Holidaze: We Learned Nothing From 2009

I've had my problems with Joan Walsh over the years, but she's absolutely right in her look back at the last decade, and pins the events of the rise of Trump to the cowardice of both the media and of Democrats starting in 2009.

I had a strange spot from which to regularly witness this f&$%ing decade: cable news green rooms, tiny flash cam cubbies and convivial tables of televised political-panel chats; mostly on MSNBC, occasionally on Fox, and lately CNN. Once the euphoria of Obama’s inauguration subsided, it quickly became clear to at least a few of us that we were witnessing a profound racial backlash. In the early days of the anti-Obama Tea Party, journalists were required to say the uprising was about government spending run amok (I covered San Francisco’s first Tea Party event, on Tax Day 2009, and tried to give attendees the benefit of the doubt, though I couldn’t miss the guy demanding House Speaker Nancy Pelosi examine Obama’s birth certificate, an early “birther.”)

Fox News, always a site of white racial anxiety (remember when Barack and Michelle gave one another “terrorist fist jabs” during the 2008 campaign?) immediately became a clubhouse for white panic. Fox went from hyping the lame thuggery and purported voter intimidation of the tiny, impotent New Black Panther Party, to “exposing” some past controversial political views of Obama’s black “green jobs czar” Van Jones (which led to bipartisan demands for Jones to resign), to promoting doctored videos “showing” the black-led community empowerment group ACORN supposedly helped a “pimp” avoid paying taxes (which led to a bipartisan push to defund ACORN), to pushing another Andrew Breitbart (RIP) story that former NAACP leader Shirley Sherrod used a government job to discriminate against white farmers when the truth was the opposite (which led to bipartisan demands that Sherrod be fired).

Yes, my point is: Fox is evil, but it sometimes succeeded because Democrats are cowards, and utterly unprepared to fight evil enemies. Hosts like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and the rising Sean Hannity regularly peddled those and other racial panic stories, while the mainstream media generally, and even leading Democrats, tried hard to avoid seeing what was happening.

Then there was the almost immediate uptick in political violence. In April, 2009, a Glenn Beck fan killed three police officers in Pittsburgh. In May, an anti-abortion terrorist murdered Dr. George Tiller in the Wichita church where he served as an usher. In June, an elderly white birther murdered a guard at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. In August, anti-Obama protester William Kostric brought a loaded gun to a New Hampshire town hall meeting with Obama, and carried a sign referencing Thomas Jefferson’s famous credo, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots.” Folks in the media debated what Kostric was trying to say. (You can understand why I insisted on roping in 2009 into this decade.) But the political violence continues and has worsened—from Charleston to Charlottesville to Pittsburgh to El Paso—ever since.

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I covered all of this, and I had the distinction of being mocked, at least twice, by the cable hosts I loved the most, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central. After I debated disgraced former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly in July 2009, over whether his violence-tinged rhetoric contributed to the climate that led an anti-abortion zealot to murder Dr. George Tiller, Stewart played our heated exchange and distilled it down to each of us saying the other had blood on their hands (admittedly not my finest moment), and mocking us with the zinger “No backsies!”
The fact that I got thousands of hateful emails and a few old fashioned snail-mail letters, some of them threatening harm to me and my daughter, while O’Reilly railed at me every night for almost a week from his top-rated multi-million-dollar Fox perch, didn’t figure in the sketch. We were simply “both sides.” It prefigured Donald Trump’s “many fine people, on both sides” after Charlottesville—but for laughs.

Maybe worse, I was apparently mocked at the stupendously awful “March to Restore Sanity” Stewart and Colbert sponsored in October 2010, for calling the people behind the uptick in political murder “gun nuts.” I say “apparently” because multiple people told me I was in some compilation video of the divisive people on “both sides,” the partisan “crazies” who needed to be called out so that bipartisan “sanity” could be restored, but I’ve never been able to find it online. Whether or not I was mocked doesn’t really matter; we know the “march” occurred, and was intended to promote nonpartisan solutions to the rising climate of hate. Which was mostly, can we now admit, coming from one side? But again, in this f&$%ing decade, criticizing “both sides” was apparently the only way to acknowledge the rot emanating from one side.

But I didn’t only face this on Fox or, occasionally, from folks I admired on Comedy Central. I ran up against it sometimes on MSNBC too. On “Hardball,” longtime political analyst Pat Buchanan regularly attacked me as an elitist for deriding the racism of the growing Tea Party, even as he recognized them as the descendants of the George Wallace voters he’d welcomed into the GOP four decades earlier. The first time he did it, I was gob-smacked, thinking I’d won the debate. But new rules, put into place under Obama, meant you couldn’t even dismiss George Wallace voters as racist anymore. Back-dated by Buchanan, and a precursor to the right’s Trump analysis, the Wallace voters’ problem was merely “economic anxiety” combined with resentment that “elites” like me didn’t like them. Never mind that Buchanan came from a wealthy Washington D.C. family and I grew up a working-class New Yorker.

Meanwhile, I lost my regular invite to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” the day in early 2010 when I failed to correctly identify the person Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski believed was the MSNBC equivalent of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. I can still find the video and transcript, courtesy of the right-wing Web that loved how a “clueless” me was schooled, especially by Brzezinski:

JOE SCARBOROUGH: …I think it helps us all to say there are extreme voices on the left, there are extreme voices on the right, and it’s our responsibility to call out people, I believe, on our side.

JOAN WALSH: Who would you have me call out? I mean who would you say on the left is comparable to Rush and…

SCARBOROUGH: Don’t do it.

MIKA BREZEZINSKI: Mmm-mmm! No thanks, Joan. We’re good. We’re good.

SCARBOROUGH: Can we talk about the Chinese now?

MIKA: I think it’s all very obvious.

WALSH: Is it obvious? Who on the left is comparable to Rush and Glenn on the right?

MIKA: Okay, Joan, if it’s not obvious to you I’ll talk to you off-set. I mean, my God! Alright so let’s read from the Washington Post…

SCARBOROUGH: We’ll talk off-set.

WALSH: Okay…

MIKA: Seriously, it’s like BLIP… BLIP… BLIP… right in front of you and you’re like [imitates willfully clueless Walsh] “I’m sorry, I don’t see it!”

A shocked Walsh was left with her mouth hanging open.

I am sure my mouth did hang open. It just hung open again, reading that exchange. “Off-set,” and also later on the Web, it was “revealed” to me that the correct answer was then-MSNBC host Keith Olbermann. Folks, Olbermann has had his career and personal ups and downs, and I have had my own with him, but there is no way that he ever—then or now—spewed the crazy hatred, let alone the casual racism, of Limbaugh or Beck. Of course, the history of this f&%^cking decade shows that “Morning Joe” later opened its airwaves to candidate Donald Trump whenever he chose to phone in—and even later turned on him, to the hosts’ credit. But “even later” was too late. The damage had been done.

Trump's racist birther garbage was apparent eleven years ago, and so was the failure of our media and the Democrats.  The signs were there, and at every turn last decade the country gave in to him.

Now in 2020 we have one last chance to stop him, or the country is done.