Not just a Repub wet dream…
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… which, of course, is why Cosmo Boy will not stop lying about Maddow’s phantom candidacy. An articulate left-wing lesbian is the perfect Teabagger boogie-monster, an ideal image to scare the rubes into emptying their wallets for the clean-cut fella with the sincere expression. But there are plenty of good progressives, and even some Democrats, who wouldn’t mind chipping in to fund a Maddow run for Ted Kennedy’s old seat, either.
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And Scott Brown, while no Rhodes Scholar, is very media-cunning — he had a successful career as a male model, his wife is an anchor on the ‘middle-of-the-road’ Boston local news station, his daughter made it to the top handful of contestants on American idol. None of the stuff on the video above is actionable; if confronted, Brown can skate handily between ‘I was too polite to disagree with those wicked commentors saying naughty things’ and ‘some low-ranking office staffer must’ve lost the while-you-were-out messages Rachel left’, with a side order of ‘Jeez, can’t you uptight progressives take a joke?’
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I’m afraid Scott Brown may turn out to be the working political version of Sarah Palin.
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Redshirt
Every day in every way, we’re getting Dumber and Dumberer.
That’s my America!
Seriously, if this Brown Clown is not kicked out in 2012, I hope we can forever rid the meme-world of the idea that Massachusetts is a “liberal” state. It’s just been conditioned differently in the past, but that’s all changing as Mass, too, gets infected by this Wingnut madness.
El Cid
Title took me a second.
Kryptik
You know, this wouldn’t happen if we didn’t have a media equivalent to a 5 year old ADD child. Except, you know, the kid actually learns while the media just sort of keeps rolling aimlessly toward the next GOP talking point.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Better your state than mine:)
Jim, Foolish Literalist
What really offends me is the cheap bigot-baiting (‘Teh Gai is coming after me! and you! Send money!’) and even moreso the fact that no MSMer, to my knowledge, has called him out on this
Comrade Mary
@El Cid: I think that’s because it works on at least three levels, including the musical reference. Nice one!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Redshirt:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but hasn’t MA had more Republican govs than Dem over the last 20, 25 years? By a pretty solid ratio, too?
dmsilev
OT: If you didn’t see last night’s Daily Show coverage of Erick of the House of Erick’s new CNN gig, get thee to thedailyshow.com and watch it.
-dms
Brick Oven Bill
Rachel is not a boogie-monster. She is an attractive prospect whose only apparent fault is spending too much time amongst the Men of MSNBC.
Teabaggers do not make judgment without placing themselves in the other person’s shoes.
This is a term we call empathy.
Betty Cracker
I think Maddow should stay right where she is — we need her perspective in the media. Fortunately, she seems determined to do just that.
Ogami Itto
@dmsilev: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-april-1-2010/cnn-hires-erick-erickson
danimal
Dems could do worse than watching her pushback on Brown’s false charges. Notice how she doesn’t parse her words and that she repeats “he’s lying” every other sentence. When confronting lies and liars, the harsh truth is the best response.
tamied
That’s if any Republican Senator actually did any work.
YellowJournalism
“Oh, no. I never said she was running. I said someone like her was running.”
“No, no, no. I was under the impression that there Democrats who wanted her to run. I never said she was recruited or was running.”
Wouldn’t it be great, though, if she won a write-in vote because of all of this publicity?
some other guy
The important question that no one seems to be asking is: does Maddow drive a truck? I, like the fine people of Massachusetts, tend to base my voting decisions mostly on the candidates’ primary mode of transportation.
media browski
Wait, you called her articulate? Isn’t that… oh, yeah, I guess that’s the perfect word for her :)
Belated Happy b-day to Maddow!
Kristine
I thought conservatives turned on Brown after he voted for the jobs bill?
shirt
I think Rachel should move back to California and take DiFi’s job.
some other guy
She also appears pretty clean.
Can you say “President Maddow”?
jeffreyw
Plato teaches us in The Republican that the city is built upon shills.
Ash
If anyone has the day off and is bored, check out this Vice TV piece on the Oath Keepers/tea baggers.
http://www.vbs.tv/newsroom/2nd-revolutionary-war–4
These fucknuts get all their information from youtube and worked for Ron Paul. That’s all you need to know.
Liberty60
Every generation
needsdeserves its Dan Quayle.PaulW
If someone were using me as a political strawman as a fundraising target, and using lies in the process (after all, I’m not running for his Senate either), wouldn’t I have the right to pursue defamation charges against him?
FlipYrWhig
@some other guy: A truck that he bought to tow horse trailers for his daughter’s equestrian competitions, but that he ceased to use for that purpose because he found it too difficult to back up. Seriously.
