Rachel Maddow Show

In a desperate attempt to save Rep. Anthony Weiner, who has even been abandoned by the leaders of his own party, MSNBC is still refusing to acknowledge that Weiner's actions should jeopardize his House seat.

Lawrence O'Donnell, host of "The Last Word," ridicules the idea that lying should be grounds for resignation, Rachel Maddow, host of "The Rachel Maddow Show," describes the situation as "more gossip than news," and Cenk Uygur, MSNBC political commentator, says that "he lied, so what."

(Videos after the break)

Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner was probably expecting softball questions from Rachel Maddow last night. That's not quite how it played out.

On Friday, the same evening he previously appeared on Maddow's MSNBC show, a risque photo of Weiner was sent from his Twitter account. An uproar in the blogosphere and broader media quickly followed, with Weiner denying he sent the photo but not addressing whether the photo was of him.

Weiner made another attempt at damage control when he went on Maddow's show again Wednesday. Before he appeared, however, Maddow signaled that the interview would not be business as usual when she said this (video below page break) --

File this one under: Imagine If The Partisan Tables Were Turned.

On her MSNBC show this evening, Rachel Maddow repeatedly mocked Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell as "little Mitch, the rodeo queen."

Maddow was miffed over McConnell's arranging a Senate vote on the raising of the debt ceiling, and by extension the Republican position on Medicare reform.  And so, for about ten--interminable--minutes, Maddow beat into the ground a labored metaphor, somehow analogizing McConnell to the cowgirls in Utah who were forced to compete on stick ponies because the real horses had been sidelined by illness.

View video after the jump.

Does anybody at MSNBC vet this stuff before it comes from Rachel Maddow?

Because much of it wouldn't pass muster at a halfway decent high school newspaper.

Case in point -- Maddow's blatantly inaccurate claim on her show Friday that US negotiations with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar began after bin Laden's death. (video after page break).

The potential for over-the-top advertising from Democrats to defend Medicare is definitely there, Rachel Maddow told her MSNBC audience Monday.

She should know, since her show of late is little more than a Medicare commercial for Democrats.

As she talked about the next day's special election in New York's 26th House district, Maddow described Jim Martin, chairman of the 60 Plus advocacy group, stumping for Republican candidate Jane Corwin (video after page break) --

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow this weekend predicted that there is going to be a Republican presidential candidate that will refuse to do any interviews with the mainstream media.

She told her fellow panelists on the syndicated "Chris Matthews Show" that it could be Sarah Palin (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Wow, talk about digging deep.

Then again, Rachel Maddow's critique of Congressman Paul Ryan's proposed reform of Medicare did extend beyond the word "kill." It also included the words "killed" and "killing."

Just how the GOP plan does this Maddow didn't say on her MSNBC show last night, what with inconvenient facts lying in wait to undermine her allegation of homicide.

She decided instead to repeat the same thing over and over, nine times in the first 11 minutes of the program,  as if repetition will make her wishes come true (video after page break) --

Gail Collins, the New York Times’s editorial page editor (2001-2007) turned feminist columnist, went on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show on Tuesday night to discuss the revelation that California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger having a child with a long-time domestic servant.  Although Schwarzenegger, the former bodybuilder and actor, hardly has a reputation as a social conservative, Collins nonetheless used him to tar the social right as hypocrites.

Maddow: But we’re sort of being confronted with the glass houses and throwing stones problem. I understand why people have glass houses. People fail. But why is throwing stones still part of, a main stream part of Republican politics?

COLLINS: Well, because there are people, a lot of people in the country who not only have very strong, you know, family values, but believe that somehow you can legislate them into other people`s families and they’re very powerful within the party. So, the poor Republican candidates, I must say, do get kind of stuck on this one because they toe this very rigid line about personal behavior when like most human beings, they’re failing to live up to it.

So she insulted half her viewers, the straight ones anyway.

Deploying trademark saccharine smarm, Rachel Maddow last night rushed to defend Planned Parenthood from the predations of Indiana governor Mitch Daniels and like-minded Republicans in the legislature who have blocked federal funding to the abortion provider's clinics in their state.

In the process, Maddow used a surreal approach -- briefly converting her MSNBC studio to a "man cave" that looked like the sports den of a middle-class dad -- then talking down to the men in her audience as knuckle-draggers unable to comprehend beyond football and cars (video below page break) --

As NewsBusters has been reporting, so-called "news" organizations have been routinely calling leading Republican figures racists for having the nerve to criticize the policies of President Obama.

