Media: Tea Party Is Racist, Evil, Should Die! And They're the Extremists

By Ben Shapiro

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

This week, massive crowds of veterans descended onto Washington, D.C., to protest the Obama administration's vindictive shutdown of open-air memorial sites -- sites that require no guards but were fenced off simply to make Americans miserable as a bargaining chip in the government shutdown negotiations. Veterans, including many wheelchair-bound veterans from World War II, overturned the barricades placed at memorials by the administration and proceeded to carry them to the White House.

The media covered the men and women who attended the so-called Million Vet March by suggesting that they were racists and terrorists and hoping that politicians allied with them would die.

CNN previously described the rally this way: "At tea party-like rally, Obama told to 'put the Quran down.'" The veterans were relegated to secondary status in the CNN report, and CNN snarkily remarked that the event "drew far fewer than a million people" -- a comment CNN never made about the Million Man March or the Million Muslim March or the smaller-than-expected immigration rally last week. CNN then singled out one kooky speaker who suggested that President Obama "put the Quran down," and attempted to lump all protesters in with that idiot.

Virtually the entire leftist media infrastructure began drooling when one moron showed up with a Confederate flag. Suddenly, headlines began proclaiming that "protesters" had marched with a Confederate flag -- one lone dummy became an entire movement. "DC protesters wave the Confederate flag," Salon.com stated. MSNBC's Irin Carmon said that the presence of the Confederate flag was a not-so-subtle violent threat against Obama: "To me, this is a threat. This is a house where a black family lives."

But by the same token, the pro-Obama media had no problem with actual threats from the left. Politico's chief political columnist Roger Simon labeled the tea party racist, then proceeded to ask the following rhetorical question: "Question: If Ted Cruz and John Boehner were both on a sinking ship, who would be saved? Answer: America." Drown those suckers, and we'll be good to go!

And yet conservatives are the supposed extremists in all of this. The Los Angeles Jewish Journal ran a cartoon of a tea partier dressed in a black jihadist suicide-bombing outfit, complete with a dynamite vest and a detonator. "Of course I don't feel any regrets about the cost everyone will pay for my beliefs!" the so-called "Tea-Hadist" says. "After all, there are 72 virgins awaiting me!" Kathleen Parker of The Washington Post labeled Texas Sen. Ted Cruz "Ted bin Laden -- the guy who hands out suicide vests and then goes to lunch."

The truth is that the left are the extremists in this case. Our current government shutdown has placed government spending back at Bill Clinton levels. There has been no economic catastrophe. Should we hit the debt ceiling, President Obama is bound by the constitution to pay back our debts by reallocating funds. This whole situation could come to an easy end if President Obama were willing to forego aspects of his ugly and partisan Obamacare law. He isn't. So the fiscal situation deteriorates.

There can be more than one side of an argument. But not according to the media left, whose unearned sense of moral superiority forces them to portray The Other -- the tea party -- as an enemy in need of destruction.