The day after Al Gore and Keith Olbermann called for an American spring, a wave of terror has swept through Fox News and the right wing media.
Here is the video of Gore on Countdown:
Gore said,
We need to have an American spring. You know, the Arab Spring—the nonviolent part of it isn’t finished yet—but we need to have an American Spring, a kind of an American Tahrir Square. Non-violent change, where people from the grassroots get involved again.
Not in the Tea Party style. There are people who are genuinely upset in the Tea Party, I understand that, but that movement was funded with seed money from right-wing billionaires, the Koch brothers, and promoted on Fox News and turned into a stalking horse for this right-wing agenda that a lot of people have been trying to push on this country for a long time. What’s sacrosanct for them is to have absolutely no tax increases on the wealthiest Americans. They’re at a low level now, and to try to shrink down government so they can get it out of the way of powerful corporations and special interests so that they can have free reign, and the Supreme Court of course has now declared that they’re persons and can make those secret contributions.
I want to tell you, Keith, this country is in trouble. Our democracy has been withering on the vine, it really has been. This has been going on for some time. But this is not an event that can be taken lately. I know it’s difficult to imagine that the people who care about the values that this country was based on will rise up and get much more involved in the democratic process, but that is exactly what we need and that is the only thing that can get our country back on the right track.
Here is the Fox News response via Media Matters:
Greg Gutfeld said, “He’s equating countries under oppression with our democracy, and by that comparison it’s a subtle way of comparing the tea party to Gadhafi, Mubarak, and Assad. It’s incredibly insulting, but more than that, it’s sad, because you realize how far Gore has fallen in irrelevancy. Just by showing that clip, more people have seen Gore than have seen Current TV in the last month.”
Dana Perino chimed in with, “So the inventor of the Internet actually moved on to invent his own TV channel, and then he added Keith Olbermann so that he can continue to be on news everyday so that I guess everyday maybe he can provide some more fodder. He has been the guest for each of the last two nights.”
The topper of coarse came from Eric Bolling, “Al Gore going on Current TV and talking to Olbermann is like dumb talking to dumber, dumb and dumber. This guy, global warming, we’ve proven now that the globe goes through warming and cooling cycles. His 15 minutes are up.”
Al Gore and Keith Olbermann provide a coherent argument that the country is being pushed in the wrong direction with by a few right wing billionaires, and Fox News’ response is to revive the old false attack on Gore that he invented the Internet, and to call them dumb.
Greg Gutfeld was wrong about the ratings. The Five is the lowest rated show on Fox News. It pulls in anywhere from 1.1 to 1.3 million viewers a night. Olbermann’s show debuted with 200,000 viewers. Judging from the drop of about 200,000 in Lawrence O’Donnell’s viewer count since Olbermann debuted; it is safe to say that Countdown is still in that same ballpark. This means that more people saw the clip on Fox than watch current in a week, not a month. A week is the bigger lie, so Gutfeld went with that.
Taken together the Olbermann/Gore and Fox News clips are the perfect microcosm of the current state of our country. When the left tries to have a serious discussion the right replies by sticking to their ideology and slipping farther and farther away from reality, this is why nothing can get done in Washington, and why our political discourse is completely dysfunctional.
Olbermann and Gore scared the holy bejezzus out of Fox News. Exposing the tea party as Astroturf is one thing, but calling for the left to get active and get involved is quite another. The dirty little secret of the right is that there aren’t very many of them. The thing that they fear most in this world is exactly what happened in 2008. A young, multi-cultural, energized left getting unified and organized. The right cannot compete with that.
The only way the conservative movement stays in power is if the left is apathetic and not unified, but if there is one point that everyone on the left can agree on it is that the far right radical agenda that is being implemented now must be stopped.
Nothing terrifies Fox News and the entire right more than a real popular movement. The movement in Wisconsin gives the right cold sweats and nightmares. Olbermann and Gore spooked Fox News so they and the rest of the right wing media had to respond.
Fox News may have the older right wing conservatives, but most of America is siding with Al Gore and Keith Olbermann.
Keep it up tea partiers, and Gore and Olbermann’s call for a progressive spring will become a reality.
Al Gore and Keith Olbermann Send A Wave of Terror Through Fox News
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