Media Confuses Midwest with Middle East

There was a time when I used to think Anderson Cooper was pretty cool.

Granted, I was about thirteen, and the reason was because he was the globe-trotting reporter for the kids’ news show Channel One that they made us watch in school.

Cooper traveled all over the world, reporting from what appeared to be the front lines of war-torn areas such as Rwanda, Bosnia and Somalia, calmly reporting on the situation as rockets and bullets whistled past in the background. The man’s unflappable calm in the face of danger prompted a friend–also below the legal driving age–to assert that Cooper probably could have won any of those battles singlehandedly without batting an eye if he were actually forced to fight.

Years later, it was revealed Cooper wasn’t so much brave as he had merely become desensitized to violence … and when a real fight finally came his way, we would find out just how brave he really was.

But sometime after leaving Channel One, Cooper turned up on the more respected – though equally immature – CNN, where he quickly dispelled any previously misplaced trust in his abilities …

Here’s Anderson … barely recognizable … his hair turned prematurely white … possibly from accidentally walking in on Larry King in his dressing room (we might never know) … but you know darn well … it WASN’T from having done anything DANGEROUS!

While we might never know the reason for his premature grayness, the CNN Cooper proved to be just another liberal “talking head.” And while it wasn’t as disheartening as learning there was no Santa Claus, it was still a lot like when we all realized MacGyver was just a hippie in a leather jacket.

In 2009, Cooper was one of the first — if not the first — to label the Tea Party movement as “tea baggers” … meaning that his self-described “desire to protect his neutrality as a journalist” is about as ambiguous as someone using the N-word and claiming to have no strong feelings on civil rights. We all know where you stand, Anderson.

As a committed member of the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party, Cooper spent the first two years of the Tea Party’s existence trying to discredit them.

The media template from the beginning has been that the Tea Party is a violent group of extremists and borderline domestic terrorists rebelling against the benevolent leadership of Barack Obama, and so all accompanying coverage has been slanted to enhance this distortion.

Cooper’s coverage of the conservative backlash to the president, combined with his history of trekking through international hot-spots, seemed oddly reminiscent of the aftermath of the 2004 election when the left wing media outlets sent their foreign correspondents to the American Heartland to investigate how George W. Bush had been reelected.

It requires little imagination to envision Anderson Cooper tossing on a flak jacket and helmet to prepare for his dangerous trip into the Midwest …

Last week, while on the ground covering the uprising in Egypt, Cooper’s luck ran out to some degree when he was caught in a riot and (in a relatively slapstick description of violence) “punched ten times in the head.” (Apparently, we had been correct in quickly revoking his “tough guy” status when we first spotted him on CNN.)

While some might joke that he was fortunate his assailants failed to choose a more vital body part, to me the incident brought to mind the interesting revelation that — for all their attempts to brand the movement as a violent extremist group — neither Anderson Cooper (nor any other brave, red-blooded American [liberal] journalist — or anyone else, for that matter) has ever been physically assaulted by a bona-fide member of the Tea Party.

At roughly the same time this attack took place, CBS was covering the riots on the CBS Evening News with a video captioned, “Middle Class Uprising”. Obviously hoping to cast the “rioters” in a sympathetic role.

Of course, the Muslim Brotherhood was known to be one of the instigators, but the media wasn’t about to report anything depicting Muslims in a negative light.

*** For those of you who work for a living: The Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist group with worldwide influence and is known to have inspired such mass-murderers as Osama bin-Laden.

Meanwhile, the American Tea Party has never been anything but a peaceful, middle class group of concerned citizens fighti9ng for constitutional integrity, balanced budgets, and smaller government. Yet the media treats them like a terrorist organization!

Clearly, the media has confused the American Midwest with the Islamic Middle East.

Everyone acknowledges that Egyptian President Hasni Mubarak is a dictator. (Well, everyone but Joe Biden. But that’s only because Mubarak’s strong-arm policies are moderate compared to what Biden would do if he could get away with appointing himself Health-Care-Global-Warming-Manhattan-Style-Project-Foreign-Policy-God- Czar. I know he’s jealous Al’s cashing in and he still has to beg for scraps till he can find a way to get that lib-best-seller book written for him.

Anyway … unfortunately in an area as messed up as the Middle East, being a dictator doesn’t necessarily make you “the bad guy.”

In the Muslim world, “the lesser of two evils” is an unfortunate reality. After all, we once supported Saddam Hussein’s Iraq against Iran.

But, while Barack Obama might just be the worst president the United States has ever had, he has yet to sentence a political rival to death.

