Note to Ed Shultz: PLEASE acknowledge that you also said ‘shakedown’

This is getting slightly depressing. I am all for castigating Joe Barton, his oil donations, and the harmful policies he almost always espouses. But I’ve been listening–for the past few minutes–to Ed Schultz castigate Barton for calling the BP $20 billion escrow fund a ‘shakedown’. Regrettably, Schultz went on about Barton for several minutes without mentioning up front that he did the same (previous post).

Also regrettably, rightwing bloggers are picking this one up: See links here and here and here, for example.

To be fair, Schultz has previously defended his word choice, in a panel discussion elsewhere. But the buzzword is out there,and he seems to have helped legitimize it. This is no time to pretend that he didn’t say it, or to expect liberal audiences to suck it up and pretend the same.

The video clip of Schultz praising Obama for shaking down BP is linked here. MSNBC needs to do some homework here. Chris Matthews, on Nerfball, did a version of the same thing–going off about BP and Joe Barton, truly and applicably enough, without taking into account the cable-and-radio cross-transmissions that influenced this dialogue.

No wonder Rush Limbaugh is further demonstrating his eerie lack of shame by repeating and defending the ‘shakedown’ reference.