Smugness so thick you need a chainsaw to cut through it. Here's MSNBC's towering intellect Rachel Maddow Monday night goofing on the FBI for their campaign targeting women in the Whitey Bulger case. Watch it all the way through if you can stomach it.
Fugitive South Boston gangster James "Whitey" Bulger, wanted for 19 murders, was captured last night in Southern California, the result of a tip from FBI television spots that began airing this week. His capture ended a 16-year manhunt that spanned the globe.
While also skeptical, Howie Carr, appearing on O'Reilly Tuesday, at least didn't make a complete buffoon of himself.
“Yeah. I don’t quite understand it, bill,” Carr replied. “They haven’t seen either Whitey or Catherine Grieg in the United States since 1996. they haven’t been seen anywhere in the world credibly since 2002. I don’t know why they are running all these spots on American TV because I don’t think they have been here for a long time.”
Top its credit, Fox News was the first cable news channel to report Bulger’s arrest in a special report a little after 12:30 AM last night, according to TVEyes. Both CNN and MSNBC waited until their morning programming kicked in to report the news.
Calling someone from MSNBC the "top" anything is certainly news to us.
"I'm not a screamer," she agrees after the show during a chat in her office, her legs curled up underneath her, and contacts swapped for heavy-framed geekish glasses. "I'm confrontational, but I don't think that translates into anger." What it translates into is ratings. In the first quarter of this year, Maddow's ratings were 26% higher than CNN's talkshow in the same timeslot (1,065,000 to 848,000), which, incidentally, is hosted by Piers Morgan.
I guess they simply have to pretend Fox News doesn't exist in order to buttress the claim she's the "top news anchor in the US," something obviously not supported by the ratings.
Another howler:
Of Fox News, she says simply "When it starts to seem like you have popped into bed with a specific party, it makes it difficult for people to believe you are not doing someone else's bidding for them."
At MSNBC, on the other hand, "there are people here who are identified as liberals, but there is no political agenda".
Really? I guess if you lie to yourself enough you begin to believe it.
The Internet's finest satirists snookered a big fish in the media world last night. In an embarrassing segment on her MSNBC show, Rachel Maddow slammed conservatives for attacking President Obama's Egypt policies. Her targets included Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, former ambassador to the UN John Bolton and Stephenson Billings at ChristWire.org. Only problem is Stephenson Billings is not a real person. He's a fictional byproduct of website that also warns readers that the Xbox Kinect is a terrorist training tool and the Japanese have created scary robot babies which "threaten humanity."
The article that caught Maddow's eye called for an "American-led invasion" into Egypt and begged former Alaska governor Sarah Palin to lead the war cry.
"The escalating crisis in Egypt could become a defining moment for Sarah Palin," Billings wrote. "Governor Palin needs to speak out publicly and forcibly for an American-led invasion to protect our interests in North Africa."
In the following clip (which MSNBC scrubbed from its website) Maddow falls for the article hook, line and sinker:
How hard up are the people at the Kennedy School of Government that they're reduced to having this woman lecture on political journalism?
Could U.S. Sen. Scott Brown’s fund-raising fear-mongering become a political reality with a 2012 Senate challenge from MSNBC’s top liberal talk diva?
“There’s a reason people in opinion-driven news flirt with running for office,” liberal host Rachel Maddow told a Harvard University audience last night. “It gets a ratings spike.”
But Maddow declined to commit to the flirt last night, as she delivered the 2010 Theodore H. White address on political journalism at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
A tweet sent to Maddow by Democratic state chairman John Walsh kicked off a firestorm of rumors about the talk-show host’s political ambitions. Brown sent out a fund-raising e-mail in March warning supporters of a possible Maddow candidacy — prompting the sometime Northampton resident to take out a full-page newspaper ad denying it.
Maddow said last night she “will never be” a politician, but her local fans last night made it clear they want her to step up.
The Kennedy School crowd was positively salivating at the prospect of a Maddow run.
One starry-eyed college student wanted to know what made her switch from politics to news, and from which is she better-placed to change the world?
“I stopped trying to change the world on March 9, 2007,” Maddow said, citing the day when she stopped her work as an activist and started at Air America, the liberal radio station.
“You say you’re no longer an activist, but aren’t you?” persisted one law student.
“No,” Maddow said.
“You have confirmed over and over again that you’re not going to run for office, and we don’t have the privilege to elect you,” bemoaned another student.
“I’m real happy with my job,” Maddow insisted.
Of course her "job" is working as a full-time advocate for the hard left while peddling outlandish conspiracy theories on national television. Instead of being deservedly on the unemployment line she gets a gig lecturing on journalism. Good grief.
