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When I talk about my work with my parents, they invariably ask, "Why do so many people vote against their interests?" And my response is that it's messaging. While progressives may have the moral and --dare I say it?--economic high ground, the fact remains that we suck at conveying those ideas. Conservatives not only win in their ability to shape easily digestible sound bytes that sound sensible until you subject them to a little scrutiny, but they also are fantastic at message discipline. You will hear the same phrase (we can't raise taxes on the job creators!) over and over again, until it becomes conventional wisdom. Add the daily talking points-mandated Fox News anchors and you have a messaging juggernaut.

Of course, it all comes crashing down when you have a conservative who won't play. Amato caught Ben Stein on one of his periodic appearances on The O'Reilly Factor and he steadfastly refused to play along with one of the benchmarks of conservative economic policy--that taxing the rich hurts the economy--to Billo's increasing chagrin.

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Crowley: This is completely outrageous. Americans voted in a black man as president with 53 percent of the vote. And now, all of a sudden we're hearing from the far left that now we're a nation of bigots and racists? What's really going on here?

Don't you just love how people who did not vote for Barack Obama (and never would) now proclaim his victory as proof that America is now no longer racist?

Fortunately, Mark Sawyer -- who called out Fox News and Republicans on this very point not so long ago -- was there to knock down Crowley's self-serving nonsense:

Crowley: So are we somehow to believe that between 60 and 70 percent of the American people are racist?

Sawyer: No. No one would ever suggest that.

Crowley: Cynthia Tucker seemed to.

Sawyer: No she wasn't. What she was saying was that we've had exactly what we did have. We had a summer where the Republicans, and to a certain degree you guys at Fox News, realize that racial resentment works in bad economic times. And if you play the racial resentment card, where whites are feeling uncomfortable --

Crowley: Hey Mark, it wasn't us playing the race card. It was the far left playing the race card against the Tea Party, and against Republicans in a grossly unfair way and with no evidence whatsoever.

Sawyer: You guys had the New Black Panther Party, you guys had the New Black Panther Party --

Crowley: Which was a legitimate story that the Holder Justice Department threw out.

Sawyer -- You tried to run with the Shirley Sherrod story. You tried to run with the Shirley Sherrod story. That one blew up in your face.

Crowley: This was not us, Mark. Nice try, but this was all the far left fanning the flames of these stories, trying to accuse racism where it didn't exist.

Sawyer: The far left looks at the same polls that Republicans do -- that whenever the president's talking about race, it fans the flames of white racial resentment and his numbers go down. You learned that last summer when you saw him step out about the Henry Louis Gates issue. And that's how they learned how to play the racial resentment card. And that's what's been going on. That's why the numbers of people who think the president is a Muslim have been going up.

So it's simplistic to say that white people are turning against him because of race -- but a substantial part are, and data shows that.

You've gotta love those rare moments when truth is permitted to be spoken on Fox News. Especially about Fox itself.

[Note: Here's Media Matters' timeline of the Shirley Sherrod matter. You'll see that Fox -- including The O'Reilly Factor -- played a critical role in disseminating Breitbart's hoax.]

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[H/t Heather]

This seems to have been Laura Ingraham Tries Out for Her Own Fox Show Week at The O'Reilly Factor, and it's been quite a bust -- largely because Ingraham has tried to use O'Reilly-style bullying of her guests, and has not just been outplayed, she's really come off as a nasty, mean-spirited whiner.

That was particularly the case yesterday, when she tried playing the Right-Wing Victimology Card in the "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy: It's not Muslims who are being victimized by the hateful scapegoating of Islamophobes who want to associate them with all things 9/11 and blame them for all the world's terrorism -- rather, it's those very Islamophobes who are being victimized by the people calling them out for their bigotry.

It was particularly striking how she reacted when her guest -- a conservative Republican Muslim named Muhammad Ali Hassan -- tried to explain patiently that the very accusation that these Muslims and this mosque are somehow associated with terrorists is simply prima facie bigotry: "When you tell a group of people they're not allowed to build something because they're Muslim, that's bigotry." It really is that simple.

Ingraham acted as though someone had just spilled coffee on her lap. She began shouting Hassan down, talking over him, attacking his conservative bona fides because he dared to speak this simple truth.

And I just love it whenever right-wingers play the victim card. It's a classic case of the waving-the-bloody-shirt strategy, which magically transforms vicious and violent right-wing thugs into the woebegone victims of the meanness of the people they target.

