Rush Limbaugh Calls Chris Hayes 'Insane' for Comparing Bain to Rev. Wright

January 13th, 2012 9:01 PM

On The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell on Thursday night, Chris Hayes of The Nation magazine (and a weekend host on MSNBC) conceded that the eruption of GOP Bain-hate might “inoculate” Mitt Romney -- even as he imagines Team Obama popping open the champagne. “ I think the analogy here is, if Jeremiah Wright tape had surfaced in October as opposed to April, that would have been much harder for the president.”

Is Bain Capital really as scandalous as Reverend "God Damn America" Wright? Rush Limbaugh was blunt on his show Friday about the Hayes comparison: “That is insane.”

Liberals are a bit giddy about all the "King of Bain" anti-Romney messaging from the Left, paid for by conservative financiers. Hayes was feeling generous that it was possible this could help Romney, if not likely:

LAWRENCE O’DONNELL This is really more, it seems to me, than the Obama campaign could have hoped for. They may have hoped for a longer contest for the nomination but they couldn`t have hoped for a better fight.

CHRIS HAYES: Yes. I`m amazed. They must be popping champagne. I mean, I think there`s --

WENDY SCHILLER. Brown University: I hope they are not popping champagne just yet. It’s premature.
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HAYES: Here`s what I`m trying to say. I think there is a way in which it`s feasible to conceive of this as inoculating in some ways. Because this story is burning up the airwaves, it`s on our air. It`s getting a lot of play right now. There is an argument I think you can make that it makes the story when these attacks come directly from the president or allied super PACs in the fall have less of a bite because people kind of know the story and they`ve made up their mind on it.

I think the analogy here is, if the Jeremiah Wright tape had surfaced in October as opposed to April, that would have been much harder for the president. We may have a President John McCain. I don`t know what would have happened if it surfaced in the general.

There is a chance of it happening this early allows the Romney campaign to figure out how they’re going to deal with it. For Romney to have his version of the Barack Obama Philadelphia speech where he talks about, you know, what capitalism is or something like that where he really takes it head on and that may end up benefiting the campaign in the long run. I don`t think that’s likely, but it’s possible.

Hayes thought the Romney equivalent of the "race speech" would somehow be a cartoonish Gordon Gekko "greed is good" speech. Wouldn't that have been like Obama making a speech that race-hatred like Wright's was good?

O`DONNELL: He would need to steal a lot of what Joe Scarborough just said, that look, this investing opportunity for entities like Brown University that is a noble, you know, place that needs to invest endowment and all that --

SCHILLER: Pension funds...

HAYES: Literally -- he literally needs to make the Gordon Gekko ‘greed is good’ speech, because the whole point is, the profit motive, I mean, the assumption is that the profit motive ultimately yields the best results.

And so, a company coming into an inefficient staple manufacturer or hanging folder manufacturer, purely looking for profit, purely out of self-interest and getting rid of those jobs and outsourcing them in the name of the efficiency, that that creates the greatest good for the greatest number. That is fundamental belief that we have in America about free enterprise. He has to defend that head on. And I think when it is defended head on, it`s subject to a lot more skepticism than we realize.