Criticizing the rhetoric on Savage’s radio show, which has about 5 million listeners and airs on over 300 stations, is a relatively easy task, as evidenced last week when MSNBC announced Savage’s new show. The liberal media watchdog group FAIR, for instance, immediately responded with a press release pointing out that Savage often refers to Third World nations as “turd world nations.” In addition, Savage has said the U.S. “is being taken over by the freaks, the cripples, the perverts and the mental defectives,” and said of poor immigrants, “You open the door to them, and the next thing you know, they are defecating on your country and breeding out of control.”

But there’s more to Savage than the sum of his hateful quotes. Known before his radio career began as Michael A. Weiner, he’s also an ethnobotanist with a Ph.D. from the University of California who wrote a number of books about natural healing and nutritional supplements with titles like “Herbs That Heal.” Savage became an author after he failed to get an academic position, a result he blames in his book on affirmative action and his status as a white male: “For here I was, a ‘manchild in the promised land,’ denied my birthright for matters of race.”

In 1995, in the aftermath of the Republican takeover of Congress, which many credited to Limbaugh and other conservative talk radio hosts, Savage launched his show on San Francisco talk station KSFO, eventually landing a national syndication deal and becoming, according to Talkers magazine, the fifth most popular talk-radio host in the country.

It’s worth noting, however, that Savage attempted to return to academia in 1996, when he applied to be dean of U.C. Berkeley’s School of Journalism based on less than two years of experience in radio and his Ph.D. in epidemiology and nutrition science. When he wasn’t granted an interview, Savage filed a lawsuit that, unsurprisingly, didn’t go anywhere.

Unlike Limbaugh and the increasingly popular Sean Hannity, Savage spends little time in his book praising President Bush or the Republican Party, or spreading false tropes that circulate in the conservative media. Unlike Hannity’s “Let Freedom Ring,” for example, which often reads like a collection of Republican talking points, “The Savage Nation” is an almost unreadable amalgamation of virulent attacks on liberals, feminism, Islam and gays. It wouldn’t be much of a surprise if people like MSNBC president Erik Sorenson, who called Savage “brash, passionate and smart” in a press release, haven’t actually opened the book.

If Sorenson did read “The Savage Nation,” one has to wonder what he thought of Savage’s description of MSNBC correspondent Ashleigh Banfield, whom he calls “the mind slut with a big pair of glasses that they sent to Afghanistan,” adding, “She looks like she went from porno into reporting.” Those aren’t the only kind words Savage has for successful women, though. “Today in America,” he writes, “we have a ‘she-ocracy’ where a minority of feminist zealots rule the culture.” In Savage’s mind, this “she-ocracy” includes not only the usual conservative targets like Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barbara Boxer, but even right-leaning Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a Reagan appointee.

One can only hope Sorenson didn’t refer to Savage as “smart” based on his insights into the fight against terrorism or, as he calls those who took down the World Trade Center, “pirates in filthy nightshirts.” Savage states flat out in his book what several mainstream conservative commentators, like Hannity, have only dared to hint — that American liberals are a threat equal to terrorists. “To fight only the al-Qaida scum is to miss the terrorist network operating within our own borders,” he states. “Who are these traitors? Every rotten radical left-winger in this country, that’s who.”

Lest one think Savage is only talking about the truly radical left, he makes clear that he includes most Democratic leaders and center-left foreign leaders on that list. Former President Bill Clinton, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are all “New World Order Socialists” to Savage, with Blair earning the extra moniker of “Third Way Führer Blair.”

Savage’s rants against liberals also occasionally include the obsession of radical right-wingers with a one-world government. “[The liberal agenda] is all about one oppressive central government ruling the whole world,” he says. “This is the utopia the left has in mind for us.” Savage is fiercely bipartisan when it comes to one-world government, though, adding later on, “I’ve said for a long time that we have a ‘Republicrat’ or ‘Demican’ oligarchy in America and that most of our politicians are pawns controlled by their one-world puppet masters behind the scenes.”

Most of the book consists of fact-free rants such as these; “The Savage Nation” doesn’t bother with notes, and doesn’t even have an index. Like Ann Coulter, Michael Moore and Hannity, when Savage does bother with facts, he often gets them wrong. He says that “the divorce rate has doubled since 1970,” but according to federal statistics, while the divorce rate was 3.5 per 1,000 people in 1970, it never came close to doubling, and was 4.7 in 2000.

Using a study by Tokyo University scientists as data, Savage mocks former Vice President Al Gore’s efforts “to combat the evils of global warming and the ozone depletion [sic]” and asks “Why won’t Al, the global warming bogeyman, back down?” That study, however, found only that the ozone hole in the Southern Hemisphere would heal itself by 2040 thanks in part to regulatory controls of CFCs and other chemicals. Savage, whose biography calls him an “ardent conservationist,” seems unaware that ozone depletion and global warming are in fact separate phenomena.

As part of an attack on the use of Ritalin by children, Savage quotes then-first lady Hillary Clinton at a White House conference calling the drug “a godsend for emotional and behavioral problems for both children and their parents.” He fails to mention, however, Clinton’s next comment: “We do have to ask some serious questions about the use of prescription drugs in all children … What about the effects on our very youngest children who haven’t been tested for these prescription drugs and whose brains are in their most critical stages of development?” Hardly the words of someone who, as Savage alleges, is “calling Ritalin a miracle drug.”

