Extreme right-wing personalities have become so prevalent and so powerful that they now – for the first time in history – hold an unrivaled amount of influence within the GOP. This scares me.
Like it or not, right-wing personalities have a direct influence on public opinion in the United States. These people hold serious power.
But the problem is not that they are influential, powerful or that they have large audiences; the problem lies in the fact that they are extremely disrespectful, biased, increasingly outrageous, and loose with the facts. The problem is that they spread fear, hate, and violence on a daily basis.
Take right-wing talk-star Micheal Savage for example. Savage is so out of control that he is currently banned from entering the United Kingdom, or any other country within the European Union for that matter. Savage appears on the UK's no-entry list alongside Fred 'God Hates Fags' Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church and KKK Grand-Wizard Don Black.
How did Savage manage to make this no-entry list? According to government documents,
Savage is "considered to be engaging in unacceptable behaviour by seeking to provoke others to serious criminal acts and fostering hatred which might lead to inter-community violence."
So Savage can forget about attending the Olympics!
I'm surprised Savage was the only right-wing talker to make this list quite frankly. I wish he was the only extremist, but there are many more – so many that I cannot begin to touch on them all in this one diary.
Rush Limbaugh – possibly the most powerful voice within the GOP – constantly goes on the air, degrades the office of the Presidency, and spews his craziness, making outrageous blanket statements like “Barack Obama is destroying the United States economy”, and “this guy [President Obama] has a chip on his shoulder, he is angry at this country, he is not proud of it.”
How about last October, when Rush took to the airwaves to proclaim that the
“Lords Resistance Army are Christians, fighting the Muslims in Sudan, and Obama has sent troops – U.S. Troops – to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them ... ugh, are we going to help the Egyptians wipe out the Christians [next]”.
Remember that? The Lord’s Resistance Army – for those of you who don’t remember – is an African militant group, led by Joseph Kony, infamous for brutal murders, torture, rape, and child-soldiers.
Limbaugh was just so eager to push a new Obama conspiracy theory – even if the story had no basis in reality – that he forgot to include any facts.
I remember listening to Sean Hannity – on his radio show in December of 2009 – rant and rave about how “the President is not in fact a legitimate citizen by birth”. I also remember watching him on television last winter claiming that Osama Bin Laden would still be alive today, “if he [President Obama] had it his way”.
And the extreme rhetoric is only getting worse as election-day draws closer.
I read a diary by duke1983 – here at the DailyKos – describing how Neil Boortz went on-air last Thursday; urging every employer to fire any employee who may support the President this fall. Combine that with Michelle Bachmann's unwarranted attacks on Huma Abedin two weeks ago and this begins to sound like a bad re-run of a Joe McCarty episode.
On a personnel note, I have mixed emotions about the newfound power of the extreme right-wing within the GOP.
I am a progressive. An out of control, extreme GOP helps progressives by turning-off independents and encouraging them to vote Democratic.
But on the other hand, it upsets and scares me that extreme right-wingers have so much power. It scares me that they have such a powerful voice within the GOP and it scares me that these people have a powerful influence on the American public.