Rush Limbaugh's Lovely "Racially Charged" Songs About Sharpton And Obama
(April 27, 2007 -- 3:59 PM EDT // link // )

Updated below.

Oh, man. You just have to listen to these caricatures of black pols that Rush Limbaugh is pushing right now. They're quite -- how should we put this -- "racially charged."

You may already have heard the "Barack the Magic Negro" shtick that Rush sang on his show the other day (more on that in a bit). But we've found a bunch of new ones that are way more eye-popping. They're done by Paul Shanklin, a self-described "political satirist" who's been doing stuff on Rush's show for many years. You can only access them in the members-only section of Rush's Web site, but we've put together a montage of them for you below.

Let's start with a particularly lovely Rush/Shanklin special. It has a voice parodying an Al Sharpton who is so illiterate that he spells the word "respect" like this: "r-e-s-p-e-c-k." Here's a transcript of the relevant bit, where the Sharpton stand-in is standing outside Barack Obama headquarters asking Obama for attention by singing the following lyrics to the tune of Aretha Franklin's "Respect":

"R-E-S-P-E-C-K. Wha-choo mean it ain't spelt that way? R-E-S-P-E-K-T? I need a dictionary!"

There's more. As Media Matters reported the other day, Rush sang the ditty "Barack the Magic Negro" on his show on March 19, basing the lyrics on an L.A. Times Op-ed piece. But it gets better.

Now Rush is running a new, improved version of the "Magic Negro" song that's way more fleshed out -- and way, way, more eye-opening, too. It features a parody of Sharpton singing about "da hood" and saying that Obama is "ar-ti-coo-late." Just give it a listen, it's hard to describe how low it is.

There are also routines where the Sharpton stand-in insults Obama by saying "yo mama's so fat" and so forth, as well as one where Sharpton demands that Obama explain himself to the "commooonity." Listen to them all here:

This is hardly a new point, of course, but it still never ceases to amaze that top officials of the Republican Party -- including the Vice President -- go on a show that traffics in this sort of thing.

Whaddaya think, all?

Special thanks to TPM associate editor Ben Craw for making the video and to reporter-researcher Eric Kleefeld for help in digging these up.

Update: As commenter Crust points out, President Bush himself went on Limbaugh in November of 2006.

Update II: Much more on this from Digby and John Amato, who says sources are telling him that stations around the country are getting heavily criticized for airing this bile.

Meanwhile, one other point. It's sad that this has to be repeated so often, but so be it: This is not a free speech issue. It's about the fact that top officials in one of the two major political parties in America -- including the President and Vice President -- have no problem lending whatever credibility they have left to someone who's trafficking in the worst kind of vile, demeaning garbage, in exchange for the use of his megaphone. Rush can say whatever he wants. Likewise, so can his critics. They can even put pressure on his advertisers if they like -- also a form of speech. The stations that air Rush's crap will weigh whatever benefits they accrue from running Rush against whatever costs are incurred as a result of the criticism running Rush brings. These stations are not obliged to run Rush. If they were to decide not to, that would be their choice. It would not an impingement on Rush's right to free speech.

Again: This is not a free speech issue. This is not a free speech issue. This is not a free speech issue. Okay?

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Malkin Slides Deeper And Deeper Into Self-Parody
(April 26, 2007 -- 9:32 AM EDT // link // )

It's hard to be surprised by the antics of the wingnut bloggers, but every now again you come across something that proves them to be so utterly without irony -- so completely lacking in basic literacy and self-awareness -- that you can only sit back and marvel in amazement at the spectacle they make of themselves.

Case in point: Here's Michelle Malkin, attacking this blog because of this post yesterday previewing David Broder's column today. Malkin is blasting us over the fact that the post began with the words "blogswarm alert!" -- which she took as a sign that we were literally ordering the "nutroots" to wage "preemptive" war on the WaPo over the Broder column.

Michelle, please take a moment to bone up on the meanings of the words "literal" and "irony." This was not a literal call for a blogswarm, you silly figure of fun. It was meant ironically -- that is, as a gently self-mocking way of acknowledging that this column would create yet another anti-Broder blogswarm in the liberal blogosphere. Hence the word "alert," as in, "tornado alert" -- you know, as if to say, "here comes a blogswarm."

What makes this really rich, though, is that Malkin herself has in fact commanded her readership of pod people to march into battle against her foes -- she has ordered blogswarms of her own. Remember when Malkin ordered a blogswarm of some antiwar students in California by posting their names and addresses on her blog?

