Back to Basics

It was obviously an effort by liberals and “progressives” to do something—anything—to counter the conservative revival in the country, as reflected in such events as Glenn Beck’s massive 8/28 rally in Washington, D.C.

Wearing an American flag shirt and playing patriotic songs, Jon Stewart sounded like a voice of reason at his “Restore Sanity” rally. Pointing at the U.S. Capitol, he thundered that the politicians, as well as liberal and conservative voices on cable TV, were polarizing the country and driving us into conflict and controversy. But in the end, he couldn’t shake his television persona. The “serious” side of Jon Stewart was a bust.

It was difficult for Stewart to accuse others of dividing the nation when his recent TV guest, President Obama, had called on Latinos to defeat his “political enemies.” Stewart said, “We can have animus and not be enemies,” oblivious to the reckless political verbiage that the President had used. Obama had engaged in what the liberals used to call “Nixonian” tactics, identifying “enemies” and seeking their political destruction.

“Glenn Beck—Go FOX Yourself” was visible on one of the posters being held upfront in the crowd and scanned by the Comedy Central television cameras.

In Stewart’s mind, the problem is not Obama; it’s his political opposition, including on cable TV. While a series of funny TV excerpts did show some MSNBC personalities making wild accusations, the thrust of his remarks was that things are not as bad as Obama’s critics say they are.

“We live in hard times, not end times,” Stewart said, as if he understands the gravity of the situation and others don’t. This remark, clearly directed at religious people who believe America is at a crossroads and that God’s help is required to save the country from a combination of secular and spiritual forces, demonstrated Stewart’s commitment to politics as usual. It was as if he were saying, “Give Obama a chance. Just give the President and the Democrats two more years.”

That was the clear sentiment of many in the audience.

Playing to this mostly liberal audience, Stewart attacked those claiming that “Marxists [are] actively subverting our constitution,” as if Marxism is too harsh a term to use to describe a President tutored by a member of the Communist Party USA who has pursued socialist-style policies during his two years in office.

In Stewart’s world, the fault lies with the President’s critics.

Apparently in serious mode, Stewart tried to explain why America will somehow muddle through any problems which confront us. Oddly, he played footage of a traffic jam, using that as an illustration of how people with different ideologies and political affiliations drive their cars and avoid crashing into one another in order to get to a common destination. This was America in action, he implied, as if he were making a profound observation that will go down in history.

His criticism of the press, delivered in those final 10 minutes of “enlightened” commentary from the stage at the end of a series of gags and songs, fell flat.

Dohrn griped that they have become “pawns” against their old friend and associate, President Obama, and that critics of Obama have been trying to depict them as “insane” and “murderers.”

When comics Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert announced their rallies on the national mall scheduled for this Saturday, they may not have expected—or wanted—an endorsement from Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. But Ayers told the Ford Motor Company-sponsored Green Festival in Washington, D.C. last Saturday that the event will be a needed respite from the “Alice in Wonderland” world of military domination of the planet and wars waged by the U.S. “empire.”

The October 30 Stewart/Colbert rallies, dubbed “Restore Sanity” and “Keep Fear Alive,” are “worth attending,” Ayers said.

Ayers’ wife, Bernardine Dohrn, once labeled a “violent maniac” by a former gang member in congressional testimony, turned deadly serious at the Green Fest in declaring that the U.S. was no longer a “hegemonic power” because of its economic decline but that its military strength was still a major problem in the world.

Sounding as anti-American as ever, Dohrn and Ayers complained about U.S. military aid to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Israel, and U.S. backing for “repressive” regimes.

Ayers, who is retiring as an education professor for the University of Illinois, encouraged the audience to focus on “community power,” such as what they can accomplish in “the classroom.” He said, “This is the only power we have access to.”

At the sparsely-attended event, Ayers declared that “education is a human right” and put his faith in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

Offering something for the “Green Americans” in attendance, Dohrn said that Americans have to learn to “live differently.”

