McClatchy Headline: 'Liberal TV Host Rachel Maddow Works for Civility'

Change font size:  A |  A

Talk about a divorced from reality headline! Check out this McClatchy Newspapers headline: "Liberal TV Host Rachel Maddow Works for Civility." The article itself, dateline Los Angeles by Rick Bentley, follows the lead of its fawning headline:

MSNBC boasts Maddow has become the network's first program to beat CNN talker Larry King in more than a dozen years.

Maddow had been hosting her own show for just over four months when she sat down to talk at the Universal Hilton. This wasn't a chat about politics. It's all about her.

Stand by now for the money quote and please put down your coffee cup while reading it or risk a drenched computer screen:

MSNBC, as was the case with Air America, gives Maddow the chance to add a rare liberal voice to the dominant conservative chatter that fills cable talk shows.

Yeah, so very rare that every voice on MSNBC, with the exception of Joe Scarborough, is liberal. Shuster, Olbermann, Matthews, etc..

 "Air America Radio was founded because there was nothing on talk radio that was not either sports, religious, or right-wing politics. There was no other form of politics in talk radio forever," Maddow says. "And getting that platform gave me a chance to get really good at talk radio. And I think getting good at talk radio was a great place to prep for being a good guest on TV. And prepping to be a good guest on TV ultimately prepped me to be a good sub-host.

Maddow conveniently forgets that there were hordes of liberal talk radio shows but they flopped bigtime because of lack of ratings. Jim Hightower, Mario Cuomo, Bill Press, and Al Franken among others.

As to the McClatchy headline claim about Maddow's "civility," McClatchy Watch begs to differ:

Uh, wrong. Maddow is vulgar, not civil. During the week of the Tea Parties, Maddow and fellow host Keith Olberman sneered at Republicans, in a way that was crude and uncivil. Below is a video of Maddow saying the Tea Party movement is about "tea bagging," which is an obscure homosexual practice. According to one account, Maddow used the term “tea bagging” in this clip 63 times. She means the term as a vulgar insult to the decent people who took to the streets to protest out-of-control spending (99% of whom, I'm sure, had never heard of the sexual act that Maddow is "joking" about). Watch the video to see for yourself how civil Maddow is.

Perhaps your humble corresondent is also out of the mainstream of weird liberal culture because I too have never before heard of "tea bagging" in reference to some sort of vulgar sexual act I prefer not to think about. However, it seems that Rachel, Keith Olbermann, David Shuster, and Anderson Cooper made the connection instantly. 

McClatchy Watch concludes with this observation:

Call her vulgar and snide, and you'd be right on target.

The McClatchy reporter who wrote this article must have known about Maddow's crude insults -- why didn't Maddow's uncivil behavior register with him?

Perhaps it is because anyone familiar to with the obscure (to regular foks) vulgar term "tea bagging" is automatically blind to Maddow's uncivil behavior.