Archive for April 22nd, 2009
April 22nd, 2009
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 I seriously doubt that it will happen, but there’s a lot of buzz on the Net today about a massive march of armed militia types in Washington on the 4th of July.
 (Here’s ONE of the many skeptical posts on the matter.)
 The putative organizers, an outfit called the Ohio Militia, say they’re hoping to draw a million participants.
 Yeah, good luck with that. There won’t be one-tenth of one percent of a million, if this thing comes off at all. And they won’t be armed.
 The motivation behind this movement, of course, is the insane fear among these bedwetters that big bad Barack Obama is going to take their guns away.
 Isn’t it ironic that these self-styled men’s men live such fear-filled lives? They dress up in their pretend fatigues and fantasize about shooting at all the things that make them so afraid.
 Deep down, they’re weenies, and they know it, and they hate themselves for it.
 POSTSCRIPT: Note the misspelling of what is intended to be the word “you’re” on the militia poster.
April 22nd, 2009
(Incidentally, the words “torturously” and “tortuously” don’t mean the same thing.)
April 22nd, 2009
 
 A few years back, the highest-rated local radio talk show here in Rockford had a decidely conservative bent, especially with regard to a school-desegregation lawsuit, which was a daily topic of discussion.
 Two members of the School Board were regular guests on the show, and their views were supported by the host and the vast majority of callers to the program. The show almost amounted to a daily three-hour commercial for these two board members.
 But a funny thing happened when this pair ran for re-election in their respective subdistricts: They both got trounced — not just edged, but trounced.
 I can recall similar examples of local radio being out of touch with the electorate. The Republican congressional primary election of 1978 was a case in point. The Rockford mayoral election of 1997 was another. In both instances, the prevailing sentiment on the most popular talk shows was not mirrored in election results.
 (In fairness, I should also note that my own five-year career in local talk radio ended in ignominy when I was fired for failing to attract many listeners. When they shun you in droves, you can hardly claim to have been in touch with their points of view.)
 Anyway, these matters came to mind this morning as I pondered the sometimes misleading concept of “popularity” in political media.
 Consider this paradox:
 Rush Limbaugh has by far the highest-rated radio talk show in America. The Fox News Channel is by far the highest-rated of the cable news outlets. The Drudge Report is by far the highest-rated news aggregator on the Internet. All three are conservative in their political bent — but their brand of politics is not the dominant one in this country, as election results and public-opinion polls will attest.
 As I’ve noted here before, Democratic candidates have carried the popular vote in four of the five presidential elections since Limbaugh became a national phenomenon. And despite Limbaugh’s entreaties, Democrats control both houses of Congress, most state legislatures and most governorships. Similarly, the relentlessly conservative propaganda peddled by Fox News and the Drudge Report has not prevented a sharp decline in Republican fortunes.
 So, what explains this seeming contradiction?
 I have a theory: No matter the high ratings for Limbaugh, Fox and Drudge, the fact remains that most Americans rarely, if ever, pay them much attention. The majority of people listening to the radio in the middle of the day are not listening to Limbaugh. Most people watching TV are not watching Fox. Most people surfing the Net are not visiting Drudge.
 Most of us are getting our information from other sources. Most of us are formulating our political opinions on the basis of factors other than those offered by these three conservative behemoths.
 The moral of the story is that the big crowd attracted by the most popular showman amounts to only a fraction of the overall populace. “American Idol” is the most popular show on TV, but most of us pay it no mind. I, for one, have never even seen it.
 UPDATE: I had to pass along this observation from a friend with whom I spoke on the phone a few minutes ago.
 He said the central point of this post brings to mind NASCAR. It’s wildly popular among a certain segment of the populace, but most folks wouldn’t know Jimmie Johnson from Jimmy Neutron. (The former is a NASCAR driver, and the latter is a TV cartoon character.)
April 22nd, 2009
 
 Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, intelligence agencies told the Bush administration that there was no evidence of ties between Saddam Hussein’s regime and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist network.
 As a former senior U.S. intelligence official puts it, the administration was “told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies.”
 It says HERE, however, that Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld “applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees” in an effort to disprove the intelligence findings.
 Those methods proved fruitless, but the administration went ahead with the invasion anyway.Â
April 22nd, 2009
 
 I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I am seriously worried about the declining fortunes of the Republican Party.
 Yeah, I’m a liberal Democrat, but I am first and foremost an American, and I don’t think it’s good for the nation to have one of its two major parties dwindle to a core of angry extremists whose overheated rhetoric is unacceptable to almost everyone else. That’s exactly what’s happening to the Republicans.
 The GOP is purging moderate politicians from its ranks and forcing on its remaining conservatives an ugly orthodoxy decreed by the unsavory likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.
 Even John McCain, who’s hardly a liberal, is facing a serious primary-election challenge from the founder of the Minutemen fringe group. (See HERE.) And Arlen Specter’s bid for renomination is similarly opposed by a comparative extremist.
 Moreover, dramatic demographic changes bode ill for the GOP for years to come (see HERE), but the party is doing nothing to adapt in hopes of survival.
 Meawhile, the GOP’s attacks on President Obama, most of which are ridiculous, have had virtually no negative effect on his popularity. Indeed, in Gallup Daily Tracking Polls conducted in the wake of last week’s celebrated tea parties, where anti-Obama invective was fairly commonplace, there has been NO DECLINE in Americans’ approval of the president’s job performance.
 Make no mistake. I’m glad that extremism in Republican ranks is not gaining among the broader populace. But I’m dismayed  that the party of Lincoln, a party that once had a vibrant  progressive wing, now finds itself in the clutches of right-wing radicals.
 UPDATE: Even Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committe, is PESSIMISTIC about the party’s prospects in next year’s elections.
April 22nd, 2009
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 The story is far too complicated for television news to effectively distill into some two-minute overview, but the scandal involving U.S. Rep. Jane Harman and former Bush administration Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would make a good movie.
 The plot involves spies, wiretaps, political intrigue, media coverups and who-knows-what-else. It might turn out that Democrat Harman and Republican Gonzales both committed crimes.
 TPM has a helpful timeline HERE.
April 22nd, 2009
 
 John Aravosis RECOMMENDS that health insurance for federal lawmakers be repealed until they provide coverage for everybody else.
 What really galls me is the sight of some demagogic politician who enjoys gold-plated coverage at taxpayers’ expense warning about the evils of “socialized medicine.”
