Want to know why millions of Americans have turned away from traditional media analysts & towards new media voices like Andrew Sullivan & Josh Marshall? David Gergen, the dean of Beltway talking heads, is like some sort of bizarro Stephen Colbert — he can’t see crazy.
Check out this roundtable discussion featuring Gergen & Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi:
Taibbi: I interview these people. They’re not basing their positions on the facts – they’re completely uninterested in the facts. They’re voting completely on what they see and hear on Fox News and afternoon talk radio, and that’s enough for them.
Gergen: The great unwashed are uneducated, so therefore their views are really beneath serious conversation?
Taibbi: I’m not saying they’re beneath serious conversation. I’m saying that these people vote without acting on the evidence.
Gergen: I find it stunning that the conversation has taken this turn. I disagree with the Tea Party on a number of issues, but it misreads who they are to dismiss them as some kind of uneducated know-nothings who have somehow seized power in the American electorate. It is elitist to its core. We would all be better off if we spent more time listening to each other rather than simply writing them off.
Note how it’s not Matt Taibbi, who’s traveled extensively talking to real Tea Partiers, who knows what Tea Partiers are really like. It’s David Gergen – Yale undergrad, Harvard law, Beltway insider for 40 years, lives in Cambridge, MA – he’s the voice of the people.
Look, this isn’t some sort of centrist wisdom. David Gergen is regurgitating astroturf. The Tea Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of front groups funded by a handful of some of the richest people who’ve ever lived, like David Koch, trying to gin up anti-Obama hate to seize power, then cut their own taxes & roll back health & safety regulations on their businesses. They wouldn’t be able to get away with it without people like Gergen. At his core, Gergen is a pro wrestling referee who turns his back while the bad guys pour over $270 million into influencing our elections, then claims the results are just real Americuns tryna take back Washington from those big government libruls.
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