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[T]wo conservative groups are launching new initiatives aiming to adopt the left’s tactics against liberals like Rachel Maddow.The groups plan to pressure advertisers for left-leaning shows like Maddow’s on MSNBC, in hopes that the sponsors will pull their ads. They charge that Maddow and other liberal hosts are peddling conspiracy theories and smearing conservatives with personal attacks.
Observation: The modern "conservative" movement is entirely reactive. Bill O'Reilly was finally fired over a decade of sexual harassment allegations because advertisers wanted nothing more to do with him; the response is to pick out some perceived liberal enemy and try to gin up a retaliatory movement against them. The last presidential election was rife with fraudulent news reports set up by overseas rage-for-profit peddlers; the response was to hammer together a new bandwagon in which every story, everywhere, was declared to be equally fake. The Republican Congress has long considered its major goal to be undoing the act of the last non-conservative president.
An entire political movement, reduced to I know you are but what am I. Spin in your grave, Bill Buckley.
Media Research Center, the long-running conservative media watchdog, and a new group called Media Equalizer say for too long the left has successfully pressured advertisers to stop advertising on shows featuring hosts like Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck, who were eventually forced off Fox News, and Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, who have so far fought off their critics.
Glenn Beck was forced off the air for a slow breakdown so severe and obvious that Roger Ailes, who dedicated an entire network to peddling asinine narratives to America's most gullible people, finally came to the conclusion that his chalkboard conspiracy rants were making the rest of the network look bad. Bill O'Reilly was fired after a decade of lawsuits from his female co-workers over inappropriate behavior, and if that is the hill so-called "conservative media watchdogs" want to die on than hike on up there and load your gun. If the premise is that conservatives in the public eye should be able to sexually assault their co-workers with no career repercussions or public reprobation, say that. Defend it. Write your little op-ed columns explaining yourself.
But blaming it on a cabal of dastardly liberals who are forcing career repercussions upon skeevy perverts is, in a word, pathetic. The stated premise is that since conspiracy theory peddlers and office perverts have been getting second looks from nervous advertisers, by gum the only thing to do is come up with reason why non-conservative pundits ought to be given the same attention. Our man may have violated company policies for a decade—but your pundit insults people. Our current network standard-bearer may have peddled ridiculous conspiracy notions about a murdered man that so wounded the family they publicly begged America to stop, but your pundits are "smearing" our good name.
"Fighting fire with fire is just to point out this can go both ways,” said Brian Maloney, a former conservative radio host heading up the Media Equalizer movement. “We’re trying to show [that] if you’re going to play this game, live or die by this sword. I don’t think the left is used to the right firing back on this.”
Oh heavens no, liberal groups and perceived too-liberal foes are entirely unaware of all the many, many, many boycotts and anti-advertiser campaigns and harassing phone calls and anthrax mailings and bomb threats and sending men to your place of work with a goddamn gun that can go on when conservatives begin to get upset with how an ideological opponent has been treating them. Truly, this will come as a revelation.
So the notion here is that because Bill O'Reilly was fired for being an apparently unredeemable skeevy workplace pervert and because Sean Hannity is in some lukewarm water himself over torturing an American family with gibberish-laden theories about how their son's death was something something Hillary Clinton, iteration three hundred and twelve, Brian Maloney and associates will therefore stick it to (spins dial) Rachel Maddow, precise reasons to be determined later. No defense of O'Reilly's acts. No defense of Hannity's obvious falsehoods. Just retaliation, good and hard, against whoever Brian can identify as an ideological foe of similar import.
How very infantile. An entire political movement, led by children. No ideology other than to do harm to opponents because they are opponents; no strategy other than to react to each perceived wound by wounding back; no belief system other than the insistence that whatever the other side is against, we must be for, and whatever they are for, we must be against.
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