| « | Funhouse Economics |
»
|
|
Monday, September 14, 2009
Minimize, Marginalize, Delegitimize!
The Left's campaign to obscure and belittle the titanic, million-man-plus demonstration of Saturday in Washington, D.C. has begun:
"Obama Takes to the Road to Promote Healthcare Reform": 14,488 news articles"Tea Party Protesters March on Washington": 126 news articles
I was offline for most of the afternoon and early evening — and just learned that the nutroots are claiming that the screenshot of the 9/12 march in D.C. that I posted — taken from a livecam of the event that I linked to here — is somehow “fake.”The claim is that the shot came from the Kennedy procession or a previous left-wing protest and that the flag at half-mast proves that it was “fake.”
Newsflash for the clueless: Flags were still at half-mast earlier today in honor of the murder victims of the 9/11 jihadi attacks.
Guess the 9/11-was-an-inside-jobbers are still that much in denial.
And as a comment to this brief report, here's a typical leftist's parting shot:
Could you all stop being the news long enough to actually listen to the news. Things are getting better, the stimulus package is starting to work. The Healthcare Plan savings will allow companies to call back workers. The Healthcare Plan will also help new businesses open. Oh, by the way, it will keep people alive and well and in their homes. Obama is spending money to help us. Bush just raped and robbed this country. Why are you losing your minds now? Why did'nt your strap up your boots and march during the Bush years. A war, Tax Cuts for the rich, Prescription Plan. A TRILLION DOLLARS IN SPENDING...yet, none of you decided to come off your medication until Obama took Office. HUM....[...scroll down...]
I'm sorry. I got to say this. The whole march and tea party crap is making me very uncomfortable. There are just veiled Clan Rallys in disguise, and I'm not going to believe otherwise, until one of you answers my very fist question: WHY NONE OF YOU STRAPPED UP YOUR JACK BOOTS AND MARCHED IN THE LAST EIGHT YEARS?
American leftists are terrified. They sense that the national mood is against them -- that they can no longer hope to slip their social-fascist state over on us without a violent confrontation -- and it's got them reaching for their time-tested straws: they who demonstrated must be racists, Klu Klux Klan members, boughten supporters of some "corporate interest," et cetera ad nauseam infinitam.
But the straws won't support their weight any more. The calloused mouth effect has caught up with them. It's not just "compassion fatigue" this time, either; Americans are finally fed up with being flailed with unearned guilt, spurious accusations of racism, and imputations of indifference to the plight of others when those others lift nary a finger in their own service.
A demonstration massing to over a million persons represents a far larger number of the like-minded. The ratio is difficult to determine, but it's a safe bet that the question looms large in the minds of every Congressman, every Senator, and our Socialist-in-Chief (who prudently took himself to Minnesota for the eventful day). Indeed, given how profligate spending and usurpation of authority have permeated our smaller political units, elected officials at the state and local levels ought to be reviewing their resumes, as well.
The next few days, and the way the Old Media treat the events of Saturday, September 12, 2009, will be critical to the future of freedom in these United States. Surely anyone who genuinely cares is already aware of the march, its size, and the passion displayed by its attendees. But to be successful in our time, a political movement must "capture the middle:" the voter indifferent to ideology, unaffiliated with any party, who might spend no time at all thinking about fundamental principles of freedom, law, and justice, but who "knows what he likes."
Above all, we must keep the pressure on. The TEA Parties must continue, and must spread to still more parts of the nation. Demands for honest, objective coverage of these events must deluge our regional news organs. An avalanche of letters must descend upon federal legislators, informing them coldly of what will become of them should they support any further Obamunist initiatives. Pro-freedom websites must proliferate; forthright, patriotic discussion of our way forward must continue. If we fail at this, our political adversaries will succeed in treating Saturday's rising of opposition as a non-event, by the simple expedient of ignoring it.
We're on a roll. Let's keep rolling. And may God forever guard and guide these United States of America!
Comments
One of the problems with the Tea Parties is that it’s Reds marching against the Blues in power. In that sense, it’s not very interesting (although sheer numbers alone at least deserves a double-take!)
What would have been the power if these protests occurred in response to the first large bailouts back when a Red was president? That would have been interesting to see!
By the way: I just did the Google News search with the terms provided. The Obama headline has 99 versus the Tea Party’s 1,102.
Posted by Liquid Egg Product on 09/14/2009 at 02:02 PMAs always, we need to be careful with sources!
“Obama Takes to the Road to Promote Healthcare Reform”: 14,488 news articles
The originator of this information (see http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/09/google_news_or_obama_news.html) either made a grave error, perhaps using a different search term, or is straight up lying.
1. In Google News history, there is no where close to 15,000 stories for the specified term.
There are 194 articles since 1980 matching the specified search: http://news.google.com/archivesearch?um=1&ned;=us&hl;=en&q;=Obama+Takes+to+the+Road+to+Promote+Healthcare+Reform&cf;=all
2. Checking with other search engines:
Yahoo! News: 7 Obama vs 321 Tea Party
Ask.com News: 32 Obama vs 269 Tea Party
Bing News: 14 Obama vs 95 Tea PartyRepeating false data only serves to hurt the case that the Tea Party was suppressed.
