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(h/t Heather for the video)

C&Lers know that I've had a history with the odious Mark Williams over the years. He once sent out an email claiming that we were trying to hurt his dog to drum up support for his failing radio show.

With no where to go he turned to the tea party movement and now is leading one of those buses that drives around screaming about death panels and calling Obama an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug and a racist in chief' who is taking away our freedoms and whatnot. Dylan had him come on the air following Mark Potok of the SPLC, who issued a new extremism report that says hate groups have exploded in 2009. Dylan wanted to know from Williams why they tolerate hate groups becoming part of the tea party movement.

Mark, how do you draw the bright line between the very admirable and understandable principles that are advocated by so many....and the more radical views and hide if you will inside the tea party umbrella?

Williams: That's real simple. There's wingnuts and there's normal people...

Ratigan: It's not that simple...

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What confuses me about the tea party, is the tea parties willingness to accept the wingnuts as you put it

Williams: So it's our fault that they are nuts?

Ratigan: You have not shamed them Mark....Do you accept racists and Nazis in the tea parties?

Williams: Here at Sacramento...

Ratigan: I'm asking you a question my man, do you want to have a conversation or do you want to come on my TV show and do a commercial for yourself?

Ratigan walks off camera.

Williams: I'm answering the question. We have a women here from a local NBC affiliate who after an anti-Semitic rant at Sac State was promoted from reporter to anchor does that make NBC, does that make you an anti-Semitic?

Ratigan: Mark, do I run NBC? Are you a guest on my show? Do you have any intention of answering any of my questions because I don't want to continue to fool with this. You're wasting valuable oxygen. Can we please cut off this man's microphone, He has no interest in answering my questions, Mark a pleasure. Actually not really a pleasure. It was offensive, you're offensive. Your treatment of my show as a vehicle to spread your propaganda, ignore my questions, offensive and an indication of what is wrong with the dialogue in this country. Period. Not to mention that a group that would accept Nazis and racists.

The comedy started as soon as Williams tried to separate himself from wingnuts. Mark is never on to answer any question and Dylan got a taste of what an idiot this man is. Williams will never be able to justify the Radical-hate filled-Patriot-racist-right wing elements that make up the tea parties.

FOX News and movement conservatism reached out to the outer fringes of Planet Wingnuttia to build the tea party movement. Obviously not everyone is part of the Patriot movement that has joined in, but a large segment of these haters do inhabit there and have found a nice new home to be very open with their beliefs. They certainly carry enough signs around at their tea party events to let the world know what and who they are.

Ratigan gets mad props for dislodging Williams from his show. Yes, it's unfortunate that he gets asked to come on many cable news shows, but this is the best possible treatment. It's too bad that not enough Villagers take the few minutes to understand the teabaggers. They are merely an extension of the movement conservatives of the 80's only they didn't have a the media infrastructure that they do know.

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Notice that peculiar odor arising from the news that Sarah Palin plans to speak at the National Tea Party Convention planned the first week of February in Nashville?

It's got the distinct whiff of a scam. Take, for instance, Palin's insistence last night on The O'Reilly Factor -- in her debut as a "Fox News Analyst" -- that "I will not be financially gaining anything from this".

Well, yeah, except for that $100,000 speaking fee. Palin insisted she was going to "turn it right back around and contribute to campaigns, candidates, and issues that will help our country."

Right.

But exactly what kind of movement is it that locks out the press and operates behind closed doors? As Dave Weigel says:

This really is unusual. As a journalist, I’ve been allowed into sessions, dinners, everything at conferences hosted by the Eagle Forum and by Focus on the Family. Extra credit to Eagle Forum here — when I was covering the How to Take Back America Conference in St. Louis, Phyllis Schlafly’s son Andy, an organizer, invited me away from my media seat and into a seat at his dinner table to chat with more activists. And some of the most controversial speakers at the National Tea Party Convention, like Rick Scarborough, happily chatted with me inside and outside of their sessions at previous events.

One major implication of this, of course, is that for the third time since the presidential election — the first at a speech in China, the second at a speech for a pro-life group in Indiana — Sarah Palin will give a political speech that members of the media are not allowed to attend.

The National Tea Party Convention is being largely spearheaded by Tea Party Nation, which styles itself an independent operation. But if you look at the list of speakers, among them is WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah, who's keynoting the Friday dinner.

