Jay Rosen made a couple of good observations about CNN’s role in last night’s ugliness:
The first tweet refers to this Times story about how CNN is trying to get over its reputation as the “mouthpiece of the political left” (news to me – I thought that was MSNBC’s job). The second refers to the branding of the debate as the “CNN/Tea Party Republican” debate.
Given CNN’s consistently underwhelming and myopic political coverage, the fact that they went out of their way to bond so tightly with the Tea Party is probably an indicator that the Tea Party’s time in the spotlight is pretty much over.
Southern Beale
Last time the crowd applauded Rick Perry’s execution record. This time, according to my Twitter feed, they applauded when someone (I assume from the audience not one of the candidates) said people without health insurance should be left to die.
Tea Party is the party of death. It is the worst of America.
Ash Can
From your keyboard to the FSM’s orecchiette.
Keith
I found it also a bit odd that it’s branded as if there is a The Tea Party, as if it is a real political party rather than a concept that has been franchised into dozens of groups with various ideas of what “their government” is supposed to be. Maybe CNN should have been more specific with the name, like “The CNN/Tea Party Express Republican Debate”
WereBear
Let’s call it the Cranky Sociopath party and be done with it.
burnspbesq
@mistermix:
That kind of wishful thinking will get Rick Perry elected.
Ash Can
@WereBear: As opposed to the White Privilege Party and the Republican Sore Losers Club.
RandyH
SEVERAL years ago, one of my drunken white trash trailer-dwelling associates commented that CNN=Communist News Network and she seemed to believe that all of the informed people (those who watch Fox News) knew this to be a fact. CNN may be earning some new cred with her and her ilk today.
ornery
You know what I’m glad about? In the 20’s, corporatism learned to put a microphone down into the sludge of society, to empower inhuman insanity and build a street army of resentment-filled violent thugs. Blackshirts, brown shirts, what have you.
So I’m very glad to hear CNN and other corporate media are indicating their building up of the Tea Party is at end. It’s subtle, but mrmix sees it.
The only bad thing would be if the corporate media were doing what they actually are doing, you know, in increasing their spotlighting of the Tea Party.
Oh wait, some seem to still think the Tea Party is an organic movement … except they know it isn’t, they watched how it started and who funds it … but surely NOW the corporations will stop because–
I guess it’s because we hope they will? I may not fully understand this post…
Keith
@Keith: Bit of a correction, as apparently, some sites other than CNN do refer to it as CNN/Tea Party Express, so I guess that’s the org that is co-sponsoring (although CNN seems to be pretty consistent with going with generic “Tea Party”)
Emma
@Ash Can: From your keyboard to the FSM’s orecchiette.
Publisher’s Clearing House would like to inform you that you won the Internets this morning. Where would you like it delivered?
And who in heck has time to even think of CNN, much less watch it?
kay
Ugh. “Branding”. I’m glad we’ve now completely dropped the pretense that people are ever anything other than consumers of one or another product.
Transaction is the right word. We’d be better off with a straight cash exchange between CNN and the Tea Party. That at least would be transparent.
Ash Can
@Emma: Thanks, but between Kay and Morzer tearing it up yesterday, I don’t think there are any Internets left to win. :)
Lee
I think CNN knows that the Tea Party is on the way out. That is why they are branding the debate that way. Eventually they will be able to say “Hey we hosted the wing-nuttiest branch of the Republicans, how can we be liberal?” Not that it will help.
If I were an optimist, I would say they are hosting it in order to bring about the downfall of the Tea Party quicker.
Ron
CNN long ago stopped even being a pretense of a “liberal” network. They went for “balanced” which basically meant they would get equal numbers of democrats and republicans, let each of them speak their piece and never actually commit journalism by questioning anything. So you could get an exchange like this:
CNN person:”Some people say Obama is a communist. What do you think?”
Democrat:”That’s ridiculous. He lowered taxes and is trying to support small business.”
Republican:”Of course he is! And a Kenyan Mooslim too!”
CNN person:”Thanks for your responses. Coming up next, some people say that Obama is really a terrorist. We’ll talk to X and Y to see what they think.”
Quiddity
Dave Weigel has an article about the coming together of the Tea Party and CNN
America’s Tea Party Network
How the Tea Party Express took over both the Republican Party and CNN. (Sep 12)
dpCap
@Southern Beale:
Seriously there are times I wish I could meet someone who thinks like this so I can ask them what the fuck they are thinking. Sadly I live in Massachusetts, so everyone I know thinks that last night’s debate was disgusting.
