Things I learned about myself from listening to Right Wing Radio

[CShine]

This thread is taken from one damn awesome thread I saw on another board written by a liberal poster who calls herself "Pepperswiththeslam." She really takes the right-wing radio nuts out to the woodshed on this one. I had originally linked the thread here, but forgot that you have to register to view the site, so I'll copy and paste her posts into the thread.

Yer gonna luv this stuff! Read the Monday-thru-Friday responses down below that are under my login name.

[Vickers]

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[CShine]

2. Thanks, guess I'll have to copy and paste them straight into this thread.

[Wind Dancer]

3. Don't listen to this garbage anymore. n/t

[CShine]

4. Monday

Things I learned about myself from listening to RWR--Right Wing Radio:

My journey begins today.

Today's insight from Rush Limbaugh's chair-warmer, John Hedgecock: I and my liberal kind want lots of Iraqis (such as the former leader of the coalition govt.) and US servicepeople to die so that Bush can be defeated in the November election.

It would be hard to argue, based on the above astute analysis, that I'm NOT a truly terrible person, but I feel certain that with four more days left in this week I have not even begun to plumb the depths of my own depravity. Self-discovery awaits. Tally ho!

Pep

[CShine]

5. Tuesday

Well, I'm afraid today's session didn't bring my sense of self-worth down quite as far as I'd initially hoped, but I feel that this was simply due to time constraints. Unfortunately, I got distracted by a cell phone call from my mother, who is laid up with a cracked pelvis, poor woman (this morning's commute) and then I got a bit derailed by Terry Gross' interview of Kristol, one of those PNAC guys, on Fresh Air. But I tore myself away from that very interesting and important interview to don the ceremonial hair shirt, and check in with Sean Hannity.

Ok, so what I learned today is that I am a sanctimonious hypocrite because I have not yet apologized for my having said the Bushies lied about the WMD's, now that the shell with the sarin gas components has come to light and made the news.

Apparently, despite even administration spokespeople urging caution in jumping to conclusions based on this, I should have made my immediate mea culpas, tucked my tail, and slithered back under the nearest rock of the appropriate size to keep the sight of my sanctimonious, hypocritical self from offending the eyes of decent Americans.

No word yet on whether it's a conservative or liberal wish that the sarin gas would actually have been lethal. Perhaps Sean will have the answer to that one tomorrow. I can kind of see it both ways. I mean, if the gas had been lethal, then that would have been a WMD actually found in Iraq and no question it was a WMD--which is bad for liberals and good for conservatives. So, you'd think the gas having actually been deadly would be something that the Bush supporters would have been pleased about. But it could also be GOOD for liberals because it would probably have killed soldiers and civilians alike, which would please us as we hate the military--right? So dead soldiers are good. And then as far as the civilian deaths, I believe (if I read my scorecard correctly) that we always use dead civilians to justify why War is Bad.

So, I'm just not sure which people I'm supposed to want to see die this week, or how.

Another thing I learned is that people with Bush bumper-stickers are afraid of hate-filled liberals like myself doing "things" to their cars because they are showing their support for Bush, because a man's wife got a note on her windshield telling her not to vote for Bush. Hannity didn't quite agree that this rose to the level of an actual threat. But he did launch into a completely irrelevant anecdote about having found a strange guy parked in his driveway one morning, which frightened him as well. No word on which candidate the strange driveway parking man plans to vote for in November.

Curiously, this was immediately followed by a chest-thumping session where Hannity revealed that some of his colleagues were big crybabies because they couldn't handle some attacks by the liberal attack dog media without complaining about being "attacked".

Sean Hannity--fearless in the teeth of a full-frontal media assault--you are my new hero.

Tomorrow, I will do better. I will listen longer.

I'm still pretty confident, but I'm definitely beginning to think some of my sanctimonious liberal hypocrite friends need replacing.

