We, as moderates and liberals alike, are not in a debate with Movement Conservatism. We are no more in a debate with the Right than a mugging victim is in a debate with his or her mugger.
There is something that really bothers me that is going on in the tiny slice of liberal basic cable news media that we have, and a particularly blatant example of it struck a nerve yesterday.
Last night, Lawrence O'Donnell basically gave failed GOP Presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty a combo open forum/20 minute long tongue bath. He did it for no good reason other than shits and giggles, and it was as huge a waste of liberal air time as it sounds. Done at the expense of a thousand better uses of that lost time we will never get back.
With Occupy Wall Street protests abounding all across this land, with a triumph in Ohio for both native Ohioans and the American Middle Class still fresh in everyone's minds, with Elizabeth Warren being smeared by Karl Rove, we get a second go-round with Larry O's weird fixation on aggrandizing T-Paw? Instead of 20 minutes with Elizabeth Warren? Anybody from OWS? Bernie Sanders?
Since Joe Scarborough and Mrs. Alan Greenspan equal the airtime of every single liberal MSNBC on-air host, I don't think we can afford this in the age of OWS, the cult of austerity that gave us the Super Committee, and a GOP that would love to give us a second Great Depression to go with a second Gilded Age.
Jack Abramoff also went on Lawrence O'Donell's show. Okay. Got his ass kicked, right? Nope. He got his ass kissed. Kissed like a rock star, warmly given the floor, and was promptly free to claim the sort of "Both Sides Do it" nonsense liberals have to be fighting each and every day each and every time they get air time. Sure, Lawrence O'Donnell tried, uncomfortably briefly, to get him to fess up that he was what he was: a Rove Republican Insider lobbyist/hack and Movement Consevative bagman, and all we got was more RW flacking because even in disgrace Abramoff knows who he wants to win elections. It ain't us.
It's not just O'Donnell. Chris Hayes, Ed Schultz, Al Sharpton, and even Rachel Maddow all have GOP time sucks come on their various shows and run substantial chunks of time off the clock. Rachel is the best at not letting her Republican guests roll her, but even she gets gamed from time to time. It's 2011. We don't have time to pretend we are in a debate with these people.
Spend every waking minute of the time you are on the air putting liberal voices and ideas in front of the American people who are starved for an alternative to Republican policies, pundits, and pols. Nobody will miss Tim Pawlenty, the 'No Labels' guy, Ken Blackwell, that hack from McCain/Palin '08. I promise.
Chris Hayes Up! show. A good third of it is Nice Polite Wingnuts running time off the clock. It's a total fraud because those people do not represent Movement Conservatism in the Tea Party era. That's simply liberals helping the Right sell a lie that the current Right has a sane wing. They don't. That polite guy from IBD or the seemingly sane National Review Online columnist is a beard. A pretense of more widespread RW civility and sanity for those who basically want to make a woman's womb government property and privatize Social Security. Lack of blatant bad faith and no yelling that you hate America doesn't mean you are in a good faith discussion. Those people are beards who make a crazy movement seem sane. Let them go back to suckering the naive Broderite knobs at NPR for a while.
I'm not calling for the complete erasure of conservatives, just a radical reduction in the time they get compared with the time they get now. There is no reciprocity on the other side of the fence. The massive desert of Movement Conservatism apologia and Village wankery on the other side of the fence.
The idea that the liberal side of cable news actually being the liberal side of cable news might result in real liberals and actual moderates getting intellectually flabby due to a lack of intellectual challenge and rigorous discussion only sticks if you ignore that we are talking about exactly a handful of people. Liberal cable hosts are more endangered species than risking getting too full of themselves by doubling down on the mission of selling the nation on something other than wingnuttery. A handful of people on one network. One network where a Contract on America vet in Joe Scarborough and Mrs. Freakin' Alan Greenspan have equal time to every liberal host's programming each and every weekday.
Our cable news liberals need a doubling down of liberal bias. Stat.