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Don’t expect Ed Schultz to invite Ernest Istook back on his MSNBC show any time soon.

As was the case back in November, the former congressman and distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation deftly engaged a hapless Schultz, to the point that Schultz this past Wednesday actually apologized to his audience because "this was not the way this interview was supposed to go." And Schultz had it all mapped out!

Keeping tabs on left-wing media usually provides all the appeal of a re-education camp, but the slog does have its moments. This was one of them, from "The Ed Show" on March 24. A transcript of the exchange follows, interspersed with snarky commentary in italics, along with a video clip below the fold – 

SCHULTZ: Ernie, what’s happening with the right wing in this country, the conservatives in this country, the over-the-top rhetoric, the acts of vandalism. How do you address that?

ISTOOK: Well, first of all, I condemn any sort of vandalism or violent rhetoric. But let’s remember that it happens on both sides. Wasn’t it just last month, Ed, that you said that they ought to rip out the heart of Dick Cheney? You know, did you want people to condemn you for that?

SCHULTZ: And get him the best health care in the country. He should become the poster child (… before dying a richly deserved premature death) …

ISTOOK: Yeah, yeah …

 

SCHULTZ: Now wait a minute now, now don’t …

ISTOOK: But it’s that kind of rhetoric, Ed. It comes from both sides is my point. 

SCHULTZ: No, no, no. No, that’s not rhetoric (… nor did I use words when I said it) and the fact is, is that that was said on a radio talk show and that not, doesn’t excuse it (In other words, beyond the pale), but the fact is I said we want a successful conclusion for the vice president because we want him to become the poster child, everybody in the country should have the same health care as Dick Cheney, because most people …

 ISTOOK: But rip his heart out, Ed?

SCHULTZ: Wait a minute, and stuff it back in him and make sure that he survives and has the best health care. And, you know, this is what happens in America, making a joke and …

ISTOOK: My point is just that it happens on both sides, Ed.

SCHULTZ: No, it doesn’t happen on both sides because I haven’t cut anybody’s fuel lines, Ernest. You know that, OK …

ISTOOK: Well, Ted Kaczynski, the Unambomber, murdered people. He was an environmental extremist. That came from the left. It does happen on both sides.

SCHULTZ: You know, it’s not happening on both sides at this level and you know it’s not. You know that there are …

ISTOOK: I’ve received death threats. I had a man go to prison for threatening to kill me and dismember me.

SCHULTZ: OK, all right (Realizing he’s overmatched, flop sweat setting in). So the tea partiers are just, it’s normal operation procedure, correct, Ernie? I mean, is that what your answer is?

ISTOOK:  No, I said …

SCHULTZ (fingers pointing): You see, you’re the problem, Ernest! Ernest, you are the problem! (It was you who cut that man’s fuel lines!) You can’t, Ernest, you can’t point the finger at the culprit in any of this (Neither can anyone else, but who cares?). That’s the problem, right there. 

ISTOOK: Those were the first words out of my mouth to condemn that.

SCHULTZ: Oh yeah, and then of course attack, saying it happens on both sides when it doesn’t. It’s not happening on both sides …

ISTOOK: Ed, I just gave you examples where it does.

SCHULTZ: Democrats are not, Ernest, tell me, tell me a Democrat …

ISTOOK: I did not get my threats from the right, I got them from the left. They threatened to kill me.

SCHULTZ: Tell me a Democrat who’s thrown a brick through a window, who has also recently threatened families and also left messages about how you’re gonna die. Tell me who those people are on the left right now? (… and I’ll keep searching for conservatives guilty of these things).

ISTOOK: Like I said, Ed, a man went to prison for threatening to kill me because I would not vote to legalize marijuana. That wasn’t coming from the right.

SCHULTZ: OK.

ISTOOK: That was coming from the left.

SCHULTZ: All right, so I guess you’re condemning, you’re condoning it then (Condemn, condon, whatever). Laura Flanders (Schultz’s other guest), your thoughts on what should …

ISTOOK: I just said I condemn it on both sides.