[CShine]

6. Wednesday

Wednesday--The Day I Stop Dodging Ugly Truths

Since I didn't do a very good job of honoring my commitment to the project yesterday, today I decided to do some make-up work.

I got off to a slow start with Glen Beck's program. Glen Beck turned out not to be lead guitarist for the Eagles, which is what I had assumed. He's THIS GUY. A quick perusal of his site shows that he is very much opposed to partisanship. He also offers for sale a variety of partisan t-shirts, mugs, and posters, plus his own rather nice logo.

Unfortunately, Glen was on about the media not having "perspective", and since I'm not a part of the media, it failed to make me feel bad. Glen is very very big on perspective, and so am I, because without it, you wouldn't be able to see what things were far away and which were up close, and which things were big and which were small, and all illustrations would look like the illuminations in Medieval manuscripts or aerial photos of suspected mobile weapon labs. Shame on people who aren't using perspective correctly to show the relative size and position of things.

But all was not lost, because I noted this morning that I used the last lunchbox cookies to pack my son's lunch this morning, which justified a lunchtime trip to the grocery store, which meant that today I would get to check in with Rush who is not on the radio during my commuting times (I was coming home from the dog show on Monday, which is how I heard Rush's show that day).

Well, it's ten minutes to the store and ten minutes home, and so I dutifully clicked on my radio as I pulled out of my workplace parking lot to hear Rush raving about---dodgeball???? Apparently, this is becoming a fitness sport for adults and kind of a fad, but Rush is more concerned about how kids aren't getting to play dodgeball anymore due to Left Coast Liberals who don't want their kids to be subjected to the humiliation of having balls thrown at them.

I was not aware that the elimination of Dodgeball from gym class was a liberal thing, as I guess in my ignorance I had always assumed that both liberal and conservative moms were equally-likely to be upset when their kid comes home with a nosebleed from Dodgeball. Myself, I always LOVED Dodgeball because I was purely incapable of throwing or catching anything, and the whole team effort concept eluded me, but growing up as the naughty daughter of a hot-tempered redhead of Scotch-Irish extraction had rendered me extremely nimble and quick at ducking and avoiding objects which were hurtling at me through the air. So, this was the ONLY gym class activity at which I actually EXCELLED.

So later on, I asked my husband when he called me at work what his opinion was of dodgeball, because after all, he once campaigned for Jerry Brown, Governor Moonbeam himself, and is actually a Westerner, so perhaps he could shed a bit of light on the Left Coast liberal conspiracy to eliminate dodgeball. He said he always liked dodgeball a lot. But he was also the starting pitcher for a little league team which went all the way to the state championships, so he had a pretty good arm when a kid. He said he usually tried to hit the annoying stuck-up rich kids very hard in the 'nads, and due to the speed and accuracy with which he hurled the dodgeball, he usually succeeded, but one time, the a.s-u.r.k. ducked, took the ball in the face, and it broke his glasses. He allowed as how perhaps that kid had a liberal mother who got upset about that, but it would have surprised him since the kid's dad was an executive vice-president at Coors.

Anyhow, this seemed pretty tame for Rush and I thought maybe he was sticking with a more innocuous subject matter after the big bruhaha over his comparison of the Abu Garib torture to fraternity pranks and hijinks, but he didn't let me down, after all. As I was pulling into the parking lot of the store, he assured me that if the prison guards at Abu Garib had been playing dodgeball with the prisoners, the liberals would have been up in arms about that as well. I thought they were playing dodgedog, but whatever.

On the way back to my store, Rush had left the playground behind to focus on the way that the media was completely ignoring the improving economy to focus on the various scandals around Iraq. As proof, he read a news article from a major news outlet about the improving economy. This is a very serious subject--partisan media spin and sensationalism. I absolutely believe Rush is right about the media choosing to keep the good economic news off the front page in favor of sex-tainted political scandal. I seem to recall this has happened at least one time before, back in 1997, maybe, when scandal drove good economic news off the front pages, and I failed to follow. So, I feel gullible and used for getting suckered into liberal media spin, yet again.

