THIS JUST IN!!! Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich must really be a socialist, a RINO, a liberal Democrat, or a Maoist. the reason: he has praised Barack Obama’s upcoming speech to schoolkids, in one of his Twitters:
http://bit.ly/HQNSW RT @newtgingrich: Just read President Obamas speech to students. It is a good speech & will be good for students to hear.
Another person who has been presenting himself as a Republican now also shows signs that he must really be a Marxist, a Mao worshipper, Fidel Castro mole, Hugo Chavez groupie, perhaps a closet Nazi/Fascist (pick your buzzword), or someone who doesn’t wear underwear. A radical by the name of Joe Scarborough. He also had some good things to say via Twitter about the advance of Obama’s danger-to-democracy speech to schoolkids:
The message the President will deliver is one that all students should hear.
[h/T MyDD]
But seriously, folks: don’t expect the fact that Obama’s speech isn’t much different than Ronald Reagan’s or George HW Bush’s to change things.
Those who claimed Obama’s speech was going to be a partisan, Marxist, cult of personality, speech to poison their kiddies’ minds with liberalism/socialism (pick your favorite buzzword) will still insist it was dangerous.
There will be all kinds of attempts to rationalize having enough egg on their faces to make an omelette big enough to serve all of the Denny’s’ in America, and having discredited themselves by basically crying “Wolf!!!”
You can already see some claim that Obama’s actual speech is tame because it has now been cleaned up, altered from its original version.
Apparently somewhere some of these folks have seen the real copy of Obama’s speech — which apparently no one in the old media or new media has actually seen.
It’s probably held by the same person who has the real plans for Obama’s death panels that would kill grandma and other senior citizens, and who also has a copy of the real birth certificate that shows Obama was born in Kenya or perhaps on Mars — which is far away from the moon, where Glenn Beck lives.
In the wake of this manufactured-for-ratings-and-partisan-gain furor, look for the actual airing of the Obama speech to get far more coverage than it would have without the 24/7 outrage fest surrounding it.
And look for many Americans who don’t accept whatever Glenn and Rush and Sean say as the Gospel to wonder what the frenzy was all about.
Some may conclude it was all about unfettered partisanship and the rank hatreds that all too frequently these days stem from it and are inspiring some Americans to avoid belonging to a political party.
Question: Whoever dreamed we would ever see the day in the United States when partisans would not let their kids listen to a President of the United States and use as justification exaggerated, false assumptions, coupled with political name-calling and demonization labeling? You didn’t even see this in the McCarthy era.
And, the way it’s trending, we are likely to see more incarnations of this intense personal hatred of those who dare to think differently in the months and years to come.
The biggest question is: will the majority of Americans eventually buy into it, or will there be an emerging backlash that will relegate the talk radio political culture to just that: a self-contained segment, a culture. But not the national political culture.
Hope springs eternal.
But so does the sewage flow.
The cartoon by David Fitzsimmons, The Arizona Star is copyrighted and licensed to run on TMV. All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.