The De-Evolution of Talk Radio

A quite hard-hitting post by C. James Thomas on February 12, 2009 in his TPM Blog, he virtually eviscerates right wing radio, of course, he is being attacked as a Marxist, a Leninist who wants to silence the opposition as is the case to what the listeners of what is commonly referred as 'Hate-Radio' do to anybody who brings up the detrimental effects that these shock jocks have on US society as a whole.

A noteworthy aspect of his exposé, is that he is speaking from his own experience as a listener to these talk-radio shows.

Since moving to Dallas I have become an avid talk radio listener since I spend a lot of time driving to and from work. It has turned into a true addiction, as bad as smoking cigarettes. And just like smoking I can't give up this habit even though I know it is bad for me.

I can see why Democrats are pushing to pass the "Fairness Doctrine" as the medium is at times completely out of control. But what I find fascinating is that with each passing hour in the day the talk shows themselves become more and more extreme so that by 11pm that average goober who has been listening all day has become so pumped up with rage they are ready to grab a shotgun and start peppering their local rancher and all his barnyard animals in order to get the hate out of their system.

Yes indeed, we are seeing the effects in the rise of hate crimes against people who are different than them and vulnerable enough to be blamed and attacked for the woes of their listeners, they misdirect their dissatisfaction and frustration to the changes around them, by giving them a target to hate, rather than to look at the real culprits of their predicaments, which ironically are the people that their listeners support and elect into office who literally pick their pockets and worsen their living conditions.

He starts with the initiator of the 'hate radio genre', Rush Limbaugh, whom he (C. James Thomas), inexplicable to me, kind of paints as mainstream while at the same time does recognize his extremism, by comparison with the others, I concede that he may have a valid point.

El Rushbo is the father of conservative talk radio which makes him, in our anthropological descent chain, the original Neanderthal. But Limbaugh is not actually the most extreme guy on the radio dial contrary to what you might believe. He represents mainstream conservative thought and many Republicans share his political beliefs. Limbaugh is a fervent culture warrior who views liberalism as being more dangerous than even foreign threats, like terrorism itself. While that is certainly a sign of political extremism amongst normal Americans that is par for the course when it comes to social conservatives whose hatred of the political left trumps all other hatreds. That's saying a lot considering how many other hatreds the right embraces.

The anti-liberal hate is the issue that I find most vexingly puzzling, the monumental ignorance of the right wing radio audience and their gullibility in believing such false tenets as Michael Savage's "Liberalism is a Mental Disorder" or Hannity's "Deliver us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism." Or Limbaugh's pronouncements that "liberalism as being more dangerous than even foreign threats, like terrorism itself"

A quick review of Liberal positions, the cultural and legislative changes brought about due to their beliefs and deeds, gave us the Labor Movement which in turn gave us the 5 days work week, the 8 hour work day, overtime, weekends off, vacations, sick leave, workplace safety, health benefits for millions, retirement benefits, educational opportunities for other than the wealthy, etc.

And here is the paradox, the shock jocks' audience, are mostly members of the quickly disappearing middle class, blue collar workers and what might be termed, lower class whites, in other words, these are the people who most benefited from Liberal Thought and Action and yet, they hate Liberalism and worship Conservatism.

And if we take a scant look to what the Conservative Thought and Policies have given us, what jumps at us is a Corporatist Agenda, where the lower classes' sole purpose of existence is to enrich the Upper Class, we find that in the 1800s the working and living conditions of the lower classes were miserable, we jump to the Hoover Era and we have a continuation of the conditions in the previous century, culminating with the Great Depression of October 1929 which lasted until under what are considered Liberal Economic Policies, the New Deal was forged and implemented, thus reversing the downturn spiral that the Conservatives / Republicans had brought about.