WND, you may recall, has been promoting an assortment of conspiracy theories about Obama, including the "Birther" theory and the claim that concentration camps are being planned for rounding up conservatives. (Weigel has more on this.)

Even the redoubtable Erick Erickson at RedState is sensing the odor:

I think the tea party movement has largely descended into ego and quest for purpose for individuals at the expense of what the tea party movement started out to be.

That’s not to say it is in every case. I have much good to say about groups like Tea Party Patriots, but I think this national tea party convention smells scammy.

Let me be blunt: charging people $500.00 plus the costs of travel and lodging to go to a “National Tea Party Convention” run by a for profit group no one has ever heard of sounds as credible as an email from Nigeria promising me a million bucks if I fork over my bank account number.

That scammy smell is what you get whenever you combine money and far-right wingnuttery.

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Howard Kurtz did a segment on something I've wanted for a long time: Networks holding people accountable for what they say on our airwaves. A TV Ombudsman.

The more this idea gets out there, the more important it becomes to push it home -- although it would be a real miracle if it did happen. MSNBC did correct Giuliani's lie because it was a lie. Fox News ignored it because of partisanship. Kurtz should stop with the false equivalent comparisons. MSNBC does not promote an agenda for 24 hours seven days a week like Fox does, nor have they promoted a movement to overthrow a sitting president.

UPDATE: Michael Calderone got a response from David Gregory:

Over the weekend, I wrote about some recent criticism of the Sunday shows, along with suggestions such as running a fact-check online or mixing up the regular guests. And the piece prompted a few interesting responses, with more suggestions for utilizing technology better.

The Nation's Ari Melber noted that NBC didn't respond to Jay Rosen's fact-check suggestion that he addressed to "Meet the Press" EP Betsy Fischer a couple weeks ago, but David Gregory responded in a statement for my piece. "That's a big shift from refusing to respond at all," Melber wrote. "And while it's an improvement, it also shows how these programs tend to be more responsive to other members of the media than to their audience."...read on

UPDATE II: Nisha Chittal writes: What the Sunday Morning Shows Need Is A New Media Makeover

What troubled me the most was a quote in Calderone’s piece from Robert Thompson, a professor at Syracuse, who argued that the case for modernizing Sunday shows wasn’t that relevant because young people wouldn’t care enough to watch the shows anyway...
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I fully believe that the Sunday morning talk shows need a new media makeover, and I have a handful of ideas for how they can do so. I admit that I know absolutely nothing about what goes into the making of a political talk show. But what I do know is that my generation wants transparency, participation, and engagement in their political process – and their news. So here are my suggestions on how the Sunday shows might undertake a new media makeover that could finally usher them into the year 2010...read on

Nisha has a lot of nice suggestions, but without fact checking all these innovations are useless. It comes down to the truth. Sure, some things can be debated but not the core issue of a story. When Giuliani said America didn't have a domestic attack under George Bush that was a flat out lie and it needs to be cleaned up immediately and if need be, Rudy should be suspended from TV for a year. Do you think that would help things along? We need the media to do a better job. PERIOD.

CNN has the full transcript:

Kurtz: I talked on this program last week about whether all the Sunday shows and, indeed, all television programs should do more fact-checking of what guests say when politicians come and sit in those seats and make claims, some of which don't always bear that much relation to reality.

I want to play some sound. Senator Jim DeMint, the Republican from South Carolina, went on the "CBS Early Show," MSNBC's "Morning Joe," and he talked with Gloria Borger here on STATE OF THE UNION, making a charge about President Obama and the effort against terrorism.

Let me play that, and you're going to see this from Rachel Maddow's MSNBC program and how she took it on, on a factual basis.

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Glenn Beck -- who of course has a fetish about "extremist radicals" supposedly infiltrating the White House, while himself promoting far-right extremism on his show on a regular basis -- has been regularly plumping far-right "constitutionalist" theories about the 10th Amendment and states' rights for awhile now, including that hourlong segment complete with 1990s militia figures.

Mostly, though, Beck has been somewhat restrained about just how far down this path he would go, eschewing some of the more radical ideas that are part and parcel of this belief system, or at least declining to mention them to his audiences. But yesterday, filling in for the appendicitis-stricken Beck, Judge Andrew Napolitano opened the constitutionalist Pandora's Box wide and loosed all its ugly demons.

