Our political Quote of the Day comes from Dick Polman, looking at the case of the Move.On.org protester attacked by a Rand Paul supporter. The beginning and end of THIS POST that needs to be read in its entirety:
The now-infamous Kentucky incident, in which a Rand Paul acolyte saw fit to affix his sneakered foot to the head of a prostrate protester, is hardly the most important news event of the week. Still, I’m fascinated by the response to the event – particularly among conservative spin doctors who can’t even face the factual reality as recorded on actual video footage.
Yep, we’ve reached the point, in our ideologically polarized era, where we can’t even forge a consensus based on what we can see with our own eyes.
Lauren Valle, a MoveOn.org activist in a red hoodie, wanted to present Paul, the tea-party GOP senatorial candidate, with a mock award. It was a gag, an attempt to honor Paul for his alleged ties to corporate America. When she tried to approach Paul as he exited his campaign car the other night, she was steered away by Paul’s guardians. Paul exited the car and he was gone – but the guardians, ever alert to the purported threat, wrestled her to the ground. Whereupon Tim Profitt, a county coordinator in the Paul campaign, planted his shoe on her neck and shoulder, then pressed it down on her head.
Notice, however, that I didn’t use the word stomp.
That verb – which, in many quarters, has already come to define this incident – strikes me as too strong. Stomping is what Nazi goons did in the ’30s when they’d take a German Jew into an alley and render him senseless. Stomping is what Robert DeNiro and Joe Pecci did in Goodfellas, when they turned a guy into a hunk of meat on the bar floor. At least by comparison, Profitt’s needless coup de grace was far more benign. Valle was essentially unmarred and unscarred by the time she predictably surfaced on MSNBC one night later.
Most noteworthy, however, is some of the response on the right – starting with Profitt’s willful state of denial.
And at the end:
Memo to Profitt: Those cops were right. In America, if you’re standing at a candidate’s event with a wig and a poster, you’re not supposed to get preemptively hauled away.
Facts and footage notwithstanding, however, various conservative voices have reacted in predictable fashion. The first necessary task was to demonize Valle – as “an unhinged leftist,” a stalker, a “professional agitator,” as “another paid Soros activist (who) tries to incite violence.”
Incite violence?
Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh went on the air to deny what we can see with our own eyes: “Her head was not stepped on, her shoulders were.” No word yet on whether Tim Profitt will land a show on Fox News, or sub for Limbaugh when the big guy goes on vacation.
Granted, passions are running high in this campaign season. But given the fact that a young woman in Kentucky was subsumed by a foot for having the temerity to protest a tea-party candidate, and that a reporter in Alaska was handcuffed and carted away by tea-party Senate candidate Joe Miller’s bodyguards for having the temerity to ask pesky questions, perhaps it would appear that the right has an insufficient grasp of the First Amendment. It’s enough to make me want to take my country back.
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.