Is Rachel Maddow sincere? [View all]

[hfojvt]

Of course, by asking that question here I sorta feel like I rolled in bacon grease, walking into a den of hungry lions and shouted "dinnertime!"

Rachel is widely admired here. She's smart. She's funny. She's passionate. And heck, she's even good looking (in my eyes, tastes differ).

I always watched her show, and enjoyed it, for the brief time when I had cable TV. But is she good for us? Is she honest? Or is she playing us for fools in order to make her million dollar salary?

Somerby, a blogger I started reading in perhaps 2002, criticizes her quite a bit. So much so, that some readers/commenters on his blog see him as just another rightwinger harping about the liberal media. Which is kinda funny, considering that he started his blog detailing how the media was unfairly attacking Al Gore.

Still, even I find him to be somewhat too centrist, as he seemed to support Hillary in the 2008 primary. He's perhaps not a member of the "Democratic wing of the Democratic Party" as many of us think of ourselves here.

Or he wouldn't say this in today's post.

"By how much are women underpaid? It’s very hard to answer that question; there’s no easy way to tell. But whether we liberals like it or not, Republicans are largely in the right when they challenge the familiar claim that women are underpaid by 23 cents on the dollar."

Rachel assures us that Republicans are wrong, but one of the ways she proves that is with selective editing that seems as dishonest as what Breitbart does. As Somerby details, she played a tape of somebody agreeing with her and then continued

"MADDOW: Women get paid less than men do, 77 cents on the dollar on average. That’s true. Democrats know that’s true. It is the accepted truth by anybody who is looking at the facts of the matter. Republicans do not know that’s true."

As if she was unaware of what the rest of the tape would say

"Now, as you go along, as you control for other factors, even if you control for everything you could possibly imagine, all those things, the college, the hours worked— Men still make more than women, that gap narrows, it's about 5 cents of a difference."

Rachel claimed 23 cents and implied that anybody who denied 23 cents was deluded, a denier of reality. Someone so bizarre that she could not understand how they were thinking (if it could even be called thought).

The thing is this. A five percent gap is unacceptable. It's a significant amount of money, and I do not accept discrimination. A 5% pay gap deserves to be fought. But if you stubbornly claim something that is not true, that the pay gap is really 23%, then you undermine a fight for fairness by making yourself look dishonest or deluded in the eyes of an objective observer.

The question is, whether we are fact based objective observers, or if we are hopelessly in love with people who seem to get paid millions of dollars to misinform us. And who also would stir up hatred or contempt for people who disagree with us.

http://dailyhowler.blogspot.com/2012/05/do-you-believe-what-maddow-said.html

But some readers, perhaps will not think that I am sincere.