I thought Al Sharpton just gave one of the great speeches of this era. His passion was inspiring. Yet this is being spun by the "liberal media" as a terrible mishap by the democrats. Sharpton has already been criticized for "bashing Bush." How dare any conservative criticize a democrat for "bashing" the president? We're talking about a party that has done nothing but launch personal insults at Kerry since the beginning of campaign season and before. You did brilliantly Al. Thank you for being honest and passionate.
I saw him getting slammed on just about every cable news network. I don't know if it as conservative spin or not, but I did think it was odd. I thought his speech was humerous, and also made some good points. It may have gone against the idea that they would rather not key in on Bush, and maybe his speech did that more than the general theme, but not enough to throw everything off kilter. It was a strange reaction by the pundits.
The conventional wisdom is that Al Sharpton is a looney tuney, self promoter and a charlatan. I agree with that, I have a friend who worked fairly high up on his "campaign" (as part of his paid employees); and this perception is largely correct. However, that doesn't change the fact that he's kind of a kick-ass orator; he won most of those debates, and is excellent at delivering soundbites.
CNN was the main one that was criticizing Sharpton. Don't tell me they are a conservative movement now? They were all over the negative tone of his speech. MSNBC talking about the speech now as well. "How dare any conservative criticize a democrat for "bashing" the president?" If the liberal media outlet CNN had a problem with it, then the conservative outlets are going to have a field day (s) with it. Hopefully Kerry's campaign message does not get diluted from the negative press over the next 24 hours because Al could not follow the positive train....
Speaking of spin....I watched about a half hour of the convention last night (until I got hooked by ESPN Classic), but I spent the entire half hour flipping back and forth between FOX News and CNN. I was on CNN when the Dems brought out all of the retired military people supporting Kerry. They were showing it live. I then flipped to FOX News. They were showing a Cialis commercial.
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart tonight had a bit on that. It was pretty good - every channel bashing him while not even showing the speech. That was classy.
