What can I say to add to what the panel on the Chris Matthews show had to say about health care reform other than thanks for recommending a kick on the chin Chris? Wall Street doesn't like it so let's carry water for the investment class that's making money from the insurance industry denying care to average Americans, and let's use the fear of the economy getting worse that Wall Street helped to wreck as a reason to feign concern over whether anything gets done or not. And while we're at it, let's also tell the "left wing" that they need to "take it on the chin" so we don't upset the Wall Street bankers.

About the only good thing I saw coming out of this segment was the admission that a whole lot of what's driving the health care debate in this country is not about what's good for Americans, but what's good for Wall Street. Until that changes, nothing is going to improve with our health insurance or health care delivery system in the United States.

Even after showing a poll which shows that the majority of the opposition to the President is comprised of Southern, white, older men and white Evangelicals, and after playing some of the over the top attacks on President Obama by the likes of Zell Miller and Rush Limbaugh, Matthews still chooses to frame the first part of his panel debate this way.

Matthews: Did the Sotomayor nomination, the combinization of all those discussions about the wise Latina woman and how she'd be a Justice, did the discussion by the President where he talked about the sergeant in Cambridge acting stupidly, did he open the door to this sort of ethnic attack on him? An attack on his very legitimacy?

What astounded me about the panel's response is not one of them bothered to mention that maybe it is their job to beat back at this nonsense. While acknowledging the right wing lunacy, they all seemed to feign helplessness with what to do about it. None of them stated clearly that the Sotomayor nomination or the Gates dust up nonsense was not a legitimate reason for the right wing to be going ballistic at these town halls, and with the over the top racial attacks on President Obama.

John Heilemann is dead wrong. The President did not give them a "permission slip" to act this way, and it is in no way "unintentional" that they wanted to open the door to racial attacks. They were already looking for any excuse to do it and whether it was Sotomayor or Gates or whatever, this would have happened sooner or later because the haters simply will never accept that a black man was elected President in the United States.

This is the Sarah Palin nut jobs gone wild, morphed into the tea baggers movement, and it is about hate, pure and simple. End of story. And unfortunately I don't think these people are going to stop until someone ends up dead, and even that may not stop them.

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Part two of the Peggy and Kathleen show on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. This time the topic is health care. After some straight talk from Paul Krugman about the importance of including a public option to control costs and the fact that there is no real competition in the health care markets now, we get another "Oh my goodness" moment from Peggy Noonan. Noonan seems to think she knows what most "normal humans" think and forget all those mushy details those darned economists like Krugman tend to bring up. Let's just talk about taxes. Doing her best to channel a little bit of Sarah Palin here:

Noonan: Oh my goodness. Well let...you know how I feel from my column this week. I think things have become a little bit scattered. Um...Paul...if you just limit this conversation to taxes alone, you have some sense that people, normal humans in America, might be getting a little bit nervous about health care and energy care and all of this stuff. America has a huge deficit. We've never seen anything like it before.

Spending is very big. A Warren Buffet, who people tend to trust on economic matters says look, this energy thing the House just passed is a big tax. Health care, the Congressional Budget Office says is probably $1.8 trillion over the next ten years...

Krugman: No...it's not...

Noonan: Well, without gettin' into the weeds, you gotta' assume it's going to cost money. We've got California going under. We've got New York with I think a $20 billion deficit. They're going to be raising taxes. Income taxes are going to be going on up. At a certain point, you've got to realize, people are going to say "Whoa...this is no good. You've got to stop this." (crosstalk) Yes.

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Listening to Republicans Peggy Noonan and Kathleen Parker on the panel of This Week practically swooning over Mark Sanford's emails to his mistress and excusing his behavior was truly a sight to behold. They both looked downright giddy this morning while dismissing his actions because he was in love.

Paul Krugman and Michael Eric Dyson do their best to try to point out that the trouble is not so much the cheating since it is human nature which is not reserved for one party, but the hypocrisy of the Republicans being the party of family values and people like Mark Sanford's words coming back to bite him. Of course Noonan and Parker were having none of that.

Noonan: Ooohh...I never think that when politicians, Democrats and Republicans get in these stories, that the story itself, the sin itself if you will, undermines what the politician stands for necessarily. Mark Sanford's Libertarian/traditional views are right or wrong on their own. Um..I must say I've been thinking about Clinton a lot and it seems to me that in the Clinton era, during that famous story, a new devilishness was unleashed, especially in the media where a new meanness took style.

