As he was rushed into the emergency room at George Washington University Hospital, a grievously wounded President Ronald Reagan prayed for John Hinckley, the man who had just tried to kill him.

"He was a mixed-up young man from a fine family," Reagan wrote in his memoirs, "An American Life." "That day, I asked the Lord to heal him, and to this day, I still do." (Audio after the jump)

On the plus side, here you have an example of a liberal not blaming George W. Bush for, well, whatever. Instead, this specific left winger, radio talker Thom Hartmann, is going with the liberal fallback position - It's All Reagan's Fault. 

To earlier generations of leftists, Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy also proved useful as all-purpose boogeymen who could be cited repeatedly in vain attempts to end an argument. (Audio after the jump)

Libtalker Thom Hartmann has been on a tear of late, denouncing the GOP as "the party of suicide bombers" and comparing Sen. Ted Cruz to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

It was just a matter of time before Hartmann's hothouse rhetoric become a bit overheated even for him. That day came yesterday, after he derided House Speaker John Boehner as guilty of "manslaughter" for his role in the partial government shutdown, followed by Hartmann describing Boehner as "a killer." (Audio clips after the jump)

Far left radio host Thom Hartmann has said some really crazy stuff over the years such as that evil right-wing billionaires deliberately provoked the violence in Benghazi, Libya in order to make President Obama look bad. He’s also said that NPR is full of “right-wing bias.”

Hartmann’s latest delusion is particularly hilarious. He is quite convinced that congressional Republicans plotted to shut down the government as a way to distract people from the glorious rollout of the Obamacare health insurance exchanges. You know, the ones that less than 10 people in the entire country appear to have signed up for because of widespread system failures.

One of the reasons liberal talk radio has never been a big national success is the liberal elephant in the room: NPR. But when you're a leftist host like Thom Hartmann, NPR looks like a den of corporatist pigs about two political inches away from his villains, like the Koch brothers.

On Tuesday's show, he announced "I'm astounded that several times a week I hear on NPR somebody from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, treated as if they were some kind of an expert on something. These are front groups for the right-wing corporatists and the billionaires." You can't be an "expert" and a capitalist, apparently.