Welcome to your Wednesday open thread. I’ve been trying to follow the weather predictions and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m hopelessly confused about the weather. I’m going to try the old-fashioned look out the window technique.
Did you all see Jon Stewart’s takedown of Fox News and Megyn Kelly? It’s worth a watch (or a rewatch).
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| 24 Hour Nazi Party People | ||||
| www.thedailyshow.com | ||||
|
||||
That was brilliant, Jon Stewart at his best. I just want to add for the record, only Nazis are like Nazis. It’s never appropriate to compare your opponents to Nazis and I wish people would stop.
Oh look, it’s another leader of the left who none of us have ever heard of. Glenn Beck has been demonizing an elderly academic named Francis Fox Piven who has been getting death threats.
A City University of New York professor and scholar of grassroots activism, the 78-year-old Piven has been the target of relentless Glenn Beck attacks. For an entire year now the Fox News talker has been pushing a tangled conspiracy theory that puts Piven, and her late husband, fellow academic Richard Cloward, at the center of an all-powerful left-wing movement to “collapse” the United States economy and government — a devious collapse designed to allow President Obama to radically transform the country, according to Beck.
The talker’s basis for the dark attacks date back to a Nation essay Piven and Cloward wrote 45 years ago. And as part of his misinformation campaign, Beck has repeatedly demonized Piven, denouncing her as an “enemy of the Constitution” and someone who wants to “destroy America.” Piven has become a star player in Beck’s rogue gallery of treacherous, all-powerful (often Jewish) liberals, seeking to eliminate the American way of life.
Beck’s fans have recently taken notice of Piven. On a website Beck runs, The Blaze, which also traffics in the Piven smear campaign, readers began posting lurid threats against the elderly academic. “ONE SHOT…ONE KILL!” announced one. “Why is this woman still alive?” asked another. And this particularly shocking threat: “Maybe they should burst through the front door of this arrogant elitist and slit the hateful cow’s throat.”
This new era of civility is looking a lot like the old era of incivility. But hey, Democrats and Republicans sat together at the SOTU so it’s all good.