Harold Ford, a failed Blue Dog Democrat turned Merrill Lynch vice chairman and Fox News then MSNBC political contributor, says Democrats should simply ignore the international Occupy Wall Street movement, and compared it to the Tea Party.
“We Democrats, we Democrats can’t criticize Republicans for catering to the Tea Party and not be — and not say to our Democratic Party you’ve got to look beyond Occupy [Wall Street] and be willing to do what’s in the best interest of the country.”
The comments were made yesterday to Andrea Mitchell on NBC’s Meet The Press Sunday, during an extremely offensive example 0f journalistic malpractice.
Brent Budowsky on his blog at The Hill, writes,
On the “Meet the Press” this past Sunday there was a discussion of Occupy Wall Street that included panelists Jack Welch (obviously no friend of Occupy), David Brooks (who has attacked Occupy) and the man billed as former Democratic Rep. Harold Ford (who has various relationships, almost never disclosed to viewers, with Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs).
You get the idea. Three voices on one side, while the other side, the Occupy Wall Street side, is blacked out in this panel on “Meet the Press” without even fair disclosure of the financial interests of Harold Ford, who in my view represents what is wrong with the Democratic Party.
Tim Russert, no doubt, would have agreed.
For those not familiar, Jack Welch “was Chairman and CEO of General Electric [formerly the full-owner of NBC] between 1981 and 2001. In 2006 Welch’s net worth was estimated at $720 million,” David Brooks is a conservative author who has worked for, among other publications, the uber-conservative Washington Times, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, and Harold Ford, who failed miserably at his 2010 attempt to re-enter politics in his newly-adopted state of New York, where voters are not only more progressive and demanding than those in his former state of Tennessee, whom he served as a Congressman for 10 years.
Ford opposed same-sex marriage before he supported it,
Wikipedia adds,
In Congress, Ford opposed benefits for same-sex couples and supported the Federal Marriage Amendment, which would have defined marriage as one man and one woman. He told Democrats they should be more supportive of the Iraq War, and criticized Senate Democrats who attempted to filibuster the nomination of Samuel Alito. He was one of the few Democrats who voted for the bankruptcy bill, and he defined himself as a pro-life candidate, supporting some restrictions on abortion, including a ban on intact dilation and extraction, called “partial-birth abortion” by opponents.
…
In March 2007, Ford joined the financial services firm Merrill Lynch as a vice chairman and senior policy advisor., and in the same month he was hired by Fox News Channel as a political contributor. In March 2008, he moved from Fox to MSNBC as a news analyst, appearing as a panelist onDavid Gregory’s Race for the White House, Hardball, and Morning Joe.