Appearing together on stage in a talk show format, the efforts by Ayers and Dohrn to gin up the crowd mostly fell flat, in part because the acoustics in a location in the Washington Convention Center made it difficult for many to hear what was actually being said. Even Ayers complained about an inability to hear the questions.

However, questions from this columnist about their communist terrorist backgrounds were heard clearly and denounced by Dohrn as a “pack of lies.” The questions concerned Dohrn’s praise of the Manson Family murders and a book they wrote that was dedicated in part to Sirhan Sirhan, the assassin of anti-Vietnam War candidate Robert F. Kennedy.

Dohrn griped that they have become “pawns” against their old friend and associate, President Obama, and that critics of Obama have been trying to depict them as “insane” and “murderers.”

They didn’t mention it, but Ayers and Dohrn had staged a fundraiser for Obama when he began his political career by running for the Illinois State Senate. Ayers and Obama served on a board and appeared at functions together. During the campaign, however, Obama tried to play down his relationship with the terror couple.

“We did a lot of things wrong,” looking back at the time when she and Ayers were in the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Weather Underground, but were on “the right side of history,” Dohrn claimed.

…there’s all sorts of really bad reporting that I just—again, it’s why I wrote the book. I just felt that somebody needed to set the record straight.

The ongoing story of the Salahis, the so-called White House gatecrashers, appears on the surface to be a tabloid story about some social-climbing status seekers who, with the help of the Bravo Network, were able to crash President Obama’s first White House state dinner last November. But as I pointed out in a special report last December, there was much more to the story. Could the Secret Service have been so incompetent or careless to allow people into such an event who were not on a list? Why was President Obama contradicting his pledge of transparency by exercising executive privilege to keep the key people in a position to know from testifying before a Congressional committee looking into the affair? And were the media once again covering for Obama by viciously going after the Salahis, who were easy targets because of their style of living large while stiffing a number of small businesses, as was well documented at the time.

Now they have become Reality TV stars, being one of five couples featured in Bravo’s “The Real Housewives of DC,” which mercifully ended last week. The show was painful, and embarrassing to watch, but it did contain some of the most beautiful high definition video images of the Washington DC area ever shot. The final episode (not counting two mud-slinging “reunion” shows) included the first video the public got to see of the actual events of that night last November when the Salahis managed to get into the White House reception, past the checkpoints, and were introduced as they entered. It was highly edited, and thus still ambiguous as to what actually happened. But it was clear that someone, presumably from the Secret Service, couldn’t find their name on the list, but sent them on anyway to the next checkpoint.

Veteran journalist Diane Dimond, who has been an anchor at National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, a White House and Congressional reporter for RKO Radio Network, and a highly acclaimed celebrity author and journalist with shows like Hard Copy and Entertainment Tonight, has recently come out with a book on this whole affair, called Cirque du Salahi: Be Careful Who You Trust. She spent a lot of time with the Salahis while writing this book, with the understanding that they would have no say in what was eventually published. And as Ms. Dimond tells Accuracy in Media in this exclusive interview, the Salahis were not very happy about some of the things she reported on. But in fact Cirque du Salahi provides a balanced, inside look at who these people are, and how this story unfolded, and saves its sharpest criticism for the White House and the media.

In many ways this is a story unique to these times.

Frightened of this White House and Obama-friendly search engine management, many of my regular publishers may choose not to print this column. This is following the Obama administration’s new definition of “hate speech” which is any speech in support of the good ole USA and, more importantly, at odds with the Obama administration. This is what may cause some of my regular publishers concern, that they will lose search engine support for their publication.

But so be it! Someone has to say it like it really is and if I don’t, I’m hard pressed to find anyone else in the old or new media who will.

Allow me to state for the record that one need not live long or look far to realize that bad things can happen to good people, leaving them in a real moment of need. When this happens, no people on earth will step in to help as Americans do every day. Americans are the most generous people on the planet.

My family has raised the children of others when their parents couldn’t. We have mowed grass, mended broken homes, paid electric bills and even made the occasional mortgage payment when someone else could not – not because we had to, but because we could and we wanted to.

