying to even organize a post apocolyptic wasteland and that it wasn't happening right away, people were dying and it was certainly all Bush's fault.
In the very center of town is a scribbled sign reading "BUSH WAS HERE!"
Bush came out within 24 hours of the storm dissipating and literally said it looked like there were several failures and things that could be done better on the federal and state level. Then it was game-on for sure as things were said that would seem completely absurd in a non-biased context. The feds were accused of not trying, of letting people die, of committing ethnic genocide and presumably being nazis. The list went on. Survivors are expected to say those things sometimes, just depending on how much they project responsibility on the government, but news reporters and rival politicians? The event went down as a monstrous failure on the part of the Federal and State governments and a PR nightmare for the Bush Administration and New Orleans Mayor Nagin.
What Actually Happened...
The day after the hurricane there were emergency crews trying to help. Within 24 hours of the end of the storm there were rescue choppers delivering aid and collecting survivors. They had organized relief shelters and ran in supplies. To many that sounds stupid because people for some reason expected the government to have boots on the ground, shelters set up, food in trucks, alternative housing made, and to be pumping water back into the sea within a few hours of the storm ending. The news agencies certainly did. But here's a fact that will shock you.
Despite its overwhelming scope of dustruction, chaos, and difficulty in accessing key areas due to them being underwater; the FEMA response time during Katrina was "the quickest and largest in United States history" for a major hurricane. Don't believe me? Of course you don't, because no one told you otherwise.
Hurricane Andrew struck Florida and Louisianna in late August of 1992. Then president Clinton did not even address the hurricane as an issue until well after the event. FEMA took 4 days to have anyone in place. Wait, say that again? That's right, it took 4 days before FEMA was there. And unlike New Orleans, these parts weren't under water. FEMA put some improvements in place and by the time Hurricane Charley rolled around they had a couple of first aid camps in place around 24 hours after the hurricane ended and assistance in place 3 days after, which was considered an amazing improvement. There was no criticism of the federal government in the media at all. People were just jazzed that the government was able to help.
So why on earth was Katrina so different? Considering the difficulty in actually getting aid into New Orleans, why such harsh criticism for faster response times? Shouldn't this be a mavel? Well, apparently not. The only thing that forseably changes from the instances is mere expectation, and how it was reported.
Also consider that the most unusual part of the incident was the what happened at the Superdome where people began running out of supplies and there was looting and violence. Althought all those things happen in hurricanes it was specifically pronounced with so many evacuees there huddled together. What took place there was an excess of people for what they'd prepared for. The marvel is that it was prepared in advance. The tradgedy happened when there was a a loss of utilities and an vast number of refugees they couldn't prepare for. The National Guard had enough food and water for 36 hours, and that just wasn't enough for the 20,000 that ended up there.
When evacuations to safe place and supplies were made available even ahead of the timeframes of easier challenges in other disasters, it didn't matter. What happened would forever be considered the State's fault for not having everything ready and the civil violence would be thrown on them as well. Don't get me wrong, what happened there was a tradgedy, and this isn't an article about how things were not tradgedies, this is an article about how the story was told wrong. Consider the federal response to previous disasters the next time someone uses Katrina as an example of government incompetance. In reality, FEMA had been sharpened into an oiled machine by the time Katrina hit, and it was a good thing too. Had it been the same response time as under Clinton in 92' the toll would have been catastrophic.
3. The Arab Spring
During the initial reporting of this stream of uprisings in the Middle East there was no doubt in anyone's mind that the first uprising in Tunisa was pro-Islamist. That is, people rising up against the seccular government in favor of a more exclusively Islamist one. But after it the Algerian uprising was seen as very pro-democratic and western and from that point on, they all were.
