“I’ve never seen so many attractive domestic terrorists in all my life!” Dick FAT Armey yelled at the adoring crowd. “It’s so nice to be here again together, isn’t it?…You mean you actually came to town on your own terms? To say what you wanted to say? And to be heard? Sounds pretty much like terrorists to me.”
Tea-Partiers: The Irrelevant Republican GOON TERRORISTS!
Politico: Clad in red and armed with Grinch dolls, grim reaper scarecrows, posters and their loud voices, several thousand tea party protesters rallied near the Capitol Tuesday to send a single message: “Kill the Bill.”
The crowd’s message and energy was only intensified by the encouragement of some of the nation’s best known conservatives, including Sens. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), Richard Burr (R-N.C.), Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) and radio personality Laura Ingraham. [ READ MORE ]
Fox News, right-wing media promote anti-health care “Code Red” rally
MediaMatters Reports: Fox News personalities and its website, The Fox Nation, continued the network’s pattern of right-wing advocacy by promoting the December 15 anti-health care reform “Code Red” rally, which featured a speech by Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham. Other right-wing radio hosts joined Ingraham in boosting the event, which was coordinated by several conservative political organizations and featured speeches from Republican senators. [ READ MORE ]
Just like old times: Fox gives Tea Party anti-health reform “Code Red” rally live coverage
Beck: “Fall to your knees and pray that Joe Lieberman is strengthened” in stand against health care reform
Limbaugh repeats falsehood that the benefits to health care reform “will not start for four years“
Beck compares health insurance regulation to football helmets, which he claims cause reckless behavior and concussions
Savage: Dems more in touch with the dead because “they’re the living dead“; asks if Obama is a reincarnation of “Hannibal“
Hannity claims “we were victorious” in Iraq “in spite of the Democrats‘ efforts and attempts at preventing victory”
Rush: Media, White House “will be pushing the notion of a third party that takes votes away from the Republican Party“
After calling Sen. Collins “stupid” and “ignorant” Limbaugh says “people are going to be dying” from health care bill
Rush advocates “shutting down the government” to stop health care reform
Adolf Hitler hid behind state controlled radio to spread lies and propaganda. In 2009, his fascist descendants — Beck, Limbaugh, Savage, Hannity, Osama Bin O’Reillya.k.a Bill O’Reilly, ….the whole array of conservative radio hate-talkers have nowhere to hide. Everything is out in the open — thanks to Media Matters For America and the Internet.
Comprehensively and persistently, Media Matters For America has for several years been monitoring, analyzing, correcting and documenting Republican lies and mis-information. They have a treasure trove of video, audio and commentary with which they systematically cut-down narcissistic lie-machines like Fox News and lethal baboons like radio bloviator Maha Rushie Limbaugh…the self proclaimed “defender of motherhood,” …consistently, on a daily basis.
Bloggers like me who loath ALL forms of conservatism, dig in at MediaMatters.com, every day, with gusto. BRAVO Media Matters for America!
The truth hurts and it is showing [ VIEW VIDEOS BELOW ].
Beck calls Media Matters’ VP Rabin-Havt a “hobbit,” asks “Does Gandalf work at Media Matters, too?“
On FBN’s Imus, Bo Dietl yells at “jerky thing” Media Matters: “You don’t like Bo Dietl because I talk the truth“
MediaMatters: A few days ago, Glenn Beck thrEw a “political” party for a group of Florida retirees. Always one to prefer drama over substance, it was little surprise that Glenn Beck was nearly an hour late to his own rally in The Villages (a retirement community in Florida) on November 21. During the wait, Beck’s patient and very non-diverse crowd was treated to supposedly live footage on giant video screens of him getting lost driving a golf cart to the rally. He admitted to have gone in a circle at least once, complaining that it took 50 minutes to drive just three miles. Soon afterward, his big tour bus pulled up alongside the crowd, and Glenn Beck took to the stage among loud cheers and applause.