Then, on the way home, I checked out Sean Hannity. Sean really does seem to have a certain problem with focus, but if you listen long enough, he will eventually start making his points. One thing Sean is very big on, like Glen Beck, is perspective. He also is appalled by the way political discourse in this country is corrupted by the injection of POLITICS. Heaven, forfend.

Today's points were a very serious charge--namely, that liberals and dems are race-baiting, anti-semites. In fairness, I didn't get to the part where it was explained why I was an anti-semite, but I think it had to do with Sen. Fritz Hollings-D from, I kid you not, South Carolina, saying something about the Iraq war being about protecting Israel so that Bush could get Jewish votes in Florida (like the Palm Beach County voters who turned out so heavily for Pat Buchanan, I suppose). No doubt this caused the various neo-cons who put together the PNAC to roll around on the floor whooping with uncontrollable laughter. Crazy old Fritz, eh? But anyhow, I didn't hear that part, so I'm just speculating.

But the race-baiting thing was pretty damning of my kind. The first example given was an anti-Bush ad from the 2000 election which was put out by the NCAAP, using James Byrd's daughter to blast Bush for not signing the Hate Crimes bill. Sean had a pretty good point about how even though Dubya didn't sign the hate crimes legislation, he did support the death penalty for murder, so iot would be hard to see how hate crimes legislation could have resulted in harsher sentences for those convicted.

This was presumably an ad signed off on by a black organization, and aimed at black voters in Texas, and since I'm not black or Texan, I figured none of this really applies to me.

However, a similar disturbing report comes from Missouri, where the MO Dems have put up a billboard showing a young black man, with the legend "Missouri Republicans have a plan--but it doesn't apply to you."

Naturally, anyone seeing will assume that by you, they mean black people, not men or young people. This is clearly a despicable form of race-baiting, designed to keep MO black voters from voting Republican. No word yet on how it might affect the vote of people who think MO already has too many govt. plans and programs designed to advance minority interests.

Sean didn't give an example of the proper, non-race-baiting use of images of black persons in political speech, but I felt certain that if any were to be found, they would all be on the Republican side. So, I went to the fountainhead, so to speak, GWB's re-election website (official).

There I found the "Compassion Photo Album", which is taken as read--photos of President Bush being compassionate. You will note that all of these photos but one show him being compassionate to black people, and this is clearly NOT race-baiting, because black people are the Americans who are most in need of compassion, which is why all the compassion photos show black people, especially those showing welfare moms, who are, of course, all black. There is one picture of Bush reaching out to shake a little blond white kid's hand, and while the kid looks healthy and happy and has a fresh haircut and so does not appear particularly in need of compassion as such, I suspect he is very upset and unhappy Liberals won't let him play Dodgeball at school and that's why President Bush feels compassion for him.

I looked at the other photo albums and immediately felt better about myself, even though I'm implicated in the Missouri political poster race-baiting thing, because I noted that in the environmental photo album, all the people were white and many of them were blonde females of a certain age, and this describes me to a 't' because I'm very big on the environment, too. Hopefully, if we continue to show compassion to black people and people of color, one day they, too, will come to care about the environment.

I tried to see what Kerry was up to where race-baiting photos were concerned, but his official site not only didn't have photo albums neatly organized by subject matter like Bush's did, but when I went to look at his photos, I got an annoying pop-up that wanted me to download a more current version of Flashmacromedia, which I ONLY seem to download like, every other freakin' DAY, and so I'm over Kerry and his website, because I hate getting that pop-up every time I try to go from one page to the next. And it says I can't view the content without the updated version, but it turned out I could, and so that was a LIE.

Definitely, I'm having second thoughts about my liberalism.

[CShine]

7. Wednesday (part 2)

There was one thing I left out. As I was pulling into my driveway, Prominent Black Republican J.C. Watts was Sean's first guest, and he said (again, I kid you not) "Ooowee, Sean, you be standing in tall cotton."

However, he was very much opposed to race-baiting in political advertising, so there you have it. Both sides, represented.

Tomorrow, I promise I won't go as long, but the whole dodgeball thing just struck me.

Pep

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8. Thursday

Thursday—In Which I Embrace Complexity While Avoiding Hoobestank

I promised not to go on so long today, and I won't*, but first I want to tell those few, intrepid, masochist readers I still have (this is self-deprecating humor--more on that, later) from whence the inspiration to immerse myself in Right Wing Talk Radio came. It was actually from all the reviews and commentary of the new documentary "Supersize Me"--a film I expect to win an Oscar next year if it doesn't get crushed in the voting by Members of the Academy who have fond memories of Michael Moore's starmaking turn as a deranged, paranoid bowling alley shoe rental clerk in an ill-fitting tux accepting the Oscar for Best Documentary along with thirty or forty of his closest and most intimate louse-infested documentarian friends.

The central conceit of "Supersize Me" is that a healthy guy with a live-in vegan girlfriend ate nothing but the worst and most unhealthful McDonalds menu items for a month. At the end of the month, he was on life support, and the Guinness Book of World Records was hiding in his shrubbery, attempting to photograph him getting into or out of his tub, for their "World Record 30-day Weight Gain" section. Well, I thought about trying to subsist entirely on Power Bars and Sports Drinks for a month, or even the Atkins diet, but decided that the whole dietary regime switch thing had been done to death. So, I figured it would be an interesting project to subject my liberal sensibilities to a week of Right Wing Talk Radio, and then scientifically assess the effects.

But now I realize that I, typical liberal, had rushed into the thing willy-nilly without lining up a properly telegenic psychiatric professional to compare my mental state before and after, as well as a documentary film crew to record any interesting facial tics or substance abuse binges. See how this experience has changed me already? Monday, I thought it would be enough simply to hurl myself into art for art's sake. By today (Thursday, for those of you liberal layabouts who are unemployed, sucking on the government teat, and therefore have no need of telling one day of the week from the other), it occurred to me that I was unlikely to get paid for any of this work due to lack of advance planning.

It's the difference between DOING something, and MAKING something, and boys and girls, that's really all that needs to be said.

Not only that, but keeping the dial turned relentlessly to Right Wing Talk Radio has eliminated any possibility of hearing that horrible "The Reason" song by Hoobastank** this week, and thousands cheered.

I launched myself into the project full-tilt this morning by once again checking out Glen Beck. Glen Beck has a really catchy spoof of "Everyone Knows It's Wendy", only instead of 'Wendy', it's 'Lyndie', and if you think there aren't a whole lot of comedic nuggets to mined from song parodies about Downsey-looking West Virginians with no upper lips who get off on sexual torture, then my friends, you are in for a rare treat if you tune into Glen Beck's show. Good clean bright entertainment.

With an elasticity that would do a yoga instructor proud, Glen seamlessly manages to both blame 100% of the Iraqi Prison torture scandal on the enlisted men and women accused, while still preaching that any criticism or media attention focused on the scandal is a failure to "support our troops". One can but step back and admire as he draws such deft distinctions.

And people say that Conservatism is simplistic. I say--NOT. The Glen Beck show is lousy with nuance.

Glen Beck also thinks that people who bring rifles to weddings deserve what they get, which undoubtedly explains why Appalachia still has so much prime real estate left undeveloped.

This afternoon, I checked in with Sean Hannity, and now that the three BC Powders and two gin and tonics I downed afterwards have kicked in, I'm able to summarize the first hour of the show for you. See, the thing about Sean is that he is like a butterfly which flits and sips from many flowers, and if you don't pay attention, he will simply leave you behind with a light dusting of pollen on your nose and a befuddled expression.

