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Wednesday, Jul 02, 2003
Rating the Kool-Aid of the Savage Weiners
In a rant of epic proportions Digby describes an experience sampling the cabal of savage weiners. Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, et al, spew forth for several hours each day, using sheer repetition to drive messages into the minds of their subjects.
I also sample the products of the right wing's propaganda corps, but it's a dangerous thing, best done in moderation. The juice is toxic.
Often Rush tries to be logical. He's not the screaming ranter type. Rush is a pontificator, and feels the need to wrap his arguments in psuedo-logic. He contructs morality plays between the god-fearing and the liberal cultural warriors, then explains why the god-fearing are right, right, right, and why the liberals are evil, irrational, or just plain wrong.
This morning Rush was struggling. He attempted to formulate arguments against homosexual marriage on the basis of tradition, and was clearly winging it. Rush meandered, so he put emphasis on basso profundo elecution to hide the vacancy of his words. Rush found himself harkening back to days of pre-civilization, and cited the primordial drive to preserve genetic lineages as the basis for the marriage contract -- which, as we all know, has since time immemorial been a male-female pair-bond based on romantic love.
At some point, he realized he was waxing nostalgic about the days when women were chattle. Thinking quickly, he said "of course we don't want to go back to that", and changed the subject with a well-worn annecdote about feminazis.
I'd say Rush put in a tired weiner performance rather than a savage weiner. The feminazi rant was well executed, but it's shopworn, and wasn't enough to counter the tedious attempts to form a coherent argument.
Hannity is on the tube (FNC) and the radio. On Fox he has a liberal cohort whom he flogs nightly. Colmes is largely ineffective, but can counter the most extreme excesses. This morning I caught Hannity's radio show for the first time.
He seems to have a cohort on the radio, but she's far more subservient than Colmes, so Hannity's rants are unchecked.
The guy was doing a "Fun with Real Audio" with clips from Hillary, Bill, Monica, et al. And having a blast at it. He was just as outraged about the DNA on the dress as ever.
Hannity played clip of an angry moment in a Hillary speech over and over to demonize her. He completely ignored the content of Hillary's statement -- that debate is patriotic -- and focused on the theatrics of her delivery.
I have to give Hannity a rating of all-savage and all-weiner. His show is filled with rants, histrionics, and venom, yet has the most tenuous relationship with rational thought. If Hannity says "What lies? Clinton was the liar! He spooged in the White House!", then the miasma of questions about Bush simply waft away.
That's some kind of Kool-Aid.