The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Why Ed Schultz Became a Liberal

Posted on | December 21, 2010 | 13 Comments

Big hat-tip to the AOSHQ Headlines on this one. You sometimes hear conservative guys joke that liberal guys are liberal just because they want to score with liberal chicks. MSNBC’s firebrand “populist” is the punchline to that joke:

He savors his skewering of the right, but there was a time when he was one of them—a television sportscaster (after briefly making the roster of the Oakland Raiders) who became a talk-radio conservative, boosting Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. That began to change in 1992 after Schultz had his first date with the woman who ran the homeless shelter in Fargo. She had him grab a tray and wait on line for the Salvation Army lunch served to the downtrodden.
“Ed was in his suit, dressed to the nines, surrounded by homeless people. He was mortified,” says Wendy Schultz, now his wife and the producer of his three-hour radio show, broadcast down the hall at Manhattan’s 30 Rock. “He had a very tender heart and was very easy to tip over.” . . .
Schultz soon morphed into a left-wing prairie populist. “Some people believe it’s a made-up story, that it was about money, that he saw an opportunity as a liberal talk-show host,” says Schultz’s friend Don Haney, a reporter at KFGO radio. “But his conversion was genuine.”

Which is kinda ironic. Me, I was a Democrat my whole life and didn’t have to change my politics to marry a nice Republican girl from Ohio. (Crawl through broken glass and beg, yes; change my politics, no.)

It wasn’t until after I was married — with three kids and a mortgage — that I started to wise up to the fact that the Democrats’ class-warfare rhetoric wasn’t anything but a lie to get Democrats elected on their bogus promises of helping “the little guy.”

Ed Schultz reminds me of every mean drunk I ever knew. He’s a natural-born bully, which undoubtedly accounts for his popularity with MSNBC’s audience.

Category: MSNBC

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