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.On ABC, after Amanpour read her “radical right” quote from her book Dirty Sexy Politics, Meghan proclaimed:'
I wrote this out of personal experience. I know how I'm vilified on an absolutely daily basis. No matter what the Republican Party wants to think about this Tea Party movement, it is losing young voters at a rapid rate. And this isn't going to change unless we start changing our message. Maybe we won't care. But I still care. That's all I'm saying.
Maddow went fishing in the same waters, citing a Media Matters blog lamenting conservative bloggers mocking McCain’s weight, and allowing a pity party where McCain ended up blaming “men,” as in the entire gender. If a real conservative was allowed to challenge the stale unanimity, they might suggest that calling Christine O’Donnell a “nut job” is hardly civil discourse.
MADDOW: On the more vicious side was the response from conservative bloggers today. As "Media Matters" compiled today, much of the conservative bloggers’ criticism did not focus on Meghan McCain’s stated opinion at all, but rather much more personal and petty....Let me get your response, first of all, to these conservative bloggers who attacked you today. I know a little about your response because I saw what you posted on Twitter which I thought was perfectly snarky. [She wrote that if she were an “A-cup,” her opinions on O’Donnell would be acceptable.] What did you - what do you want to say back to those folks, if anything?
MEGHAN McCAIN: You know, I love my job and I love my life and I expect this to sort of happen. Two years ago, there are always scandals. I’m over when women say anything in any kind of public forum. And everything goes back to what they look like and how much I weigh.
I just don’t know at which point - these people don’t know it no longer bothers me. But I worry about young women. I have a lot of young women followers - teenagers. I worry about little girls that are reading my column and reading this stuff and what it does to them. It means, "Don’t speak out because, god forbid, my weight is criticized again. And it’s so old. This is like the oldest thing ever. It’s so old.
MADDOW: I feel like it is - it’s like, wow, back in junior high. And the reason - it’s never surprising when politics go back to junior high level. But what is surprising is that I feel like, on the right, particularly around Sarah Palin’s candidacy and her continued ascendancy in the party, so much of the right’s defense of her has been defending her from supposedly sexist attacks on the left. And then to have this sort of brutal, like, pure sexist assault on you, whenever you say anything that’s critical of conservatives. I just - I find it hard to understand. I find it hard to find any coherence there.
MEGHAN McCAIN: And I think the irony as well is that you cannot say sexist comments about Sarah Palin and Christine O’Donnell. But me, if free game all day, every day. I don’t think it’s just right-wing bloggers. I think it’s men. I really think it’s a lot of men on the Internet with a lot of time. And they’re sitting around talking about my body and it is really pathetic. But again, if I couldn’t handle this, I wouldn’t do it. It’s been happening literally since junior high so I don’t care anymore.
Maddow also calmly asked young McCain to repeat all her denunciations of Christine O’Donnell, causing the Daily Beast writer to keep her victim routine going, that she’s the only one (unlike "everybody else") who has “the balls” to denounce O’Donnell on TV:
MADDOW: Let me ask you about the comments about Christine O’Donnell that started this.
MEGHAN McCAIN: And again, I did not wake up in the morning being like, "I’m going to start a big fight with Christine O’Donnell today. I had just done a lot of research before I went on a very prestigious Sunday news show. And I got more and more scared the more research I did.
MADDOW: Why does she scare you?
MEGHAN McCAIN: Because she has little-to-no qualifications to be a principal, let alone to be a senator. I mean, it is the ethics complaints. It’s the bizarre social things, that she thinks she has secret information about China that’s going to take over America.
In any other context, in any other election, this would be a joke. And originally, people like Karl Rove were against her. But all of a sudden, everybody is rescinding and now supporting her.
And the difference between me and everybody else is I am saying what everybody backstage is saying. And I have the balls to come on television and I sit and I take heat and everything that comes because I do not lie. And this is how I feel about this woman.
Fact check, anyone? No one else has denounced Christine O'Donnell on TV? She also promised as the victim to fight on courageously against the Tea Party bullies: “I am not going to stop speaking out just because a bunch of people are going to bully me around.”
The second segment revolved around promoting the gay agenda, and Maddow played a clip of conservative Senate candidate Ken Buck suggesting that homosexuality was a choice, and not biological, which clearly sent Maddow to the moon and back. Conservatives are “super anti-gay” and are not being punished, apparently:
MADDOW: You, all this and Mark McKinnon and some gay Republicans have been out there arguing for more Republicans to be more moderate on this issue. This election cycle, it actually - it seems like it has just gotten a lot worse, not at all better.
MEGHAN McCAIN: It’s very sad.
MADDOW: Are there consequences for Republicans for being super anti-gay, though? Does anything bad happen to them politically when they’re very anti-gay?
MEGHAN McCAIN: I don’t know, actually. I think it is bad just culturally. And you do see a lot from Republicans. But even with Carl Paladrino [sic] statements, again, it just goes from being ‘I’m against gay marriage and I’m against, for "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell," but I’m a bigot as well.’ Like, to me, it filters another territory. And we have this whole gay suicide epidemic that’s going on with teenagers. I don’t think in the same way that I think when you see a woman’s weight criticized in the media, I don’t understand how it cannot have an impact on gay teens.
Now we’re churning up the victimology to a new level. McCain seems to be taking the so-called “gay suicide epidemic” and throwing in there the people who criticize “women’s weight” in the media, and how it can lead to teen suicide. If we connect the dots here, is McCain implying that conservative bloggers mocking her weight could be part of a cycle of “hate speech” that leads the “little girls” who follow her think of suicide?
It was no surprise that after Meghan snorted dismissively that being “born gay” is “scientifically proven,” that Maddow would end the interview “It’s always a real pleasure to have you on the show.”
No one should credit this patronizing exchange with the intellectually challenged McCain as MSNBC granting time to a “conservative.”
