1 Boring Old Man

The first time I noticed it was in 2003-2004 when Kerry was beginning to run for President. Somehow the topic of his Viet Nam medals came up. A guy in the conversation said knowingly, "You know, they gave out those medals to everyone over there. Some people have drawers full of them." Well I didn’t know that [nor was it true]. But later that same day, I heard the same comment from someone who couldn’t have possibly known the person in the first conversation. I was kind of naive, I think. My curiosity about how such "Talking Points" were disseminated so quickly and so broadly was naive because I had never listened to Talk Radio or watched Fox News at that point. I didn’t even know what they were.

Slowly, I caught up with the rest of the world and realized there was a whole network of media outlets pouring out these sarcastic and devaluing "Talking Points" all day long – Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, etc. who were debunking and dissing the news almost as it happened, and that the people who speaded these ideas were listening to it all the time. I later picked up a Wall Street Journal and found a slightly higher brow version of the same thing. Later, I met The Weekly Standard in a waiting room.

I wondered if there were some "Right Wing Talking Point" newswire that got the word out or if they were just feeding off of each other. I finally got it that the answer was "yes" – meaning that they were independently creating these things; they were getting them from each other; and they were getting them from the Administration – specifically from the White House via Karl Rove, who finally joined them after he left in the wake of the U.S. Attorney scandal. And it’s a powerful network of people.

Recently, I was talking to a construction worker who said, "It wasn’t F.D.R. that stopped the Depression, it was World War II." I like this guy, but I know he doesn’t use a computer or the Internet. I know he didn’t finish High School. And I know that his major off-work activity has to do with his motorcycle and motorcycle club, not studying American History or Economics. He heard that line on the radio. I don’t think this is a vast right wing conspiracy that meets in a bunker in Coeur-d’Elene Idaho any more than the network of Progressive bloggers is a left wing conspiracy, but I do think the aim is different. These people exist to tear down any non-conservative, non-Republican, non-right-wing idea that comes along. They are specifically destructive. Take for example Limbaugh’s Operation Chaos in which he actively encouraged Republicans to vote for Hillary Clinton in Primaries to undercut Barack Obama.

We have freedom of speech, and there’s no way to shut down the steady stream of sarcasm and contemptuous drivel that streams out of this media. It wouldn’t be an American thing to do. On the other hand, this has been an extremely virulent force in American politics, something of a verbal "dirty tricks" machine that pumps venom into our political dialog by the hour. It was an effective tool for the Bush Administration whose luminaries made increasingly frequent appearances in interviews. Barack Obama has set a tone that we need to put away childish things and stop this kind of silliness.  Yesterday, Obama even said it directly to the Republican Congressmen in a very clear way, "You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done." That’s completely correct.