Posted on 04/22/2004 8:53:37 AM PDT by tdunbar
Americans who want to understand conflicts between Democrats and Republicans during the election season have received precious little help from the media. While reporters usually recognize that there is some sort of problem about values and about faith-based principles, and that the Democrats and Republicans are often on opposite sides, writers and editors tend to publish news and analysis as if the situation were as follows: The Christian right, having infiltrated the Republican Party, is importing its divisive religious ideas into our public life, whereas the Democratic Party is the neutral camp of tolerant and pluralistic Americans.
This way of framing the matter predominates, not only because it reflects the personal beliefs of many journalists, but also because it draws upon a long American tradition of suspicion and fear of committed Catholics and evangelical Protestants. (In the elite newspapers and magazines, the number of journalists in either of those groups is tiny.) It is thus comfortable for journalists to conceive of religiously based political conflict in terms of an aggressive Christian right advancing upon a beleaguered neutral and pluralistic center and left.
What the journalists leave out of their accounts is the fact that the nonreligious have also become aggressive actors on the political stage and that they possess and promote, in fact, an overarching religious worldview of their ownone that can fairly be called secularism.
This point is strongly supported from the results of our analysis....
The analogy that I especially like is: The people who wrked for and supported Willie are like people who roll around in dog s**t; they constantly accuse others as being the source of the bad smell.
Look at blacks in this country and, more specifically, the fully segregated, step-n-fetchit Congressional Black Caucus. While they were swearing that Willie was truthful, that Starr was out to get him and, whatever his faults, "...they did not rise to...," almost a million African-Africans were being slaughtered. Had some one in the world with moral authority protested, had some one put 1,000 well armed troops on the ground, most of these African-Africans would still be alive. The dems look at this and hate themselves. The media remains silent because they are as guilty and all blame everything on Bush.
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