However, this is not the situation being discussed here today. This piece takes a look at a growing segment of the U.S. population and their overall entitlement mentality which makes them think they have a right to the honest earnings and assets of others, bringing and owing nothing to society in return, and their endless demands for government tyranny.

One of the most disgusting events in American history was held in our nation’s capital last weekend and the American press has had absolutely nothing to say about it.

On October 2, 2010 – Democrats, Union Workers, and Communists Rallied Together in Washington.

For years, I have written on the subject of how the terms democrat, socialist, communist, Marxist, liberal, and progressive are all synonymous in American now. In the good ole days, they were in the closet, but today, they are on daily display from the White House to the Halls of Congress, to the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument.

Calling this cabal of mental and emotional misfits communists is nicer than they really deserve. The proper term is parasite, “a person who receives support, advantage, or the like, from another or others without giving any useful or proper return, as one who lives on the hospitality of others.” One need look no further than the signs carried at last weekend’s DC rally for confirmation.

Decent, honest, hard-working American taxpayers are all caught up in the daily assaults on their individual freedom and liberty, and rightfully so today. The 24/7 assault on individual freedom may be worse in America than anywhere else on earth right now and political pandering to parasites is at the root of the problem.

Now to be at least somewhat fair, most of these parasites are not really parasites by choice.

Since the Obama organization known as “Organizing for America” urged its supporters to attend the rally, this should prompt questions to the White House. But it’s doubtful the media will utter a peep.

Various communist and socialist groups were photographed and filmed during the October 2 “One Nation Working Together” rally in Washington, D.C. But groups can show up at any event they want to and there is not much that organizers can do about it. The real controversy lies in whether they were officially invited to participate. In this context, the involvement of the Communist Party USA, a group that served as a subversive pawn of Moscow for decades, is relevant and newsworthy.

Since the Obama organization known as “Organizing for America” urged its supporters to attend the rally, this should prompt questions to the White House. But it’s doubtful the media will utter a peep.

Here are the facts: the CPUSA was an official “endorsing organization” and was given space to set up a literature table by the rally organizers. Indeed, a two-page official list of “One Nation March” organizations shows that it was given a highly coveted “reserved space.”

These officially-sanctioned groups also included the AFL-CIO and several left-wing labor unions; United for Peace and Justice, founded by veteran Marxist activist Leslie Cagan; Code Pink; the ANSWER Coalition, a front of the Party for Socialism and Liberation; the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC); the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism; Green for All, the group once associated with former White House official Van Jones; Democratic Socialists of America, which helped give Barack Obama his start in Illinois state politics; and the NAACP.

The special recognition accorded the CPUSA would be comparable to organizers of a Tea Party event or Glenn Beck’s August 28 “Restoring Honor” rally honoring the efforts of an extremist organization that almost everyone would view as beyond the pale. Nothing like that occurred, but this hasn’t stopped the liberal media from picking a few extremists out of various Tea Party events, as if they were somehow representative of the entire grass-roots movement. It is a dishonest tactic that the media and their progressive allies frequently use.

Ironically, it turns out that some of the “Tea Party extremists” selected by the press in the past have actually been representatives of Lyndon LaRouche, a perennial candidate for president and convicted felon who usually runs as a Democrat and actually started his political career in an offshoot of the radical left Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). His people are usually the ones holding posters depicting Obama with a Hitler mustache.

You know, I’ve been to so many small tea parties that I don’t care too much about the size of events after a while. The feeling at the massive rallies is just exponentially different. I covered the Phoenix amnesty and reconquista march, which easily saw 50,000 people make the trek from the starting Indian School location to the civic center. But whenever tea partiers march there’s a systematic press effort to suppress the numbers. What’s so funny about the socialist rally yesteday is that there’s nothing the media could do to help the measly turnout for the radical leftists. Perhaps 10 or 15 thousand showed up all day, but it’s pretty odd for speakers to still be yelping to the crowd when the mall is virtually empty (at the video). That said, Nicole Bell — obviously of the reality-based community, right? — is undeterred: “Here’s Your Enthusiasm Gap: One Nation Rally Draws More Attendees Than Beck’s ‘Whitestock’.” (Via Memeorandum.)

