Daily Beast blogger Andrew Sullivan, who seemed to take the ups and downs of President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign very personally, said in his Friday night appearance on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” that the Republican Party should rebuke conservative talker Rush Limbaugh and “demonize and cut off” the Fox News Channel.
“The first conservative who will be the future of that party will be the one that says Rush Limbaugh does not speak for the Republican Party,” Sullivan said. “He is a poison on the discourse, and until they start — you see, the media-industrial complex on the right is so lucrative they don’t want to lose it. And it is now controlling a political party. That has to be severed. Fox News has to be demonized and cut off.”
That remark drew the objection of the show’s lone conservative, MSNBC’s “The Cycle” co-host S.E. Cupp, who questioned Sullivan’s premise on free speech grounds. However, the other panelist on the show, CNN’s James Carville, insisted Limbaugh and Fox News should stay around in order to help Democrats continue their electoral success.
CUPP: So we’re making arguments now to cut off speech instead of adding on?
SULLIVAN: No.
CUPP: Demonized and cut off? What does that mean?
SULLIVAN: that means that Republicans, not everybody. The Republican Party has to say, “We have no part of Fox News.”
CARVILLE: But why do we want to say that? We want them losing elections. We want Rush out there. We want Fox.
SULLIVAN: Because I want the Republicans to come back.
CARVILLE: I don’t. I want them to stay out! I don’t want them to come back.
SULLIVAN: I think that the Republicans control the House and that constitutionally gives them a place at the table in these discussions and that Obama has to meet them in some way.