Most outrageous comments of 2009
December 21, 2009 3:17 pm ET —
50 Comments
Outrageous comments are nothing new to the conservative media -- one might even call them a defining characteristic. The Most Outrageous Comment of the 2009 came when Fox News host Glenn Beck asserted that Obama is a "racist" who has "exposed himself as a guy" with "a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture," but right-wing media figures made plenty of other unhinged remarks throughout the year:
Racially charged remarks
The election of the first black U.S. president led to a slew of racially charged comments that were truly outrageous:
- Limbaugh on Obama: "We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles ... because his father was black"
- Jesse Lee Peterson: "I think we all agree that Barack Obama was elected by, mostly by black racists and white guilty people."
- Criticizing federal response in KY, Quinn claimed Obama "basically sees white people as kind of a you know, sort of an evil fact of life"
- Savage: Obama is "biggest liar in the history of the presidency," and he's "getting away with it... because he's a man of color"
- Limbaugh: "[I]n Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering"
- Limbaugh: Obama is "the greatest living example of a reverse racist"
- Limbaugh: "Obama's entire economic program is reparations"
- Bay Buchanan on "quota queen" Sotomayor: "Her whole life was dedicated to demanding special privileges"
- Pat Buchanan: "This has been a country built, basically, by white folks"
- O'Reilly tease: "[S]hould white Americans be concerned about Judge Sotomayor?"
- Quinn to "race-baiting" African-American "ingrates": "get on your knees" and "kiss the American dirt" because slavery brought them to U.S.
- Savage declares: "The white Christian heterosexual married male is the epitome of everything right with America"
War on the poor
In the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, some right-wing media figures attacked the poor:
- Cunningham on the poor: "They're poor because they lack values, ethics, and morals"
- Cunningham on Section 8 housing: "I like keeping all those degenerates in one location so we can keep an eye on them"; residents "sit around and fornicate, defecate"
- Bill Cunningham claims stimulus "give[s] ACORN up to $4.2 trillion" and contains "$350 million to hand out condoms and birth control pills so the poor can fornicate like rabbits"
- Limbaugh fill-in Davis: Cash for Clunkers "helps your shiftless cousin buy more meth," lets you buy "carton of Luckys"
- Boortz: People living in Katrina trailers, Section 8 housing and on welfare shouldn't be allowed to vote
- Boortz welfare rant -- "human parasitic garbage lining up to get their applications to loot"
War on women
Right-wing media figures also engaged in sexism and downright misogyny:
- Quinn calls Pelosi "Bolshevik Bitch with a Mallet"
- Limbaugh: If Pelosi "wants fewer births, I have the way to do this and it won't require any contraception: You simply put pictures of Nancy Pelosi ... in every cheap motel room. ... That will keep birthrates down because that picture will keep a lot of things down"
- Limbaugh airs clip of Hillary Clinton, asks his listeners, "Doesn't that remind you of your first, and maybe your second, both, your ex-wives?"
- Limbaugh on Pelosi: "The third person in line for the presidency in this country is a complete airhead"
- Limbaugh: "[Granholm's] a ditz. Pelosi is a ditz. Obama is a menace and a danger."
- Savage claims that "as a result of women on Naval ships," they have become "floating brothels"
- Limbaugh: Hillary Clinton wasn't let into Marines because "they didn't have uniforms or boots big enough to fit that butt and those ankles"
- Post's Milbank, flashing Hillary Clinton photo: "We won't tell you who's getting a bottle of Mad Bitch" beer
- Quinn on Pelosi: "This bitch is trying to get us to lose the war!"