Beck wasted little time before displaying his narcissism, declaring himself and all those present as the nation’s “Constitution czar” just a few minutes into his appearance. He then tried to stir up the crowd with what appeared to be a reference to climate change, declaring: “The science is not settled. We will not sit down. We will not shut up. We will stand!” [ READ MORE ]
MediaMatters: Glenn Beck touted climate scientists’ emails that were apparently stolen by hackers from the UK’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) — emails Beck claimed “someone released” — to assert the existence of a “brand new reality” in which the fundamental legitimacy of global warming is in doubt. But in advancing his claims, Beck distorted the emails and took them out of context to suggest they indicated that climate change was a “scam,” ignoring climate scientists’ subsequent statements to the contrary. [ READ MORE ]
Beck’s “brand new reality” on climate change relies on distorting apparently stolen emails
Beck on Landrieu: “We’re with a high-class prostitute” [ Senator Landrieu Voted "YES" For The Healthcare Bill Last Weekend ]
Dr. Jeremy Levitt, a Law professor at Florida A&M University: “Fox News and the far right have a race deck, and they play the ace of spades every day.“
Comedian Colbert slams racially-tinged remarks by Beck and Limbaugh
Dr. Levitt Confronts Osama Bin O’Reilly of the O’Racist Factor
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The Canines
Savage claims song in school kid video is “brainwash[ing] the children into accepting Arabic names” because they say “Hussein“
Hannity, Andersen still promoting conspiracy theory that Ayers “helped write” Obama’s autobiography
Beck identifies next target: “The one that you need to start asking questions on is Valerie Jarrett”
Stimulus Distortions
The TRUTH About The LIES About ACORN: Confederate Moron Rep. Steve King (R), Iowa, Calls Obama ‘The Star of ACORN‘
The obsession is to bring down President Obama by all means necessary, including entrapment, by using hidden cameras and dispatching right-wing goons like James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles, disguised as a pimp and prostitute to ACORN offices. They are being sued by ACORN.
HuffingtonPost: Republican Congressional leaders are continuing their witch-hunt against ACORN, the grassroots community group dedicated to helping poor and working class people. This campaign now unfortunately has gained bipartisan legislative support in the form of the Defund ACORN Act of 2009 which has now passed the House and Senate. As Ryan Grim at Huffington Post has pointed out, the legislation “could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex:” [ READ MORE ]
Marie Cocco of the Washington Post Writers Group notes: “…. the drama stirred up by Republicans reveals some interesting things about race in the age of Obama.“
The sound and the fury at Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings signify almost nothing. Yet they still tell us almost everything we need to know about race and politics in the age of Obama. No matter how much drama Senate Republicans wish to concoct, it is practically a foregone conclusion that Sotomayor will win confirmation and thus become the first Supreme Court justice of Hispanic heritage, and only the third woman to serve on the nation’s highest court.
So as a matter of Supreme Court politics, the incendiary arguments of Sotomayor’s Republican opponents amount to gruel spooned out to the party’s base, shrunken and demoralized after repeated electoral losses and scandals.
Unless Sotomayor suffers a “complete meltdown,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina predicted, she will be confirmed. The price, though, is barely coded race baiting that has been part of the assault on Sotomayor since her nomination was announced. And it dominates the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings.
And it dominates the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. The opening statement by Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the panel — whose own bid for a federal judgeship in the 1980s was turned down because of his track record against African-American voting rights — was a masterwork of this ancient art. [ READ MORE ]
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Fearing a backlash from Hispanic voters, the pathetic G.O.P members of the Senate’s Judiciary committee, resorted to “wailing,” veiled race-baiting and nonsensical reasoning — to complement the straight-up RACISM of their comrades in the media. Well known anti-immigrant bigots, Senators John Kyl and Jeff Sessions took center stage.
