Ed Schultz's Sub Lumps in Conservatives with Mao Zedong and People Who Wanted to 'Murder' Galileo, Copernicus

July 1st, 2011 11:39 PM

When Ed Schultz takes a vacation, the guest hosts may be even weirder. On MSNBC, it's been the Al Sharpton Hour. On the radio on Thursday, it was conservative-bashing trial lawyer Mike Papantonio. The man was on such a tear about textbook revisions in Texas that he was comparing conservatives to Mao Zedong:

The GOP teabag-type conservatives are pushing education in the same kind of direction that Mao Zedong pushed China when he wrote history, rewrote the history, changed the history of China by destroying books and terrorizing intellectuals who disagree with his crazy, cryptic, conservative view of the world. See, conservatives don't, Mao Zedong was the ultimate conservative. He was afraid of everything.

But Mao may have been too modern an inspiration. Minutes earlier, the Tea Party was just like medieval people who wanted to "murder" Galileo and Copernicus:

So the same conservatives back then, who were called Tories, are really no different from the same conservatives we have today that call themselves teabaggers. They only can accept what they know. ... Understand, it was the same kind of inflexible, frantic bunch of social political conservatives who wanted to murder Galileo. They wanted to murder Copernicus. Because those two men had ideas that were different from the world that conservative knew. And now we're only a thousand years later and we have the same conservatives in charge of the idea that change is terrifying.

It's only natural then that the hero of the Texas textbook activists was "Red-baiting" Joe McCarthy:

Their conservative hero that they want to put into children's books, their conservative hero that they want to demand are (sic) in textbooks, well he ruined the lives of hundreds of decent scientists, writers, actors, politicians, clergy. He created a Cold War hysteria that dwarfed the Salem witch hunt. And God knows, teabagger conservatives love hysteria.

Since Papantonio's so enjoying the "teabagger" moniker, perhaps we should ask that when Papantonio unfairly bashes conservatives, can we call it a "Pap smear"?