The Media Research Center’s comedy cop, Alex Christy, was ready to write up John Oliver for calling out the greed of Clarence Thomas — whom the MRC is constantly defending — in a Feb. 20 post:
The new season of HBO’s Last Week Tonight debuted on Sunday with host John Oliver bitterly attacking Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for making people’s lives “demonstrable worse for decades” and therefore offering him $1 million per year and a new luxury RV if he resigns and gets “the fuck off the Supreme Court.” A day later on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, Jon Stewart approved, wondering if Thomas would accept the offer.
Oliver wasn’t sure if the $1 million was enough, “You have exactly 30 days from midnight tonight to make your resignation effective. And if you’re still on the fence, I actually have a little deal sweetener that I’m excited to show you, so please come with me. Just come this way. Because we know you’ve got a lot on your plate right now from stripping away women’s rights to hearing January 6th cases you definitely shouldn’t be hearing to potentially helping roll back decades of federal regulations, and you deserve a break.”
[…]Oliver could not bring himself to believe that Thomas actually has a judicial philosophy. For him, Thomas could only be other people’s puppet:
Christy offered no evidence that Thomas does, in fact, have a judicial philosophy that is independent of right-wing narratives. After whining that Jon Stewart noted the Oliver segment, he huffed:
Ultimately, Oliver and Stewart are just looking for reasons to be angry at Thomas and delegitimize the Court for rulings it doesn’t like. Does anyone who has followed Thomas’s life and career really believe that he is simply other people’s puppet?
Again, Christy offered no evidence that he’s not a right-wing puppet. He served up a similar defense of Thomas after another commentator opined about his greed in a March 30 post:
On Monday, MSNBC’s Joy Reid claimed that her objection to NBC hiring former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel was not because she was a Republican and that she has no problem welcoming them to her show. The rest of the week discredited that notion, and Friday’s edition of The ReidOut was just the latest example of Reid living in her bubble as she suggested Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has sold out for “a fabulous lifestyle.”
Reid’s dislike of the Supreme Court goes beyond Thomas, as she addressed her panel of SiriusXM host Dean Obeidallah and author Clay Cane, “The Supreme Court is very clear that some of them are just like ‘we want Trump back.’”
Trying to come up with some proof for her claim, she added that “they also just want Republicans to win. The Supreme Court has slow walked an illegal Congressional map in South Carolina, they’re like ‘No, y’all got to vote on that map. You have to use that map because we can’t be bothered to get ourselves together to fix it.’”
That assumes there’s something that needs fixing, as Obeidallah admitted when he condemned the Court for not having ruled on the map.
Christy continued to lash out at Reid as she went on to call out Ginni Thomas’ political activism:
If Reid was serious about her Monday claim about hearing Republican perspectives, she could’ve brought on an actual conservative or former Thomas clerk, but instead Cane offered up a quite lazy, but satisfying for MSNBC response of “And Ginni Thomas. I call her a 10th member of the Supreme Court. That’s what I call her. Hey, listen, he put in a blueprint. He’s etched it in stone and he is—it’s been profitable for him. I guess he’ll be on more yachts from Harlan Crow—.”
For Reid, it is unfathomable that Thomas could possibly disagree with her, “He’s essentially trading and I don’t know if he believes this stuff or not, but essentially his votes are traded for a fabulous lifestyle that he couldn’t get from a job and the irony is he couldn’t get the job you wanted to be a rich lawyer because of racism.”
For someone who claims to place a great emphasis on facts, Joy Reid sure does do a lot of projecting and motive questioning.
For someone who claims to be a “media researcher,” Christy clearly cares more about peddling right-wing talking points and not responding to Reid’s actual criticism than what most people would call media research.