The kids are all right

[tarheel]

How showbiz reactionaries like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly feed on a campus culture of callousness, submission to authority and ruthless self-interest

B Y H A L C R O W T H E R


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Right-wing propagandists like Limbaugh and Coulter are essentially entertainers, entertainers who stimulate prejudice, selfishness and meanness the way a comedian works for laughs or a tragedian plays for tears. Theirs is a new art form, exclusive to America and bewilderingly successful. In place of traditional conservative ideology, they offer their audience partisan belligerence and a complete package of mail-order hatreds, designed for the conceptually and ethically impaired. If many of these performers are insincere mercenaries, a few may be mentally unstable--Fox's Bill O'Reilly throws red-faced fits on occasion, and there couldn't have been a whole lot of calculation when Michael Savage ended his MSNBC career by snarling at a caller, "Oh, you're one of those sodomites. You should only get AIDS and die, you pig. How's that?... You have got nothing to do today, go eat a sausage and choke on it. Get trichinosis."

Savage worked for the same network that fired Ann Coulter "four or five times," as she recalls, for inappropriate invective. The right side of the media landscape is crawling with strange creatures, and the shame falls on irresponsible networks who unleash them, in the name of "balance," on quasi-news and even sports shows. The "why" of it is simple. Hate sells, and TV drools over the vast raw-meat radio audience where hatred and rudeness have been hot commodities since the 1980s.

Rush Limbaugh may not be sincere, or even clever enough to remember where he is or which scam he's working, but with 20 million listeners he's one of the major power players in American politics. If you concede that every one of those 20 million dittoheads votes Republican (and that G.W. Bush polled only 43 million in 2000), Rush might claim--without benefit of his Oxycontin--to be the most potent political boss in history. I shouldn't have been so surprised when I saw him sitting next to Barbara Bush at the 1988 Republican convention.

Limbaugh, Coulter, O'Reilly and many of their apprentices are best-selling authors because the talk-radio right will purchase books by the bushel just to prove that it can read. And there's another lucrative market in books for liberals, like Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them (Franken also wrote Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Liar) that deconstruct the most ridiculous and deceitful rhetoric from Dittoland, a dirty job that wouldn't be necessary in a republic where the average citizen could think for himself.

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http://indyweek.com/durham/current/cover.html


http://indyweek.com/durham/current/index.html



This article is from a local independent paper, amazingly called, THE INDEPEDENT. It the only unabashed source of journalistic truth in this area. They have nailed these so-called "pundits" here. Second link is to the paper's homepage. Some of you might enjoy reading some of the articles and columns. This is a good progressive publication.