Okay. It’s time I do my duty as a political blogger and comment directly on the blog-o-rific issues of the day… if anyone who’s writing a political blog that would command you to sit on the right-side of some Crossfire-esque quasi-debate show, that has neglected to do so in lieu of comments about some stupid suicide pact and a mad mass-murderer from a decade ago…, I recommend you get on the balls right now.

If not Jeff Gannon, you have Eason Jordan to attack. Or Ward Churchill. You hear that FDR’s grandson dissed Brit Hume for throwing a FDR quote out of context? (If you don’t like dissing Brit Hume, you can always gravitate right back to Dan Rather.)

Eason Jordan’s comments, either said or not said (it’s impossible to say from Davos), was completely out of line. Soldiers targetted and killed twelve journalists? Please! Twelve is such an arbitrary number that it looks like Eason Jordan is just grabbing stuff out of his butt! Now parse out the eleven deaths, and you might find one or two or three… or four, perhaps… but where does this guy get off spouting off imaginary numbers like twelve???

Ward Churchill? “Little Eichmans”, I guess, is the phrase that, 3 and a half years later, embroiled him in some controversy… befitting the phrase “The Blame America First Crowd”. It is a point, a frame of reference which stomping away does not render meaningless or incoherent. For his part, Ward Churchill says the essay was akin to a first draft, work on it a little and you get this book.

Thump through the right-wing radio shows and their comments on the Ward Churchill comment, and I hear this: “Those are fighting words! The First Amendment don’t protect ‘fighting words'”. It may be beating up straw, but… um… no. “Let’s fight” is fighting words… a controversial critique of American foreign policy, — you’d prefer the comments George Carlin made of, when all is said and done, remarkably similar though with a more amoral tone, in When Will Jesus Pass the Pork-Chops? (Or Chalmers Johnson‘s more… highbrow and scholarly version.)?

The Jeff Gannon saga throws me back to the Bush desire to “get past the media filter”, which is to say, something is plugging up what would be their pure undiluted messaging. Everything is starting to run together… Maggie Gallagher and Armstrong Williams are thrown into the mix here. And the kids today believing we should scrap the First Amendment. There’s something… there… there.

Brit Hume, you ask? Well… maybe there are lessons for how to reform social security for those born in 1865 or thereabouts.

There. I did my blogging duty. Now I can go back to talking about… I don’t know… some 60 old conspiracy theory.

From Good Will Hunting:
SEAN: Hey, Gerry. In the 1960’s there was a young man graduated from the University of Michigan. Did some brilliant work in mathematics. Specifically bounded harmonic functions. Then he went on to Berkeley, was assistant professor, showed amazing potential, then he moved to Montana and he blew the competition away.
LAMBEAU: Yeah, so who was he?
SEAN: Ted Kaczynski.
LAMBEAU: Never heard of him.
SEAN: Hey, Timmy!
TIMMY: Yo!
SEAN: Who’s Ted Kaczynski?
TIMMY: Unabomber.

Ted Kacyznski spent his career as a Mathematician composing brilliant mathematical formulas of such esoteric abstraction and high specialized nature that the number of people on Earth who could understand and appreciate them number in the tow digits. The formulas, naturally, serve no practical purpose.

Imagine, though, that something he did becomes the basis of a as-of-now completely unimaginable technology. A technology that shifts paradigms of human experience around and reshapes the landscape of how we perceive our existance. (In the process, of course, humans serve this technology in equal measure to how the technology serves humans.)

Kacyznski’s current status as extreme Luddite, mad-man, hermit terrorist, et al would then fall by the wayside, and his name would become synonymous with this Paradigm-Shifting technology. (The nature of his writings, personal and political gripes relegated to mere curiosity, a footnote in the history of this Grand Technological Breakthrough.)

That would ironic.

Fox News is supposed to be giving us the profile of what a true conservative looks and acts like. However, what they truly give us is a world where every opinion is raped and beaten in confrontational paradigm. They make conservatism look like a war. The well groomed Sean Hannity prattles on about how the American hegemony is good for the world, while his so–called liberal sidekick adds to the conversation “We’ll be right back.”

Even Air America, in their attempts to bring some balance, creates stereotypes about liberals that make you wonder if you are being sold an image to identify with. We are all to believe that liberals are nothing more than effeminate, soft– spoken wisecrackers like Al Franken, or pseudo–lesbian brain trustees like Janeane Garofalo.

