The Fok News DKOS Group publishes a nightly diary summary of Keith's opinion blog Fok News.
Tonight's Olbermann commentary has video homework. It's a 1946 Bugs Bunny cartoon called Racketeer Rabbit.
The "money quote" that Keith will refer to is between 2:25 and 3:00.
In the cartoon, The boss is dividing up a stack of bills at a table to his gangsters..
Bugs puts on disguises and and with different character voices repeatedly comes back to the table for a share of the loot.
Keith asks a question...
When the country has rejected, one-by-one, the antiquated principles of the Republican party; when two cops at the ballgame in Clearwater today come up to me and say “we’re Conservatives but this crap with our unions here and in Wisconsin has gotta stop”; when enough Republicans have already rejected Scott Walker that if another election were held today he’d be voted out of office two months after he assumed it – how does the Right Wing/Media/Industrial Complex continue to throw around so much weight?
He answers it with a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
They do what Bugs did to Rocky. Every five or six rabid Conservatives we hear on talk radio, or see at protests, or read online, may not actually exist. They are just Bugs Bunnies, wearing different hats.
And then he concludes with the evidence....
The latest evidence to support a brilliant but heinous effort to forcibly swing public opinion via the use of phony advocates? A remarkable piece by a website on Jewish faith called The Tablet nonchalantly reveals that the same company that syndicates the shows of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity has also employed actors to call in to those shows and pretend to be real people with real opinions and real problems.
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The conclusion of The Temple article observes how our media is "increasingly used to shake the foundations of the real". We know that television is wall to wall acting, but radio seems different. Radio seems real.
We listen to radio because the voice, we think, doesn’t lie. The voice is immediate and intimate and present. We attach ourselves to radio personalities with an intensity we’d never dream to extend to, say, television hosts—
It is time to question this notion as well. The next caller you hear, the next personal story that makes you sniffle or shout with rage, may be the doing of someone at some faceless casting agency, hiring actors and writing scripts designed to titillate. The point is, without something like the hoshen, an object capable of channeling the celestial spirit and telling truth from lie, we’ll never know.
How do we know the next voice we hear on the radio is not like the crafty prankster with many voices, long ears, and carrot?