And I feel like in every one of the scandals of the past few months, and we've had so many of them, the political sex scandals, the level of meanness of the response, publicly, and on cable and the newspapers, gets meaner each time. It seems to me that we are coming, we are reacting as almost as a nation, but certainly in the media as kind of Puritans without faith, which is the worst of both worlds. To be Puritanical and not even have faith.

I'm sorry Peggy, but the treatment any of the Republicans of late have gotten in the press pales in comparison to what the media did to Bill Clinton. And the media are not the ones being Puritans. The Republicans are the ones who have held themselves out there as the party of virtue and family values. The press didn't invent that.

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(h/t David)

Oh poor, put-upon Bill O'Reilly. Those mean old "liberals" in the media are just itching to blame him for the assassination of Dr. George Tiller. Never mind that the only "liberal" cited is Olbermann, who flatly rejects the label and those who did actually call attention to the inciting rhetoric of O'Reilly in regards to Tiller were bloggers like C&L, who of course, were not invited by Howard Kurtz to give their point of view.

Kathleen Parker has the unenviable job of defending O'Reilly, though it's made easier by Kurtz's framing, which shows clearly where his sympathies lie:

KURTZ: Some liberal commentators couldn’t wait to accuse O’Reilly of inciting the violence that led to George Tiller’s murder. Fair or unfair?

PARKER: Irrelevant. I mean, yes, of course, it’s unfair. You can’t blame anyone for a crime except the person that commits the crime. Clearly, people on the far left are always looking for an excuse to attack Bill O’Reilly. And Keith Olbermann and O’Reilly tend to bounce off each other a good bit. So I’m not sure who this argument is really between.

Um, news flash to Parker, you absolutely CAN blame someone who incites violence, even if they don't actually commit the act. Ask Charlie Manson.

Parker's viewpoint is a little morally troubling, as she tries to play false equivalencies in the abortion debate and pooh-pooh the violent rhetoric as an "all's fair as each side tries to defend their stance":

KURTZ: What George Tiller was doing was legal, although many people did not like what he was doing, but I also want to mention he was shot in 1993 when there was no “O’Reilly Factor”, like there was no Fox News. Do you think, Kathleen, that the people pointing the fingers at O’Reilly with varying degrees of fervor are politicizing this tragedy?

PARKER: Well, of course they are. This is…this is the Topic du Jour anyway, because of Obama’s recent address to Notre Dame. It’s on everyone’s mind. And you know, any opportunity for the pro-choice people to make their case more strongly is going to be taken advantage of, and same…and vice versa. I mean, we’re always listening to the extremes on either side. They’re the squeakiest wheels, the loudest voices and they get the attention.

So denouncing organizations that foment violence like Operation Rescue is the equivalent of shooting women's health providers? Defending the rights of women to make a legal choice is an extreme position? Really? Ugh, the morality of the "Moral Majority" is enough to make you sick.

But here's where it gets funny. After denouncing the media for going after Bill O'Reilly, Parker actually agrees with all those liberal talking heads (seriously, someone point out to me where these multitudes of liberals are, I need to do some DVR programming) that this tragic event should illustrate how important it is not to broadcast such violent rhetoric:

PARKER: I would love for the outcome of this to be that O’Reilly—and all of these talking heads who become so completely over the top so many times—just to say look, this is a teaching moment. We’re not gonna do this anymore. We’re not …we’re gonna make our cases as strongly, we’re going to be passionate, but we’re going to tone down the rhetoric. I mean, wouldn’t that be a great result?

Well, yes, it would, Kathleen...and that's why we're saying that Bill O'Reilly should take responsibility for that kind of violent rhetoric. Is that so hard to understand?

PARKER: The media followed the fire, clearly. You know, wherever the heat is, that’s where—and I’m part of the media, I know how this works, I’ve done this for a long time—where the action is. But there is, I think, the media are always going to defend the pro-choice position. They’re less likely to portray sympathetically the pro-life position, that’s just a fact.

Damn, and just when I thought you were getting it, Kathleen. The media (which is neither monolithic nor particularly liberal-leaning) is not defending the pro-choice position, you nimrod. That's the law of the land, whether you like it or not. Violating laws--like murder and terrorist acts--and trying to disrespect civil rights of others is not a sympathetic position for anyone to advocate.

Let's get ready to RUMBLE!
The stage is set. Conservatives are fighting one another to see who will dominate the now defunct Republican party. Christian Conservatives led by James Dobson have been running things since Newt Gingrich launched his Southern Strategy back in '94, but some conservatives are not staying silent any longer about the dominance the religious zealots have had. Kathleen Parker has been speaking up ever since Bill Kristol convinced John McCain to nominate Sarah Palin as VP in their losing effort. She was blasted for it by angry righty wingers.

