Of all the things Americans have to be grateful for this Thanksgiving, here's another one: Martin Bashir is not on MSNBC today. That's due to the holiday, of course, rather than any MSNBC executive's sense of honor.
Bashir's reprehensible attack on Sarah Palin leads off the current edition of MRC's Notable Quotables, our bi-weekly compilation of the most outrageous quotes in the liberal media. Also this week: instead of President Obama apologizing for misleading millions of Americans that they could keep their insurance plans, some journalists say the "real apology" should be delivered to Obama from conservatives who all along warned of the folly of ObamaCare; while the increasingly-absurd Ed Schultz insists that the thrill-up-their-leg Obama-loving media "want ObamaCare to fail."
Selected quotes and video after the jump; the full issue is posted at www.MRC.org.
MSNBC’s Most Disgusting Attack on a Conservative (So Far)
“One of the most comprehensive first-person accounts of slavery comes from the personal diary of a man called Thomas Thistlewood, who kept copious notes for 39 years....In 1756, he records that ‘A slave named Darby catched eating canes; had him well flogged and pickled, then made Hector, another slave, s-h-i-t in his mouth.’ This became known as ‘Darby’s Dose,’ a punishment invented by Thistlewood that spoke only of the slave owners savagery and inhumanity.... When Mrs. Palin invoked slavery, she doesn’t just prove her rank ignorance. She confirms that if anyone truly qualified for a dose of discipline from Thomas Thistlewood, then she would be the outstanding candidate.”
— MSNBC host Martin Bashir on November 15, reacting to Palin’s comparison of excessive debt to slavery. The following Monday, Bashir began his eponymous program by apologizing to Palin: “My words were wholly unacceptable....And they have brought shame upon my friends and colleagues at this network.”
Won’t Grateful Americans “Forgive” Obama for Health Care Lie?
Co-host Matt Lauer: “He [Obama] apologized for the fact that he made a promise during the rollout, during the campaign for health-”
Sarah Palin, interrupting: “Many, many, many promises.”
Lauer: “-made it over and over again. Said you get to keep your existing policy if you like it. Five percent of Americans can’t keep it because it doesn’t meet the standards of the new health care law. If it turns out, Governor, that they end up — those five percent of people — with a better health insurance policy, do you think they’ll forgive him for the broken promise?”
— Exchange on NBC’s Today, November 11.
Forget Millions Who’ve Lost Coverage — The “Real Apology” Should Go to Obama
“Leading off tonight: Who deserves the real apology here?...The facts are that many of the same people that feel betrayed now will be thanking the President later. These are people in so-called junk plans that could bankrupt them and their families if they ever got sick.”
— Fill-in host Michael Smerconish on MSNBC’s Hardball, November 8.
“The apology should be coming from the conservatives. The conservatives should be apologizing for having no plan and no option for any of the people you’ve just seen illustrated on this program, and they should be apologizing to the 50 million Americans who have been without insurance because, damn it, they’ve been sick!”
— Host Ed Schultz on MSNBC’s The Ed Show, November 11.
Even When Obama Lies, It’s Racist to Call Him a Liar
“The political right in this country has reached a new low, as I said. It has shown from the beginning that President Obama doesn’t deserve the decency accorded other American presidents. His enemies have called him an illegal immigrant, a street corner con artist, a fraud, a Manchurian candidate brought to this country to undermine all we stand for. Well, now Dick Cheney comes right out and calls him a liar. When a right-wing back-bencher did that four years ago, he was called out for rebuke even by his own party. Well, now what was condemned as historic bad behavior comes snarling out of Dick Cheney’s mouth and nobody says to shut up. Well, we can argue, as we do here, about the problems implementing the Affordable Care Act. But is this, calling the President a liar, the new language of American politics? Or is it a language specially treated for the country’s first African-American president?”
— Chris Matthews on Hardball, November 15.
NBC Reassures Obama He “Didn’t Intentionally” Mislead Us
“It’s probably the most quoted thing or re-quoted thing you have said in your presidency, ‘If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.’ You said it a lot during the run-up. At this point, though, it’s obviously something — a promise that has not been able to be kept....Do you feel like you owe these folks an apology for misleading them? Even if you didn’t intentionally do it, but at this point, they feel misled.”
— NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd to President Obama in an interview segment shown on MSNBC’s PoliticsNation, November 7.
Cancelled Policies Like an Unsafe Pinto, but ObamaCare Is a “Ferrari”
“You know, the number one cause of bankruptcy in United States is medical bills. And a large part of that is because there are really bad plans out there. I mean, I think this is a little bit of a red herring and, if you look at the numbers, this is a relatively small percentage of the population that we’re talking about that fits into this idea that they have plans, they want to keep them because they are buying insurance already in the individual market. But we have regulations for cars that are unsafe. People say, ‘I want to keep my Pinto. I don’t want to be forced to buy a Ferrari.’”
— Weekend host Sanjay Gupta, who the Obama administration contemplated as a candidate for Surgeon General, on CNN’s Piers Morgan Live, November 12.
Absurd Ed: “The Media Want ObamaCare to Fail”
“Why is it that all of a sudden, we have this huge conflict and this pitbull mentality that we just won’t give up? The mainstream media, I believe, wants ObamaCare to fail. They look for every negative number they can find. They’re afraid to do a positive story, because they’re afraid that somebody might not watch. The media is just cherry picking the bad facts that are out there, repeating them over and over again, and in many cases, they’re making stuff up.”
— Host Ed Schultz on MSNBC’s The Ed Show, November 12.
Failed Radio Host Scarborough Slams Conservative Talk Radio
Co-host Savannah Guthrie: “You really go after conservative media....You seem to be saying talk radio is part of the problem.”
MSNBC host Joe Scarborough: “Well, I mean, it’s not a part of the problem for them. They make millions and millions of dollars. I don’t knock that. You know, let everybody make millions and millions of dollars. But when they start pushing their world view on Republicans across the country and start saying, ‘You either have to run up to the barricades and fight to the death every single time or you’re not sufficiently conservative,’ and you actually have politicians listening to that and not understanding that’s a profit motive. And again, let them make their millions of dollars, but we’ve got to stop feeding every single little resentment if we want to get back into the White House.”
— NBC’s Today, November 12. In 2010, Scarborough’s own radio show was cancelled after less than 18 months.
Disdaining the “Horrible White People” of the GOP
Director Oliver Stone: “I don’t know why these Republican white people — frankly, the McConnells and the — they’re strange to me. It’s almost as if we’re an apartheid state and they’re still fighting for the rights of whites in South Africa. It’s like they’re scared. So they’ve figured out with, remember Tom DeLay is another one of those horrible white people that come along and they go back to, he was crooked....Their stand on guns, their stand on white rights, the concept of blocking the voting of blacks and Hispanics, it adds up. I would think that they’re very scared this country is going to become colored.”
Host Tavis Smiley: “That’s what I was getting at. They’re threatened by something. It may not that he’s doing anything, but they are threatened by something.”
Stone: “But he is threatened by the fact that he is black. You know, that’s enough.”
— Exchange on PBS’s Tavis Smiley, November 13.
Sarah Palin = “a Dumb C-Word”
“Go to dictionary,& look up he ‘C’Word,....next 2 the definition...you’ll see a Pic of Sarah PALIN ! NO...WAIT ...SHES UNDER DUMB C WORD”
— Singer/actress Cher in a November 15 posting to Twitter [grammar and punctation as in the original].
