Ready for the streets

I was disappointed on Friday last when even a proportion of WGBH's Beat the Press simply did not get it regarding Republican mob politics to oppose health care. Mob rule: good lord, Alexander Hamilton is spinning in his grave.

Whatever his other credentials, it was clear that Emerson's Paul Niwa flunked American history when he compared the reactionary Republican mobs disrupting healthcare town meetings to the Sons of Liberty. Paul, there were such groups, true, but they weren't the Sons of Liberty: they were Loyalist (Tory) mobs; like today's mobs, they existed to defend the status quo and to prevent change.

Paul Sciacca trotted out what must be the Herald party line. He doesn't do that often, so shame on him. He argued that the press would not call a demonstration by union members an angry mob.

Well, no, they wouldn't. Because union demonstrators would fly their true colours, a principle republicans seem to have abandoned. Good journalism demands that one would call them by their identity. However, when republican sneaks paid off by health insurance interests hire and deploy an angry mob under no colours at all, they have no reason to object when it is called an angry mob.

I've ignored the emails asking me to show up for Obama at this event or that. While I am not best pleased with how the administration has handled this business, that isn't the reason. I am not there because I am furious, I am feeling very revolutionary, and I would test the value of some reactionary clown's health insurance. The world is better off with my sweet self on the sidelines.

But back to the journalists. so-called. Most now seem to be clear on the concept that these are paid thugs. I grant that GMA among others is still without a clue, and none of them can figure out the ones demanding that Obama "keep the gummint outta my Medicare." Health care providers have been rolling on the floor over that one for years. One said to me the other day that we'd have emergency room overcrowding fixed overnight if we could find a cure for stupid. Beat the Press should have been asking, "where was the critical faculty?" What terminal flaw is it that prevents broadcast journalists from ever questioning the source and nature of the story? That flaw is, I submit, that they are not journalists at all, that they do not work for news media. They are entertainers, and their employers are simply circuses in the Roman sense, who gull the mass audience into blind acceptance.