There is no liberal Rush Limbaugh By Joan Walsh....

[Ichingcarpenter]

I didn't have a Sarah Palin moment when asked to name one. My silence was my answer

I'm traveling this week so blogging is light. But I'm compelled to comment on the way the right is hyping my Tuesday appearance on "Morning Joe."

First, thanks to my friends at Newsbusters. It's nice when my videos go viral. But Newsbusters and its devotees drew an awfully weird conclusion about my conversation with Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough yesterday morning.

I'm the one who posed the question: Scarborough suggested that reasonable folks on the left (that's me) and the right (that's Joe) ought to denounce the extremists in their own camp. I asked him whom he thought I should denounce, because I don't think there's anyone on the left as consistently cruel, divisive and wrong as Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck. But my question wasn't merely about media: The problem on the right includes extremists who've made death threats against Democrats like Patty Murray, Bart Stupak, Nancy Pelosi and, of course, President Obama. There's no one on the left posing the same threat to leaders on the right -- or if there is, I'd like to know about it. (The whack job who threatened the folks who made the movie "Babe," along with Obama and GOP whip Eric Cantor, doesn't count.)

Joe and Mika acted stunned that I couldn't name anyone equally extreme myself, and the goofballs on the right are interpreting it as they stumped me, kinda like Katie Couric stumped Sarah Palin when she was asked to name a newspaper she read, or Beck stumped Palin when asking her to name her favorite Founding Father ("all of them" wasn't the right answer).

Of course, that's stupid. I didn't name anyone not because I was stumped; it was because in my opinion, the violent rhetoric is coming from the right, not the left. It's not Nancy Pelosi who's telling her San Francisco constituents they need to be "armed and dangerous" to fight their political enemies; that's Michele Bachmann. There isn't anyone in liberal media as consistently vicious as Beck or Limbaugh. Now, the lads at Newsbusters are providing their own names, but I wouldn't compare anyone they mention to the two right-wing titans of hate.

I didn't have a moment of ditz; I answered their question with my silence. My friends at Crooks and Liars have a different take on it all, here.


http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joan_walsh/politics/2010/04/21/a_liberal_rush_limbaugh


Joan is such a keeper!

[Name removed]

1. Deleted message

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[JI7]

2. Mika is a bitter drunk

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

3. There is no liberal Rush Limbaugh because

liberals by our nature don't go looking to a voice of authority - while conservatives and other variations on authoritarians are dependent on the guidance of an authority figure to function.

[Sherman A1]

6. Agreed

We are able to think for ourselves and hopefully are not bitter as they appear to be.

[Turborama]

4. Unfortunately the reich wing morans won't be able to read this

Because it's more than 5 words long.

The C&L piece she's referring to: http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/mika-acts-child-and-right-mocks-joan-wa

[Ichingcarpenter]

5. for sure.... to quote Mika Mouse

"i overreacted for sure! joan" ... her twitt to Joan

[Ichingcarpenter]

7. Mika Mouse takes a drink...... I saved this photo

before it was scrubbed.





SKYY Vodka

[malaise]

10. LOL

Eek-a...Mika Mouse!

[underpants]

8. Having rewatched the video several times I actually think that Mika meant Mark Halperin

who was sitting right across from her
Halperin, of course, sat there with a smirky grin on his face. The whole thing made no sense, Halperin has nothing to smirk about he is a reliable tool of the right and only dreams that he was a household name like Rush or Beck.....oh and that his father wasn't a convicted Soviet spy


Video is here

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x457429

[malaise]

9. Bravo Joan

K & R

[KharmaTrain]

11. Joan's Ghost Boxing...

Center to the right's misinformation machine is its ability to dominate the news cycle...this has been done by using hate radio and websites like Drudge to ramp up the poutrage and the corporate media echoing it and turning a non-issue into a major controversy or taking a lie and turning it into "conventional wisdom".

A major element in this machine is to marginalize and freeze out any contrary opinions or when their rhetoric goes over the top to play the false equivelency game that either "both sides do it" or that there are as many shitstains in our sandbox as there are in theirs. Sorry, our side doesn't have the luxuary of corporates owned by liberals...we don't have a Murdoch (sorry George Soros doesn't own newspapers and a teevee empire) or a Cheap Channel or Salem that force feed hate radio into every corner of the country...there is no "liberal" equivelent.

Joan, bless her heart, is paddling upstream on this one...she's exposing the right wing who are in total denial and a corporate media so sucked into their "conventional wisdom" to call out the wingnuts on their verbose rhetoric...instead they encourage it.

[stray cat]

12. Do we really like Rush that well that we want the dems to emulate him?

Imitation generally implies respect

[Ratty]

13. There never could be

I can't imagine our side ever putting up with the outright lying shit these loons spew out. Look how we treat our own president, we don't forgive him an awful lot either. Hate clouds one's reasoning faculties which is why I think so many otherwise intelligent people swallow Rush's, Beck's, etc., crap hook line and sinker. They hate so much they don't WANT to find the lies.

We gave Bush and the repubs shit during their 8 years, but this hatred we're seeing now is a whole different animal. It's murderous and unreasoning and I don't think we ever stooped that low.