Doucherina Contessa Goes Bare-Ass on MSNBC

Megan McArdle notes that Reason Magazine has recently caught Queen of the MSNBC Douchebags [though Maddow is a close runner-up] fretting about "racial overtones" with a man in a white shirt showing up at a townhall meeting with an assault rifle on his shoulder, except rods-and-cones-challenged Contessa identifies him as "white," though photos show clearly that he is a man of color. Perhaps Contessa Brewer forgot that Doucherinissima Janeane Garofalo the Buffalo had already retired the Guinness Cup for incredibly idiotic racist hyperbole. Megan amplifies and expatiates:

Meanwhile, Matt Welch catches E.J. Dionne going off the deep end:

Remember when National Rifle Association President Wayne LaPierre's Godwin's Law comment about "jackbooted government thugs" was the worst thing ever? Well, the mainstream commentariat continues to use the same incendiary, totalitarianism-invokingWashington Post columnist and serial public broadcasting commentator E.J. Dionne:

This is not about the politics of populism. It's about the politics of the jackboot. It's not about an opposition that has every right to free expression. It's about an angry minority engaging in intimidation backed by the threat of violence.

Another Hobbit with leftoid paranoia is verbally slapped about the head and shoulders by Nick Gillespie, as the diminuitive failed Broadway critic Frank Rich soils himself in front of fellow-sport-of-nature Maddow who gets rattled by any demonstration of Constitutional Rights being observed---her PhD is from an un-American University. Rich drools on his soiled underwear before Maddow and babbles that:

the walk up to the [JF] Kennedy assassination, [when] there was all this hate talk about Kennedy, and then there was the John Birch Society, they were worried that the government was going to fluoridate the water and poison the country...it always seems to happen when there's a new liberal group taking over...it's not coincidence that the militias started up again in the 1990s or when Kennedy came in..

Gillespie politely begs to differ with this note on Rich's hallucinatory Oliver Stone/Quentin Tarantino reading of those times:

A propos of the above: JFK was not assassinated by a right-wing crank, but by a demonstrably pro-Castro defector to the Soviet Union who tooks shots at a rising right-wing freakazoid not long before shooting the president (yes, Oswald done did it). And, you might remember, that revolutionary (coff, coff) violence that wracked the '60s and early '70s was the result primarily not of out-of-control Barry Goldwaterites but by groups on the left.

The facts, ma'am, just the facts! Megan ends her observations with an overall assessment:

We'll leave aside the garden-variety hypocrisy of people who have suddenly discovered that dissent may not always be the highest form of patriotism. (And, to be fair, those who have suddenly rediscovered their right to peaceably assemble and demand redress of grievances)
Talk of death panels and crazy signs is, if polls are to be believed, a tiny fringe of the many Americans who do not like this health care plan much. It's even, as far as I can tell, a small minority of the many Americans attending town hall meetings to harangue their congressmen. Democrats appear to think that blowing those people up into the totality of the movement will help them win the PR battle on healthcare. I suspect this will do more harm to the Democrats, and their ability to effectively deliver their message, than it will to the conservatives.
I expect the conservatives to become unhinged; it's the normal response to losing power. So why are so many journalists losing basic touch with reality?

Matt Welch then definitively slaps a silly Asst. Prof. of Journalism at U. of Missouri, an otherwise creditable School of Journalism, even sillier as Herr Professor Davis pontificates:

Hate, shuffled off stage in the post-racial haze of the election of the nation's first black president, is back with a vengeance. Hate, if it ever truly threatened to leave the political stage, is most definitely back, larger and nastier than ever.

Welch gives no quarter to either leftist America Haters [The MSM] and others on the Right:
T

he "best way to beat hatemongering," [Davis's] subhed advises, "is to report it." I didn't realize that we were now teaching strategies for "beating" various societal phenomena in J-school, but I will admit to a certain unfamiliarity with academia.
Anyway, some of Davis' writing I think illustrates, in an unintended way, why people distrust both journalists and those who deliver lectures on the topic. To get all journalistically theoretical for a moment, what is the definition of journalism? Well, I don't know, but I do know that one thick chunk of the idea is to write or say (or aim to write and say) things that are unequivocally 100 percent true, and hopefully verified in some way. This is even more true, if such a thing is mathematically possible, for those who deliver lectures on all that should be true and good about journalism.

