The Left’s Hurricane of Hate

Posted By Arnold Ahlert

On August 30, 2012

A hurricane coupled with a Republican convention is more than enough to elicit the latest spasms of hate emanating from the Left. Our list of oh-so-tolerant all-stars comes from the predictable precincts of Hollywood and the mainstream media. All of them seemingly embrace the Obama administration’s credo of never letting a crisis go to waste.
Former movie star Ellen Barkin apparently didn’t get the memo about toning down the violent rhetoric in the wake of the Gabby Giffords shooting. Last Sunday, Barkin re-tweeted a message from one of her followers that illuminated the rank hypocrisy of those who consider themselves paragons of tolerance. “C’mon #Isaac! Wash every pro-life, anti-education, anti-woman, xenophobic, gay-bashing, racist SOB right into the ocean! #RNC,” the message read. Barkin defended herself by lashing out at Twitchy, the website that reported the tweet. ”For better or worse, that was not my original tweet.A retweet.But Twitchy liked it better their way,” she wrote. Twitchy noted that a re-tweet is not necessarily an endorsement of the original message, but noted that ”Barkin didn’t give any indication that she disagreed with the revolting sentiment when she retweeted it to her followers.”
Barkin is no stranger to expressing such “open-mindedness.” Back in July, she expressed her displeasure regarding the idea that some Americans aren’t thrilled with her upcoming television show, “The New Normal.” The NBC series is about a gay couple who want to use a surrogate mother to have a baby. ”I love everybody,..except u right wing f**kin morons, (sic),” she tweeted at the time. Add her August take on voter ID, “bulls**t going on now will kill us all,” and her tweet to actor Jon Lovitz for criticizing the president, “John Lovitz maybe I met you a few times back in the day, but now you’re just an ignorant a**hole. Shut the f**k up,” and you have a woman oblivious to her own, foul-mouthed intolerance.
She is hardly alone. Samuel Jackson also took to Twitter to question the wisdom of God Himself, and his divine decision to spare the city of Tampa, FL, site of the Republican convention. “Unfair S**t: GOP spared by Issac ! NOLA probably F**ked Again! Not understanding God’s plan!” wrote Jackson. A deluge of responses apparently caused Jackson to issue two other tweets characterized as “an apology” by The National Post: ”Daayum! Poked a Hornets nest, hunh? Apologies to God, Tampa, da GOP& Isaac(sp)! Who played the Race card?!” Jackson wrote, followed up by “Whoooo! A lotta sh**t stirred into a Bulls**t tweet! Politics & Religion get MUHFREPUBLICANS heated!” Such tweets are apparently as “apologetic” as Jackson gets.
As for Jackson’s inquiry about who played the race card, going right to the top of the list would be MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. If one embraces Matthews’ distorted worldview, every criticism aimed at Barack Obama constitutes racism. On a Monday segment of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Matthews lashed out at Republican National Committee Chairman (RNC) Reince Priebus. Mitt Romney’s birth certificate remark, a joke to anyone capable of rational thinking, was apparently the fuse. “That cheap shot about ‘I don’t have a problem with my birth certificate’ was awful,” Matthews said. “You are playing that little ethnic card there. You can play your games and giggle about it, but the fact is your side is playing that [race] card.”
Matthews was even more incensed when Priebus called the president’s economic policies “European.” “What? Where do you get this from? That’s insane,” Matthews responded. “You mean the fact that every president we’ve had has tried to offset the economic cycle with stimulus going the other direction is somehow European?” As the exchange grew more heated, Priebus decided arguing was pointless. Matthews’ “journalistic” response? “Because you’re losing, that’s why,” he groused.
Later that evening, Matthews defended himself. ”It is obvious that this is something I care passionately about: race was abused by white politicians in my lifetime, including Reagan,” he contended. “For someone to come on the program and deny that this is part of their process, I couldn’t take that. This is something I really, deeply believe in. We grew up in a country where appeals to race have been awful, terrible. This language–we are beyond this. It had to be called out.” He further noted that “race is the San Andreas Fault in this country, and this is dividing this country along racial lines.”
