It’s somehow become Video Friday here at Essential Liberty.  Honest, I didn’t plan it that way.

Here’s a little video history of Shep Smith at Fox News showing glimpses of decency and free-thinking while mired in the propoganda machine.

Back in November, Ralph Nader referenced Uncle Tom when discussing Barack Obama.  Shep Smith no likey:

And here’s Shep emphatically stating his stance on torture:

And finally, my personal favorite, Shep Smith trying to be a good Fox News soldier, but unable to contain his contempt for new colleague (and Fox’s new Golden Boy), Glenn Beck:

Shep needs to go ahead and break free from The Dark Side and join the Alliance.

Tell you what, Fox News — we’ll trade ya for Doug McKelway.

Some have tried to paint today’s Tea Parties as rational and measured discourse against the fiscal policies of the current administration.

But when your party’s current leaders are Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh — did you expect anything but what you see below?

Images courtesy of The Washington Independent:

Uh-huh.

Today’s “grassroots” Tea Parties are going on across the country.  After eight years of standing idly by while Bush spent our savings like a sailor on shore leave, today’s the day they decide that they’re mad as hell, and they’re not gonna take it anymore!

It reeks of desperation.

If this is the best that today’s Conservative Party can come up with, then they’re in worse shape than I thought.

Taibbi agrees.

This must be a terrible time to be a right-winger. A vicious paradox has been thrust upon the once-ascendant conservatives. On the one hand they are out of power, and so must necessarily rail against the Obama administration. On the other hand they have to vilify, as dangerous anticapitalist activity, the grass-roots protests against the Geithner bailouts and the excess of companies like AIG. That leaves them with no recourse but to dream up wholesale lunacies along the lines of Glenn Beck’s recent “Fascism With a Happy Face” rants, which link the protesting “populists” and the Obama adminstration somehow and imagine them as one single nefarious, connected, ongoing effort to install a totalitarian regime.

This is not a simple rhetorical accomplishment. It requires serious mental gymnastics to describe the Obama administration — particularly the Obama administration of recent weeks, which has given away billions to Wall Street and bent over backwards to avoid nationalization and pursue a policy that  preserves the private for-profit status of the bailed-out banks — as a militaristic dictatorship of anti-wealth, anti-private property forces. You have to somehow explain the Geithner/Paulson decisions to hand over trillions of taxpayer dollars to the rich bankers as the formal policy expression of progressive rage against the rich. Not easy. In order to pull off this argument, in fact, you have to grease the wheels with a lot of apocalyptic language and imagery, invoking as Beck did massive pictures of Stalin and Orwell and Mussolini (side by side with shots of Geithner, Obama and Bernanke), scenes of workers storming the Winter Palace interspersed with anti-AIG protests, etc. — and then maybe you have to add a crazy new twist, like switching from complaints of “socialism” to warnings of “fascism.” Rhetorically, this is the equivalent of trying to paint a picture by hurling huge handfuls of paint at the canvas. It’s desperate, last-ditch-ish behavior.