Pop quiz, hot shot.
Is Glenn Beck:
A) A talk show host who, though often controversial, raises important issues that need to be discussed in mainstream outlets?
B) A provocateur and propagandist given free rein on a GOP cable outlet to stir up a white backlash against President Obama, using paranoia and conspiracy theories instead of facts?
If you answered B to the question above, you’re obviously overqualified to host a morning talk show on MSNBC, if Dylan Ratigan’s performance this morning is to be believed.
Follow me for more, including a transcript.
On today’s "Morning Meeting with Dylan Ratigan," GOP Congressman Jack Kingston of Georgia was on to discuss the Van Jones resignation. Remember Kingston? Get a quick refresher about the tyranny of the five-day work week here and here.
Ratigan and Kingston went for a tandem concern trolling about Obama’s apparent over reliance on so many policy "czars" like Jones.
What ensued is hard to believe, and I lack the adequate word power to convey it without a video or transcript, which I will add as soon as it becomes available.
UPDATE: Wow! It was worse than I remembered. Here's a link to the MSNBC video. My thanks to Scarce in the comments below. I've added transcript to the relevant highlights.
Most people in the still-thinking-tasting-sensing world understand that the right-wing obsession with the policy czars is one in a long line of phony controversies stirred up by opponents of the president to derail policy agendas and excite the black helicopter crowd. We also know that Glenn Beck was steering this hysteria toward Van Jones, in part to retaliate against the boycott of his show.
Apparently that last fact has escaped Ratigan, or worse yet, was known to him but was considered a legitimate frame for a news story.
Ratigan and Kingston went back and forth for several minutes of uncontested cable airtime, wringing their hands about how Obama has relied on undemocratic processes to appoint unsavory people to positions of power, circumventing Congress, the rule of law, and maybe even the legacy of George Washington and the Continental Congress. Who knows any more?
Here were the best parts:
Kingston Ratigan (even worse) repeating the phrase "czarist culture" in reference to the Obama administration.
Kingston: Put it in perspective. Czarist Russia over a 300-year period of time had 18 czars. We’re up to 34 now. These are very powerful people.
[Snip]
Ratigan: As a representative of the American people from the state of Georgia, what can you do and what can others in Congress do to, at the very least, bring the "czarist culture" that we are living in, if you will--and we’ll come back to the oligarchs in a second--but how do you bring light to that? Is there a piece of legislation you can offer up?
Google "obama’s communist czar" and get a sense about the garbage Kingston is shoveling. It makes about as much sense as calling Obama both a communist and fascist in the same breath, but the scary czar meme is now how Republicans call Obama a communist.
Ratigan repeating the word "oligarchy" (spelled O-L-I-G-A-R-C-H-Y) in reference to Congress, the banks, the health care industry, and the administration.
Transcript:
Ratigan: Considering that we basically have a banking oligarchy, and a health insurance oligarchy, and a corn oligarchy controlling our government... it make sense to me that we’d have czars.
Brewer: Well you call them something else. Maybe if you called them something other than czars.
Ratigan: I’m just saying the czars kind of match the oligarchy that runs the US Congress.
That last dog whistle about oligarhy oligarchy was the best indication that Ratigan spent his week’s vacation listening to talk radio and letting what was left of his brain go to mush.
UPDATE: And here's one that I had forgotten in which Ratigan makes an equivalence between having a green jobs czar and torturing people:
Ratigan: What would be the resistance? In other words, if people are uncomfortable with power outside of the democratic process--whether it was the creation of a third class of prisoner on the torture front, or the decision to deliver a few dozen trillion dollars of taxpayer money to the banks without talking to anyone about it, or appointing 35 czars to do whatever they want to do--what can Congress do to get some version of democracy back to America?
We can’t let this kind of rank stupidy persist on our airwaves. With every indication that Beck is going to be fixing his sights on other key Obama advisors, we’ve got to be on guard for every mainstream newser who can’t separate the tinfoil hatters from the news.
Ratigan reminded us today that the only apparent qualification to host a show on cable is the ability to talk fast and loud. One doesn’t necessarily need to know much about the subject he or she covers, and in most cases, it probably is a hindrance. Ratigan has been relentless in his hounding of Wall Street bailouts, but his tendency to rant instead of think has made him, more often than not, one of the obstacles to getting fair coverage of the health care debate, free of insurance lobby spin.
Contact MSNBC’s Morning Meeting and tell them to cut the nonsense.
While we’re at it, let’s keep asking MSNBC to scrap their entire morning lineup, from Morning Joke to Dr. Nancy, and get some hosts that are true to their audience.
Thanks to the folks at Media Matters for supplying enough video to keep us occupied until MSNBC makes their transcript for today public: