Noted Fox News Basher Ed Schultz Really Wanted To Be On Fox News

So, the thing about Ed Schultz is that he’s not authentic.

The red-faced, spittle-flecked ranter he plays on television is a character. An affectation. A mask he puts on to entertain a left-wing audience because that’s how he gets paid.

North Dakotans have long been aware of this. They watched as Schultz pandered to his red state audience for years as a radio host in Fargo, only to tack hard to the left when it became apparent that there would be opportunities for him as a liberal talk radio host/television commentator.

But perhaps there’s no better evidence of Schultz’s calculated media persona than this letter from 2008, published by  the Daily Caller, in which his representatives begs to get the potato-headed dolt a spot on Fox News, the nexus of evil for the left-wing world.

For context, this letter was sent around the time Schultz was broadcasting his national left-wing radio show but, obviously, hadn’t yet landed a TV gig. He ultimately landed at MSNBC.

Clearly Schultz wanted some sort of a correspondent gig, and the hypocrisy here isn’t that he was going to go conservative to be on Fox, but that he wanted to be on Fox at all. “Just three years after the letter was written, Schultz, now safely ensconced at MSNBC, trashed Ailes on the air for running a ‘political machine’ not ‘a news organization’,” reports the Daily Caller.

Whatever you have to say to please the audience, right Eddie?

The letter also seems to speak to Schultz’s character. It came to light as a part of a lawsuit filed by a former Schultz associate who said the blowhard had promised him a cut of any TV deal he landed. Said associate, one Michael Queen, says Schultz went behind his back to sign the MSNBC deal.

Schultz had previously denied knowledge of this letter:

Queen wrote Ailes under a pseudonym because he is an engineer for the NBC News Washington bureau. The name Jeffrey Landa, identified as the “Agent for Ed Schultz,” appears at the bottom of the letter. Landa, who is defending Schultz against Queen, said neither man saw the letter until after the lawsuit was filed. He pleaded ignorance about whether Schultz had advance or contemporaneous knowledge of Queen’s pitch to Ailes.

The lawsuit dates back almost four years but he never asked his client? “I don’t know means I don’t know,” Landa growled.

Queen and his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment. An email sent to a 2008 address for Schultz contained in court filings was not returned.

Pay that man his money, Ed.