Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Seemingly so, and if G.O.P. leaders of all stripes, from Romney to Mitch McConnell to Olympia Snowe to Lindsey Graham, are afraid of these forces, that’s the strongest possible indicator that the rest of us have reason to fear them too.
In March, CNN made stunning announcement that Erick Erickson, editor of the ultra-right Tea Party screed Redstate.com (owned by Eagle Publishing, owner of malodorous HumanEvents.com) would be a regular panelist on the new "John King's USA" program. We get the media we deserve, and I was loath to roll over for one more indignity. I got a little worked up about it.
So We Made A Video About CNN's Latest Farce
My video partner, Oilwellian and I felt this reckless erosion of CNN's responsibility was so egregious that it needed a simple polemical response that called attention to it.
Enough is Enough — How You Can Help
Educate Time-Warner Stockholders
Show them just how fast and loose CNN executives, Jon Klein and Sam Feist are being, You can be sure their stockholders have no idea what kind of unhinged propaganda they are presenting to the American people in their pursuit of a few of Fox New's ratings points.
PLEASE RETWEET this post (see below), so a viral pressure might goose @CNN to stop this Fox-chasing nonsense and try being a real news network again. It took them two years to admit the Lou Dobbs mistake, so I don't have a lot of hope that they'll can this stupid Erickson idea too soon. But at least this exposure can make it painful for them. We have only 24 hours left to make video go viral (and get special notices on YouTube). Your RTs and emails would help a lot.
IT'S IMPORTANT: Even though John King USA's show is pretty boring (King was never mister magnetic), and the nepotism shown by using his wife Dana Bash as the show's (Republican friendly) Congressional reporter makes the show a laughing stock, that doesn't mean this farce should stand, unassailed until the inevitable cancellation. The experience may make CNN just a bit more sensitive to the fact that the Tea Party ain't the only Americans fired up, lately.
Some of us are just disgusted with the corporate wrecking ball that American capitalism—and our media—have become. It's time we just said no, and meant it.
I have already invested a fair amount of time being the partisan crasher on Twitter on this issue, but it's just not something we can afford to shrug off after a few days of whining. The right assumes, as CNN's Jon Klein did, that "progressives never get too worked up about anything".
In Retrospect, Our Video Was Too Kind
The right has screwed up this nation too thoroughly for us to just acquiesce to CNN giving a platform to the latest overrated stooge of concorporate hegemons. As the past few years have proved, they own or control most of this nation where it counts, and even when progressives score gains (as we just did with Health Care Reform), there is still a huge question mark hovering over the future of the United States. A recovering economy will not mask the near-kleptocratic nature of what our modern predatory-capitalist-system-run- amok has become.
Through one of many proxies like Redstate, the corporate and conservative elites use massive private funding networks to distribute professionally crafted propaganda masking as "grass roots" efforts.
Their work is designed to prey on the emotions and fears of an almost fundamentalist fervor amongst the ignorant Teahadist soldiers they are whipping up across the nation. The primary goal is to convince these gullible—or just rich, mean, racist, or stupid—people, that the administration that inherited the burden of fixing the economic malaise they created, are actually the people who caused them in the first place. And when you have a 24 hour news channel (Fox News) devoted to such efforts, it's really not all that hard to sell such foolishness to the proles.
This professionally-crafted and marketed lying has gone on far too long—and it's wrecking this nation. And yet, as I type this, the US Chamber of Commerce is gearing up to spend more millions of dollars in local elections. Precisely the kind of spending secured with the kind of right-wing propaganda that HumanEvents, Redstate, and Erick Erickson represent (often literally).
Below, I have created one of my "capsules" to provide some background on CNN's latest gift to the nation, and to the right wing groups and strategies that have crippled it: Erick Erickson.
There is not much about this creep to like. Let's just say he's a man of average means, who now has way above average influence in a Republican party that respects only results, regardless of outcomes. A full picture of him will emerge from the materials, herein.
