The Rise and Fall of Hope and Change

The Rise and Fall of Hope and Change



Alexis de Toqueville

The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money.
Alexis de Tocqueville

The United States Capitol Building

The United States Capitol Building

The Constitutional Convention

The Constitutional Convention

The Continental Congress

The Continental Congress

George Washington at Valley Forge

George Washington at Valley Forge


Thursday, March 15, 2012

Talk Radio Matters

From The American Spectator:


Talk Radio Matters

Liberalism is dead, and it wants talk radio to suffer the same fate.
WASHINGTON -- For a couple of years now I have been talking about the Kultursmog, the utterly polluted state of our political culture. Those who pollute it are the Liberals. Kultursmog is the only form of pollution that they approve of, but they do approve of it mightily, and, of course, they are the chief contributors to its noxious fumes. Now they are using it to kill off an American value prized by millions of Americans down through the centuries, free speech. As I say in another context, we are watching the death of Liberalism.
Through Media Matters for America, MSNBC, Think Progress, and various other outfits, the Liberals are trying to kill off talk radio. They have made feints in this direction for years, for instance in encouraging the return of the Fairness Doctrine, which is anything but fair. Now they are aiming at the heart of talk radio, Rush Limbaugh, and as collateral damage Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and the whole conservative camorra. As I mentioned last week, Rush in the course of his 15 hours of dialogue each week made a joke of dubious jocularity about the felicitously named Sandra Fluke. All hell broke loose. To my surprise -- and I suspect to Rush's -- it turns out that his joke was almost tasteful and indeed elevated in comparison with the tasteless scurrility directed at conservative women.
The clown Bill Maher called Sarah Palin a "dumb t***" and a "c***." He jokes about Rick Santorum's wife using a vibrator. Ed Schultz has called Laura Ingraham a "right-wing slut," anticipating Rush's reference to Fluke. Keith Olbermann is as foul, and doubtless there are others. This is the language regularly resorted to by the left, and one would think that these revelations would put an end to the orchestrated crisis over Rush, especially because it was a Liberal, the admirable Kirsten Powers, who turned up these instances of garbagespiel. But no, the crisis continues.
I can understand why. Talk radio is almost exclusively conservative radio. For some reason, Liberals cannot make it in the talk show market. Even when they come up with heavily subsidized formats like Air America the Liberals flounder. This is, I suspect, because they cannot talk about politics without assuming a grim voice and interlacing their dialogue with scatological references. Have you ever heard them? Have you read their blogs? They have sewers for brains.
My colleague, Jeffrey Lord, Tuesday on The American Spectator'swebsite, has connected the dots. Using the indispensable Daily Caller, he pointed to the Caller's evidence that Media Matters virtually writes the scripts for such MSNBC eminentoes as Al Sharpton and the dolt Schultz. Moreover, they do it with a vast mound of George Soros's money. Most of what Sharpton and Schultz say is mendacious and infantile, and sometimes it is worse. Lord presented for Spectator readers some of Sharpton's indigestible morsels. The morsels came from before he linked up with Soros and MSNBC, but that is all the more reason he should not be posing as a commentator on cable news. He has absolutely no claim to being a journalist. Perhaps he can claim to being a personality, but if that is the case, the way he became a personality is similar to how the late George Wallace became a personality. It was through racism, and as a personality Wallace did not get far.
On our website Lord has preserved the tapes of Sharpton inveterately using the "n" word. He uses terms like "white interloper" and "cracker." He refers to Aristotle -- yes, that Aristotle -- as "a Greek homo." So far to the left has the Kultursmog gone that it finds Rush controversial but it finds Sharpton a budding Walter Cronkite. In truth, as Lord has demonstrated, Sharpton made his way to national fame as a racist rabble-rouser.
Talk radio is afflicted by several thousand social isolates sitting around the house in their underwear tapping out irate messages to the sponsors of Rush and his cohorts. They do it on their digital tools, Twitter, Facebook, the blogs. They rely on the same mentality as the Occupiers. Their complaints to sponsors amount to dirty tricks. They are not clients  or customers. They are a pain in the neck but nothing more. Eventually this too will pass, but in the meantime things will be tricky for talk radio… unless it mounts a counterattack on Media Matters for America, MSNBC (whose owner is Comcast), and Think Progress. Just a thought!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. is the founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator. He is the author of the forthcoming The Death of Liberalism, published by Thomas Nelson Inc. His previous books include the New York Times bestsellerBoy Clinton: the Political Biography; The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton; The Liberal Crack-Up; The Conservative Crack-Up; Public Nuisances; The Future that Doesn't Work: Social Democracy's Failure in Britain; Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House; The Clinton Crack-Up; and After the Hangover: The Conservatives' Road to Recovery.

No comments:

Post a Comment