Because of the mental exercise he offered me today, I forgave him for inflicting on me a song even WORSE than 'The Reason', by Hoobestank**--namely, Toby Keith's "Have You Forgotten". Sean thinks a lot of people have, though not his listeners. Even so, he thought we should all hear this song again. It's etched permanently in my psyche now, Sean. Please give it a rest.

Today's theme more or less was "Education", and this was of great interest to me since I spent last evening in an elementary school gymnasium being tortured on a wooden bleacher seat (much more comfortable when I was ten years old) for two hours during a band concert, during which my own offspring had about five total minutes onstage demonstrating My Tax Dollars, At Work. We had Fifth grade Band, Beginner Band, Jazz Band, Sixth Grade Band, Fifth Grade Chorus, Sixth Grade Chorus, and Choral Ensemble. Our local chiropractor’s daughter was the Choral Ensemble soloist and she sang quite a long solo, and when I got up and felt the shooting pains in my pelvis and spinal column after two hours of plunking my wastrally liberal bum on hard wooden bleachers, it occurred to me that this might not be coincidental. I used the time my son was not onstage to make certain observations—namely, that it seems there must be a law on the books somewhere that specifies that the biggest, fattest white boy has to play the base drum, while the fattest African-American boy gets stuck with the tuba. You know? But it is a comment on how greatly this week has changed me in that rather than getting all puffed up with liberal indignation over the fact that there was clearly “sizeism” involved here, and also over the fact that all the African-American boys who weren’t extremely overweight were relegated to the Percussion, while the flute section was made up entirely of nerdy, glasses-wearing white kids like my own son, I thought instead about the movie “Supersize Me”, and that everyone including kids were getting fatter due to McDonalds, and surely tubas and base drums were going be a growth sector of our economy in which money could be made, so long as the govt didn’t tax our profits, overmuch.

(to be cont...)

*When I said I wasn't going to go as long, I meant in one post. So, that wasn't a lie. It's a post-length reduction related program that I intended to embark on.

**A Hoobestank, according to the band, is an ice-skating term for when you try a triple axle but fall on your bum, causing intense pain and numbness, not unlike that gotten from planting your 42 year old bottom on wooden bleachers for upwards of two hours while listening to cacophonous renditions of “Hedwig’s Theme” played by fifth graders who are laced to the gills with Pepperoni Pizza and Sunny Delight.

[CShine]

9. Thursday (part 2)

Well, Sean was on and on about Bill Cosby’s speech, which he agreed with 100%, though he was really surprised and dismayed that just because Bill was speaking on the occasion of the anniversary of Brown Vs. Board in front of the NCAACP that people just ASSUMED he was talking about black kids.

But then, these are undoubtedly the same race-baiting knuckleheads who would assume that any poster which showed a black person wasn't solely aimed at black people.

Anyhow, Sean totally agreed with Bill that the community (which means anyone who is poor, I guess) and the parents have FAILED kids by not making them speak proper English and by buying them $500 sneakers when they haven’t even finished their homework satisfactorily, for crissakes. I agree with that, absolutely. I mean, if the parents talk like “Mushmouth” and don’t make their kids do their schoolwork, and the community doesn’t honor the kids who try hard to be good students, then how are any of these kids supposed to go to medical school?

Sean is very big on education, though he has a charming self-deprecating way about him, and mentioned several times in the show that when he was a kid, he was a dumb jerk who did dumb things and wasn’t very good in school. This is a very admirable quality about conservatives in that they are not intellectually-snobbish and are willing to admit that they weren’t always effete, intellectual, pasty flute-tooting grinds. Nope, Sean would have been back there banging away in the percussion section, certain sure, and yet--here he is today, successful and famous and published; an inspiration to us all.

