Primary tabs

Talk Radio Take on Obama

Listening to conservative talk radio is painful. The right wing radio hosts should be required to read Surgeon General warning labels because their programs are hazardous to our mental health.The radio hosts on these programs don't just express their ignorance. They celebrate it. Unfortunately for me, I am too curious. I often wonder about how they will creatively distort reality to match their audience expectations. This week I listened to Rush Limbaugh and his clone-in-the-Triangle, Bill Lemay of WPTF radio. I can listen for only a few minutes at a time (see Surgeon General warning). Therefore, the following is just a sampling of comments about Obama and his inauguration from the right wing radio perspective:- True conservatives should hope that Obama fails.
- Obama's goal is to implement a "socialist agenda."
- Bill Ayers is going to be running the Dept. of Education from behind the scenes.
- Obama's inaugural address was "a rambling, disjointed, buzz kill."
- There were no memorable lines in the speech and the audience was down and depressed. There was no buzz.
- The liberal media would have told us the speech was great "even if Obama read his car's owner's manual."

Perhaps, in the future we can create a public health response to the disease of right wing talk radio. The conservative entertainers will always have a right to speak but, I think young people should be inoculated against illegitimate sources of information that do not even try to speak the truth.

Michael B. Owen

Comments

Rush who?

Submitted by AHands on January 21, 2009 - 5:39pm

Limbaugh—is he still on the air? I suppose it has all been a big buzz kill for him.I voted for Ayers as a write-in, even though he didn't do enough to end the war. "The red man can get ahead, man" was a pretty good one, but from The Man Himself:

it has been the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things -- some celebrated, but more often men and women obscure in their labor -- who have carried us up the long, rugged path towards prosperity and freedom.For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life. For us, they toiled in sweatshops and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip and plowed the hard earth.For us, they fought and died in places Concord and Gettysburg; Normandy and Khe Sahn.Time and again these men and women struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that we might live a better life. They saw America as bigger than the sum of our individual ambitions; greater than all the differences of birth or wealth or faction.This is the journey we continue today. We remain the most prosperous, powerful nation on Earth. Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began. Our minds are no less inventive, our goods and services no less needed than they were last week or last month or last year. Our capacity remains undiminished. But our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions -- that time has surely passed.Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.

Thanks

Submitted by mbo123go on January 21, 2009 - 7:39pm

Thanks for refocusing my attention back to the positive rhetoric of Obama and away from toxic prose of the radio nuts. They seem to worry that Obama will "reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine" for the communication industry. I really don't know what the Fairness Doctrine is but if it requires right wing radio stations to present two sides of an issue I think it is a great idea.