Just how does a book like this get published? The answer can be found on a network of conservative Web sites. “The Savage Nation” is one of the first books published by WND Books, a partnership between the conservative site WorldNetDaily and Thomas Nelson, a publisher of Christian books. All WND books are not only heavily publicized on WorldNetDaily but also made available for sale there first, giving direct access to a loyal audience most authors would kill for.

Much of Savage’s content, meanwhile, can be traced directly to columns he published on the conservative site NewsMax.com. The book itself is divided into two- to four-page sections, many of which are near-exact replicas of Savage’s NewsMax columns with the same name. Most of the content in the book, in fact, can be found in the columns archived on this page. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with collecting a series of columns into a book. It’s noteworthy, however, that Savage doesn’t tell his readers they’re primarily reading recycled material, and it’s revealing that a book containing so many errors is primarily a cut-and-paste job.

The easiest response to all of this, of course, is one that Savage himself partially makes early in his book: “Comedy is what I sometimes do.” Does taking Michael Savage seriously play right into his hands? It’s certainly important to point out the hypocrisy of a bestselling author who says of himself, “I want to elevate the dialogue, if I can, to some level that’s civil.”

More fundamentally, in a world where people like Savage are rewarded with their own shows on a major cable news channel, close scrutiny is absolutely necessary. Either MSNBC executives have listened to Savage’s show and read his book and believe his brand of vitriol and distortions make him, as Sorenson said, “brash, passionate and smart,” or they don’t care about anything other than his ratings and his book sales. Either way, they have a lot to explain. Michael Savage may be one small step up in the ratings for MSNBC, but he’s one giant leap down for our political discourse.

Coulter admits she relies on Pethokoukis, so let’s go directly to the source. To recap, Nutting crunched Office of Management and Budget and Congressional Budget Office numbers to find that under Obama, spending has risen at an annualized rate of 1.4 percent, less than any president since Dwight Eisenhower. It jumped 8.1 percent in the last three years of the George W. Bush presidency, and in fiscal year 2009, for which Bush approved the budget, it jumped 17.9 percent. But Bush isn’t the most profligate Republican: Ronald Reagan increased spending an average of 8.7 percent in his first term.

Pethokoukis quarrels with Nutting’s assigning Bush’s budget to Bush, because “Obama chose not to reverse that elevated level of spending; thus he, along with congressional Democrats, are responsible for it.” Exactly how one president undoes the spending approved by another president under a different Congress goes unexplained. The AEI pundit also argues that we should look at federal spending as a percent of GDP, and he notes that’s gone up under Obama, attempting to prove that Nutting is mistaken – but that’s a useless metric during a recession, which by definition shrinks GDP.

Coulter goes even further (of course). “It turns out Rex Nutting, author of the phony Marketwatch chart, attributes all spending during Obama’s entire first year, up to Oct. 1, to President Bush.” (The italics are in the original; they’re where the good writing is supposed to be.) She continues: “That means, for example, the $825 billion stimulus bill, proposed, lobbied for, signed and spent by Obama, goes in … Bush’s column.”

Shockingly, Coulter is … wrong. First of all, only about $120 billion of the stimulus was spent in fiscal year 2009 – and Nutting counted it in Obama’s column. He also included new funds appropriated under Obama and the Democratic congressional majority for the child health insurance program and other projects. And it says so quite clearly on the nifty chart Coulter finds fault with: $140 billion spent in the 2009 budget year is plainly attributed to Obama. It also says so in the text of the story, for people who don’t read charts.

“I attributed all the new spending I could find to Obama,” Nutting told me in an email. “I looked at the CBO’s budget outlook from Jan. 2009, and spending for ’09 was actually lower than CBO projected. And spending has been flat since then.”

Coulter also claims that Nutting’s piece has been ignored by the New York Times, but in fact David Firestone weighed in today, and made a point I should have made: It’s actually sad that a Democratic president is kvelling about cutting the rate of federal spending growth to its lowest level since Dwight Eisenhower (actually, I made that point last August). Firestone notes that various budget deals aim to cut discretionary spending by $800 billion over a decade, by trimming education, food, housing, transportation and job training programs. “This category of spending, which used to be 5 percent of the gross domestic product in Nixon’s days, is heading down to less than 2 percent,” Firestone notes. Pethokoukis and Coulter ought to be applauding.

I’ve hailed Nutting’s piece not because I’m happy that Obama has presided over such stingy budgets (largely forced to by congressional Republicans), but because I’m glad to see a reporter telling the truth. If Pethokoukis and Coulter are the best the GOP can do to tear his work down, maybe more reporters will join him.

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-november-2-2011/conservative-minorities-vs–liberal-minorities?xrs=share_copy

09/13/01: Remembering the Day We Forgot the Lessons of the Day We Had Sworn We Would Always Remember

A lot of people say Ann Coulter is toxic. But we had no idea that she would take that literally. You would laugh at her if she wasn’t making light of a terrible tragedy.

Watch Schultz’s segment in full. Note Ann Coulter’s glowing green head.

Coulter cites a 10-year-old newspaper article and some studies by fringe scientists as proof to her theory. She goes on to compare radition — which she says is “a sort of cancer vaccine” — to “poisons” like zinc and magnesium found in multi-vitamins.

Bill O’Reilly invited Coulter onto his show last night and scolded her for misleading the audience into misunderstanding the well established dangers of radiation: