Tina Brown: Limbaugh 'Like the Bad Fairy at Sleeping Beauty's Christening'

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The Daily Beast’s Tina Brown targeted Rush Limbaugh for ruining 2009, particularly after Obama’s inauguration, on Thursday’s Today show on NBC, blaming him for the “big discord and toxic atmosphere in politics,” and likened him to the “the bad fairy at Sleeping Beauty’s christening” for uttering his famous words about the President, “I hope he fails” [audio clip available here].

Brown slammed the talk show host just hours after he was hospitalized for chest pains. The British-born journalist appeared with commentator Nancy Giles and comedian Andy Borowitz nine minutes into the 8 am Eastern hour for a panel discussion on the past year. Substitute anchor Erin Burnett turned to Brown first and asked, “What do you think was the most important moment of 2009?”

Brown unsurprisingly chose the Obama inauguration, and after gushing over the moment, set her sights on Limbaugh:

BROWN: Well, it’s got to be that incredible inauguration of Obama because, you know, you started the year with this huge festival of hope and renewal and everything is going to be so different now, and then, like the bad fairy at Sleeping Beauty’s christening, Rush Limbaugh utters the words, ‘I hope you fail.’ ‘I hope he fails,’ he said, and from that moment, the sort of the Pandora’s box opened and the rest of the year has been just this big discord and toxic atmosphere in politics and partisan divide and people shouting at each other and the Tea Parties and death panels, and all of the stuff til we descend to the year where now, where we just got the health care bill probably about to be passed with no Republican votes at all. So, it was a real turn-around from the bank bonuses and bailouts onwards.

The Daily Beast founder began her 2009 with Limbaugh bashing. During a February 27, 2009 appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, she labeled the conservative talk show host a “blow-hard bullfrog.” Later in the year, Brown couldn’t contain her awe over both Mr. and Mrs. Obama in an April 26 segment on CBS’s Face the Nation: “One of the great surprises is what a force-multiplier Michelle Obama has turned out to be because these two are working in such, sort of, flawless concert. You know as the world is talking about torture and the Bush administration, then we have Michelle with her vegetable garden. Talk about Spring time in America! There's a real sense that these two are operating in a kind of wonderful symbiosis that we really haven't seen, I don't think ever, between a President and a First Lady.” Within the past two month, she twice slammed Sarah Palin on Morning Joe, the first time on the November 24 show, and later bashed the former Alaska governor’s anti-Copenhagen climate summit op-ed in the Washington Post on December 9.