Linda Featheringill
I don’t keep up with CNN’s fortunes but are they so really out of touch with the world their recognition of a movement is an indication of the movement’s demise?
kdaug
@Lee:
Yet to see the positive review this AM.
If you’re right – expose them, sunlight / disinfectant, etc.
Not gleaning a deliberate strategy here on CNN’s part, though. Likely a happy coincidence. “Kill, baby, kill” may work in the primaries, but I have to hope it’s a tough sell in the general.
Mino
@Ash Can: Orecchiette Wow, just wow.
Linda Featheringill
@Ash Can: #2
I had to look it up. To the FSM’s ear-shaped pasta, from a Pastafarian.
:-)
kay
@Linda Featheringill:
I just think they’re incoherent. They pander to the Tea Party and every pro-business libertarian interest, but they’re also screeching fear-mongering lunatics on “threats”. Anything happens, anywhere, and CNN always has the jackass panel up finger-wagging on how “this could have been prevented”, and it’s always a governmental entity who could have prevented it, or should fix it.
CNN wants a giant governmental apparatus to keep us all safe, from anything, everywhere, but they’re also promoting the Tea Party. I don’t even think it’s coherent as marketing, let alone “news”. It’s a mess.
lol
@Lee:
Wishful thinking.
It’s more akin to the 50 year old guy who awkwardly starts trying to incorporate modern slang into his speech in a futile effort to appear young and hip.
Linda Featheringill
What if it doesn’t mark the decline of the teaparty but the decline of CNN? Maybe CNN is dying.
RalfW
The next logical step in this race for the bottom is for CNN to go ahead and hire James O’Keefe as their new investigative, ummm, journalist.
We are so badly served by our media that it can’t even be called a failed experiment any more.
grandpajohn
@Linda Featheringill: we should be so lucky
Gin & Tonic
@Linda Featheringill: Actually, to be more in line with the “standard” phrasing, should be the singular orecchietto.
Linda Featheringill
Aside from CNN, how about a Perry/Cain ticket?
As a student of history and by projecting myself a half century into the future in my imagination, I can see that having a positive effect on the US society. It might enlighten some folks who think that all dark-skinned people push a liberal agenda. It might enlighten others who think that all cowboys are the good guys. And it might take some of the shine off of machismo.
Ash Can
@Gin & Tonic: That’s “orecchieta.” And, the FSM has only one ear?
Gin & Tonic
@Ash Can: I’ve normally heard it as “from your lips to God’s ear”, not “from your lips to God’s ears”, as it is difficult to whisper into both ears at once.
TooManyJens
@Linda Featheringill:
The problem is that the kind of society that would elect a Perry/Cain ticket may not have half a century left.
harlana
@Ron:
Or, “I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there . . .”
harlana
@Linda Featheringill: CNN employs Erick Ericsson, they certainly deserve to die a horrific, agonizing death. Sorry, Ted.
Gin & Tonic
@harlana: When I was at their HQ in Atlanta a decade or more ago, they had a sort of “museum” where, among other things, they showed the jacket which Peter Arnett had used to smuggle $100k in currency into Baghdad when he was covering the first Gulf war. I wonder if they’ve taken that down? They really were out on a limb with Bernard Shaw and mostly Arnett in Baghdad during that time, the only live Western coverage.
WaynersT
Move On is not the left equivalent of the Tea Party
Unfortunate he would promote that idea in his response –
‘both sides do it’ mentality has sunk in deeper than we know.
Ben Cisco
@lol: Otherwise known as “too old for the club.”
Odie Hugh Manatee
The CNN kiss of death? Please let it be. CNN is where crappy news people and pundits go to slowly fade away and die.
Any place that would hire Erikkk Erikkkson and Nancy Grace is a place that wants to let sleaze lead the day.
Slowbama
In my experience the very early supporters of the Tea Party weren’t downscale God ‘n’ guns voters at all, but uber-wealthy country club types. I remember early on having a talk with the owner of the company I work for; he said “keep your eye on these guys, I think this thing’s gonna be huge.” I thought he was crazy; he was right.
catclub
@Slowbama: I always figured it was out of work real estate agents, as well as the hoveround crowd.
If only there had not been a huge housing crisis the RE agents would have kept busy ‘working’.
Ben Cisco
In deference to their current leanings, I propose the network change its name to “TeaNN.”
