2 Cheers For Salon.com

Justin Elliot at Salon.com has become (I think) just the 2nd person in the “big leagues”, joining Ben Smith at Politico.com to notice what I has first pointed out in September –

 

THE MOSQUE STORY IS NO LONGER CONSIDERED NEWS

 

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/12/31/park_51_a_look_back/index.html

 

Elliot uses a neat graphic from Google News to show the timeline of national news coverage about the mosque to show that the Mosque story is dead. But Elliot fails to point to the obvious reason why and instead tries to make a political point. He writes:

There can be no single explanation for why a news story of this magnitude disappears. But, given the timeline here, it seems likely that the electoral calendar played a role. National Republicans who used Park51 as a bludgeon against Democrats suddenly were less interested in talking about the project after the election. In addition, there was suddenly action in Congress again after Nov. 2. And political analysts turned their focus to what Washington would look like with a Republican House majority in 2011.

Really?

A story starts getting good coverage in July, gets major coverage in August, starts a downward trend in September and then virtually disappears.

I say Elliot is wrong and there is a single, simple explanation and I said it on September 21st -

(T)his was a classic “summer story”. That is, a minor event or controversy that gets enormous attention in the media because there is less real news happening in August. Previous examples include shark attacks and Chandra Levy.

 



FreedomParty's picture
Submitted by FreedomParty on Mon, 01/03/2011 - 12:10pm.

Yup!

According to Webster Tarpley, the reactionary right wing neo-con faction of the our secret government is slowly creeping back in to power.

These 2 articles blew the cover on the Murdoch/Koch/Shultz/Armey astro-turfing operation:

News Corp’s number-two shareholder funded ‘terror mosque’ planner

By John Cook

Fri Aug 20, 3:59

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20100820/bs_yblog_upshot/news-corps-number-two-shareholder-funded-terror-mosque-planner

Untangling the Bizarre CIA Links to the Ground Zero Mosque

By Mark Ames

⁠September 10, 2010

http://www.observer.com/2010/politics/untangling-new-intrigue-behind-ground-zero-mosque

White racism is funded by the right wing faction of the intel community?

THE TEA PARTY DOESN'T EXIST!

Gauging the scope of the tea party movement in America

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/23/AR2010102304000.html

Tarpley:

"Television commentators have been babbling for months about the purported existence of something called a “Tea Party.” The Washington Post recently reported that a survey of the principal Tea Party astroturfing operations (some of them until only yesterday standard Republican political action committees, think tanks, public relations, or lobbying firms which had supported Bush the younger and McCain) had yielded a claim from the astroturfers that they could mobilize a grassroots base of 2,300 local Tea Party groups.⁠8 The Washington Post was able to find some evidence that about 1,400 of these local groups existed or had existed in some form. But they were only able to make contact with about 650 of them. The ones they were able to contact reported a very low level of political activity, with almost no candidates supported, no political actions undertaken, and very little public activity of any kind."

"This means that the alleged mass base of the Tea Party has atrophied to a very large extent, and that the Wall Street-funded astroturfing operations are continuing to conduct their political swindles on the basis of a social phenomenon which has largely ceased to exist. The Republican Party and its flanking organizations have been able to absorb, neutralize, and otherwise obviate whatever authentic mass ferment that existed in the first half of 2009. The new incumbents who claim to represent the Tea Party are in reality beholden to the astroturfing money men, and they undoubtedly know it."

"The tea party is as unreal as the crowds of young dupes festooned with orange bunting who crowded into the central square of Kiev in November 2004 to demand the seizure of power by a pack of IMF and NATO agents. They are as unreal as the useful idiots mobilized by mass manipulation to install the fascist madman Saakashvili into power in Tiflis, Georgia in the so-called Roses Revolution.

"Or, they are as unreal as the antiwar left liberals here in the United States who, blinded by their hatred for Bush and Cheney, abandoned all political criteria and rallied behind the purely synthetic candidacy of Wall Street puppet and foundation spook Obama. The Tea Party and its exploitation by the media reflect precisely the same methods of mass manipulation as these notorious color revolutions or CIA people power coups. My Obama: The Postmodern Coup has in-depth analysis of these methods."

http://tarpley.net/2010/11/09/post-election-advice-for-desperate-dems/

Shultz-Murdoch Reactionary Wing of US Ruling Oligarchy now Ascendant

Tarpley:

"Since about 2005, we had seen the ascendancy of the center-right group around James Baker III, which includes financier George Soros. Now, power is shifting back to the George Shultz-Rupert Murdoch right wing faction, which has the Koch brothers, Mellon Scaife, and a few others as its ultra-reactionary fringe. We need to recall that George Shultz, former secretary of labor, the treasury, and state, was the ruling class operative most responsible for assembling the administration of Bush and Cheney, whom he had a key role in anointing. Schultz was also instrumental in selecting Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and other members of the so-called “Vulcans” cabal which staffed the administration. Shultz also helped choose Arnold Schwarzenegger to become governor of California. The ascendancy of Shultz-Murdoch is what we would expect under conditions of world economic and financial depression, with high levels of unemployment and belated economic problems."

"How far are Shultz and Murdoch prepared to go? Normally, this wing of the ruling class would prefer to govern through more or less respectable right-wing politicians claiming to be from the mainstream of US society. But the problem is that normal Republican bureaucratic hack politicians (think of Michael Castle of Delaware, or Bob Bennett of Utah) are having an increasingly difficult time getting traction among masses who are steadily becoming more and more crazed because of persistent high levels of unemployment, foreclosures, and immiseration. When normal semi-respectable hacks such as those furnished by the Bush family can no longer give the financiers what they want, it is then time for the financiers to shift their support to the guttersnipes, rowdies, scoundrels, hooligans, lunatic fringe, and criminal elements which have been prominent among candidates claiming to represent the Tea Party. O’Donnell was a witch, but her current racket was to loot her own campaign treasury to finance her shopping sprees and personal expenses. Miller’s idea of democratic debate was to have his goons slap handcuffs on a reporter who asked inconvenient questions. Angle’s attack ads veered sharply into outright racism. McMahon with her wrestling antics was a grotesque worthy of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. Ohio GOP congressional candidate Iott likes to get dressed up in the uniform of the Nazi Waffen SS. Many of these candidates clearly crossed the line dividing normal bourgeois respectability from guttersnipe territory.

"Scoundrel time in the GOP

"Under depression conditions candidates who want to succeed need to offer some kind of populism to distressed voters. Democrats could have offered real economic populism in the form of concrete solutions to the urgent everyday problems of American working people, but that was ruled out by the presence of Wall Street puppet Obama. The Republican answer to situations like this is to reach into the cultural populist grab bag of gyps, dodges, and deals. Scott Brown drove a truck – a stunt he copied from former Senator Fred Thompson. Sarah Palin knows how to field dress a moose, although she is patently an imbecile on other matters more germane to governing. Reagan had jellybeans. Bush the Elder tried to plebeianize himself with pork rinds and a horseshoe pit. Lamar Alexander ran for president based on his plaid shirt. Mitch Daniels is trying to launch himself towards national office based on riding a motorcycle. But there comes a time when these cheap cultural populist tricks are no longer enough. This accounts for guttersnipes like Angle and Arizona Governor Brewer charging headlong into overt racism. We need to remember that racism is an extreme form of cultural populism, and extreme or völkische race theory was the heart of the Nazi ideology. If unemployment remains at 10% or more for the next several years (and really more like 20-25%, depression levels), this is where we will be heading."



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