It is a good point about Air America, though I’ll just have to brush aside the phrase “pseudo-lesbian” and picking up with “brain trustee” (You can add “Hollywood Elite” into the equation). Randi Rhodes represents another odd Liberal Stereotype, if the idea of a slightly quirky aunt makes sense as a Liberal Type. In the realm of Donkey versus Elephants (which isn’t where Clyde Lewis would want anyone to riff off into from that, but I don’t particularly care), perhaps Air America Radio is doing Brand Air America a favour by shoe-horning onto their assortment of affiliates the North Dakotan Ed Schultz. (I don’t know what you can say about Matt Malloy, whether or not he is Mr. Lewis’s “soul brother”.)

So what do you have? A station with a dedicated listenership wherever over 20 Starbucks are located within a 5 mile radius. (And not a Walmart in sight!)

So, therein lies the secret to programming a different Liberal Talk Radio Station. Find and create another type for the listener to identify with. We now enter into the domain of “Red State”-land.

Start with Ed Schultz, because he’s now pretty easily identifiable. Convince the Texan Jim Hightower to try another go at talk radio. (You now have the format ready to go and don’t get sucked into the equivalent of a Garth Brooks song in between Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin.) Jerry Springer seems to be a good bet… he has a radio show.

Beyond those three, I don’t really know. Scour the South for regional balance of sorts. Maybe you can toss in Lionel, who’s a bit off in this brand identity (I guess he’s an ACLU Libertarian-minded person), because we need to program something here.

“I think it’s the ultimate sign of disrespect. We have troops dying for us,” Land Park resident Mark Cohen said.

“Even if you don’t agree with it, he has the right to state his opinion. I don’t find it offensive at all,” Land Park resident Cece Williams said.

…

The matter has been reported to the police department and to the city attorney. The City Council has even heard about it, but said they can’t solve the problem.

“Unfortunately or fortunately, this is protected speech by the First Amendment … so there is nothing we can do about it,” Sacramento City Councilman Rob Fong said.

Exchanges from a message board forum:

#1: This guy seems a bit confused. Or maybe he came close to admitting that he’d like the First Amendment to go the way of the Dodo, but covered his butt by his inclusion of the word “fortunately.”

#2: Personally, whether you are for or against the war, I can’t think of a more appropriate way to express one’s strong feelings about people killing and dying than in one’s own neighborhood, on one’s own private living space.

I have a feeling that people who are trying to pass a law against this form of expression are the ones that really want to live in a complacent and smug world of denial, and care very little if anything about the troops’ well being or the well being of the Iraqi civilians.

#3: where I live- if I had hung that up my house woud be stoned!
windows broken ,and outright shouting by the people living around me.

Seeing that the place I live has 80% Bush death cult supporters.
there would even be the risk of being shot.

This is kind of funny.

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Once upon a time, somewhere in the mid-90s, before anyone had really figured out how the Internet was going to be sorted out, bills were being written and pended out in the US Congress to outlaw linking… which, in Internet-land, makes absolutely no sense.

Well… the cursory link / excerpt:

After being involved in a piece of history, members of the 120th Engineer Combat Battalion returned home Monday to a Valentine’s Day family reunion filled with kisses, hugs and some heartbreak.

Editorial Comment: I think that is very nice.

That was a bit bizarre. Tom Hart was on “The Majority Report With Jeanine Garofalo and Sam” last night. It was a lackluster interview, replete with a routine that is getting older and older, and I could never quite figure out how Tom Hart ended up on the show. (The hosts, on more than one occasion, referred to “Owen Hart”, pro-wrestler that he be.

For some reason they discussed Grover Norquist for the bulk of their time. Was that due to a small mention in the original 1994 Hutch Owen’s Working Hard. (Nay… I look and see that he’s there in the archives, big as life, from the start.

These guys seem to be have been underwhelmed with Tom Hart.

They’ve never read “Love Looks Left”?

I wonder if Al Gore had this equation in his mind as the week wore on during his “Media Blitz” and Saturday Night Live reherssals back in December of 2002:

If he decided to run for president, he would nix the “Hot Tub with Joseph Lieberman” scene.
If he decided not to run for preisent, he would do the “Hot Tub with Joseph Lieberman” scene.

It was hilarious, as was that entire episode, but… you see… it’s a little…

… well, gay.

Anyway, that’s just a random wonderment I have.

What holds me back from bemoaning these survey results completely, swiping at “kids today”, and taking the opportunity to do a standard curse of our educational system, perhaps personalizing it to the point of cursing a particular seventh grade teacher as a personification of “Outcome Based Education”, is the gut feeling I have that It’s probably not that different amongst the whole population at large.

Take this result as a bit of evidence:

74% say people shouldn’t be able to burn or deface an American flag as a political statement; 75% mistakenly believe it is illegal.

Once or twice a year, the “Flag Burning Ban Amendment” is trotted out to score political points. If a majority of people thought a person shouldn’t be legally able to burn or deface an American flag, politicos wouldn’t bother trotting this bill out on such a regular basis.