News agencies all across Europe and the US began reporting on the rising of democrocy in the Middle East and how this was a pro free-thinking, pro-secular, pro-western movment of young people just like, say, Occupy Wall-Street, standing up against tyranny. It was affectionately dubbed the Arab Spring and everyone criticizing it was billed as demogogues and hate-mongerers. The rise of democracy and open-mindedness was a win for the global community.
What Actually Happened...
All you have to do is pay attention to the "revolutionaries" burning American flags to know what's wrong with that picture. As it turns out, the movments of the Arab Spring were hardly pro-western or pro-personal freedoms. It is true that many of them are pro-democratic, but certainly not pro-civil rights, or pro-equality...so, domocracy for some.
In Libya and Tunisia the rising regimes were unabashedly Islamist but some billed them as very western. It was similar in Egypt where they were actually assisted and orchastrated by groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. A group definitively tied to terrorists and jihadist views. Freedoms for minorities had been taken away, not given. Under Mubarak Egyptian Christians were actually guarded against violence and oppression, the Muslim Brotherhood seems to care nothing at all and is in direct opposition to the Chrisitan groups. With the Brotherhood now in control (as predicted) its hard to see how this attitude was missed during the uprising.
Just look at how much they like us over there.
2. Every Domestic Terrorist Attack Since 9/11
Have any idea who John Allen Muhammed was? I would say that for 45% of you who listen to conservative media, you do, while the remaining 55% have no idea. That's because for the first few years after John Allen Muhammed was arrested he was called John Williams and was simply a lunatic gunman or "The DC Sniper."
Now that you remember, you would be good to know that he was a Muslim who was killing specifically out of hate for America. But for some reason, he is not considered a terrorist. Why? Mainly because the media is very careful not to portray Muslims as terrorists. One reason why is its respectful to Muslims who are certainly not terrorist and love America. Two, it would only encourage other American Muslims to express their anger the same way or even help them understand their anger as deriving from the same place John Allen did. Both are good reasons, but it is also disingenuous to do so. There are literally reporters and columnists who keep playing off Islamic terrorists until almost none exist.
Nidal Hasan was an army psychologist at Fort Hood, TX who one day executed a plan to kill two dozen or so of his fellow servicemen and women. In the following days everyone was clearly saying in the news that this was NOT terrorism and that he had simply flipped out or something. I literally watched a news commentator justify him by saying that with having to psychologically council all these marines returning after having killed innocent civilians and muslims for being muslims, that he would naturally respond that way. As if killing people just for being civilians and/or muslims is something that naturally every soldier does. Hasns later was open about his beliefs and anger toward America and his support of a global jihadism.
This effort to suppress these reports culminates in some rather absurb statistics from ridiculous columnists who claim things like right-wing extremists are just as much a threat to terrorism than foreign-born terrorists. Which is a concept so void of actual knowledge it derserves to be referenced.
Don't get me wrong, domestic terrorism and extreme views are a problem and gaining some momentum. They have largely responded to a government crack down on them since the Obama Administration took over. What the government gave them was respect, which was really the only thing keeping them so small over the last decade or so, lack of respect. Some right-wing extremists also may just be angry about black people in the White House, since these groups are neo-nazis and other pro-aryan movements. In either case the threat of native anti-foreigner terrorism is certainly there, but actual statistics show that even with their gain in the past few years that acts of terrorism by non-foreigners of any ideology make up only about a third of attacks since 9/11. Which is ridiculous considering non-foreigners vastly outnumber foreigners domestically. In most cases, these native terror threats are not right-wing at all, but left-wing as you will see.
The fact that these get reported on is not a problem, but how they get reported. As soon as Jeremy Loughner shot Gabriella Gifford it was because he was a right-wing capitalist, and a tea partier. When in reality he was a communist/socialist. The same was said of James Holmes, a psychological mess and anarchist (much like the Joker, his hero).
Oh, yeah, practically the same guy. Definately on the same team.
