Rush To Judgment?
Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 13:52Well, yeah! First, Rush Limbaugh embraced the ranting of resigning Representative Eric Massa and had this to say (emphasis added):
RUSH: Who's jabbing his finger into your chest in a shower where there are no curtains in the House gym. This is representative Massa lashing out at everybody in the Obama administration, particularly Rahm Emanuel in a radio appearance yesterday. And what he's basically accusing the Democrat leaders of doing here is orchestrating a campaign to force his resignation. "There's a reason that this has all happened, frankly one I had not realized. Mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill." Remember, this guy was going to serve out his term until November. Friday we found he's going to resign today at five o'clock. And what this is all about is what inspired that. What speeds it up, he says, "Mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill, and this administration and this House leadership have said, quote unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill. And now they've gotten rid of me and it'll pass." We've got more. [...] This guy is a Democrat. He's in a conservative district in New York, but he is a Democrat and this is just hilarious. Can you picture this in the shower, with no shower curtains in the House gym? Here are both of these guys buck naked and here comes Rahm Emanuel poking a finger in this guy's chest, and they start arguing about this. "What's he doing in the House gym anyway? He's the White House chief of staff, what's he doing over here?" Now, Massa warns us what we all know, but I think you need to hear it from a Democrat being forced out by Obama and Steny Hoyer and Pelosi. [...] He was asked in this appearance: "Well, why don't you rescind your resignation?" He said, "The only way I can do that is if this becomes a national story." So Congressman Massa, we're doing our part here to make it a national story.
One day later, after it came to light that the allegations of groping and "tickle parties" with male employees had substance:
RUSH: Now, back to Eric Massa. Yesterday, I'd never heard of this guy in my life. If I heard of him before, I had forgotten him. All I knew was that this guy was telling great stories about Rahm Emanuel and these guys being butt naked in the shower in the House gym. And he's talking about how the country is going to hell in a handbasket and how the Democrat Party is forcing things down people's throats and the consent of the governed and all this kind of stuff. So here we have a legitimate kook and he says, "I won't quit." We need his "no" vote. We don't want this health care. We don't care who it is voting against it, kooky or not, and he says, "I might rescind my resignation if the story goes national." I simply offered to help take it national. But "supporting" what he said? Who knows? Actually from the moment this thing started yesterday I suspected a rope-a-dope and I still think a rope-a-dope's going on and I still think that anybody out there who embraces this guy is in for big trouble.
He then goes on to talk, at great length, about Massa's involvement in the "phony soldier" stuff from 2007. Of course, he does this in the hopes that his listeners will forget all about the extensive, postitive discussion of Massa's rants that he gave just one day earlier and his assurance that Massa was just confirming "what we all know." Riiiiiiiight.
Meanwhile, over in Beckistan, we went from this:
Tomorrow at five: congressman Massa for the full hour. I just spoke with him off air. All Americans need To hear him. Exclusive 2morrow fox
to seeing Beck picked apart by folks on the right, including America's Right:
The bottom line, though, is that the interview did nobody any good. And Glenn Beck is certainly included in that. He came off as overzealous, as though he was digging and digging and digging for information and explanations that simply were not forthcoming, and he was incredibly late to the party when it came to understanding that substance and Eric Massa simply do not make good bedfellows.
America’s Right’s own Randy Wills, in an e-mail sent to me this morning, said that Beck seemed to just “want it too much”–the “it” being dirt on the innerworkings of the Obama administration–and that he did “tremendous damage” in allowing him on the show. I agree, recalling at one point that Beck seemed to be actively searching for a way to tie the unions and SEIU into the Massa “tickle fight” story.
Of course, Beck now says that he was just a dupe of a kook:
On his radio show today, Glenn Beck lit into former Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) for his disastrous, rambling appearance on the Tuesday episode of Beck’s Fox News Show.
“America, have you ever heard of a 50-year old man having a tickle-fight — five men tickling each other so hard that they can’t breathe?” said Beck. “I think we found out who he is — someone who can’t be trusted to tell the truth about his life.”
Beck indulged the “possibility” that somebody “got to” Massa and turned him — at the very least, said Beck, the former congressman “lied” in a pre-interview.
Actually, I think that America's Right nailed it. Both Beck and Limbaugh were SO hot to get ANYTHING with which to slam the Administration that they jumped at the chance to champion Massa without doing even the most basic research into his history or the allegations against him. After giving him national exposure in their shows, they both got to backtrack fast-n-loud when Massa's story fell apart.
(It should be noted that Michelle Malkin apparently sounded the alarm about Massa's conflicting stories and past history, even as NRO and RedState were hyping Massa's rants; I'm beginning to see that Malkin takes her work more seriously than do these others.)
It's bad enough to see this in the blogosphere, but it's revealing to see the exact same behavior from established conservative talkers.
Reader Comments (8)
I got to hand it to you, Wes. You sure know how to single out the big "scandals", while at the same time studiously ignoring this:
"The Washington Post reported Wednesday that an aide to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was told in October by Joe Racalto, Massa's chief of staff, that the New York lawmaker lived with several young male aides, that he used sexually explicit language with them and that Massa made a potentially inappropriate lunch date with a young aide to Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.). It is unclear whether any of the information Racalto provided to Pelosi's staffer suggested that Massa broke House rules or warranted an ethics investigation."
Here's what Pelosi had previously said about what she knew and when she knew it:
"Pelosi faced questions about both Rangel and Massa at her weekly news conference Thursday.
The speaker told reporters that she did not learn about the Massa allegations until Wednesday.
“I asked my staff; I said, ‘Have there been any rumors about any of this before?’” Pelosi said. “There had been a rumor, but just that, no formal notification to our office that anything — a one-, two-, three-person-removed rumor that had been reported to Mr. Hoyer’s office that had been reported to my staff, which they didn’t report to me, because, you know what? This is rumor city. Every single day, there are rumors. I have a job to do and not to be the receiver of rumors.”
Pelosi also insisted that she and her party have lived up to her pledge to have the “most ethical Congress in history.”
I don't see Pelosi (or anyone else) lining up to lionize Massa or defend him against the ethics investigation. Remember, he said (at one point) that the ethics charges were coming, and that "they" would "get him" that way if he didn't resign.
So, if there were ethics charges coming, then the Ethics Committee folks were doing their job...your point?
Massa is obviously a sicko/kook - it's just hysterically funny that both Limbaugh and Beck spend a quick 24 hours lionizing him and giving him their platforms...before they figured out that he's a sicko/kook.
You must have missed her interview with Charlie Rose.
lol, only the left can try to shift the story over to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh... what, no mention of Larry King? These are topics of the day, Glenn Beck gave him an opportunity to speak on his show expecting him to unleash far more than he was willing to unleash, but instead spent the whole our playing damage control for himself... even Beck told his audience at the end of the show that he was sorry for wasting everybody's time.
That's pretty far from "lionizing" him, saying that the hour was a waste of time. If anything, Beck's interview put him to shame, as even reporters on MSNBC pointed out that same night (I know... I watched them all). People wanted to hear more about administration intimidation tactics and Massa failed where he could have shined.
Skinny, I was referring to how Beck hyped his "exclusive"..."all Americans need to hear him"...
As far as "administration intimidation tactics," does anyone consider this something new? Isn't that the whole purpose of having majority/minority Whips - party discipline, and all that? Remember when we talked about the Medicare drug bill and the threats made to GOPers during that vote (I think it was the drug bill, but I don't have time to search the archives right now)?
I think wes is having a major league bromance with Beck and Limbaugh.