Rachel Maddow

Allegedly not reeling from the previous night's midterms, Rachel Maddow quickly sought to reassure her shellshocked viewers -- debacle, what debacle?!

To bolster her argument, Maddow cited a bar graph created by Steve Benen at Washington Monthly showing midterm losses -- along with a few gains -- for the party in the White House since 1934.

Here's Maddow's valiant spin on her show Wednesday (video after page break) --

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank attacked Fox News in Wednesday's paper for having a Republican "victory party" on air on Election Night. Nowhere in this piece did he acknowledge his routine appearances on MSNBC, and whether it had a partisan sound on Election Night (and every other weeknight). He also avoided the idea that NBC-Universal was helpfully doling out large chunks of air time for Barack Obama this fall to stave off Democrat losses. His column began:

At Rupert Murdoch's cable network, the entity that birthed and nurtured the Tea Party movement, Election Day was the culmination of two years of hard work to bring down Barack Obama - and it was time for an on-air celebration of a job well done....

 

Liberals don't want to believe that anyone would oppose the Obama agenda out of a principled stand against massive government spending and massive intervention in the free enterprise system. It's easier (and dirtier) to blame it all on racism. The leftist blog Daily Kos is keeping up that smear: "It's the black man in the White House, stupid." Michael Moore truly thrilled the blogger called "blackwaterdog" by claiming "Two years of a black man who secretly holds socialist beliefs being the boss of them is more than they can stomach. They've been sick to death since the night of 11/04/08 and they are ready to purge."

MSNBC should be so proud that this blogger frames this smear with a Rachel Maddow segment celebrating all the "achievements" of Democrat-dominated Washington in the last two years. (The lowlight is Maddow celebrating that the "bureaucracy" of private student loans has been removed and it's all wonderfully streamlined and nationalized now. Or Maddow celebrating how health care "reform" is the secret to reducing the horrendous national debt. Or...) Then came the Kosmonaut song sheet:

It’s no secret that the nation is preparing for a GOP tidal wave with significant conservative victories in the Senate and House next Tuesday. The election has essentially focused on domestic economic policy. Conservative candidates have been gaining ground with a popular job growth/lower taxes/revive the economy mantra.

But desperate liberal Democrats have suddenly shifted the focus from the economy to divisive social issues like abortion and gay rights, and the mainstream media have been more than willing to give them a platform. Media personalities like Matt Lauer, Rachel Maddow and Eleanor Clift are loudly voicing concerns over the future of gay marriage and the legal status of abortion.

(Video below the fold)

 

  Left-wing MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, on Monday's Today show, disgustingly tried to link pro-life candidates running in this year's midterm elections to the murder of abortion Dr. George Tiller, as she told Today co-host Matt Lauer "the thing that has surprised me the most is how much" Tea Party candidates were "going back to hard line...positions on abortion" and, as she plugged her upcoming documentary on Tiller, warned viewers: " I think it's important that it's airing right now because there are, there are five Senate candidates running right now who have a position on abortion that has never really been seen in mainstream politics before."

Right before Lauer alerted viewers of the hour long documentary that is airing -- not coincidentally only eight days before Election Day -- at 9 pm Eastern time on MSNBC tonight, he asked Maddow if the Tiller murder was "isolated" or "part of a larger campaign" to which the MSNBC host ominously responded: "If the far edge of the pro-life movement is getting mainstreamed" by candidates adopting their position "what do we need to know about the far edge of the anti-abortion movement?"

                             (video after the jump)

It appears Juan Williams’ firing is just what the public needed to realize their tax dollars are being poorly handled through subsidies from the federal government given to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to prop up National Public Radio.

However, “Red Eye” host Greg Gutfeld makes the most reasonable case not to deprive NPR of its taxpayer subsidies. On the Oct. 23 broadcast of his program, Gutfeld explains to his viewers his case for not defunding the radio organization, but not without taking some jabs their decision to fire his Fox News colleague.

Video Below Fold

Last night on her MSNBC show, Rachel Maddow planted a brave smile on her face and ran what passed for a correction of her scurrilous -- and legally problematic -- claim that a Republican congressman "received advance notice" of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.  

As to be expected, such a reckless polemicist could not issue a mea culpa without a healthy dose of self-justification and alleged delight. Here's what Maddow had to say --

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow offered this jaw-dropping sentence on Tuesday night: “We love to have conservatives on this show. We really, really, really do. Last night, Meghan McCain was nice enough to come by. And incredibly, nobody was injured or even angered.”