KURTZ: Here is what you wrote this week: "Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn't, I should off myself."

Now, this is all because some readers didn't like what you had to say about Sarah Palin.

PARKER: Some people were very upset. Approximately 11,000 so far, and counting.

Yes, I wrote about Sarah Palin stepping down from the ticket. I felt after her third interview -- I didn't think any of her interviews were very good, but the third was catastrophic -- that she ought to leave the ticket and let McCain try to put somebody else in place to do a better job and help him with maybe the economy.

<>

KURTZ: What about the reaction? All those e-mails, all the vitriol directed at you, I mean, that has got to be somewhat depressing. Are you expected because you are on the conservative side of the spectrum to defend any nominee the Republican Party throws out there?

James Dobson is none too happy with Parker for not embracing the extremely radical values of Palin and is now urging his flock to go after Parker in his latest screed.

So, Kathleen Parker has determined that getting rid of social conservatives and shelving the values they fight for is the solution to what ails the Republican Party (“Giving Up on God,” Nov. 19). Isn’t that a little like Benedict Arnold handing George Washington a battle plan to win the Revolution?

Whatever she once was, Ms. Parker is certainly not a conservative anymore, having apparently realized it’s a lot easier to be popular among your journalistic peers when your keyboard tilts to the left. She writes that “armband religion” — those of us who “wear our faith on our sleeve,” I suppose, or is it meant to compare socially conservative Christians to Nazis? — is “killing the Republican Party.” Lest readers miss the point, she literally spells it out. The GOP’s big problem? G-O-D.

TAKE ACTION
Do you have something you'd like to say to Kathleen Parker about her recent column criticizing socially conservative Christians and their involvement in matters of government and public policy? You can send her an e-mail — please be respectful — through our Action Center.

This is an interesting fight taking place. The other favorite of social repressors is Bobby Jindal, the man who love Intelligent Design and brags about exorcisms. Poor Kathleen Parker, I almost feel for her.
Who will win?

From the Chris Matthews Show, Oct. 19, 2008.

Chris asks his panel of Kathleen Parker, Andrew Sullivan, Katy Kay and Mark Whitaker if the Republican party is out of ideas.

(h/t Heather)

Columnist Kathleen Parker is continuing her martyr tour to complain about the meanies who have gone after her for daring to say that Sarah Palin should step down.

Frankly, I'm a little disgusted by Parker's self-congratulatory stance of being "on the front lines" and taking fire for saying things that the GOP don't want to have said out loud. That's not bravery...that's acknowledging reality.

And though he doesn't get her to say it out right, I suspect there's another Barack voter sitting right there.

(h/t Heather)

The Republican Party has always had amazing message discipline when it comes to their talking heads. They have their talking points and dutifully repeat them verbatim, echoing throughout the media until they become accepted conventional wisdom, regardless of the truth of the matter.

That's what makes this segment from The Larry King Show so fascinating. The inclusion of Sarah Palin on the Hate Talk Express appears to have actually derailed the Republican Party too. And these talking heads, columnist Kathleen Parker, consultant Michelle Laxalt and Bay Buchanan, once so reliably in tune with the GOP, are imploding and scattering in different directions. Buchanan, sticks with the party line, even making up stats (90% of Republicans are behind this ticket? Uh, not even close). Parker sticks with her well-documented assertion that Palin should leave the ticket for the good of the party. And Laxalt takes feminist umbrage (seriously, what's a feminist doing in the GOP anyway) with the misogynistic bent of the McCain handlers, who send out a neophyte female politician but aren't "man" enough to not back her up:

In my estimation, she is being used unfairly as a tool by a team who, by the way, do not even support, nor does their candidate, equal pay for women for equal work. So if she is going to be the traditional vice presidential attack dog -- which I concur with Bay, that's very much a traditional role -- why didn't her male running mate, i.e. the candidate himself, man up and speak to those issues, calling his opponent essentially unpatriotic, calling him a terrorist?

I'm sorry. This is not the Republican Party that Bill Buckley, that Paul Laxalt, that Ronald Reagan raised me on. And I don't believe the American people like this kind of dirty politics. If they can't win fair and square, they shouldn't trash the other guy.

