Why was a school bus fight national news?
There was a school bus fight a day or two ago. The remarkable thing about this fight was that it made national news. Drudge blared it and it reverberated through the AM radio dial and conservative blogs.
School bus fights should be something in everybody’s life experience, I would think. They probably happen more in some places moreso than others. I remember one time when I saw a rather inexplicable fight on a school bus. It was a beating, not a real fight. I nor any other bystander knew the background of this thing. Police were called. The bystanders were asked what happened. Presumably things were sorted out, the instigator punished. No national news was made. No local news was made.
Then again, nobody cheered it on. The cheering on was reserved for the school yard fights. The school yard fights were interesting things — they occured in clusters at the beginning of the school year in September and toward the end of the school year in May. A fight would break out. Someone would shout out “FIGHT!”. And a swarm of a crowd would rush in. One of the school’s two security officers would rush over and break it up. This was followed by a sort of generalized pooh-poohing by the teachers in the classroom and a short lecture to the effect that we’re all better than that, which obviously “we” weren’t.  (Maybe I was. I came fairly quickly to not swarm.)
Given this sort of thing, this comment strikes a bad chord:
They saw a fight, they egged it on. That’s what kids do. Evidence please. Words matter.
I don’t have too much interest in pursuing the comments of various conservative commentaries on the matter. What did Bill O’Reilly have to say, he of the “Tough streets of Levittown” fame? I see he takes the racial angle of the others. Funny, that guy. This is that “flick through the am radio dial” thing. How I heard of this tempest in a teapot was my standard quick flicking through on the radio dial, where I heard about 15 seconds of a fourth rate conservative host demanding “Where is Al Sharpton? I will pay him for the air fare to bring him in to this spot!!” And then, move the dial, and hear a second rate bloviator collect large supplies of salavia in pounding on the stupid little bus fight.
Rush Limbaugh, the first tier bloviator, chimed in with this. You put your kids on a school bus you expect safety but in Obama’s America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering ‘yeah, right on, right on, right on.’ Of course everybody said the white kid deserved it he was born a racist, he’s white.
Huh.
Al Sharpton is that perfect foil for them in that “too quick to judge” mode in terms of running off to, say, Jena Louisiana or the Duke Lacrosse Team. The point about Sharpton is that they think for the sake of consistency, they should join them in jumping to racial conclusions on this trumped up incident — and, I guess, join them in their comments on the broader meaning of the Obama Presidency in Whites Losing power to the Black Man. (Limbaugh makes that one clear with that statement.)
And they deny any element of truth to Jimmy Carter’s or Nancy Pelosi’s statements? Any at all?