Matt Frei in his Washington Diary on the BBC website.
After expressing surprise that Germans are not blaming America for Germany’s economic slowdown and that “Youth unemployment, especially in the former East, is rising to alarming, Depression-era levels” he gives an account of the Tea Parties that makes CNN look professional. Here’s a sample of this stooge’s ‘calling it as he sees it’:
“. . . unhappy Republicans, who seemed to have found their voice of late, organised thousands of tax day tea parties to protest against Barack Obama's economic policies.
A few protests carried messages not usually associated with tea drinking. Or with tax protests, for that matter.
“One poster complained that "American taxpayers are the Jews for Obama's ovens".
Another called "Barack Hussein Obama" the "new face of Hitler".
“Add to that the news that gun sales have rocketed because gun owners fear - quite unrealistically - that Mr Obama may be restricting the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which protects the right to bear arms.
“To sum up: a small number of Americans, who believe that Obama is the new Anti-Christ, are arming themselves to the teeth, fully expecting to have to defend their property from marauding gangs let loose by the recession and a grasping government.
“Mercifully, this is a tiny minority, but what is worrying is the degree to which more and more Republicans are responding to just about anything that the Obama administration does with undiluted rage.
“Ideological war
“The party that lost the election is getting adept at channelling the middle-class anger that was unleashed by the economic crisis with some of the same tools perfected by the Obama campaign.
“Last week's tea parties used Facebook and Twitter to get organised.
“A few months ago, the same social networking tools were used by Mr Obama's army of 13 million e-mail foot soldiers to organise house parties for Change. Tea parties v house parties: let the battle begin.
“The Republicans are beginning to respond to the Obama administration with the same hysterical opposition that the Democrats once reserved for President Bush.
During the last administration, some on the left accused Mr Bush of using 9/11 as an opportunity to rearrange America's political furniture, wage wars abroad, expand executive powers at home and tamper with the fundamentals of the Constitution.
“More and more Republicans believe that President Obama and his team are using the crisis triggered by 9/14 - the day that Lehman brothers collapsed - to re-shape America, tamper with its free market fundamentals and turn it into a worker's paradise.
“I will leave it up to each reader to decide where they stand on this issue.”
Are we expected to thank him for allowing us to make up our own minds? His account of the Tea Parties is totally at odds with what I saw on the many clips I watched. With their news coming from partisans like this guy it is not surprising that Europe doesn’t like America. How could they even know much about America. Bush didn’t cause this guy’s distortions and Obama probably won’t be able to fix it. Why believe the truth when you can believe the BBC instead?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
There's a great deal of misunderstanding between Europe and the US. The problem is most people don't seem to realize it. Europeans are convinced they understand America since so much of our culture is exported to them-- but are you really going to understand America (or any country) through Hollywood movies and sit-coms? Of course we don't really understand Europe very much either, although most people romanticize it a great deal.
And Obama roaming about ignorantly offering blanket apologies doesn't help matters either. It just muddies the water further.
I don't know if you've noticed the widget I have that displays the flag of the country of visitors to this site. I have hundreds of visits from Europe every week. Most commonly they are from Great Britain and Germany. This makes me wonder if most might not be American service men. But that doesn't account for all the non-Americans visiting the site. I imagine many other conservative sites also get many foreign visitors. I am very happy that the dinosaur media can't stifle people's search for truth as long as the internet is vibrant.
Post a Comment