After nationally syndicated columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin posted the e-mail addresses and phone numbers of three members of Students Against War, they received a flood of obscene and harassing messages from around the country, including death threats...

"I woke up in the morning and my cell had 14 new messages, 25 missed calls and it kept going on," said SAW member David Zlutnick, estimating the group's three media contacts have already sifted through 500 e-mails, more than 100 with death threats.

After a troubled woman who was involved in that political fight committed suicide (no, I'm not blaming you, Michelle, sorry), Malkin actually smeared the dead woman, calling her a "corruptocrat." This is the person who's pillorying this blog for allegedly ordering a blogswarm. Meanwhile, here is another wingnut blogger, congratulating Malkin for breaking "the story" of our alleged blogswarm command, as if this was somehow a scoop.

Really, the silliness and lack of self-awareness on the part of these jokers just defy belief and parody.

Update: And let's not forget this bit of Malkin buffoonery posted yesterday by Atrios.

Update II: Some readers ask why we bother engaging the likes of Malkin. Good question. Answer: Purely for the entertainment value. Nothing more.

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Broder To Compare Harry Reid's "Ineptitude" To That Of Alberto Gonzales
(April 25, 2007 -- 6:13 PM EDT // link // )

Blogswarm alert!

It looks as if David Broder's column tomorrow may be making the rather creative case that Harry Reid is as inept as...Alberto Gonzales.

How do I know this? Over at the Dallas Morning News, which prints Broder's column from time to time, they've done a teaser on the paper's blog previewing the Op-ed columns the paper is running tomorrow. Here it is:

Tomorrow's op-ed columns

Two pieces that look at the deregulation/re-regulation debate going on in Austin:

*FRASER (State Sen. Troy Fraser) Writing in support of why proposed tweaks to deregulation aren’t “re-regulation.”

*TXU response (details to come)

(Carl Leubsdorf) The first Democratic debate is Thursday night and Carl uses this opportunity to reflect on where things stand on this side of the presidential race.

(David Broder) How Harry Reid has joined Alberto Gonzales as exhibit A of ineptitude.

I just checked with the Morning News's editorial department, and they assure me this characterization is accurate. I've also emailed WaPo.

Boy, oh, boy. Will Broder really argue that Reid is as inept as Gonzales, despite the fact (or perhaps because of the fact) that Reid has refused to back down on Iraq while simultaneously maintaining public approval of his approach? He's also maintained a respectable 46% approval rating -- far higher than Bush, who Broder says is on the verge of a comeback. What is it that's so profoundly threatening about Reid's success to the Broders of the world?

Okay -- we should absolutely reserve judgment until we see what the man actually wrote, of course. But here's something to keep an eye out for. Yesterday Broder bashed Reid during a radio interview for saying the war is "lost," insisting that "about every six weeks or so there's another episode where he has to apologize for the way in which he has bungled the Democratic case." Fine, Reid's line was clumsy and could have been more artfully done. But Broder's assertion that Reid has had to apologize "every six weeks" is flat-out false.

Will Broder repeat it? And if so, when do we get to stop calling him the "Dean" and start calling him inept?

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Murdoch's New York Post Rewrites Associated Press Story To Make It Way Worse For Dems
(April 25, 2007 -- 11:34 AM EDT // link // )

Oh, man. You won't be surprised to hear that Rupert Murdoch's New York Post is willing to stoop to extraordinary depths of dishonesty to smear Dems, but this one is quite remarkable.

Check out the rewrite that The Post has done on an AP story it ran today. The Post's version is far, far, far worse -- almost comically so, in fact -- for Harry Reid and the Dems than the AP story was in its original form.

Here's the headline and lede of the original AP story (there were many versions of it throughout the day looking basically like this):

Democrats Challenge Bush on Iraq Bill

By DAVID ESPO - A historic veto showdown assured, Democratic leaders agreed Monday on legislation that requires the first U.S. combat troops to be withdrawn from Iraq by Oct. 1 with a goal of a complete pullout six months later.

'No more will Congress turn a blind eye to the Bush administration's incompetence and dishonesty,' Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in a speech in which he accused the president of living in a state of denial about events in Iraq more than four years after the U.S.-led invasion.

Bush, confident of enough votes to sustain his veto, was unambiguous in his response. 'I will strongly reject an artificial timetable (for) withdrawal and/or Washington politicians trying to tell those who wear the uniform how to do their job,' he told reporters in the Oval Office as he met with his top Iraq commander, Gen. David Petraeus.

Taken together, the day's events marked the quickening of a confrontation that has been building since Democrats took control of Congress in January and promised to change policy in a war has claimed the lives of more than 3,200 U.S. troops.

