Jackass TV

[Geee]

Human Events:

MSNBC began simply as a bland, Internet-gimmicky version of NBC News on cable TV, but in the last decade it has shuffled more and more to the radical left. As it picked up a stable filled with ultraliberal talk-radio hosts, and even hired substitute anchors from the far-left Nation magazine, the network now boldly associates itself with leftists and President Obama with a new, revolutionary slogan: “Lean Forward.”

The “Lean Forward” ads now all over TV were directed by black leftist Spike Lee—the one who created a strange HBO conspiracy documentary to explore how George W. Bush allegedly dynamited the levees to flood New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The Nation ads are everywhere, not only in heavy rotation on MSNBC, but popping up on liberal sites from NPR to The Atlantic to The Huffington Post. This summer, the Nation is taking the ads to upscale movie houses.

The first explanation of this “branding” campaign tried to be less ideological: “To lean forward is to think bigger, listen closer, fight smarter and act faster. To celebrate the best ideas, no matter where they come from.” Chief marketing officer Sharon Otterman explained, “It stands for progress and advancing the issues our viewers are interested in.”

But anyone who has seen the ads knows they are audacious expositions of liberal beliefs and bugaboos. MSNBC’s viewers are the people who think Barack Obama is an over-compromising centrist, so “advancing their issues” closely matches the agenda of those guest hosts from the Nation magazine.

Even comedians have mocked the campaign. Seth Meyers of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” came to the White House Correspondents Dinner and joked, “‘Lean Forward’—as if the problem has been that we couldn’t hear them. Have you seen ‘Hardball’? Chris Matthews yells like an auctioneer in a wind tunnel.”

Matthews is the dean of MSNBC pundits, even if his ratings run behind those of the network’s prime-time shows, and his promo takes the thrill up his leg he gets from Obama talking about America and denounces all Republicans. From the roof of the Hay-Adams Hotel overlooking the White House, Matthews demands his opponents say, “I disagree with Obama on taxes, on the size of government and some foreign policy issues, but he’s as much an American as I am. And you know what the problem of this 2012 election is? They won’t say that.