On Monday, conservative talk radio host Mark Levin specifically called out NBC News not only for its on-air talent being "blindingly white," but also for "promoting racial division in this country" (embedded audio follows with transcript and commentary):

I've not been much of a fan of Time magazine for years, though I am again, if only briefly.

Fresh off Rachel Maddow's ludicrous claim that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was "not all that well known" until he was killed by the US military in 2006 and allegedly elevated in death beyond what he was in life, Time magazine published a special issue titled "The End of bin Laden."

The cover of the magazine, which can be seen here, shows an illustration of bin Laden crossed out with a prominent red "X" -- as in, buh bye.

Turns out this is only the fourth time in Time's history that the magazine has gone with the "X" cover. Prior to bin Laden's rude awakening by Navy SEALs, Time did this for only three other globally reviled figures: Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein -- and Zarqawi. (video after page break)

Rachel Maddow has engaged in a strange--sinister?--irony.  On her MSNBC show last night, one moment Maddow was condemning the late Senator Joe McCarthy for encouraging people to "turn in their friends" in the entertainment industry. The next moment, Maddow was urging her viewers to . . . turn in someone in the entertainment industry--the animator of Mike Huckabee's history series for kids.

Maddow devoted a sarcastic segment to mocking Huckabee's series of DVDs on American history.  Along the way she accused Huckabee of engaging in revisionist history. Her example was the way a Huckabee DVD described Ronald Reagan's testimony as a friendly witness at a McCarthy hearing, in his role as president of the Screen Actors Guild, as Reagan having "worked against Communism in Hollywood."

Maddow then said this: "We asked [Huckabee's production company] today who had done the animation on these DVDs.  They would not tell us.  If you know who brought this amazing animated sauce to life, please get in touch with us.  We would like to know."

View video after the jump.

Rachel Maddow on Monday again demonstrated how absolutely pathetic a journalist she is.

Without anything in the court records to support her assertion - in fact, the transcript of the proceedings thoroughly refutes it - Maddow claimed on the MSNBC program bearing her name that an African-American man was tossed off a Louisiana jury in a 2009 murder trial because he protested the presence of a Confederate flag in front of the courthouse (video follows with transcript and extensive commentary):

Ever notice how liberals trot out pseudo-profundities when talking about guns?

Latest example -- MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on her show Friday night, hanging out with Meghan McCain at the NRA convention in Pittsburgh.

NRA member McCain said that as a young woman and daughter of a prominent politician, she owns a gun to protect herself from those seeking harm (video linked here) --

Forget about Bush Derangement Syndrome.

According to MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, the Sunday morning political talk shows are all biased towards the 43rd president we conservatives all thought they despised (video follows with transcript and lots of debunking commentary):

I have to wonder if someone spiked that White House-brewed Kool Aid for MSNBC with hallucinogens.

Either that or the network's apologists suffer from pathological dishonesty.

How else to explain one of the most blatantly deceitful claims on MSNBC in memory, when Rachel Maddow on Wednesday dutifully cited the reasons why she agreed with Obama's decision against releasing photos of a deceased bin Laden.

After all, Maddow said, many Iraqis refused to believe that Saddam Hussein's sons were no longer alive after the US military released photos of them upon their deaths.

Not only that, Maddow argued, look at what happened after our military unveiled a photo of deceased terrorist Zarqawi (video after page break) --

Not bad, it took her a mere 18 months to grasp this.

On her MSNBC show Monday night, the first time it ran after the death of bin Laden, Rachel Maddow cited several post-9/11 examples of terrorism targeting Americans in the US -- including the attack at Fort Hood in November 2009.

"Since Sept. 11, the story of terrorism targeting the United States itself has mostly, thankfully, been the story of thwarted attacks," Maddow said, such as the so-called shoe bomber and underwear bomber, a plot to detonate explosives in the New York City subway system, the failed bombing of Times Square, and the so-called Dallas bomber who targeted former president George W. Bush.

"And then there was the mass-casualty shooting at Fort Hood in Texas in 2009, carried out by Major Nidal Hasan," Maddow said.

Quite a contrast with how Maddow described the incident on her show Nov. 12, 2009, fully a week after the carnage (video after page break) --

Brace yourself for a shock ... Oprah Winfrey, of all people .... she's one of them ...

