Last Tuesday, Senator Charles Schumer of New York inadvertently gave the public a political backstage tour. Before a conference call with members of the press, Schumer was briefing fellow Democrats on specific talking points concerning the current budget negotiations. What he did not know was that some of the reporters were already patched into the call, and the discussion was caught on tape.

“The only way we can avoid a shut down is for Boehner to come up with a reasonable compromise and not just listen to what the Tea Party wants because the Tea Party wants to stick to HR1 with its draconian, extreme -I always use the word extreme, that is what the caucus instructed me to do the other week- extreme cuts and all these riders, and Boehner’s in a box, but if he supports the Tea Party, there’s going to inevitably [be] a shut down. What we are trying to do here . . .”

At that point, the call was muted. When the official conference began, Schumer’s colleagues,  Benjamin L. Cardin, Richard Blumenthal, Thomas R. Carper, and Barbara Boxer, all advanced the Tea Party-as-extremist position. Later, Senator Schumer’s spokesman, Brian Fallon, released this statement:

“There’s nothing wrong with reporters overhearing him calling the House Republicans extreme, because that’s what it is. He had just given a speech on the Senate floor saying the same thing. The sooner Speaker Boehner abandons the Tea Party’s extreme demands, the sooner there can be a bipartisan deal on the budget.”

The fact that political parties issue talking points of this sort is not a surprise. What is revealing about the Schumer gaff is that it exposes the use of a subtle technique that the Left has been employing for many years. By labeling center-right organizations extreme, what the Left is attempting to do is push those groups to the fringe in the public’s perceptions. Once it becomes established that a mainstream movement, such as the Tea Party, resides on the far right of the political spectrum, it has the effect of shifting the ideological scale: ostensibly placing the radical Left near the center.

This technique of shifting the center takes different forms. For instance, when Glenn Beck held a rally that was largely viewed as a Tea Party gathering in Washington, D.C., the left-leaning Jon Stewart felt compelled to hold a similar rally. Stewart’s rally was called the “Rally to Restore Sanity,” and he also referred to it as the “Million Moderate March.” By holding a counter rally that claimed to be the voice of moderation and sanity, Stewart was purposely working to brand Beck’s audience as extreme while establishing his mostly liberal audience as the commonsense center.

Organizations can also be used to achieve this perceptional shift. Dave Foreman, the environmental activist that founded EarthFirst! has claimed that he formed the radical organization to make the Sierra Club appear more reasonable. In an interview for Smithsonian magazine, Foreman states:

“We thought it would have been useful to have a group to take a tougher position than the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society. It could be sort of secretly controlled by the mainstream and trotted out at hearings to make the Sierra Club or Wilderness Society look moderate.”

By forming an extremely radical environmental group, Foreman was pushing groups such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the Wilderness Society toward the center in the public’s perceptions.

Another recent example where the center-shift technique has been employed was in a March 26 piece written by John Avlon. Avlon, a co-founder of the faux-centrist group No Labels who is best known for labeling opponents as “wingnuts,” penned an article for The Daily Beast called “Minnesota’s Bachmannization.” In the editorial, Avlon paints all conservative positions as radical ideology while simultaneously positioning the Left as the commonsense middle:

“Minnesota is a swing state, and its pendulum has swung heavily—from the liberal era of Humphrey and Mondale, past center-right figures like Norm Coleman, and right on to Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann . . . The Minnesota Republican Party has undergone a “Bachmannization” in recent years, lurching to the right on social issues, with the prerequisite purging of centrists and elevation of ideological absolutists . . . In recent weeks, the Republican-controlled state legislature has clashed with liberal Democratic Governor Mark Dayton. Among their headline grabbing and eyebrow-raising legislative efforts have included trying to ban all abortions in the state after 20 weeks and forbidding anyone on public assistance from withdrawing more than $20 cash per month.”

How dare those Republicans clash with a liberal Democratic Governor. How dare they defend the life of a half-formed human being. Observe the language: lurching, purging, clashing, banning, forbidding. One wonders how this article would have read if it had been written by a true centrist.