I think I’ve already said this: I’m not a fan of The Pledge of Allegiance. After the first six words, the question plagues me “Why am I pledging Allegiance to a flag?” If someone tells me that a dear relative fought to preserve the flag, my thought is “If they did, they fought for a stupid reason.” (If you had a choice between living in a Totalitarian Dictatorship that left the Stars and Stripes as the Official flag and living our dear Republic, which would you choose?)

“The foundations of the country are vehemently about its citizens’ right to be defiant to tyrnnical and Godless authority.”

It is at this point in time that I recommend we stop having our kids recite the Pledge of Allegiance and have them recite The Bill of Rights. (Previously I thought The Declaration of Independance of the Preamble of the Constitution would be a just substitute.)

It’s a bit more organic to our nation and sends a better message, methinks.

Provocative, I have to say. I had heard this line of thought before. It’s a caller to Clyde Lewis’s show, and it goes like this:

“I DO NOT Support the Troops. Screw the Troops! It’s an all volunteer military, and they knew what they were doing when they signed the contract. Money for college? It’d be better if they danced on a pole or sold pot!”

Two more callers called in, with some form of agreement. “I was talking with this woman, who said ‘I Have a son who joined the National Guard and has been sent to Iraq.’ I say, ‘I’m sorry.’ She said, ‘No… no… He’s defending our freedom!’ At that point…”

Shades of the (seemingly) oversold stories of Vietnam War soldiers returning and being spit upon. Shades of “Hanoi Jane Fonda”. (IE “Heck, in a weird way, I support the troops in Iraq more than us — IT’S Their Country they’re defending! We have no right to be there.”)

The phrase “Support the Troops” is an emotional hostage act. Half the time a media figure uses the line “no matter how you feel about this war”, it is almost instantaneously undercut with “because they are defending your freedom.” The “anti-warriors” who do gravitate toward the line “Support the Troops” is a sort of kicking away of free will by sort of infantilizing the troops — they’re… young, scratch free will away from them because of their early adulthood. Whether that is any more or less honest than a sort of obscene “hero worship” the “warriors” who gravitate toward the line “Support the Troops”, I do not know.

A game of semantics which is best left to boot away, and leave the lines of Logical Vigour for a different topic altogether. Consider it an experiment in holding multiple contridictory competing thoughts in your mind at one time.

I leafed through (actually only really read the dustjacket) A Patriot’s History to the United States at Borders. The cover, title, and for that matter subtitle, immediately give it away as a response to the famed left-wing Howard Zinn book A People’s History of the United States, a book that veers toward a sort of Manichaean Morality Lesson for America’s Left. (If it’s required for me to explain my problems with that book, I’ll get to it sometime later.)

“From Columbus’s Great Discovery to the War on Terror”, eh? Columbus… them’s fighting words. Get back to Howard Zinn and it brings to mind the lecture from Portland State University circa 1992 broadcast perpetually on Public Access, wherein you see Zinn quoting a history saying (quick google search brings this up to me) “He had his faults and his defects, but they were largely the defects of the qualities that made him great—his indomitable will, his superb faith in God and in his own mission as the Christ-bearer to lands beyond the seas, his stubborn persistence despite neglect, poverty and discouragement. But there was no flaw, no dark side to the most outstanding and essential of all his qualities—his seamanship.”

As a result, many history books devote more space to Harriet Tubman than to Abraham Lincoln…

The paragraph is something of a farce. I recall my fifth grade classroom, decorated on the wall with the 41 presidents — that is Washington through Bush the Better. It was undoubtedly set up in that way to encourage conversations such as happened thusly: “Kennedy kicks butt!” “No, you fool! Lincoln!!” (The textbook lesson of that year largely jumped from Washington — maybe Jefferson with the “Louisiana Purchase” — to Lincoln. To fill in the spaces and a sense of time, the teacher laid out coloring pages of all these obscuro-presidents… which was where my conversation to the conversation came in “William Henry Harrison beat them all!”)

The “Harriet Tubman” canard? There is this sense I have that the average public school student simply ain’t ever going to be President of the United States, and pretty well can come out with more on how to be an effective citizen from the life of Harriet Tubman than from any of the presidents. Note the dust-jacket line “And they conclude that America’s place as a world leader derived largely from the virtues of our own leaders.” No room for the old line “If you don’t like the news today, go out and make your own news.”

Regrettably, the inside dust jacket is not available at Amazon.com, because the final bullet-point for the book made me scoff. “Learn how, even when America fights a war for the wrong reason, America still spreads freedom.” A historical argument for the “Noble Lie”? Here, we chime in with a great debate point: “Huh? Actually, I could care less whether what’s being said is true or not… we’ll spread freedom no matter.”

Well… whatever.