Nutella
Amanda Marcotte predicts/tweets that “a GOP candidate is going to bite the head off a pigeon during a debate to demonstrate toughness by Xmas.”
Mayur
OT, but: See, this is how thoroughly we’re fucked.
You have a network that fired one of its two major liberal pundits and has three hours a day of firmly Republican-slanted commentary (Morning Joe) plus Pat-goddamn-Buchanan, and that’s “the mouthpiece of the political left.” Then you’ve got a network that has one dyed-in-the-wool Republican commentator (John King) and a bunch of corporate shills (Blitzer etc) and that’s also “liberal”?
It’s like the Times. There’s Krugman… and then what? Brooks, Douthat, and whatever RW douche they have contributing the latest piece of pablum.
Whoever’s running media strategy for the Right understands Baudrillard quite well. The simulacrum of liberal media has thoroughly replaced its simulated.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Mayur:
the irony of it, it still doesn’t give them peace. Then again it’s apologetics for failed ides.
So that’s the future – Fox is GOP propaganda, CNN is the TeaBillies and MSNBC is the Democratic Party, an elite of wannabe conservatives trying to silence the progressives.
trollhattan
Don’t know how relevant this is, but “Tea Party Express” is basically “owned” by longtime Republican lobbyist Sal Russo, so whatever deal CNN cut was likely cut with him, personally.
I’ve held since the beginning that the tea party “movement” is no movement at all; rather, it’s the orchestration and frankly, abuse of a certain flavor of the disaffected. And it’s unlikely there’s anybody more cynical and adept at doing this than Russo.
Hob
I’d honestly like to know what the fuck they were thinking with that health insurance question. It kind of sounds like a gotcha (and it sure brought out something ugly in the crowd) but it’s just so weirdly constructed – asking for a bad solution to an imaginary problem that (a) isn’t the problem we’re facing (the guy doesn’t have insurance but is able to pay) and (b) doesn’t even make sense on its own terms (why wouldn’t the hospital just bill him? That’s what they do. Has Wolf Blitzer ever been to a hospital?). It’s like:
“Let’s say Space Muslims from the Pork Planet have landed on the Lincoln Memorial. Would you shoot first and ask questions later?”
Hob
@Nutella: A pigeon is too ferocious. Bite the head off a marshmallow peep is more like it. But first subject the peep to waterboarding and lethal injection.
Elie
Call me crazy but I do believe that this is the zenith of the tea party “effect”. Its the “effect” — not a movement — comprised of angry and scared white and white identifying people, having various tantrums to express their displeasure with their perceived loss of power. Problem is, like most tantrums, you usually end up hurting yourself or something you really like and then look like a fool, putting yourself in an even less powerful position.
The Tea Party is almost there, and despite being stroked by opportunists like CNN, are not being engaged and adopted as they once were freely. More and more they are having to coerce their “believers”. More and more the outrageous is defining them: saying the mean stuff about sick people, medicare, immigrants… it just hurts their own cause.
I frankly hope they keep it up. It will make it more and more obvious and less and less likely that people will support their ways. They are graceless and primitive and while some white Americans are attracted to the novelty of being able to hear their most outrageous thoughts spoken out loud for a “one night stand” so to speak, they won’t be liking that to marry…Maybe in another time period without all of the exposure…but not now.
Where do you go from here if you are the tea party? You have called the President every name you can think of? Have said and threatenned all sorts of things to immigrants and brown people. Swaggered around showing guns and subtly threatenning violence. Where to next? Nowhere is where.
My two cents anyway.
Frankensteinbeck
The entire MSM has committed themselves to pretending that the Tea Party is a huge grassroots movement of true independents. I mean, haven’t they? They pushed that story from day one. The Narrative always wins, and they’re not going to back down. At best they’re hoping the Tea Party will get swept under the rug and they can pretend it never happened. Maybe they’re holding out for something they can treat as so outrageously shocking that they can go ‘Who could have known that they were actually lunatic arch-conservative Republicans?’ I don’t see much hope for that. It seems like the very few willing to go that route already did.
Ash Can
@Gin & Tonic: I see. I learned something new today, then!
Elie
@Frankensteinbeck:
CNN and the other outlets will drop them like they never existed. They do that all the time. The “Nevermind, yawn” step… no matter how much damage they caused by pumping up this crap.
Paul in KY
@dpCap: It would just make your head hurt.
