If you don't see eye-to-eye on an issue with your ideological counterparts - rather than debate the issue, you can go on national TV and call them derogatory names like liberal talking head David Sirota has done.
Earlier on CNN's Sept. 7 "American Morning", as NewsBusters' Noel Sheppard pointed out, Sirota called Fox News host Glenn Beck a "right-wing political terrorist" and added that Van Jones was "a national hero." But this time he set his sights on Florida Republican chairman Jim Greer and "people like Jim Greer" who were concerned about President Barack Obama speaking to school children in a highly politicized environment.
"My take is simple," Sirota said on CNN's Sept. 7 "Campbell Brown". "The Orlando Sentinel wrote about what Jim Greer put out there. Jim Greer put out his criticism of Obama's socialist indoctrination plan before any of these lesson plans came out."
And Sirota declared this would be a victory for his side, as parents would realize that those skeptical of the president speech were "a bunch of psychopaths."
"What the effect of this is going to be is - it may have been a short-term controversy that helped Republicans, but what is going to happen is all the parents who tuned into this speech because of the hysteria by people like Jim Greer, are going to read this speech and realize that the Jim Greer's of the world - that the right-wing Republican base are a bunch of psychopaths to try and make this into a giant controversy about socialist indoctrination."
But according to Greer, Sirota was "a little confused" on the timeline and how his public response played out, since he relied solely on the reporting of the Orlando Sentinel writer's take on Greer's disposition.
"I had not even raised this issue until a principal sent us the lesson plan and said you need to see what these things include," Greer explained. "And after looking at the lesson plans, where the teachers were told to talk about the president's - what can we do to help him before the speech and after, that's when the issue is raised."
Greer added that it wasn't being a "psychopath" for parents to take issue with the possibility the president might try to use a school address as a political platform.
"When you talk about psychopath, it is strictly an issue of parental control and parents being involved in what their children listen and see in schools," Greer said. "That's not a psychopath."
