The media continue to assault Sarah Palin and other social conservatives in the wake of the Tucson, Ariz., shootings because they are intent on silencing voices that disagree with theirs, Dr. Laura Schlessinger says. Her comments highlight a situation where the left can attack Republicans for harsh political rhetoric while at the same time Democrats compare GOP tactics on healthcare repeal to those used by the Nazis.
“(The media goes after Palin) for the same reason they go after all social conservatives, they’re trying to silences voices that disagree with theirs,” Schlessinger said in an exclusive Newsmax.TV interview. “There’s a horrible trend in censorship going on in this country. Newsmax is a safe place to be, Sirius XM, where I am now on radio, is a safe place to be. But I really find a soul sister in Sarah Palin because every day they try to eviscerate her and every day she survives the shark attack.”
Schlessinger, whose new book is titled “Surviving a Shark Attack (On Land): Overcoming Betrayal and Dealing with Revenge,” is no stranger to attacks. She ended her longtime syndicated radio show last year after being criticized for her use of a racial epithet that is commonly heard in rap music and other entertainment venues. Since then, she moved her show to satellite radio.
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Nonetheless, during House debate on the repeal of Obamacare Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., said Republicans were using tactics employed by Nazi Germany.
“They say it's a government takeover of healthcare, a big lie just like Goebbels. You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, and eventually, people believe it. Like blood libel. That's the same kind of thing,” Politico reported him as saying.
Cohen added that “the Germans said enough about the Jews and people believed it — believed it and you have the Holocaust.”
Cohen apologized on Thursday for his remarks, insisting that he never said Republicans were Nazis.
Schlessinger said that the focus on Palin and other conservatives following the Tucson shooting that killed six and wounded 13, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., was a means of attaining power.
“What happened, the tragedy that happened in Tucson, had nothing to do with politics but everything to do with paranoid schizophrenia,” she said referring to the mental state of accused gunman Jared Loughner. “We have to have a means by which society can contain somebody who is mentally ill and dangerous.”
The shooting and the efforts to place some of the blame on conservative dialogue has led some to call for a return of the Fairness Doctrine that required broadcasters to present both sides of an issue. The repeal of the measure in 1987 is credited with the rise of talk radio.
Schlessinger said the measure should not be reinstituted, calling it a means to “curtail discourse.” “To say we’re going to curtail speech that offends somebody gives you the power to shut down what you don’t agree with,” she said.
Speaking of her new book, she said she just adored the concept of revenge but, like things that are illegal, immoral or fattening, she won’t do it herself. She said she wrote the book to help people deal with personal assaults that are often motivated by such things as envy and greed.
She said that for the most part people have a good sense of figuring out whether someone is bad in the same way you can tell when milk is about to turn sour.
“The truth is everybody’s not good and there’s not good in everybody,” she said.
Schlessinger acknowledged that some things are simply not forgivable, like sex with children, but betrayal is often not clear-cut.
“What I do discuss in one whole chapter is 'Were you really betrayed?' and one typical kind of scenario is 'My spouse had a brief affair,'” she said. “Well, yeah, we all consider that a betrayal. Except you find out that the spouse had been betrayed for a very long time by the so-called victim. And you get a lot of husbands and wives who have neglected their spouses, starved them out of emotion and the other person had choices to leave, to find somebody who cared about them.
“It’s the wrong thing to do by virtue of their vows, but they were pushed, they were literally pushed by the neglect they had in their marriage, their relationship. So I tell these people this was a team effort.”
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