At least if judged by the same jaundiced standard that Rachel Maddow applies to Newt Gingrich.

On her MSNBC show last night, Maddow criticized Gingrich for asking why Obama waited as long he did before releasing his birth certificate (video after page break) --

(Updated with video clips of Kenosha, Wisc., town hall forum provided by Congressman Ryan's press office; links to clips after end of post)

A British media outlet's profile of MSNBC's Rachel Maddow is generating considerable buzz for a specific remark she made, though another is equally curious.

In response to a question from The Guardian's Hadley Freeman, Maddow said gays in the media whom she did not identify should come out of the closet.

Here's how it was reported by Freeman --

Once again, a presumably simpatico guest on "The Rachel Maddow Show" undermined a claim she made on the same show.

This occurred twice in the same week back in March, as I described at the time. It happened again Friday night when Maddow talked about Republican congressmen facing constituents angered by the GOP budget plan. Maddow compared this to the contentious public forums on health reform in August 2009.

Here's what Maddow said about the Republican budget's effect on Medicare, followed by her guest claiming something altogether different (video after page break) --

Something tells me that future Huffington Post coverage of Rachel Maddow will be a tad less adulatory.

In a remark on her MSNBC show last night that has to be heard to be believed, Maddow mocked the influential liberal website for ... not being liberal. Seriously, Maddow really said this.

[video after page break]

On Monday, Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback signed a new voter-identification law the requires photo identification of all in-person voters at every election, as well as requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration beginning on January 1, 2013. The state House passed the bill by a margin of 111 to 11. Naturally, liberals like Rachel Maddow think these simple rules are rigging the system. On Tuesday night's show, a very hyperbolic Maddow claimed "it's going to be almost impossible to get registered to vote now in Kansas." Her guest was Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the incoming chair of the Democratic Party, who was lobbing bombs at Republicans.

MADDOW: Is making it harder to register to vote, which many Republican-controlled states are pursuing right now -- is that a partisan tactic?

WASSERMAN-SCHULTZ: Well, I think it's sending a very strong signal that Republicans don't think they can win elections in a fair fight. So, they need to go systematically state-by-state rigging it so that it makes it much more difficult for all voters, regardless of political party affiliation or philosophical approach can get to the polls.

Bill Maher Tuesday made a statement on MSNBC that would be truly embarrassing for the so-called news network if any of its executives cared at all about being an impartial disseminator of information.

At the end of an almost thirteen minute interview with Rachel Maddow, the comedian said of Republicans, "I hate them as much as you do" (video follows with commentary):

Are you one of them small-gubmint conservative weirdos?  A critter who cringes when someone tells you they're from the government and there to help you?  Well, answer this: are you, or have you ever been . . . a fan of The A-Team?

Because, yes: one of Rachel Maddow's guests has, with a straight face, advanced the argument that Mr. T and company were complicit in undermining Americans' belief in the benign powers of government.  David Sirota made an appearance with Maddow on her MSNBC show this evening to promote his book that advances the A-Team-as-enemy-of-government-love theory.

View video after the jump.

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Monday went to great pains illustrating the similarities between President Obama's Libya address to the nation and his December 2009 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

Not surprisingly, the devout dove suddenly turned hawk chose not to discuss the irony (video follows with partial transcript and commentary):

Somewhere the ghost of George Orwell cringes in recognition.

In her eagerness to please, Rachel Maddow occasionally collides headlong into immutable facts of economic reality. To wit, cutting taxes does not constitute new government spending, at least outside of doctrinaire Marxist analysis.

Here's MSNBC's Little Miss Sunshine giving her two-cents' worth on this Tuesday night (video below page break) --

They won't agree on much, but Fox News host Bill O'Reilly and Medea Benjamin, founder of the far-left anti-war group Code Pink, found some common ground on one fact Tuesday night: MSNBC talkers Rachel Maddow and Ed Shultz are hypocrites.

Both Schultz and Maddow defended President Obama's decision to impose a no fly zone over Libya on their respective shows. Maddow trotted out the "reluctant warrior" line, while Schultz insisted that the president "deserves the benefit of the doubt and our support."

O'Reilly asserted - and Benjamin agreed - that neither MSNBC host would have been so generous had Obama's predecessor engaged in such a conflict. "The word 'hypocrisy' comes to mind," Benjamin quipped (video and partial transcript below the break).