The New York Post, however, "edited" the story and ran a version beginning like this in their pages:

'WHITE FLAG' HARRY FUROR

WHITE HOUSE: PULLOUT PLAN A DEATH SENTENCE

By DAVID ESPO, AP

April 24, 2007 -- WASHINGTON - The White House warned yesterday that Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid's new legislation requiring the first U.S. troops to be withdrawn from Iraq by Oct. 1 is a "death sentence" for millions of freedom-loving Iraqis.

The stinging comments from President Bush's spokeswoman came just days after Reid declared the war is already "lost" and as negotiators for the House and Senate nailed down the details of the war bill, which also set a goal of completing the pullout by April 2008.

Dana Perino, the president's spokeswoman, charged that Reid is in denial about the vicious nature of the enemy and about the U.S.-led plan to provide more security in Iraq.

Reid (Nev.) had earlier accused Bush of being in a "state of denial" about what's happening in Iraq four years after America went to war.

Perino fumed about Reid, "He's also in denial that a surrender date - he thinks it is a good idea. It is not a good idea. It is defeat.

"It is a death sentence for the millions of Iraqis who voted for a constitution, who voted for a government, who voted for a free and democratic society," she added.

As you can see, the Post completely rewrote the story to make it a hit on Dems -- than ran the piece with the imprimatur of the AP and Espo. While papers are free to edit AP copy, this complete makeover is nonetheless extraordinary -- and extraordinarily revealing. In the first version the "death sentence" remark from Perino was in the 13th paragraph. In the Post version, that was the lede and headline. Wow.

I just checked in with AP spokesperson Jack Stokes and asked him if anything put out by the AP yesterday looked anything like the Post story. His answer: "There is no version like that on AP wires."

So there you have it. I'm not sure it gets any clearer than that.

Update: It gets better. I just heard back from the author, David Espo. He told me: "I didn't write anything remotely like that. My name was on the story and I didn't write it anything like the way it was printed."

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Tom DeLay Accuses Pelosi And Reid Of Getting "Very Close To Treason"
(April 24, 2007 -- 1:32 PM EDT // link // )

Check out this snippet of an interview Tom DeLay did with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

You can watch the full interview here at the Tribune-Review's Web site. Here's a fuller transcript:

I think Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are getting very very close to treason...For the Majority Leader of the United States Senate in a time of war, with soldiers dying on the ground, announcing that we have lost the war, is very close to treasonous. I looked it up while we were driving over here, the definition of treason, it's the betrayal of trust. I have never in my adult life, nor in my understanding of history, seen something so blatantly outrageous...I am blown away by this attitude of the Democrats. To me it's just a hatred of Bush...The American people are gonna eventually be fed up with this.

I'm highlighting this for a reason. Has anybody else noticed that every day brings palpably more wild-eyed and unhinged attacks from the folks who either are in favor of the war or the folks who are for some reason instinctually opposed to the Dems' aggressive antiwar stance?

You can see the attacks growing significantly more deranged by the day -- and sometimes by the hour. Yesterday White House flack Dana Perino suggested that anyone who's in favor of withdrawal is a person of bad character. David Broder (not pro-war, but anti-anti-war, if you get my meaning) invented facts outright in order to argue that Reid is an "embarrassment," despite his respectable approval rating. Today brings Bush, who indulged in some of his most demented rhetoric yet to argue that the public's on his side on Iraq, and Cheney, who sputtered and snarled unintelligibly for a few minutes this afternoon before skulking off. And now DeLay's "treason" charge.

What's interesting here, I think, is the discernible tone of incredulity on the part of all the attackers, as if they're mystified by the fact that the Dems just won't back off on Iraq. Dems aren't supposed to be behaving this way. It upsets the natural order of things. When the Dean of Washington journalism says you're an embarrassment who's bungling the Dems' case, you're supposed to quickly run for cover and let more hawkish Dems make the case for the party. But here Reid is again, repeating the things he said yesterday, even turning up the rhetoric a notch. Look, public opinion is complex and mutable, and Dems have many tough choices ahead that they may botch. But judging by the mounting hysteria of their opponents, it looks like their aggressiveness is working.

Update: Think Progress has much more. And Taylor Marsh has vid of the Veep here.

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Times' Adam Nagourney Cops To Helping Create "Breck Girl" Slur
(April 23, 2007 -- 3:16 PM EDT // link // )

The other day, I noted that The New York Times had injected the original "Breck girl" insult of John Edwards into the discourse by quoting anonymous Bushites using the slur against him back in 2003.

