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’s
website, 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!
