Fox News host Bill O'Reilly and guest Laura Ingraham on Sept. 23 highlighted the left's latest line of attack on Tea Parties: that they're crazy. Ingraham characterized the attacks as an attempt to distract from the liberal record and said the critique "doesn't work."
"As you may know, the Tea Party was racist for about six months as the far left tried to demonize the movement," O'Reilly said when introducing the broadcast's "Top Story" segment. "But now things have changed; the Tea Party is simply ‘crazy.'"
He showed clips from a report by the MRC's Culture and Media Institute illustrating liberal commentators and journalists attaching the "crazy" label to Tea Parties and Tea Party candidates like Christine O'Donnell, Sharron Angle and others.
Ingraham suggested "the critique doesn't work" because more Americans are in line with the Tea Party's views than with the liberal establishment.
"What's crazier, stating that you think the government is too big and needs to be dismantled ... or is it crazy to say that the stimulus actually created the millions of jobs that we were promised it was going to create?" she asked. "Or is it crazy to say, hmm, cap and trade is going to help our economy or that ObamaCare is going to bring down our insurance rates?"
Ingraham said pointing the finger at "crazy" Tea Party members is an attempt to distract potential voters. "It's like, ‘Look at this, look at this.' And that way you don't really have to defend your own record," she said. "You don't really have to get engaged in a substantive argument about whether cap and trade is actually going to cripple American business globally or is it going to really be some engine of economic growth in our country."
"'These guys are crazy. You can't follow the crazy people. You've got to follow us. You know, we're pulling ourselves out of the ditch, slowly but surely,'" Ingraham said, referring to President Obama's car-in-the-ditch campaign metaphor. "I don't think it's going to work but as you and I have talked about before, Bill, what else are they going to run on?"
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