Joe Scarborough doesn't just take his Obama-landslide talk to NBC. He also spewed some of it on the Tavis Smiley show on PBS on Monday night. "This past month has been – and I was saying it this morning on the [MSNBC] show – this has been the worst month for the Republican Party since August of 1974 when Richard Nixon resigned, and I mean that."
To which Smiley replied: "Wow, wow, wow, wow." Then Scarborough delighted his NBC overlords by ripping into Rick Santorum:
NPR is supposed to be a very, very civil space to talk. But apparently not when NPR stations air the weekend talk show of PBS star Tavis Smiley and his Marxist professor friend, Cornel West. Brian Maloney at the Radio Equalizer was disturbed by West alleging the media and the politicians only care about the "vanilla side of town" and the hosts were "laughing hysterically at a 'kill Whitey' joke." Their guest was 1970s Saturday Night Live star Garrett Morris. Maloney asked, "Can you imagine jokes about killing black people airing on NPR?"
PBS host and leftist activist Tavis Smiley called out Republican candidates for their hostility to the poor in America, on Thursday morning on MSNBC. Appearing during the 7 a.m. hour of Morning Joe, he singled out four candidates by name and warned that "we're in a world of trouble" due to their campaign trail rhetoric.
As a PBS host, Smiley benefits from public funding. That has not stopped him in the past for making outrageous liberal remarks, and it didn't stop him on Thursday when he railed against a Congressional "bipartisan consensus that the poor just don't matter."
Hosting two far-left activists, CNN's Suzanne Malveaux teed them up with "controversial" quotes from Republican presidential hopefuls that she said "people found quite offensive and strange." The interview with PBS's Tavis Smiley and Princeton professor Cornel West aired during the 12 p.m. hour of Newsroom.
Unsurprisingly, the duo bashed Republicans and hit President Obama from the left. Malveaux simply provided a podium for them to proclaim their liberal gospel. The two "controversial" soundbites that were aired were quotes from candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum:
How do you get a liberal talk radio host to do your bidding?
Easy. Just threaten his future invitations to White House events if you are a Democrat president. Such was apparently the case with Tavis Smiley of the Smiley & West radio show which he co-hosts with Cornell West. According to Politico, Smiley was recently ousted as the speaker of the upcoming Martin Luther King luncheon.
New York Times media reporter Brian Stelter marked the 15th anniversary of Fox News on the front of Monday’s Business section with a profile of host Sean Hannity, whose program has been a channel mainstay from the beginning: “Victory Lap for Fox and Hannity.”
Stelter wasn’t hostile, but did use something a guest said on Hannity’s show to accuse Hannity of instigating “inflammatory rhetoric.” But another Stelter story in the same section failed to criticize a left-wing figure, Tavis Smiley, who engages in truly inflammatory rhetoric from a secure public perch at PBS.
To answer Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain's claim that racism is not a big factor in African-American unemployment, CNN brought on radical left-wing activists Professor Cornel West of Princeton and Tavis Smiley of PBS, both of who co-host a public radio talk show.
Not-surprisingly, West and Smiley, both African-Americans, ripped Cain's comments. West griped that Cain needs to "get off the symbolic crack pipe" and added that he has "mediocrity, mendacity, mean-spiritedness toward the poor, and now mean-spiritedness toward black people fighting for their lives in this very ugly economy."
PBS talk show host Tavis Smiley interviewed Michael Moore on Monday night, and it wasn’t hardball time. Smiley asked: “What about growing up in Flint allowed you, moved you, in the direction of being the humanist that you are?” He also explicitly compared Moore to Martin Luther King, both seeking a “vocation of agony.”
But Smiley stayed true to his record of whacking President Obama from the left, asking Moore if he is finally seeing the light about “the venom and the vitriol and the vulgarity of the enemy that he’s up against?” Smiley isn't looking in the mirror. He means the conservatives.
A skirmish broke out on Morning Joe today as PBS host Tavis Smiley claimed President George W. Bush "lied" the USA into the war in Iraq. Joe Scarborough and--surprisingly--Jon Meacham forcefully refuted Smiley's slur.
Scarborough unwittingly provoked the incident when, commenting on yesterday's 9-11 observances, he called for a Kumbaya moment in which Americans would put aside politics and thank presidents Bush and Obama for keeping the country safe. That set Smiley off: "the reality is that one of those guys lied to the American people"--and the fight was on. View video after the jump.
A taxpayer who doesn’t favor Barack Obama might not mind subsidizing a show where he’s attacked as unserious about the country’s problems. But with PBS talk-show host Tavis Smiley, it’s been a relentless attack on Obama from the left. Everything he’s done isn’t half-socialist enough.
On Wednesday, Smiley welcomed fellow leftist and former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert to his show to denounce Republicans for keeping Obama from passing a woefully insufficient second “stimulus” attempt. Herbert thinks Obama's new spending proposal is about one-tenth of what's needed. We need a four-trillion-dollar plan.
... which helps explain why conservative radio continues to dominate the airwaves while Air America Radio, uh, went kaput.
During a recent appearance on Tavis Smiley's PBS show, enviro lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose "Ring of Fire" show ran on Air America, made what reasonable souls among us might construe as a questionable claim.
Here's Kennedy responding to a question from Smiley on how liberals can better hone their message (video clip after page break) --
After radical Princeton professor Cornel West savagely attacked President Obama as a Wall Street mascot and puppet, it would hardly be surprising that PBS talk-show host Tavis Smiley would provide him a forum on Wednesday night to repeat his analysis – after all, Smiley and West host a public-radio show together. But it’s still amazing that he doesn’t see his insults as very insulting:
SMILEY: Did he have to be called a Black mascot and a Black puppet? There are those who suggested that you were petty, for a man who talks as much about love as you do, that you were petty for using terminology like "mascot" and "puppet."
WEST: Well, one, I am the kind of Christian, I love mascots. I love puppets, too.