Senator Tom Daschle criticized the tone taken by talk show hosts, Rush Limbaugh in particular, as having "a very shrill edge" that had led to a dramatic increase on threats among people in public life. Daschle said, "What happens when Rush Limbaugh attacks those of us in public life is that people aren't satisfied just to listen. They want to act because they get emotionally invested. And so, you know, the threats to those of us in public life go up dramatically, on our families and on us, in a way that's very disconcerting."
Now, if you take a large flock of chicken, and lob a lit cherry bomb into the middle of the flock, the response isn’t going to consist of the lead rooster looking up and politely asking if one of the hens has gas.
Nobody along the fringes of the American political right asked if anyone was suffering from gas.
It will take weeks for the howling and yowling to subside.
It will be years, if ever, before right wingers stop whining in the wounded tones of a baboon with a thorn in his foot about the terrible things Daschle said. In pretty short order, they will have changed it around so they have Daschle saying that Rush had called for his assassination. In fact, reading the loons at Freak Show Republic and on Usenet, I see we’ve already crossed that border. But then, those guy often cross borders where rational people don’t even think there are pathways.
Rush, and his followers, responded with the usual bifurcated logic that is essential their trademark, simultaneously denying that they were having a negative influence on the body politic while demonizing Daschle by hotly disputing claims he never made. No surprises there, right?
Limbaugh, of course, screamed like a stuck pig. Racing to his webpage, he wrote, "Soon-to-be Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle has blamed me personally, and about all of you who listen to me, for his loss and for the supposed "threats" he's receiving"
It’s always fun to dissect Radio Gasbag’s stuff. He had a column show up in my local paper last year, and I fell on it with loud cries of joy, convinced that I had struck a mother lode of humorous materials for my essays. This wasn’t exactly ground-breaking on my part. Such well-known net lefties as Bartcop, Rack Jite and Milt the Weasel got their start deconstructing Limbaugh’s lies, misstatements and fallacies. I was following a well-trodden path. The others had moved on to other things because, unless you are getting paid $25 million a year by fat cats, going over the same lies, over and over and over, gets tedious beyond measure.
Alas and alack, no columns appeared after the one. But I did get one good essay out of that one column.
So let’s take a look. He starts out with a little pot shot: "Soon-to-be Senate Minority Leader..." That’s apropos of nothing, except he wishes to assign a rationale to Daschle for saying what he did about hate radio. His readers are a little bit slow, and he has to be a little bit obvious in his setups. "...Tom Daschle..." This stands out as the one accurate part of that statement. "...has blamed me personally..." He didn’t, you know. He cited Rush as an example of some truly disgraceful broadcast practices, is all. "...and about all of you who listen to me..." Actually, Daschle makes it pretty clear that he’s talking about a fringe element. Of course, in this case, it’s the fringe element of a fringe element. Anyone who listens to Radio Gasbag day in, day out, nodding in angry agreement does have a few screws loose. "...for his loss..." Daschle doesn’t mention the election, of course. While the unending propaganda of the right wing and the disgraceful control of our once-free media it exerts influenced the election, Daschle wasn’t even talking about it. But Rush needed a strawman to explain why he’s being criticized. "... and for the supposed ‘threats’ he’s been getting." Well, we know for certain that someone tried to murder Daschle last year.
So. One short sentence, and he managed to jam in a sneer, two misstatements and three bare-faced lies. That’s pretty impressive for just thirty-one words. (I’m assuming that "Soon-to-be" is three words, even though my word-processing software wants to argue the point.)
So, having falsely accused Daschle of attacking him because the Democrats lost some seats in the election, and having misrepresented what Daschle actually did say, Radio Gasbag goes on to one of his more amazing self contradictions. He starts out by talking about how Time ran an issue with a cover emblazoned "Is Rush good for America?" (The answer, evidently, was no).
He follows this up by demanding of his online audience, "Isn't it interesting that this is the first we've heard of this?"
Well, apparently Time had mentioned it before.
And of course, the question about the effect hate radio is having on America has been raised before by many people, myself included. President Clinton made mention of it shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing, and caused many howls of outrage from Rush and the hate radio chorus. Hillary Clinton first made the phrase "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" popular when she mentioned it in an interview in 1999. For all the vitriolic howls of derision that ensued, the phrase stuck, and now, after much information about the "Arkansas Project" and the like has come out, it seems there really was a vast right wing conspiracy.
For examples of the effect Rush and all the little gasbags of hate radio are having, one need only wade through the posts from right wingers at the Freak Show Republic (freerepublic.com) or cruise the political groups at Usenet.
You won’t see calls for the assassination of Democrats. While some of the people posting are certifiable, they have enough sense – or the managers of the talk groups do – to know such talk isn’t protected by the First Amendment.
But you will see endless demonization of "libruls" and Democrats. A lot of these people are either utterly convinced that Democrats are traitors and satanists, or are intent on painting them that way. They often cite claims made by Rush and such disreputable right wing "news sources" as Newsmax, Jewish World Review and WNS to back up their strange, paranoid delusions. Rush doesn’t say Democrats are traitors who need to be shot; he merely spends three hours a day, fifteen hours a week, arguing that anything that is good for America, Democrats oppose. He leaves it for his listeners to build from that, and some of those listeners end up slipping over the edge, fed by anger and fear, until they start making threats and in rare instances, even trying to carry them out.
Threats from the right are getting more and more common. Folks like Bartcop, Rack Jite and I get "monkey mail" all the time; most of it is usually just right wingers accusing us of being America-haters and traitors because we don’t like Putsch (yes, folks, it’s true: I don’t like him. One little bit. I was going to mention that. Honest.). Every so often, we get something that’s more than just the usual dull-witted whine that "our type" need to be shut up, and they actually make a more direct threat.
Rush can try to change what Daschle said and howl that he’s innocent of accusations that Daschle never made, but this is what Daschle actually said, and he’s completely right:
"If entertainment becomes so much a part of politics and if that entertainment drives an emotional movement in this country among some people who don't know the difference between entertainment and politics, and who are then so energized to go out and hurt somebody, that troubles me about where politics in America is going,"
It troubles all of us. But we are a free people, and we aren’t going to back down from the brownshirts who so love Rush.
So let ‘em howl, Daschle. You did the right thing by talking about it.