In the days leading up to and on the morning of the “Restoring Honor” rally, it was ring-around the liberal networks as every left-leaning news outlet from CBS to MSNBC attempted to paint Glenn Beck’s gathering as “controversial and political.”
On Friday, ABC ran a headline that read, “Glenn Beck’s Non Political Rally Turns Political” while some blogs and internet news sources actually pondered if “Beck’s rally would start a race war”?
That same morning also featured a bizarre and baseless attack on Beck from ABC’s Good Morning America, in which editors felt it necessary to piece together comments out of context in order to prove a very fictional point.
In fact, the far-left media spent an entire week promoting the idea that Beck’s rally was too divisive during a period of racial sensitivity and growing concerns over the nation’s overall direction.
Of course it would have helped if these networks had actually provided evidence to back up their erroneous claims.
And here comes the big shocker: None of the mainstream networks, or their affiliates, took the same approach towards Al Sharpton’s “Reclaim the Dream” rally, even though the lineup of speakers for that event included NAACP leader Ben Jealous and MSNBC bomb-thrower Ed Schultz.
We all know Mr. Jealous and Mr. Schultz have never made any contentious comments.
So let’s recap here. Glenn Beck is controversial for organizing a Christian-themed peace rally for our troops but Ed Schultz and Al Sharpton have never deliberately uttered a single word that may be deemed political or divisive.
That mentality ranks right up there with installing a screen door on a submarine.
Unfortunately, the media has spent the better part of a week portraying Sharpton’s event as a civil-rights gathering, as if that other evil rally was a mob of angry white people aiming to overthrow the government by any means necessary.
At the end of the day, the predictability of the media’s fabricated stories and canned talking points has become laughable.
However, the question everyone in the media should be asking is which rally was proven to actually be more political and racially driven. Here is a look at some play-by-play updates from Sharpton’s rally as blogged by Washington Post reporters.
“Shame on them. We still have a dream. We are here to let those folks on the Mall know that they don’t represent the dream. They sure as hell don’t represent me. They represent hate-mongering and angry white people. The happy white people are here today. We will not let them stand in the way of the change we voted for!”
That excerpt was taken from SEIU-32BJ president Jamie Contreras’s greatest hits.
“If we hadn’t elected a black president, do you think they would be doing this today?” asked Joyce White.
And of course, the obligatory “those teabaggers” was thrown in the mix.
“Glenn Beck, we’re going to show you. We ain’t going to let Glenn Beck turn us around,” one man shouted into a megaphone. The crowd followed him. A few people took photos as they chanted and walked down Constitution Avenue. “We need to be shouting ‘we are America,'” said one woman at Sharpton’s rally. “See all those teabaggers.”
“Don’t let anyone tell you that they have the right to take their country back,” Avis Jones DeWeever, executive director of the National Council of Negro Women told the crowd at the Rev. Al Sharpton’s rally. “It’s our country, too. We will reclaim the dream. It was ours from the beginning.”
It was ours from the beginning? What does that even mean?
Remember when “take back our country” was strategically used by Democrats during the 2004 election cycle? Isn’t it odd how the media can reshape a single phrase to advance a certain political agenda?
Now these same media kooks are making it a point to let everyone know that Beck’s rally was overwhelmingly white, providing yet another insinuation that Americans who are concerned about our nation’s trend away from moral values and into deeper financial debt are actually closet Klan members.
Imagine if today’s major headlines read, “‘Reclaim the Dream’ rally overwhelmingly black”
So the media paints the majority of Americans as extremists, but gives a free pass to far-left race-baiters who have no qualms about stirring controversy on the grounds of so-called “equality.”
But the good news is that this is all Bush’s fault.
Ashley Stinnett lives in West Virginia, where he serves as an adjunct college instructor, writer, media and public relations consultant, public speaker and political commentator. He is a registered member of the West Virginia Associated Press, and is a nationally syndicated columnist. He is the author of the new book, “Grasping Appalachian Conservatism: How Not To Be Mistaken For A Latte Liberal.”