On Sunday, Capitol Hill was flooded with protesters demanding that the Obama administration make good on its promises to move immigration reform forward. The protests got lots of coverage on all the cable news networks, and the views and goals of the movement were fairly represented and made well known. Just kidding! Hardly anyone in the mainstream media gave the immigration protests press, because everyone was too busy talking about the much smaller protests against the passage of the health care reform bill. The "Tea Partiers" grabbed airtime by expressing their discontent with a word economy peculiar to the frightened and intentionally misinformed.
Over the weekend: • Rep. Barney Frank got called a ‘faggot,’ • Civil Rights hero Rep. John Lewis was called a ‘nigger,’ • Rep. Ciro Rodriguez was called a ‘wetback’ who should ‘go back to Mexico,’ • Rep. Emanuel Cleaver got spat on, • Rep. Louise Slaughter got a brick thrown through her window, • and a man with Parkinson’s got dollar bills thrown at him (since he was clearly asking for a ‘handout’). Even Bart Stupak got called a ‘baby-killer’ — by a fellow member of Congress! (Are you really going to make me defend Stupak in the name of appropriate nomenclature, Rep. Neugebauer? Unless you mean that women were once babies.) The conservative response? There’s plenty of people out there saying dumb shit about ‘I didn’t see it so it didn’t happen,’ or ‘This is what happens when you pass a bill using totalitarianism.’ Statements like these are unsurprising, false, and valueless. The relative voice of reason comes from David Frum, who lays out that the natural outcome of putting all your stock into the extremist fringe unaccountable media figures who make money by fostering and enraging an extremist fringe. Long-term consequences of shock-jock culture aside, what does the pro-migrant movement have to do to get some cameras on it? Is it even possible to invoke press-garnering rage in the name of lifting everyone up? image via Wonkette.