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Edited on Fri Aug-27-04 03:16 PM by troublemaker
When Jackie Robinson became the first black Major League baseball player we received a lot of abuse from the opposing team everywhere the Dodgers played. In one incident he lost his cool over the things being shouted from the opposing bench. One of his team-mates (a southerner) talked to a friend on the other team, who said, ”your boy is just thin-skinned. We were giving him the same kind of razz every rookie gets.” (Bear in mind that in baseball the batter stands midway between the two benches, so a batter can hear voices from the opposing bench while his team-mates and manager cannot.)
Later the press asked Robinson’s team-mate about the incident and he said it was no big thing and that Jackie just needed to get used to Big League ball.
At some later point Robinson told his team-mate that he was deeply hurt that he had told the press it was no big deal for a man to be called “black monkey” and “nigger,” or to be told he should be back picking cotton. The team-mate almost cried. He had not realized the abuse was so specifically racial (hardly what “every rookie” hears in a white league!), and he had believed the other team's player over his own team-mate just because the other guy who was a white guy from the south like himself.
And from that day on he was Robinson’s staunchest defender. (That’s from memory, so it may be full of time-and-place errors, but the basic tale is sound.)
When the Swift Boat liars started up the media took it as a merely a different point of view—the “other side of the story.” Everyone in politics polishes their resume with the best interpretation of events, and then the other side spins the same facts the worst way that they can. The conventional wisdom is that the truth is always somewhere in-between, as it often is.
Everyone knew the Swift Boat Liars were organized by Karl Rove and few media types could believe that someone who works inside the White House would smear an American veteran’s service record with out-right lies, at least not if there were any chance of the lies being found out. So it was precisely because that they knew the Swift campaign was organized by Bush that the media gave such credence to the charges, assuming truth was “somewhere in-between.” (Since Rove has been associated with more flat lies than any political strategist the media have no excuse for their analysis, but they’re not as bright or honest as they think.)
Now that the media KNOWS that the Swift charges were conscious lies, and lies they bought into because they came from the President’s men, how do they react? I don't expect any epiphanies, but most of them know we are entitled to a “make-up call.”
So I hope that every Democratic spokesperson uses the Republican Convention as an opportunity to scrap pre-existing standards of political nice-playing. Each speaker should be met with:
That speech might have played well to the kind of hand-picked extremists the Republicans recruit as props for these partisan political events, but there was nothing there aimed at the American people… just the same disorganized list of lies that we have all learned to expect from this gang.
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