The Great Pretender

This guy, right here.

Viewers of Ed Schultz's MSNBC show have likely noted that the Big Guy dropped his "Pretenders" segment, in which he called out an idiotic statement made by an idiotic conservative that had no basis in fact or reason, the week after the Democrats got their rear ends handed to them in the midterms.  It's since been replaced by the "Two-Minute Drill," in which our hero offers his opinion about a sports story.  Okay, he's entitled to do that, because he used to play football.  But the fact that he suddenly stopped calling out the right for their toxic nonsense is rather telling - someone higher up at MSNBC must have told Schultz to cut it out, lest he offend anyone in the new Republican majorities in Washington or all those newly elected and re-elected Republican state governors and legislators.  And while Ed Schultz may no longer be calling out all of the right-wing politicians that keep on pretending that global warming isn't real or that tax cuts for the rich produce good jobs, it's come to my attention that Ed Schultz is the biggest pretender of them all.  Because he believes in a renewal of progressive values in America that, quite frankly, isn't going to happen.  Even if Elizabeth Warren is our next President.

Loyal readers of my blog will recall that Ed answered my question on the air about what a Bill de Blasio victory in the New York City mayoral election would mean for the progressive movement nationally, and he said that he thought it would have a huge impact on the American progressivism and instigate more positive change.  So, he predicted that de Blasio would start a turnaround for the liberal movement, but the only turnaround de Blasio caused were police officers facing their backs to him at police funerals.  Ed also predicted that once people started benefiting from the Affordable Care Act, President Obama's popularity would recover in time to help Democrats in the 2014 midterm elections.  And how about all those Democratic local, gubernatorial and U.S. Senate candidates he interviewed on his show throughout the 2014 election campaign season, as if they were almost certainly going to win?  Yeah, right . . . none of those people (including  accidental Democrat Charlie Crist and also Sandra Fluke, who lived up to her surname) have been on his show since November 4, their names cleared from the Rolodexes of Schultz's booking secretary and Democratic National Committee members.

Perhaps Ed's biggest recent blunder was when he, along with talk radio consultant Holland Cooke, interpreted the number of advertisers fleeing Rush Limbaugh's radio show in the aftermath of misogynistic comments he made as a sign that his popularity was waning, a conclusion they thought was ratified by the the fact that Limbaugh's show moved from WABC-AM in New York to WOR-AM.  WOR-AM is a talk radio station that, I've been led to understand (led to understand by Schultz and Cooke), has a weaker signal and less of a reach than WABC-AM.  Okay, guys, then how do you explain this May 2014 observation from Radio Ink, a radio-industry trade publication: 

"Since moving to WOR­-AM, [Limbaugh] has maintained his position, long held, as the No. 1 talk show in his day-part in the market. He has led WOR into the Top 10 stations and increased WOR's ratings by more than 200 percent in the nation's largest market."

Oh, by the way, how is Ed - whose own radio show went podcast not too long ago - doing in the cable-news ratings in his 5 PM Eastern time slot?  Let me put it this way . . . there's a damn good reason he provides the results of his cell phone polls with percentages instead of raw numbers. :-O

And why did he quit terrestrial radio? You can draw your own conclusion.

Ed Schultz is a great guy, he tells it like it is, he's for the working man, and I love him, but his hopes that liberals will prevail and that conservatives will be revealed to be the scoundrels that they are, in fact, are totally unfounded.  I'll keep watching him, if only because I agree with everything he says.  But if Ed thinks the American progressive movement's best days lie ahead and that he'll be among the ones leading it, well, he can keep on pretending. :-(