http://thinkprogress.org/2009/06/12/far-right-shep-smith/Angered By His Holocaust Museum Shooting Coverage, The Far Right Goes After Shepard Smith
On Wednesday, Fox News’ Shepard Smith responded to the tragic shooting at the Holocaust Museum by a white supremacist by saying that it was time to re-think the Homeland Security report on right-wing extremism that conservatives disparaged. “The right went absolutely bonkers!” said Smith, adding that the report was a “warning to us all” and that DHS was “warning us for a reason.”
Later in the day, Smith said that the e-mail he’s been receiving from viewers has become “more and more frightening.” “It’s been happening over the last few months,” said Smith. “There are people now who are way out there on a limb.”
Watch it at link~
As Media Matters noted yesterday, the right-wing has now turned its fire on Smith. On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh mocked Smith’s “whining and moaning and complaining about e-mails”:
LIMBAUGH: As for Shepard Smith whining and moaning and complaining about e-mails, nobody needs to tell me about hateful e-mails, for crying out loud. I get the most vile, sick e-mails attacking me as a “Jew lover” that you can imagine. I don’t read ‘em. I hear about them. They’re in a public account, of course, as you know — and I’m a conservative. Who do you think these hate e-mails from coming from? Where are they coming from? Yeah, I get people, “You Jew lover, you Jew lover!” because I am faithful to Israel and a number of other things.
So, Shep, you got nothing on anybody out there. The vile hate that was 24/7 in most of the American media for the eight years of Bush — and particularly from 2003 on after the Iraq war — nobody, nobody at this point in time has ever done, in our society, anything comparable to the kind of hate that we got from mainstream sources.
Allahpundit of Michelle Malkin’s Hot Air wrote that if Smith truly believes his viewers are “would-be presidential assassins,” then “why doesn’t he quit?” Further out on the fringe, conservative blogger Pamela Geller, who writes at Atlas Shrugs, titled a post, “Please Shepard Smith Out the Door!” She followed it up with a post saying, “Shepard Smith has got to go.” Geller’s call for Smith to be fired is beginning to get traction with some conservatives online.