Per comedian Bill Maher, these WHITE MEN are behaving like — “….for too long Puerto Rican women have had their boot on the neck of white men in America ….” (See VIDEO BELOW)
Bill Maher Tours The SOUTH | Comments on Sotomayor Hearings/Republicans
Fox News misrepresents Sotomayor, Obama quotes to stir controversy. Fox News’ special about Judge Sonia Sotomayor misrepresented Sotomayor’s quote that “the Court of Appeals is where policy is made” to claim that she “apparently confess[ed]” to “legislating from the bench.” The special also misrepresented President Obama’s quote about “empathy.” [ READ MORE ]
3.When old white guys attack: Forget her actual record — Jeff Sessions and the angry GOP just know Sotomayor wants to keep the white man.
————————————————————————————————————————————————– Alternet: The 10 Dumbest Things Republicans Have Said About the Sotomayor Hearings — A list of the most ridiculous questions, jabs and rants by GOP lawmakers and other conservatives. [ READ MORE ]
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What is this fury about? In his scant 145 days in office, the new president has not remotely matched the Bush record in deficit creation. Nor has he repealed the right to bear arms or exacerbated the wars he inherited. He has tried more than his predecessor ever did to reach across the aisle. But none of that seems to matter. A minority of Americans, irrationally fearful of the fast-moving generational, cultural and racial turnover Obama embodies — indeed, of the 21st century itself, is now getting angrier in inverse relationship to his popularity with the vast majority of the country. Change can be frightening and traumatic, especially if it’s not change you can believe in. The right-wing rhetoric, with its pseudo-Scriptural call to action, is toxic. It is getting louder each day of the Obama presidency. No one, not even Fox News viewers, can say they weren’t warned.
By – Frank Rich WHEN a Fox News anchor, reacting to his own network’s surging e-mail traffic, warns urgently on-camera of a rise in hate-filled, “amped up” Americans who are “taking the extra step and getting the gun out,” maybe we should listen. He has better sources in that underground than most.
The anchor was Shepard Smith, speaking after Wednesday’s mayhem at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Unlike the bloviators at his network and elsewhere on cable, Smith is famous for his highly caffeinated news-reading, not any political agenda. But very occasionally — notably during Hurricane Katrina — he hits the Howard Beale mad-as-hell wall. Joining those at Fox who routinely disregard the network’s “We report, you decide” mantra, he both reported and decided, loudly.
What he reported was this: his e-mail from viewers had “become more and more frightening” in recent months, dating back to the election season. From Wednesday alone, he “could read a hundred” messages spewing “hate that’s not based in fact,” much of it about Barack Obama and some of it sharing the museum gunman’s canard that the president was not a naturally born citizen. These are Americans “out there in a scary place,” Smith said.
Then he brought up another recent gunman: “If you’re one who believes that abortion is murder, at what point do you go out and kill someone who’s performing abortions?” An answer, he said, was provided by Dr. George Tiller’s killer. He went on: “If you are one who believes these sorts of things about the president of the United States …” He left the rest of that chilling sentence unsaid.ox”
These are extraordinary words to hear on Fox. The network’s highest-rated star, Bill O’Reilly, had assailed Tiller, calling him “Tiller the baby killer” and likening him to the Nazis, on 29 of his shows before the doctor was murdered at his church in Kansas. O’Reilly was unrepentant, stating that only “pro-abortion zealots and Fox News haters” would link him to the crime. But now another Fox star, while stopping short of blaming O’Reilly, was breaching his network’s brand of political correctness: he tied the far-right loners who had gotten their guns out in Wichita and Washington to the mounting fury of Obama haters.
O’Reilly responds to “pro-abortion zealots and Fox News haters” who “attempt[ed] to blame us” for Tiller’s murder
What is this fury about? In his scant 145 days in office, the new president has not remotely matched the Bush record in deficit creation. Nor has he repealed the right to bear arms or exacerbated the wars he inherited. He has tried more than his predecessor ever did to reach across the aisle. But none of that seems to matter. A sizable minority of Americans is irrationally fearful of the fast-moving generational, cultural and racial turnover Obama embodies — indeed, of the 21st century itself. That minority is now getting angrier in
inverse relationship to his popularity with the vast majority of the country. Change can be frightening and traumatic, especially if it’s not change you can believe in.
