So as the anger surrounding the health care bill escalates, many in the media are reporting how the anger surrounding the health care bill is escalating!

Now I’ve been down this road so many times I could navigate it blindfolded and covered in peanut butter.

It goes like this: for the media, anger is only okay if its targets meet their stereotypical, romanticized criteria. Meaning: the corporation, the conservative, the daddy who never loved them.

Here’s a list of people doing angry things the media is okay with:

-People calling Bush a Nazi
-Students and non students rioting on college campuses
-Animal rights freaks dousing rich folks with paint
-Actors wishing average folks would get rectal cancer
-Bureaucrats labeling military vets as potential violent right wing extremists
-Radical environmentalists advocating violence against loggers
-Pranksters throwing pies at conservative commentators (you know, somehow they never pie Michael Moore, which makes him sad; he likes pie) (more…)

A week into Barack Obama’s presidency comparisons abound concerning his personal and political gifts. Is he a rock star, or too cerebral for the sort of crowd-diving, one-with-the-audience intimacy that riles fans to amplified hysteria? Or is he a musician, yes, but more of a cool jazz artist who maintains an appropriate distance from his listeners while at the same providing a (false) sense of comfort for his admirers to absorb? Or is he a messianic figure who elevates our better instincts and unites the races, forever banishing the tragedy of human nature – its affairs with cowardice, its comfort with indifference, its passivity before evil – allowing us to march forward to paradise on earth? Or, finally, is he all of these things, a post-partisan president – a man who refuses to let eloquence devolve into mere rhetoric – and brings so many Clintons and conservatives into his ever expanding arms so we can make the world sing in perfect harmony? (more…)