This is in stark contrast to famous and successful liberals who, far from boasting about their youthful stupidity, tend to disclose their youthful experimentation with illegal drugs in the form of a cautionary tale. This sends a very negative message to kids, particularly when you are a rock or movie star with three homes and millions of dollars in the bank, and you confide that drugs almost ruined your life. The kids think—HEY! I can do drugs for years and STILL become rich and famous, so long as I quit when I get rich enough to afford three months at Betty Ford, doing Vodka and Odwalla shots with Robert Downey, Jr. Contrast that to Sean Hannity, who admits he was the dumb kid, but bragged today that his call screener is a really SMART girl who got 1560 on her SAT’s. Just think, kids—you can be a dumb jerk and grow up to have your own show, or you can make 1560 on your SAT’s and be dumb jerk’s call screener. Is America a great nation, or WHAT? I say—Great! Liberals say, What? But they’re just a bunch of negative whiners who Hate America.

But are they--by whom I mean, ME--evil?

Sean said on the show that Liberals aren’t really evil, just misguided. A few minutes later, he said they were also thick-skulled. It is remarkable that so few of them have their own radio talk shows, considering, but then they lack ambition and work ethic and want the govt. to give them handouts, so perhaps that explains it.

Anyhow, I was totally grooving on Sean’s message that the parents (Other parents—not me. I make my son do his homework or no computer gaming OR downloading the Michael Berg Beheading video) are to blame, but then he said that the REAL problem is the unholy alliance between the liberal democrats and the teacher’s unions, which have destroyed education in this country AND resulted in the $500 pair of sneakers, not to mention ebonics.

I’m still a little confused over whether or not it’s important to be smart or achieve in school in order to differentiate the life's famous hosts from life’s anonymous call screeners, but by golly, I’m clear on the role that ghetto parenting and the democrat lapdogs of the NEA have played in rotting the minds and destroying the futures of America’s Youth.

Sean Hannity—a true Monet—Up close, a big ol’ mess, but from a distance, a masterpiece not unlike a fifth grade band performance of "Hedwig's Theme" in which if you listen long enough, you can actually pick out the tune as long as you also have a program to clue you in as to what tune it's supposed to be.

I am still probably mostly a liberal, but I am thinking that like the troops, there are good liberals worth supporting and bad liberals, and everyone but me is one of those thick-skulled, misguided, knuckleheaded, NEA-wh0re liberals.

Pep

[CShine]

10. Friday

FRIDAY--During which, Rush and I find common ground vis-a-vis Evolutionary Theory

Today was the final day of my weeklong experiment, and so I treated it like a last day of shore leave, banging away for all I was worth.

Glen Beck was on vacation this morning, and was replaced by a fellow whose name was, apparently, Joe Crummy. Joe Crummy was a very angry individual, with more than a teaspoonful of spleen to vent. However, instead of directing his anger at the most obvious target, namely, his father, for giving him the last name of "Crummy", he shot his vitriolic wad in the general direction of John Kerry.

At last! This was what I was hoping for all week--after all the nattering on about dodgeball, dead Iraqis, and race-baiting billboards! I settled into my bucket seat and set the cruise control on 63, in the hope of enjoying a good old-fashioned John Kerry bashfest.

I have to admit, Crummy got it right about one thing. Kerry's new "Theme" is possibly the lamest catchphrase to come down the pike since "Whip Inflation Now" and “It’s Not You, It’s Me”. I mean, "Let America Be America Again"? Any idiot knows that the only rational campaign slogan for Kerry is "Vote for me because I'm not George Bush and despite outward appearances, I am an unembalmed, sentient, vertebrate, mammalian life form with an opposing thumb and forefinger, unlike this pot of paste with Dick Cheney's finger stuck in it that you were probably strongly considering."

I also learned that the big bucks advertisers were paying more for ads on CNN than on FoxNews. This has to do more with political bias and snobbery than with the fact that most FoxNews viewers make their consumer choices based primarily on decals. And I say this tongue firmly in cheek because I, too, watch and enjoy NASCAR.

