Outrage, Inc. by Derek Hunter

Author:Derek Hunter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-06-18T16:00:00+00:00

Not only was this one guy who’d said something stupid responsible for what he had said, the candidate at the top of the ticket, and every single one on down the ballot, was also somehow responsible for what that one guy had said, and if they couldn’t get him to resign, voters would see it as weakness, according to the website.

Realistically, voters would not associate one guy running for office in one state with the person running for president, but the media made damn sure they did.

All Republicans are routinely held to account for the things other Republicans have said; Democrats often aren’t asked about the things they themselves say.

In 2012, when Vice President Joe Biden made a clearly race-baiting comment about Romney and his policies, the media largely balked. They reported it, but in the context of Republican outrage, not outrage in general at the comment, as was the case with Akin.

Campaigning before a predominantly black audience in Virginia, the vice president told the crowd that Romney’s policies regarding the financial sector of the economy would “put y’all back in chains.” Clearly a reference to slavery, unless the banking industry has a secret market set up that has escaped regulatory oversight for centuries.

Some considered it a gaffe and dismissed it as “Joe being Joe.” The man had, after all, plagiarized a biographical speech about himself in 1988 and had developed quite a reputation for verbal diarrhea over his long career, so MENSA wasn’t exactly beating a path to his door. But Biden knew exactly what he was doing, and so did the complicit media that covered him.

Race-baiting has a long tradition in the Democratic Party, starting with slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, and the progressive movement’s embrace of Planned Parenthood and the grotesque idea of eugenics; that they’d still embrace that tactic, though in a different form, is no surprise.

The New York Times “covered” the Biden comments with the headline “Biden Warns Romney Policies Would Put Crowd ‘Back in Chains.’”9

In its story, the Times acknowledged that Biden had “created a stir” with his comments by angering Republicans, while Akin’s comments had been unabashedly denounced as asinine for their content.

“President Obama and his surrogates have been campaigning heavily in Virginia, and the campaign’s strategy relies in part on energizing the black vote to take the traditionally Republican state, which moved to the Democratic column in the 2008 presidential election,” the Times reported. The paper continued, “Mr. Biden said his remarks had merely alluded to a term used previously by Republicans, including Mr. Romney’s running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan. In his response to Mr. Obama’s State of the Union address in 2011, Mr. Ryan said, ‘We believe a renewed commitment to limited government will unshackle our economy and create millions of new jobs and opportunities for all people, of every background, to succeed and prosper.’”10

But Ryan used the word “unshackle,” not “unchain,” which makes Biden’s defense suspect at best. Akin apologized for his remarks, but that changed nothing in the tone of the press coverage of his race through election day.

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