The Washington Free Beacon’s Andrew Kugle released Friday morning the site’s latest indispensable SUPERcut. This time, the topic centered around the not surprising but nonetheless horribly biased double standard between when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wagged a finger toward President Donald Trump versus when then-Governor Jan Brewer (R-AZ) did so to Barack Obama in January 2012.
“Waving your finger at the president of the United States is disrespectful only if the president is a Democrat, according to members of the media,” Kugle began, stating the obvious fact.
He noting that “Pelosi received positive coverage when she and other Democratic leaders stormed out of a meeting with President Donald Trump” and even more so after Trump tweeted a still photo of her standing and pointing a finger toward Trump.
In the video, Pelosi soundbites included Morning Joe’s Mika Brzezinski calling it an “iconic photo” of Pelosi standing “among a room full of men” while CNN’s Dana Dash swooned that everyone “look at that photo of one woman standing up” and “giving it to the President of the United States.”
But when it came to Brewer, there were no proclamations but denunciations ranging from anger to dismay to even cries of racism.
Kugle’s video noted that it was condemned by Jonathan Capehart as “incredibly disrespectful” and “off-putting,” to the office of the President, by CNN’s Don Lemon as something that you don’t do to people you disagree with, and by both then-MSNBC hosts Tamron Hall and Alex Wagner as an “infamous” display.
And there was this quote Kugle included from then-CNNer Jack Cafferty: “All that many saw in that famous photograph was a white woman wagging her finger at the first black President.”
An examination of the vast NewsBusters archives finds a plethora of other incredible examples from 2012.
On January 28, 2012, The Ed Show featured on-screen a viewer tweet that said: “Next time Jan Brewer sticks her finger in President's face, the Secret Service should break it & drop her.”
Now-ratings-deprived CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell boasted at that “it’s Brewer's finger that has tongues wagging” while colleague Bob Schieffer lashed out at the hubbub as “just another sign of the growing incivility and really vulgarity of our modern American politics.”
He added that it’s another example of “the coarseness of our culture in this age of social media” demonstrating a “public rudeness” when Americans are “better...than this little incident.”
And over on MSNBC, Melissa Harris-Perry was a guest on the January 26, 2012 Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell when she offered this comparison to Brewer’s confrontation (click “expand”):
The fact is, when I see that still, I cannot help but to be reminded of the still photograph that was captured in 1957 in Little Rock, Arkansas, of the young woman Hazel screaming at a young Elizabeth Eckford on her way trying to get into Little Rock High School, Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. And the reason I bring up that image is because what we’ve come to know about Hazel in the years later is that as a young woman, Hazel, the young woman who was screaming at Elizabeth Eckford, was not herself sort of particularly, you know, full of racial animus or anything like that. But she was, she was caught up in this moment of racial anxiety, of making this point against these people who were coming in and trying to force their way into the school, and she sort of enjoyed the show or being able to yell at Elizabeth Eckford in this moment. But that image captured all of the ugliness, all of the nastiness of the larger political milieu, and I feel that this picture does as well.
But perhaps most ironically was that such finger-pointing was done to Obama predecessor George W. Bush. Back in 2006, Brian Williams interviewed Bush and grew annoyed himself so he pointed his left index and almost jabbed Bush in the chest.
So to say that this was something new, earth-shattering, and worthy of saying things like, “slay queen” would be quite simply dishonest. For the liberal media, they only demand respect for presidents they like while applauding and encouraging scorn for presidents they hate.
