God bless America. It’s a land where we can all believe different things, have different values, look different, speak different, smell different, be Joaquin Phoenix, and still get along and respect each other like one big happy American family. Right? That’s how we do it in the U.S. of A. Right guys? High fives? Bill O’Reilly? Keith Olbermann? We can all agree to disagree right?

Story Highlights
This is a pretty serious article, but it has a few solid laughs in there. Dig in for the long haul. It’s worth it. Pretty lengthy though (that’s what she said). Get a beverage?
Liberal commentators resorted to dick jokes when covering conservative protests. That should be reserved for people like us here at TTM, thank you.
Janeane Garofalo accused conservative protesters of racism. She is also completely insane.
Conservative and liberal media alike are out of control, nearing if not having reached the point of irrelevancy. For Republicans to matter politically, they need to return to the basic fundamentals upon which the party was founded.

Absolutely not.

I’m going to talk about a few news pieces by “lefties” and “lib’rals,” but let’s get one thing straight at the start: the right wing is not without sin. Bill O’Reilly is just as guilty of being a biased, idiotic, horrible “news” person as Keith Olbermann. Neither of them are interested in real intellectual discussions of the issues, they are both simply interested in hearing their opinions regurgitated by “authorities” that they bring on the show, who are almost never any kind of authority on anything. FoxNews deserves just as much criticism as the left networks. They’re doing a dumbass job of communicating and representing “conservatism.” Fortunately, there are plenty of people out there keeping a very watchful eye on FoxNews to make sure that they don’t get away with anything. Watch any comedian, fake news show, or news show on any other network and you will see FoxNews verbally tarred and feathered over and over again, often for damn good reasons. Get it together FoxNews. You’re making the intellectual, educated conservatives look like stupidasses. I’m tired of it.

Just a disclaimer: I am going to be mentioning some sexual language that you might find kind of offensive or at least gross. Sorry. Let it be known that it wasn’t my idea, I’m just covering what was on prime time news. This isn’t something from The Daily Show, this is Anderson Cooper, Rachel Maddow, and Keith Olbermann, et al. These are supposedly “respectable” news anchors. Let’s get right down to it.

You may have heard about “Taxpayer Tea Parties” that happened on April 15th, tax day. These were protests across the nation where people gathered to decry the recent actions of the federal government: bailouts which equal massive, massive federal spending. They were sort of fomented by an outburst from Rick Santelli on CNBC regarding government spending. Not really a controversial subject to be pissed about. These weren’t anti-gay marriage protests. Just some people getting together and loving their own money.

Granted, a lot of people said some stupidass, extreme things – comparing Obama to Hitler, etc etc. You name the stupid thing that someone could say to ruin a potentially positive conservative rally, and some idiot put it on a poster for some other idiot to photograph and put on national TV. Thanks, guy. Appreciate you implying that Obama is working for Osama Bin Laden. Really using a lot of good information and logic there, you know, the whole “their names rhyme so they must be in cahoots” thing. Way to help the conservative image. You’re going to have morons in any group, it’s just statistics.

And it’s not like you didn’t see really retarded things coming from the left either, did you? We’ve seen both sides using the same sensationalistic, dumbass rhetoric to attack people that think differently. I don’t give a damn what you think about Bush or Obama, neither of them is even close to Adolf freaking Hitler. You can’t make that argument. Stop it.

So anyway, people protesting taxes, some stupid but most probably honest Americans who really aren’t happy with what the government is doing. They’re protesting a federalist government – that is to say, a government with a large federal presence. This is supremely ironic, since the Democratic party actually has its roots in anti-federalism, citing this wikipedia article:

“The party arose from opposition to the policies of the ruling Federalist Party, which was dominated by [Alexander] Hamilton and advocated a strong central government, a loose interpretation of the Constitution, and a republic governed by a well-educated professional class.”

There you have it. Today’s Democrats have literally turned into what their party was started to oppose. And that’s what these “Taxpayer Tea Party” protesters were/are against: a large federal government whose hand is in everything, spending its citizens’ money in ways they feel are irresponsible and unconstitutional. This is a government that they feel is acting unjustly. They are not protesting taxes as a principle (sorry, John Stewart – see video later) but rather the extreme level of bailouts and subsequent taxes that both the Obama Administration and the Bush Administration embraced. These are people that believe in the free market and the private sector, hence their desire to let bad businesses fail. It’s a free market. If your business sucks, it’s going down. Too damn bad. Whether or not free market capitalism at its truest form is ever going to be possible in our society is up for debate, I’m just saying that this is – from what I can tell – what is at the core of these “Taxpayer Tea Party” protests. Doesn’t seem horrible, right? Enter the liberal commentators.

