MSNBC’s Most Disgusting Attack on a Conservative (So Far)
“One of the most comprehensive first-person accounts of slavery comes from the personal diary of a man called Thomas Thistlewood, who kept copious notes for 39 years....In 1756, he records that ‘A slave named Darby catched eating canes; had him well flogged and pickled, then made Hector, another slave, s-h-i-t in his mouth.’ This became known as ‘Darby’s Dose,’ a punishment invented by Thistlewood that spoke only of the slave owners savagery and inhumanity.... When Mrs. Palin invoked slavery, she doesn’t just prove her rank ignorance. She confirms that if anyone truly qualified for a dose of discipline from Thomas Thistlewood, then she would be the outstanding candidate.”
— MSNBC host Martin Bashir on November 15, reacting to Palin’s comparison of excessive debt to slavery. The following Monday, Bashir began his eponymous program by apologizing to Palin: “My words were wholly unacceptable....And they have brought shame upon my friends and colleagues at this network.”
Won’t Grateful Americans “Forgive” Obama for Health Care Lie?
Co-host Matt Lauer: “He [Obama] apologized for the fact that he made a promise during the rollout, during the campaign for health-”
Sarah Palin, interrupting: “Many, many, many promises.”
Lauer: “-made it over and over again. Said you get to keep your existing policy if you like it. Five percent of Americans can’t keep it because it doesn’t meet the standards of the new health care law. If it turns out, Governor, that they end up — those five percent of people — with a better health insurance policy, do you think they’ll forgive him for the broken promise?”
— Exchange on NBC’s Today, November 11.
Forget Millions Who’ve Lost Coverage — The “Real Apology” Should Go to Obama
“Leading off tonight: Who deserves the real apology here?...The facts are that many of the same people that feel betrayed now will be thanking the President later. These are people in so-called junk plans that could bankrupt them and their families if they ever got sick.”
— Fill-in host Michael Smerconish on MSNBC’s Hardball, November 8.
“The apology should be coming from the conservatives. The conservatives should be apologizing for having no plan and no option for any of the people you’ve just seen illustrated on this program, and they should be apologizing to the 50 million Americans who have been without insurance because, damn it, they’ve been sick!”
— Host Ed Schultz on MSNBC’s The Ed Show, November 11.
Even When Obama Lies, It’s Racist to Call Him a Liar
“The political right in this country has reached a new low, as I said. It has shown from the beginning that President Obama doesn’t deserve the decency accorded other American presidents. His enemies have called him an illegal immigrant, a street corner con artist, a fraud, a Manchurian candidate brought to this country to undermine all we stand for. Well, now Dick Cheney comes right out and calls him a liar. When a right-wing back-bencher did that four years ago, he was called out for rebuke even by his own party. Well, now what was condemned as historic bad behavior comes snarling out of Dick Cheney’s mouth and nobody says to shut up. Well, we can argue, as we do here, about the problems implementing the Affordable Care Act. But is this, calling the President a liar, the new language of American politics? Or is it a language specially treated for the country’s first African-American president?”
— Chris Matthews on Hardball, November 15.
NBC Reassures Obama He “Didn’t Intentionally” Mislead Us
“It’s probably the most quoted thing or re-quoted thing you have said in your presidency, ‘If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.’ You said it a lot during the run-up. At this point, though, it’s obviously something — a promise that has not been able to be kept....Do you feel like you owe these folks an apology for misleading them? Even if you didn’t intentionally do it, but at this point, they feel misled.”
— NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd to President Obama in an interview segment shown on MSNBC’s PoliticsNation, November 7.
Cancelled Policies Like an Unsafe Pinto, but ObamaCare Is a “Ferrari”
“You know, the number one cause of bankruptcy in United States is medical bills. And a large part of that is because there are really bad plans out there. I mean, I think this is a little bit of a red herring and, if you look at the numbers, this is a relatively small percentage of the population that we’re talking about that fits into this idea that they have plans, they want to keep them because they are buying insurance already in the individual market. But we have regulations for cars that are unsafe. People say, ‘I want to keep my Pinto. I don’t want to be forced to buy a Ferrari.’”
— Weekend host Sanjay Gupta, who the Obama administration contemplated as a candidate for Surgeon General, on CNN’s Piers Morgan Live, November 12.
CNN Anchor Demands: How Can You Say ObamaCare Isn’t Working?
“How can we say it’s not working when it isn’t implemented yet? How can you say premiums are skyrocketing when they haven’t put the plans into effect yet? You’re being a little dangerous with how much political spin you put on something that’s so central to the well being of so many families?”
— Anchor Chris Cuomo asking GOP Senator Ted Cruz about ObamaCare on CNN’s New Day, November 20.
Absurd Ed: “The Media Want ObamaCare to Fail”
“Why is it that all of a sudden, we have this huge conflict and this pitbull mentality that we just won’t give up? The mainstream media, I believe, wants ObamaCare to fail. They look for every negative number they can find. They’re afraid to do a positive story, because they’re afraid that somebody might not watch. The media is just cherry picking the bad facts that are out there, repeating them over and over again, and in many cases, they’re making stuff up.”
