It is probably a mistake to make too much of the commentary of Michael Savage.  To get a good guage of a follower of Republican talking points, the best radio host to turn to is Sean Hannity — the impossibly blandest and most notably unnotable of the lot.  To get a possible writer of Republican talking points, the name is Rush Limbaugh.

Of course, that is why Savage and, in the current era of Obama Mr. Glen Beck, are the most pervsely entertaining and listenable of this bunch.  This might be an indictment of what I can take, and perhaps I should lay off all such junk.

I have always meant to engage in a “Hannity Project”.  Tune in for a random single minute for one week and report what he says.  The point of the “Hannity Project” is shown in the manner that the last two times I flicked past him and held for several seconds, I heard roughly the same thing — and, bizarrely enough, the two names of Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright were interjected into roughly the same run-on sentence about how Obama is governing from the far left, turning the nation socialism, and betraying his moderate presidential campaign.

Regarding Mr. Savage — and with this particular item of invective I have a theory that this item goes more or less across the board.  The man Savage was in a tizzy about the Department of Homeland Security’s report on the threat of violence from “Right Wing Extremism”.  It is a sign of an emerging gestapo from the Obama Administration.  It was timed specifically to intimidate the Tea-Partiers.  Governor Napolitano is emerging as a new Janet Reno, and a new Waco is just around the corner.

The reason I can single out Mr. Savage for hypocrisy is I can recall right off the top of my mind an item of vitrol he spewed against Quakers.  As you may recall in the previous administration, there was a report that Quaker and Vegan groups were being monitored.  Savage’s response was a sort of predictable ranting about how Left-wing Extremists hide behind Quaker and Vegan groups, and such organizations are not spiffy clean.

It’s also pretty damned clear that these definers of “Movement Conservative” opinion are not much bothered by, say, the NSA’s monitoring of a member of congress.  (And behold the incoherence of the free republic posters.  To add my own possible incoherence: they won’t care unless it turns out to be Bachman.)  I may well mention that looking at an old conservative magazine from 1956 (as I am want to do), I saw a survey of dream presidential wishes which was topped off with Jay Edgar Hoover.

There probably shouldn’t be a “Department of Homeland Security” — such a department came into being because the public demanded some action and this manuevering of boxes was the easiest salvo.  As it were, it is charged with spitting out administrative documents about the possibility of right-wing extremist violence on one hand and left-wing extremist violence on the other.  The clearest example of domestic right-wing violence through the past two decades is Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing, and the report on right-wing extremism largely copies his profile.  The result is probably a bit dumb, though it is where they can draw the conclusion of “recruit from former military ranks”, an item which is especially grating to various people.  I actually can’t think of what constitutes domestic left-wing terrorism (apparently, as that columnist states, some property damage inflicted by extremist Earth Liberation Fronters, and a few items of computer hacking).  I am amenable to the categorization of Ted Kaczynski as a left-wing nutcase.  Given him as idiosyncratic more than anything else, such that we conjure up more threatening possibilities from a re-emerged Militia Movement than hermits living in the woods, the Report on Left Wing Extremism looks like it is stuck bouncing about the “Black Blocks” of your average mass war protest — “Re-create ’68”?  Really?  Though, to be sure, I guess such report has to mention Something, and if you paint a picture of a politically motivated act of violence from the left, I guess it would come from an “Anarchist”.  There was a bizarre protest movement which sought a nostalgic rush toward a riotous Democratic convention.  Interesting movement, that.

Well, at least they’re more threatening than the Quaker bake sale movement.

Incidentally, Pat Robertson called the writer of the report “gay.”  Really!

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