Chuck Todd actually gets this right on Meet The Press. Gregory played a clip of Dick Armey trying to say that the teabaggers represent the "center" of American politics as bizarre as that may sound and it was Chuck Todd who corrected that lie. FOX News grabbed them, promoted them, sent their hosts to caress and nurture them and were the first network in the history of broadcasting to become true political activists that worked to undermine a newly elected president.
FOX News is the Ministry of Propaganda for the GOP.
MR. GREGORY: There's also the issue of the sort of opposition that the president faces. Where is the Republican Party? We talked a little bit about that. Again, part of the conversation we've had outside the hour today in some outside interviews includes one with Dick Armey, a former congressman who's now part of FreedomWorks, who is part of this tea party movement that was influential in Massachusetts and elsewhere. Here's what he said about the center of American politics.
(Videotape)FMR. REP. DICK ARMEY (R-TX): This is the broad center of American politics. Look at the polling data. Right now the tea party polls higher than the Republicans and the Democrats. And it is becoming increasingly clear to the electorate out there, and they're expressing their understanding, it is the Democrat majority in Congress and the president that's on the liberal fringe and we are on the center. There's no doubt about it.
TODD: I don't know they are in the center. I mean when we did our own polling on this it's clear that the tea party gets a big benefit because there is one news organization that gives them a huge bump all the time. I mean they are favorable among Fox viewers is through the roof and the rest of the country sort of doesn't know a lot about these folks. But the message of the tea party sort of saying the government doesn't work, these institutions and we've got to shrink the size of government, is tapping into what we were just discussing before which is this -- not disgust but sort of this distrust of all institutions that are out there. Government included.
But I think that, I want to go to something E.J. said about the Republican Party. I think the most striking thing about the minority party today is that a Republican can't go home and it's mostly because of this tea party crap cannot go home and sell a piece of pork that they got from Washington. It's now when you bring home something, saying hey, "I brought federal dollars to this," you're on the defensive now. And so that does make the president's challenge -- it's not as if he can trade, you know, go and have these trades with a Susan Collins or an Olympia Snowe or let's say a Lamar -- let's move over to more of the conservative center right -- Lamar Alexander or something like this because they're not getting a benefit at home of bringing something back because we have like destroyed this idea that somehow anything from government that comes through is bad.
The tea party crowd is a hyper-extension of the conservative movement. Sure, it's attracting some hard working Americans who are fed up with the state of the country that the Bush administration left us in, but the base of that movement are the militia, white supremacist, Gold standard, black helicopter, Gospel of Hate movements that FOX News has been trying to main stream into American politics.
When will the media elites (The Villagers) not be afraid to expose this very dangerous precedent that FOX News has set in the media?
(photo via David Weigel)