- Ingraham: "Nancy Pelosi basically did everything except sell her own body" to pass health care reform bill
- Beck on Landrieu: "We're with a high-class prostitute"
- Echoing Beck, Limbaugh claims Landrieu "may be the most expensive prostitute in the history of prostitution"
Attacks on GLBT community
In addition to a sustained assault on Department of Education official Kevin Jennings, right-wingers made outrageous attacks based on sexual orientation:
- Savage: "One of the reasons America is suffering right now is because so many people who are gay have not had children. ... Some of the most wonderful genetic material is going to waste"
- Hannity and "Great American" panelists fearmonger about Jennings "indoctrinating" children, "promoting homosexuality"
- Limbaugh: "[W]e all know that Barney [Frank] patrols Uranus"
- Quinn:"[T]the last time I checked, two guys doing the bone dance with Mr. Sphincter was not going to produce the next generation of children"
- Robertson: Many "made homosexual because of a coach or a guidance counselor or some other male figure who has abused them"
- O'Reilly again claims that if gay marriage was legalized, "you could have married a duck"
- Pat Robertson suggests "ultimate conclusion" of legal same-sex marriage is legal polygamy, bestiality, child molestation, pedophilia
Revolutionary and paranoid rhetoric
Right-wingers frequently employed paranoid and revolutionary rhetoric and suggested that progressives, including Obama and Democrats in Congress, were betraying America.
- Morris: "Those crazies in Montana who say, 'We're going to kill ATF agents because the U.N.'s going to take over' -- well, they're beginning to have a case"
- Limbaugh: "Thank you President Obama. Thank you CNN. You are doing the job that everybody expects of you, taking every tradition and institution that defined this country's greatness and trying to rip it to shreds"
- Limbaugh claims White House is "[p]erfectly timed, perfectly programmed, perfectly educated to destroy capitalism ... and they're in the process of doing it"
- Fox's Charles Payne: "[O]ne day, I think that we are heading toward a one-world sort of government. I think Obama probably likes that"
- Limbaugh attacks state of Maine, says "saw the state off and let it float out to sea"
- Claiming Obama is "letting our troops literally bleed and die" in Afghanistan, Beck suggests he will "pay for it" in afterlife
- Savage: "[L]ikelihood is very high" that "martial law will be declared" after "equivalent of the Reichstag fire" occurs
- Savage: "There are internment camps being planned" and the National Guard is going to "run" them
- Limbaugh: "if we had any good luck, Honduras would send some people here and help us get our government back"
- Beck guest Scheuer: "The only chance we have as a country right now is" for bin Laden to "detonate a major weapon" in U.S.
- Beck: "[I]f we don't have some common sense, we're facing the destruction of our country... it's coming"
- Rodgers: A "few million dead Americans" will "wake up" public "to the fact that they have elected an anti-American President"
- CBS golf analyst Feherty: "[I]f you gave any U.S. soldier a gun with two bullets in it ... there's a good chance that Nancy Pelosi would get shot twice, and Harry Reid and bin Laden would be strangled to death."
- Morris on Obama's foreign policy: "If you're an enemy of America... he's in bed with you... The way to get popular with this administration is to be an enemy of the United States"
- Beck: "You can't convince me that the founding fathers wouldn't allow you to secede"
- Beck imitates Obama pouring gasoline on "average American"; says: "President Obama, why don't you just set us on fire? ... We didn't vote to lose the Republic"
- Newsmax columnist: Military coup "to resolve the 'Obama problem' " is not "unrealistic"
Birthers
Conspiracy theories about Obama's birth certificate were conclusively debunked during the 2008 campaign, but that didn't stop several right-wing commentators from continuing to push the smear:
- Limbaugh: "Barack Obama has yet to have to prove he's a citizen. All he'd have to do is show a birth certificate"
- Dobbs asks: "[S]hould he produce his birth certificate -- the long form, the real deal? Should he be a little more forthcoming? ... What is the deal here? I'm starting to think we have a -- we have a document issue. Do you suppose he's un -- no, I won't even use the word undocumented. It wouldn't be right."
- Liddy claims Obama "born" in Kenya; warns guest to "to avoid the corpses of the illegal aliens" while passing through desert
- Limbaugh: "God does not have a birth certificate. Neither does Obama."
- Hannity: Given his father's birthplace, what's wrong with asking if Obama has a "legitimate birth certificate?"
Nazis and fascists and communists, oh my!
There were far more attacks on Obama and other progressives as Nazis, fascists, communists, Marxists, socialists, and similar labels than we have space for, so here are some of the most ridiculous examples:
- Days after decrying those who say Democrats are "trying to turn us into communist Russia," Beck claimed Obama "has Marxist tendencies"
- Beck continues long history of invoking Nazis by comparing Fox to the Jews during the Holocaust
- Quinn agrees with caller that Democrats "took over the country without firing a shot," adds "so did Hitler"
- Savage: Obama "is a neo-marxist fascist dictator in the making"
- In CNBC host Cramer's "U.S.S.A.": "Comrade[]" Obama is a "Bolshevik" who is "taking cues from Lenin"
- Limbaugh: "Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate"
- Hannity suggests SCOTUS nominee will be "somebody extremely radical" since Obama's policies have been "radically left" and "socialist"
- Dick Morris' self-confessed conspiracy theory: Obama "wants his plan to fail...so that he can make the case for bank nationalization and vindicate his dream of a socialist economy"
Other
Plenty of other remarks defied categorization but certainly merited mention among the Most Outrageous Comments of 2009:
- Limbaugh likens Democrats to murderers, rapists, and "this Muslim guy" that "offed his wife's head"
- Limbaugh on EFCA: "One day Tony Soprano will walk in with a lead pipe and he will start beating people upside the head to vote to unionize"
- Ingraham guest host Bruce on the Obamas: "We've got trash in the White House"
- Beck portrays Obama, Democrats as vampires "going after the blood of our businesses," suggests "driv[ing] a stake through the heart of the bloodsuckers"
- Beck: "Nobel Peace Prize should be turned down by Barack Obama and given ... to the Tea Party goers and the 9-12 Project"
- Perino: "We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term"
- Fox's Wallace on ACORN booking: I wish we "were going to have the prostitute [Giles] because she's pretty cute"
- Beck encourages "day of Fast and Prayer for the Republic" on Yom Kippur
- Dobbs on Howard Dean: "[H]e's a bloodsucking leftist -- I mean, you gotta put a stake through his heart to stop this guy"
- Beck jokes about "put[ting] poison" in Nancy Pelosi's wine
- Brandishing bat, Beck declares, "Anyone not on board, look out, because you too could be the next victim of the killing spree"
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The geek in me wants to write about the conservation of stupidity, the fifth fundamental force of nature. Stupidity has no limits to expansion. It expands to fill vacuums as well as solid brain matter, equally. We can't measure the power of stupidity nor the speed with which it travels. The inability to comprehend the mass of stupidity has befuddled our greatest scientists for centuries.
Pass the eggnog, yeah the one with brandy. Better yet, just pass the brandy.
Funny that there isn't more scientific writing about Stupidity, since it's something that affects us all.
dumb all over, a little ugly on the side
Take some time to familiarize yourself with it, and you won't display as much of FZ's basic universal building block.
"No, no. I have been practicing...I bowled a 129. It's like -- it was like Special Olympics, or something."
police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, "acted stupidly" in arresting a prominent black Harvard professor
"I didn't want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about doing any seances."
[One wonders what] Mary Jo Kopechne would have had to say about Ted’s [Kennedy] death, and what she’d have thought of the life and career that are being [rightfully] heralded. Who knows — maybe she’d feel it was worth it.”
- Melissa Lafsky, Huffington Post.
“The Republicans lie! They want to see you dead! They’d rather make money off your dead corpse! They kind of like it when that woman has cancer and they don’t have anything for her.”
- Ed Schultz, The Ed Show
“...the total mindless, morally bankrupt, knee-jerk, fascistic hatred — without which Michelle Malkin would just be a big mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it.”
- Keith Olbermann, Countdown
“The tenets of the Republican Party are amazing and they seem warm and welcome. But when I watch it be applied — like you didn’t have to go much further than the Republican National Convention....It literally look[s] like Nazi Germany.”
- D.L. Hughley, Breaks the News
“It’s hard to talk when you’re teabagging.”
- Anderson Cooper, 360
“This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up. That is nothing but a bunch of teabagging rednecks.”
- Janeane Garofalo, Actress/Activist
“There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today. One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages.”
- Thomas Friedman, NYT
when i first heard and read these i didn't find them to be particulary outrageous, just dumb... but when i applied media matters' technique of being thin-skinned it was just as easy to be offended by them as mm is at the so-called outrageous comments they cited...