Posted by Liquid Egg Product on 09/14/2009 at 02:37 PMNot to tit or tat with nits or picks, but…
http://news.google.com/news/search?pz=1&ned;=us&hl;=en&q;=Obama+Takes+to+the+Road+to+Promote+Healthcare+Reform yields 11,172 news articles
Whilst http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz;=1&ned;=us&hl;=en&q;=Tea+Party+Protesters+March+on+Washington yields 229 news articles
In any case: Huzzah!
“WHY NONE OF YOU STRAPPED UP YOUR JACK BOOTS AND MARCHED IN THE LAST EIGHT YEARS?”
I shan’t answer until the questioner answers this: “When did you stop beating your wife?”
Posted by Russell on 09/14/2009 at 03:28 PMThe MSM ignoring us is one thing. The politicians ignoring us is completely another.
Believe me, Marginalize, Minimize, and Delegitimize will not work in this case. Alinsky was very, very wrong. To do those three things to the TEA party protestors, and the remainder of the freedom and America loving crowd will succeed in nothing but pissing us off more, swelling and motivating our ranks, and creating a bigger problem for the statists to handle.
To ignore this movement is to blind yourself to your own peril, politicians! If you ignore more than 50% of the populace in this matter, you will lose. Big time.
Just pray, if you choose to not heed my advice, that your eventual loss will only be at the polling booths, and not at the hands of some angry, marginalized, minimized, and “delegitimized” lynch mob (God, please forbid!)
Posted by on 09/14/2009 at 03:56 PMI just wonder what sort of evidence they have that none of us protested the war?
Hell, I have pictures of me doing it!
Posted by on 09/14/2009 at 07:18 PMRussell: I was looking at the “results” number at the top rather than the “news articles” below the link. So this is the number in question.
1. A simple reason why there would be more healthcare related links than Tea Party: the health care issue has been around for months. The Tea Party occurred two days ago. There are simply more healthcare articles out there.
2. Did you look at the articles? Obviously we can’t go through each article. There seems to be a sufficient sampling of pro- and anti-Obama links, besides stories which don’t venture much of an opinion and articles that are only tangentially related.
Posted by Liquid Egg Product on 09/15/2009 at 01:03 AMSo this is the number in question.
Actually, no, it isn’t. It is the number that you are talking about. The rest of us, including Francis, are looking at the number of news articles found for the combination of words given. The number you are looking at gives all other links and paths associated with some of the words in the search query, which basically means that many of them may have NOTHING to do with the subject at hand, and every one of them links to another Google page which will have thousands more links to similar, unrelated news stories. The number that you are looking at is unfortunately irrelevant to the discussion.
The correct number that should be referenced is the one both Francis and Russell are using. That is the one that references the number of news articles found that match the query, as opposed to just matching pieces of it.
Posted by on 09/15/2009 at 11:24 AMHere’s something interesting:
“Healthcare”, “Democratic healthcare”, and
“Republican healthcare” all return the same results (Google News). The top article for a “Obama healthcare” search is “Obama’s $4 Trillion Lie”.Sorry if I’m being overbearing with this topic. But arguments that the Tea Party was ignored must be solid. In this case, attacks on Google results only weaken the argument. Give no opening if you can!
Posted by Liquid Egg Product on 09/15/2009 at 12:04 PMAnd now I just noticed something weird, clicking on the links I used yesterday yields a completely different result set. 10,530 vs 239.
I think it would be best not use Google as data.
Goober: “The correct number that should be referenced is the one both Francis and Russell are using.”
I agree, it should be, but it doesn’t seem solid. Whatever Google is using to calculate that number seems to be soft and I don’t like that. Without a better understanding of how they arrive at that number, I’d use it as an indicator of the news media gestalt, not as a core data point in an argument.
The ratio is more telling than the numbers, clearly the news media has invested more time in covering health care than the Tea Party. Which makes sense.
I’d like to see a comparison to other protests vs the 9/12 Tea Party. Or how the wording treats the Tea Party vs the coverage of the Health Care speech.
LEG: “In this case, attacks on Google results only weaken the argument.” I think you are correct. Everything I’m looking at indicates that the result sets fluctuate and that hurts the argument when one day the numbers can reflect a whole new view.
Besides that, the more people squawk, the more coverage happens to the point that even the institutionalized MSM news outlets let some articles to show up. No matter how much they have turned into bastions of left thinking, they still want to sell papers.
Until, of course, they can funnel money straight from the tax payers into their coffers.
Posted by Russell on 09/15/2009 at 12:41 PMGoober: Yes, I realize I erred. My first two comments used the wrong numbers, and the last two comments used the correct numbers.
Russell: It seems that the article count is based on articles written in the last month, which would account for daily changes.
Google is also known for tweaking the algorithms on occassion.
Posted by Liquid Egg Product on 09/18/2009 at 06:58 PM
Comment Form
Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.