SCHULTZ: It doesn’t mean anything, Ernest! You lose your credibility when you say it’s both sides …

ISTOOK: For being even-handed? (Istook right hook connects with Schultz glass chin)

SCHULTZ: … for not condemning it the way it is right now (… the way everyone does at MSNBC staff meetings). I mean, you will not tell Boehner to come out and absolutely condemn this, call on the leadership …

ISTOOK: Read Politico, Boehner already condemning that.

SCHULTZ: I don’t have to read anything, I’ve got my own show, Ernest (What’s the point of reading when you’re a cable legend?). I’m sorry, I have to apologize to my audience tonight. This was not the way this interview was supposed to go (Why can’t conservatives ever say what you want them to say?!). But you know, this is how the righties operate (With logic and specific examples — these people are ruthless). You know, they can’t even give good commentary without attacking (Using my own words against me — the scoundrels!).  

Still rattled from the exchange more than a day later, Schultz said this on his radio show Friday (click here for audio) —

I’m really getting to the point where I don’t want any conservatives on ‘The Ed Show’ on MSNBC because they all lie.

Even worse, they blow my cover as a buffoon.

Pivoting off a New York Times column by Frank Rich that accused tea partiers of being more afraid of "a black president and a female Speaker of the House" than by oncoming big government, Chris Matthews, once again, accused tea partiers of sexism and racism, on Monday’s Hardball, and even brought on a Princeton professor to buttress his charges. However conservative talk show host Dana Loesch was on hand to rebut, point by point, Matthews and his guests’ ugly accusations about the right as she fended off allegations of Birtherism by pointing out the nutty Trutherism that exists on the left and denied charges of secessionism by clarifying the tea partiers are about 10th Amendment principles. For his part Matthews claimed the Birthers were a fixture on the right but Truthers weren’t "a part of the Obama coalition."

The following is Matthews’ opening teaser and a portion of the explosive exchange that was aired on the March 29 edition of Hardball:

CHRIS MATTHEWS AT TOP OF SHOW: Plus what are the tea partiers really angry about? Health care reform or the fact that it was an African-American president and a woman Speaker of the House who pushed through major change?

…

MATTHEWS: The passage of health care reform last week unleashed a rage on the right but New York Times columnist Frank Rich says that it wasn’t health care reform itself that stoked the anger but instead a shift, in this country, toward more diversity that has left some in the diminishing majority anxious. Melissa Harris Lacewell is a professor of Politics and African-American Studies at Princeton. And Dana Loesch is a radio talk show host and tea party organizer. Let’s take a look at the New York Times column that’s caused all this conversation. Frank Rich wrote this, quote: "If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. This same conjunction of a black president and a female Speaker of the House, topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay congressional committee chairman – it would have sown seeds of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country, no matter what the policies were in play." Professor, your thoughts. Is this fight, from the tea party side, aimed at the, or ignited by the health care defeat last week they suffered, about ethnicity and gender and orientation, sexual orientation or is it about the substance of the issue? The fiscal policy, the social policy involved. Which is it?

MELISSA HARRIS LACEWELL: Well I don’t know that we can be quite so dichotomist as to suggest which is it. But certainly what we can see is that the tone, or the strategies, the language used about the policy has ended up having overtones around all of these anxieties about diversity that Rich suggests in that New York Times column. You know we know from, pretty much decades of social scientific research at this point, including some really terrific work by Karen Stenner, in a book called the Authoritarian Dynamic, that there are individuals that have sort of a pre-disposition towards intolerance. And when those individuals are in a society where things start changing very rapidly, particularly if things start feeling like, you know political leaders are fighting or if there’s a lot of racial diversity or change, then that kind of ignites this anxiety and it creates precisely the kind of intolerance that we’re seeing. So my bet is that, certainly part of it is about policy but also part of it is about the anxieties of this particular group and that’s why we’re seeing these expressions around racial and, and homophobic, sort of discourse.

MATTHEWS: So just to stay with you, for a minute, if Hillary Clinton had won the Democratic nomination last year and had won the general election against John McCain, and that’s iffy but it’s possible, we can imagine that happened, would the anger be as extreme as it’s been with these placards, the people’s faces, the contortion of anger that you see, not in every face but a lot of faces out there. Would it still be there? Had that been the case? Right now? Hillary not Barack.

