First They Came for the Political Shock Jocks

The title is paraphrase the old poem that originally referred to the Nazis; "First they came for the Communists". Of course, like a lot of "left legend", the Nazis coming for the communists doesn't really somehow mean that the Nazi's were "right wing" or "conservative", it means that they were an authoritarian socialist (National Socialist ...) group that was going to war with the communists on their eastern front. They also came for religious leaders other than the Jews that opposed them, and the left certainly doesn't ascribe any moral authority to religion because the Nazis came for them too.

Like all other humans, it is pretty easy to not give your enemies enough credit. Just one of the places that the left will need to use the chisel when they finally remove God from the public square is around the top of the Jefferson Memorial: "I have sworn upon the alter of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.". I need to read a Jefferson biography, I suspect that back in those days, even though there were a lot of fights between Federalists(modern Republicans) and the Republicans(modern Democrats) the fall to the left was so early that those Republicans would find todays Republicans to be positively leftist, and be unsure what a modern Democrat even was. Come to think of it, in that they would most likely have a lot in common with a modern Democrat, but I digress.

Do I like, approve of, respect, etc Don Imus? No, absolutely not. He should have never been on the radio / TV in the first place. As part of the destruction of meaning, the left uses the clever ruse that "pornography = sexually explicit material". Actually the constant removal of symbolic meaning; destroying all forms of "covering or distance" (as in keeping private life private, formal communication, honor, standards), respect for position or proffession and a host of other areas too numerous to mention is really far more damaging than mere sex. The Imus stock and trade has been belittling public figures of all stripes and both political parties. Yes, he has generally been much more generally a friend of the left than the right, but he made his living saying very outrageus things about people. BTW, he was a HUGE and obvious supporter of Harold Ford Junior, there is NO ISSUE that the guy is a racist in any way shape or form.

So what does this have to do with not giving my enemies enough credit? In allowing Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson the power to remove Imus, we set a precedent. The precedent is WAY different from the Dixie Chicks. Their public decided that they didn't want to listen to them for awhile after they spouted off about Bush. There was a lot of discourse about how the Dixie Chicks was a "Free Speech Issue", but in fact, the Dixie Chicks were just a marketing issue. There was no equivalent of Sharton/Jackson out working to take them down ... you can't name a single person "leading a charge", because there wasn't one.

If Imus had lost his program because ratings dropped and the station said they were taking him off the air, then I'd say "great"--over this comment or thousands of others over the years. It is a horrible statement of our "culture" (really lack thereof) that he or Howard Stern are even ON the air at all. BUT, in taking Imus out, the target was chosen wisely. Imus has effectively "no friends"--he has been enough of an equal opportunity abuser that nobody on either side is standing up for him. The left finds it "chilling" when people don't want to have their TAX DOLLARS go to support a crucifix in urine or the Virgin Mary covered with elephant dung. Rush Limbaugh and Fox News being on the air are also chilling to the left as are the Ten Commandments in a public place, or the Easter Bunny at the city building up in the cities.

We hear a lot about the "Facist Theocracy" that we are either living in, or on the verge of depending on which lefty one talks to. What does one call it when Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson decide who gets to be on the air?