Charles Blow

Did Frank Rich read Charles Blow's column and sub-consciously subsume it? Rich's NY Times opus of March 27 is a virtual echo of Blow's item of March 26.  

Coincidence or not, the two Timesmen are very much on the same wavelength.  Their shared theory: conservative opposition to Obamacare is fueled not so much by the substance of PBO's plans as it is by the racism, homophobia and sexism of people who can't bear to witness America's changing demographics.

Compare the eerie similarities in the two columns [emphasis added].

New York Times columnist Charles Blow and MSNBC contributor Mike Barnicle traded liberal talking points like Topps baseball cards on today’s “Morning Joe.” Confident the American people care more about eliminating preexisting conditions and expanding health insurance entitlements than the $569.2 billion tax increase and the $1.2 trillion price tag, the journalists failed to substantiate their claims with anything more than their liberal impulses.

“Most people want what they have in this bill or more,” insisted Blow. “We cannot let Republicans take over that talking point, which is that most people don’t want this bill somehow because it is too liberal. That’s just a lie. That is just a lie.”

Really? The American people don’t think the largest tax increase in American history is too liberal? The American people don’t think an unprecedented expansion of government control in the health insurance industry is too liberal? Blow’s failure to back up his assertion renders it laughable.

Then Barnicle chimed in, echoing Blow:

 

How much of a pickle is Pelosi potentially in?  Enough that Dem loyalist Charles Blow had to resort to some truly twisted reasoning to explain away her delay in responding to allegations against Eric Massa.

Of all things, the New York Times columnist tried to excuse Pelosi's failure to act by blaming . . . "our crazy misogynistic culture."  Huh?

Blow offered his odd opinion on today's Morning Joe . . .

"In 1984, Ronald Reagan won every Northeastern state. Since then, the leadership of the G.O.P. has systematically shed its idealists in favor of ideologues, reducing itself to the current Cheney-Limbaugh illusionati whose strategy is to exploit faith and ignorance by fanning fear and hatred. But, Northeasterners are not so easily duped. Voters there tend to be wealthier, better educated, less religious and more progressive than those in other regions." -- New York Times columnist Charles Blow, writing on May 23, 2009.

vs.

"Welcome to the mob: an angry, wounded electorate, riled by recession, careening across the political spectrum, still craving change, nursing a bloodlust." -- Charles Blow in his January 23, 2010 column, after Republican Scott Brown's victory in a special Senate election in Massachusetts.

(Hat Tip: James Taranto at Opinion Journal's Best of the Web)

On MSNBC's "New York Times edition" Friday afternoon, host John Harwood, who also writes about politics for the Times, called talk show host Rush Limbaugh's comments about Obama using the Haiti earthquake to appeal to black voters "pretty disgusting," about twenty minutes into the show.

Harwood then put Times columnist Ross Douthat on the spot as its "man of the right" to explain Limbaugh if he wished (Douthat didn't). Liberal Times columnist Charles Blow followed up by calling Rush "a particularly vile human being."

The source of the Times's ire? Limbaugh's comments on his radio show that "This'll play right into Obama's hands, humanitarian, compassionate. They'll use this to burnish their, shall we say, credibility with the black community in, both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country."

Charles Blow's op-ed in Saturday New York Times, "G.O.P. Grief and Grieving," offensively mocked the Tea Party protesters as rednecks and rather desperately and unconvincingly insisted, against current evidence (the Massachusetts Senate race, anyone?) that the conservative movement is in its death throes.

At least Blow recognizes that the tea party protesters are not partisan in nature but have major problems with the Republican establishment as well as President Obama:

The attack on the Republican establishment by the tea party folks grabs the gaze like a really bad horror flick -- some version of "Hee Haw" meets "28 Days Later." It's fascinating. But it also raises a serious question: Are these the desperate thrashings of a dying movement or the labor pains of a new one?

(I suspect Blow really wanted to compare the tea partiers to the banjo players in "Deliverance," but rejected the idea as too on-the-nose.)

