Gist for that mill continues
Ed Schultz made a particularly intemperate statement that rolled around in a stew of controversy last week. It’s gotten clipped down to a 15 second youtube clip, thrown around various blogs, I am having a difficult time picturing it discussed on talk radio of the right but who knows?, and found its way to a condemnation by Republican congressional leadership of John Boehner. I don’t quite know what to make of this as controversy. Is this projection from the more than fifteen seconds of radio gnashing? Roll your way across the AM dial and it will be one rightwing host after another in accusatory tones with diatribe that starts around where Schultz’s 15 seconds went.
It is interesting to note that Air America is dead. Take a look at KPOJ’s schedule, and you’ll see six hours late at night of Air America’s program. Their two biggest talents have bailed to other syndicates. Throw in a Senator. Toss in another person who moved up to MSNBC and has something of a courtesy radio rebroadcast. Ron Reagan is now the major face of Air America, on more stations than anyone else there.  I would prefer Stephanie Miller to be stuck into their weekend scheduling, 970 booting them out as they changed their name to “Freedom 970”, and apparently Ms. Miller opposes Freedom.
Actually, I suspect that the easy branding of a consciously “conservative” radio station with the word “Freedom” tells us how easy it is to round up fury against Ed Schultz in the “speck in my eye, log in your eye” way.
“No other president in American history has ever addressed school children. It’s the tradition of Hitler, Castro, and Mao. We had the Hitler Youth. Obama now wants to have the Obama Youth.”
That one came from last month’s conservative Movement talk show bloviator keyboard warrior controversy. Obama offered a speech for the children. A bit more gist for the mill was offered up last week. A creepy video from Febuary of a teacher leading her class of second graders to a song about Barack Obama. The youtube clip findally reaches the shores of Drudge after seven months. I will go on record as saying that, yes, the song was a bit creepy, and the teacher should be a bit ashamed. The school, though, has entrenched itself with no apologies. And, given the disporportionate anger and vitrol from the, and I use the term sarcastically, “Citizen Journalists” of Michelle Malkin on down, in findind the school and turning up the proper addresses — leading to unhinged threatening comments that lead the school to Lockdown, I probably would have to suggest an entrenching against this fury. Really, I now have to side with one slightly over-eager school teacher against those forces.
The question with these things is always a “Do you really think something can’t be poked out from the Bush Administration of more noxiousness?” Then again, back to a roll over of the AM dial where these controversies are manufactured beyond the keyboard — the corridors by which such a response are pumped out are smaller, and the echo chamber that leads to Obama being a particularly nasty dictator remain. And maybe it’s about time I poked my own way to the book “The Cult of the Presidency”.