Rachel Maddow: The Right Needs to Answer for What's Happened to Conservatism
While discussing the success of Sarah Palin's book Mike Murphy echoes David Brooks with his statement that "the noisiest parts of kind of the conservative media machine have far less influence than the mainstream media machine that covers the Republican world thinks they do". Murphy needs to tell that to those sour-grapes Palin voters hitting those tea bag protests across the country. I also wonder if he thinks there's a difference between the "conservative media machine" and Fox News?
Rachel Maddow rightly points out they're not going to be able to dismiss Palin that easily and need to answer for the brand of conservatism that has elevated her to the position she has in the party, 2012 nominee or not.
MURPHY: No, she will sell a lot. I'm, I'm going to buy it. I'm going to wait for it to get spell-checked, but then I'm going to buy it.
GREGORY: Right. And she's number--I should point out, I mean, number one on the best-seller list for Amazon.
MURPHY: Yeah. No, no, look, she has a constituency. She'll never be the nominee, I totally agree with David. I agree with Steve Schmidt, it would be actually a disaster if she was the nominee. I do wish my friend Steve felt that a year ago when a lot of people were asking John McCain to put her on the ticket. But the truth is--and I'm going to agree with David here, too--the noisiest parts of kind of the conservative media machine have far less influence than the mainstream media machine that covers the Republican world thinks they do. These radio guys can't deliver a pizza, let alone a nomination. And you can case study that out in the last election. So I--the question is whether or not our party will learn, when we have a pretty good midterm victory due to Obama's mistakes this time, that turning up the volume is not the reason that we're going to do well, I believe, in the midterms. And the fact is to get all the way, there are a lot of things we have to do to modernize conservatism to be successful.
MADDOW: I, I do think that there's a little bit of reckoning that needs to happen on the right for Sarah Palin's success. I mean, she was the vice presidential nominee, she is going to sell a kazillion books and she is the biggest brand name in Republican politics still right now. And she's chose--the person who's writing her book, her last--the last person who she co-authored a book with was called "Donkey Cons" and it was co-authored with a guy who's widely believed to be and I believe him to be a white supremacist. So she's chosen Lynn Vincent, who's written a book with a white supremacist, to write her book, and she's the biggest name in Republican politics.
MURPHY: Oh, but, Rachel...
MADDOW: And you can dismiss her and say she's not going to be the nominee, but I do think the right needs to sort of answer for what's happened to conservatism.
MURPHY: But let me just say, I am a well-documented nonfan of Sarah Palin, at least as a national politician. I don't know her personally. But that's guilt by association stuff. That's the cable stuff. That's the problem.
MADDOW: But why would you--you can pick anybody to be your ghostwriter.
MURPHY: Sarah Palin's a lot of things, but she's not a white supremacist. And...
MADDOW: You could--no, I don't think she is. But when you can pick anybody, why would she pick somebody who's associated with the League of the South, who said that Americans are revolted by the idea of having a black sister-in-law. I mean, she--this is who she picked to write her book.
MURPHY: Yeah, but there's...
MADDOW: Why do you do that?
MURPHY: That's sort of guilt by association stuff, which I don't know and it can--I--check it out.
MADDOW: It's guilt by choice. It's guilt by choice.
GREGORY: OK.
No, of course you don't believe in guilt by association......for Republicans. Dem's are a horse of a different color. Anyone who ever had a conversation with Obama has all of their transgressions associated with him without question.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y9dkCJYB8M
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
previous writing partner was a black supremacist. The wingnut shrieking would be at a dog-whistle pitch. Even someone as thick as Palin knows that who you partner with sends a very strong signal.
Is the greatest person in the world.
You can't even come up with that much awesome if you tried.
n/t
And here here! She is a gift and I'm glad to see she's being taken seriously.......She is grace under fire and her level of intelligence goes far and beyond most other anchor's on Cable or otherwise
Spot on! I couldn't have said it any better.
saw this today. the others including
david the asshole, tried to drown her
out with their bs, but she held her own
and was the smartest and most honest with
her answers. guess those "poor old white guys"
just can't stand it when an intelligent
woman has a higher IQ than they do combined.
hooray for rachel.
she should be hosting and not david.
last week.