If we look at one of their biggest heroes, lauded as "America's Greatest President", Ronald Reagan, we can clearly see that the right wingers of the lower class are being sold a bill of goods:

Some of Ronald Reagan's Legacy:

It would be impossible in this space to catalogue all the damage Reagan wrought in eight years. The standard line is that he won the cold war, but elsewhere in this issue Jonathan Schell corrects that notion. It is also worth noting that this man who yearned so much for freedom and democracy in Soviet-bloc nations showed limited concern for democracy and human rights in other parts of the globe. After Democrats and Republicans in Congress passed sanctions against the apartheid government of South Africa, Reagan vetoed the measure. His Administration cuddled up with the fascistic and anti-Semitic junta of Argentina and backed militaries in El Salvador and Guatemala that massacred civilians. It moved to normalize relations with Augusto Pinochet, the tyrant of Chile. Reagan sent George Bush the First to the Philippines, where the Vice President toasted dictator Ferdinand Marcos for fostering "democracy." Pursuing a quasi-secret war against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, the Reagan Administration violated international law and circumvented Congress to support contra rebels engaged in human rights abuses and, according to the CIA's own Inspector General, worked with suspected drug traffickers. Reagan covertly sent arms to the mullahs of Iran and courted Saddam Hussein, even after his use of chemical weapons. He appointed officials who claimed nuclear war was winnable, thus raising the chances that miscalculations by the Soviet Union or the United States would plunge the world into chaos.

On the home front Reagan was almost as divisive and disingenuous as the second Bush, as William Greider recounts on page 5. His deficit-causing supply-side tax cuts (derided by the elder Bush as "voodoo economics") were sold with phony numbers and sleight-of-hand accounting. These "trickle-down" tax cuts--coupled with a tremendous boost in military spending--were designed to bankrupt the government, pressuring it to reduce government spending and thereby justifying draconian cuts in social programs. (Remember ketchup as a vegetable?)

Reagan showed little concern for the deindustrialized workers who suffered during the 1980s, and he was actively hostile to unions, firing PATCO air-traffic controllers en masse after they struck for better pay and working conditions. His Attorney General, Edwin Meese, displayed little regard for civil liberties, noting, "You don't have many suspects who are innocent of a crime." His Interior Secretary, James Watt, fancied dead trees over live ones. And no one in the Reagan White House appeared to care about a new pandemic that mainly killed homosexuals. Reagan's inaction and bigotry against gays and drug-users led to tens of thousands of deaths that might have been avoided if he had moved earlier.

And today, right wing radio would have you believe in an unparalleled greatness of him (See also The Reagan Legacy: "He was a true believer who moved the country divisively to the right. But compared to the current president, Ronald Reagan looks like a moderate." --
"As the eulogies come down the pike, don't let conservatives, once again, win the ideological struggle to determine mainstream discourse. Remember Reagan; respect him. But don't let them make you revere him. He was a divider, not a uniter"

If we look at the present, we have George W. Bush's familiar Conservative ideas and policies which have not only sunk the US in Economical turmoil but the whole world, Foreign Relations? Do I need to go into it?

One of the latest lies making the circle of right wing radio is the notion that FDR caused the Great Depression, I was tempted to say that they are very good at making their audience believe their misinformation, but on second thought, I think it speaks more to the low level and quality if information in their audience, but in any event, it is so pervasive that even one of the newest Republican Representatives, Steve Austria of Ohio, repeated this lie, worse yet, even Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) inaccurately argued that the New Deal “exacerbated the Great Depression.”

“Most historians date the beginning of the Great Depression at or shortly after the stock-market crash of 1929; Roosevelt took office in 1933.” As Dean Baker has explained, “Roosevelt’s New Deal Agenda lowered the unemployment rate from 25 percent in 1933 to 10 percent in 1937.”

And the Shock Jocks keep infecting their listeners with the notion that Conservatism is good and that Liberalism is bad, worse than terrorism - and people have died, are dying and continue suffering because of it.

C. James Thomas continues:

Hannity is perhaps the biggest hack on the radio. There is no line he won't cross or hypocrisy he won't commit in order to defend "conservatism." Like Limbaugh, he too is a social conservative whose war against liberalism trumps all other concerns. Hannity even wrote a book titled, "Deliver us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism." Now what kind of kook lumps in liberalism with terrorism and despotism?" It is this kind of garden variety hackery that keeps Hannity from evolving into a Rush Limbaugh style Neanderthal and instead keeps him stuck in the "Australopithecine" stage of Talk Radio development.