Political pundants and columnists from every left-wing media outlet talked about the vitriol of conservative commentators and news pundants, even calling for cencorship. (Such a new concept, calling for the cencorship of your political opponents). Joseph Stack flew a plane into an IRS buliding, and immediately it was a right-wing terrorist attack. As it turns out he was actually anti-american, anti-big business, and an overall anarchist, much like the others. In no way were any of them right-wing. If anything, they were all left-wing. But that is still the story we got and you would never know any better unless you actually bothered to read their profiles.
When an actual extreme anti-foreigner neo-nazi like the Sikh Temple gunman arises, the media has no way to up the ante on how they report that. Like the little boy who cried wolf, by the time you actually report a real wolf, people have begun to tune it out, and that is something tragic.
1. Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street Movements
Dating back to its roots around 2005 or so, the Tea Party Movement picked up steam in 2006 and made waves in 2008. With literally tens of millions of activists, supporters or members it is the strongest modern political movement in American history. Compare that with the Occupy Wall-Street movement which has struggled to get even 100 protesters in every city and at its height has had maybe a couple thousand in one place at one time. And its approximately a little over a year old. So how on earth these get presented as equal movements of the people is startling.
When the Tea Party marched on Washington DC in 2009 it was a massive event. According to some respected analysts there were as many as 1.5 million people there. Even the most conservative estimates of photos of the event place the turnout around 750,000. But read any news article or listen to any of the television reports at the time and you heard "tens of thousands" or even "roughly ten thousand or so."
Above: Ten Thousand?
Yeah, no. It was the single largest gathering for a political movement in Washington DC ever. Watching the videos on the only places that would show them (like GBTV) and then turning on CNN and hearing tens of thousands, it was such a joke you had to just dismiss it and not think about it. It's like when a cop watches an accident with you and the red car clearly ran a red light and slugged the minivan and the cop turns and says, "looks like another case of people not watching for motorcycles, eh? That's what you saw." Then he writes it down and clears things up. How do you respond to something like that? What's crazier is, when has that ever happened to you? That's what made it so hard to respond to, I'd never seen media coverage quite that bad. It was like, "I can see the movie and know you guys are full of it. Do you just not care?" Apparently not, because they kept doing it.
Occupy Wall-Street was started by people that had worked for democratic lawmakers' campaigns and it was begun with people who literally didn't even know why they were there. The media immediately picked it up and ran with it. The first outing was (not kidding) reported as "thousands" or even "tens of thousands" of protesters.
This is the largest number of "Occupiers" I could find doing searches.
Seriously? I don't know how this is even in contention. On top of this there is how each party has been reported on. If you watch nothing but MSNBC or CNN you imagine the Tea Party as a bunch of weird extremists or neo-nazis. What's so bad is there is actual documentation on places like GBTV or Drudge Report of reporters actually finding that lone radical with an effigy of Obama and then taking that picture and representing the movement with it. There are even documented cases of liberal opponents to the movement dressing up like neo-nazis or white supremecists going to these events and shouting racial offenses before the real Tea Partiers kick them out. On top of that, the whole movement is billed as pro-white, anti-muslim, and bigotted when in reality the Tea Party has brought more conservative ethnic and racial minorities and women into the Republican Party than the last 20 years. But you didn't see that.
What you probably saw were images like this:
When in reality, there was 1,000 times more of this:
Honestly that is very hard for a lot of people to believe since the ideas they have of the Tea Party were created with an agenda in mind. The Tea Party universally is about the National Debt, Irrisponsible Government Spending, and Taxation, in particular the growing sentiment that government taxes to pay for things that don't represent the values of the people but of politicians and special interest groups.
On that note, far more entertaining pictures of Occupy Wall Street protesters can be found.
I wish this was that lone nut equal to the one above but
those creepy masks were pretty popular. I won't undersand that.
If you don't believe me, just google it. New media agencies can't hide all that stuff. And hopefully at the end of it you will come to the realization that just perhaps news is reported from either right or left with an agenda in mind.
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