As David Neiwert here at C&L knows, Palin chose the co-author because of her affinities to Palin's beliefs, not in spite of them.
Absolutely!!
The coincidence/white persecution card is getting fucking old. These are some of the same liars who when Ronald Reagan(another racist Republican icon) opened his 1980 Presidential campaign with a speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi(where three civil rights workers were tortured and murdered by local police and Klansman in 1964) was also a bizarre accident.
Palin and the Republican party's only hope in 2010 and 2012 is metastasizing the Teabaggers and winning through galvanizing angry and racist white people.
And Rachels is just so much smarter than these effing idiots. Bunch of morons. Coincidence my butt. And it's not the same as calling Ayers a "friend of Obama" - they barely knew each other. This is choosing a person with whom to share credit on a book that will go out to a million knuckle-draggers. It does mean something.
It still bug's me they made a statue of Regan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-emQAsGMeQ
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
Rachel rules but when the guy says, "the noisiest parts of kind of the conservative media machine have far less influence than the mainstream media machine that covers the Republican world thinks they do", he's right. The problem is that the media covers what these douchbags say. The media is stuck in this mode of 'he said, she said' and 'there are two sides to a story'. The media should isntead be focused on the facts.
Dammit, this is her weakest moment on the whole show, why highlight it?
The damned Republican is right -- bringing up Palin's ghostwriter's having worked with an arguable white supremacist is even weaker logically than Repub wingnut hysteria over Bill Ayers.
I mean, "Bill Ayers blew stuff up 40 years ago -> Obama is his friend -> Obama loves terrorists" is ridiculous guilt-by-association, but "Guy X is maybe a white supremacist -> a professional writer ghostwrote his book -> Sarah Palin hired that professional writer to ghostwrite HER book -> Sarah Palin's evil?"
C'mon. Rachel's right that the Republicans need to explain the birthers and the teabaggers and loonies in their tent, but instead of hammering on that she segued into Supermom's guilt-by-association-with-someone-who's-I-guess-guilty-by-association-with-someone-else. It's ridiculous.
The ghostwriter's associations are much more recent and include some of the right's most wingnutty members, such as Gen. Jerry Boykin, the Special Forces vet who claimed he was on a crusade against Islam.
'Give somebody an inch and they'll take a mile'? Well, that's the Republican Party right now.
How much are we willing to let them get away with? They crow about Obama's failed efforts to get the Olympics for America. They hope we get attacked again. They send each other racist emails about the leader of our nation all while claiming, "No, no, we aren't racists!" They break laws with impunity, they lie and lie and lie and no one says or does anything about it.
Republicans have to literally kill thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people, and crash an economy to the ground before they're held accountable for even the smallest offenses (and make no mistake, Palin's ghost writer is offensive).
The republicans think they can do or say whatever they want without fear of retribution, legal or moral. For the longest it was true. But now we need to send a message the days of republican hypocrisy and scumbag behavior is over. They need to know they can no longer condemn others for actions, real or imagined, that republicans themselves commit with impunity. We see them now and we will call them out.
I hope Rachel keeps hammering republicans from every angle until enough people see what the republicans are: soulless, vicious, hypocritical liars.
that she was not accusing Palin of guilt by association but guilt by choice. Palin choose to employ an active racist. That is telling. In, at least, the fact that it doesn't bother her and she doesn't feel it would be seen as a negative to her followers. SPOT ON to the larger discussion they were having as to the composition of the Republican party today.
...seems to coincidentally hold a certain religious persona.
Where did these people spawn...
Sunday, August 9, 1925. “KKK services.” The “services” at the Capital Horse Show grounds in Arlington, complete with flaming 80-foot cross, wrapped up the Klan’s weekend in Washington. Some 100,000 people from all over the country were thought to have attended.