Even during what would appear to be at the period of peak attendance it’s just not that crowded. Check this CNN video at about 30 seconds. Pay attention to the grassy area on the left, next to the reflecting pool. It’s just wide patches of grass. And then check my post from yesterday.

Roughly the same shot can be seen at this C-SPAN screencap:

And Andrew Berman states the main problem: “I still have not found a good overhead shot yet …” Exactly. William Teach predicted that we wouldn’t see any overhead shots, and we won’t, unless a tea partier cruised up to the top of the Washington Monument to snap a picture. If one become available it would go viral big time. See a report from both Glenn Beck’s and “One Nation” at Just a Conservative Girl, “8/28 Crowd V. 10/2 Crowd See for yourself.” And at Lonely Conservative, “Rally for Socialism Fails to Draw Much of a Crowd.” Plus, at RWN, “Lefty Rally at Lincoln Memorial Gets Glad Handed By Old Media, But Event a Bust.” And Nice Deb has the most comprehensive roundup of the day, “One Nation of Moonbats March on Washington.”

1 Nation Rally proves to be Pelosi’s favorite type of ruffage, Astro Turf.

Now lets see what a crowd looks like that respects God and has a better grasp on its morals.  Keep in mind that no one at the 828 Rally was paid or forced to go to.  Each person that went, went because they wanted to.  Not because some nefarious puppet master made them.  Yes forced them to attend the rally.

The 828 Fly Over

1 National Rally Fly over

Not only did a lot of people show up at the Lincoln Memorial and around the reflecting pool on Saturday, the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s famed “I have a dream speech”, but the mainstream media drew criticism for reporting the obvious. They were mostly white.

Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention in the weeks leading up to the event, but I assumed Glenn Beck was going to use the platform to call attention to the key issues with which the nation is struggling and which will influence the outcome of the forthcoming November midterm elections. Obviously I was wrong.

I have been to an evangelical tent meeting. I actually met the late Oral Roberts long ago in Columbus, Georgia where he invited me to attend. I can still recall the fervor of that evening and I was reminded of it while watching Beck.

There was a lot of talk of God, but I don’t recall that Dr. King, a preacher of astonishing power, was preaching Christ Jesus that day forty-seven years ago. King focused on the problem that had been troubling the soul of America since the days of the Revolution, the days of the Civil War, the Reconstruction, and the hundred years that had passed since then.

I knew what Dr. King was talking about. I had spent enough years in the South to know what it was like to see Whites Only drinking fountains, a separate room at the bus station where blacks had to wait, and all the other wretched reminders of Jim Crow. In time I even met Dr. King after he gave a speech at Drew University in New Jersey.

I was covering the event as a freelance journalist for a black newspaper and Dr. King was greatly amused that the newspaper didn’t mind a bit that a white reporter would write the story. Being cheeky, I told him that greenbacks can be spent by white and black alike. He laughed, we shook hands, and he moved into history.

I am sure that Glenn Beck is sincere about his faith, but I can understand why even a charlatan like Rev. Al Sharpton was unhappy that the day and the place had been usurped by a wannabe preacher who was a television personality.

To be candid, I have a real problem when I occasionally and briefly watch Glenn Beck when he does his show each evening on Fox News. I know he has a huge following and I know he has exposed a lot of bad people in high office, but I cannot muster the same confidence I do when others address the same topics. Veering back and forth between outrage and tears, I find him creepy.

I think the Beck-a-Palooza that took place on Saturday will fade quickly from public memory and I think it should.

