Topic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center loves to defend the Catholic Church against any perceived slight -- after all, MRC chief Brent Bozell is on the board of advisers for the right-wing Catholic League.
But there's one nasty anti-Catholic attack the MRC has remained utterly silent about: Last week, Iowa radio host Jan Mickelson asked a congressman whether he had "any power to pull the Nuns on the Bus over and pistol whip them."
Pistol-whipping nuns seems like the very thing Bozell and crew should be offended by. But, sadly, don't expect to see them come to these nuns' defense -- effectively condoning this threat of violence.
First, the MRC has been railing against the Nuns on the Bus tour -- designed to promote federal spending on social issues -- as nothing but a bunch of "lefty" nuns who are, in the words of Matt Hadro, causing "doctrinal chaos" and, thus, "needs reform."Similarly, Mike Bates dismissed them as "liberals attacking modest GOP efforts to control Federal spending."
MRC research director Tim Graham, meanwhile, was quick to take the side of the Vatican hierachy over Simone Campbell, who's leading the Nuns on the Bus tour:
It’s an “understatement” that the church has a “messaging” problem. Cloud does not acknowledge that the Vatican is facing a hostile media that wants to distort and poison its image inside and outside the church walls – including Time magazine. It's easy for Sister Simone to "outflank the church hierarchy" by manipulating the radical feminists and secular leftists of the news media.
The second reason you won't hear the MRC denounce Mickelson is because he's a right-wing radio host -- and, as it just so happens, one of the judges for last year's annual MRC liberal-bashing awards. And the ones in 2010 and 2007 and for numerous other years all the way back to 1998.
In other words, Mickelson is a frind of the MRC. And the MRC is too cowardly to criticize its friends in public.
As we saw with Rush Limbaugh's three days of misogyny against Sandra Fluke, the MRC simply does not, and will not, hold its fellow ideologues for the same behavior it excoriates in non-conservatives. It's another gutless, hypocritical performance for Bozell and Co.
So Jan Mickelson is free to pistol-whip away at those nuns, and Bozell won't lift a finger to stop him. Way to set an example, Brent.
