Posted by Ed Brayton on September 27, 2009 Here’s a perfect example of why I think Ed Schultz is just the liberal equivalent of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk:
“[T]he Republicans lie! They want to see you dead! They’d rather make money off your dead corpse! They kind of like it when that woman has cancer and they don’t have anything for her.”
That is every bit as shrill, overblown and ridiculous as the kind of presumptuous bullshit that Limbaugh and Savage spew every day.
Hmm, so we have all these shrill right-wing nuts on the radio, and everybody knows they are nuts, so let’s just politely criticise them for their, ahem, misstatements (let’s not call it lies; we’re too polite for that). Let’s see, that worked so well the last 8+ years, didn’t it?
See the http://www.dailyhowler.com/ for many examples.
So that’s why I think we need a few more shrill voices on the left. Having more shrill leftists on TV and Radio would also move the ‘Overton Window’ ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window ) to the left; at the moment, by just being less shrill than Limbaugh, some Republicans can present their radical ideas as seemingly reasonable. E.g. the health insurance reform discussion should have started with a single-payer system as the default Democratic position; then a ‘public option’ might have appeared as a reasonable compromise. But by starting out with the idea of the public option as the most leftist position, it could be represented as extreme from the start, and might fail (though most people support it
(http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/09/so_off_message.php?ref=fpblg , so perhaps enough people had their own insurance problems to counteract the insurance companies’ 1.4 million a day propaganda campaign).
While I didn’t yet listen to Ed Shultz, the main question should be how to get more rational leftist voices heard.
September 27, 2009