{"id":6269,"date":"2009-11-13T13:00:58","date_gmt":"2009-11-13T18:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=6269"},"modified":"2009-11-13T13:03:25","modified_gmt":"2009-11-13T18:03:25","slug":"nope-no-liberal-media-here-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=6269","title":{"rendered":"Nope. No Liberal Media Here."},"content":{"rendered":"

If, say, Ed Morrissey – my friend, radio colleague and longtime fellow Northern Alliance blogger – were to write something in incredibly dubious taste, and I wanted to do something to say “I’m not with him on this”, what would it be called?<\/p>\n

Disavowing?<\/p>\n

Repudiating?<\/p>\n

Chiding?<\/p>\n

You have a wide variety of English verbs to use for the purpose.<\/p>\n

One of them would not be “Back Off”.\u00a0 To back off of something implies you’ve done something in the first place to “back off” from.<\/p>\n

Kevin Diaz, writing at the Strib’s “Hot Dish Politics” blog, notes that Rep. Bachmann has repudiated\/chided\u00a0some of the people who brought some fairly inappropriate placards to her demonstration on Capitol Hill last week:<\/p>\n

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, who\u2019s been getting a lot of media attention since her starring role at a D.C. rally against the House health reform bill last week, has been distancing herself from the Holocaust<\/a> imagery displayed by some of the participants in the event.<\/p>\n

“Sadly, some individuals chose to marginalize tragic events in human history, such as the Holocaust, by invoking imagery and labels which have no purpose in a policy debate about health care,” the Minnesota Republican said in a statement she has been sending out to reporters in recent days.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, whenever you go to a demonstration that is open to the general public, you’re going to draw a thin film of nutters.\u00a0 They turned out to all three of the Minnesota Tea Parties – a tiny few of them, anyway (although the leftymedia coverering the event did in fact focus on them to the exclusion of the 99% majority of pretty regular workadaddy hugamommy people who showed up – a dishonesty far worse than Fox News’ inflation of the Bachmann rally’s numbers in its own way).\u00a0\u00a0 And if you’re a conservative, you get used to having to drag liberals back to the real conversation; to too many of them, the odd nutter at a conservative rally is like a shiny piece of tinfoil to a kitten.<\/p>\n

The placard in question, the leftymedia bleated, was one showing piles of bodies at a concentration camp after World War II; it equated Obamacare to the Nazi healthcare plan applied to Jews.\u00a0 As I noted in this blog last week, it was pretty stupid, partly for its historical ignorance, and more for the opening it gave the leftymedia to portray the event as if every <\/em>protester and <\/em>Rep. Bachmann was carrying one.\u00a0<\/p>\n

(I also noted that it’s great, absolutely fab<\/em>ulous in fact, that the left…<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

…has gotten so very <\/em>conscientious…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

…about not wanting to cheapen the horror of the Holocaust and the Nazi regime…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

…for moronic political effect.<\/p>\n

Well played, Left!<\/p>\n

At any rate, it was a stupid placard.\u00a0 And Rep. Bachmann repudiated\/chided it:<\/p>\n

“These regrettable actions negatively shift the focus of the current discussion on this issue,\u201d her statement continues. \u201cThe American people deserve an open and honest debate to ensure the best possible solution to our health care problems, and I agree that these unfortunate instances are wholly inappropriate.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, Bachmann’s demonstration drew blood, and the left realizes it needs to marginalize it as much as possible – in this case, by trying to convince the world that a duck is not a duck, or in this case that a moron with an inappropriate placard is really an official statement by Rep. Bachmann (in the same way that the right ascribed the many, many trivializations of Naziism that became such a cottage industry on the left, to the left):<\/p>\n

Bachmann\u2019s statement comes after U.S. Rep. Steve Israel, a Jewish Democrat from Long Island<\/a>, called on her to apologize for the offending images<\/a> at the Capitol Hill rally, which she\u2019s been largely credited with inspiring and organizing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0Yadda yadda.<\/p>\n

At any rate, this is all background to the real point of this post.\u00a0 Now, with newspaper headlines in print editions, headlines are usually not the responsibility of the writer\/reporter who does the actual story.\u00a0 It’s a copy editor who writes those.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure who writes the headlines on the Strib’s online publications – if it was Kevin Diaz, or some minion in the copy or web department.\u00a0 But someone <\/em>put a title on Diaz’ post:<\/p>\n

Bachmann backs off from Holocaust images<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Er, yeah.\u00a0 But Bachmann didn’t use <\/em>any Holocaust images.\u00a0 She never mentioned the Holocaust, to my knowledge, in the history of the healthcare debate, much less at her demonstration.\u00a0 It was someone in the audience<\/em>.<\/p>\n

How can Bachmann “back off” something she, herself,\u00a0never did, said or implied?<\/p>\n

And if your answer is “the leader is responsible for the actions of even his\/her most demented follower”, then I’ll await your collective apology, from President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer and Howard Dean on down, for the repeated, slanderous “Nazi” references that conservatism and conservatives have endured this past nine years.<\/p>\n

Deal?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If, say, Ed Morrissey – my friend, radio colleague and longtime fellow Northern Alliance blogger – were to write something in incredibly dubious taste, and I wanted to do something to say “I’m not with him on this”, what would it be called? Disavowing? Repudiating? Chiding? You have a wide variety of English verbs to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,79],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-slander-files"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6269"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6269\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6271,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6269\/revisions\/6271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}