He opened the Beck program with a long rant in which he began (as is typical with "constitutionalists") with utterly false premises -- namely, that not only would the Obama "public option" health-care plan completely take over our health-care system, but the plan could put you in jail for failure to buy insurance. And from there, he sprang into advocating the repeal of the federal income tax and the "nullification" of federal laws by the states:

Napolitano: Last Saturday, at 11 o’clock in the evening, the House of Representatives voted by a five-vote margin to have the federal government manage the health care of every American at a cost of $1 trillion dollars over the next ten years.

For the first time in American history, if this bill becomes law, the Feds will force you to buy insurance you might not want, or may not need, or cannot afford. If you don’t purchase what the government tells you to buy, if you don’t do so when they tell you to do it, and if you don’t buy just what they say is right for you, the government may fine you, prosecute you, and even put you in jail. Freedom of choice and control over your own body will be lost. The privacy of your communications and medical decision making with your physician will be gone. More of your hard earned dollars will be at the disposal of federal bureaucrats.

It was not supposed to be this way. We elect the government. It works for us. How did it get so removed, so unbridled, so arrogant that it can tell us how to live our personal lives? Evil rarely comes upon us all at once, and liberty is rarely lost in one stroke. It happens gradually, over the years and decades and even centuries. A little stretch here, a cave in there, powers are slowly taken from the states and the people and before you know it, we have one big monster government that recognizes no restraint on its ability to tell us how to live. It claims the power to regulate any activity, tax any behavior, and demand conformity to any standard it chooses.

The Founders did not give us a government like the one we have today. The government they gave us was strictly limited in its scope, guaranteed individual liberty, preserved the free market, and on matters that pertain to our private behavior was supposed to leave us alone.

In the Constitution, the Founders built in checks and balances. If the Congress got out of hand, the states would restrain it. If the states stole liberty or property, the Congress would cure it. If the President tried to become a king, the courts would prevent it.

In the next few weeks, I will be giving a public class on Constitutional Law here on the Fox News Channel, on the Fox Business Network, on Foxnews.com, and on Fox Nation. In anticipation of that, many of you have asked: What can we do now about the loss of freedom?

For starters, we can vote the bums out of their cushy federal offices! We can persuade our state governments to defy the Feds in areas like health care -- where the Constitution gives the Feds zero authority. We can petition our state legislatures to threaten to amend the Constitution to abolish the income tax, return the selection of U.S. senators to state legislatures and nullify all the laws the Congress has written that are not based in the Constitution.

One thing we can’t do is just sit back and take it.

I can't tell you how bizarre it is to see arguments I used to hear coming from the mouths of Montana Freemen like LeRoy Schweitzer in the 1990s -- arguments that led to him embarking on an 81-day armed standoff with federal authorities, and resulting in him spending the rest of his natural life in a federal prison -- coming from supposedly mainstream talk-show hosts on Fox News only 13 years later.

Chip Berlet at PublicEye has a decent rundown of the roots of these "constitutionalist" beliefs:

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Homeland Security Chairman Sen. Joe Lieberman told Fox News' Chris Wallace that he wants the Department of Defense to launch an investigation into the shooting rampage at Ft. Hood. Lieberman said evidence indicates that Major Nidal Malik Hasan was probably a "self-radicalized, homegrown terrorist."

"If the reports that we're receiving of various statements he made, acts he took, are valid, he had turned to Islamist extremism, and, therefore, if that is true, the murder of these 13 people was a terrorist act and, in fact,it was the most destructive terrorist act to be committed on american soil since 9/11," Lieberman said Sunday.

Lieberman wants the Department of Defense to conduct a special investigation to see if the shootings could have been predicted. "While the Army and the FBI are conducting the criminal investigation about exactly what happened and what Dr. Hasan should be charged with, the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense has a real obligation to convene an independent investigation to go back and look at whether warning signs were missed, both the stress he was under, but also the statements that he was making which really could lead people to believe that Dr. Hasan had become an Islamist extremist," said Lieberman.

"A couple of years ago, after a two-year investigation, my committee put out a report that said the new face of terrorism in America would not just be the attacks as 9/11 organized abroad and sending people in here, it would be people within this country, homegrown terrorists, self-radicalized, often over the internet, going to jihadist websites, and there's concern from what we know now about Hasan that, in fact, that's exactly what he was, a self-radicalized home grown terrorist," Lieberman concluded.

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Conservatives virtually declared victory after forcing a moderate Republican out of a highly contested House race in upstate New York. The Republican candidate, Dede Scozzafava, withdrew Saturday virtually guaranteeing a win for Conservative Party Candidate Doug Hoffman in New York's 23rd Congressional district.