It has really been quite the demonstration of the intellectual bankruptcy of conservatives this week at O'Reilly's place. Ingraham has tried to pose as someone smarter than her guests. Consistently, she's being outsmarted and made to look like the shallow and vicious harridan we all suspect she really is.

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Filling in for Bill O'Reilly last night on Fox, Laura Ingraham led off with a "Talking Points Memo" segment castigating Daisy Khan and the backers of the "Ground Zero Mosque" for having the temerity to point out how the whole debate has served to stir up a real wave of anti-Islamic hatred. Apparently, when minorities under siege in this country stand up for themselves, that's a real sign of "extremism" in Ingraham's book.

But then she brought on Alan Colmes, who promptly called her out for he naked hypocrisy -- having, after all, not so long hosted an interview with Daisy Khan in which Ingraham declared: "I like what you're doing."

COLMES: This is worth seeing who the intolerant people are in this country. It's interesting that the word "tolerance" was used with you and the love fest you had with Liz Cheney. But the real intolerance we're seeing are from those people who don't seem to believe in religious freedom in this country. And I'm interested that you were very much for this when you interviewed Daisy Khan or spoke with her.

INGRAHAM: Actually, you're not reading the transcript correctly, Alan.

COLMES: I did read the transcript.

INGRAHAM: I never said I was for building the mosque--

COLMES: You actually did.

INGRAHAM: --600 feet from Ground Zero.

COLMES: You actually said I don't have a problem--

INGRAHAM: I said I like what you're doing. No, I said--

COLMES: I like what you're doing, which is--

INGRAHAM: No, I said I can't find a lot of people who have a problem with it. I like what she said--

COLMES: Yes.

INGRAHAM: --about bringing Muslims into the American experience.

COLMES: Right and that--

INGRAHAM: And I repeated that last night. Absolutely.

COLMES: And that hasn't changed. That hasn't changed.

INGRAHAM: When she goes on television and calls people who question the positioning of the mosque, where it is, not the right to build it--

COLMES: Right.

INGRAHAM: --but the place of building as people who hate Muslims--

COLMES: You know--

INGRAHAM: --I reject that. That's intolerant.

Memo to Ingraham: There's an important -- and large -- difference between declaring that the opposition to the mosque is stirring up Islamohobia and claiming that everyone who's opposed to the mosque is a bigot. Khan says the former, not the latter.

In any event, Ingraham then immediately retreated to the day's favorite Fox talking point -- namely, the suggestion by the mosque's imam that America has Muslim "blood on its hands" in Iraq:

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Laura Ingraham, filling in for Bill O'Reilly last night, invited Karl Rove on to come and whine about how mean President Obama is for ripping into the deficit-spending policies of President Bush. He even calls Obama a "teenager" and "juvenile" for, um, pointing out the truth that Karl Rove hates to hear.

But then Ingraham pointed out that Bush was not particularly beloved of the new conservative-movement darlings, the Tea Partiers:

Ingraham: You speak to a lot of the Tea Party folks. I mean, you go all across the country promoting your book. You know, though, that the Tea Party people will say, 'Look, you know, we love President Bush, he's a patriot, he's a great man, but these guys were deficit spending, these guys were soft on the border, they weren't listening to us.' And they're running against candidates like Bennett in Utah, who got his marching orders, and others across the United States, who are the Establishment candidates, who supported a lot of what President Bush did, Karl. And how do you respond to that charge?

Rove: Well, first of all, look, I've just come through a 111-city book tour and I ran into a lot of Tea Party people. I didn't get that animus toward President Bush that you got. In fact, I got a lot of people who said 'We miss him terribly, we wish he were back in office.'

Apparently Rove has managed to miss all those episodes of the Glenn Beck program where he definitively labeled George W. Bush a "progressive Republican" -- and therefore part of the "cancer" that's destroying America -- as he did, for instance, in this bit:

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Ever notice that Rove never shows up on the Beck program?

But Rove is no doubt right. There certainly ARE a lot of Tea Partiers who looooved them some deficit spending when it was a Republican president doing it while cutting taxes for the wealthy. And they really don't want to have to admit that they were wrong. They just want to have something to bitch at Obama about, because that's who they ALL have an animus toward.

Rove is really just admitting what we already know: The Tea Party is really just the Sore Loserman Party.

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So, I have a question:

Since when was it any damn news anchor's business how good of a Catholic their guests are?