No one would let a Democrat get away with that kind of bullshit.
FlipYrWhig
Palin is hampered by being prickly and petty. Brown seems to be roughly as ignorant as Palin, but plays it as genial oafishness. Palin to me has always seemed just plain mean.
Maude
@Brick Oven Bill:
Good morning. Have you done any spring planting yet?
The thing about teabaggers being in other people’s shoes is teabags get dunked in boiling water. Aren’t the baggers in a lot of pain?
Pasquinade
Speaking of Palin, even the FReepers can’t work up much enthusiasm over her Fox “interview” show.
Joey Maloney
@PaulW:
Not if you’re a “public figure”, which any tv personality assuredly is. Well, you still have the right, but you have to prove something called “actual malice” which is a virtually impossible hill to climb. I think you’d also have to prove that being called a candidate for office is defamatory per se, which, jokes aside, would be completely impossible.
IANAL but I talk smack on the internet a lot, so that should be enough of a credential, at least in the country that ran Sarah Palin for vice president with a 72-year-old cancer survivor.
Scott
@PaulW:
If someone were using me as a political strawman as a fundraising target, and using lies in the process (after all, I’m not running for his Senate either), wouldn’t I have the right to pursue defamation charges against him?
I think it would be a really difficult case to win. You’d have to prove that the false claims caused some sort of harm (usually to reputation) to Maddow, and it’d be hard to get a judge or jury to accept “He made it sound like I was going to run for Congress!” as a serious injury.
And if the court ruled against her, Brown would start crowing that he had been “vindicated.”
Scott
Or what Joey Maloney said…
cfaller96
OMG SEXISM MISOGYNY HOW DARE YOU!
David
Brown’s mo is long-term grifting whereas Palin has only a short-term vision. Her motto is “get while the gettin’s good.”
Ron
@some other guy: Actually, she apparently DOES drive a truck.
Meyer
Elizabeth Warren would be a much more interesting candidate, particularly if the dems can get Brown to vote against financial reform. I’m sure Jon Stewart would campaign for her and wouldn’t that be fun?
AxelFoley
Thanks a lot, Massachusetts. Thanks a fuckin’ lot.
Still–STILL–can’t believe MA elected this man to replace Teddy after all he did and meant for that state and this country.
Any other empty seat, I wouldn’t care as much, but we’re talking about Ted Kennedy (and I’ve never been to MA). Regardless of how inept a campain Coakley ran, no fuckin’ way this clown should have won Teddy’s seat.
Dave Fud
Rachel should probably ignore him instead of promoting him. I love Rachel, but I don’t think, as she stated in this clip, that she is actually “extracting a price” from Brown by calling him out on his annoying, lying behavior. Maybe she understands her state better than I do, but it seems to me that she is a useful enemy in this context, and she is upping the ante.
Redshirt
@AxelFoley: Exactly! How “liberal” can Massachusetts be if the replace the “Liberal Lion of the Senate” with this paper-maiche clown?
The obvious answer is the voters of MA are as gullible and…, stupid, as voters anywhere, and can fall for the exact same tricks that have taken over large swathes of the rest of the country.
It can happen here people!
Xenos
@some other guy:
Better than that, Maddow’s wife runs a landscaping business (or at least used to, back when they met) and uses her truck for work, instead of pulling a pony trailer around Norfolk County, MA. In other words, in a butchness contest, Brown loses.
TR
I suppose there isn’t much legal recourse.
Still, if I were her, I’d try to file for a restraining order against this obsessed stalker of hers. For nothing other than the publicity.
some other guy
@FlipYrWhig
@Ron
@Xenos
I was only kidding about the truck thing, but I guess it’s nice to know I could, in a pinch, rely on Rachel to help me move a couch or something. That’d get my vote, for sure.
Meanwhile, Scott Brown would be one of those rat bastards who refuses to help because we might scratch up his plastic bed liner.
James K. Polk, Esq.
Doesn’t that mean he’ll quit the Senate halfway through his term?
Xenos
Never lived in Mass, have you? I did not think he was going to win, but it certainly was a serious possibility from the beginning of the campaign. We have lots of independents here, and they cottoned onto the Fox craziness.
Meyer
Yeah, well, that sense of entitlement was a major reason Brown actually did win that seat. People were saying “It’s not Teddy’s seat, it’s OUR seat.”
Andy
@Xenos:
I believe Susan Mikula is an artist, and it was Maddow who was working as a landscaper when (and how) they met. Details, details.
Meyer
Yep. And I’m pretty pissed at the MA dem party, which I think sucks hard and does take votes for granted.