Much more here on Maddow's complete disdain for actual journalism.
Yes, this has happened to a smaller degree before. In 1994, in the first mid-term election after the last Democratic president was elected, we got a slate of candidates that included Helen Chenoweth of Idaho and Steve Stockman of Texas. These two were so close to the militia movement in this country that Mr. Stockman actually received advance notice that the Oklahoma City bombing was going to happen
Of course nothing of the sort ever happened. But why let facts get in the way when your goal is to smear people?
Is this what Lean Forward means? Accusing Republicans of knowing about an upcoming mass murder yet doing nothing to prevent it? It's bad enough when you have simpletons like Rosie O'Donnell spew her idiocy about 9/11 on The View, but MSNBC is supposedly a news network. Are they going to let this nonsense stand?
Probably.
Update: Reader Sylvia points out this item from Power Line last February debunking the lunacy of New York Times propagandist Frank Rich.
Rich links to a rather funny and typically paranoid Times piece on Congresswoman Chenoweth of Idaho, who served three terms in Congress and then retired consistent with her term limits pledge. But the Times article to which he links, while lengthy, makes no mention of Chenowith supporting any violent acts or "endorsing groups preaching violent revolution," which was the standard that Rich applied to his own Democratic Party. Likewise, Rich's link to a Times article on Steve Stockman, of whom I have no recollection, does not in any way support his claim that Stockman somehow supported violent political action.
Now take a wild guess who's appeared on Maddow's show spewing lies? Why, none other than Frank Rich.
“I think we have a problem,” said Frank Rich to Rachel Maddow on her show Wednesday night. He was talking about people bringing guns to health care rallies. Yesterday’s distraction about whether or not MSNBC deliberately edited footage of a black man with a gun so they could then talk all about dangerous white anger was just that: a distraction.
So here we have a "news" network that deliberately edits footage, invites on a discredited New York Times hack to discuss said discredited footage, that same hack promotes an outright lie that a GOP Congressman had prior knowledge of the Oklahoma City attack, and the host of the same show then repeats the lie a year later.
Obama held a meeting with several columnists and liberal commentators this morning, following up on last night's dinner with conservative writers, according to sources with knowledge of the meeting.
The group included the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne and Eugene Robinson, the Wall Street Journal's Gerry Seib, National Journal's Ron Brownstein, the New York Times Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd, The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, among others.
Liberal TV lioness Rachel Maddow is demanding an apology from GOP U.S. Sen. Scott Brown for raising campaign dough on scuttlebutt she’s planning to run against him in 2012 - a false rumor that was actually trumped up by Bay State Democrats.
“The idea that the Democrats are to blame for this doesn’t even make sense. It’s ridiculous,” Maddow told the Herald yesterday. “Scott Brown made this up in order to make money off my name and likeness and I think he should stop. And I think he should apologize.”
Maddow, who lives in western Massachusetts, called Brown a “creep” in a planned MSNBC newspaper ad scheduled to run today and slammed him for sending out a nationwide fund-raising letter this week “smearing me to raise money for himself.”
Now mentioning someone in a fundraising letter is a smear? Good grief, get over yourself. Maybe she should take it up with the idiots that started it.
However, the rumor sprang from a Facebook page launched by a liberal Northhampton radio host, was fueled by a mysterious tweet from the state Democratic party chairman and got pumped up as recently as Wednesday by the state’s Democratic governor.
Earlier this month, radio yakker Bill Dwight and another man created a Facebook page titled “Rachel Maddow for U.S. Senator from Massachusetts in 2012.”
A few days later, John Walsh, chairman of the state Democratic Party, sent a curious “tweet” to his Twitter followers that included his contact information and read, “Some are talking about you running vs Scott Brown in ’12.”
I know, I know, it is bad form to do back-to-back posts on the same topic, but this idiot Alan Grayson is on an all-out media blitz and is apparently turning into the mainstream media's latest darling. Here is a video of him appearing on the Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer in which he and James Carville engage in a little mutual admiration lovefest. What is most comical(?) is that when a conservative guest starts listing various proposals the Republicans have tried to put forth in the health care debate he immediately begins to talk over the top of him, all the while claiming the Republicans have no ideas and are just engaging in partisan politics and attempting to block the legislation. In doing so, he proves just what the Republicans on Capitol Hill have been saying all along--mainly that the Dems won't listen to them and won't entertain any of their suggestions or ideas.
