The leftist European press does a terrible job reporting on the American political scene. Tea Party reporting is so bad as to be scandalous. British writer Daniel Hannan says Tea Partiers
are generally portrayed either as a gaggle of stump-toothed Appalachian mountain men or as a KKK lynchmob. A typical column in Britain's Guardian newspaper last month described them as 'a movement most of whose emergent stars would appear to be better suited to prison or lunatic asylums.'
Who of us doesn't find that disgusting? Hannan says further,
At the annual Conservative Party conference last week, I discovered that several delegates had no idea that the tea party was campaigning for smaller government. Such is the media coverage that even many Tories believe that it is essentially a fringe of irreconcilables who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge a mixed-race president.
Germany's Der Spiegel is no better. (HT: Drudge) Journalist Klaus Brinkbaumer writes of
America's hate-mongers, gun freaks and Tea Party demagogues who first compare Obama to Hitler and then minutes later to Stalin. They are people so filled with vitriol they can no longer think straight -- people like television presenter Glenn Beck, who says that putting the common good first is "exactly the kind of talk that led to the death camps in Germany." Beck has millions of followers, and appears in public with former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin, the darling of the Tea Party movement, who gleefully pronounces Obama's middle name Hussein as if it were a naughty, menacing word.
Me: Don't expect Europeans to understand America or the Tea Party movement. With reporting like this, it's no wonder they remain deceived and clueless.