I'm sure there were lots of affiliate and sponsor defections when Ed Schultz used the same word
to describe Laura Ingraham. (Mr Ed only has one tenth of El Rushbo's listeners though)
I've been preparing similar thoughts on both Ed and his former cry-baby colleague, Keith Oberman. The hostile ravings of those two hate merchants have been drawing free passes for years, thanks to their head-count starved ratings. Comparatively few listeners even hear their lunacy, so what you have is that ages old philosophical question about the proverbial tree nobody is around to hear or see falling in the forest. Does it even matter? Nobody's listening (watching) anyway.
The point of my contribution to the Rush-to-flush-Rush dialogue is the bubbling hypocricy now oozing to the surface. Rush stuck his foot in his mouth, for sure. But both KO & Ed do this stuff nearly everyday. I'm beginning to wonder if those two poster chidren for anger management brush their teeth with a solution made from Dr Scholls Foot Powder. Yet they dodge the bullet of consequence almost every time, in part because of the common ideological thread weaving it's way down from the CEOs of both NBC and CURRENT, but, more ludicrously, the fact that they have so few viewers and listeners.
Limbaugh's predicament is a nasty one, and he has nobody to blame but himself. Still, like the residual fallout from eating a bad breakfast burrito, this too shall pass.
My years of watching the conversation flow through the sluice of these forums reminds me that we all approach life very differently. We can hear the same person on TV or Radio and come away with completely different evaluations. We go listen to our favorite person and we cut them some slack and come away saying "He/she is so nice when talking compared to those idiots over on the other channel." And the next forum participant sees it exacly in the opposite way.
Many of us can sit in social situations with our friends who walk on the other side of the fence and have civil conversations about all of these issues. And it helps us understand how other people come to their political positions.
But I must observe this little two-part conversation that I quote above is beyond credibility. KO and Big Ed know they are to some extent entertainers. They make no bones about being partisan toward the left side of center. But nothing, nothing, nothing that I have ever heard either of them do has any resemblance of what Rush did for three hours a day, three days in a row. How can we ever maintain our confidence that this system of our we call "self government" will ever work when we have voters who cannot listen to three human beings talk and then evaluate the content of those three people with integrity?
Elections have always contained an element of rowdiness... but it looks like this election year may go down in history as some kind of new genre. I think this would be an interesting debate topic for college level debaters: "Resolved, it is true that as talk radio and television have become more established, the American election process has become less trustworthy."
