Anyone remember conservative chicken hawk Ben Ferguson being taken to the cleaners by Randi Rhodes on Larry King’s show back in 2006? Well he was back on Fox News the other day on O’Reilly’s show and apparently he still hasn’t taken Randi’s statement that we all need to be looking out for the weakest among us to heart yet.
It’s the holiday season, so Fox Business Channel regular Eric Bolling was filling in for O’Reilly. He brought on radio host Leslie Marshall who I’ve never heard of before watching this, who calls herself a liberal, but she's one of those "liberals" that seems to like coming on Fox an awful lot, and conservative radio host Ferguson to discuss the response to the Boxing Day Blizzard on the east coast.
Bolling started out the discussion by conflating Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell’s statement that the NFL’s decision to postpone the Philadelphia Eagles game might be because we’ve become a “nation of wusses” to the plight of those that were not dug out of the blizzard in a timely manner. He played some of Mayor Bloomberg’s response to the criticism he’s received over the last week and then asked his two guests to weigh in.
Par for the course, Ferguson used the opportunity to attack President Obama and the “nanny state.”
FERGUSON: Here’s the point. Look at this president. This president ran on saying, for those of you that cannot take care of yourself, I’ll do everything for you. And that’s really what the government has done now. You don’t have for two years and we’ll give you a check. You don’t have health insurance; we’ll give it to you. You need food, we’ll give you that too and oh by the way, we’ll give you a free education and feed your kids for free at school. So we’re not accustomed to this. We can’t even shovel our own snow any more!
Bolling brought up the issue of extended unemployment benefits and both he and Ferguson used that to attempt to paint Americans as just a bunch of lazy moochers who don't want to work. Never mind those unemployment numbers or that our jobs have all been outsourced, you terrible unemployed people just want to suck off the government teet.
FERGUSON: You have a cultural problem in this country and if you want to blame both sides, I'm really okay with that, but the reality is America now does not know how to stand up for itself and actually make due. I mean, you've got snowplows now. My parents and grandparents didn't have that. You've got things that will literally, you can push along, they're automated to shoot the snow in your neighbor's yard. They didn't have those around thirty five years ago and guess what? No one complained then.
I'm not sure how Ferguson would know that no one was complaining back then since he wasn't born yet, but he expects the rest of us to just take his word for it. Marshall pointed out that we used to have kids going around offering to shovel their neighbors walks for a few bucks and said that no one is doing that today, which whether that's true or not seems like a ridiculous point to even bring up since the problem is not whether people had their own walks cleared but the streets being closed which wasn't going to be solved from teenagers shoveling their neighbors' walks for them. To which Bolling followed with an even more ridiculous statement and Ferguson chiming in in agreement.
BOLLING: But Leslie, here what is happening. In New York we had twenty inches of snow, the worst in history within a day. There are people saying hey wait a minute, why isn’t my street plowed. Why can’t I get my car out? Why aren’t all the buses and trains running? For goodness sakes, I mean, give them a break. Man up. Toughen up a little bit America. Go shovel your own car.
FERGUSON: Dig out your own car.
Someone needs to remind both of these idiots that no one was asking the government to come dig out their cars for them. They wanted their streets plowed, which means they were going to have to dig their cars out after the plows buried them in snow.
They wrapped it up with Ferguson trying to paint government as incompetent while ignoring the fact that, as Susie already pointed out, Bloomberg just got rid of the city workers that he should have known would be needed if they got hit with a big storm.
And here he is during part of the panel discussion on Larry King's show that I mentioned in the beginning of the post with Randi Rhodes calling him out for being a chickenhawk. Too bad she or someone besides another Fox faux liberal wasn't there to put this kid in his place again.