What, class, do we notice about Davis' statement above? IT IS DEMONSTRABLY FALSE. We used to have slavery in this country, and Jim Crow laws, and all kinds of officially sanctioned, legalized discrimination against disfavored minorities. And you want to tell me that hate is "larger and nastier than ever"? We had a CIVIL WAR in this country, where people not only brought their legally licensed firearms to townhalls, but they MURDERED THE SHIT OUT OF ONE ANOTHER. How many people died in racially fueled street riots 41 years ago, compared to how many died in racially fueled street riots in 2009? This little couplet, tossed off without evident concern, as if OF COURSE we all know this is true, is blatantly, sophomorically, and insultingly untrue. It's an advertisement for the author's fundamental lack of seriousness about the very subject he aims to address. More like this:

Somewhere, somehow, the news media have to make the same determination those brave civil rights-era reporters and editors made: This is wrong, deeply wrong, and we must cover it, day in, day out, like any other beat, albeit a more distasteful beat than most.
The same? Really? Let's see, every day in the Jim Crow South (and not only the Jim Crow South), black people were denied entrance to schools, businesses, and various public facilities, and when they attempted to be treated as equals, they were routinely met with official state violence. In 2009? Some loathesome individual citizen, with no official power over anyone, brings a "Death To Obama, Death To Michelle And Her Two Stupid Kids" sign to a political event at which no Obama attended (he is detained by the Secret Service). A man exercising his legal right to bear arms shows up on the periphery of an Obama event and menaces no one (the White House later says it has no problem with citizens legally bringing guns to public gatherings). Fox News alarmist Glenn Beck, ridiculously, claims that Obama has "a deep-seated hatred of white people," (and is rewarded for his omniscience with an advertiser boycott). Slappable broadcast shouter Sean Hannity "openly relishes violence" (this is Davis' claim), while Rush Limbaugh mentions "Obama" and "Hitler" in close proximity. That's the sum of his examples.

To draw any kind of equivalence between the official, police-backed bigotry of the United States–a bigotry that waged violence and worse against patriotic American citizens each and every day of each and every week–with the widely condemned hyperbole of talk show hosts and a scattered few non-violent acts of individual citizens, is not just kind of basically obscene, and an insult to the casualties on the often very lonely right side of the Civil Rights struggle, but it also serves to undermine faith in the very project under discussion. If this is the cavalier attitude with which ever-crusading journalists are going to treat the facts that concern them most, how can those of us who disagree with their basic premise begin to trust the forthcoming product from the Hate Beat?

Meanwhile, I can predict the kind of "hate" that will escape attention by the new desk. It's the kind that assumes, lack of evidence notwithstanding, that we are always–but especially now that liberal Democrats run the country–on the verge of a race war. It's the kind that takes a surface look at current events, luxuriates in historically ignorant alarmism, then proclaims that America itself is "delusional," "irrational," "hysterical." You can't get away with hating a (Democratic) president's policies, or even a single policy, but hating on the country as a whole for failing to get on board? Well, that's just journalism!

Saul Alinsky's 13 Rules For Radicals does insist that alarmist hysteria creates an atmosphere where the Radical Left can buffalo a large segment of the population to take their frontal lobes out of contention while considering topics which are emotionally overwhelming. Those who counsel cooler deliberation are then branded hate-mongers and racists---at least in the most recent effusions from faux-academics like Prof. Davis. The real rent-a-mobs are the ACORNista shabby stoned slackers and the SEIU Marxist cadres Axelrod and Emanuel summons when things get very dicey.

Barry Goldwater noted in the Sixties that "When treason rules the land, none dare call it treason."