CNN's Bill Schneider: Limbaugh Speech Was 'Angry, Mocking, Bullying, Harsh, and Full of Contempt'

March 1st, 2009 10:09 AM

It appears that Rush Limbaugh's speech yesterday to the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) was just too much for CNN's political analyst, Bill Schneider, to handle. Schneider just couldn't contain his inner liberal as you can hear in the amazing invective hurled Limbaugh's way in this video as he was interviewed by Randi Kaye about the speech. Here is the transcript of Schneider in all his extremely biased glory:

RANDI KAYE, CNN HOST: Senior political analyst, Bill Schneider, watched it from Los Angeles. He's part of the best political team on television and he joins me now by phone. Bill, what do you make of Rush Limbaugh's tone during that keynote address?

BILL SCHNEIDER:  Well, it was an angry tone. He was the hero of 1994. Fifteen years ago when Republicans won a big victory in Congress. And that was the year of the angry white men. When they came to power they honored him as being the prophet who led them to victory. Well, this was a very angry speech. By the way, they're not all white and they're not all men but they are angry conservative voters. They didn't do so well last year but they're still angry. The tone of this speech was mocking, bullying, it was full of contempt, and I thought it was a very harsh speech. One that while it rallied the conservative audience it also angered a lot of Democrats and people who aren't particularly partisan just by the tone of it.

Wow! Angry? Bullying? Harsh? Did Bill Schneider watch the same speech the rest of us did? Perhaps that liberal filter of his altered Rush's speech in a significant way that diverged completely from reality.

RANDI KAYE:  And Bill, today he did not apologize for his comments earlier that he would like to see President Barack Obama fail. In fact today he defended those comments. What do you make of that?

SCHNEIDER: Well, he did say he hopes Obama fails. Now that in my view crosses a line. It's one thing to say I disagree with the President, I think he's wrong, I think his policies are wrong. A lot of people feel that way. Republicans voted against them. One can even argue these policies won't work, some economists say that. There's either not enough spending, too much spending, they're not the right answer but to say "I hope he fails." That really crosses a line. He said he thinks Democrats did the same thing in Iraq. Most Democrats that I heard didn't ever say "We hope the United States loses." Some of them said, "We're not winning. We can't win." But to say, "I hope the President fails" and at another point it even got rather sinister because he said there were forces there that were trying to undermine the country from within. Those are very sinister comments and I thought in many ways the speech did cross a line.

So did casting aspersions upon the truthfulness of General David Petraeus also cross a line, Bill? We await your comments on this...if they ever arrive.

CNN also displayed Twitter comments about Rush Limbaugh's speech yesterday. See if you can spot a certain pattern here:

KAYE: All right. We are going to continue this discussion. But for now, we want to let you know, we are getting a huge response to Rush Limbaugh's speech on Twitter. And this is what some of you are saying.

One person wrote in for cjustice2K says "I literally had to stop watching it. I have one word about Rush's speech. Hitler.

PinkissoPretty5 writes "When Rush Limbaugh is clearly the spokesperson for the GOP, the party is in worse shape than I thought."

KLDavis08, "At least in all of his absurdness he's entertaining. Limbaugh 2012?

Rusty Campbell writes, "Rush Limbaugh is describing how mean spirited and small minded his brand of conservatism is.

And WhateverDanny writes, "I hope the voice of the GOP is Romney. It will further help the Democrats."

Another one from Apicasso, "Rush contradicting himself in the same sentence over and over. Nice that the audience doesn't care if what he says is factual."

If you had guessed that all the Twitter comments displayed by CNN were highly critical of Rush Limbaugh you would have been right. Somehow CNN just couldn't seem to find even a single comment favorable to Rush. No one!

UPDATE: YouTube took down the first video I used under "terms of use violation." However, the exact same video was posted by another user so I switched to that one. So why was the first video taken down when this second one was allowed to remain? Was it because a certain someone or organization didn't appreciate seeing the video posted here at NewsBusters? And how long will the second duplicate video remain?