…

MATTHEWS: What do you make of the, what do you make of the signage? Some of it’s pretty nasty and why don’t people walk away from those signs? Why are they comfortable standing there when people have nasty signs up? Hitler mustaches, etc, etc.?

DANA LOESCH, RADIO TALK SHOW HOST: Like they did with Bush and Hitler? Because they had that on the left as well. I mean I specifically, I specifically remember the RNC protests from the Republican National Convention that happened just a year, just a couple of years ago. There were Bush/Hitler signs. I, myself, have been at a protest in St. Louis where they’ve burned Bush in effigy. So, I mean, to kind of like portray it as just being on one side or and not the other isn’t, isn’t exactly fair because – I mean google Bush/Hitler and you’ll get pages and pages of the same thing. But the bottom line too is we know that with any large group of people, you are going to have people who are on the fringe on both sides but the difference that I’m seeing is that a lot of people on the left like to sit here and portray that the fringe on the right represent the whole of the right and that’s not accurate.

MATTHEWS: Okay did just see that sign? "Don’t blame me I voted for an American." There’s a big number of people out there led by Neugebauer of Texas and other congress people who challenge this president’s birth right. They challenge that he’s an American. If you look at a poll I saw, it shows they were largely bunched in the South. Those people who believed that he wasn’t an American and you say that’s not racial. Why would it be bunched in the South so heavily these people that believe he’s not an American. What’s that about?

LOESCH: Well do you mean the same way that the left tried to say that John McCain wasn’t an American because he was born on a base in Panama?

MATTHEWS: No, no, no. Nobody made an issue, nobody made an issue about-

LOESCH: Because you could say that’s racial too.

MATTHEWS: No, no, no Dana. No, don’t chuckle about this. It isn’t funny. And nobody-

LOESCH: It is funny!

MATTHEWS: Nobody made an issue of John McCain being born in another country, in the canal zone.

LOESCH: Well if you’re asking me, whether or not, I’m a Birther the answer is no.

MATTHEWS: Nobody made an issue.

LOESCH: Oh yeah there was. There was headlines about that.

MATTHEWS: Why are there so many Birthers out there? Why are there so many Birthers out there?

LOESCH: I’m not a Birther so I’m not quite sure.

MATTHEWS: But why are they out there and why, and why are people comfortable having them in the-

LOESCH: Why are there so many people who deny 9/11 on the left? I mean, you know, I mean we could sit here and do this all day.

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

LOESCH: But no there was that issue made about McCain too.

MATTHEWS: Well I don’t think, I don’t think the Truthers are a part of the Obama coalition. Do you think? Whereas the Birthers are a part of the tea party crowd.

LOESCH: Well let’s see who was it?

MATTHEWS: Why are they comfortable in that group?

LOESCH: Who was it? John, maybe not John Cusack or Sean Penn. There was a celebrity who is a Truther that’s, you know, talked about those.

MATTHEWS: Yeah, well, that’s odd. Let me, let me bring the professor back and I want you to go at each other.

LOESCH: But I mean why can’t we talk about the substance of this? Why do we have to constantly invalidate people who are for smaller government by saying that they’re a racist. That is, I mean, I think it’s actually an insult to the civil rights movement. And to say that people who oppose Nancy Pelosi are sexist.

MATTHEWS: Okay Professor you get in here. I have my reasons, they’re based upon all these Birthers out there that I do think are challenging his Americanism.

LOESCH: This isn’t about Birtherism! This is about big government.

LACEWELL: Well, well let me just suggest this. That the tea partiers by using the language of tea party have asked us to draw a parallel between their movement and the Revolutionary War movement. But I think if we look more carefully we’ll see that in many ways the tea party movement resembles more closely the kind of secessionist feelings that were both part of the Confederacy before the Civil War and then also remained in the post-civil war Reconstruction era. So in other words-

LOESCH: It’s about state sovereignty not secessionism. It’s about 10th Amendment principles.