White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett told ABC's George Stephanopolous that pressure on Scozzafava to drop out shows how conservatives are marginalizing moderates. "I think [the Republican Party is] becoming more and extreme and more and more marginalized," said Jarrett.

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Glenn Beck says the rest of the media -- what he calls "the fringe media," which makes sense only if you live on Planet Beck -- should be covering what he's covering: Which is to say, his thesis that the Obama White House is a secret conspiracy to overthrow American capitalism and replace it with communism.

It's a refrain we're hearing from Fox a lot these days. They've been running ads attacking the other networks for not covering "the ACORN scandal" that they largely created out of whole cloth. There is, of course, a perfectly good reason they haven't: the shoddy journalistic standards Fox has adopted in these stories, ably limned by Joe Conason and Media Matters.

With Beck the problem is even more obvious: His entire "Tree of Revolution" is the kind of guilt-by-association conspiracist wingnuttery that heretofore had been almost solely the province of John Birch Society filmstrips. Now this kind of extremism is being broadcast daily to an audience of millions.

I mean, look at the thing. Right at its root, he has Woodrow Wilson -- one of the more authoritarian presidents in our history. In fact, he was most noted for his implementation of the Sedition Act of 1918, which was later repealed after Wilson-era abuses.

What was the purpose of the Sedition Act? Why, to outlaw revolutionaries and put them in jail.

That's some root of the "Tree of Revolution" there.

But then, there's nothing particularly coherent about Beck's guilt-by-association game here. It's just whatever names he can throw up around Barack Obama's name to make the president appear like he's surrounded by a bunch of communist radicals, rather than the Wall Street Establishmentarians he in reality is surrounded by.

Only on Planet Beck.

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Protesters at an event in Austin, TX yesterday just took the vile rhetoric we've seen on display this August one extra step:

"the protesters had Larry Kilgore, a “Christian activist” and candidate for governor who has endorsed executions for homosexuals; Debra Medina, a Ron Paul Republican and a slightly-less long-shot candidate for governor; and Melissa Pehle-Hill, yet another fringe candidate and a member of a self-appointed “citizens grand jury” investigating Barack Hussein Obama, aka Barry Soetoro."

Kilgore captured the sentiment of the mob. (video here)

“I hate that flag up there,” Kilgore said pointing to the American flag flying over the Capitol. “I hate the United States government. … They’re an evil, corrupt government. They need to go. Sovereignty is not good enough. Secession is what we need!”

“We hate the United States!"

Just a lone nut, I guess. Except the Governor of Texas, Rick Perry, flirted with the secessionists a few months ago. He didn't attend this protest, which I guess is a positive step.

But this has increasingly become the Republican base. A group of people who feel completely justified in chanting "We hate the United States!" I seem to remember being told that I hated America and I was "on the other side" and "in league with the terrorists" because I didn't agree with an unnecessary, illegal and ultimately disastrous war. I don't have tape of myself from every day in that time, but you can trust me that I never chanted "We hate the United States" in front of a state capitol building.

Note, too, the lady who used the phrase, "the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots," a quote from Thomas Jefferson, often misappropriated by extremists and the Patriot movement. Timothy McVeigh was wearing a T-shirt that bore this inscription when he was arrested for murdering 168 people in Oklahoma City.

What the report reflects is a reality that law enforcement trying to deal with domestic terrorism in America must confront: Their subjects are thoroughly American; many of the people drawn into these movements are, if anything, "hyper-normal." Their version of "patriotism," for instance, is so extreme that they actually hate not just their government but their fellow citizens -- in essence, their country: because, you see, it has been "perverted" from its original purposes.

The hyper-normality is a kind of intentional camouflage. The Patriot movement, and militias in particular, were a very specific and intentional strategy adopted in the 1990s by the white supremacists and radical tax protesters of the American far right -- and the whole purpose of the strategy was to mainstream their belief systems and their agendas. The tactic was to adopt the appearance of normal, "red-blooded" Americanism as a way of pushing out the idea that their radical beliefs are "normal" too.

In the process, they often adopted time-worn "patriotic" sayings and symbols, such as the "Don't Tread On Me" flag Beck wears, as their own -- though with a much more menacing meaning. If you've seen that flag at an Aryan Nations compound, as I have, you never quite look at it the same.