We don’t know whether the tiny subset of domestic terrorists in this crowd is egged on by political or media demagogues — though we do tend to assume that foreign jihadists respond like Pavlov’s dogs to the words of their most fanatical leaders and polemicists. But well before the latest murderers struck — well before another “antigovernment” Obama hater went on a cop-killing rampage in Pittsburgh in April — there have been indications that this rage could spiral out of control.
This was evident during the campaign, when hotheads greeted Obama’s name with “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” at G.O.P. rallies. At first the McCain-Palin campaign fed the anger with accusations that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.” But later John McCain thought better of it and defended his opponent’s honor to a town-hall participant who vented her fears of the Democrats’ “Arab” candidate. Although two neo-Nazi skinheads were arrested in an assassination plot against Obama two weeks before Election Day, the fever broke after McCain exercised leadership.
That honeymoon, if it was one, is over. Conservatives have legitimate ideological beefs with Obama, rightly expressed in sharp language. But the invective in some quarters has unmistakably amped up. The writer Camille Paglia, a political independent and confessed talk-radio fan, detected a shift toward paranoia in the air waves by mid-May. When “the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation,” she observed in Salon, “there is reason for alarm.” She cited a “joke” repeated by a Rush Limbaugh fill-in host, a talk-radio jock from Dallas of all places, about how “any U.S. soldier” who found himself with only two bullets in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden would use both shots to assassinate Pelosi and then strangle Reid and bin Laden.
This homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs. Glenn Beck has dipped into O’Reilly’s Holocaust analogies to liken Obama’s policy on stem-cell research to the eugenics that led to “the final solution” and the quest for “a master race.” After James von Brunn’s rampage at the Holocaust museum, Beck rushed onto Fox News to describe the Obama-hating killer as a “lone gunman nutjob.” Yet in the same show Beck also said von Brunn was a symptom that “the pot in America is boiling,” as if Beck himself were not the boiling pot cheering the kettle on.
But hyperbole from the usual suspects in the entertainment arena of TV and radio is not the whole story. What’s startling is the spillover of this poison into the conservative political establishment. Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan G.O.P. chairman who ran for the party’s national chairmanship this year, seriously suggested in April that Republicans should stop calling Obama a socialist because “it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.” Anuzis pushed “fascism” instead, because “everybody still thinks that’s a bad thing.” He didn’t seem to grasp that “fascism” is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find “bad” because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler.
The Anuzis “fascism” solution to the Obama problem has caught fire. The president’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and his speech in Cairo have only exacerbated the ugliness. The venomous personal attacks on Sotomayor have little to do with the 3,000-plus cases she’s adjudicated in nearly 17 years on the bench or her thoughts about the judgment of “a wise Latina woman.” She has been tarred as a member of “the Latino KKK” (by the former Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo), as well as a racist and a David Duke (by Limbaugh), and portrayed, in a bizarre two-for-one ethnic caricature, as a slant-eyed Asian on the cover of National Review. Uniting all these insults is an aggrieved note of white victimization only a shade less explicit than that in von Brunn’s white supremacist screeds.
Obama’s Cairo address, meanwhile, prompted over-the-top accusations reminiscent of those campaign rally cries of “Treason!” It was a prominent former Reagan defense official, Frank Gaffney, not some fringe crackpot, who accused Obama in The Washington Times of engaging “in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain.” He claimed that the president — a lifelong Christian — “may still be” a Muslim and is aligned with “the dangerous global movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood.” Gaffney linked Obama by innuendo with Islamic “charities” that “have been convicted of providing material support for terrorism.”
