President Obama’s distain for those associated with the Tea Party movement goes back at least as far as his 100th day in office when he said this:
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The President’s mockery has continued with a sustained tone of ridicule that has ratcheted up as the Tea Party movement has spread. Last month he said this:
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According to Jake Tapper in a forthcoming book, Obama blames the GOP’s resistance to the stimulus bill for the opposition against him. It’s all part of his linking the Tea Party movement to the Republicans and, thereby, aiming to make them what they are not – a partisan issue.
Meanwhile, two TV news outlets, shills for Obama since he announced as a candidate for the presidency, are losing their audiences. According to the New York Times:
CNN continued what has become a precipitous decline in ratings for its prime-time programs in the first quarter of 2010, with its main hosts losing almost half their viewers in a year.
The trend in news ratings for the first three months of this year is all up for one network, the Fox News Channel, which enjoyed its best quarter ever in ratings, and down for both MSNBC and CNN.
In the midst of the continuing decline in viewers and relevance, MSNBC has become even more the President’s parrot and adopted a tone of mockery similar to his, but more edgy, and profane.
An article in Business & Media Institute entitled “MSNBC: The Place for Low-Brow ‘Teabag’ Humor: Network’s primetime shows repeatedly use sexual slang to refer to taxpayer tea party protests” states:
MSNBC prides itself as being the place for politics, the seemingly clever marketing slogan could be used to describe the network as the place where hosts try to use dirty humor about important political events.
So what do we make of this behavior on the part of MSNBC, and to a somewhat lesser extent, CNN?
Sophocles pegged it in the dialogue between Athena and Odysseus in his tragedy, Ajax. Athena is mocking Ajax, calling him out of his tent. Odysseus counsels caution so as to not aggravate him. Athena says,
To mock foes, is that not the sweetest mockery?
Obama and the sycophantic MSM perceive the Tea Partiers as foes. Tea Partiers are not intimidated. If anything, they’re further energized by the negative attention. They’re neither politicians or media personalities – nor any combination of both. After all, King George didn’t intimidate them in 1776.
So, how shall we characterize the MSNBC and CNN on-air “talent” persons who continue to mock the Tea Partiers?
Remember the movie Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978)? Peter Sellers, as Chief Inspector Clouseau, plays a peg-legged pirate with an inflatable parrot on his shoulder. Imagine David Shuster’s head on the inflatable parrot. You know who the pirate is.
To mock foes, is that not the sweetest mockery?
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