Like most liberal media members, Bill Maher thinks violent political rhetoric only comes from Republicans.
Proving this once again, HBO's "Real Time" host on Friday disputed former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele's claim that Democrats used such hostile talk against Republicans during the recent budget battle (video follows with transcript and commentary):
As NewsBusters previously reported, Congresswoman Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday Republican freshmen in the House "are here to kill women."
On CNN's "Reliable Sources" Sunday, host Howard Kurtz correctly wondered why this didn't cause any media outrage (video follows with transcript and commentary):
Despite it being only three months since Democrats and their media minions sharply criticized "violent rhetoric" and imagery in the wake of the tragic shootings in Tucson, left-leaning elected officials have been regularly using such language in regards to the budget battle without the slightest outrage from America's so-called journalists.
On Friday, conservative talk radio host Mark Levin took to the airwaves to challenge "Meet the Press" host David Gregory to report on Sunday's program what these Democrats have been saying (YouTube audio follows with commentary):
"In '94 people were elected simply to come here to kill the National Endowment for the Arts," claimed senior Democratic Congresswoman Louise Slaughter at a pro-choice rally on the National Mall Wednesday. "Now they're here to kill women." Slaughter, the ranking Democrat on the Rules Committee, went on to compare proposed GOP proposals on abortion, bizarrely, to "show-me-your-papers" policies in the Third Reich.
It's been two days since Slaughter made these incendiary and baseless remarks, yet there has been a virtual media blackout. So once again we have to ask, as did the Washington Examiner's David Freddoso, what if a Tea Partier had said it? [Disclosure: I also write for the Examiner]
The story was initially reported by NewsBusters sister site CNSNews.com, and aside from the Examiner, no other news organization has reported on Slaughter's absurd statement thus far. It's safe to assume that if a conservative Republican had made similar remarks, coverage would be significantly greater (check out the video of Slaughter's remarks below the break).
Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center was interviewed all over the liberal and hard-left media in the last week. On Tuesday, he appeared on Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now show to talk about the harsh tone of calling Obama a fascist -- even as they approvingly played audio of Rep. Louise Slaughter comparing her Republican colleagues to Mussolini for encouraging protesters:
I could not believe, last Sunday, probably one of the most beautiful days the Lord has made, was really destroyed for all of us by the actions that took place on the Capitol grounds....
And some of my colleagues went out on the balcony, looking a great deal like Mussolini, if you remember, those of us who are of a certain age, egging them on with megaphones, holding up signs saying “Kill.” Some of my African American colleagues—the great icon of civil rights, John Lewis, was harassed by people with very petty and small minds.
Potok was asked how this compared to the atmosphere before the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and of course, he found similarities. He argued that the right-wing reaction here is like the protests against the end of American slavery, the granting of women's suffrage, and large-scale Catholic immigration:
Let's see... The author of the bizarre solution to avoid a direct vote in the House of Representatives on the Senate ObamaCare bill is Congresswoman Louise Slaughter. Yet, to call it a "Slaughter Solution" is somehow an unfair Republican tactic. Such is the assertion of Brian Montopoli at the CBS Political Hotsheet:
The Republican Party already has plenty of evocative phrases with which to hammer the health care reform effort: "Government takeover," "ram down our throats," "job-killing monstrosity."
Now House Republican Leader John Boehner's office has come up with perhaps the most striking entry yet: "Slaughter Solution."
Sheryl Gay Stolberg devoted most of her article in Sunday’s New York Times detailing the concerns of radical feminists over the future of legalized abortion, specifically its support among the younger generations. Stolberg tried to downplay the larger opposition to abortion in the 18-30 year old demographic, and only one of the pro-abortion activists that she quoted in her article belonged to this group.
The New York Times correspondent began her article, “In Support of Abortion, It’s Personal vs. Political,” with a sympathetic personal anecdote from one of the aging radicals, Representative Louise Slaughter of New York: “In the early 1950s, a coal miner’s daughter from rural Kentucky named Louise McIntosh encountered the shadowy world of illegal abortion. A friend was pregnant...and Ms. McIntosh was keeper of a secret that, if spilled, could have led to family disgrace. The turmoil ended quietly in a doctor’s office... Today, Louise McIntosh is Representative Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat of New York. At 80, she is co-chairwoman of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus — a member of what Nancy Keenan, president of Naral Pro-Choice America, calls ‘the menopausal militia.’”
This so-called militia, and the wider “abortion rights movement,” according to Stolberg, has been “forced...to turn inward, raising questions about how to carry their agenda forward in a complex, 21st-century world.” The reason: “a generational divide — not because younger women are any less supportive of abortion rights than their elders, but because their frame of reference is different.” The correspondent continued that “[p]olls over the last two decades have shown that a clear majority of Americans support the right to abortion, and there’s little evidence of a difference between those over 30 and under 30, but the vocabulary of the debate has shifted with the political culture.”
Democrats in Congress say the darndest things, don't they?
My favorite recent example -- 10-term Congresswoman Louise Slaughter of New York talking with liberal radio host Ed Schultz on Tuesday about why she voted in favor of bailing out Detroit (click here for audio) --
SCHULTZ: The Big Three, how did you, you voted in favor of that.
SLAUGHTER: I did, because one in 10 jobs in the United States is tied to what happens to them. I've been on their back as long as I can remember. When I was in the state legislature in the '80s, we passed a seat belt law in New York. And they fought us tooth and nail and (said) if they had to put in seat belts in cars they would surely go broke. And I remember that just before I went down to vote an ophthalmologist from my district called and said, please go down and tell them how hard it is to dig glass out of eyes. But they fought every thing in the world that we ever tried to do, always at the same time that the foreign automakers were doing it and cleaning their clock. I've never understood their reluctance really to do things to help themselves. I guess their political situation was just so good in Washington they didn't have to worry about it.
On Friday's Countdown, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann charged that the "endless war and endless spending" had "crippled our ability to repair or just check our infrastructure," as he hosted Air America's Rachel Maddow in a discussion blaming the Minneapolis bridge collapse on Iraq war spending and unwillingness by conservatives to raise taxes. Olbermann quoted Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar's charge of "messed up priorities" and New York Democratic Congresswoman Louise Slaughter's labeling of bridge collapse victims as "almost victims of war" because "perpetual war depletes the funds available to maintain our infrastructure." Maddow charged that America is "paying this incredible deadly price for a brand of American conservatism that hates and demeans government." (Transcript follows)