If this isn’t a handy rationalization for another lone nutjob to take the law into his own hands against a supposed terrorism supporter, what is? Any such nutjob can easily grab a weapon. Gun enthusiasts have been on a shopping spree since the election, with some areas of our countryreporting percentage sales increasesin the mid-to-high double digits, recession be damned.
The question, Shepard Smith said on Fox last week, is “if there is really a way to put a hold on” those who might run amok. We’re not about to repeal the First or Second Amendments. Hard-core haters resolutely dismiss any “mainstream media” debunking of their conspiracy theories. The only voices that might penetrate their alternative reality — I emphasize might — belong to conservative leaders with the guts and clout to step up as McCain did last fall. Where are they? The genteel public debate in right-leaning intellectual circles about the conservative movement’s future will be buried by history if these insistent alarms are met with silence.
It’s typical of this dereliction of responsibility that when the Department of Homeland Security released a plausible (and, tragically, prescient) report about far-right domestic terrorism two months ago, the conservative response was to trash it as “the height of insult,” in the words of the G.O.P. chairman Michael Steele. But as Smith also said last week, Homeland Security was “warning us for a reason.”
No matter. Last week it was business as usual, as Republican leaders nattered ad infinitum over the juvenile rivalry of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich at the party’s big Washington fund-raiser. Few if any mentioned, let alone questioned, the ominous script delivered by the actor Jon Voight with the G.O.P. imprimatur at that same event. Voight’s devout wish was to “bring an end to this false prophet Obama.”
This kind of rhetoric, with its pseudo-Scriptural call to action, is toxic. It is getting louder each day of the Obama presidency. No one, not even Fox News viewers, can say they weren’t warned.
About The Author: Frank Rich is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times. His weekly 1,500-word essay helped inaugurate the expanded opinion pages that the paper introduced in the Sunday Week in Review section in April 2005.
Mr. Rich started as a columnist on the Op-Ed Page in January 1994. He first began writing his longer-form essays for the Op-Ed page in 1999, and from 1999 to 2003 was also a senior writer for The New York Times Magazine, a dual title that was a first for The Times. Before writing his column, Mr. Rich served as The Times’s chief drama critic beginning in 1980, the year he joined The Times.
From 2003 to 2005, Mr. Rich was the front-page columnist for the Sunday Arts & Leisure section as part of that section’s redesign and expansion. He also served in an advisory role in the revamping of The Times’s daily and Sunday cultural report during that time.
Among other honors, Mr. Rich received the George Polk Award for commentary in 2005. In addition to his work at The Times, he has written about politics and culture for many other publications. His latest book, “The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina,” was published by Penguin Press in 2006 and as a Penguin paperback in 2007. His childhood memoir, “Ghost Light,” was published in 2000 by Random House and as a Random House Trade Paperback in 2001. The film rights to “Ghost Light” have been acquired by Storyline Entertainment. A collection of Mr. Rich’s drama reviews, “Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for The New York Times, 1980-1993,” was published by Random House in October 1998. His book “The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson,” co-authored with Lisa Aronson, was published by Knopf in 1987.
In May 2008, Mr. Rich signed on as a creative consultant to help initiate and develop new programming at the pay-TV network HBO. He recused himself from writing about either HBO or its parent company, Time Warner, in his weekly Times column.
Before joining The Times, Mr. Rich was a film and television critic at Time magazine. Earlier, he had been film critic for The New York Post and film critic and senior editor of New Times Magazine. He was a founding editor of The Richmond (Va.) Mercury, a weekly newspaper, in the early 1970s.
Mr. Rich earned a B.A. degree in American History and Literature, graduating magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1971 and serving as Editorial Chairman of The Harvard Crimson.
Mr. Rich has two sons. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, the author and novelist Alex Witchel, who is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.
WHEN a Fox News anchor, reacting to his own network’s surging e-mail traffic, 
