I watch Dylan Ratigan about as often as I watch Glenn Beck -- which is to say that I almost never waste my time on either of them. But there's been some buzz about this segment from Ratigan's show yesterday in which he interviewed cartoonist Ted Rall about whether the time has come for a violent revolution, so I decided to watch it. It wasn't pretty:
Just like Beck, Ratigan doesn't come right out and say that he wants a violent revolution. He just says we need a revolution, and even though he'd prefer that it not be violent, nothing else seems to be working. And his guest Ted Rall agrees that neither Republicans nor Democrats have solved any problems facing the country and that passive resistance has failed, so what else is left, right?
Ratigan chimes in that the entire political system is corrupt and is run by six industries and that society has become a duopoly between those industries and government. And they both agree that all we really need is a super powerful president to save us, but clearly, they say, Obama isn't the leader that they are looking for, so what option do they really have other than a violent revolution, you know what I'm saying?
By the end of the segment, the only thing I could think about was the fact that on the last day of Keith Olbermann's suspension for failing to ask permission to make a campaign contribution, MSNBC's daytime programming was chasing Glenn Beck into his paranoid and delusional rathole, hosting a serious discussion about whether the time has come to violently overthrow that very same system in which Olbermann sought to peacefully participate. Talk about screwed up priorities.
Update: To all ye conservatives who think this is an example of a liberal Democratic MSNBC host advocating revolution, (a) Ratigan is emphatically not a Democrat and (b) he calls himself a conservative, saying in September that "I consider myself a conservative" and on April 14 telling Mike Pence that "you and I -- both of us come from a fairly conservative mindset, especially when it comes to business and enterprise in this country."