Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Legal Commentary Blogs -> Discriminations

Legal Commentary

: Discriminations

Even When They Get It, They Don?t Get It

Mike Barnicle, taking a day off from MSNBC?s Morning Joe and other talking head assignments, returns to his roots on the streets of Boston to observe the Scott Brown rally with Rudy Giuliani a few days ago, and writes an almost excellent column about it in Time, ?Scott Brown Rides A Perfect Storm in Mass.?

Barnicle perfectly captures the current mood, where

voters sit, feeling helpless, voiceless and powerless as joblessness grows, taxes rise, services dwindle, disillusionment prospers and the roster of family anxieties about tuitions, mortgage payments, employment, two wars and a whole lot more make negative ads and campaign rhetoric seem hollow. Add the fact that many voters seem to feel questions about the cost of health care reform and the size of the budget deficit go unheard, and politics becomes flammable.

But then he flushes all his insight down the toilet.

Now, Brown finished speaking. He plunged into the crowd alongside former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Given the often contrived and polarizing conflict that dominates the cable-TV landscape, it would be easy, on the outside looking in, to slap a Tea Party label on Brown?s supporters. But most of those lunging for his hand were not lunatics from the fringe, merely Democrats and Independents feeling bruised, ignored and taken for granted by people in power.

Barnicle obviously never attended a real, live Tea Party gathering, where he would have found not ?lunatics from the fringe? but angry and frustrated normal people indistinguishable from those he describes so sympathetically in Boston.

Apparently you can take a man out of the MSNBC set, but you can?t take MSNBC out of the man. Barnicle, go back to the polarizing conflict that dominates cable TV and take your assigned seat.

Full post as published by Discriminations on January 17, 2010 (boomark / email).