Today, in light of the "controversy" surrounding Edwards' $400 haircut, The Times's Adam Nagourney offers up a mea culpa of sorts for his role in helping give widespread currency to the schoolyard taunt. He writes:

Our story may have had the result of not only previewing what the Bush campaign intended to do, but, by introducing such memorably biting characterizations into the political dialogue, helping it. Was that a mistake on our part? Perhaps...

...faced with the same situation again, I would press the Bush officials to be named in offering their characterizations; no justification for anonymity here. And based on my experience in trying to insist more often that sources speak on the record in this campaign season, I think I might have succeeded.

Nagourney's conclusion about the whole haircut affair, however, is curious. He notes that even the Edwards campaign was upset with its handling of it, adding that the media attention "was a reminder that, fair or not, this remains a persistent vulnerability for Mr. Edwards." He adds: "appearances matter in politics, and four years after the Breck Girl line first appeared in print, Mr. Edwards continues to have trouble leaving it behind." Yes, but why does this difficulty persist?

I have no problem partly blaming Edwards' faulty political judgment here, a case that was deftly made the other day by Ezra Klein. But to paraphrase Joe Conason, it's possible to keep two ideas in our heads at the same time:

(1) Edwards screwed up.

(2) The decision by many in the media to devote the amount of attention to Edwards' fair locks that they did was idiotic and indefensible.

The fact that Nagourney is revisiting his decision to float the "Breck girl" schoolyard taunt is a good thing. But the real media failure here was one of degree. As gets repeated here all too often, the deafening roar of media coverage of Edwards' haircut was the result of editorial decisions. Such coverage is not involuntary or inevitable. It is not a fact of nature. It is the result of decisions made by human beings -- the Associated Press' editorial decision to run a whole stand-alone piece about it with a lead calling Edwards "pretty"; Maureen Dowd's editorial decision to write a whole column about it; and a whole bunch of other similar decisions.

Is the fact that Edwards' GOP rivals pushed the story an excuse for all the coverage? Candidates attack each other all the time; reporters and editors don't have to cover it, and often don't. Apologies for stating the obvious, but reporters and editors choose to cover what they do -- as well as choosing the tone, placement and intensity of the coverage -- based on their own judgment of the subject matter's news value. Wouldn't a short mention of the haircut in an AP story have sufficed? Yeah, the Edwards camp screwed up. But we're talking about the man's hair, people!

Update: Don't miss the takes by Matthew Yglesias and Scott Lemieux on why the media's purely to blame here. Also Garance Franke-Ruta arguing the Edwards-is-a-bonehead case.

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Broder Mangles Facts In Order To Portray Reid's War Stance As An "Embarrassment"
(April 23, 2007 -- 11:03 AM EDT // link // )

This is a bad one. The Washington Post's David Broder was interviewed today by XM radio's Bob Edwards, and Broder hammered Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid for declaring the "war is lost" as follows:

BRODER: "Democrats by and large wish that Harry Reid would learn to engage mind before mouth opens.This has become kind of a pattern for him. I think at some point down the road the Democrats are going to have to have a little caucus to decide how much further they want to carry Harry Reid. They've got able people on the Senate side and they don't have to put up with this kind of bumbling performance forever."

EDWARDS: "Think Harry Reid is an embarrassment to the Democrats?"

BRODER: "I think so. I mean, he has been a pretty effective leader but he is verbally just a real loose cannon and it seems to me, Bob, that about every six weeks or so there's another episode where he has to apologize for the way in which he has bungled the Democratic case."

Audio here.

Look, you can argue that Reid's choice of words was a poor one -- that he could have made the same point more artfully. Nonetheless, there hasn't been any credible evidence yet that shows that Dems will pay a price for this; most polls show that pluralities basically agree with Reid here. Maybe some numbers will come out saying that Reid's comment is hurting them -- but for now there's simply no evidence that this is the case.

What's more, what on earth basis is there for suggesting that Reid's been an "embarrassment"? He currently has an approval rating of 46% -- a heck of a lot better than Bush.

Finally, it looks as if Broder completely butchered his facts in asserting that Reid has had to apologize "every six weeks." I just checked with Reid's office, and they told me in no uncertain terms that Reid has not apologized for any of his remarks during his first four months or so as majority leader. He certainly hasn't apologized for the "war is lost" comment.

Doesn't the Dean of Washington journalism check his facts?

Update: Atrios comments: "The disconnect between elite opinion in Washington and reality continues to grow. It's frightening." Indeed. And more on this from Think Progress.

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