Media Matters Goes After Bill Cunningham: Some of His Comments Earn Him Title of "Purveyor of Hate Speech" From Liberal Group

Media Matters has set it's sights on conservative commentator/radio host Bill Cunningham for some of his controversial comments about poor people, blacks, the unemployed and other groups.

He came into the national consciousness during the recently concluded Presidential elections when he introduced John McCain at an event in Cincinnati. He used President-elect Obama's full name (HOW DARE HE USE THAT NAME!) and said that he was a "hack" and a "Daley-style Chicago politician" among other things.

McCain didn't like it, and immediately repudiated what Cunningham said, which prompted Cunningham to say that he had been thrown under McCain's "Straight Talk Express" bus and trampled. He pulled his support of McCain and returned to his local talk-radio show. McCain knew who was introducing him, yet made no effort to find someone else to do the honors.

In the months since, he made some very nasty comments about Obama that Media Matters has zeroed in on. And truth be told, Cunningham is in the same vein as Michael Savage and Bill O'Reilly; he sometimes says the right things the wrong way. The specifics that Media Matters quoted in their report are as follows (credit: Media Matters web site) :

• Alleging that "Obama wants to gas the Jews"

• Invoking "[s]ix-six-six" and "the beast" in discussing "Barack Hussein Obama"

• On Obama Sr.: "That's what black fathers do. They simply leave"

• On the poor: "[P]eople are poor in America ... because they lack values, morals, and ethics"

• Declaring that America's "so-called noble poor" don't use birth control so that "the mom can get more checks in the mail from the government"
  
  
• "We are the only country in the world where poor people are fat."

The part that Media Matters forgets is that as inappropriate as some of these comments apparently are (while out of context, mind you), it's also protected speech.

I definitely don't agree with everything that Savage, O'Reilly and Cunningham say. They're their own worst enemies at times, but I also disagree with Media Matters on how they cut and paste comments together to make their victims look as bad as possible.

If fascism does start in this country, it'll start in the media with the same kind of tactics that Media Matters employs when going after people they don't like.

Ultra-Left Launches Two-Pronged Smear Campaigns Against Conservative Commentators; Senate Democrats Foolishly Get Involved

The ultra-left has gone after Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh with smear campaigns in the last few weeks that Senate Democrats found irresistible to avoid. They're on the wrong side--again.

Some background...Bill O'Reilly was on his radio show and was expressing his surprise at a recent visit to a Harlem-area diner, in which he saw that minority-population customers acted like everyone else. The Democratic organization Media Matters posted a clip of the clip on their web site and CNN and MSNBC jumped on the story a few days later, running it as their lead stories last week, making suggestions that O'Reilly was a racist.

O'Reilly fired back hard and other Conservative commentators--Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity--came to his defense.

Then this week, Limbaugh was commenting on a soldier who had reported seeing/participating in atrocities in Iraq on a recently completed tour. The problem was that this "soldier" wasn't a soldier at all, and had never been in Iraq. Limbaugh referred to him--truthfully I might add--as a "phony soldier," and was immediately attacked by Media Matters and the usual crowd--as being an anti-military commentator who was going after soldiers who were opposed to the Iraq War. Again, several of the networks picked up the story and ran with it as their lead story for several days.

Then the Senate Democrats got involved, demanding that Limbaugh and the company that syndicates his national radio show, Clear Channel Communications Inc., retract the "phony soldier" comment immediately. Senate Majority Leader Reid made a speech on the floor of the Senate, as did several of his colleagues. They even went so far as to sidetrack their already-sidetracked agenda and put together a letter that condemned Limbaugh and demanded the retraction. Forty-one Democratic Senators signed the letter.

I have a few things to say about that.

O'Reilly kind of screwed up by using words that had double-meanings. He should have thought twice about revealing his apparent ignorance, but the clip of the clip used by the media and Media Matters was unfair. They didn't bother playing what O'Reilly said before and after the comment in question.

Limbaugh didn't screw up. It's the Senate Democrats who royally screwed up by going on with such a blatant lie. Their condemnation of Rush (a private citizen--not an elected official) during Senate working hours is further testimony to Reid's failed leadership, the derailed Democratic agenda, and the ineptitude of the Democratic majority to recover their lost momentum. Furthermore, the Democrats who signed Reid's letter are accomplices of the lies told by one man who is a "phony soldier." The words "swindlers" and "liars" fit in here somewhere.

The smart Democrats were the ones who didn't sign Reid's letter.

I object to taxpayer resources and time being used in the manner that the Senate Democrats have displayed in the last couple of days. It's the Democrats who should apologize to Limbaugh and to their constituents for participating in this utter farce.