Avlon, whose ties to the Clinton administration have recently been scrubbed from his Wikipedia biography, works tirelessly to position himself as a centrist, but one can see that when Avlon speaks of the center, he really means the Left. For instance, in his article, the definition of “Minnesota Nice” means liberal:

“The point is that these are not isolated incidents, but indicative of an intra-party atmosphere that is starkly inconsistent with the state’s justified reputation for “Minnesota Nice.” This is, after all, the state that gave us Bob Dylan, Garrison Keillor and the Coen brothers.”

The political beliefs of the Coen brothers are unknown, but Bob Dylan and Garrison Keillor are hardly known as ideological centrists. After showing evidence that the Minnesota Republican Party is implementing a conservative social agenda, Avlon concludes:

“ . . . Pawlenty and Bachmann are going to have to answer for the increasing extremism of their home-state Republican Party.”

Conservatives are going to have to answer for their agenda to whom: the Left? Notice how Avlon works to shift the center. By labeling Bachmann and the conservative social agenda as extreme, he is establishing the Left’s social agenda as the default position from where the political debate begins.

It is a well-established fact that the United States is a center-right nation, yet over the last fifty years, the country’s laws and policies have slowly drifted leftward. One reason for this is that the Right has passively accepted the premise that the Left holds the middle ground. By labeling conservative ideas as extreme, the Left is laying claim to a default position in the center. The only thing extreme about a 60 billion dollar budget cut is that the cuts are extremely inconsequential. The only thing extreme about a law that blocks abortions after 20 weeks is the necessity of such a law. The Right needs to reassert itself as the true center in American politics.

MSNBC: where Ed Schultz's idiocy goes down the memory hole.

Does MSNBC edit its transcripts to make its hosts look better and conservatives look worse? The network’s transcript of Monday’s edition of “The Ed Show” did just that. Host Ed Schultz had on Ron Christie, former deputy advisor to Dick Cheney, to discuss Obama’s ever-weakening Homeland Security policies. In the discussion, Ed made an embarrassing verbal blunder, and Ron ably defended himself — but the edited transcript posted on MSNBC’s website has elided key parts of their discussion.

Ed mocked “this idea that [Bush and Cheney] kept the country safe,” thundering, “We were hit, big time, on Cheney’s watch, not on Obama’s watch.” The Left has used this line, without effect, since at least the 2004 elections — as though al-Qaeda sprung from whole cloth on January 21, 2001, and accomplished its grandest plans in a mere nine months. Christie had his number — and Schultz’s inept response proved it:

CHRISTIE: Do you even want to go there with me, Ed?

SCHULTZ: Yeah, I wanna go down that road. Go ahead!

CHRISTIE:  Let’s talk about the Clinton administration.  Let’s talk about the Clinton Justice Department that viewed acts of terrorism – the first World Trade Center bombing, the bombings overseas of our embassies – as a law enforcement matter.

SCHULTZ:  Uh, excuse me, on American soil—

(Cross Talk)

CHRISTIE:  Let’s look at Jamie Gorelick, Ed. Let’s look at Jamie Gorelick, who refused —

SCHULTZ: …the people that [sic.] hit during the Clinton administration, they ended up getting prosecuted and those people that [sic.] hit in  New York back in [it sounds as though he said '92, or slurred some amalgam of '93 and '92] — those folks are behind bars.  The point is this—

First off, U.S. embassies are “sovereign U.S. territory.” Second, Ed Schultz’s retort proved Ron Christie right: the Clinton administration viewed terrorism as a matter for the courts, and not a high priority, at that. There was no military response, and al-Qaeda grew increasingly belligerent until 9/11. Words alone don’t do Ed’s idiocy justice. Watch the way Ed thoughtful pause before saying Clinton “prosecuted” the terrorists, as though it were a ripping rejoinder, and his leering, “gotcha” look upon noting the mass murderers were “behind bars.” You can verify my transcript and Ed’s body language at the 6:55 mark below, or in MSNBC’s video clip:

Evidently, this was so discrediting to MSNBC’s dullest host that the network scrubbed the exchange from its official transcript of the program. The network’s website records the conversation thus:

CHRISTIE:  Do you want to go there with me, Ed?

SCHULTZ:  Yes.

