The rant that’s making waves today… Eric Massa has had a weekly radio show on Sunday mornings since early 2008, before he won election to Congress (never mind the violation of equal time rules), on WHHO– the same station that had its license revoked a month ago. The show moved to the former sister station, WKPQ… and this week, with Massa on the verge of quitting halfway into his first term, lit into the Democratic Party leadership, Rahm Emanuel in particular. He conjures up pictures none of us really wanted to ever see– Emanuel and Massa arguing naked in the House shower. He says that the investigation was over an off-color comment he made when drunk at a New Year’s Eve party, and that the real motivation behind the investigation was that Massa wouldn’t go along with the health care bill (he had been pushing for single payer and thought that it was better not to have a bill than to force through a bill that had a real chance of being counterproductive). I haven’t heard the whole thing yet but apparently he made rumblings about leaving the Democratic Party if his health ever permitted him to run for office again.
It’s almost as if he had gone Republican.
(Link above is an audio archive of the whole show)
By the way… Massa will be making an appearance on Glenn Beck’s TV show tomorrow. Beck talked with him today about things off-air and says “all Americans need to hear him.” Things ought to be interesting.
Thanks for connecting those dots.
This Health Care thing is pushing the administration to the breaking point. Rahm Emanuel has been attacking the President in public. Congress is not used to President trying to usurp the powers of Congress and bullying them into bowing to his demands. I think trying to cut off this guy’s political head may push other Democrats to oppose the President. It’s show down time and they have to put their cards on the table.
Hmm… how quickly the tables turn. Michelle Malkin decides to poo-poo Massa, “unearths” two Massa YouTube videos (one of which John Batchelor had found several days earlier), calls up Beck and Limbaugh, and now all of a sudden they’re dismissing Massa’s claims about as vigorously as Pelosi, Hoyer and the Obama administration. Beck follows through on his word to give Massa the whole hour and at the end of the interview declares it a waste of time. Limbaugh devotes a whole segment to trashing Massa. What gives? Does Malkin really have that much power behind the scenes in the conservative movement? If so, it’s kind of troubling.
Look, obviously Massa has a lot of issues, and the more he lets out and tries to explain with regards to the allegations, the more likely I am to think that he was involved in some really bad stuff and was a creep on the level of the late Michael Jackson. I don’t think anyone in the mainstream conservative right is going to claim Eric Massa as one of their own. However, that’s precisely the reason we’ve taken note of his claims. He’s a man who isn’t capitulating to the right and whose political career is all but over. There’s also the “enemy of my enemy” factor, kind of like when the Communists and Nazis were beating each other up in World War II– did we want the Communists to win? Not really– but we loved watching the Nazis lose, because after all, the Nazis were our enemies, too. Gibbs says he has different stories– yes, but they’re not all contradictory. The things Massa is accusing Emanuel and the administration of doing are very consistent with their past actions and stated intentions– it’s just that none of us had ever heard or seen the naked shower scenario.