Before I get started, let me say up front that while I agree with much of what Ed Schultz says on his radio and TV shows I often find him annoying, self-centered and petty towards other liberal hosts like Randi Rhodes and Mike Malloy.
However, that's no excuse to smear the man in a selectively edited tape which appears to have been put together by a racist website whose proprietor is employed by none other than Jew-hater Glenn Beck, who just recently expectorated the old blood libel about Jews killing Jesus.
Mediaite is a site founded by Dan Abrams, a former MSNBC host. Anyone who remembers his show will also remember what kind of intellectually dishonest discourse Abrams tends to favor, given his fondness for the False Equivalency Fallacy (think Howard Kurtz, only smarmier). Most of Mediaite's writers (with the exception of Rachel Sklar, who is a true pearl among the swine) are also practitioners of this kind of sophistry.
A typical Mediaite story will start off with concern-trolling about something Keith Olbermann said (usually ridicule aimed at some miscreant - including some of the writers for Mediaite), followed by smarmy "even-handedness" about how he's so much like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly - if not worse. Of course it's dishonest to juxtapose Olbermann's ridicule and Beck's paranoid ravings, O'Reilly's bluster, or Limbaugh's sadism, or Sean Hannity's flat-out stupidity. Simply put, Olbermann may be a smartass (which is one of the things I like about him), but he's not a bigot (like Limbaugh), a moron (like Hannity), a bully who cuts off others' microphones and sends his semen-crusted stalker-producers to hassle those who displease him (like O'Reilly), a Jew-baiter (like Beck) or a serial liar (all of the above). So the very act of lumping Olbermann with these gasbags is in and of itself dishonest. What's more, Mediaite is far more hostile towards Olbermann than they are to the above-mentioned right-wing gas-bags. That's right: Make fun of Fox & Friends and you're as bad as the most noisome right-wing mouth-breathers. This doesn't just apply to Keith Olbermann. Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz and other liberal hosts are also subjected to this dishonest song and dance.
What is the latest furball coughed up by Mediaite? Ed Schultz just gave a speech to the Netroots in Las Vegas that came across to me as the kind of pep talk a football coach gives his team at halftime when they're getting their asses kicked, or even Blutarsky's rousing speech to his demoralized frat buddies in Animal House. Mediaite ran a rather selectively edited video of Schultz's tirade that made it appear as though his main beef with the Obama Administration was that Obama hasn't yet appeared on his show. The editing was so obvious in the video clip presented on Mediaite that I immediately smelled a rat, since defaming people based on doctored video has become a right-wing specialty - ruining the careers of everyone from Van Jones to Helen Thomas to most recently, Shirley Sherrod. That made me curious to find out just where this video came from, so I used my Google-Fu, looked under the wood pile and guess what I found slithering underneath!
You can see Mediaite's video here. So I searched YouTube and Google to see if there were any other clips and lo and behold, there was this one, which is identical, with the exception of a few seconds shaved off the end:
http://www.youtube.com/...
Who posted this video that Mediaite saw fit to run in a smear job on Ed Schultz? If you follow the links at YouTube, you'll see it comes from a white supremacist website called Naked Emperor News. Here's another video you can find on Mediaite's video source:
Obama's Christianity Requires As a Politician He Redistributes White America's Wealth
Paranoid racist conspiracy theories? This sounds like something Glenn Beck would be sponsoring. As it turns out, he is:
I like to announce my employment with Mercury Radio Arts, Glenn Beck's company.
I am looking forward to many exciting new projects and there will be more news to come shortly
Pam Key
Naked Emperor News
Let's recap: We have a concern troll website (Mediaite) cribbing a doctored video from a paranoid, racist website (Naked Emperor News) whose proprietor is in the pay of a Jew-hating crackpot (Glenn Beck) -all in an effort to attack Ed Schultz.