While lefties are foaming at the mouth over what Republican Senate candidates like Sharon Angle and Rand Paul have to say, they're not quite willing to publicly embrace or defend the antics of their own duly elected nominee, South Carolina U.S. Senate Democratic nominee Alvin Greene. That is, they weren't until now. 

On the Aug. 17 broadcast of her radio show, Randi Rhodes went to bat for Greene. According to Rhodes, the indiscretions that brought Greene indictments, in which he allegedly showed obscene photos to a University of South Carolina student and then talked about going to her dorm room, weren't really that bad. Although it's not clear if Rhodes was being serious, and it's difficult to tell, she claimed he was "sharing a wonderful moment of pornography" with this student and bewildered why such an approach warranted criminal charges.

"Let me tell you - you know my candidate for Senate in South Carolina is Alvin Greene," Rhodes said. "I left off where he was supposedly indicted for you know sharing a wonderful moment of pornography with a girl who was over 18 in a college library - in a college library where he had attended college by the way, so he still has his ID card to get on the campus, so. I don't know what law he broke, but apparently they say he did and they indicted him. And so the local TV went over to his house to see what his comments were about the indictment."

Brian Maloney at Radio Equalizer captured the bizarre (and no doubt jealous) analysis of  Rush Limbaugh on liberal talk radio over his remarks that "that cracker" George Steinbrenner made a lot of African-American millionaires as owner of the Yankees (and fired a lot of white managers). On Wednesday afternoon, Randi Rhodes tried to compare Limbaugh to Rev. Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps, who ruins the funerals of our soldiers:

This is his death, Rush Limbaugh, this is George Steinbrenner's death! Is there any event that you can't turn into a platform for racism? Rush Limbaugh has ruined more funerals than Fred Phelps ever dreamed of ruining!

I mean, he's much more widely distributed than Fred Phelps' little Westboro Baptist Church out of freaking Kansas that goes to, uh, you know, our soldier's funerals with signs that say God hates the F-word. I mean, really, this is what we've degenerated into and you want to, what, say America's the greatest country in the world.

On Tuesday's Randi Rhodes radio show, Rhodes was complaining that the stimulus money is running out, leading to layoffs of public employees. She lamented that Colorado Springs is going without street lighting and selling police helicopters, and starving the public sector is what conservatives want, because they hate public servants. 

And this is exactly why the conservatives keep harping on spending, spending, spending as the problem: because they know spending, spending, spending is the solution, and they don't want this solved! They don't want this solved because they hate government! They hate teachers. They hate police officers. They hate first responders. They hate firemen. They hate EMT workers. They want it all to be privatized! That's when you gonna get the haves having police protection and excellent schools and the have-nots having no police protection and no schools! And therein is the dreamworld for them. This is nirvana for them!

She said 32 states don't have the money for unemployment benefits, and that isn't because they've overreached, but because they're underpaid by the taxpayer. She's talk radio's answer to John Kenneth Galbraith. The public sector lives in "squalor." The fantasies about the conservative anarchists continued: 

Radio talk-show host Bill Press is the tiniest of fish in the radio ocean, but this minnow’s all over the place complaining about the whales. The problem is, of course, that if the market is any kind of measurement, no one knows, or cares, that he’s written a book. So he’s written a column to self-tout “Toxic Talk: How the Radical Right Has Poisoned America’s Airwaves.”

Press writes about the good ol’ days of civil discourse, but “that's not what we hear nonstop today.” And who’s to blame? “Honest disagreement on the issues has been replaced by a barrage of ugly name-calling from today's ministers of hate on the right.”

OK, then let’s see the evidence. But first, let’s dispense with the Michael Savage examples, shall we? Press cites this phony as screaming to a gay activist, “You should get AIDS and die, you pig!” That is true, but Press doesn’t tell you that a) that was not on his radio show; it was on MSNBC, and b) Savage was loudly condemned by conservatives (like yours truly), and MSNBC was congratulated when he was fired, though some of us also pointed out that MSNBC should never have hired this bigot in the first place. That example is evidence Press is doing a clip job, not a research project.

Left-wing radio host Randi Rhodes celebrated her one-year anniversary with Premiere Radio Networks on Friday’s show with her producer Dave giving her flowers. He oozed: "I just wanted to thank you because when we first started working together I said you rescued me like an oily bird on the shore of right-wing ideology, and I’ll always, forever be thankful." This spurred Rhodes to mourn the painful life of oppressed liberals who work at Fox News Channel (click here for audio):

I feel the worst, the worst, for the Fox News staff in New York. ‘Cause they’re all union guys, you know, these – I mean, they, and I met a bunch of them, and they’re like ‘Oh, you have no idea. Do you need any people? Can we come to work for you?’ I go, ‘uh, I don’t have much budget, but if I could, I’d take every one of ya, nestle ya in my armpit.’

Dave said it was "tortuous" and painful to have to monitor a right-wing host. Rhodes added they have to distort things at Fox: