Breaking News: MSNBC’s Ed Schultz Is Still an Angry, Dishonest Partisan Liar

Posted on | July 23, 2013 | 97 Comments

The important background facts you should know about Ed Schultz: He was a sportscaster until he was 38 and began his talk-radio career attempting to be a conservative Rush Limbaugh imitator, failed at that and then re-invented himself as a “progressive” host, which provided the platform by which Ed got an MSNBC show in 2009.

Ed’s basic problem is that he’s not very bright, nor is he well-educated, and he is essentially phony. His father was an aeronautical engineer and his mother was an English teacher, which means that Ed grew up in middle-class comfort, and his whole “populist” blue-collar shtick is just that, a shtick. Anyone who has ever watched or listened to Ed Schultz understands that he is a very angry man — he reminds you of every angry drunk you ever knew — and this is basically the selling point of the shtick. If you are the type of person who hates Republicans and rich people and “Corporate America,” then Ed Schultz will give voice to your anger.

Did I mention that Ed Schultz failed at MSNBC, too? Yeah, he started out in the 6 p.m. time slot, then moved to 10 p.m. after Keith Olberman quit in 2011, before moving to the 8 p.m. slot, where he accomplished the remarkable feat of actually placing fourth — behind Bill O’Reilly on Fox, behind Anderson Cooper CNN and even behind Nancy Grace on HLN — and was eventually bumped to the weekend shift.

If you think MSNBC has a tiny audience during the week (Chris Hayes doesn’t even hit half-a-million viewers at 8 p.m. weeknights), their weekend schedule is almost viewerless. It’s not broadcasting, it’s narrowcasting. Anyone could have predicted that Schultz’s shot at the TV big time would end in failure; his exile to oblivion is not really surprising. The market for Angry Ed’s rants is quite small.

TV is like real life that way. Suppose you’re at a bar watching your favorite sports team on TV and you feel like they’re getting cheated by the refs. Ed the Angry Drunk shares your anger, and at first you welcome his bellicose outbursts: “Hell, yeah, Ed! That ref is a blind fool!”

As the night wears on, however, and Angry Ed keeps drinking, you realize his obstreperous rage is not merely a response, it’s a condition.

He’s not angry at something, he’s just angry in general.

There is no perspective, no rationality to that kind of anger. Angry Ed rants about everything, and when he’s finished with that, he starts ranting about nothing. His anger is not a reaction to any particular wrong, but is in fact the symptom of a personality disorder.

So you’re there in the bar, watching the game and after a while, you stop laughing at Ed the Angry Drunk’s outbursts — “Goddammit, he was safe! The tag missed him by a mile! That f–king umpire should be shot!” — and instead, after excusing yourself to use the restroom, when you come back you sit as far away from Angry Ed as possible. Maybe you stop paying attention to the game altogether, because your viewing experience is ruined by the constant ranting of this belligerent drunk.

People who are angry all the time are not the sort of people you enjoy hanging around a lot, and this is as true on TV as anywhere else. But those afflicted with Permanent Anger Syndrome (as we might call it) can never accept that their unpopularity is their own fault. There is a chicken-and-egg aspect to this: Which came first, the failure or the anger? Usually, by the time people get so far gone that we begin asking that question — e.g., after they’ve killed or seriously injured someone — it’s difficult to untangle the chain of causality.

However, if you ask the angry person, you can be sure that they will blame someone else. It’s never their fault they’re angry, you see, but always they have some rationalization that excuses or justifies their rage, and instead externalizes blame onto a scapegoat.

All of which is a preamble to something incredibly stupid Angry Ed said Sunday on his MSNBC show that nobody watches:

Michigan used to be a symbol of industrial strength in manufacturing in this country. But thanks to a lot of Republican policies, the city is now filing for bankruptcy. Now, it’s the largest public sector bankruptcy in U.S. history, and the consequences could be devastating if you care about people. The already small force of police, firefighters and EMTs are in danger of future layoffs, that’s only going to make it worse. Roughly 30,000 retired workers are concerned about their pensions. You know, what they’re counting on.
Make no mistake, Detroit is exactly what the Republicans want. They outsourced manufacturing jobs, attack unions, cut public services, and this is the result. Now they can wipe the slate clean because now they can start privatizing city assets.