The New York Times's "Visual op-ed" columnist Charles Blow issued his latest conservative-baiting column on Saturday, "The Enemies Within." Blow actually defended the infamous report from the Department of Homeland Security that vaguely tarred anyone active in conservative causes like abortion or immigration as potential extremists.

Blow focused on what the report said about U.S. veterans, who are apparently not smart enough to avoid getting involved in hate groups after returning home. The text box read: "Hate groups want our veterans." Blow's piece came with a helpful visual aid showing the number of "Veterans in White Supremacist Groups." The total confirmed or claimed over the last seven years? A less than overwhelming 203 out of a group numbering millions.

Blow wrote:

Fresh off the cancellation of his own MSNBC show an unleashed David Shuster, sub-hosting for Chris Matthews on Monday's "Hardball," ranted and railed against "crazy," "conservative" "wingnuts" like Chuck Norris, Michele Bachmann, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck for fomenting, "dangerous," "red hot rhetoric," that "inspire some of the crazies out there", like accused cop killer Richard Poplowski, "to do something violent."

Shuster – who apparently wasn't liberal enough for MSNBC's tastes, that he was replaced by liberal talk radio host Ed Schultz – seemed out to show his bosses, that oh no, indeed he was liberal enough for the network's standards, and set out to prove that, right off the bat, in his "Hardball" opening monologue:

DAVID SHUSTER: Who is the real nutcase? North Korea's Kim Jong-Il or any conservative who wants to bomb him? Let's play "Hardball!" Good evening, I'm David Shuster, in tonight for Chris Matthews. Leading off tonight, nuclear war games! So what are we to make of North Korea's attempt to send a satellite into space? Even though the launch failed the North Korean rocket did travel some 2000 miles twice as far as an earlier North Korean rocket. President Obama called it "a provocative act," and wants new UN sanctions. Former House Speaker Gingrich says we should have bombed North Korea before the launch. Is Gingrich crazy to talk like that or is it dangerous to hope sanctions will do the trick?....And back for crazy talk for a moment. How in the world do you explain people like Chuck Norris calling for a second American Revolution to defeat President Obama's policies? And what about conservative Congresswoman Michele Bachmann appearing to tell her constituents to start stockpiling weapons and ammunition.

Sometimes you just have to laugh at the Pauline Kael-like left. It seems that leftists in America are either mentally stunted or living in such an enclosed, bubble-world that they cannot discern reality from their own fantasy. Such is the case with the faux shock expressed by one Chuck Blow from The New York Times whose April 3 article is filled with the horror that some on the American right might not wish much success for a president of the United States. One must laugh at this man's alarm and wonder if he missed the last eight years where Bush, Cheney -- and at the end, even today, Palin -- were hung in effigy, where the past president was wished a long and torturous death, and where the left wanted untold horrors visited upon them and all Americans that support Republicans?

Charles' sudden awakening to the passion that politics brings is amusing if only to the extent that it is so empty of any introspection. It is hilarious that Chuck only just now had his eyes opened to enflamed political rhetoric and talk of the grave concerns for this country by many millions of his fellow Americans. Sad, in the end, that this guy thinks such vitriol has only just now come from the American right as if born fully grown and never-before-seen.

Chuck must surely have been in a coma since the year 1999.

New York Times "visual op-ed" columnist Charles Blow remains giddy over Republican failures in his latest column, "Three Blind Mice." Blow's mice (aka "the axis of drivel") are Republican governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, RNC chairman Michael Steele, and talk show giant Rush Limbaugh (the latter of whom controls "Limbaugh-tomized minions of the far, far right").

All these insults are packed into one puny-sized column in Saturday's edition, accompanied by a graph (that would be the "visual" part) demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that among citizens at large, the newly elected President of the United States is more popular than a conservative talk show host. This apparently proves something or other.

...the Republicans have dissolved into a querulous lot of nags and naysayers without a voice, a direction or a clue, and we are not amused.

And who has surfaced as their saviors? Bobby Jindal, Michael Steele and Rush Limbaugh -- the axis of drivel.