chrisbrad | A Few of the Media's "Deathwishes" to Conservatives

From MRC

■ “I’m waiting for the day when I pick it up, pick up a newspaper or click on the Internet and find out he’s choked to death on his own throat fat or a great big wad of saliva or something, you know, whatever. Go away, Rush, you make me sick!” — Left-wing radio host Mike Malloy on the January 4, 2010 Mike Malloy Show, talking about Rush Limbaugh going to the hospital after suffering chest pains.

■ MSNBC’s Chris Matthews in 2009 fantasized about the death of Rush Limbaugh: “Somebody’s going to jam a CO2 pellet into his head and he’s going to explode like a giant blimp”

■ Author/humorist P.J. O’Rourke: “It’s the twilight of the radio loud-mouth, you know? I knew it from the moment the fat guy-”
Host Bill Maher: “You mean Rush Limbaugh and Sean-”
O’Rourke: “-from the moment the fat guy refused to share his drugs....”
Maher: “You mean the OxyContin that he was on?...Why couldn’t he have croaked from it instead of Heath Ledger?” — HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, February 8, 2008.

■ MSNBC’s Amy Robach in 2006 mildly wondered if “Death of a President” movie depicting the imagined assassination of President Bush was “poor taste or, as some say, thought-provoking?”

■ On his radio show in 2009, Ed Schultz wished for Dick Cheney’s death: “He is an enemy of the country, in my opinion, Dick Cheney is, he is an enemy of the country … Lord, take him to the Promised Land, will you?”

■ Also on his radio show, in 2010, Schultz shouted: “Dick Cheney’s heart’s a political football. We ought to rip it out and kick it around and stuff it back in him!”

■ Then-Air America host Montel Williams in 2009 urged Congresswoman Michele Bachmann to kill herself: “Slit your wrist! Go ahead! I mean, you know, why not? I mean, if you want to – or, you know, do us all a better thing. Move that knife up about two feet. I mean, start right at the collarbone.”

■ Writing on the Huffington Post in 2007, radio host Charles Karel Bouley mocked: “I hear about Tony Snow and I say to myself, well, stand up every day, lie to the American people at the behest of your dictator-esque boss and well, how could a cancer NOT grow in you? Work for Fox News, spinning the truth in to a billion knots and how can your gut not rot?”

■ “I’m just saying if he did die, other people, more people would live. That’s a fact.” — Host Bill Maher on his HBO show Real Time, March 2, 2007, discussing how a few commenters at a left-wing blog were upset that an attempt to kill Vice President Cheney in Afghanistan had failed.

■ “Earlier today, a rental truck carried a half a million ballots from Palm Beach to the Florida Supreme Court there in Tallahassee. CNN had live helicopter coverage from the truck making its way up the Florida highway, and for a few brief moments, America held the hope that O.J. Simpson had murdered Katherine Harris.” — Bill Maher on ABC’s Politically Incorrect, November 30, 2000.

■ Host Tina Gulland: “I don’t think I have any Jesse Helms defenders here. Nina?”
NPR’s Nina Totenberg: “Not me. I think he ought to be worried about what’s going on in the Good Lord’s mind, because if there is retributive justice, he’ll get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will get it.” — Exchange on the July 8, 1995 Inside Washington, after Helms said the government spends too much on AIDS.

■ “I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he dies early like many black men do, of heart disease....He is an absolutely reprehensible person.” — USA Today columnist and Pacifica Radio talk show host Julianne Malveaux on Justice Clarence Thomas, November 4, 1994 PBS To the Contrary.