I admit it.
I listen to sports talk radio in the morning.
I have a ten minute drive to get to the train station in time for my 5:40 am train, followed by an hour and fifteen minutes on the commuter rail before I reach school. And before I have my coffee and before I finish up my preparations for the day's courses, it's kind of nice to ease in to the day with a mindless diversion.
I'm not proud of this. I know sports talk is home to the kinds of misogyny, homophobia, sensationalism, and anti-intellectualism that most of us here find abhorrent. I don't completely lose my critical capacity when I switch over to the AM dial. But I love baseball, and the basketball season just got under way again too, so I try to stomach the troglodyte messengers to catch up on what I've missed during the past day in the world of sports.
But lately, it's not even possible to enjoy this ten-minute distraction.
That's because many mornings - and almost every morning now that we're so close to the election - instead of finding out who won the World Series or whether my Atlanta Hawks opened up the season on a positive note, the DJs on Boston's WEEI (carried on an affiliated station in Worcester - gotta love media consolidation) have seen fit to hold forth on politics for the first segment of their show.
And let me tell you, they give Rush Limbaugh a run for his money.
This morning's uninterrupted stream of ill-informed, nonsensical bile included one of the DJs claiming that Obama is an anti-Semite because of his tangential connection to Rashid Khalidi. Meanwhile, one DJ moaned the words "hope" and "redistribution," while another explained that he was reduced to the moaning because he had forgotten to wear his aluminum foil hat and had succumbed to the brainwashing in Obama's commercial last night. And before they were through (and they were still going when I got to the train station), they had even tossed off casual references to Rezko, Wright, and Ayers (the unholy trinity of guilt by association smears).
In other words, during the course of a ten-minute drive this morning, I was treated to a distilled version of the right wing's electoral strategy this year. It's a not-so-subtle blend of lies and innuendo meant to foment race and class-based resentment: Obama's not one of "us." He doesn't hate Arabs or Muslims enough. He wants to give "our" money to minorities who don't deserve it. He pals around with people who hate this country, and so he must hate it too.
And what I heard this morning is echoed in bits and pieces by St. John the McMaverick and the Neiman Marxist on the campaign trail. And it's in the email forwards from all-too-credulous friends and relatives clogging up my inbox. And it's bouncing back and forth from every corner of the wingnutosphere to every last wave on the right wing radio spectrum.
The thing is, at this point, there's nothing new here. Obama's beaten back every single kitchen sink that's been heaved at him at him since it started to look like he may actually be the nominee. And now that they've run out of sinks, they've started stripping the rusty pipes that lead to the fetid sewer of right wing thought. You can be sure that they're going to keep swinging those pipes with all their might from now until Tuesday.
But this is not the time to worry about whether the blows are landing. In these last days, the best way to parry the wingers' attacks is to work harder to make sure that they have fewer ill-informed targets to hit. Phonebank. Canvass. Donate.
Yes we can.