Seldom does a week go by
when the likes of a Bill O‘Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, Ann Coulter or
others of their ilk don‘t make some idiotic, antisocial or otherwise sociopathic
public statement over the airwaves. That‘s what their constituents expect; it‘s
what they tune in for, and what these hucksters of sensationalism are more than
willing to give them to keep them listening/watching. But why, oh why, must
there always be a response, not only from the blogosphere, but from the MSM as
well, and why must we elevate the worthless claptrap purveyed by these
shlockmeisters to the realm of being discussed, much less debated.
Whether it‘s the
manufactured “War on Christmas,” the invitation to Al Qaeda to bomb San
Francisco or, in Robertson‘s case, the curse called down on an entire community
because of its stand against Intelligent Design, the asininity of the statements
by this group of out-there commentators is self evident. So why does the
blogosphere go ballistic on these idiots every time they make one of their
bizarre pronouncements, and why does the MSM pay them any attention when doing
so only multiplies the impact of statements that so richly deserve to be
consigned to oblivion? One site, Media Matters for America, has made a career
of contradicting virtually every syllable that comes out of O‘Reilly‘s mouth, as
though anything the man says should really be listened to, much less debunked.
Some bunk just doesn‘t need to be debunked.
On any given day, in any
major city in this country, it isn‘t difficult to find some poor misbegotten
soul ranting on some street corner, be it about the second coming of Jesus, the
imminent end of the world, alien abductions or an occasionally more believable
subject. “Speaker‘s Corner”in London‘s Hyde Park actually sets aside a space
for these oratorical bloviators. But no one sees fit to dignify these harangues
by responding to them, or even by paying any attention to them.
Are the likes of
O‘Reilly or Limbaugh worthy of any more credence than these lunatics? So what
if they have audiences that number in the millions? They‘ve already been turned
into irretrievable mental zombies by O‘Reilly and his ilk, to whom such things
as either facts or logic are utterly irrelevant. If what H.L Mencken once said
(“no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American
public”) is true (surely our last two national elections proved that), it‘s time
we stopped resisting the fact that there will always be people in this country
who will be credulous enough to believe people like Bill O‘Reilly.
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