Joe Crummy also reminded me that it was us liberals who were so very hot to see the price of gas go up, as it would make us cool like the French. This was a great comfort to me as I observed the price of gas here shoot up from 2.03/gallon to 2.17 in the six hours I was at work. If I felt any cooler, I'd gag myself on a crusty baguette and have to be airlifted to L'Tour D'Argent to have it surgically-removed from my windpipe by Johnny Depp's greasy-haired, Arid Extra Dry-challenged personal chef.

Yes, I do recall those heady days of sticking the nozzle in my car and thinking to myself, "Gee, the price of gas is so low. I feel very uncool, buying it at such a pittance."

So, we liberals simply do not have the right to whine about gas prices. If we were not vile hypocrites, we’d be taking public transportation to our jobs at the Natural Foods Co-op.

One thing I left off of yesterday’s post is that while I was circling the grocery store parking lot looking for a space (wasting gas to the tune of 2.03/gallon), Sean Hannity played excerpts from his previous day’s hard-hitting interview with Howard Dean. Dean had apparently been (*gasp*) CRITICAL of Kerry’s positions when he was running AGAINST Kerry, but now that he has withdrawn from the race, he is saying NICE THINGS about Kerry. Sean Hannity is a man who clearly has no patience with politics and partisanship, and less still with “flip-flopping”. So, which is it, Howard? Is Kerry a good candidate for Prez, or what? Seems like you have waffled on the issue, and by gosh, Sean wasn’t going to let you wriggle out of it. Woof! Woof!

So, this afternoon, it was on to Rush.....

(to be continued)

[CShine]

12. Friday (part 2)

As I said in an earlier post, Rush is generally on during my work hours, but today I got to leave work 30 minutes early so I could deliver needed medical supplies to the housebound and infirm, as our usual delivery guy had to take emergency leave due a family crisis. So, this allowed me to tune in to Rush, though continuity was lacking as I had to get in and out of the car from time to time to deliver medicine.

I think the first caller said she’d never paid any attention to news or politics until 9/11, but then became a news junkie, though she was upset that if Rumsfeld or Bush gave a speech, there were talking heads afterwards at CNN who distorted their message. She said she loved talk radio and finally got FoxNews even though her cable channel wasn’t providing it at the time due to probable bias. It struck me that the themes from this morning's show seemed to carry on into the afternoon shows. One can but admire such thematic discipline on the right. Conservative media functions like a well-oiled machine. Liberals, in contrast, are like disoriented ants who are all tugging and pulling at the same stale potato chip, but in opposite directions.

In contrast to the underunderwrited FoxNews, Rush’s show sure has a lot of commercials, which means it’s very successful, like American Idol, which also appears on Fox. So even though I gave him 30 minutes, there wasn’t a whole lot of actual airtime for Rush to affect my self-esteem. The second caller I heard was upset that his teachers expected him to believe that “he came from a cosmic hiccup”. That started Rush in on evolutionary theory, and I must admit that I had never had it explained to me in quite this way before. Rush says that evolution CAN’T explain creation, which is true. To say that would be just as idiotic as claiming that germ theory explains why dogs chase cats, instead of the other way round, and it really makes me mad that teachers are telling students that evolution explains how the universe came to be.

But he wasn’t done. Rush went on to say that there is NO WAY he evolved from a Chimpanzee or Baboon, since if he HAD, then why are there still Chimpanzees and Baboons---hmmm??? Explain THAT!.

I have to admit that after listening to Rush’s cosmological theories and dissection of the theory of evolution, I agree with him completely that there is NO WAY he evolved, from a Chimpanzee OR Baboon.

Eats, shoots and leaves.

The final caller to his show was the icing on the cupcake, or, as Johnny Depp’s personal chef might say L’piece de resistance. This guy said “These liberals always want to save the air and the water, but they make the steel mills close so hard-working Americans lose their jobs. What have liberals ever done to protect America?”

It may surprise some of you to hear that Rush wasn’t able to think of a single example. Liberals—useless AND annoying AND responsible for high gas prices (or at least happy about them) and rust belt unemployment!