But at least Hannity is able to walk erect on two legs. Come 6pm after Sean Hannity has signed off the most savage of primates takes to the airwaves. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you Mark Levin, a howler monkey of the lowest order. Levin is a loathsome creature whose spittle flecked microphone is quickly coarsened with a whole host of slanderous invective aimed at liberals, moderates, Democrats, Independents and anyone else who refuses to acknowledge the greatness of Herbert Hoover.

But as nefarious as Levin is, C. James Thomas gives Michael Savage the highest, or the lowest in this instance, honors:

Levin's "Center for Immigration Studies" is a crude exercise in wedge politics and racial scapegoating. He has one section dubbed "Black Americans" which attempts to whip up anti-Hispanic sentiment amongst African Americans by throwing around all sorts of statistics that show how those scheming Mexicans are stealing all of the jobs of poor black folks. As if Mark Levin gives a rat's ass about the plight of the black underclass...

All in a day's work for "the Great One." But if you thought Levin was the worst of these anti-American shlock jocks then you haven't met the vilest bottom feeder of the bunch. Michael Savage.

To say that Michael Savage is a conservative is to acknowledge that he actually traffics in ideas, which would be news even to Savage himself. For Michael Savage doesn't engage in debate, he doesn't adhere to any ideology, not even the kind of fringe conservatism that Mark Levin peddles. No, Michael Savage is simply a festering boil on the ass of America, oozing a unique puss of resentment, prejudice and bombast.

The Savage Nation has become infamous for its hate speech. Media Matters has put together a dossier on Michael Savage that reads like something the Southern Poverty Law Center would have on the Ku Klux Klan. That Savage hasn't had his broadcasting license revoked is a scandal considering how much more destructive his show is than anything Howard Stern has ever said.

We start with the rampant rhetorical gay bashing that has gotten so out of control his own fans have been inspired to kill innocent parishioners whose sole crime was that they were worshipping in a "liberal" church. We move on to Savage's routine race baiting diatribes that Savage spews forth at minorities of all stripes with such classics as, "they imposed affirmative action on me and stole my very birthright simply because I was white." Or his slandering of African immigrants with this statement, "Bring them in by the millions. Bring in 10 million more from Africa. Bring them in with AIDS. Show how multicultural you are. They can't reason, but bring them in with a machete in their head. Go ahead. Bring them in with machetes in their mind."

And if that imagery wasn't racist enough for you how about this image Savage gave to his listeners one day, "The Statue of Liberty is crying, she's been raped and disheveled -- raped and disheveled by illegal aliens."

Few are the ones who escape the lash of Savage's forked tongue. Parents of autistic children will be happy to know that Savage believes these "brats" have "a phony disease." Or that Barbara Walters is "a double-talking slut." Or that Madeleine Albright is a "traitor" who "should be hung."

And on and on it goes...

By the time the clock rolls around to 11pm the descent becomes complete. Talk Radio gets reduced to sub-human status as Michael Savage takes the form of Gollum himself.

He ends his post by saying:

... what I am saying is that the public deserves a legitimate center-right party not a collection of self-absorbed, knuckles-dragging troglodytes who would rather smash the American melting pot to pieces than lose any control over how the broth gets stirred.

But sadly, the yahoos are in firm control of the Party of Lincoln. And on Lincoln's 200th birthday, the United States of America deserves much better than that.

Amén!

Dispatches from The Culture Wars: Patriotism, Conservative and Liberal

SOURCE:



Posted on: January 26, 2009 9:02 AM, by Ed Brayton

Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of Michigan Citizens for Science and co-founder of The Panda's Thumb. He has written for such publications as The Bard, Skeptic and Reports of the National Center for Science Education, spoken in front of many organizations and conferences, and appeared on nationally syndicated radio shows and on C-SPAN. Ed is also a Fellow with the Center for Independent Media and the host of Declaring Independence, a one hour weekly political talk show on WPRR in Grand Rapids, Michigan.(static)

Watching Obama's inaugural address reminded me of an essay written by Peter Beinart in Time magazine last summer about conservative and liberal conceptions of patriotism. I thought he really nailed the key difference in how right and left tend to think about patriotism. For far too many on the right, patriotism is about mere symbols, about having a flag pin on your lapel and getting weepy eyed when the national anthem plays.