Transcripts below the fold

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Right wing columnist Kathleen Parker has been viciously attacked by over 11,000 right wing emailers for saying that she thought Sarah Palin wasn't qualified for the job. We're used to seeing the media attack the left wing bloggers by quoting anonymous comments left on our blogs which is supposed to be a fair substitute for our own writings. It's about time the right was exposed for this behavior as she appeared on CNN's Reliable Sources to discuss this incident.

KURTZ: Here is what you wrote this week: "Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn't, I should off myself."

Now, this is all because some readers didn't like what you had to say about Sarah Palin.

PARKER: Some people were very upset. Approximately 11,000 so far, and counting.

Yes, I wrote about Sarah Palin stepping down from the ticket. I felt after her third interview -- I didn't think any of her interviews were very good, but the third was catastrophic -- that she ought to leave the ticket and let McCain try to put somebody else in place to do a better job and help him with maybe the economy.

<>

KURTZ: What about the reaction? All those e-mails, all the vitriol directed at you, I mean, that has got to be somewhat depressing. Are you expected because you are on the conservative side of the spectrum to defend any nominee the Republican Party throws out there?

PARKER: Apparently. Apparently so.

KURTZ: And for those who missed the column, you said -- this was after one of her encounters with Katie Couric -- "If Palin were a man, we'd all be guffawing. And if B.S. were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself."

Their posters are as nasty and sleazy on the internet as anybody, but the media likes to create a false narrative about the left so they usually ignore it. However, Parker is one of their own and this time the Villagers didn't sweep it under the rug.

(transcripts below the fold via CNN)

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  FireDogLake:

Parker, who last week called for Palin to step down, now finds herself the target of a Wingnut Two Minutes of Hate.

Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn't, I should "off" myself. [..]

After 20 years of column writing, I'm familiar with angry mail. But the past few days have produced responses of a different order. Not just angry, but vicious and threatening.

And she knows vicious. Here's Parker in 2003, on the Democratic presidential candidates:

Here's a note I got recently from a friend and former Delta Force member, who has been observing American politics from the trenches: "These bastards like Clark and Kerry and that incipient ass, Dean, and Gephardt and Kucinich and that absolute mental midget Sharpton, race baiter, should all be lined up and shot."

Suck it up, Kathleen. You've been tossing red meat to a caged rabid animal for two decades. No sympathy when it finally bites you.

Now, she whines:

...when we decide that a person is a traitor and should die for having an opinion different from one's own, we cross into territory that puts all freedoms at risk.

You reap what you sow, Kathleen.  How do you think the liberal community has felt since George Bush took office?

Download | play    Download | play   (h/t Heather)

On Sunday's Q&A, host Brian Lamb sat down with National Review columnist Kathleen Parker to discuss her take on the comings and goings in Washington DC.  My buddy Heather noted this odd little bit of unsound morality and logic.  Parker wrote a scathing piece on McClellan's book What Happened for the NRO, coming thisclose to likening him to a serial killer (No, I'm not kidding, read it yourself).  See, for Parker, McClellan has reached the apex of immorality, because he listened to the Bush administration's plans, apparently put up no fight (of course, this is according to the White House, whose veracity should have dubious credibility) and then said nothing until he left the White House and wrote a book.  

Don't get me wrong, if I had been in Scott McClellan's position, you could be damn sure I would be speaking up loudly and longly while in the White House.  And I'd probably be out of a job and smeared within an inch of my life by the Karl Rove machine (see how they treated Paul O'Neill as an example).  But for Parker, the fact that he left the White House and then spoke up makes him more deplorable than those he spoke up against. 

Parker: ... I've met Scott and he is, comes across as just the sweetest, nicest fellow. I took great umbrage at this primarily because, whether the... you know, if... if he were... if he sat in those meetings where evidence was being trumped up and people are actually dying and never so much as cleared his throat or raised an eyebrow--which is what I'm told by everyone in the White House--then I think that he is guilty of something much greater than whatever he presents to the public in this book. You don't sit there and listen to what you now consider lies and know... you walk out the door. An honorable man walks out the door. And you can go and call a press conference if you are the Press Secretary of the President of the United States. You can call a press conference. You can walk out and get a book contract that day, but you don't sit through it for years and years and then say 'well, I think I'll go get a book contract and you know present basically my notes that I've taken all these years knowing that these people were doing wrong.'  So I simply don't trust a person like that.

But you'll trust the ones that did the lying and put the Americans in harm's way and continue to do so?  They are actually LESS offensive to your mind than someone whose conscience was so burdened that he left the job and spoke out against what happened?

Methinks someone needs their moral compass re-calibrated.

Transcripts below the fold: (thanks to Heather)

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