Maddow must be joking. Meghan McCain, who was rushed on to ABC on Sunday for writing, among other things, “Rather than leading us into the exhilarating fresh air of liberty, a chorus of voices on the radical right is taking us to a place of intolerance and anger.”

There was no anger on the MSNBC set because Maddow and Ms. McCain agree on nearly everything, as viewers could see in two segments last 12 and a half minutes. If Maddow truly loved having conservatives on, she would have let someone debate young McCain. She constantly plays the victim of vicious conservatives.

"Lean Forward," MSNBC's new slogan suggests. The better to stick a shiv in your opponent's back.

Ethics-averse Rachel Maddow did exactly that on her MSNBC show last night. After disparaging Republican candidates for their gall in criticizing reckless federal spending and government-controlled health care, Maddow made this jaw-dropper of a claim --

Cable television doesn't get any shabbier than this.

In the wake of her train wreck of an interview with GOP congressional candidate Art Robinson, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow resorted to the most threadbare tactic in the left-wing playbook, accusing Robinson of racism on the basis of evidence so barren that even other liberals must have winced in embarrassment.

Next up on The Rachel Maddow Show, human traffickers decry the suffering they witness in human trafficking ...

At the rate she's going, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow is on track to earn an Emmy for best cable comedy * (* -- unintentional category).

On Sept. 30, the ever-excitable Maddow spoke with Congressman Pete DeFazio, 12-term paleo-Democrat from Oregon, about an organization called Concerned Taxpayers of America spending $160,000 in television ads criticizing DeFazio.

The segment featured footage of DeFazio appearing at the organization's address on Capitol Hill, Washington Post videographer along for the ride, in DeFazio's attempt to learn more about the group.

Take MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow live on location from Newark, Del., the site of a hotly contested U.S. Senate race. Mix that with the local beat reporter of the state’s largest newspaper that openly admitted her role model is Helen Thomas. The result: Unfavorable coverage for the conservative Republican in said race.

On the Oct. 5 broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show,’ host Rachel Maddow wanted to give her viewers a taste of the local Delaware media, since U.S. Senate Republican nominee Christine O’Donnell had announced she would go with a more local media strategy in her upcoming contest with the state’s Democratic nominee, Chris Coons. Appearing on her show were Ron Williams, a political columnist and reporter Ginger Gibson, both of the Wilmington News-Journal.

Williams has made his view clear on O’Donnell over the past few months with his columns. Even in his most recent column he cast aspersions on O’Donnell, but that’s what columnists do. But his colleague at the News-Journal, Gibson lamented her inability to have access to the O’Donnell campaign.

This from MSNBC's resident Victorian Gent who can barely get through a story that includes naughty words without acting like she's blushing.

The latest evidence that Bill O'Reilly remains a pathological obsession on the left comes from a cover story in the current issue of New York magazine about "the loud, cartoonish blood sport" between Fox News and MSNBC with CNN's ratings suffering collateral damage.

The story, featured prominently in Huffington Post's politics media section today and trumpeted as a "must read," includes this description of a discussion between Maddow and her staff after O'Reilly called her a "loon" back in August during the Shirley Sherrod/Andrew Breitbart imbroglio --

While liberals complain that Fox News is too helpful in offering its air time for Republican candidates and campaigns, MSNBC continued the recent string of NBC-Universal properties bowing to President Obama with gobs of unchallenged free air time. On Thursday night's Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC offered two large chunks of a speech Obama gave to the DNC's "Gen 44" initiative for young people. Seconds before the first speech clip, MSNBC aired a 15-second NBC public service announcement starring Obama. (See Mark Finkelstein on that.)

The event was a fundraiser expected to raise $750,000. Two honorary co-chairs of the DNC effort are the actors America Ferrera ("Ugly Betty") and Dule Hill ("The West Wing" and "Psych").

This wasn't a standard presidential press conference or interview. This was a campaign event, aired by Maddow in a four-minute clip and then a five-and-a-half-minute clip, both followed with analysis by liberal Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson. In both clips, Obama attacked conservatives for ruining the economy and civil discourse, including claims like this:

CNN's Rick Sanchez positioned himself above the fray between "right wing" Fox News and "liberal" MSNBC on Thursday's Rick's List. Sanchez named Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, and their network to his "List U Don't Want 2 Be On," after the Obama administration supposedly exposed his competitor's left wing bias, and claimed that he "wasn't necessarily liked" by the current or previous administrations.

