Yeah, all the loonies are on the right. Everybody on the left is intelligent.
I am so sick and tired of the Goddamn double standard around here.
And I'm sick of this false equivalency. Olbermann is not "the left's" Beck. Olbermann is a bit overdramatic and does pick up stories nobody else will, but he's also not the most intellectually honest individual because of his willingness to submit to corporate interests. However, he's nowhere near the left-wing equivalent of, say, Rush Limbaugh. He doesn't outright lie, he doesn't hatemonger (that his "worst person in the world" segments feature 5 worst persons and is done nightly, complete with goofy music and sound effects while reporting factual reasons those people made the list, can safely place in the category of "not hatemongering"), and he doesn't smear.
He's said nowhere near the levels of vile, horrible things any right-wing pundit has, and anybody trying to tell you otherwise might be able to come up with one quote from 2005 while you can come up with 6 or 7 from one right-wing pundit in the last week. There are no left-wing equivalents to mainstream right-wing pundits.
Beck and the other pundits are talking about government takeover of industries that never happened, warning about socialist beliefs and policies that don't exist, scream at the top of their lungs about anything that might make a rich person give another dollar back to society through taxes, perpetuating a national narrative about how poor people deserve to be poor because **** them they're not trying hard enough, and doing it entirely through fantasy.
Death panels, things that don't exist, outright lies, smears, etc - almost half the stuff said by both the commentators and the legislators are so demonstrably false that it's frightening such a huge portion of the country buys into it - and all of it is just accelerating the removal of rational discourse in media.