Though you have to admit that Coakley ran a campaign for the record books. You could not run a worse campaign without actually trying to do so.
middlewest
Hmm… I wonder if a television personality who calls republicans out on their bald-faced lies could ever end up in the senate.
Rathskeller
Man, I’m crushing pretty hard on Maddow right now. I’ve waited so long for someone to say something like this on the air, from the left, talking about reality. I have no idea if it will work, I’m just glad she said it. Next up in my dream list: Maddow can get his spokesperson on the phone, and play with him/her like a cat with a mouse.
Brown seems to running on LBJ’s old “make them deny it”, going for money and specifically trying to get plenty of free publicity, and she in turn seems to be saying, “oh, you want a clip for CNN, here’s one they can run.” I hope the story keeps going and going, and the long-term conclusion is that Brown is pretty to look at but an empty suit.
For people surprised by the conservatives in MA, in fact, my wife hails from western Massachusetts, and it can get pretty crazy out there. I’ve never looked at the poll data in depth, but it seems that MA maps to NY: a prominent, liberal city dominates, to the annoyance and resentment of the rest of the state, which leans further right.
tamied
@Rathskeller:
You make that sound like something that would matter to the people who voted for him.
AxelFoley
@Redshirt:
This.
You’d think after 8 years of Bush, folks would wise up. But. we’re talking about the American electorate here, so…
Currants
@PaulW: I think not if you’re a public figure, but I could be wrong about that.
AxelFoley
Testing…1, 2, 3…
ruemara
Rachel should stop giving him free publicity. Seriously. We know he’s lying, but what she’s doing is giving him plenty of soundbites with his name on the air and footage to be recut. Then the morons who support him will sit back, scratch their ass and say “whep, if’n she ain’t runnin’, why’s she squawking summuch? mus’be summin ther’ ain’t it?” Then they’ll reach into their old skoal tin where they store the mad money and send Grifter Brown a 20. I’d move to MA just to vote for her, but I’m not sure if she can resist the urge to set things straight-which works out just fine for Scott Brown.
AhabTRuler
Yeah, you have to be careful in Western Mass. I mean, no one from Northhampton would vote for a Lesbian. Lulz.
On a more serious Lesbian note, later today my sister and her partner are getting hitched! DC City Council, FTW!
Home Rule, bitchez!
Ella in NM
@Joey Maloney:
Maybe so, but what about filing a restraining order to cease using her public name and reputation for money making purposes?
I couldn’t sell shampoo stating “Rachel Maddow loves it!” without paying her for that right, why should he get to fund raise for free on her name?
SadieSue
@Rathskeller:
Well, I actually live in WMass right now & our end of the state voted, with very few exception, for Martha Coakley (held our nose while doing so, though) – it was the central & eastern ends that were almost all virtually red for Brown. We may be rural, but we’re a helluva a lot more liberal than most of the rest of the state. We are also, sadly, too low in population to affect many things statewide, like that election.
And AhabTRuler is right about Northampton – it’s probably the most liberal city (small though it is) in Massachusetts, much more so than Boston, which is Democratic rather than liberal. And I think that’s one of the things people forget – Massachusetts is a very Democratic state; that does NOT necessarily mean it is a liberal state.
ETA – Congrats to your sister & her partner, AhabTRuler!!
morzer
I suspect that Brown is toast in 2012, for several reasons:
1) He can’t run the anti-incumbent, fake Independent campaign that he did before
2) Part of why Coakley lost (other than being the Valium candidate) was because, in a sense, she wasn’t intended to win. She’s very much part of the Western MA side of the Democratic establishment – and they don’t usually get to pick candidates, partly because they normally don’t have the votes, compared to more populous parts of the state. She won the primary to everyone’s surprise, and to no little chagrin from the people who run the other Democratic areas, and they simply didn’t bother to support her adequately, but sat on their hands.
3) Brown has now taken positions, and some of those are going to drag him down in 2012, especially if the economy is going well and the President is popular.
4) Once Brown is clearly part of the Party of NO, you’ll find that some renegade Democrats will come home to their real party
5) Coakley ran a wretched campaign, in a bad economy, and still didn’t lose by much. Give the Dems a good candidate, a decent economy and a more unified party, and watch Brown go down.
Someone mentioned MA electing Republican governors. This is true in recent years, but explained partly by some disastrous candidate selections by the Democrats, which allowed Republicans to seem more moderate than they really were. Then again, we also had the first iteration of the Romneytron, who seemed.. sane. Well, for a while.
ericblair
You people are so goddamn shallow. Didn’t anybody, anybody ask whether the truck has trucknutz? What kind of political observers do you think you are?
rootless-e
@morzer: The democratic party needs a rule that anyone who says “It is so-and-so’s turn” should be shot.
