Martin Bashir Uses Bullying of School Bus Monitor to Attack GOP See the relevant transcript below.
MSNBC Now with Alex Wagner June 22, 2012 12:45 p.m. EDT
ALEX WAGNER: Those were exerts from a ten minute video posted online showing a group of seventh graders in New York bullying not another student but a 68-year-old school bus monitor. The video called “Making the Bus Monitor Cry” has gotten nearly four million hits. It has prompted outrage and outpouring of support and at least one serious question. Does cruelty know no bounds? Eric [BATES], we were talking about this during the break. And there are a lot of sort of things to unpack in this. And one of them is certainly cruelty can be sort of spread across the internet in a way that well when the internet didn't exist, it couldn't be spread across the internet, but cruelty can go viral in a way that it couldn't in other times, and certainly, there's been a lot of attention on the issue of bullying. The president and the First Lady have taken this on as an issue. The it gets better campaign, of course. I wonder, you know tell us about what your thoughts were when you saw the video.
ERIC BATES: Well, one thought was it reminded me of my school bus ride in the mornings. I mean it's not that different --
WAGNER: when you were little.
BATES: When I was little, yes. No, yesterday. But yeah, you know kids can be mean. What's striking is that this was the woman whose job it was to control and contain that very kind of situation who clearly was sort of unable to figure out a way to deal with it. So it makes you worry about the other kids on the bus, too, who had probably been subjected to this kind of behavior who didn't have an adult there to protect them. The other problem is the kids themselves getting labeled as bullies. Your 15-year-old kid, if you're acting like that, you’ve obviously have a lot of problems in your life, you need help, you need guidance, you need to be able to learn and grow from your mistakes. What you don't need is a whole big heaping of national ridicule which is what we get today that kids in our era wouldn't have gotten. It makes the problem worse.
WAGNER : And all of those children have apologized via the police department although no one has directly apologized to the bus monitor herself.
BEN SMITH: I would just say that there's something about the way this went viral and the way that kind of virality changes people's behavior. I mean there's been like $400,000 raised to send her on vacation. What an insane thing to do. Maybe some amount of money but like people are so eager to have like a solution to this problem and like I want to do something positive myself in response. And so almost anything will do. And like, this was not a rational particularly response.
BATES: The other responses online, too, you look at comments to the YouTube video where people are saying those kids should die, their parents should die, let's get their names, let's let their comments follow them throughout their lives, get their names.
JODI KANTOR: It's the bullying of bullies.
MARTIN BASHIR: But to that point, what's been interesting is you watched the condemnation of these children's behavior has been, some of the people who have been most vociferous in their condemnation of this conduct are actually the most vicious and inappropriate when it comes to what they say about the president and his background and life, his origins, his religious faith, his family, his wife. The early references that were barely concealed attacks on Michelle Obama. So it's been interesting to see this absolute outflow of anger and animosity coming from individuals who themselves behave like that on a daily basis. Also, the other thing is, the facts especially I believe in most states is that we've seen a decline in crime so in terms of serious actions, many young people are actually not behaving like this. This isn't an exemplar of the generation of young people. I've got three children. They don't behave like this. You've got young children. They wouldn't. It's not true.