Worth Repeating

Agitator Radley Balko recounts a workaday example of how the neo-liberal hatred and bile is no better than the neo-conservative variety.

My Ears Are Bleeding

So I just completed the 2.5 hour drive from D.C. to Charlottesville for my speech at UVA tonight. Beautiful drive.

Along the way, I listened to some left-wing talk radio, specifically Ed Schultz. And wow. The left’s blathering idiots really are just a mirror image of the right’s, aren’t they? Cognitive dissonance, disingenuous bullshitting, demagoguery, and hateful invective all over the place. It was really something to behold.

Apparently without the slightest hint of irony, Schultz started by casting off the tea party protesters as “un-American” and “unpatriotic.” Yep. Bush has been out of office for all of three months, and the left has already adopted the “people who disagree with us hate America” crap. He then characterized tea partiers exercising their right to free speech and protest as “trying to overturn the results of an election.” Another page ripped from the right-wing playbook. Just substitute “anti-war protests” for “tea parties.”

But Schultz wasn’t done. He then said the tea party movement is primarily fueled by racism, and the parties are attended by people who can’t stand the fact that a black man was elected president. He said the whole protest was fueled by hate and “white power” supporters.

Then it got worse. Schultz actually said that Fox News anchors were secretly hoping for shots to be fired, for government officials to be killed, and for an ensuing violent overthrow of the government. He strongly implied that tea party organizers want Obama to be assassinated. He equated Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s statement in support of the 10th Amendment this week as akin to support for a bloody revolution.

This guy isn’t fringe, either. DCCC chairman and Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen was one of Schultz’s guests today. Schultz also has an evening show on MSNBC, where Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs will be his guest tonight.

Schultz’s bumper described him as the most-listened to liberal talk show host on the radio. God help us if that’s true. You have guys like Schultz gobbling up listeners on the left, and people like Hannity, Rush, and Savage gobbling them up on the right . . . and it’s we libertarians who get tarred as nut-jobs.

Notable is that this Ed Schultz clown has his own late afternoon show on MSNBC.

(You could have knocked me over with a feather. And to think for years I watched this network regularly, for what I thought was well-rounded coverage and commentary...up until about the time Obama and his mass mob took over the works and turned it into nothing more than a lefty parody of Fox News's righty nonsense.)

Balko was right to draw the analogy to neo-con warmonger's smearing and attempted-belittling of anti-war protesters in years past. Undoubtedly, though, this analogy would fall on deaf ears with those hypocrite ultra-partisans who once opposed the wars (because it was Bush at the helm) but who are suddenly quite mute now that Bush's insane militarist gambits have become Obama's, only with extra hope and chutzpah.

I am pretty far from prudish, at least in the big scheme of things anyway. But the fact that major news networks/outlets (other than Fox, obviously) and so many of their revolving parade of predictable self-important talkers consciously ran with and perpetuated, for days, a crude plain-out-sexually-vulgar slur [*nod* *wink* *insert simpering Rachel Maddow smirk*] in covering a story of national citizen protests marks a truly new low.

It is unlike anything I've ever seen in the 25 years I have been politically-aware and news-conscious. It would seem any pretense of maturity, gravity, or responsibility in "news" coverage pretty much has been stomped by the hyena-like braying of a quite vicious and corrosive self-reinforcing echo chamber bubbling up (babbling up) from the bowels of the internets.

I have pretty much resigned myself to the reality of such non-stop trash from the incessantly-angry endlessly-juvenile internet blogmobs (perhaps they should be called "blobs", in keeping with the value they add to political and social discource).

But to see a "mainstream" mass media embrace of such purely-gutter terminology in coverage of today's nationwide citizen demonstrations reflects a deplorable hyper-debasement of what was left of any sincere national media dialogue, if that was even possible.

Seriously, only the most sophomoric mentality could think it little more than pathetic self-indulgent tripe barely on par with a drunken half-retarded frat boy, stuck on stupid and snickering away at how he just browned his own shorts in public...as if the joke's on everyone else.