With all due respect to my betters in the talk radio business, I have to take Ed Schultz to task for finally calling himself "a liberal" and compounding my annoyance by saying his goal as of right now is to be "the most liberal" talk show host on the planet.
Well, Ed, welcome to my world.
Welcome to the world of "Con Games," in the Roaring Fork Valley of Colorado, down to Sunday mornings on the dial and now known as "the last of the liberal talk shows." That's a step up, tagline wise from when I started six years ago "making the world safe for liberals" when George W. Bush had an 88 percent approval rating. I guess that worked well enough because the station got rid of me, the only liberal host in the valley, and brought in both you and Randi Rhodes. Yakkety-yak. A twofer, you might say.
That's progress, sort of, for progressives--or so we liberals might suppose.
You see, after the "shellacking" in the 2010 midterms, Ed Schultz and his progressive ilk have no choice but to get serious about their beliefs. They have to dump this notion of yechhhhh "the progressive movement" and start to act like what they should have been in the first place: liberals.
A distinction without a difference? Absolutely not--and here's why.
As I've said over and over in print and on my show, conservatives stole "liberal" and turned into a dirty word. To my mind, it's perhaps the greatest triumph of the conservative movement--to linguistically wipe out the opposition, a pretty good reason for mourning in America.
MoveOn.org is a "progressive" organization. Air America was a "progressive" talk radio network. Ed Schultz and the whole damn lot of them are "progressive" hosts.
And it's all chickenshit: people afraid to say what they really are. A whole movement defined by the opposition. Using a term that's nearly a hundred years old because they are afraid to be who they are.
In contrast, is "conservative" a dirty word? Hell, no. A Republican can't be conservative enough. Even John McCain came around in the face of the lunatic fringe. But liberals, at least since Michael Dukakis was the Democratic Presidential nominee, have run away from the word faster than a shot Greek pol with a funny hat in a tank. And that's why conservatives eat liberals for lunch in the greater political debate--because liberals can't even look in the mirror without running away.
So when Ed Schultz decides it's finally time to become a "liberal," as he did this week post-shellacking, that's big news within "the last of the liberal talk shows." It means I no longer have to carry the torch alone. It means liberals are ready to stand up to these conservative clowns and clock them upside their noggins.
Welcome aboard, Big Ed. I love they new you. If you can drop the infomercials and the protectionism and the slavish devotion to American labor, you just might turn into a great liberal some day. There's still plenty of room on the bandwagon.