Ed Schultz calls Laura Ingraham “a slut”

Ed Schultz calling his desk a "thick brown harlot."

Because I need to be able to go to sleep, I watch MSNBC as little as possible. My facade of openminded centrism is flimsy enough without the voice of Keith Olbermann in my head, analyzing politics in the exact same way he analyzed sports. I therefore barely understand who Ed Schultz is. He appears to be a liberal—sorry, “progressive”—iteration of Rush Limbaugh: a jolly but vaguely menacing fat man who yells the truth at you, assuming you already know everything that’s true. He is also the man who, on his Tuesday show, referred to conservative commentator Laura Ingraham as a “right-wing slut.” For the purposes of the discussion to follow, I ask you to accept two premises:

1) She is pretty tasty.

2) This is worse for Ed Schultz than it would have been for Rush Limbaugh.

Let me also advance a third item that is not a premise but I still want to make clear, possibly for reasons of vanity: I don’t really understand who either of these people is. Ed Schultz is the guy who sometimes saddens me in airports and currently occupies the one liberal shock jock position that is open at any time.* And it turns out that Dr. Laura Ingraham is not a person. There’s Dr. Laura—nice lady—and there’s Laura Ingraham, a conservative radio host who wrote a book called Of Thee I Zing.

These are maybe not people who should be taken seriously, is what I’m saying here. Yet one is mildly saddened to learn of an Ed Schultz, a man who turns red and suggests that his female colleagues’ views have been compromised by their excessive promiscuity and generally acts like, well, a conservative commentator. Don’t try to tell me conservative commentators don’t act like that: I distinctly remember when Robert Novak called Geraldine Ferraro a “slick little morsel” during the 1984 Vice Presidential Debate. Glenn Beck says the President is a bigot, and over the holidays pretty much all of them acknowledged that he might not be a US citizen. That is, to put it damningly, their brand of entertainment.

Our brand of their brand of entertainment, MSNBC, has punished Schultz with a week’s leave at no pay. The controversy has settled on the question of whether that is enough. A quick look at the comments section of the Huffington Postthe comments section of the Huffington Post, for chrissake—reveals a degree of anti-Schultz sentiment ranging from stern disappointment to profane outburst. Lifestyle progressives are not leaping to his defense: they are admonishing one another against slut-shaming. This is bad for Ed Schultz, in exactly the opposite way that similar incidents were neutral or even good for Rush Limbaugh.

Is that unfair? Define your terms, but it’s fair to say that there is something systemic about the left-leaning/cable-watching/argument-enjoying community that resists shock politics. We don’t like it. It’s how we know we’re better than conservatives.The sadness of the Shultz Slut Slur lies in its reminder that, like many invidious distinctions, that distinction is kind of invidious.

When liberals dismiss the ilk of Laura Ingraham, we do so on the suspect grounds that they are unreasonably dismissive. Right-wingers don’t argue; they call people socialists and deploy catch phrases like “gay agenda” and generally make ideas out of nouns. The problem with being morally superior to conservatives on the issue of name-calling is that it is itself a form of name calling. And if there is one thing that can be definitively said about Ed Schultz, it is that he is the latest in a history of demonstrations that the progressive position cannot fight fire with fire.

Obama is a socialist? Well, Laura Ingraham keeps reenacting a series of emotionally frigid sexual relationships in an attempt to master the original trauma of her upbringing. See, it doesn’t work. You can say it’s because the MSNBC audience is not full of judgmental church people the way the Fox audience is, but then you become a judgmental person yourself. It’s a chiasmus, like that old, extremely judgmental canard that conservatism can exist in a liberal society, but liberalism cannot exist in a conservative society.

What a smug thing to say in an argument. Personally, I would rather be called a slut. We can have this shrill discussion about where the ship of state is headed, ignoring the topic of where it should go in favor of proving who charts its course more accurately. Or we could take the progressive position literally, and recognize that the boat will move forward whether it is steered or not. If someone else has taken hold of the wheel, too, they may be convinced but not ignored.

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2 Comments

  1. I like the boat analogy. I think that progressive/liberals (whatever your team name is) feel like conservatives want to ignore problems that exist whereas they, as progressive/liberals, want to solve them, even if the problems exist for someone else. Conservatism has a pall of not fixin’ stuff (which is what politicians do when they’re not just sayin’ stuff).

    In the ship analogy we see that the progressive/liberal would argue for a change of course, “Hey guys, there’s an iceberg up ahead, lets swerve to avoid it.” And the conservative would want to stay the course, saying, “We’re not going to hit the iceberg and/or I don’t even see an iceberg.” In the mutual struggle to avoid sinking the ship, altering the course, especially suddenly and largely at the suggestion of the poor Irish in steerage, might not be the wisest choice. In the ship analogy, conservatism is less indictable than it is in our real life political choices, and I think that’s fair.

    I, for one, wish that the liberal/progressive could see conservatism as an equally sensible and cogent position on the direction society takes, in general. On any given issue, however, that’s probably not the case. How can you know which side to take on which issues? Critical thinking is required, just like steering a cruise liner. Simply batting for your team, like we do in a lot of American political discourse, shows a lack of understanding of alternative strategies and is self-defeating since real life governance is more like steering a ship and less like playing baseball. Except in the way that it is boring to watch and do. In that way governance is just like baseball. But for the spectator the stakes are much higher, like being on a ship about to hit an iceberg.

    We just can’t forget while debating a course in the bridge that the conservatives were just using it as a distraction to launch all the lifeboats with their friends and family.

  2. Aside from basic denial of it’s existence, Republicans look at the iceberg and think, “Several of my largest campaign contributors will make a ton of money if we hit that iceberg, and besides, it’s good for the passengers to have to scramble a bit and pull themselves up by their arctic-water-soaked bootstraps.”

    Democratic contributors also profit off the collision but the Democrats will bother to toss a not-quite-inflated life raft to the passengers. In the good old days, people like FDR at least bothered to inflate the raft.

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