Paul in KY
@lol: Word to yo mama, dawg. Righteously rad!
Paul in KY
@Elie: I think you start dressing up in snazzy uniforms, institute your own private militia, start goose stepping, etc.
Elie
@Paul in KY:
Naw..
That would be how you would start… not finish
Think of Hitler’s use of fascist “set design” (Lena Wertmuller) grandiosity.. and the Soviets did as well. (Their ugly “decor” remains in Easter Europe and the folks in Poland and elsewhere have too much other stuff to do to get rid of it except slowly).
You set that up first to visually attract the brains of potential followers to looking dominant and grand.
Too late for our hommies. Fail
Paul in KY
@Elie: I thought you asked where they could go next. From what they are, what I said is the next logical step. It was tongue-in-cheek, of course, but how do you ‘double down’ from where they are now?
burnspbesq
@Elie:
I won’t call you crazy, because I hope you’re right. I may call you Pollyanna, however, because I can’t figure out any basis for that kind of optimism.
harlana
At least one seriously mentally ill person who identifies with the tea party will mow down several innocent civilians in broad daylight, I’m guessing
jl
@harlana: Hasn’t that already happened, several times, and with police, and a politician, as well as civilians, as the victims?
DFH no.6
@dpCap:
I live and work in Maricopa County, AZ, so kinda the opposite of Mass, I suppose.
I am thus surrounded on all sides by Tea Party types, who run the gamut from privileged, affluent white conservatives (like my neighbors and bosses) to somewhat-less-privileged, not-so-affluent white conservatives (like my line workers), who are pretty honked-off that a Democrat (and a black one, to boot!) won the Presidency in ’08, and who don’t at all believe that W’s Presidency was a “failed” one, or even that it was bad.
“What the fuck they are thinking” is due to their worldview being fundamentally different from that of BJ’s posters and most of the commenters here.
IGMFY is the bedrock foundation that worldview is built on, and a deeply-felt resentment (and, of all things, persecution) is the mortar.
They accept – in fairly lockstep, monolithic fashion – the know-nothing tribal dogma that is de rigueur for modern movement conservatism, from anti-intellectual/anti-science nonsense (e.g., evolution and AWG denialism) to Cloud Cuckoo-land economic absurdities (e.g., gov’t spending and debt are somehow causing – or at least contributing to – the current economic downturn).
Oh, and the wogs (and DFH wog-lovers) must be kept in their place, both here and abroad. By all means necessary.
They are fascist, and they are racist, every last man Jack of ‘em. Most of them are homophobes, too (except the handful of gay ones). And most are god-botherers (primarily Angry OT/Pharisaical/Not Sermon on the Mount Jesus version), to one extent or another (except the even-rarer atheist ones).
Whatever causes people to become fascist and racist (i.e., “modern conservatives”) that’s “what the fuck they are thinking”.
To them I am a known “race traitor” and I’ve been called such to my face. They wonder – again, right to my face – “what the fuck I am thinking” and are totaly baffled why I am not a fellow fascist/racist (though they vociferously deny those labels).
DFH no.6
@Elie:
Ah, it would be pretty to think so, but not bloody likely, IMAO.
Your formulation of “angry and scared white and white identifying people, having various tantrums to express their displeasure with their perceived loss of power” is dead-on.
But what you’ve described is the heart and soul base of the Republican Party, along with a huge chunk of so-called “independents” (i.e., Republican voters who, for various reasons, don’t self-identify as Republican) as well as a not-insignificant number of conservadems.
And the primary “tantrum” that was thrown so far was the 2010 elections, which was not just a huge victory for American fascism at the national level (House of Reps) but even more so throughout the states. I expect 2012 to be just as difficult a fight (Obama could well lose, even to someone like Perry, and the Senate will almost certainly be less Democratic, even if it remains just-barely-majority Dem, and just as certainly the House stays majority-fascist).
I thought those who dismissed the “Tea Party phenomenon” when it first became prominent in the media during the ’09 health care “debate” were very wrong to do so, and I believe the same now.
This is modern movement conservatism in America pushing back, and pushing back hard. With massive funding from wealthy and corporate interests, aided and abetted by a (mostly) conservative federal judiciary.
They’re just not bothering to put on much of a mask anymore, mostly because the economy sucks and the President is near.
Sad to say, the “zenith” may have been ours, in ’08.
As Principal Skinner put it: “Prove me wrong, children; prove me wrong” (nothing would make me happier).