This Week in Conservative Media: Apparently, Mao Is Not Dead

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Holly Bailey

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Eve Conant

At least he's not if you’re a conservative pundit tracking the Obama administration. It’s been almost a week since Glenn Beck ran a segment featuring White House Communications Director Anita Dunn counting Mao Zedong and Mother Teresa among two of her favorite political philosophers, and the “mainstream media,” according to Bill O’Reilly, are still refusing to deal with it.

O’Reilly, mystified, asked Brit Hume: “Look, what if you said, well, look, Hitler came out of nowhere after the Weimar Republic and singlehandedly raised himself up to a führer level. Gee, he was a pretty good political strategist. If you had done that, then everybody in the world would have been condemning you. Yet you can take a Mao Zedong, arguably a worse mass murderer than Hitler, and nobody says a word. Doesn't that strike you as strange?" There might be one answer to why no one is paying attention, muses O’Reilly, “Maybe, maybe, the strategy of the White House to isolate Fox News is working.”

Meanwhile, Mao appears to be on a roll. The Maoist of this week is Obama’s manufacturing czar, Ron Bloom. Beck has found a February 2008 statement of Bloom’s that that he agrees "with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun." Beck says, sure, he gets the point that if a gun were pointed at his head he’d be the powerless one, but he doesn’t “in the totally evil sort of way” agree with Mao—or Bloom—at all. Or in apparent comments of Bloom’s that the free market is nonsense. “Nobody even finds this interesting, that we have a guy who has now been appointed as the manufacturing czar and he doesn’t believe in the free-market system?” wonders Beck.

While watchdog group Media Matters accuses conservatives of glossing over moments when Newt Gingrich or John McCain have cited the tactics of Mao, Lenin, or the Viet Cong and yet have “slipped under media conservatives' communist radar,” no one over at Fox seems to be listening. (Perhaps O’Reilly had it wrong and it’s a conservative strategy to isolate Media Matters that is working?)

Mao or no Mao, the communists and socialists in the White House are coloring everything red, says Rush Limbaugh, who is happy to report to his listeners that Democrats are finally realizing conservatives are not racist. “It’s not the color of Obama’s skin that causes us any trouble. It’s the color of his policies. It’s not the blackness we oppose; it’s his redness. You’ll find red where you look in his agenda: red ink and Red policies.”

Last, but not least, we have Michael Savage, who keeps it simple by pointing his followers to a story about kids moving back home, but in the spirit of the week, he renames it for us: “College Grads Move Back Home, Thought Degrees in Maoism Would Land Them Jobs.”

Tag(s): Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Media Matters

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