My Journey Into Conservative Radio

Last week as I drove back down south to ultimately return my rental car and spend my Memorial Day weekend with friends in Birmingham, Alabama, I said WTH let me listen to conservative radio since I was actually traveling during the day.  So, I flipped through the stations trying to find the worst and vilest conservatives I could find.

First I found Laura Ingram’s show and who knows what the topic was supposed to be about, but she was talking about First Lady Michelle Obama’s fitness program and how she was doing all of this so she could run for Senate after while.  I guess like Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Roundabout midday I stumbled onto this show sponsored by the American Center for Law and Justice and a show hosted by Jay Sekulow. No doubt, this is a conservative outfit founded by evangelical Pat Robertson, (of the many famous soundbytes, but most recently his comment that the Haitians made a deal with the devil) and the topic of that day was how to deal with an upstate NY boy who was suspended for wearing a rosary to school.  And from all understandings and news reports I’ve read, this was just one of those cases of zero-tolerance policies gone amok and birthed out of the school shootings from Jonesboro to Columbine.

Then that show was done and I flipped and found Louisville, Kentucky’s NPR station and listened live to President Obama’s second press conference on the oil spill.  My initial thoughts were that Obama had somehow dropped the PR ball on this one.  From what I could gather there wasn’t much else that could be done that wasn’t done going into the “top kill” measure (which clearly we see didn’t work), and frankly I thought the president’s opening speech was reassuring to me.  Of course to Gulf Coast residents that’s another story.  What I didn’t like was the press flipping around what the president said pertaining to former head of the Mineral Management Service agency under the Department of the Interior Liz Birnbaum. Take the president at his word, especially if it’s a press conference and he just said she wasn’t fired.

And of course Major Garrett with FoxNews asked about the whole Sestak thing.

Which meant that when the press conference was over and I caught the rest of Rush Limbaugh, the entire show for Rush was about how inept the president was at handling the oil spill and how awful of a press conference it was and how he dodge Major Garrett’s question about Sestak.

So, I heard Rush Limbaugh go on and on how horrible this president was, but was focusing more of his attention on the whole Sestak situation that he was convinced was worth impeachable crimes.  And I’m saying to myself we could see riots in the streets if this Congress went ahead with impeachment proceedings against Obama.  As if that wasn’t enough, I stayed on long enough to hear Sean Hannity.

Seriously, the guy is a few bulbs short of a chandelier.  The elevator can’t go all the way up to the top.  And listening to Sean Hannity back-to-back with Rush Limbaugh, I’d actually go with Rush hands down no questions asked.  The hodge-podge of random connections that Hannity was making, all the way from Clinton, to Hillary, to Jeremiah Wright, to Bill Ayers was literally astonishing.  And Hannity, I swear was pulling three word soundbytes from Obama to prove a point–literally THREE words from some random speech.

I listened to Sean Hannity complain, on Memorial Day weekend–a big travel weekend–that the nickel or so increase in gas was due to Obama’s failure to handle the oil spill or even that the Dow Jones went up 285 points that day, and he had that ass Dick Morris (who I just want to punch in the nose) scare the listeners saying that by August we’ll be paying $8/gallon of gas.  I mean Dick Morris is a pusillanimous punk of the highest degree; like a bumbling sidekick that tries too hard to be cool, but is still a lame at the end of the day.

Naturally he compared it to Hurricane Katrina and actually said that this was “Obama’s Katrina on steroids.”

Really, 1,200+ human causalities to 11, and an entire American city was COMPLETELY unliveable for approximately 6-8 months and we’re not even to the two month mark.  And again, using the logic of this oil spill being a manmade disaster one MUST recognize the flooding of New Orleans to being a manmade failure, I’m more than sure than Hannity et. al. weren’t calling for Bush’s head back in 2005.  Of course not. Hannity, on that day during his program excused Bush’s flyover of New Orleans and Mississippi as him not wanting to land and divert resources to being around him away from the recovery effort.

