OK, maybe it's more accurate to say: Medved sneaked up on the Big Guy and kicked him in the knee.
"I love Rush," Medved told CNN's Howard Kurtz, "I'm grateful to him and I admire him greatly, but it's a terrible mistake to say on the air again and again, that this [the bad economy] is on purpose, because what happens if the economy does turn around? Will that be on purpose too?"
His point is not that it's bad, inaccurate or immoral but that it's not politically viable for 2012.
"None of the attacks on Mr. Obama's intentions offers an even vaguely plausible explanation of how the evil genius, once he has ruined our "strength, influence and standard of living," hopes to get himself re-elected. In a sense, the president's most paranoid critics pay him a perverse compliment in maintaining that his idealism burns with such pure, all-consuming heat that he remains blissfully unconcerned with minor matters like his electoral future. They label Mr. Obama as the political equivalent of a suicide bomber: so overcome with hatred (or "rage") that he's perfectly willing to blow himself up in order to inflict casualties on a society he loathes."
"Rush has changed," he told Kurtz, "I think that a large part of the conservative movement has changed. The conspiratorial stuff about President Obama - that he secretly hates America - is a different tone."
He said that Obama has never shown anything but that he's a Democrat in the mold of Jimmy Carter, Lyndon Johnson or FDR.
"He's a big government liberal. There's nothing that Obama has done as president in either appointments or policy that Hillary Clinton wouldn't have done, John Edwards wouldn't have done, or Joe Biden wouldn't have done." [emphasis ours]
Will Medved regret this apostasy, as so many others have, when they crossed the Maha Rushee? Will he be obliged to go hat-handed on Rush's show to beg his pardon, and seek atonement by osculation of the ample, imperial backside?
Medved's gratitude to Rush is for his entree into radio as a fill-in behind Rush's golden microphone in the mid-90's. When he got his own syndication in 1997, things, we're told, kind of chilled between them.
Dunno what Michael will do, but there aren't too many alternatives once you've crossed the line. All he's trying to do is to defeat Obama in 2012, just like Rush.
"The point is that you don't put your own self interest before the ahead of the country and then try to harm the country. It's not a strategy for reelection."
Seems reasonable, but reason isn't what's cool in Wingertown these days.
Medved quotes a "well-regarded" right-wing blogger who, under the headline, "Obama Well Knows What Chaos He Has Unleashed," declared: "My fear is that Obama is not naïve at all, but he instead knows only too well what he is doing, for he is eagerly promoting Islamic power in the world while diminishing the West."
These attitudes, says Medved "thrive well beyond" the wingosphere and such as the John Birch Society.
On Jan. 7, Sarah Palin spoke briefly on Laura Ingraham's radio show, saying, "What I believe that Obama is doing right now—he is hell-bent on weakening America." While acknowledging that "it's gonna get some people all wee-weed up again," she repeated and amplified her charge that "what Obama is doing" is "purposefully weakening America—because he understood that debt weakened America, domestically and internationally, and yet now he supports increasing debt."
The assumption that the president intends to harm or destroy the nation that elected him has become so widespread that the chief advertising pitch for Dinesh D'Souza's best-selling book, "The Roots of Obama's Rage," promises to "reveal Obama for who he really is: a man driven by the anti-colonial ideology of his father and the first American president to actually seek to reduce America's strength, influence and standard of living."
It's hard to imagine an Obama "raging" in any circumstance - has anyone actually seen him more than annoyed? Liberals are always trying to get him to be madder, and he keeps letting us down with his maddening thoughtfulness. His roiling fury must be kept in that secret, dark place where he keeps his deep hatred for white people, and his plans to destroy America while simultaneously taking control of the whole world.
Medved, a neoconservative and Reagan Republican reeks with conservative bona fides, but he's already being ripped in the nutosphere as "desperate to get the attention of the liberal media," and as a Reagan traitor, and an appeasing RINO with a "man crush on Obama."
Will he now be shunned as a pariah like David Brooks, David Frum, Chris Buckley, and Mark McKinnon after they preached modullation and moderation of the rapacious personal attacks on President Obama?