Again, it takes a monumental level of obliviousness for Matthews to inject race into the discussion wherever possible, even as he complains that racial issues–courtesy of Republicans only, it would seem–are dividing the country. Thus, it was completely unsurprising that Matthews doubled-down on Tuesday, when he warned his audience to “be on the alert for the tribal messages, the war drums of racial division” at the GOP convention. “Listen for the word ‘welfare’… the charge that… someone else is getting a free ride courtesy of President Obama,” he said. “Wait for warnings that your Medicare benefits are being siphoned off to pay for Obama’s health care recipients–another case where the good middle-class family is getting shorted so that poor minorities get something for nothing.” Matthews further claimed that voters would be treated to “a relentless dog whistle” that “treats black voters with disdain and treats white people like well, well-trained canines.”
Unfortunately that “relentless dog whistle” may be something MSNBC viewers will have to experience by watching another network. A report by the website redalertpolitics.com reveals just how far MSNBC is willing to go in order to maintain the meme that Republicans hate minorities. Whether by accident or design, the network somehow managed to cut all the speeches made by black and Hispanic Republicans from its coverage of the GOP convention. When Texas Senate candidate and Tea Party favorite Joe Cruz began to speak, they cut away. They stayed on commercial when former black Democrat-turned-Republican Rep. Artur Davis spoke. Puerto Rican Governor Luis Fortuno’s wife Luce’ Vela Fortuño speech was left in the background while hosts Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews talked over it. Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval, and Utah’s black congressional candidate, Mia Love, were also ignored, despite Love giving one of the best speeches of the night. (A copy of that speech can be found here.)
A combination of the Republican convention and Hurricane Isaac was fodder for others as well. Last Sunday, NBC’s chief White House correspondent, Chuck Todd, noted that “as this storm moves closer to Louisiana, the specter, the sort of shadow of Bush and Katrina does hang over this convention.” NBC’s Andrea Mitchell echoed Todd’s assessment, contending that there is “a political challenge here with this approaching storm, especially for the Republicans. No one here can easily forget the iconic picture of President Bush flying on Air Force One … looking down at New Orleans during Katrina.”
Tuesday’s New York Times stayed with that idea when it contended that “Tropical Storm Isaac is more than just a logistical inconvenience for Republicans gathered in Tampa: it is a powerful reminder both of Republican incompetence in handling Hurricane Katrina seven years ago, and the party’s no-less-disastrous plans to further cut emergency-related spending.” The paper further noted that it is “hard to forget what happened to New Orleans when that Republican philosophy was followed in 2005, and it will be harder still to explain how it might be allowed to happen again.”
Yet all of them were one-upped by Yahoo! News Washington bureau chief David Chalian. As reported to Newsbusters by ABC News’s Julie Townsend.
Chalian was identified as the person who proclaimed accidently during a Monday night ABC Internet broadcast that Mitt Romney and his wife Ann were unconcerned about the people of New Orleans, who were enduring Hurricane Isaac at the time. “They are happy to have a party when black people drown,” said Chalian.
The message here is clear. It is a re-iteration of the media-fueled accusations that Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina was racist in nature, regardless of the utter falsity of those accusations. Furthermore, this so-called “Republican philosophy” — as opposed to the stunning incompetence of Democrat New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin and former Democrat Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco — extends to Mitt Romney and the rest of the Republicans, who have done nothing more than hold their convention during a storm.
Movie stars saying stupid things is nothing new. With rare exceptions, their overwhelming need for attention inevitably trumps anything resembling common sense and common decency. Yet the efforts of the so-called mainstream media to portray Republicans as hateful uncaring racists, whether by commission or omission, is a constant reminder that coverage of this presidential election will be as slanted as any in history.
Arthur Brisbane, in his final column for the New York Times, noted the newspaper’s “political and cultural progressivism…bleeds through the fabric” of the paper. ABC’s Jake Tapper says the media “tipped the scales” for Obama in the 2008 campaign. As evidenced here, the bleeding is getting heavier, and those scales remain tipped even further toward the left. As such, there is no limit to unfounded accusations directed towards Republicans that will be reached prior to election day. When there’s an election to tilt, truth is the ultimate casualty.