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Maddow Joins Media Matters in Cheap Shot at Heritage
Thursday, November 12th, 2009More over at Hit & Run.
15 Responses to “Maddow Joins Media Matters in Cheap Shot at Heritage”
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So can we expect coverage of shots at Maddow or Brookings on this blog? Or is this more catering to the Fox News crowd? Ayn Rand and guns, woo-hoo!
That’s idiotic and unfair, Steve.
Steve,
If you think I don’t regularly critcize the right on the blog, you haven’t been reading very long. Same if you think I’m an Ayn Rand fanboy.
And if all you have for the comment section are petty ad hominem attacks, please go elsewhere.
What’s wrong with Ayn Rand and guns? *puzzled*
And so, her true colors are revealed.
I’m not a huge fan of huge expansions of federal criminal law, but Heritage’s http://www.overcriminalized.com strikes me as a kind of cynical ploy to attract libertarians to their tattered tent.
The site basically just links to other heritage.org pages that happen to agree with their “overcriminalized” thesis – sort of. The highlighted paper on the federal False Claims Act is one of the shoddier pieces of legal analysis I’ve seen of that bill, and its inclusion in the site ignores the fact that it’s a civil, not a criminal, statute. The rest of the pieces there strike me as similarly shallow, but I have no legal expertise in those areas, like I do in the False Claims Act.
More importantly, though, how can one give credence to such a site from a libertarian perspective when the same organization just three days ago released a press release titled “Revenge of the Dirty Dozen: 12 Policies that Undermine Civil Society,” including such civilization-ending mistakes like Congress’s permitting DC citizens to decide on a local level to decriminalize medical marijuana and distribute needles to drug addicts to reduce HIV/AIDS? This is the same organization that decries an increasing federal role yet advocates spending federal taxpayer dollars on “abstinence-based” sex education.
Sorry, I don’t get it. To me, http://www.overcriminalized.com looks like nothing more than a libertarian portal into a small portion of Heritage’s existing content that’s been selected to appeal to folks who would find Heritage’s other positions to be repugnant.
Not Maddows first cheap shot. Watching her show a grand total of three times, I was turned off by errors in logic and obvious partisanship.
Next Great White Hope, please.
I do agree with Steve: Ayn Rand and guns…WOO-HOOO!
Not that I would put it in exactly the same way as Steve C, but I have been dismayed with the Republican noise machine-like bent Reason has taken in recent times. That fawning appreciation Matt did of Andrew freaking Breitbart was the last straw for me.
It’s not that you don’t have a point here, Radley, but–I mean–it’s the Heritage Foundation. They’re worthless hacks dedicated to electing Republicans. Why defend one set of worthless hacks from another set of worthless hacks? Is it just to make the point that Maddow is as bad as everyone else? But that’s obvious.
Because Heritage’s Overcriminalizaiton project has real value — and part of that value stems from the very fact that Heritage is doing it.
Not to mention that it’s always worth pointing out partisan hackery.
We saw this same sort of shoot the messenger bullshit when John Tierney was writing columns at the New York Times. Tierney would write a column about the DEA’s war on pain doctors, and moronic hacks on the left would argue he was just trying to bail out his buddy Rush Limbaugh.
(I know Tierney, BTW. He doesn’t give a damn about Limbaugh. He was genuinely outraged by the pain issue.)
The right is just as lazy and cheap with this stuff. And I’ve called them out on it plenty.
Ben,
I’ve met with the people who run the project. They’re legit.
Heritage certainly has taken and still takes some God-awful positions on crime issues — I believe Ed Meese is still a fellow there.
But that project is a welcome entry into the debate on these issues, precisely because it comes from Heritage.
You’re free to doubt their motivation, but I’d hope you can agree with me that characterizing them as being soft on child porn or slavery because they oppose (or even list) some laws that address those issues is cheap.
I think there’s nothing wrong with educating people about bills that might change criminal law or sentencing, regardless of the subject. The website’s mission statement for its Legislative Update, though is confusing:
So, which is it — “all bills in Congress that add or modify federal criminal offenses or penalties”, or “legislation pending in Congress that could perpetuate the dangerous trend of criminalizing more and more conduct that is socially and economically beneficial and of punishing Americans for acts they commit without criminal intent”?
I have little doubt that the people hosting the site would not argue that desecrating soldiers’ memorials (for one example, H.R. 247, the “Protect Our Veterans’ Memorial Act of 2009″) is “socially and economically beneficial,” so they should clarify that the purpose of the Legislative Update is to document all criminal bills (a useful purpose, I think).
As for the connection to the Heritage Foundation, I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree. I think there’s an irreconcilable conflict of positions between what overcriminalized.com purports to stand for and the enormous volume of harmful work done by Heritage on innumerable subjects.
Honestly don’t know much about Heritage…All I have is the vague memory of a bad political taste in my mouth…time for me to do some research eh?
Oh…and although Maddow occasionally says things I enjoy (ok, during the last two terms), she and Olbermann both seem to be cut from the same omg-I-can’t-believe-you-said-that-BS cloth. I’d like to like them (don’t ask me why, maybe I like butch cuts?) but so many of their “points” are not even arguable…they’re just plain wrong. That means it’s useful to point out bad attack dog work on their part even if you don’t like the target…at least from my point of view.
[...] Reason.com supported by Radical Islam? In honor of the recent Media Matters (and Rachel Maddow) versus the Heritage Foundation controversy, I’d like to point out that Reason.com is having [...]
Maddow may be a partisan hack most of the time, but I like her show. There are some nice shots, like when she interviewed the Spelling Bee Contest winner, for instance(Sometimes we can even see Jonanthan Turley there). And she was fair with Ron Paul. I don´t agree with her on issues, but I something like it. It´s better than people like John Stossel and Tucker Carlson, that I agree on most issues but I can´t stand them.
The problem is that partisan hackery that provides ratings. ;-)