This is why, for example, one of the primary Republican attacks on Michael Dukakis in 1988 was that he vetoed a bill requiring teachers to lead students in saying the pledge of allegiance. For much of the right, patriotism is mostly about ostentatious displays of emotionalism and loyalty - and the ability to exploit such emotionalism for political gain. But Obama presented a very different version of patriotism in his inaugural speech.

I thought Beinart really captured this distinction well:

On the surface, defining patriotism is simple. It is love and devotion to country. The questions are why we love it and how we express our devotion. That's where the arguments begin.

The conservative answer is implicit in the title of John McCain's 1999 book, Faith of My Fathers. Why should we love America? In part, at least, because our forefathers did. Think about the lyrics to America ("My Country, 'Tis of Thee"): "Land where my fathers died,/ Land of the Pilgrims' pride." Most liberals don't consider those the best lines of the song. What about the Americans whose fathers died somewhere else? What about all the nasty stuff the Pilgrims did? But conservatives generally want to conserve, and that requires a reverence for the past. What McCain's title implies is that patriotism isn't a choice; it's an inheritance. Being born into a nation is like being born into a religion or a family. You may be called on to reaffirm the commitment as you reach adulthood--as McCain did by joining the military--but it is impressed upon you early on, by those who have come before.

That's why conservatives tend to believe that loving America today requires loving its past. Conservatives often fret about "politically correct" education, which forces America's students to dwell on its past sins. They're forever writing books like America: The Last Best Hope (by William J. Bennett) and America: A Patriotic Primer (by Lynne Cheney), which teach children that historically the U.S. was a pretty nifty place. These books are based on the belief that our national forefathers are a bit like our actual mothers and fathers: if we dishonor them, we dishonor ourselves. That's why conservatives got so upset when Michelle Obama said that "for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country" (a comment she says was misinterpreted). In the eyes of conservatives, those comments suggested a lack of gratitude toward the nation that--as they saw it--has given her and the rest of us so much.

Conservatives know America isn't perfect, of course. But they grade on a curve. Partly that's because they generally take a dimmer view of human nature than do their counterparts on the left. When evaluating America, they're more likely to remember that for most of human history, tyranny has been the norm. By that standard, America looks pretty good. Conservatives worry that if Americans don't appreciate--and celebrate--their nation's past accomplishments, they'll assume the country can be easily and dramatically improved. And they'll end up making things worse. But if conservatives believe that America is, comparatively, a great country, they also believe that comparing America with other countries is beside the point. It's like your family: it doesn't matter whether it's objectively better than someone else's. You love it because it is yours...

If conservatives tend to see patriotism as an inheritance from a glorious past, liberals often see it as the promise of a future that redeems the past. Consider Obama's original answer about the flag pin: "I won't wear that pin on my chest," he said last fall. "Instead, I'm going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism." Will make this country great? It wasn't great in the past? It's not great as it is?

The liberal answer is, Not great enough. For liberals, America is less a common culture than a set of ideals about democracy, equality and the rule of law. American history is a chronicle of the distance between those ideals and reality. And American patriotism is the struggle to narrow the gap. Thus, patriotism isn't about honoring and replicating the past; it's about surpassing it.

If Reagan best evoked conservative patriotism, many liberals still identify their brand with John F. Kennedy, a leader forever associated with unfulfilled promise. If Reagan conjured the past, Kennedy downplayed it, urging Americans to instead grab hold of the future. He liked to cite Goethe, who "tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment, 'Stay, thou art so fair.'" Americans risked a similar fate, Kennedy warned, "if we pause for the passing moment, if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of progress ... Those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future."

