Andrew Sullivan: Fox News Has Set Out To Whip Tea Partiers Into A Frenzy
Andrew Sullivan celebrated ten years of blogging this weekend — and last night he appeared on Charlie Rose to discuss what he has learned (or not, as the case may be) over the past decade.
Sullivan touched on a number of topics which will be familiar to Dish readers, including his anger and frustration with the Catholic Church following a series of pedophilia scandals, and gay marriage (‘it’s not a liberal or conservative issue’). He also declared that the “greatest mistake of my life as a journalist” was supporting the Iraq war. A mistake he partly attributed to being a bit of a “almost romantic about America…I think one’s sense of outrage and grief about that flooded my frontal cortex and I wanted to do something that would rectify it somehow, that would make it whole again.”
Sullivan saved some of his harsher words for Fox News: “I personally think Fox News and a certain propaganda apparatus have set out to whip these people [the Tea Party] in to a frenzy and it’s called demagoguery and populism and it has nothing to do with conservatism.”
He went on to note that “this whole conflation of Obama with Islam and Islam with terrorism is subliminally and subconsciously tapping into the same currents that McCarthyism tapped into.”
He was notably less harsh about the Tea Party itself saying that while he is unsure what they are about he thinks there is a “cultural panic” and “they feel besieged.” Moreover he agrees that “they’re right that the Government is too big and the deficit is too big, but no one will be honest with them” about how to reduce it.
Sullivan, however, remains supporter of President Barack Obama (as ‘unfashionable’ as that may be) in part because Obama is “the only adult in the room.” The Republicans, meanwhile, have “taken a moment of great crisis in this country and seen nothing but short term political advantage. It has done nothing for the common good and hasn’t place the country’s interest above it’s own. They did not rise to the occasion in fact they have sunk to the occasion.”
The one subject Rose and Sullivan did not talk about, or even mention once, was Sarah Palin, which I think in the context of how much time Sullivan spends criticizing Palin and additionally (questionably) focusing on her son Trig, is a rather glaring omission on Rose’s part.
Watch a clip from the interview where Sullivan reflects on Fox News and the Tea Party below and the full interview here.