Before putting his colleagues at MSNBC on his "list," the CNN anchor invoked his longtime vendetta against his other competitor and took a swipe at the last vice president: "Much was made of Vice President Cheney's insistence- remember this?- on only watching Fox News in his travels. It's a true story. Whenever he checked into hotels, he would have his staffers tune all of the TVs in the hotel to only Fox News, so he could just hear about his policies, repeated back to him by a right-wing television network."

Sanchez then moved on to his main subject: "Well, today I asked this question: what about MSNBC and their relationship now with this White House? Here's 'The List U Don't Want 2 Be On.'" He continued with the claim that "if you don't think for one minute that MSNBC is to Barack Obama what Fox was to Bush and Cheney, then you obviously haven't heard this comment that I'm about to share with you- this comment from Deputy White House [Press] Secretary Bill Burton."

CNN's John King on Wednesday mocked Barack Obama for calling Fox News a "destructive" force in our society while at practically the same time a White House spokesman was saying MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow provide "an invaluable service" to the country.

As NewsBusters reported Tuesday, the President bashed FNC in a just-published interview with Rolling Stone magazine shortly before his Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton was praising MSNBC during a gaggle held on Air Force One.

With this in mind, on Wednesday's "John King USA," the host surprisingly derided the White House's inconsistency (video follows with partial transcript and commentary): 

According to a recent poll, likely voters get their political news primarily from cable television. Among cable channels, 42 percent, a plurality, watch Fox News for its political coverage. Only 12 percent said they watched MSNBC. What's more, most likely voters don't like or have never heard of MSNBC's prime time talent.

The poll, conducted by Politico and George Washington University, used a sample split evenly between political parties - even slightly favoring Democrats in some areas: 41 percent of respondents identified as Republicans, while 42 percent said they were Democrats. Forty-four percent said they usually vote for Republicans, while 46 percent answered Democrats. Forty-eight percent voted for Obama, while only 45 percent voted for McCain.

Even among this group, Fox News is by far the most popular cable outlet. CNN comes in at second, with 30 percent. A sorry MSNBC brings up the rear.

Wow, I didn’t realize this until watching radical left MSNBC host Rachel Maddow’s September 16 rant bemoaning the “great, unacknowledged, big honking policy issue of this year’s elections nationwide.”

That is, at least 5 Republican, Tea Party-backed US Senate pro-life candidates oppose aborting innocent babies whose fathers are sexual criminals.

With Christine O’Donnell of Delaware newly added to the list, the roster includes Sharron Angle of Nevada, Ken Buck of Colorado, Joe Miller of Alaska, and Rand Paul of Kentucky.

When lefties turn on each other ... never a pretty sight.

Former president Bill Clinton, he of the elephantine memory, still nurses a grudge against MSNBC's Rachel Maddow for a crack she made about him way back in March.

In an appearance with former British prime minister Tony Blair in Philadelphia on Monday, Clinton said that "one of the leading television commentators on one of our liberal cable channels said I was the best Republican president the country ever produced, which would come [as] quite a surprise to the Republicans, half of whom still think I'm a closet communist," according to Politico.

Not how I'd mark an anniversary, but MSNBC is flexible in its alleged standards.

On Sept. 8, Rachel Maddow told viewers it was two years since her cable show started on MSNBC. And what better way to enter her third year of televised liberal polemics than with Maddow's trademark melding of smarm and deceit. 

The following night, Maddow railed at Newt Gingrich and Citizens United for producing and marketing a documentary warning Americans of the threat from radical Islam, after she complained about Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck charging admission to a meet-and-greet on Saturday, the ninth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks (first of four parts in embedded video) --

A new study by the Pew Research Center found that Barack Obama gets his highest approval ratings from people that watch MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, as well as from readers of the New York Times.

The numbers are rather staggering, as 84 percent of regular viewers of MSNBC's "Countdown" give the President high marks for his job performance.

This compares to 80 percent for regular viewers of "The Rachel Maddow Show" and 79 percent for regular readers of the Times.

But that's just one of the interesting findings in the Pew survey released Sunday:

Hope and change, meet business as usual.

Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell unveiled this curious possible strategy for Democrats heading into the midterms when she appeared on Rachel Maddow's MSNBC show Sept. 8 --

MADDOW: One last last question on the specifics here. The president himself is planning to be very visible from all accounts, multiple campaign events, the first planned press conference in a long while. Is he still the Democrats' best campaign asset or do Democrats need somebody else out there who can throw sharper barbs than a sitting president is really allowed to?