[ http://www.theblogofrecord.com/tag/kkk-photos/ ]
"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross." This insightful quote is from a book written in 1935 by Sinclair Lewis titled "It Can't Happen Here."
Study the symptoms not the virus...
I love the way that the wingers are so cockeyed sure that they are going to win the midterm election because of Obama's errors. What in the hell do they stand for? What have they, anyone of them, put forward as an alternative to anything? I have faith that the public can see through the obstructionist, anti-American hate that the wingers have demonstrated. You have to be for something. If someone asked me to explain what the GOP stands for instead of what Obama is doing, I draw a blank. All I know is that wingers are being represented by goofy talk show hosts, the GOP congressmen have done nothing but throw spitballs at the Dems, disrupt business, and play hookey this entire year. They do not even act like they know how to be congressmen and women so why would you think they are going to win next year?
It's the talking point of the right that they are somehow going to win and win big. But I've been saying the same as you, that the GOP has no ideas. Hoping President Obama will fail is not an idea. And I still don't know what kind of health care plan they have, except to hope that there isn't one. Not to mention the crazy town hall / tea bag crowd and the way they were cheered on by Republican elected officials. The one thing that they conveniently fail to mention in the conversation is that the GOP's approval rating is in dire straits.
But, somehow the electorate is going to run back into the arms of these people? Sure. The ditto heads and Fox News will tell you so.
interpret the world through a measuring of observable fact--they filter the world through their emotions and believe what they want. It's one of the reasons they're so very, very bad at governing.
Thirty years ago, prior to 24 hours forced news on 10 cable channels, there was the 6:00 nightly news and Sunday news round-ups. Sunday was when national politics and world events were discussed.
That was then.
Today news must be manufactured for entertainment purposes. Conflict sells soap, so we get 24 hours a day of he-said-she-said that substitutes for news. It costs very little, no reporters have to be sent out to the field, fact-checking is eliminated, and opinion is shoots out of asses like…well you get the idea.
Then we get to Sunday. And what is on? Discussions of what took place on the 10 cable news channels in the last 144 hours – as if it were important. And the US suddenly devolves into Dem/Repub bickering over….nothing.
Are they discussing the relative merits of a strong Public Option and single-payer health plans? Are they discussing energy infrastructure as a percentage of the stimulus package? No – Sarah wrote a book with a ghost writer. Hell, Dem/Repub have BECOME THE SOAP. Vote Repub, softer skin and no oily residue. No – Vote Dem, with new anti-bacterial grime fighting agent X! Ridiculous.
Ever turn to the TV Guide channel at 3 in the morning? Ever notice how many shows are described with “Paid Programming”? That’s cable news, all the time: Paid Programming, selling soap.
Can't just sit around and mumble and bumble if you're on with Maddow she'll school your ass pronto. I love her. She brings the discussion to an adult level. She has to smack people in the head to do it but it happens. She's the greatest.
She's one of the few on either side of the media that approaches the issues logically and fairly. Wish she had an even bigger stage. We can always hope....
SNinTN
Notice that Rachel is making sense because she always does her homework and always has facts on her side. But none of the men surrounding her want to hear it or want to expound on Rachel's information.
I'm not worried about the next election. Our president was elected by intelligent people. Ignorant racists feel left out now. Gee I wonder why. Poor little inbred minority. Their best shot is rigging the election which is no longer possible. The DOJ is no longer bringing bogus voter fraud charges. The Regent Freak University graduates are no longer infecting the DOJ. Karl Rove is just a clown that FoxSuckers brings out to give Repubnuts a hard-on.Hey I like Bozo the clown but I don't want to trust him with my future. Repubs are history. They have nothing. They stand for nothing. Let them be nothing.
It's just like the criticism of McCain during the election - it's not guilt by association, it's just bad judgment.
