Nevadan rancher Cliven Bundy, locked in a decades-long dispute with the Bureau of Land Management, is supposedly going to get even more attention in media -- from radio/MSNBC libtalker and self-professed working class hero Ed Schultz.
Schultz is telling his radio listeners that they'll be hearing a lot about Bundy from him in the days to come, a vow that will evaporate roughly at the start of the next news cycle on another major controversy. (Audio after the jump)
Hannity wants liberals to be the target. He found an anti-government guy and found the guy who could be a prop, that could paint the government as a big overreaching constriction on the American people. He found the guy. He didn't realize he's a racist. Now he's trying to distance from it. And as I said on TV last night, I don't believe Hannity or Fox News gave President Obama any quarter or any slack whatsoever when Jeremiah Wright, the reverend, came out and said some things and there were some tapes that were unearthed, oh by the way by Hannity himself. Now Hannity's asking for forgiveness and trying to distance himself. No, I'm not going to let Hannity distance himself from this guy. This is the Republican Party. All this talk about race, how they treat our president, is exactly who they are. And they were quick to defend him and now it's gone overboard and out of the mainstream, so they're trying to backpedal from it. They didn't do their homework. But wait a minute -- he is their homework. He is their fraternal order brother.
And so it is up to us as Americans, as liberals, to make sure that we don't let this story go, that this is going to be a scar on them because this is who they are. And it's the same way with their war on women, it's the same way with voter suppression, it's the same way with the obstruction on the president of the United States. Cliven Bundy is the perfect Republican! He is the perfect Republican! He is what they are all about until they get caught.
Those just becoming acquainted with Schultz are being treated to a textbook example of his illogic. If Bundy is the "perfect" Republican, why would Republicans distance themselves from him? Would not the opposite occur in response to such an exemplar? (Such as Reagan winning re-election in 1984 and taking all but one state, to cite an example that comes to mind).
Schultz unwittingly reveals the basis for his animus toward Sean Hannity, a visceral loathing shared by many leftists -- it was Hannity who broke the news about Obama's America-hating spiritual mentor Jeremiah Wright. For this Hannity can never be forgiven, much as liberals held a deathless grudge against Richard Nixon for exposing Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy.
Speaking of Wright, it was the left that rushed en masse to defend him after his unhinged sermons surfaced, delivered in a church that Obama selectively attended, somehow missing those services when Wright was at his most incendiary. Liberals circled the wagons on Wright far more than conservatives are doing now with Bundy, a markedly less sympathetic figure every time he opens his mouth. And Schultz would have more credibility condemning Bundy's observations on "the Negro" if he had ever been angered by Harry Reid's equally antiquated remarks about Obama -- except that Schultz never was.
Schultz is also hilariously indignant about "how they treat our president." Yes, one would have to go all the way back to the early years of the new century and the Bush administration to witness comparable abuse heaped upon a president. What Schultz means to say, if he could summon the candor to do so, is that such vitriol is a terrible thing indeed but only when the president is a Democrat.
