On MSNBC Friday night, Ed Schultz proclaimed on his show that Sarah Palin's a phony for touring Haiti now, that the "earthquake happened 11 months ago" and now she's just doing it to plug her new book and reality show. (Ed seems to have missed the recent cholera outbreak. Who needs the Couric question about what newspapers he reads?) Since liberals usually equate traveling to desperate spots of global poverty with compassion, let's ask this question: When has Ed Schultz been to Haiti? A review of transcripts on Nexis and Google searches provide no shred of evidence that Schultz has cared enough to visit.
But there he was in his New York studio -- the one he may have threatened to burn down for leaving him out of network promos -- trashing Palin as insincere at the top of his show: "The next stop on Sarah Palin’s grandstanding tour is Haiti. Is she really, really—does she really want to help these folks? She should start with the unemployed Americans. She’s exploiting desperate people for political gain, and it makes me sick." Halfway through the show came his attack on her "grandstanding" with Christian evangelist Franklin Graham and his Samaritan's Purse relief agency:
In the Battleground story tonight, well, Sarah Palin is proving yet again what a pathetic political grandstander she actually is. Palin’s taggin' along with Franklin Graham on a trip to Haiti pretending to care about the victims of the deadly earthquake. What a phony! You know, I don’t believe she gives a damn about anybody in Haiti. All she cares about is one person, herself. If she really wants to help out the needy, she should start right here in her own country and helping out millions of suffering Americans who are out of work and unemployed, instead she tweeted this. “Thank you to Jim DeMint for saying that he won’t support any tax deal that includes help for the unemployed.”
Actually, as anyone watching the screen would know, that's not what Palin tweeted. She retweeted Jedediah Bila: 'Thank you, @JimDeMint - DeMint comes out against tax deal, says GOP must do ‘better than this’. Bila linked to a Daily Caller story, where DeMint didn't say he opposed help for the unemployed, but he did say he didn't want to extend unemployment "without paying for it." Ed Schultz doesn't seem to be able to clear the mental hurdle of wanting that cost offset. The rage continued:
Palin kicks unemployed Americans when they’re down but expects us to believe that she cares about the people in Haiti? The Haiti earthquake happened 11 months ago. But she’s just now getting around to getting down there to make a visit because she really cares about those people. I tell you what, when she has a new book out and a reality show on TV, she is exploiting people who are suffering for media attention, for money, and for her own political gain, this is what she’s all about. I think it’s repulsive.
For more Palin-bashing, Schultz welcomed former Air America radio host Mike Papantonio, who suggested Palin is like Paris Hilton and is mentally ill:
PAPANTONIO: Palin is addicted to the camera, the same way that Paris Hilton is. It`s almost a sickness. It doesn`t make any difference how negative the attention is as long as it is attention. It is in a sense an illness. Week one, she’s clubbing halibut to death on her TV show in front of the camera, so she can get some attention there. And next week, she’s shamelessly showing her kind of cornpone nature on TV when she tells us that North Korea is our ally. The point is this: it takes time and effort to create a public image for yourself that`s equivalent of part Flav-o Flav, part Katie Gosselin, and part Lindsay Lohan, but she’s pulling it off pretty well.
Yes, he said Flav-O Flav. Papantonio is so bright that the blog post and the video his Ring of Fire radio show made of the appearance is titled "Sarah Palin's Cukoo [sic] Moments."
