Real/Unreal
by digby
Kevin Drum says that the left has been broadcasting that it needs to protest the Ryan plan at Townhalls so nobody takes it seriously when people do it:
Ever since the Ryan plan has come out, I've been reading endless tweets and blog posts about how liberals need to create a ruckus at congressional town halls. Or, alternatively, complaining that liberals aren't doing a good enough job of creating a ruckus at congressional town halls. Or wondering when liberals are going to rise up in wrath. Or something.
As a result, even I haven't really taken any of these various ruckuses very seriously. They're just too obviously contrived to be our equivalent of the tea party protests. And my guess is that the press is yawning for the same reason. You can't make protest plans in public for a couple of weeks and then turn around and try to convince reporters that this is all a grass roots effort.
The left has always been pretty good at organizing large-scale marches and protests. But fake grass roots uprisings? Not so good. The right has us beat hollow on that kind of thing.
I guess I could buy that except for the fact that the Tea Party protests were as openly contrived as can possibly be. There was this, the instruction manual. There were the big astroturf internet organizing groups, Grassfire and Resistnet along with Freedomworks and others. There was the funding by the various big money groups. There was the drumbeat of talk radio and the full blown sponsorship by Fox News. None of that was secret. It's just that nobody thought to cover it as "contrived" ---or thought it was important.
Kevin is certainly right that people pretend that the Tea Party was solely a grassroots event, but that's only because the mainstream media ignored the obvious. I suspect that's because they were all middle aged and senior citizen white people who don't look like the stereotypical protester. (Or it was because the novelty of a right wing protest made it a sexier story.) But none of that was due to the superior fakery of the right wing. The info was all out there. Nobody cared.
In any case, I'm not sure that because something is organized that means it's manufactured. Those people who came out to protest health care reform really believed what they were saying and were entirely sincere in their outrage, even if the whole thing was contrived by a bunch of GOP scam artists, plutocrats and paid political operatives. And I think the protesters in Wisconsin and Ohio and at these current Townhalls are entirely sincere as well, even if bloggers, unions and Move-On are encouraging them to go out and make their voices heard. (And these protests sure aren't being promoted with hours and hours of talk radio and Fox 24/7 every day, so in that respect it's actually much more grassroots than the Tea Party protests.)
This looks real to me:
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