Leslie Savan

Lefty Blogger: Media Coverage of Jade Helm Protests ‘Validates the Paranoia’ of Right-Wingers
By Tom Johnson | May 12, 2015 | 10:28 AM EDT

Mainstream pundits generally have seen the protests over Jade Helm 15 as an embarrassment to conservatives, but blogger Leslie Savan of The Nation suggested in a Friday post that looking silly now may benefit the right in the long run.

The Jade Helm uproar, opined Savan, “is like Obamacare death panels, or Sharia law coming to a court near you, or fluoride in the water supply. It doesn’t matter if the particular charge is proven to be completely false. Just getting the larger idea (don’t trust Obama’s feds, they want to un-cling you from your guns and religion) into the mainstream media is a victory. It validates the paranoia.”

Nation Writer’s Farewell to The Colbert Report: ‘I Laugh So Hard I Cry, and In Crying, I Swoon’
By Tom Johnson | December 19, 2014 | 10:10 PM EST

Leslie Savan writes that “as a character, and not merely a critic, of the right, [Stephen] Colbert held a unique key to the riddle of modern conservatism: How do they keep getting away with it? Why have so many conservatives turned into such small-minded haters and deniers of science, of reality?”

Lefty Blogger: ‘The Right…Refuses to See That [Al] Sharpton Has Mellowed or Changed’
By Tom Johnson | December 11, 2014 | 9:37 PM EST

The Nation’s Leslie Savan alleges that conservatives still are fixated on the image of the Rev. Al as “a radical and a race hustler,” and opines that “because he’s the best-known single figure in the growing protest movement, the right will blame him for any violence.”

Nation Media Blogger: Nets 'Afraid of the Far Right,' Tea Party Guests on Sunday Shows Aren’t ‘Grilled Terribly Hard’
By Tom Johnson | July 10, 2014 | 10:12 PM EDT

When TV’s Sunday-morning political chat shows book conservative guests, maybe they’re just trying to be evenhanded, but The Nation media blogger Leslie Savan opined in a Tuesday post that often the programs do it so that the right will be less likely to badger them about their liberal bias. As Savan put it, “Sometimes seeking balance is really a plea to call off the dogs.”

What riled up Savan in the first place was one such booking, of Dinesh D’Souza on last Sunday’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” but she also griped about the Sunday shows generally letting Tea Party guests off easy (“It’s as if mainstream media are as afraid of the far right as John Boehner is”) as well as about “the corporate media…offer[ing] their stage to far-right media figures” including Laura Ingraham.

Radical Left Amazed MSNBC Can Be 'So Unabashedly Left-Liberal and Survive In the Corporate Media'
By Tim Graham | March 2, 2014 | 7:38 AM EST

They love MSNBC at the hard-left magazine The Nation. Their writers – Ari Melber and Melissa Harris-Perry – have become MSNBC “talent.” Still, in an article on "MSNBC And Its Discontents,"  former Village Voice advertising critic Leslie Savan admitted there that “The daily, hour-long format, often featuring hosts from other MSNBC shows and a familiar rotation of guest pundits can be mind-numbing,” as with other cable-news stations. She wasn't a fan of the Ronan Farrow debut, which she found dull.

But Savan has a confession: she watches MSNBC too much, and she’s amazed a network “can be so unabashedly left-liberal and survive in the corporate media”:

The Nation: Prominent CPAC Speakers All Sound like Joe Stack
By Rusty Weiss | February 23, 2010 | 12:03 AM EST
We've seen the likes of Time Magazine, MSNBC, the Washington Post, and Newsweek link the Joe Stack airplane attack to the conservative movement.  But in an interesting twist, a political blogger for The Nation has inexplicably linked Stack to several players at the recent CPAC convention - including Tim Pawlenty, Scott Brown, and most notably Glenn Beck. 

Leslie Savan wastes little time delving into despicable comparisons from the onset with the title to her rant: 

Glenn Beck Dodges Incoming Plane at CPAC

From there, the associations to Stack stretch ever further.  Savan somehow manages to draw parallels between Pawlenty's comment about taking a 9-iron to big government, and the attack (emphasis mine throughout):

"Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty strained to hit a Southern-sheriff note of populist threat by suggesting, rather oddly, that conservatives were cuckolded wives who, like Tiger Woods's spouse, should "take a 9-iron and smash the window out of big government in this country!"--thereby managing to invoke both the wall of shattered glass windows at the Echelon Building and the marital troubles that may have contributed to Stack's anger."

It would seem the term ‘metaphor' is beyond the writer's grasp. 

Next up is an out of context quote from Scott Brown: