Apocalypse now for liberal talkers

For the pundits on MSNBC and the liberal blogosphere, the prospect of a Scott Brown victory in the Massachusetts Senate race has provoked the kind of doomsday rhetoric not heard since a certain Texan was president.

Liberal talker Ed Schultz recently told radio listeners that if he lived in Massachusetts he’d try to vote 10 times, claiming that he’d “cheat to keep these bastards out.”

Conservatives howled that the MSNBC host was inciting voter fraud, so Schultz apologized on the air Monday — well, sort of.

“I misspoke on Friday. I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” Schultz said. “I meant to say, if I could vote 20 times, that's what I'd do.”

“Let me be very clear,” Schultz said a few minutes later. “I'm not advocating voter fraud, I'm just telling you what I would do. That's how bad I want Scott Brown to lose!”

Atlantic senior editor Andrew Sullivan described the election on his blog as “a nihilist moment, built from a nihilist strategy in order to regain power ... to do nothing but wage war against enemies at home and abroad.”

Sullivan, a longtime conservative who announced he was leaving “the right” last month, concluded Monday on his blog that “Democrats can stop hoping at this point” and predicted a double-digit victory for Brown.

“What comes next will be a real test for [President Barack] Obama,” Sullivan continued. “I suspect serious health insurance reform is over for yet another generation.”

Other pundits have had their own grand pronouncements on the possibility of Democrat Martha Coakley losing the seat once held by Ted Kennedy: “Good Morning America” host George Stephanopoulos —who once worked for someone dubbed the “Comeback Kid” — wrote on his blog Tuesday that a Brown victory “would certainly be the biggest political upset I have seen in my career.” PBS’s Judy Woodruff, quoting someone from the White House, described the situation on ABC’s “This Week” as “a tragedy of Greek proportions if Ted Kennedy's successor is the one ... who was responsible for the death of health care.”

The imminent “death of health care” has been a constant theme. For Democrats — who’ll continue to control the White House, House, and Senate, with at worst 59 seats — there’s been a steady stream of doom and gloom when talking to the press.

Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts told reporters Friday that a Brown victory would “kill the health bill,” and his House colleague New York Rep. Anthony Weiner expressed a similarly dire view on Tuesday’s “Morning Joe.”

"I think you can make a pretty good argument that health care might be dead,” Weiner said.

But while Weiner focused his criticism on what President Barack Obama could have been doing in states like Massachusetts before this weekend to promote his health care agenda, along with the repercussions of losing a seat in the Senate, MSNBC’s prime-time liberal hosts have been turning up the volume in attacks on the Republican candidate.

On Monday’s “Countdown,” Keith Olbermann told viewers that in Brown, “we have an irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude model, tea-bagging supporter of violence against women and against politicians with whom he disagrees.”

“The Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” Olbermann added in his special comment, “is close to sending this bad joke to the Senate of the United States.”

Following Olbermann was Rachel Maddow, who played a 2008 clip that’s been making the rounds in which Brown suggests that Obama may have been born out of wedlock.

“Massachusetts, meet Scott Brown,” Maddow said Monday. “He could be taking his claim that President Obama was secretly born to an unwed mother all the way to Washington, D.C. in your name as your senator.”

Maddow, who’s hosting her show from Boston on Tuesday, said that she understands “all the election withdrawal hyperventilation over the prospects of an Obama conspiracy theorist-red state Republican-in-blue-Massachusetts [but] there’s still an election to be fought for here.”

Chris Matthews on Tuesday said that Democrats were facing a “disaster in their works,” and expressed the view that it was better in the old days when the party leadership would have made sure Democratic voters got to the polls.

"You get them lunch; you get them a car,” Matthews said.“You’d make sure they got there, and in some cases you’d be buying people to get them, not officially buying them, but getting them there as block secretaries, as block captains; you’d be getting them there with street money — legitimate but it’s a little bit old school."

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