Restoring Honor

To say that climbing on a bus with fifty strangers to join a caravan of hundreds of other buses jostling our way up the yellow-brick road to Oz put this Historian out of his comfort zone would not be an understatement; it would be a gross understatement. However, having fallen through the rabbit hole in the fifties and taken the red pill in the sixties, the slow motion train wreck that is the Progressive’s deconstruction of traditional America combined with the light speed transformation of our beloved Republic as a European-style nanny-state since the November Revolution of 08 compelled me to go. Stoked by daily doses of Radio-free Glenn and incited by the daily drip-drip-drip of the government take-overs and serial bail-outs the anticipation has built for months.

Now that the GREAT EVENT is over we have to ask ourselves, “What did we go to Washington to see?”

Did we go to see a politician? No! Politicians are people dressed in fancy clothes or people giving eloquent speeches? We can see those twenty-four hours a day on C-Span. The Best Congress Money Can Buy has this down to a science. They know how to look and sound important. They even know how to look and sound relevant, caring, concerned, and informed. The only problem is that time and time again we elect people to change the anti-liberty anti-individual freedom agenda rotting the core of the American Experiment, and time after time we find out that instead of sending in the cavalry we have sent in the clowns and the beat-down goes on. We did not see a politician at the Restoring Honor Rally. So what did we go to Washington to see?

Did we go to see a religious leader? Having been one myself I speak with a certain familiarity if not authority. No! Religious leaders, though they may selflessly and honestly present the message of their particular religion, are members of organizations, and they seek the advancement of those organizations: that is their job. We did not see a religious leader at the Restoring Honor Rally. So what did we go to Washington to see?

Did we go to see a promoter of hate? No! Promoters of hate sent out invitations to their event based on race, saying every one of certain races should come. The people of hate displayed a huge banner with a picture of Dr, Martin Luther King labeled “The Dream” above a huge picture of Glenn Beck labeled “The Nightmare.” The people of hate wandered through the largest crowd I have ever seen holding up signs calling the Americans of ever race and nationality who attended the Restoring Honor Rally the “KKK” and other provocative slogans. We did not see a promoter of hate at the Restoring Honor Rally. So what did we go to Washington to see?

Did we go to see a self-promoter? No! Self-promoters seek to make money and/or build their own kingdom. Self-promoters constantly point to themselves as the answer to the questions they ask, and the solution to the problems they pose.

I attended Glenn Beck’s honor rally on the mall today. I took photos and video. Nothing I could post here could possibly make you realize how enormous the event was. Not from my vantage point anyway.It was a nice event. Moving and at times cheesy. There was no politics. All I heard and observed were speeches and videos about military heroism and God.

We started our journey being jammed in the Metro train. Like the DC Rally of last Sept. it was incredibly packed. We stayed on the train until the Smithsonian stop and piled out on the DC streets with the rest of the herd. We moved toward the mall and Washington’s monument. It was at this point we began to realize the enormity of what was before us. There were people already sitting in their chairs beneath the Washington Monument. We walked down past the WW2 memorial and tried to make our way as close as we could. We got about half way before we said enough and found us a patch of grass to sit on under the trees. We had a good view of one of the screens and could here the presentation just fine. We had virtually no view of the stage. I could just make out a tiny dot the were the speakers as they walked around as they spoke to the crowd.

I’ve read media reports of the event. The AP claims tens of thousands showed up. ABCNews said 300,000. The AP said activists were handing out Obama Hitler brochures. We never saw anything of the sort. You would never have been able to find one if you wanted one as proof. It was just typical smearing from the left. We get it and aren’t surprised.

The truth is with the people there. We know what we saw. We know why we came. We know the country that we care about is imperil by statists. We are standing now to fight against the left. It scares the hell out of them. That’s why they try to minimize events like this.

Unless you come to Tea Parties or rallies you have no idea what people are feeling right now. You ignore us at your peril. You try to marginalize us using the media. But if you want to know the truth about events like this, don’t expect the media to honestly cover it.

The story should be who these people that attended today are. How far they came. How much money they spent to get here. Thousands sacrificed time and money to stand with each other to restore honor to this country. It was a good day. One in which the left and media will never understand.