Obama's political persona is also deeply bound up with youth, promise and liberation from the constraints of the past. In McCain's life, patriotism is about replicating and honoring what came before: the son and grandson of admirals becomes a war hero. In Obama's, patriotism is about escaping what came before: the grandson of an African farmer becomes the embodiment of the American Dream. If McCain's identity has been shaped largely by inherited tradition, Obama's is largely the result of personal invention, a deeply American concept. Obama chose a profession, a city, a religious identity, even a racial one, mostly on his own. His first book is called not Faith of My Fathers--how could it be, since in so many ways he has created his own faith?--but Dreams from My Father, since Obama imagined a father he never knew and from those dreams constructed a life. If some conservatives worry that America's recent immigration wave is fracturing the nation, Obama represents the liberal faith that assimilation is relatively easy and that newcomers don't divide America; they improve it.

Obama's election would, like Kennedy's, represent a triumph over past prejudice. The election of an African American, like the election of a Catholic, would be a sign that America is--as Michelle Obama implied--a different and better nation than it was before, one more worthy of the patriotism of all its citizens. Liberals are more comfortable thinking about America that way: as a nation that must earn its citizens' devotion by making good on its ideals. For conservatives, the devotion must come first; politics is secondary. But for liberals, patriotic devotion without political struggle is often empty. Liberals think lapel pins are fine if they inspire Americans to struggle to realize the nation's promise. But they worry that those symbols can become--especially when wielded by people in power--substitutes for that struggle and thus emblems of hypocrisy and complacency.

Conservatives tend to be particularly moved by stories of Americans showing extraordinary devotion to our patriotic symbols. McCain tells an especially powerful one about a fellow prisoner in North Vietnam named Mike Christian, who stitched a U.S. flag on the inside of his shirt and was brutally beaten by his captors in response but immediately began stitching it again, even with his ribs broken and eyes swollen nearly shut. Of course, any sane liberal would find that story stirring as well. But liberals more often lionize people who display patriotism by calling America on the carpet for violating its highest ideals. For liberals more than for conservatives, there is something quintessentially patriotic about Frederick Douglass's famous 1852 oration, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?," in which the great African-American abolitionist refused to celebrate the anniversary of America's founding, telling a Rochester, N.Y., crowd that "above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them."

On this issue, I am firmly with the left. My allegiance is not to a nation and much less to a flag, but to a set of principles. When my country supports those principles, I support my country; when it fails to do so, I do not support it. America can only be great if America is good, if our actions are in line with the ideals we so loudly proclaim. It is a cliche, but it remains true that actions speak far louder than words.

Savage on "liberal social activism": "They imposed affirmative action on me and stole my very birthright simply because I was white"

MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA
Monday, September 29, 2008

Summary: On his radio show, Michael Savage said, "I grew up with parents who went through the Depression. And I went through a sort of depression in my own life as a result of liberal social activism. They imposed affirmative action on me and stole my very birthright simply because I was white."

During the September 26 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, host Michael Savage discussed the current financial crisis and said, "My value system is from another world -- I'm like Rip Van Savage. I grew up with parents who went through the Depression. And I went through a sort of depression in my own life as a result of liberal social activism. They imposed affirmative action on me and stole my very birthright simply because I was white. They stole my birthright, and I could have gone under."

As Media Matters for America noted, Savage previously called "civil rights" a "con" and asserted: "It's a racket that is used to exploit primarily heterosexual, Christian, white males' birthright and steal from them what is their birthright and give it to people who didn't qualify for it."

Talk Radio Network, which syndicates Savage's show, claims that Savage is heard on more than 350 radio stations. The Savage Nation reaches at least 8.25 million listeners each week, according to Talkers Magazine, making it one of the most listened-to talk radio shows in the nation.

From the September 26 broadcast of Talk Radio Network's The Savage Nation:

SAVAGE: My value system is from another world -- I'm like Rip Van Savage. I grew up with parents who went through the Depression. And I went through a sort of depression in my own life as a result of liberal social activism. They imposed affirmative action on me and stole my very birthright simply because I was white. They stole my birthright, and I could have gone under.

I'm telling you now, I'm telling you, like, from the Savage confessional something, then I'm gonna get back to executive compensation and the yuppie punks on Wall Street who went to Harvard. I'm not jealous of them -- I don't need what they have -- I'm a better man than they are, 'cause I never stole from anybody. I never sacked a pension plan. I never robbed a person's retirement fund. OK, so don't think I'm talking from the point of view of bitterness here.

—H.D.