This is why the meaning of Thomas Jefferson's quote above is quite different for them than it is for you and me. To all outward appearances, it is just an expression of avid patriotism. But to a Patriot movement follower, it means something potentially deadly.

Patriots who use the symbols of American history while claiming overtly to hate America. This would be something good to ask Dave Neiwert about on Tuesday night in LA.

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If it wasn't already obvious that the right-wingers who organized the Tax Day Tea Parties vastly overstated their actual significance -- except as a harbinger of the slide towards right-wing populism -- then this past weekend should lay any doubts to rest.

Even before the holiday weekend, it was clear that the planned 2nd edition of the Tea Tantrums Parties was going to be somewhat less than energetic. David Weigel at the Washington Independent observed that a lot of this had to do with mainstream support peeling away:

But the collaboration between the official Republican establishment and the Tea Parties has not lasted into June. The RNC has no plans to get involved with any Tea Parties. A spokesman for Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), who jaunted around northern California to attend several Tea Parties, said that his holiday plans were private but would probably not include Tea Parties. Gingrich will not attend any of the Tea Parties, although he recorded video messages for events in Birmingham and Nashville “at the request of the respective organizers,” according to spokesman Dan Kotman.

Media coverage has also gotten a little bit more scarce. Coverage on Fox News has largely been limited to interviews with Tea Party organizers on the network’s morning shows. While sources at Fox would not discuss their plans for covering the weekend events, they confirmed that no anchors would be attending and that the attendance and news value of the events looked to be lower than that of the April rallies. Tea Party organizers are counting, instead, on local news coverage and on distributed reporting such as the conservative news site PajamasTV, which hosts an “American Tea Party” show and has asked readers to submit their own videos from their rallies.

Part of the dynamic of right-wing populism is that, as whatever mainstream backing it gathers initially peels away, its more radical elements rise to the fore. And indeed, the Anti-Defamation League warned beforehand that extremists were likely to be making their presence felt at these gatherings:

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Remember how, a week or so ago, Bill O'Reilly was preoccupied with the idea that the news media had comparatively obsessed over the domestic-terrorism killing of Dr. George Tiller, while "ignoring" the killing of Private Long, a similar act of terrorism? He had numerous segments complaining that the matter proved there was a liberal media bias.

At one point, he complained that CNN had "ignored" the story -- a completely meritless charge. At another, he even claimed that the only place you could find any coverage of the case was on Fox.

Now, compare that to how Fox has handled yet another horrifying case of murderous extremism: the arrest of Shawna Forde and her Minuteman cohorts for the cold-blooded murder of a 9-year-old girl and her father.

Fox simply has ignored the story. There is a single Associated Press story on the Fox website. This AP piece, notably, contains not a single reference to Forde's long history with the Minuteman movement, her close ties to Jim Gilchrist, or the fact that she intended this Minutemen squad to use its ill-gotten gains to "start a revolution against the United States government."

Meanwhile, I've reviewed my Fox News recordings, meanwhile, and cannot find a single instance of the story being reported anywhere on the news channel. (I could be mistaken about this; the recordings are only partially complete, and it's possible something ran in the occasional gaps in my record. But not likely.)

Meanwhile, have O'Reilly, or Glenn Beck, or Sean Hannity -- all of them big fans of the Minutemen -- even mentioned the story a single time?

No. That's a big fat No.

Of course, you have to wonder if it's not because this case demolishes O'Reilly's take on the Minutemen:

"Talking Points applauds the Minutemen. They are in the great tradition of neighborhood watch groups."

Now, it's worth noting that the entire mainstream media have largely been missing in action on this story, perhaps for similar reasons. Nonetheless, Anderson Cooper has reported on it, as has Rick Sanchez. (However, Lou Dobbs has similarly been completely mum about it.)

Meanwhile, MSNBC has reported dutifully on the matter, though I have yet to have found any news-channel coverage.

But those stations didn't accuse anyone of under-covering any stories recently. And there's no question that this is a significant story because it exposes so deeply the twisted nature of the Minuteman movement beneath its "neighborhood watch" facade -- a facade erected with Bill O'Reilly's help.

Yet O'Reilly, it seems, can't even live up to the standards he demands his cable competitors meet.

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One of the most significant and troubling manifestations of the real extremism of the "Patriot"/militia movement of the 1990s was the sharp spike in threats against local officials from the law-enforcement system -- particularly judges. There was practically a pandemic of threats against judges in the interior West (particularly Montana).