During the Carville/Grayson lovefest, Grayson blames the Republicans for the $4 a gallon gas prices we experienced last year, while conveniently forgetting that the Dems controlled Congress at that time, and it was his leader Nancy Pelosi who turned out the lights and shut off the mics and went on a five-week book tour instead of staying in session to address the issue and leaving the Republicans literally in the dark. Grayson even invokes a phrase credited to conservative writer William Safire, "nattering nabobs of negativism," to describe Republicans.
He also calls all Republicans foot-dragging, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. Real class act. The double standard could not be more apparent, either. While he is not being held to account for his bomb-throwing rhetoric by his party, and in fact is being held up as some sort of liberal idol now, two words from Joe Wilson have been the most highly criticized and over-analyzed words spoken in the last decade.
This guy Grayson is a real piece of work, and I hope his first term in Congress is also his last. His appearance on the Situation Room is just about 10 1/2 minutes of him name calling and refusing to concede any points being made that are contrary to his view.
To recap, Republicans want you to die, Republicans are foot-dragging, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals, have no ideas on healthcare and are the embodiment of nattering nabobs of negativism. Got everything but the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy in there.
Oh yeah, he appeared on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC, and from what I hear, he repeated the Neanderthal remarks.
Almost forgot, make sure to stop by the Daily Kos site and read his little diary entry from today. He is on a real media blitz today.
Is it any wonder the jealous morons at CNN and MessNBC are reduced to babbling incoherently about teabagging jokes?
Brent Bozell, president of the conservative Media Research Center, said the media coverage was "insulting," reacting specifically to CNN reporter Susan Roesgen's combative interviews with Illinois demonstrators in which she declared that the protests were "anti-CNN" and supported by FOX News. She left the teabagging jokes to her colleagues, though.
"I've never seen anything like it," Bozell said. "The oral sex jokes on (CNN) and particularly MSNBC on teabagging ... they had them by the dozens. That's how insulting they were toward people who believe they're being taxed too highly."
Max Pappas, public policy vice president at FreedomWorks -- a small-government group which promoted the tea parties -- said it's a "shame" media outlets cracked jokes at a genuine "grassroots uprising."
"I think what that reveals is how worried they are that this might actually be something serious. You make fun of things you're afraid of, I'd say," Pappas said.
If anyone thinks the orally charged remarks on mainstream cable were just a coincidence, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow's segments over the past week with guest, Air America's Ana Marie Cox, would dissolve all doubt. Their on-air gymnastics, dancing around the double entendre of the week, looked like live-action Beavis and Butthead.
By one count, the two of them used the word "teabag" more than 50 times on one show. And on Monday, Cox even let the viewers in on their joke -- referencing Urbandictionary.com, a site which offers a number of colorful definitions for the term "teabagging."
"Well, there is a lot of love in teabagging," Cox said. "It is curious, though, as you point out, they do not use the verb 'teabag.' It might be because they're less enthusiastic about teabagging than some of the more corporate conservatives who seem to have taken to it quite easily."
Ouch. Leave it to Ann Coulter to crush the idiotic media twits and their juvenile refernces to tea-bagging.
I had no idea how important this week's nationwide anti-tax tea parties were until hearing liberals denounce them with such ferocity. The New York Times' Paul Krugman wrote a column attacking the tea parties, apologizing for making fun of "crazy people." It's OK, Paul, you're allowed to do that for the same reason Jews can make fun of Jews.
On MSNBC, hosts Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow have been tittering over the similarity of the name "tea parties" to an obscure homosexual sexual practice known as "tea bagging." Night after night, they sneer at Republicans for being so stupid as to call their rallies "tea bagging."
Every host on Air America and every unbathed, basement-dwelling loser on the left wing blogosphere has spent the last week making jokes about tea bagging, a practice they show a surprising degree of familiarity with.
Except no one is calling the tea parties "tea bagging" -- except Olbermann and Maddow. Republicans call them "tea parties."
But if the Republicans were calling them "tea-bagging parties," the MSNBC hosts would have a fantastically hilarious segment for viewers in San Francisco and the West Village and not anyplace else in the rest of the country. On the other hand, they're not called "tea-bagging parties." (That, of course refers to the cocktail hour at Barney Frank's condo in Georgetown.) You know what else would be hilarious? It would be hilarious if Hillary Clinton's name were "Ima Douche." Unfortunately, it's not. It was just a dream. Most people would wake up, realize it was just a dream and scrap the joke. Not MSNBC hosts.
The point of the tea parties is to note the fact that the Democrats' modus operandi is to lead voters to believe they are no more likely to raise taxes than Republicans, get elected and immediately raise taxes.