Last night, filling in for Bill O'Reilly on his Fox program, Laura Ingraham invited on Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Illinois to talk about health-care reform and comprehensive immigration reform, Ingraham took a wild tack to go after Gutierrez: She questioned him on how good of a Catholic he was, because he had announced he was voting in favor of President Obama's health-care package.

Her reasoning was that the national Catholic Bishops' conference had announced that anyone voting in favor of the bill would not be a good Catholic. As Gutierrez tried to politely point out, this really is a church-state separation matter. Or has Ingraham forgotten the bad old days when it was pro forma for anti-Catholic bigots to accuse Catholic politicians of doing the bidding of the Vatican?

Maybe Ingraham should ask those nuns who defied the bishops just how good of Catholics they are. Hold out your wrists, young lady!

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If you thought, after watching the two segments of Jon Stewart's interview with Bill O'Reilly this week, that Stewart landed some telling observations, but he seemed to pull his punches a bit -- or at least they seemed to have been pulled for him -- you were right.

If you also noticed, as I did while making the clip, that the segments were pretty hamhandedly edited -- the continuity, especially in terms of Stewart's demeanor, was jarring -- it turns out you were also right.

Fox actually put the entire, unedited version of the interview up on its site, and the difference is jaw-dropping.

John Cook at Gawker (with the help of a couple of interns) got ahold of the full interview first, and provides a nice dissection that you should read (and watch) in full.

We've clipped some of the highlights for our own video, above.

If nothing else, the unedited video will be long remembered for the following quip:

I know what this is. I come from Jersey—it's the same thing: "I'm not saying your mother's a whore. I'm just saying she has sex for money. With people." [F]ox News used to be all about, you don't criticize a president during wartime. It's unacceptable, it's treasonous, it gives aid and comfort to the enemy. All of a sudden, for some reason you can run out there and say, "Barack Obama is destroying the fabric of this country."

Though I also thought this exchange was perhaps the most telling:

Stewart: But let's go into this. Because all I hear on your network is, this guy is -- it's tyranny, and socialism.

O'Reilly: That's what he believes.

Stewart: So, how is Barack Obama a socialist? As far as I can see, the majority of the billions of dollars he's given, he's given to banks. So if he is a socialist, he's dyslexic! Because when you redistribute the wealth, it's supposed to be going to --

O'Reilly: But he does believe in redistribution of income.

Stewart: Well, he's redistributed it to the banks.

O'Reilly: And that is a socialist tenet -- no, he's redistributing it --

Stewart: He's going up. He's dyslexic! It's supposed to be coming down!

O'Reilly: He -- Look. If you don't know that the Obama administration is redistributing income, then I'm gonna have to haul your program away from you. Get you off the air.

Stewart: Let me ask you: What is different about his redistribution of income and all other presidents -- he wants to raise the marginal tax rate back to where it was during the Clinton era. Was Clinton a socialist?

O'Reilly: He has promoted a variety of programs, OK, that --

Stewart: We already have Medicare, right? We have Medicaid. We have Social Security. Are we a socialist country? Do you want to get rid of those three?

O'Reilly: No.

Stewart: So are we a socialist country?

O'Reilly: But I want to moderate them so we don't go bankrupt.

Stewart: OK, but that's different. Now you're talking about fiscal responsibility.

O'Reilly: In a socialist country, the government pays for all of these entitlements -- the Obama administration is down that path.

Stewart: Who pays for Medicare? Who pays for Medicaid?

O'Reilly: The government pays for it.

Stewart: So now we're socialist.

O'Reilly: But now we're on Medicaid and Medicare with steroids, with the new health care bill. That's steroids!

Stewart: Once again, this is like the old joke. "Would you sleep with me for ten dollars?" "No." "Would you sleep with me for a million?" "OK." So now we know what you are, you're just negotiating price. For you guys to stand up --

O'Reilly: Of course, that's the degree of anybody when you describe socialism. There are little socialistic programs and giant socialist programs. OK? And some people believe that Obama is on the huge government creation -- the government dominance. And you yourself said it! You yourself said it! He wants more regulation, he wants to create things, he wants big government.

Stewart: But he's given back so much executive power!

O'Reilly: What?

Stewart: Executive power!

O'Reilly: He hasn't given back anything. He just hasn't handled the Congress. He doesn't know how to handle them yet. That's inexperience. Now --

Stewart: So he's not a tyrant. Because if he's a tyrant, then he's pretty lame for a tyrant.

