Dayhoff Soundtrack: Tim Padgett - Time Two Wrongs and the Right

Monday, March 12, 2012

Tim Padgett - Time Two Wrongs and the Right

Two Wrongs and the Right: Overreaction to Conservatives Leads Liberals to Hypocrisy

By TIM PADGETT | March 12, 2012

…

[…]

…

They were at it last week when commentators like my former TIME colleague Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post or Kirsten Powers of The Daily Beast dared suggest that male media personalities on the left – like Matt Taibbi, Keith Olbermann or Bill Maher, who called Sarah Palin a “c—” on his HBO show last year – are themselves guilty of misogyny. Rather than swallow their ideological pride for a moment, too many liberals, including more than a few leading feminists, have dug in like the Vatican and refused to acknowledge that their side too can be wrong or unfair. Or, as in the case of Maher, who just gave $1 million to a super PAC backing President Obama, as boorish as Rush Limbaugh.

Yes, there are qualifications. Limbaugh is a powerful gazillionaire radio show bully who beat up a powerless student on the air, while Maher targeted a powerhouse political celeb who was almost one heart-beat from the presidency and blasts her own opponents as if they were so many moose. Maher, like Limbaugh, apologized for his remarks last week while defending their right to speak their minds. But this isn’t about the First Amendment; it’s about the ugly loss of civility in American discourse. The bottom line is that publicly calling any woman the “c” word is the sort of knuckle-dragging stuff for which Maher so sanctimoniously lambastes the gun-loving, NASCAR-watching, church-going heartland on “Real Time.” Maher’s left-wing defenders, meanwhile, argue that he’s an entertainer – seemingly oblivious to the fact that right-wing presidential hopeful Rick Santorum made the same excuse for Limbaugh… http://swampland.time.com/2012/03/12/two-wrongs-and-the-right-overreaction-to-conservatives-leads-liberals-to-hypocrisy/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fswampland+%28TIME%3A+Swampland%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Journalists Tim Padgett

*****