Palin, or more likely Palin's publishers, got to choose who they wanted to ghost-write the book. There are really only two possibilities - both of them bad. They are either guilty of bad judgment for choosing someone without knowing their recent history and how it would look; OR they are guilty of pandering to the basest of the base and picked her deliberately with full knowledge of her background.
like Obama and Ayers?
How do their heads not explode when they spew such unbelievably dishonest hypocrisy?
It's hilarious that Repubs think they have something to offer in the next election. Do they think they're going to win over the majority with their racist BS. How can they repackage racism to appeal to intelligent people. The reason Obama got elected was because he was intelligent and people could relate. McCain is a doddering old fart without any ideas. He and his love doll were running on the anti-black, anti-terrorist, anti abortion, platform. And then DAMN INTELLIGENCE ruined everything. Who could have guessed the McCain/Palin ticket were RETARDS. Even Trigg would vote Democrat. Corky too.
Liberalism is worth conserving, conservatism is not.
Enough with the corporate fascination with the "right". They lost! Get over it.
Politics is for the present, but an equation is for eternity. Albert Einstein
I am not going to hold my breath waiting for the "liberal media" to point out that Palin is palling around with white supremacists.
Typically, Rachel's the only one who's done any research herself. The rest rely on notes from producers and interns, who're under constant pressure and rely on the easiest sources, other staff and press releases. Maybe too simple, but not far off, dammit.
He spotted it first.
*She* should be the moderator.
There's no one on the TV Masheen today with the drive, brains and chutzpah to carry this show.
I know she'd miss doing things like the Moment of Geek (complete with kakapos humping photographers) or making fun of teabaggers. But dammit, this show needs someone at the helm who gives a damn about truth.
Guilt by association---remember during the nominations all you saw on Fox news was Obama's link to the Weathermen Underground activist? If we're going to play, let's either be able to equally put cards on the table, or not at all.
"the noisiest parts of kind of the conservative media machine have far less influence than the mainstream media machine that covers the Republican world thinks they do"
What the fu(k is that supposed to mean anyway? Is that similar to ‘I don’t think that word means what you think it does’? (In this case the word is influence.) What influence does the conservative media machine or the mainstream media machine that covers the republican world have over the majority of sane Americans? Last time I looked, it was smaller than the time before. And when I look again it will be even smaller. The jigs up. Now go forth ye conservative media machine and mainstream media machine, who covers it, and prevent your uncouth rabble from nominating the snowbilly queen from the far north country, and good luck using your influence with that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsYJyVEUaC4
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
is that he thinks Palin would be a catastrophe for the Republican Party at the polls because he believes she is un-electable, not that she would be a catastrophe for the U. S. if she were elected, which is far more significant. I shiver every time I think if McCain were elected, he could have had a heart attack by now with all the stress of the position, leaving Sarah in charge. Good grief, we would all be in the crapper, you betcha.
This must be the best example of conservative/Republican hypocrisy I have heard THIS WEEK!!!! Rachel, why did you let that golden opportunity slip away? Why are Dems or Progressives so content to let these two faced morons get away with their blatant hypocrisy night after night. Ayers, I'm sure that was mentioned in a few posts. But come on, Hannity gets away with himself wrapped in the flag. It should have no stars and stripes just dollars bills on it.
Hannity , the racist hypocrite that accused President Clinton of sending the troops to battle without ammo etc and had no qualms about saying so. Now he is off nattering what is left of his feeble brain about Obama. But, lo and behold. If you dared to have an opinion on Bush and the Iraq/Afghan war you were a traitor. Why are these clowns not called out or is there editing involved if they are?!
Leonard Pitts wrote a great article this week. He gave one example of O'Reilly denying that he never called Dr Tiller a baby killer.
A little research by Mr Pitts and he soon discovered 17 incidents where O'Reilly actually said this. Anyone ever challenge him? No.
These half witted clowns get away with crap everyday and it is forgotten about.
A Democrat says something and it is forgotten.
Phil Donohue...where are you?!
You go, girl. You kick ass!
It went out with Bush I. The shallow end of the gene pool has finally dried up.
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