The preceding exchange–especially Dylan Ratigan’s asinine contention that Rick Santelli is “channeling an emotion that everyone in America is feeling”–ties in with what Glenn Greenwald was saying the other day about how the Beltway press corps is still obsessed with transmitting and furthering GOP talking points in the name of some mythical ‘bipartisanship’, basically making shit up about public opinion, regardless of all evidence to the contrary:
The political establishment has never come to terms with, and the media establishment just refuses to acknowledge, how deeply unpopular and discredited the GOP is among most Americans in the wake of the eight-year Bush disaster. Political and media elites don’t want to acknowledge that because they lent their continuous support for eight years to Republican power, yet — even with Bush gone — it’s scarcely possible to imagine how a major political party could be held in lower esteem among voters. By huge margins (63-29%), Americans believe the GOP opposed Obama’s stimulus package for political reasons, not because they genuinely believed it would be bad for the economy; they overwhelmingly disapprove of Congressional Republicans (38-56%) while approving of Obama (68-25%) and even Congressional Democrats (50-44%); trust Obama over Congressional Republicans to handle the economy (61-26%); and trust Democrats over Republicans “to do a better job in coping with the main problems the nation faces over the next few years” (56-30%). Those are enormous margins.
The punditry’s claims that Americans want Democrats to dilute their policies in order to attract and include Republican support is entirely misleading. The endless media stories that Eric Cantor, Michael Steele and Rick Santelli are now riding some resurgent, anti-stimulus GOP wave are pure fiction. And the incessant calls for “bipartisanship” are anti-democratic in the extreme.
The Villagers stubbornly insist on reading from a hackneyed, out-of-date script, one that no longer even remotely resembles reality (if it ever actually did). But no matter what steaming, stinking bullshit manufactured outrage merchants like Santelli, Ratigan, or Michelle Malkin brazenly peddle, as Greenwald notes the bottom line is this:
he reason that Americans voted overwhelmingly in favor of Democrats in the last two elections and overwhelmingly against Republicans is because they want Democratic policies and not Republicans policies . They drove Republicans out of office in massive numbers because they don’t want Republicans and their policies governing the country.
In other words, spittle-flecked fauxpulist motherfuckers like Rick Santelli can suck it. Hopefully he gets banished to the PJTV wilderness post haste, so he can serve heaping plates of bloody red meat to the Chicago Tea Party massif alongside his ideological (and, um, intellectual) brethren Glenn Reynolds and Joe the Plumber. And the rest of us can get back to, y’know, trying to fix the mess we inherited from the previous administration.
http://bastardlogic.wordpress.com/2009/02/26/rick-santelli-matt-lauer/