{"id":13576,"date":"2011-01-26T10:23:35","date_gmt":"2011-01-26T15:23:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2011\/01\/26\/13576.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:58:34","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:58:34","slug":"response-to-the-response","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2011\/01\/26\/response-to-the-response\/","title":{"rendered":"Response to the Response"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger has not (yet) listened to the State of the Union Address, nor yet the Republican Response, nor the Tea Party Caucus Response.\n

About that last one—David Kurtz over at TPM joked about it<\/a>, joking about CNN having broadcast Bernie Sanders or Russ Feingold giving a separate SotU response in 2007. Not only did that not happen, but it’s hard to even imagine it happening.\n

Why is that? Is it because of the inherent corporate media bias that creates collusion, even if not intentional, to prevent anti-corporate political views from being aired? Well, ok, yes, that actually is a part of it. But mostly it’s because there is nothing remotely comparable to the Tea Party caucus on the Left.\n

Remember that Michelle Bachmann founded the Tea Party caucus, and was wagging the dog<\/a> well over a year ago, when she started a rally that her Party’s legislative leadership wound up compelled to attend. That makes her news, and it makes her Caucus news. I can’t blame CNN for reporting that news.\n

Of course, some Gentle Readers are thinking back to 2003 and 2004 and thinking that there was, in fact, a political movement that was drawing crowds to rallies all over the country. And it’s true. If, in 2004, some Democratic legislator had become identified with the anti-war movement, and then had used that identification to demand that all the leaders of the Party at least pay lip service to the anti-war movement, and then<\/i> had declared that he was giving his own response to the State of the Union, then I suspect that CNN would have broadcast that response. Perhaps not. Perhaps the bias really was dispositive.\n

Or, perhaps, things would have been different had the anti-war legislators had the balls that Michelle Bachmann has.\n

Although even that would not have prevented or shortened the war. Any more than Michelle Bachmann’s speech will cut the spending of the federal government or repeal the Affordable Care Act. So there’s that, too.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger doesn’t actually respond to the response, but to the response to the response, or at any rate to the existence of the response to the existence to the response. Or one of them, anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13576"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19296,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13576\/revisions\/19296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}