In light of yet another terrorist act committed by a right-wing psychopath, can we for a second examine what people like him and Dr. Tiller's killer are likely listening to all day long.
How can one even turn on AM radio nowadays? What emits from it is nothing but a steady stream of eliminationist poison. I find myself baffled at how many conservative talk show hosts have a significant national profile. The list I can come up with, off the top of my head, is huge. Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage, Beck, Ingraham, Levin, Boortz, Gallagher, Medved, Larson, Prager, Liddy, Severin, Gibson, Cunningham, Hewitt. These people all have 3 hr. shows, and come on, in some form, one after the other, on most AM radio stations in this country.
The kind of hate that drips from the very pores of these people is well known. I don't think the mental toll that listening to these people for 6,9,12 hrs a day could have on a person should be taken lightly. As a liberal, who knows how full of BS they are, listening to them for more than 10 minutes is unbearable. For a already conservative person, who uses them to validate what they think they already know about the world, they are destructive. Many, many people get their information from the radio, especially in rural areas. Many of them don't have high speed internet access, and don't have time to watch the news on TV, even the network news casts. When these people commute to work, or are working in the field, they likely run into a local conservative host in the morning, Limbaugh at noon, Hannity at 3pm, and and steady cocktail of the others throughout the night. 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week, 365.
Much of this goes beyond political disagreements. I can literally feel how much these people hate the fact that Obama is president. I have no doubt that they would feel no remorse, indeed would be glad if something awful happened to our president. They all but excused the Tiller murder, and dismissed the one today. What is so sickening is that they KNOW people like James Von Brunn and Scott Roeder are in their audience. And they feed them lies, falsehoods and hate that only make these loons nuttier. They do it for millions of dollars they will never need, all while pissing on people just trying to get by (often their own blind audience) from their Ivory radio towers. Aside from murderers and rapists, I can think of no more vile people in this country than the right wing radio set. Does anyone have any doubt we will continue to see incidents like the horrific tragedy we saw today?