Rush finished by telling his listeners (bear in mind he’d not been there on Monday) that he’d been working AWFULLY hard and needed another vacation, so would be back Wednesday. Speaking of being cool like the French, I’m beginning to think these Right Wing Radio guys are way into the Parisian 35-hour work week. One can but hope that his replacement on Monday and Tuesday will be Crummy, too.

I was pretty happy when Sean Hannity finally came on, since I’ve come to feel a certain affection for Sean Hannity over the course of this week. Try as I might, I can't dislike him. Sean has some very attractive qualities about him, not the least of which is that he brings a tremendous amount of positive energy to the airwaves, like a talk show version of an Irish Setter. One can practically hear his tail wagging and his whole body wiggling, such is his eagerness to share with us his fabulous guest lineup and his daily insights.

Sean is on record as opposing the Kerry flip-flops, and I have to say that I wouldn’t care to see Kerry schlepping around in flip-flops very much, either, as any man with a face that long and that much hair on top of his head must have feet that should never been shown in public, lest they scare the horses. But the main thing about Sean Hannity is that he is offended by the injection of politics and partisanship into the political discourse. He finds it particularly offensive that liberals and Democrats are sniping at Bush and his policies, given that currently all three branches of govt. are controlled by the Republicans.

I thought about this. It would be more seemly for John Kerry and the Democrats to simply roll over on their backs, bare their necks, and expose their soft, white underbellies to the victorious Republicans, than to express views critical of the ruling party in a blatant attempt to seize the reins of power back for themselves. This made me think of an even BETTER campaign theme for John Kerry. “Kerry in 2004—because someone has to run against Bush, or else the rest of the world will think we’re a dictatorship.”

So, I’ve come to the end of my journey of self-discovery, via tuning in to RWTR as my time allowed. What have I learned and how have I changed? Well, I don’t like Bush any more and I’m not at all convinced that the folks currently in power deserve to be there. But I think less of John Kerry. I found a surprising affection for Sean Hannity, who reminds me of a big, drooling, overenthusiastic dog with muddy paws who you just can’t bear to scold. I’ve learned that liberals like me are race-baiting, death-wishing, gas-price-whining, flip-flopping, do-nothing, useless, sanctimonious, hypocrites who aren’t actually evil, just misguided. I’ve learned that astrophysicists and evolutionary biologists are “Pointy-headed”. I’ve learned that Rush Limbaugh in NO WAY admits to having evolved, though he thinks his show has, since they have more stations now. I’ve learned that the most intelligent woman on the planet is Sean Hannity’s call-screener. I’ve learned that it is a very bad, wrong, and flip-flopping thing to change your mind about anything EVER unless you are Zell Miller, and then it’s ok.

But the single most important thing I’ve learned this week is that it is WAY more fun to be the opposition than the folks in charge, and so that’s why I’m writing in Tony Blair come November, as that way I get to have it both ways, and no matter who complains, I get the inimitable pleasure of whinging about how bad a job they are doing, which is even more pleasurable than having your vagus nerve stimulated or seeing the price of gas rise yet again and knowing this is going to help the environment and make us cooler like the French.

Besides, if I’m going to get screwed by a politician, I’d rather be screwed by one with a British accent who can give a proper speech.

[TheFarseer]

11. be strong, man

I listen to alot of RW talk radio. I have developed a tolerance to it that allows me to listen to the crazy things they are saying and not let any of it seep into my brain. I've posted a few of the crazier things I've heard but no one seemed interested. I think it's good to hear a perspective that I don't agree with or else I will just hear my friends that I agree with and not know how the rest of the country, well not the rest, but part of the country thinks.

[BrewerJohn]

13. Thanks

Thanks for the amusing read -- good for a Friday night. I have to admit to listening to RW radio, maybe an hour or so a week, for the gallows-humor factor. Pep nails them pretty good, and provides major chuckles, which Bog knows we need these days.