This is so wrong, it cannot be accidentally wrong, and can only be described as a dishonest partisan lie. The decline of the U.S. industrial economy, and the related decline of urban America, is a subject that has been exhaustively studied, and neither ignorance nor partisanship can be an excuse for the kind of mendacious disinformation Ed Schultz foisted upon his handful of ignorant angry viewers. In 2006, Lynn Vincent and I co-authored Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime and Corruption in the Democratic Party, and I was responsible for Chapter 8, “Scene of the Crime: Creating the Urban Nightmare,” which I briefly excerpt:

Meanwhile, the cost of government was further increased by public employee unions. The very existence of such unions turns the logic of the labor movement on its head. The purpose of unions is to represent the interests of workers against the interests of the owners of businesses. But government workers are ultimately employees of the taxpayers, so that government worker unions are fundamentally opposed to the public interest — in the words of one New York liberal activist, “not extracting a share of the profits but rather a share of the taxes.”
This inexorable logic has had a devastating impact on America’s cities. Under Democratic Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr., New York became the first U.S. city to grant collective bargaining rights to city employees. The public employee unions relentlessly negotiated for higher wages, shorter hours,and more benefits, including health insurance that did not require co-payments from the workers (a policy unheard of in the private sector). Contract negotiations were a farce, since unions used membership dues to fund political campaigns to elect pro-union candidates. “During labor negotiations, the unions would be on both sides of the table.” This translated into forcing governments (which is to say, taxpayers) to pay above-market labor rates. By 2005, journalist Steve Malanga observed, “Wages average a hefty 37 percent higher in the public sector, but the differences in benefits are even more dramatic. Local governments pay 128 percent more, on average, than private employers to finance workers’ health-care benefits, and 162 percent more on retirement benefits.”
Fewer private-sector jobs, more welfare recipients, more public employees, higher government costs, higher taxes — by the mid-1960s, Democratic policies had sent the nation’s biggest cities into a downward spiral that could only end in bankruptcy. For Detroit, already devastated by deadly riots, the worst days were ahead. . . .

See, there is a pattern here. It’s not just Detroit, it’s New York or New Orleans or any other place where the power of Democrats and their union allies is so unchecked by any opposition that they can basically dictate policy. This has failed everywhere it’s been tried.

The underlying problem of industrial decline is more complex, because what happened was that for the first 25 years after World War II, the United States enjoyed advantages that could not possibly be sustained. The industrial capacity of our major competitors — especially Germany and Japan — had been devastated by the war and the task of rebuilding the postwar world created a massive demand for goods and services that the United States, relatively unscathed by the war, was uniquely prepared to fill. Once that advantage began to fade, and especially after the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973 made Detroit’s high-powered low-mileage cars less desirable than little Volkswagens and Toyotas, the easy profits and high wages of U.S. industrial workers faded pretty quickly, too.

Nobody has yet figured out how to reverse that decline — or, if some ideal policy prescription could be imagined, it has not been implemented — but to blame this on “a lot of Republican policies” is so demonstrably false as to be absurdly implausible.

The Democrats controlled Congress for 40 consecutive years, from 1955 to 1994. The industrial decline occurred after Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson implemented the most sweeping set of liberal policies (“The Great Society”) since the New Deal. During the 48 years from 1933 to 1981 — from FDR to Jimmy Carter — Democrat presidents occupied the White House 32 years, compared to 16 years for Republicans, and by the time Ronald Reagan took office, the American economy was in its worst crisis since the Depression. Anyone who studies this history and says “a lot of Republican policies” caused the problems is just plain lying.

No intelligent or well-informed person could believe Ed Schultz’s lie, but then again, his audience is made up entirely of Democrats, eh?

It ought to be pointed out, also that this latter-day liberal nostalgia for the “Good Old Days” is hypocritical bullshit. All during the “Good Old Days” of the 1950s and ’60s, liberal intellectuals constantly excoriated the capitalist greed that they blamed for the plight of the poor. Democrats always demanded more concessions to labor unions, and the unions themselves kept going on strike to demand more concessions from the companies that (little did anyone suspect) were then just decades away from going bankrupt.

You don’t have to take my word for any of this. You could go back and read the newspapers and magazines of the 1950s and ’60s and see for yourself the scathing indictments of the U.S. free-market system that liberals published during the Good Old Days that this bullshit phony “populist” Ed Schultz now uses as a club to beat Republicans, claiming that their policies were to blame for the decline.

Democrats do this all the time: Find a problem and then conjure up some way to blame the problem on Republicans, and invite all their liberal buddies in the media and academia to climb aboard the Big Bandwagon of Blame that will help elect more Democrats.

Hint: Whatever your problem is, “vote Democrat” is never the solution.

Democrats never seem to learn the lesson Margaret Thatcher so eloquently summarized: “The problem with socialism is that sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money.” Problems caused by the “success” of Democrat policies are always worse than whatever problems are caused by the “failure” of Republican policies.

Having expended 1,800 words explaining to you why Ed Schultz is completely full of shit — yeah, you knew he was full of shit, but maybe you didn’t really know why — it is now perhaps safe to embed the video, without risk that anyone will be deceived by his lies:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Shut up, Ed. Nobody really likes you, and that’s not their fault.

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