What would the right-wing bloviators have to babble before their core audiences said, “that’s over the line”?
Would Rush Limbaugh have to say: “Why should some poor working stiff nobody cares about have the same vote as me? I’m an important, influential multi-millionaire who owns a $44 million estate in Florida with 5 swimming pools and a $14 million apartment in New York City and yet I only get a single vote. That’s wrong. I’m rich, so naturally I’m better than you, so I should get something like 100,000 votes to the single vote of some dumb middle-class slob, like the idiots who listen to my show! That’s only fair! For that matter, why should some dope who makes below a million per even get a vote?”
Would Glenn Beck have to say: “We have to get rid of these evil progressive programs like Social Security and Medicare. If grandma and grandpa are poor or sick and dying, well, they’ve had a good life let them die or kill themselves and get out of the way to make room for the future! Why should my tax money go to keep your grandparents alive? That’s communist socialism, folks, and we can’t have it here in the free-market capitalist Christian America I love! Hey, it’s a fact: Jesus hated the poor and loved the rich just like me! If you aren’t rich then your proper place is to be a slave and do what you’re told by those who are it says so in the Bible and the Constitution if you read them right!”
Would Bill O’Reilly have to say: “I don’t care, frankly, if I’m completely wrong about some historical event, if it helps me make my point. As long as I believe it and you believe it, who cares? I’m not some wimpy historian and I’m not in the business of telling you the truth. I mold opinions, even if they are usually based on pure crap I make up or something my employers tell me to say for political reasons. Facts are vastly overrated; it’s faith and ratings that count!”
Would Sean Hannity have to say: “Sure, I lied about where those donations to my college fund for the kids of dead veterans were going; it’s true, only about ten percent actually went to the families of military personnel killed overseas. So? I have a high-overhead life, folks, and I’m sure if those dead peasants uh vets were alive to say it, they’d tell you that they’d want your donations to go to keeping me and my family traveling in style. C’mon, I’m a TV star these guys were little nobody’s! What, am I supposed to fly Business Class or even ack! Coach for this friggin’ charity? What are you, nuts?!? I’m a Republican I’m in it for the money, people!”
Would Michael Savage have to say: “You know why I’m doing this, my friends? Because I failed at being a hippy-dippy herbal medicine and homeopathic healing book author. That’s right, I was as liberal as they come back then and called myself ‘Dr. Michael Weiner,’ but I couldn’t rub two dimes together. Ha, ha, I swam naked with homo beat poet Allen Ginsberg did you know that? Then I noticed all the loot Limbaugh was raking in from you ultra-conservative bozos and jumped on the gravy train. So I changed my name and thought up the most outrageous, disgusting political stuff I could and here I am rich and almost king of the hill! I dont believe a word I say but I get a damn good laugh that you do! Hey, and I voted for Obama! Ha, ha, ha, ha!”
Would Neal Boortz have to say: “My fellow patriots, I have a lovely family, but you know what really gets me off? Sex with animals, particularly sheep. There’s nothing like a warm sheep to keep you company at night why, I’ve even installed a small stable on the second floor of my mansion just to be near Maizie, one of my special favorites. It’s okay, my wife understands completely I’ve even introduced her to a very handsome horse named Oater to see if she’d like to ‘go for a ride,’ if you know what I mean.”
2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.
They could say all that and get away with it. What would they have to say? “I was wrong. I am now a liberal.” And mean it. Challenge the status quo of hate.
The current outrage is the attempt to claim that pointing out the threats and the hate is “politicizing it.” Remember the shot that was supposed to have been taken at Republican headquarters? Heard a report yesterday… not exactly true. Some gun welding idiot on their side shot up in the air out of joy over something. Bullets that go up… do tend to come down.
I don’t know, Ken — Beck has already told his audience he’s just a ‘rodeo clown’ and that only an idiot would believe anything he says and he’s still on the air. The audience for this bilge are people who are so stupid they think Medicare isn’t a govt program and Ronald Reagan was our greatest president, so they’d likely just dismiss it as a joke if Beck claimed he was now a liberal — either that or go deaf on that part, just as they go blind when they read Jesus’ words in the NT.
Maybe we have this LTS stuff “all wrong,” RS. Or maybe we should just create another website? A right wing one getting them to buy into all kinds of stupid things and “donate” for the cause. If we get away with it: do it in a clever enough way, we’d be richer than Trump.
I just don’t have the heart for that kind of thing. When Bush the lesser took over I told my wife we would be rich beyond our dreams if we simply took all our stocks and poured them into one of their favorite military contractors. We both admitted we simply couldn’t do that.
Good for you and your wife for having a conscience, Ken. As I’ve posted before, Rushbo’s gay boyfriend in college, Eliot Sanders, claimed Limbaugh wasn’t particularly political when he started in talk radio, he just picked the group most likely to buy his outrageous BS, and that was the righties. If not for Reagan suspending the Fairness Doctrine and the law changes on radio station ownership, Rush and his ilk would still have relatively small regional audiences. As it is, contrary to Rush’s bluster that he has 14 to 20 million listeners a day, the true figure is more like 1.4 million but, then, conservatives just can’t count accurately, except money.