Tom Hilton
I thought I was going to have to read through 57 comments in this thread, but fortunately most of them have been stricken. Saves me time.Rathskeller
@SadieSue: Fair enough. It might be just that my wife’s family is crazy. No arguments about Northampton; I was thinking of Springfield, Hadley, Chicopee, Holyoke.
morzer
@rootless-e:
To go with the circular firing squad rule?
Tom Hilton
Let’s try this.Still strikethrough?Hob
Your HighnessDear Ms. Maddow,Please let me know if you need any computer consulting, graphic design, yard work, foot rubs, or just a live-in assistant in French maid attire. PS: I can be a girl up to a certain point.
ellaesther
@some other guy: Bingo.
(Also, Rachel would probably mix you drinks after helping you move the couch, so, yeah. Go with Rachel).
ellaesther
Also, I said this yesterday but it bears repeating:
My favorite part of her “you’re lying, stop lying” mini-rant (can it be called a rant when she remains so calm and reasonable?) was when she said, in a mildly Olbermann-esque tone: “I’m not trying to get my ratings up – look at our ratings data. You don’t rate, sir.”
arguingwithsignposts
Damn, I need a cigarette. WTG Ms. Maddow!
TooManyJens
@Tom Hilton: It looks fine in Firefox.
Meg
@some other guy: I think actually she does drive a truck and she likes fishing.
Meg
@Hob: Too late. I think Rachel’s partner is an artist and they met when Rachel was hired to do her partner’s yard work.
WereBear
@some other guy: Yes, she does. She showed it on air at one point; big red pickup.
Xantar
I lived in Massachusetts under Governor Bill Weld, and I’m pretty sure that in any other part of the country, he would have been a Democrat. He may have been a Republican, but he didn’t do that badly. And I had to give him a lot of respect for running “The Good Race” against Kerry.
Joseph Nobles
The only person trying to recruit Rachel Brown into running against Scott Brown…
…is Scott Brown.
PaulW
But the bastard is lying! At some point he’s got to answer for that.
Redshirt
@PaulW: That seems a little naive in today’s climate – when has lying ever hurt a Republican? In fact, lying seems to be one of their core strategic weapons.
Dr. Morpheus
@Rathskeller:
That describes Illinois to a Tee.
Very liberal Chicago (and other metropolitan/college cities) and scarlet in the rural areas.
WereBear
Show me a liberal/rural area.
I live near artist colonies & such, but it still does not dominate numerically.
henqiguai
@SadieSue (#55):
I did not know that about Massachusetts’ Western Reaches (the liberal stuff); but there is that whole ZooMass campus and the five campus consortium including the likes of Smith and Amherst colleges.
The central part, up north, is dominated by the results of Fort Devens (now just Devens), and a number of wealthier and fairly conservative small towns. Too, let’s not forget that some of the most virulent anti-busing activism was out of Boston.
So no, Massachusetts is not liberal, it’s a conservative Democratic state with very strong puritan and Catholic influences. And a lot of localized parochialism.
Yeah, I live in Massachusetts, and no I’m not a native.
Yutsano
The funniest part of all of this is it’s making me want to draft Rchel to run sooo bad. I know she won’t do it as she has a pretty sweet gig and is probably a bit too honest to do the actual politicking thing, but why not let Scotty Boy’s biggest fears come to light? I have little doubt she could win, especially since the publicity train goes both ways.
asiangrrlMN
@ellaesther: Yes. I liked how she got slightly exasperated, but kept her cool. I think she needs to keep at him for the exact reason she stated: People should be called out when they are lying. If more Dems did it (in general), I think there would be more consequences for the people doing it (in general, Republicans).
@Yutsano: I know! That’s my immediate reaction as well. It would be a hoot!
SadieSue
Rathskeller at 1:25 pm
I grew up in Granby (MA) so I’m very familiar with all the towns you mention (I went to nursery school & kindergarten & spent a couple of years of college in Springfield, shop frequently in Hadley, & shopped, went to movies & hung out in Holyoke, at least until it disintegrated pretty completely) Yeah, there are conservatives in each town around here, even Northampton, but they still tend to be, more often than not, very blue collar traditionalists & Democrats rather than Republicans. So, you may be right – it may just be your wife’s family rather than the area. =D
That said, Coakley won Springfield & might have won Holyoke (I don’t remember) but here is a map of the state after the election – as you can see, the Berkshires, Pioneer Valley (where I am), & the Boston area is blue. The rest, quite sadly, isn’t. Here’s hoping the D’s put up a good candidate (for a change) against Brown in 2012.