DL Hughley's show was canceled less than a month after that line.
Tom Friedman is not even close to progressive.
http://www.salon.com/comics/tomo/2009/11/30/tomo
LOL .... Thank-you for sharing your insightful commentary. My spouse and I salute you with a powerful eggnog toast. Well spoken !!!
<sarcasm off>
The syndicated programs like Rush, Beck, Hannity, Ingraham, Savage etc saturate the country with their message all day every day. Then local parroting hosts repeat the same thing all day every day. On any given day 10's of millions listen to this crap. The are a debate team that won't allow the other team on. They are corporate financed frontmen that protect the 4 main industries controlling this Country
1. Health/ Pharma industry
2. Wall St
3. Military industrial Complex
4. Big oil/ energy
They act like they care about their listeners and wrap their message in the flag of Patriotism and individual freedoms while always protecting the above 4 industries. It is effective, powerful and the biggest threat to our Country's progress and security.
Rush alone has a 400 million dollar contract....some powerful wealthy groups want his message out there. When the Fairness Doctrine was repealed the 4 big industries began to build this powerful propaganda marketing strategy by dominating talk radio. It is uniquely effective because it saturates the country and repeats ans repeats the message. Listeners can listen passively or interact which gives them the feeling of participation and empowerment. The saddest part of all is how these hosts have manipulated and duped their dedicated listeners through a persuasive message of Patriotism, freedom and finding people to hate (immigrants, gays, Liberals, Obama etc) while they laugh at them all the way to the bank.
as for the big 4 industries, their ideology is the dollar, and if there was a market for liberal talk shows stations would program them... if they drew ratings the big 4 would advertise on them... in their mind there are no countries or political parties, as best explained by ned beatty's character in the film "network":
the new world order according to arthur jensen
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/mccainpalin-supporters-let-their-rac
Pardon me but the idea that "if you disagree with obama, you're a racist" is a right-wing construct — you know, thin-skinned, right-wing whiners too lazy to defend their point of view with rational and fact-based argument because: (1) it's just much easier to play victim and scream "he called me a racist - waaaaa!"; or (2) there is no such thing as a rational, fact-based argument to defend their point of view. Oh, and pardon me again for asking, but please explain the "point of view" expressed by Quinn (see third item in MMFA list) when he claimed Obama "basically sees white people as kind of a you know, sort of an evil fact of life."
but i stand by my opinion that the bulk of the comments cited by media matters are hardly outrageous... nor is my idea on weak-ass name-calling a construct of any sort... it's a response i've received more than a few times on this site to comments i've made calling obama out on various issues... rather than addressing my point, the tact taken was the all too easy "you're a racist" or it's "because he's black"...
How dare you libruls accuse my leaders of such nonsense? These cannot be true statements by Rush or others. Rush is an intelligent, caring warm-hearted human being who only cares about others. Why don't you libs explain to me why Rush needs so many days off..I'll tell you..because he works so hard at fighting off you Commie-Pinko people.
Anyway, how could anyone believe all of these statements to be true..obviously for this Great American, I can only say that most of this stuff is made up and only idiots would believe half this crap. Except that birther stuff of course.
Forever yours
Queen of the Twit
Sarah P. QOTUS
No disagreements from me. Well put together MMFA.
Randy
Beck: Look, those Nazi Communists at Media matters have compiled a list of stuff we said that they think is truly radical and stupid.
Limbaugh: We did that without really trying. That's just what happens with we try to be uplifting and positive. Some people have no sense of decency and no decency of sense.
Hannity: That's us to a teabag. I can't wait until next year. Let me take a look at that. We can do better. The gauntlet has been passed and the baton has been thrown down.
Beck: Don't you mean the other way around?
Hannity: Whatever.
Michelle Bachman: Hey, I'm not on the list. I need some of this glory, too, you know. They have raised the bar, and I can get under it better than anyone else.
Limbaugh: Aren't you mixing your metaphors?
Bachman: Take your mind out of the gutter. Quit talking about my anatomy, you sexist pig. We're trying to have a conversation about politics.