Right-wing radio has produced an entire population of slathering, racist idiots
It's almost to the point where you can't discuss anything on an open internet forum without some right-wing idiot turning it into an anti-Obama rant. Sure, they hated Clinton with a passion. But I don't recall ever hearing anybody question Clinton's religion, or demanding to see his original birth certificate.
Right-wing radio seems to have whipped up the "tea-party" types into an unprecedented frenzy. These people seem to be preoccupied 24/7 about "Obamacare", Obama's birth certificate, Keynesian economics, and various conspiracy theories. All of which is fueled day in and day out by the likes of Hannity, Limbaugh, Beck, Savage, Boortz, etc. Ask any teabagger to explain Keynesian economics and you'll likely get a blank stare, more than likely followed by some comment about socialism or communism. The only reason they even know the word "Keynesian" is because Hannity throws it around during his anti-Obama rants.
Right-wingers have always been a special breed - you would have to, in order to believe in "trickle-down" economics. But the past several years they seem to have devolved down to a completely new level.
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zoo keepers with they keys to the cages.
They study all sides of the issue from one source, fox news.
And that kind of mentality is scarier than the pundits themselves. 
He was a Union Teamster and Operating Engineer his whole life running heavy equipment and building highways.
Well, the AM radio in the cab of his dump truck could only bring in very powerful stations in the "radio wasteland" of Eastern Washington so he got a diet of fucking Rush and the rest of those idiots all day long, every day. It worked.
My sister and I can not believe he buys this crap and spiel that works against his own wallet and livelihood, but he does.
I told my sister, "Well, we've lost him" and she sadly shook her head in agreement. At least our father (a proud Union member for 50+ years) is not alive to see what's happened to his son. 
...black helicopters, the socialist takeover using Chinese RedArmy troops under UN flag, etc.
Not to mention Hillary's lesbian affair with Vince Foster. 
Still crazy after all these years.
where people who did non-political shows jumped into the right wing pool thinking it would be good for ratings.
Paul Harvey was known for his folksy "Rest of the story" segments before he started spewing right wing crap and lost a big chunk of his audience. Then it turned out he had a "special relationship" with horses....
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Right-wing style propaganda works best when there are a lot of miserable and confused but uninformed people, people who can't make ends meet, who have seen their everyday lives deteriorate. They are angry. But they're too uninformed or stupid to understand why their lives are so miserable.
Enter right-wing propaganda.
In the Middle Ages, it worked like this: The peasants would start grumbling about having to work like dogs exclusively for the benefit of their lord and perhaps start wondering about armed rebellion. The lords would get wind of this and start scapegoating.
"So your crops failed and half your children died! You know whose fault it is? It's God's punishment because you let Jews live in the area! Pogrom time!"
or, "It's the witches who have put curses on you! Get the witches!"
or "It's because we have allowed the Muslims to occupy the holy city of Jerusalem! Come on a Crusade!" (which would incidentally get rid of a lot of the feistiest troublemakers as they marched off to the Middle East.)
So the peasants would let off a lot of steam killing whichever scapegoat the lords had chosen for them. Of course, they were still miserable afterwards.
It's the same today. Right-wing media cleverly deflect people's anger away from the real culprits (the 1%) and toward people the audience is inclined to dislike anyway, especially racial minorities.
To the Democrats' everlasting shame, they allowed right-wing media to flourish without a response for a good ten years before any left-side figures responded. The MSM were perfectly fine with that, too. It was only after Michael Moore and Al Franken began responding that the MSM began tut-tutting against "the coarsening of public discourse" and acting as if both sides were equally to blame.
Here's why the Democrats' delay in responding was so disastrous: Josef Goebbels was evil but an evil genius of propaganda. He understood that uninformed people would believe anything, no matter how stupid, if they heard spoken often enough and with conviction, especially from a variety of sources. (He was at work in a time and place that had a high rate of basic literacy but the vast majority of the population quit school and went to work at age 14, so intellectually, they were in middle school.) Since the Nazis controlled radio, newspapers, and movies, the only media that existed then, required the schools to teach Nazi ideology, and set up summer youth camps where brainwashing was mixed with swimming and hiking, they created a total information environment for the German people.
OK, so in the 10 years between the rise of the right-wing media (AM radio, the Moonie Times, the right-wing infiltration of the formerly non-political fundamentalist churches) and Michael Moore's and Al Franken's first efforts, the frustrated working class people who had seen their living standards stagnate or fall had someone telling them that it was all the fault of the "liberals." (This was the point at which the Dems should have started a campaign, "Liberal and proud."
Furthermore, working class men in particular, who could no longer count on having a wife who had a home-cooked meal and a clean house ready for them at the end of the day, were taught to blame "feminazis," even though most of their families could not have survived without the wife's income.
During the very time that the right wing media were ascendant, the Dems pretty much ignored working class and rural economic concerns. For example, not signing NAFTA and all those most-favored-nation treaties with Third World countries would have been a popular move on both the right and the left. But the mainstream Dems "the realists," "the moderates," drank the "free" trade Kool-Aid and did nothing as job after job was outsourced to the Third World, leaving entire communities devastated. They didn't make a peep during the Reagan administration as the double whammy of high interest rates and low commodity prices caused thousands of proud family farmers to lose land that had been in their families for generations. (This was in spite of controlling the House. They didn't even make a *gesture.*)
So it is not surprising that working class and rural whites, not only propagandized on all sides for nearly 30 years, but legitimately able to ask the Democrats, "What have you done for me lately?" should have become Republican robots.
