So let me get this straight: Glenn Beck, who is an employee of Fox News, organized a rally of thousands of people, and then anchored coverage of said rally on the network. Can we now officially retire the "Fair and Balanced" slogan? Or take the "News" out of Fox? How can they continue to pretend what they're doing is anything besides advocacy?
As for the protest itself, these are conservatives protesting deficits, debt, and government authoritarianism- all of which took place for eight years of Bush-Cheney, and none of which occasioned a protest by the Teabaggers. It is, quite simply, the Anti-Obama Movement- a full-fledged protest against the president's very existence. Leaving aside the Nazi comparisons, the birther garbage, the "Bury Obama With Kennedy," and all the rest- it's simply a reaction against a pretend version of Obama who doesn't really exist. A protest against taxes that haven't been raised, ideas that haven't been or never will be proposed, etc.
I appreciate James Poniewozik's takedown of the protests' association with 9/11, as well as this, making fun of the wildly divergent crowd estimates.
Posted by Stephen Silver at September 13, 2009 10:15 PM