This all started because some of the “Taxpayer Tea Party” protesters were mailing tea bags to congress in the days before April 15th. Some of them – not all, this was not the overarching language of the movement which you can see here on this website – referred to this as “teabagging” congress or “teabagging” Washington. And therein lies the problem, ladies and gentlemen. You see, teabagging is… well… it’s… I guess I should ask Urbandictionary.com to help me out here:

Teabagging: v. To lower one’s scrotum into another’s mouth.

Yeah. Bad idea, conservative guy who used that verbiage. “Teabagging” wasn’t the slogan of the movement, though. They weren’t referring to themselves as “teabaggers.” They were protesters. You wouldn’t know that, though, from people like Rachel Maddow:

Sweet Holy Moses. Damn Rachel Maddow. I might have respected you at one point, despite the fact that I disagree with you on almost everything except that we both prefer boobs to bros, but not after you just made more teabagging jokes than I ever made in college. And I’ll confess to you – I made quite a few. I just thought that people whose job it is to cover the news would refrain from making jokes about putting balls in mouths. If this were the rhetoric of these protests, then I would be singing a different song. If you refer to your movement as the “Teabagging Movement” whose members are “Teabaggers,” then you really deserve to be mocked. You’re an idiot, and you need to know it. However, that’s simply not the case here. Maddow takes a couple examples that ignorantly stepped on a frathouse joke landmine and skewers them for seven minutes straight. She indicts the whole movement on the testicle-in-mouth concept, ignoring the fact that it really didn’t apply to the vast majority of those involved. Great news reporting, Rach!

Even the technology website/magazine Wired threw their hat into the ring with this article by Kevin Poulsen titled “FBI Arrests Oklahoma Teabagger For Twitter Threats.” Why not “Oklahoma Protester”? Wired isn’t utilizing a self-assigned moniker to refer to these protesters. They’re using a moniker placed on this movement by leftist commentators who seek to belittle people that think differently from them. That’s pathetic, Wired. Stick to technology and stay out of politics.

Then we have Keith Olbermann, who should have stuck to sports. Keith decided that he should get a political science professor from Harvard on his show to comment on the movement. Just kidding! He got “actress,” “comedienne,” and “activist” Janeane Garofalo:

This is where this crap gets way out of hand. Now I understand that the crowd wasn’t a big fan of the “Bush bashing” guy – hell, they’d probably be pissed at me for some of what I’ve said too – but Garofalo just goes ballistic. She starts quoting tons of neuroscience, which she’s obviously an expert on having gotten her degree in history. Whoops. Not a lot of neuroscience taught in history classes huh, Janeane? But then again, Olbermann didn’t bring her on the show because she’s an authority on anything, but rather because she would say inflammatory things. Which she did. Garofalo attributed the entire “Taxpayer Tea Party” movement to racism. Here’s a direct quote:

“…let’s be very honest about what this is about. It’s not about bashing Democrats, it’s not about taxes, they have no idea what the Boston tea party was about, they don’t know their history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks.”

Where in the hell did she get that from? I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to say that she pulled that little idea out of her liberal, conservative-hating ass. The most ironic thing about Garofalo’s statement is that she is actually the one being racist. The protesters are not protesting Obama’s skin color, but his actions. They are evaluating Obama based on the merit of his decisions, in which they have found fault. Garofalo, on the other hand, defends him based not on the merit of his decisions nor on his actions, but on his skin color. These protesters are wrong, she says, not because Obama has made the right decisions, but instead because he is a black man. If President Obama were white, she’d have no argument to present. Were there racists present at these protests? Of course. There are crazy people everywhere. Have you been outside? They’re everywhere. But that is not the majority, which Garofalo doesn’t want to accept. She would argue that if Obama were white there wouldn’t be any protests, but that’s because she refuses to pay attention to the actual motivations of the protests. Why don’t we see some of these liberal commentators actually engage the subjects at hand, rather than tossing around hyperbole and testicle jokes?

She touches on the answer to this question, even though I’m not sure she realized it. The answer is a reality which The Talking Mirror hopes to change: intellectual conservatives in the media are all but nonexistent. Where can you find an intelligent conservative perspective in the media? One that doesn’t rely on fear mongering and embellishment to fuel their arguments? No where, and that is why the Republican party is floundering right now. The liberals aren’t engaging conservatives intelligently because conservatives aren’t communicating intelligently in the first place.

One thing is for sure, though: American news media is totally and utterly screwed.

The point is that the news media at large is way out of hand and truth be told, I don’t have an answer. I do know that if conservatives want to have any place in the future of the country, they need to get back to the small government, free market roots of the party and stop embracing fear-fueled moral issues as the foundation of their politics. That hasn’t worked, that’s not working, and that won’t work in the future. It’s time to get back to the basics, guys. Fundamentals, not fundamentalism.

1900 words later, I’m done. What do you guys think?