I swear I almost wrecked my car.

Seriously, I heard this guy accuse Obama of not being transparent, but did everything but drink the sweat from Bush and Cheney’s right brow.

The next day as I was driving to Atlanta, and then having to drive back to Birmingham I got a chance to meet Georgia’s favorite black Republican and conservative–right out of Morehouse, y’all can definitely go ahead and claim the one and only Herman Cain.  Yup, never heard of him, but he made my skin crawl as I listened to him.  Yeah, I know I struggle with the nature of true blackness, but damn Negro could you get a friggin clue?! I thought I was listening to Rush Limbaugh in black face!

****************

Most people say it’s not what you say most times, but how you say it.  (Granted statements from leaders of the great state of South Carolina such as Rep. Joe Wilson  holler out “You lie!” during the State of the Union address, and now State Senator Jim Knotts throwing around the word “raghead” are really instances of what you say no matter how you say it.)  But often times, the issue with conservative speech is a) the level of lies and b) the level of sheer nastiness associated with their comments.  They’re known for turning a phrase that just seems mean spirited such as Rush referring to CNN’s Anderson Cooper’s program as “Anderson Cooper 125” as opposed to 360 (which I’m assuming is a reference to getting a 360-degree, all around perspective).  And the stuff Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity say are barely suitable for the air.

And they have numerous others who have local radio programs who do the same thing.

Clearly I’m biased and of course liberal talk radio programs use the same level of nastiness to talk about their counterparts, but seriously, no one can point to a liberal as mean, acerbic, acidic, ribald and as loathesome as Ann Coulter.  And you NEVER hear about liberal pundits, let alone Democrats in office committing such vicious civil improprieties as referring to a president with a racial slur as “raghead” –at least not in public!

Frankly, I just don’t want to be associated with anyone who is so anti-anything else.  Hell, Arizonans done lost they damn mind, saying a picture on a mural was too black!

At this point, I’m really kind of fed up with the level of douche-baggery that’s taking place. I don’t have intelligent words to express my level of detestation for the how we’re carrying on in this country!  Are we serious when we say these things out loud? Apparently so.

Its frustrating to see all of this happen in 2010.  And I’m sorry, it’s because Obama is black. I am slow to hear any other reason why else do we have the Tea Party movement which as Jim Wallis said in no uncertain terms:

Finally, I am just going to say it. There is something wrong with a political movement like the Tea Party which is almost all white. Does that mean every member of the Tea Party is racist? Likely not. But is an undercurrent of white resentment part of the Tea Party ethos, and would there even be a Tea Party if the president of the United States weren’t the first black man to occupy that office? It’s time we had some honest answers to that question. And as far as I can tell, Libertarianism has never been much of a multi-cultural movement. Need I say that racism — overt, implied, or even subtle — is not a Christian virtue.

Actually, this seems to be a retrogression back to the 1950s and prior when it was cache to say such negative comments about race.  Or maybe it really isn’t a retrogression as it’s just a sleeping giant thats being awakened again.  I mean, maybe we’re operating under the delusion that this stuff had went away, but black folks and other more aware folk have known that this stuff has never gone away.

Ronald Reagan made sure of that!

This was more a venting post than anything that pointed to a specific treatise.  Thank God for my own blog.

Leave a comment down below.

Keep it uppity and truthfully radical, JLL

3 thoughts on “My Journey Into Conservative Radio

  1. “At this point, I’m really kind of fed up with the level of douche-baggery that’s taking place. I don’t have intelligent words to express my level of detestation for the how we’re carrying on in this country! Are we serious when we say these things out loud? Apparently so.”

    Which is one of the top reasons why I’m leaving.

  2. Nice blog, I really like your post, good point made. I can\’t wait to dig into this material and learn from it. I am sure your next post would be very interesting. Can\’t wait to see more. Wish you all the best! Thanks.

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