— Host Ed Schultz on MSNBC’s The Ed Show, November 12.
MSNBC Sycophant Slams “Independent Media” for Being Too Tough on Obama
“On health care, instead of playing frickin’ defense, how about you go after the Republicans, who have 40 million people they want to commit to the emergency room? They don’t want to lift a finger for them! And the so-called independent media out there never brings it up! They have discussion after discussion of ObamaCare. They’re scoring one half of the game. The other half of the game, when the Republicans come to bat, they don’t even swing!”
— Chris Matthews offering his advice for Obama on MSNBC’s Hardball, November 11.
Failed Radio Host Scarborough Slams Conservative Talk Radio
Co-host Savannah Guthrie: “You really go after conservative media....You seem to be saying talk radio is part of the problem.”
MSNBC host Joe Scarborough: “Well, I mean, it’s not a part of the problem for them. They make millions and millions of dollars. I don’t knock that. You know, let everybody make millions and millions of dollars. But when they start pushing their world view on Republicans across the country and start saying, ‘You either have to run up to the barricades and fight to the death every single time or you’re not sufficiently conservative,’ and you actually have politicians listening to that and not understanding that’s a profit motive. And again, let them make their millions of dollars, but we’ve got to stop feeding every single little resentment if we want to get back into the White House.”
— NBC’s Today, November 12. In 2010, Scarborough’s own radio show was cancelled after less than 18 months.
Touting Overseas Complaints About “Extreme Wing” of GOP
“From an international perspective, I can tell you that there is a massive and mass scratching of heads as people out there look at what’s going on in the United States....They look at the extreme wing of — what they call the extreme wing of the Republican Party, and they think that’s beginning to dominate. They were incredibly nonplussed, as you know, by the shutdown, really worried in case they took it over the brink of the debt ceiling on a potential default. And people are trying to figure out what really is happening and is this now solidified in the U.S.?”
— CNN’s chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour on AC360 Later, November 5.
Obama Seeks “Great Things” While His Puny Conservative “Enemies” Bark Away
“The dirty little secret of American politics today is that this battle between President Obama and his enemies is not a contest of achievement. No, it’s a battle between a president who wants to do great things — extend health care to the tens of millions of working people, many of them poor; ending two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and preventing a third war with Iran — and an almost totally negative force arrayed and barking against him, a campaign of verbal terror and negativity aimed at denying tens of millions decent health care, denying immigrants the chance to become citizens, denying people of other sexual orientations and identities an equal chance to provide for themselves, obviously, also denying marriage equality. It’s a strange, unbalanced battle between a man who wants to do great things, and an enemy aimed at ensuring he does not.”
— Chris Matthews on Hardball, November 20.
Yearning for Someone to Eliminate the “Right Wing” from Republican Party
“I think what’s going on here is the right-wing of this country has been a big part of the Republican coalition, and not once has Boehner or McConnell ever stood up and said, ‘Those people are unacceptable,’ in the way that Bill Buckley in the 1950s said anti-Semitism is not allowed in the American conservative coalition. Nobody says it. Nobody stands up from the middle right and says, We ain’t part of your crowd, you’re not part of ours....I look at the free ride the media has been giving the Republican Party. They get — these birthers are treated as just Southern, usually out-of-it people, Gohmert — he’s just a joke. He doesn’t matter. And yet the right-wing of the party, a quarter of them, a third of them — haters of Obama because of his background, haters!”
— Host Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball, November 11.
Disdaining the “Horrible White People” of the GOP
Director Oliver Stone: “I don’t know why these Republican white people — frankly, the McConnells and the — they’re strange to me. It’s almost as if we’re an apartheid state and they’re still fighting for the rights of whites in South Africa. It’s like they’re scared. So they’ve figured out with, remember Tom DeLay is another one of those horrible white people that come along and they go back to, he was crooked....Their stand on guns, their stand on white rights, the concept of blocking the voting of blacks and Hispanics, it adds up. I would think that they’re very scared this country is going to become colored.”
Host Tavis Smiley: “That’s what I was getting at. They’re threatened by something. It may not that he’s doing anything, but they are threatened by something.”
Stone: “But he is threatened by the fact that he is black. You know, that’s enough.”
— Exchange on PBS’s Tavis Smiley, November 13.
Sarah Palin = “a Dumb C-Word”
“Go to dictionary,& look up The ‘C’Word,....next 2 the definition...you’ll see a Pic of Sarah PALIN ! NO...WAIT ...SHES UNDER DUMB C WORD”
— Singer/actress Cher in a November 15 posting to Twitter [grammar and punctation as in the original].
Sign up to receive Notable Quotables [1] via e-mail.
PUBLISHER:
L. Brent Bozell III
EDITORS:
Brent H. Baker, Rich Noyes, Tim Graham
DEPUTY RESEARCH DIRECTOR: Geoffrey Dickens
NEWS ANALYSTS:
Scott Whitlock, Brad Wilmouth, Matthew Balan, Kyle Drennen and Matt Hadro
INTERNS: Paul
Bremmer, Jeffrey Meyer
MEDIA CONTACT:
Jeremy Little (703) 683-5004