Vermont Tiger is the flagship of GOP bloggery in Vermont. Oh sure, they claim to be nonpartisan, but you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who reads them, of any political stripe, who could repeat that claim with a straight face. Why so many Republicans fueling such efforts (from Vermont Tiger all the way to Fox News) feel the need to camoflauge their loyalties is a topic for another day…
In any event, some days their partisan hackery is more brazenly on display than others. This week it's particularly naked, for the simple reason that site founder Geoffrey Norman didn't go to the trouble of running his attack through the most fundamental filter of rationality and consistency, leading to a little hit that only a true-believer Republican who turns off his or her brain could love.
Don't get me wrong, its nothing big, earth-shattering, or otherwise meaningful. Merely the little 5-sentence smackdown in the screenshot to the right. It's just that its particularly illustrative of the partisan agenda in play and the hypocrisy of a site that continues to insist it doesn't have one.
You gotta give these guys credit, there’s a lot of BS crammed into those five little sentences.
First of all, the message the title sends is clear – evil librul Welch doesn’t want poor everyman “you” to have any more money. No bonuses. What a slimeball, eh? Of course, the content of the very same hit-post clearly states that Welch was referring to – in Norman’s own words – “recipients of Federal bailout money to be paying themselves bonuses this year.” I think its a stretch to believe that Norman believes its these very recipients that are the audience reading his blog, and as such the use of the word “your” in the title, while it may send a convenient partisan “evil elitist” message to the casual surfer, is fatuous at best, overtly dishonest at worst. take your pick (and I do mean “your”).
That’s sentence 1 of 5. Skip down to sentence 4 and you’ll see a snarky line poking Welch by name along with other congress-folk for receiving a scheduled pay-raise at the beginning of the upcoming year. Again, the implication is that Welch specifically is choosing to grant himself a raise (and coupled with the headline, the further implication is that said raise is at your personal expense), suggesting that it is consciously being granted for legislative “performance.” Shocking!
The problem here is that, with a simple click of the mouse on the link they provide, you find that its an automatic pay increase due to kick in without action or personal congratulations from Welch or any other Representative. There is a bill to suspend the increase with cosponsors from both parties of all political stripes (from Ron Paul to Peter DeFazio – although Welch is not among their number), but it’s currently bottled up in committee. So the implication that Welch is voting to increase his own pay for his fine performance is just as phony as the headline.
Finally, sentence 5 attempts to pull it all together with a link to a YouTube piece peddling the Limbaugh/Hannity notion, utterly rejected by non-ideologue economists, that the whole economic meltdown has its complete genesis with the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapses, and that they were entirely brought on by liberal Democrats who mandated assistance to low-income Americans. As though the years of laissez-faire-inspired financial deregulation allowing the explosive propogation of bizarre financial instruments heaped upon bizarre financial instruments all destined for massive exploitation and ultimately to collapse in on their own weight is just a fanciful mythology of the evil, elite, librul, latte-sipping media.
Puh-leeze. I doubt even VTTiger’s own Art Woolf would go along with that desperate Republican attempt to avoid reality and responsibility. Although what do I know, maybe he would. Partisan denial is a powerful thing.
But the keyword, again, is “partisan.” And if Vermont Tiger, as it claims, is truly “non-partisan,” then I’ve got Barack Obama’s abs.