O'Reilly: I don't object --

Stewart: How many tyrants do you know that really suffer because they can't get cloture? Very few.

OK, OK. So it wasn't a literal evisceration. Stewart did not unzip O'Reilly from scrote to sternum and empty out his intestines. We understand that he's a tad sensitive about how his takedowns are described these days.

Still, you can sure see why O'Reilly's producers edited this stuff out. Lord knows the regular septuagenarian Bold/Fresh audience would have fainted dead away.

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Seems that Sarah Palin isn't the only right-winger out there trying to convince the world that the "death panels" actually exist. Indeed, as Media Matters notes, there's a whole bandwidth of wingnuts out there trying to revive the notion.

One of these is the Troll Who Lives Under the Bridge And Sucks Your Toes, aka Dick Morris, who was on The O'Reilly Factor earlier this week with fill-in host Monica Crowley:

Morris: Look, Monica, it's one thing to load a big bill with pork. That's what the stimulus package was. But to load a health-care bill, where Americans are seriously worried that this is gonna destroy the health care their parents get, that this is gonna lead to government-imposed euthanasia, where they'll say, 'No, you can't have this annual mammogram, because I know it might save your life, but it costs too much.' 'No, you can't have this drug for colon cancer, because the drug we're going to let you take isn't as good as this one, but we can't afford it.' When we come to those kind of euthanasia-like decisions, to learn that the reason the Senate approved this was some little bitty payoff that went on to some insurance company that gave you a campaign contribution -- that kind of tawdry stuff for this kind of magnitude of deformity on the system is enough to drive people crazy -- me included.

I've always said that anyone who takes Dick Morris's advice deserves everything they get, because the man is such a font of misinformation. That includes a lot of intentional disinformation, promoting provably false "facts" that unhinge the people who absorb this crap. As we can see.

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John Gibson has a new book out hilariously titled How the Left Swiftboated America: The Liberal Media Conspiracy To Make You Think George Bush Was The Worst President In History, and he was touring his old haunts at Fox News yesterday -- first at Fox and Friends and then with Bill O'Reilly -- pitching it and showing off his Kewl New Look (like the goatee?).

His chief line: "They lied through their teeth!"

He meant the evil liberals who are tearing down poor George W. Bush's legacy, of course.

It should be entertaining to see how Gibson manages to translate "openly discussing Bush's actual record" -- from his manifest failures with Katrina to the destroyed economy -- into "lying through their teeth," but Gibson no doubt hired the best propagandists money could buy to ghost-write his book.

But the title is especially interesting in this context, because it's obvious now that Gibson equates "Swiftboating" with "lying through your teeth".

What's interesting about this is that, back in 2004, when the Swift Boat folks were appearing on Fox News en masse in real time and in fact lying through their teeth, John Gibson actually told his viewers they were telling the truth.

Not only that, Gibson attacked other media outlets for failing to run with the Swift Boat stories. He also carried "news" reports treating the Swift Boaters as credible sources.

So who was lying through their teeth back then, and who's doing it now? We suspect that John Gibson hasn't any idea how to distinguish them -- but he does know how to write a book that will sell red meat on the right-wing talk circuit.

Blue Texan has more.

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Sure enough, just as Nicole wondered, Juan Williams was pretty bent out of shape over Warren Ballentine's calling him out -- using black cultural lingo -- for being such a willing supplicant to the "Limbaugh is being oppressed by mean black people" meme currently popular in right-wing circles.

So who does he bring on to buttress his claim that liberals are being bigots? Why, none other than Tammy Bruce and ... the Rev. Ken Hutcherson!

Bruce is bad enough. This is the person who called Michelle Obama "trash"

But Hutcherson? That's rich.

Folks outside the Seattle area may not know a lot about Hutcherson, so

they just see him as a black conservative. Which is common enough, especially on Fox. It's more genuine than being a fake liberal like Williams, at least.

But he's also one of the most prominent anti-gay bigots in the state, and for that matter on the West Coast.

This is a man who told his flock that "God hates effeminate men".

He also headed up an initiative to legalize anti-gay discrimination in Washington state. (It went down in flames.)

Of even deeper concern is his heavy involvement in promoting a virulent and violent anti-gay organization called Watchmen on the Walls. This is a global evangelical-Christian outfit that, elsewhere in the world (particularly in Eastern Europe) is associated with violent anti-gay hate crimes.

I reported on a Watchmen gathering in nearby Lynnwood a couple of years ago (photos here). I also remember his sermon very clearly:

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