Griper Blade: Conservatives and the Politics of the Tattletale Child

It's all so terribly unjust. It turns out that, if you unfairly characterize people as "thugs" and "goons," those people will have a poor opinion of you. They might even want to beat the people you're supporting in elections. It's shocking, I know. Who would expect the rhetoric of demonization to come with consequences? Surely not the Tea Party and surely not Fox News. And, since consequences are only for non-'bagger non-supermen, Fox was there to make sure those consequences didn't exist.

OK, OK, OK... Let me get it together here. I'm still in stitches over the claim that the Tea Party doesn't say things like that. Right. And Dean Martin never drank. And, of course, calling Hoffa a "thug" and comparing him to mafioso Tony Soprano is totally justified, given the context.

Context is key here. Because the context presented by Fox News was not the context presented to reality. Using what Media Matters describes as a "dishonestly cropped video," Megyn Kelly and Fox offered a version of Hoffa's speech that was easy to completely misunderstand. "Everybody here's got to vote," Hoffa said in the fuller context. "If we go back and keep the eye on the prize, let's take these son of a bitches out and give America back to America where we belong! Thank you very much!"...[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]