I think our kind, soft-hearted friends on the hard left are telegraphing a message that seems cloudy — Muslim desires are sacrosanct, conservatives are to be equally feared and derided.
Nine years ago, 19 Muslim rads wiped out close to 3,000 Americans at Ground Zero. An imam with a spotty record at best — America deserved what happened on Sept. 11, he says, and America has more blood on its hands than Al Qaeda — wants to build a Ground Zero mosque, either in tribute to the mass-murdering terrorists or to show us they are decent Muslims. Funding is a secret. Plans are a secret. But, hey, you know how many blabbermouths there are in this country. They want to start construction on the ninth anniversary of Sept. 11. They want to dedicate the Ground Zero mosque on the 10th anniversary. What mama wouldn’t want a such a perfumed son who reasons that way? The left thinks this is a beautifully conceived idea. We are building bridges, baby, and simultaneously lowering unemployment. What a concept.
Now Meet the Really, Really Bad Guy
A few weeks ago, Glenn Beck — whom the left calmly tells us is responsible for almost as many terrorist acts as Al Qaeda — announced he wanted to stage a rally for the common folk, a Restoring Honor commemoration, at the Lincoln Memorial in our nation’s capitol. Since conservatives work on weekdays, Mr. Beck, a radio and television pundit said to have a large following, scheduled his non-political rally for Saturday, Aug. 28.
Within a month, offended hard left’ers shrewdly determined this would be the 47th anniversary of Dr. King’s I Have a Dream speech. Within another month, somebody else discovered Mr. Beck not only was white but, icky-pooh, conservative. Horrors, the filthiest kind of American.
So darned kindhearted that it was painful to watch, the hard left leadership concluded this would be as sacrilegious as spitting in the face of your mother. Actually, they said later, spitting on mama would be preferable to allowing the extremist Mr. Beck, on the lam for several years from left-wing politically correct officers of the almost-law, stage a rally in the same place Dr. King stood, irretrievably defacing his hallowed honor.
Yes, I know Dr. King preached color-blindness. But Mr. Beck is so conservative. Shouldn’t he at least be whipped or jailed first?
Mr. Beck said that he was attempting to rally patriotic Americans to reclaim this country for decent people, the mainstream, before Mr. Obama’s crowd has a further opportunity to redistribute our wealth among his base.
Mr. Beck said the rally’s accent would be on religion, not on politics.
Haters on the left reviled him for obscenely torturing Dr. King’s memory, but for lying about the contents of the rally and the number of people he hoped to attract.
He expected, he hoped for, 100,000 people.
The hard left mocked him. Well, they mock him for getting up in the morning. They mock him for saying good evening on his television show. This latest mature mockery scarcely should surprise.
Every newspaperman for the past two centuries knows that such populist rallies produce three main channels of interest:
• Size of the crowd, which commonly is grossly above or below expectations,
• The violence quotient and
• Often a distant third is content.
The Los Angeles Times, which passionately hates Mr. Beck, equally in its news pages and its op-ed essays, reported yesterday that the Restoring Honor rally was “heavily religious and overtly political.” Take that accidentally accurate assessment to the Bank of Zell.
Given that the crowd was evidently the biggest in America anywhere in recent years except for Mr. Obama’s inauguration, the Times flashed its acute news judgment in determining placement. The boys wrung their hands. The story was positioned on page A-14, just ahead of a lengthy piece on sexy Greensburg, which every purveyor of news knows is in Kansas, 10 miles south of Oz.
Its little heart beating faster than Bugs Bunny’s when he is on the business end of Elmer Fudd’s rifle, the Times headlined this breathtaker as “Conservative rally in D.C. draws thousands.”
Wow, Daddy, I want one of them.
Those enviably clever boys at 2nd and Spring brilliantly lifted the idea for their whopper headline from the aforementioned Mr. Beck.
When he stepped to the platform on Saturday, Mr. Beck, accustomed to hard left ridicule, said with a smile:
“I have just gotten word from the media that there are over a thousand people here today.”
With three reporters constructing this journalistic booby prize, the boys, as if whispering to their readers in the 23rd sentence the reason everyone was reading the story, that organizers placed the crowd at 500,000. MSNBC, which hates Mr. Beck more than the Times, estimated 300,000. So you can believe 500,000 is pretty darned close.
Meanwhile, over at that brick bastion of bully-boy bigotry, The New York Times, they buried the story of the biggest non-inauguration crowd in years on Page A-15 in yesterday’s edition.
Their prize headline declared “At the Lincoln Memorial, a Call for Religious Rebirth.”
By golly, Murgatroyd, there is compelling news I want to read.
Everybody, except the hard left, wanted to know the size of the crowd.
Those master manipulators of hard left journalism, taking pity, only made their readers tap their toes until the 18th paragraph to disclose the 500,000 and 300,000 estimates.
Mr. Beck did, though, win some points over his lovely enemies.
Having just spent the entire summer defending the “right” of Islamists to build a Ground Zero mosque, it was too risky even for the hard left to hammer Mr. Beck this weekend for making this a religious rebirth for American rally instead of a right-wing political demonstration, which they drooled for.
Both Timeses wrote smarmy, smear-centric stories. But, by sundown, the majority of people seem to have voted with their happy feet for the charismatic Mr. Beck.
Sunny conservatives 1,
Perpetually angry detractors 0.