Followed by Harris-Lacewell responding, as if hearing the question from Maddow for the first time --

Looking for someone to investigate theft and questionable spending in government programs? Think twice about hiring Rachel Maddow. The earnest MSNBC polemicist has deemed such a thing impossible, at least when it comes to Social Security.

Reacting with the reptilian defensiveness of liberals whenever conservatives suggest Social Security is unsustainable, Maddow made this whopper of a claim on her show Sept. 1 in response to former senator Alan Simpson's pithy criticism of the FDR-created sacred cow --

MADDOW: Here's the broader context, what he said, it was in an email, what he wrote in that email, in which that quote, from which that quote was taken. This is what he said -- 'yes, I've made some plenty smart cracks about people on Social Security who milk it to the last degree. You know 'em too. It's the same with any system in America. We've reached a point now where it's like a milk cow with 310 million [tits]', thing that starts with T that rhymes with bits.

Appearing as a guest on Tuesday’s Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter repeatedly characterized the conservative wing of the Republican party as "radical" and "extreme" as he and host Maddow discussed the possibility that conservative talk radio host Bill Cunningham would broadcast his radio show from House Minority Leader John Boehner’s office on Election Day. Alter asserted that the Republican party became radical in 1994, and soon advised "progressives" that they "need to learn a little bit about what the stakes are" because Republicans currently have a "radical agenda." Alter:

You know, it began in 1994. That was where we got radical Republican leadership for the first time. The reason that they succeeded was that the moderate Republican leadership of the old days had failed to regain control of the House of Representatives. So the lesson after ‘94 was: Be radical and maybe you can come back into power. ... so the message is not really for other Republicans. The message is for Democrats and how much do Democrats care about turning over a branch of our government to extremists, to radicals.

He soon concluded:

Ve haf certain powers, Miz Maddow . . .

In the midst of bashing Pres. Bush over Iraq this evening, Rachel Maddow's mic went suddenly dead, forcing her MSNBC show to go to commercial.

When she returned [and after paraphrasing a line from Macbeth], Maddow let it be known she was "such a conspiracy theorist" but didn't dare tell the audience what she was thinking because "it would discredit me forever."

President Barack Obama's decision to include, in his Tuesday night address from the Oval Office on the end to the “combat mission” in Iraq, a sentence respectful toward former President George W. Bush, appalled MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.

Anchor Keith Olbermann recited Obama's graciousness toward Bush (“It's well known that he and I disagreed about the war from its outset, yet no one could doubt President Bush's support for our troops or his love of country and commitment to our security”) and then, obviously speaking for himself and the entire MSNBC team, proposed: “There are people who would support President Obama who would howl at hearing that said aloud more than once.” Maddow indeed howled, launching into an indignant rant:

To have in this speech, as combat operations are ending, to have...the President not only not addressing the circumstances in which we went to war, but these kind words for President Bush, describing his “commitment to our security” despite the recklessness with which President Bush discarded that national security in favor of this war of choice, which only diminished our security, and is responsible, probably, for the Afghanistan war still going on today, for the deaths of people who have died in Afghanistan after the time after which that war would have ended had we not gone to Iraq -- not to mention all of the people who died in Iraq.

Those crack researchers at MSNBC have done it again!

Last week, hosts Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow both did stories about a blogger whose travel instructions for folks going to Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally got posted at the Maine Tea Party Patriots website.

Included were warnings about what stops to avoid on the DC Metro.

Predictably, the liberal blogosphere had a field day with this citing it as another "example" of racism within the Tea Party.

There's only one problem: the culprit, a Washington, D.C.-based realtor, is a major contributor to the Democrat Party as well as gay rights groups.

But before we get there, here's what Rachel Maddow reported Monday with the help of the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson (videos follow with transcripts and commentary, h/t Seton Motley):

Here is how the Wall Street Journal began its lead editorial, "Victory in Iraq," on Aug. 20 --

When the men and women of Fourth Brigade, Second Infantry Division deployed to Iraq in April 2007 as part of President Bush's surge, American soldiers were being killed or wounded at a rate of about 750 a month, the country was falling into sectarian mayhem, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had declared that the war was 'lost.'

On Wednesday, the 'Raiders' became the last combat brigade to leave Iraq, having helped to defeat an insurgency, secure a democracy and uphold the honor of American arms.

For viewers of NBC and MSNBC earlier that week, the title of Fourth Brigade, Second Infantry Division would likely have struck a chord -- on Aug. 18, both networks interrupted their scheduled broadcasts with exclusive live coverage of the brigade crossing the border into Kuwait, the last US combat brigade to leave Iraq.