The right once listened to such as William F. Buckley who, in the early 1960's, turned down the volume and drummed the Birch Society (which was rife even back then with these same "New World Order" conspiracies) out of the conservative movement.
Nowadays though, the right-wing fringe is led and fed by Rush, Glenn Beck, and a legion of broadcast wannabes inspired not by civic zeal, but by hot rhetoric's ability to attract MSM attention which in turn drives ratings which in turn sells mattresses and gold bricks which in turn assures them of lucrative employment and celebrity for one more book.
For them, unlike those with true political interest, there's no future in moderating. Michael Medved et al can talk until they're blue in the face... the dittohead lemmings will keep tramping toward the cliff's edge of political self-destruction led by the corpulent entertainer and his clones.
(Can't wait to hear Rush's reaction to Medved. He always reacts to friendly fire... stay tuned.)
(H/T joanie)
ugh. Cannot listen to that fat buffoon.
1st, he must inform us that he is a huge media personality. Ok, he is uge, and it is a weekend so his normal viewers may have forgotten this.
2nd now he's slamming the First Lady on nutrition, complaining she was eating ribs on a ski vacation. Hey, fatass - you burn quite a few calories skiing, not that you would know...
Posted by: mark | February 21, 2011 at 09:20 AM
Nothing wrong with ribs. In fact, in the attempt to reduce fat in childrens diets, some children aren't getting enough fat and that is a problem, too. Has to do with seratonin and other brain chemicals. Children need some fat.
A balanced diet includes protein and fat and it is most important when children are developing. Even vegans were born of humans whose ancestors ate meat. It is part of our diet. Everybody is an expert these days.
Posted by: joanie | February 21, 2011 at 10:47 AM
Medved is still a far right disgrace who just last election time a few months ago was paraising the Repug clown candidate in Delaware and deriding those who were saying she had no chance of being elected. she had a really good chance, he said. Really. A few days ago he had a nujob flogging an anti-Obama book he wrote, on his lame radio show. This screed, which sounded like something from Regnery or other rightwing publishing house,claimed among other things that Obama didn't write his two books. I switched the radio off at that point, so i didnt know whether he went on to name the usual suspect the wacked righties have been claiming wrote the book- that ex- Weatherman bomber guy turned professor. I don'r believe Obama to be brilliant, and im not even an obama fan, but he is undeniably a quite intelligent fellow Does anyone relly think that htis ex-mad bomber professor guy is smarter and more capable of writing a book like this than Obama? The two books he wrote were not Dostoevsky novels and something a man of Obama's education and intellect could easily write, with perhaps some generous help from an editor. The writing prowess of the books, which were done in a competent workmanlike job, nothing more, was not the reason they sold. It was his life stories contained inside them . The idea that he would need a ghost writer to write his own life story for him is ridiculous. e
Posted by: Tommy008 | February 21, 2011 at 11:45 AM
this ghost writer claim might make sense if the hate screed guy on Medved was talking about say two autobiographical books Governor Jesse Ventura of Minnesota claimed he wrote himself. The Ventura guy is a cheap schoolyard bully and an undereducated boor. It does not make sense when you are comparing the mad bomber guy to a fellow who graduated from as high or a higher quality university than he did( probably higher...im taking a wild guess that the bomber guy did not go to the Ivy League) and was a professor at a more prestigious university than than the bomber/professor guy.
Posted by: Tommy008 | February 21, 2011 at 12:19 PM
ok i guess Bill Ayers, the mad bomber guy, went to Columbia teachers college for his masters and Michigan fo rhis B.A. Columbis is Ivy League, but Obama still wins on points. Look up Ventura's background on wikipedia if you want a good laugh.
Posted by: Tommy008 | February 21, 2011 at 12:27 PM
Medved is a mixed bag - he is a neocon - BAD ! but has some good moments as an interviewer and brings on guests from the left a fair amount and tries to stay civil in his interviews. He is wise enough to know that Palin is not presidential material, unlike some talkers on the right.
Posted by: KS | February 21, 2011 at 07:47 PM
You and I could do a blog on Mikes and Michaels in the radio biz and have plenty of content.
Posted by: Mike Barer | February 23, 2011 at 06:35 AM