CHRISTIE:  Let‘s talk about the Clinton administration.  Let‘s talk about the Clinton Justice Department that viewed acts of terrorism, the first World Trade Center bombings, the—

SCHULTZ:  Excuse me, on American soil—the people hit during the Clinton administration, they ended up getting prosecuted and those people that hit New York back in ‘93 — those folks are behind bars.  The point is this—

CHRISTIE:  We had the opportunity to go after Osama bin Laden.  The Clinton administration refused to do so.

By striking Christie’s words about Clinton seeing terrorism “as a law enforcement matter,” the transcript now reads that the Clinton Justice Department “viewed acts of terrorism” — presumably, that it witnessed them and did nothing. This edit turns Ed’s inadvertent concession into a triumph.

Christie’s reference to al-Qaeda bombing U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania is omitted, even though Ed was not speaking over him at the time. His reference to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing has been made plural to compensate. In MSNBC’s telling, Ed Schultz got the correct year of the World Trade Center bombing (“’93,” not ’92, which was before Clinton’s inauguration). And Jamie Gorelick disappeared from the transcript entirely.

The transcript edits another exchange seconds later. The words MSNBC omitted are in bold:

SCHULTZ:  Ron, Ron, Ron, are you trying to tell us, [a]re you trying to tell us that the Bush administration did a good job protecting the country?

CHRISTIE:  Yes, Ed.  The fact of the matter is—

SCHULTZ:  O.K. Alright. End of the discussion.  You said yes.

CHRISTIE:  The fact of the matter is the country was not hit after 9/11 and [t]he fact of the matter is the Clinton administration had the opportunity to have taken out Osama bin Laden.  They didn’t.

SCHULTZ: So, Ron, Ron, let’s — let’s not reverse history.

CHRISTIE: Jamie Gorelick, the deputy attorney general —

SCHULTZ:  Ron, wait a minute.  Wait a minute now.  Do you think the Bush administration….

Christie rightly noted the Bush-Cheney administration foiled every terrorist attack for 7+ years. In this edit, it looks as though Christie claimed the Bush administration protected us from 9/11 — and has been twisted to that effect on the left-wing Democratic Underground website. (The following post calls Christie a “cross-eyed uncle tom.”)

The transcript trimmed out a few of Ed’s interruptions, making him seem like less of a boor — but usually losing Ed’s words is no big loss.

One could protest this was cross talk — but so was the exchange between Schultz and Christie connecting these two edits, and although Ed spoke over top of Ron, MSNBC did not mutilate that text. (“We had the opportunity to go after Osama bin Laden.  The Clinton administration refused to do so.”) Burrell’s Transcripts faithfully records all discernible cross talk, making their work accurate and authentic. And MSNBC does not post instantaneous transcriptions; these often take 24 hours or more to post. (Which is why this post about Monday’s show is appearing on Wednesday.) They couldn’t be done right?

As a former journalism student, I know better than to underestimate the laziness or incompetence of journalists. It would be worthwhile to see if there are other such instances of transcript edits. However, it seems curious the two sentences omitted from this transcript would have made Ed Schultz look (more) like a blithering idiot.

If false, Ed’s views are dangerously widespread. Last June, candidate Obama stated: “In previous terrorist attacks — for example, the first attack against the World Trade Center — we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in U.S. prisons, incapacitated.” Omar Abdel Rahman and co. are imprisoned but hardly “incapacitated.” In early 2005, terror lawyer Lynne Stewart was convicted of perpetrating a kind of “jailbreak” by helping the Blind Sheikh smuggle a message to his Egyptian followers telling them to keep fighting. A Clinton-appointed judge gave her a token sentence while hailing her “public service, not only to her clients but to the nation.” Like Ed’s brilliant reply, history proves Christie’s point.

The Left’s greatest deficit, next to cogency (and decency), is coherence, and Ed Schultz is a repeat offender. As I have noted, he once retorted, “This was not an idea; this was a plan.” This is significant only because lampooning the verbal gaffes of Sarah Palin has become a major sport on the Left; Pam Meister of Family Security Matters had some cogent thoughts on Pajamas Media.

Here is the key to mainstream media bias: MSNBC invents misstatements by conservatives; it erases verbal gaffes by leftists.

If its crack team of J-school grads can’t properly report the proceedings of its own network, in what sense can other journalists continue to pretend MSNBC is a news organization?