On this week’s edition of Real Time, Bill Maher really gave it to the Republicans about the violence coming from their side — and of course they adamantly refused to admit it:
Bill Maher got his right wing guests, the National Review’s Reihan Salam and Fox New’s Margaret Hoover on this week’s edition of Real Time worked up when he asked why all the recent political violence is coming from the right. Salam reminded me a bit of Howard Fineman on Hardball the other day who couldn’t name anyone on the left that equaled the violence we’re seeing from the right either and reached back to the Weather Underground as an example of a violent group on the left, which Maher pointed out existed before he was born. Fox’s Margaret Hoover tried painting Joy Behar with the same brush as the Kentucky head-stomper for her comments on The View, which as Lawrence O’Donnell pointed out, is completely ridiculous.
While I don’t agree completely with Bill that if you looked hard enough you couldn’t find some example of someone on the left behaving badly because there are a few out there, he’s spot on that both sides are not equal and the craziness we’ve been seeing for the last several years is coming from the right, not the left. I’m surprised neither of them pulled out the faker Kenneth Gladney’s story where pretended to get beaten up by members of the SEIU that Dave wrote about here — Faking victimhood: Just how hurt was that supposed victim of SEIU ‘thuggery’?.
The big difference between what’s going on now, as I said in the post on Howard Fineman’s hackery is, and it’s a point Maher failed to make, is that this hatred that is being drummed up right now is coming from these astroturf groups funded by big business and from the Republican leadership itself and from right wing hate talk radio. These are not just isolated incidents, but ones that are being incited intentionally and drummed up by people who understand full well what they’re doing and just don’t care about the repercussions. Bill did point out some of the things that Tom Tancredo has said recently and Hoover tried writing him off by saying he’s not a Republican any more. Uh-huh.