By contrast, “the best president” a Muslim nation might have is someone who hasn’t had any political rivals beheaded in the last week. The definitions are relative, at best.

The government of Egypt is not the most desirable or stable ally the United States could hope for, but it’s about the best we could expect from that area of the world. The Mubarak regime has historically maintained peaceful relations with Israel, which both placed them in the minority of and put them at odds with other Islamic nations.

Because Israel is our nation’s strongest ally in that region, that alone makes the status of Egypt’s government of vital importance to the United States. If a militant Islamic government were to take the place of the current regime, we would go from having a key tactical ally to having yet one more enemy and breeding ground of terrorist enemies.

Many in the media and the current administration do not seem to see the situation for what it is … particularly with the classic “underdog” angle journalists are attempting to play up.

Mubarak is an oppressive ruler and democracy is always an ideal, but the practicality of transitioning from one to the other is what is in question.

We’ve seen this sort of uprising many times before, and it rarely ends well. Like the Iranian Revolution …

The current scenario has uncanny similarities, right down to an American president who has often been called “the second term of Jimmy Carter.” Publicly, at the very least, Obama’s reaction to Egypt has been very much like Carter’s handling of Iran, a policy which led to a disaster we have been paying for ever since. This would not be the first time the United States has suffered from Obama repeating Carter’s mistakes, and it might just be equal to the damage of his economic irresponsibility.

As most historians and international political experts would agree, popular uprisings like this one might start out appearing beneficial for the downtrodden citizens, but will devolve into something much worse. The fall of the original strongman is followed by a scramble for a new government, which is rarely successful as originally intended.

More often, the vacuum of power is filled by the most radical elements at hand, which also tend to be the most organized. Despite their clamors for democracy, there is a very low likelihood Egypt will emerge as a democratic nation.

With the Muslim Brotherhood currently the only organized faction rebelling in Egypt, their revolution is less likely to bring us an Islamic Thomas Jefferson than it is to bring us an Islamic Adolf Hitler, or another Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Speaking of Ahmadinejad and Iran, the Obama administration and the media showed comparatively little interest during the brief Iranian uprising of 2009 …

When Iranian citizens protested a blatantly evil and oppressive government which would make Mubarak’s Egypt look like a free society by comparison, Obama made it clear that he had no intention of supporting a democratic revolution. Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad pushed ahead with his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, while his supporters took to the streets shouting, “Death to Israel! Death to America!”

Given Obama’s current support of the Egyptian revolution and his push for a speedy transfer of power–regardless of whom that power is transferred to–what once looked like misplaced priorities now appears to have been outright hypocrisy. Worse still, this is yet another in a long string of examples in which Obama’s hypocrisy has swung counter to the interests of the United States.

Obama often claims confusion as to why roughly 25% of Americans believe he is a Muslim. Regardless of whether he is or isn’t, it would be much easier to side with him if his foreign policy didn’t seem primarily focused on the support and establishment of radical Islamic regimes.

The news media spent most of the last decade trying to convince the public that Islam is a religion of peace and that we have all been overreacting to the threat of Islamic terrorism since 9/11.

The Obama administration has openly endorsed this position to the point that they refuse to use the word “terrorism” when referring to such events, opting instead for the absurd label “manmade disasters.”

Instead, the Tea Party movement is what the American media and Democrats refer to as a threat against our nation.

Obama often speaks in soaring rhetoric of the greatness of the Muslim faith and refuses to identify even groups like al-Qaeda as terrorists, but he openly refers to the Tea Party and Republicans as “enemies,” and the only “radicals” the media recognizes on a regular basis are the everyday citizens marching peacefully at Tea Party rallies . . . the same people the left has been accusing of violence for the past two years without a shred of evidence to back up their claims.

The original Boston Tea Party precipitated the American Revolution and brought us the greatest country on the face of the planet.

The Iranian Revolution brought us a radical Islamist government bent on jihad, the acquisition of nuclear weapons, and the annihilation of the United States and our allies.

Today, there is a new Tea Party embodying the values and objectives of the old, and a new Middle Eastern revolution threatening the world with yet another radical Islamic regime.

The media and the Obama administration are either blindly ignorant of these similarities, or willfully negligent in their handling of the participants. Either way, they are possessed of a childlike misplaced sense of perspective.

Some of us grew out of that. Others, it seems, never learn.

Travis Sedars
Mason City, Iowa

©2011 The Common Sense Politics Blog. All Rights Reserved.

.

Related posts:

1. Public trust in the news media takes a dive … What took so long?
2. Tea Parties vs. Tequila Parties
3. Establishment Republicans Eat Their Own …

Read more at The Common Sense Politics Blog