What liberal bias?

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Was Cindy Sheehan really at Martha's Vineyard last week where the President and his family were vacationing? You would barely know it from the news coverage.

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Palin smart, Liberals dumb?

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Insightful article by Ron Rosenbaum about Sarah Palin's "death panel" comment and the Left's reaction to it and to her.

They couldn’t believe that Sarah Palin was capable of something as canny as that deadly “death panels” phrase. They couldn’t see that it was a metaphoric shorthand for something real. Instead they thought she was too dumb, that she meant it literally (to have seen the potential for rationed end-of-life care in the bill), and instead indulged in an orgy of disdain for her “crazy,” “ignorant” “lies” and malicious misrepresentation.

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What Fidel said

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Fidel Castro, speaking publicly for the first time after being dead for three years, decried the evils of global warming and declared that right-wingers in America oppose Obama's policies because they're racists. It's good to see the old man knows his left-wing talking points. My understanding is that Fidel is an avid follower of Democracy Now! with host Amy Goodman.
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Where's Oprah?

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MSNBC host Rachel Maddow had on a special guest the other night in the person of Bill Maher, the Sage of Hollywood. As the two of them were commiserating over the difficulties in passing health care legislation Maddow began earnestly beseeching the Sage for an answer to the Democrat's dilemma. Maher opined about the need for the very people who got Obama elected to come to the fore once again and join the fight. "Where's Oprah?" the Sage asked.

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Comparing protests against socialized medicine to historical evils

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Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House: protesters are "carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on healthcare."

Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.) “What we're seeing right now is close to Brown Shirt tactics. I mean that very seriously.”

Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) "Well, the last time I had to confront something like this was when I voted for the civil rights bill and my opponent voted against it. At that time, we had a lot of Ku Klux Klan folks and white supremacists and folks in white sheets and other things running around causing trouble."

Rep. Brian Baird (D., Wash.) protests remind him of Timothy McVeigh

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It doesn't get any lower than this

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If you oppose the [Democratic] health care plan you are a racist!

So says Paul Krugman:

But they’re probably reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing, or even to what they’ve heard about what he’s doing, than to who he is.

That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the “birther” movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.

And cynical political operators are exploiting that anxiety to further the economic interests of their backers.

Does this sound familiar? It should: it’s a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.

Many people hoped that last year’s election would mark the end of the “angry white voter” era in America. Indeed, voters who can be swayed by appeals to cultural and racial fear are a declining share of the electorate.

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Amateur Hour

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Rachel Maddow delivered a sermon ripping Rush Limbaugh for comparing Obama and his policies to the Nazis because she warned such comparisons would incite violence, but when her own guest, a Democratic congressman, compared the protesters of socialized medicine to Timothy McVeigh she nodded in agreement, as if it were an apt comparison. Nor did she explain to her audience (she probably didn't know or didn't care) the context of Rush's observations, that he was in fact answering Nancy Pelosi, who the day before had compared those protesting against the health care bill at Town Halls to Nazis!

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