I just read Laura Clawson's Sean Hannity proposes adopt a woman birth control program, about one of Hannity's latest attempts to manufacture outrage among conservatives. How stupid does he think his audience is?
They're conservatives. The one thing his audience wants more than anything else is to not have to pay for anything. The "I don't want to pay for it" party. But covering birth control is a whole lot cheaper than covering babies -- so if it's paying for things that's under your skin, you're really confused.
Confidential to Sean: The insurance companies have done this calculation. They're covering birth control to keep costs down.
So, how about that war on women, Sean?
Actually, women are just a prop for you. The war is really on your audience. Make them afraid (of the government taking their money away), manufacture outrage and get them really angry so they think with their guts and not their heads, and then make fun of whomever you want to target -- tell them that your target is the one who will take their money and squander it. And make sure to give them a strawman version of your political opponents. If you don't regularly reinforce their aversion to liberals, they might actually listen to a Democrat someday.
No worries. They won't think about a damn thing you've said. They've been listening to you day after day for years, and they are a reliable noise machine now. They are Pavlov's dogs. You ring the bell, and they salivate at whatever object you hold in front of them.
You'll say any stupid thing that's necessary to keep your noise machine clanging and hollering. Racism? No problem. Sexism? You bet. False equivalence is your logical fallacy of choice, but you do a great job of covering spectrum. So go to work and make sure that your listeners are dumber today than they were yesterday.
Even Limbaugh has less contempt for his audience than you do.
And as long as you hold up women as your target du jour -- that's a proxy war on women. What will you do when your audience realizes that the war is really on them?