It's been a nasty week, just in the hours since "National Unity Day" on 9/11, for the liberal and hard-left talkers. Talk of killing right-wingers is in the air, as is talk of the Tea Party loving "the taste of blood in their mouths." What is this,a Twilight movie? On Tuesday's Randi Rhodes show, Randi complained about the backwardness of Florida, where she lives: "This place is full of conservatives and crazy old people -- right wing extremist wackos and prehistoric reptiles that you can't kill, basically, the Tea Party!"
Over on the typically screechy Mike Malloy show on Tuesday, Malloy was rooting for Donald Rumsfeld to be hanged like a Nazi war criminal. He was furious that Rumsfeld would decry Paul Krugman's sleazy 9/11 blog post:
MALLOY: You miserable son of a bitch, Rumsfeld! You miserable, murderous war criminal! sending people to die...sending American soldiers to die with your flip comment, 'You go to war with the army you have!' Sending people over there overprotected you slime ball! And you call Krugman's post repugnant? You should be in the dark, put on trial and if the same laws applied to you as we applied to the German high command your ass would have been hanged months ago! You found Krugman's column repugnant - the balls you people have - you and Cheney and Bush and all of you!
And yet Malloy thinks it’s the Tea Party that wants people to die. The heart-warming story of a crowd pulling a wounded motorcyclist out from under a car as his bike was blazing on fire spurred Malloy to insist no Tea Partier would save a life:
Now, my question to you - how many of those people that did the pulling out - how many of them do you suppose were Republicans or Tea Baggers? I'll tell you how many - not one! You know what they would have said? They would have stood back on the curb like they did last night and say 'LET HIM BURN! HE SHOULD HAVE HAD HIS OWN PERSONAL RESCUE TEAM WITH HIM - WHAT THE HELL DOES HE WANT?' Isn't that what they said last night about the guy who in a coma who didn't have any insurance - and the question was what happens to him - and the audience members - let him die!!!
Several left-wing talkers jumped all over the Wolf Blitzer debate question to Ron Paul about whether a man should die because he failed to buy health insurance. (Paul came around to saying charity would save the man, but liberals pretended not to listen that long.) On MSNBC's The Ed Show, hearing-impaired Ed Schultz saw the Ron Paul moment as vindication for Alan Grayson’s “Republicans want you to die quickly” speech on the House floor. He played that outrage again, and then welcomed Grayson on the air to boast:
GRAYSON: I’m often proven right, but usually not so vividly. I have to say this encapsulates exactly what people fear about the Tea Party, the so-called Tea Party – that they just love the taste of blood in their mouths. And that’s what this seems to come down to. You know, they call themselves pro-life, but if you listened to them last night, it seemed that they were pro-death.
Ed asked if there was a parallel to the cheering for Rick Perry on the question of the death penalty in Texas at the Reagan Library.
SCHULTZ: Is there a parallel between the reaction to that question and answer as the one we saw last night on health care?
GRAYSON: Yes, the parallel is sadism. That’s what the parallel is. A total lack of empathy. You know, if you ever saw the movie Blade Runner, the way you could tell the difference in the movie between the robots and the human beings – the only way because technology was so advanced – was that the robots had no empathy. Seems to me that’s a good description lately of what I hear from the Tea Party. No empathy! They just don’t care.
Schultz had a perfect record of ignoring Paul's answer, decrying at the Grayson interview's end that "A doctor was on that stage last night pushing for the free market. I think we are a better country than that." Incredibly, seconds later, he attacked Rick Perry, insisting his strategy was "make stuff up and maybe nobody will notice."