The threats were a direct outgrowth of the Patriot movement's ardent adoption of the concept of "sovereign citizenship" -- the fantasy belief system built around the idea that the federal government was a run by a secret cabal that for decades had usurped public power for their own nefarious purposes, and so by filing the proper kind of "constitutionalist" documents, one could declare oneself a "sovereign" who was not subject to the restraints of federal laws, including paying taxes and observing land-use ordinances.

This belief system originated with the old Posse Comitatus organization, a racist and radical movement that originated in the 1960s and whose followers had a long record of extreme violence. In the 1990s it was promoted most notably by the Montana Freemen -- but after they began to fade earlier this decade, so did the threats against judges.

Now, that trend is rapidly reversing:

According to the U.S. Marshals Service, the number of threats against federal judges and prosecutors has mushroomed from 500 in 2003 to 1,278 in 2008. It is on track to go even higher this year. There are no statistics on the number of threats against state and local judges.

The problem was examined in some detail last week in the Washington Post:

The threats and other harassing communications against federal court personnel have more than doubled in the past six years, from 592 to 1,278, according to the U.S. Marshals Service. Worried federal officials blame disgruntled defendants whose anger is fueled by the Internet; terrorism and gang cases that bring more violent offenders into federal court; frustration at the economic crisis; and the rise of the "sovereign citizen" movement -- a loose collection of tax protesters, white supremacists and others who don't respect federal authority.

... Hundreds of threats cascaded into the chambers of John M. Roll, the chief U.S. district judge in Arizona, in February after he allowed a lawsuit filed by illegal immigrants against a rancher to go forward. "They cursed him out, threatened to kill his family, said they'd come and take care of him. They really wanted him dead," said a law enforcement official who heard the calls -- which came from as far as Richmond and Baltimore -- but spoke on condition of anonymity because no one has been charged.

You may recall, in fact, that the man who murdered Dr. George Tiller in Kansas on Sunday was in fact a "Freeman" who had previously filed his own set of "sovereign citizenship" papers. Leonard Zeskind has even more details on this at Huffpo:

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I actually think the UK was wrong to ban Michael Savage from their shores no matter how whacked out he is.

Britain on Tuesday published its first list of people barred from entering the country for allegedly fostering extremism or hatred, including Muslim extremists, a right-wing American radio host, an Israeli settler and jailed Russian gang members.

The U.K.'s law and order chief, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, said she decided to publish the names of 16 of 22 people who have been banned by the government since October so others could better understand what sort of behavior Britain was not prepared to tolerate.

Popular American talk-radio host, Michael Savage, who broadcasts from San Francisco and has called the Muslim holy book, the Quran, a "book of hate," is on the list. Savage also has enraged parents of children with autism by saying in most cases it's "a brat who hasn't been told to cut the act out."

It's their country, so you'd think a conservative like Savage would leave the choice up to them, because they are taking personal responsibility for their own welfare, right? Isn't that what he preaches? Anyway. I don't agree with them, but when he asks Hillary Clinton for help, well, that's insane.

Michael Savage, who has since expressed his outrage at the decision. “It is demented,” Savage said. “I want my name off of that list and I want a letter of apology from this [British Home Secretary] Jacqui Smith.” Now it appears that Savage is seeking help from an old nemesis: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The San Fransisco Chronicle’s Rich Lieberman reports that “[l]awyers for Savage are formally asking [that] she call on the British Government to withdraw its ban.” It’s interesting that Savage is now turning to Clinton for help, considering what he has had to say about her in the past. Some examples:

– “Hillary Clinton, the most Godless woman in the Senate.”

– Regarding one of Clinton’s speeches: “That’s rubbish. That’s Hitler dialogue. Goebbels would be proud of you, Hillary Clinton. I know Mao Zedong would have been proud of you.”

– “[Clinton has] destroyed the war effort against terror. And if, God forbid, a suitcase bomb goes off you’ll know who to blame.”

– On Clinton’s run for the presidency: “[She would] stir up a race war, a civil war in the country to get that hag, that harridan elected.”

Savage also once suggested that Clinton had something to do with the death of John F. Kennedy Jr. so she could run for U.S. Senate in New York.

The venom directed at Hillary from talkers like Savage is despicable, but I do find it ironic now that he's actually asking her to intervene on his behalf. How miserable does it make him feel that he has to seek out Hillary for help. Hahahahahahaha.

Digby has a nice line about it: People In Hell Want Ice Water, Too.