09
Jun
Laura Ingraham: Right-Wing Radio’s High Priestess of Hate
The following is an excerpt from Shock Jocks: Hate Speech and Talk Radio by Rory O’Connor with Aaron Cutler (AlterNet Books, 2008).
Laura Ingraham is … different. Not only is Ingraham younger than many other conservative radio personalities (at 45, she’s more than a decade from Limbaugh’s cohort), and the only female among them, but she also brings to the airwaves a snarky brand of aggressive humor fused with an attack-dog sensibility that she expresses with a chalk-on-gravel voice. Her goal is not to assert her own glory, but to rip apart her enemies, which include everyone from liberals and “elites” to, from time to time, even President George W. Bush and presidential hopeful John McCain. Her style of argumentation is bare-bones simple; in a 1997 piece for Salon.com, Eric Alterman wrote that Ingraham just laughed in response to a position he took on television during the 1996 election. How could he counter that?
Ingraham often uses laughter as a weapon. One of her show’s most popular parodies, “But … Monkey,” interposes the sound of a screeching monkey over a sound bite from a political figure. Victims have included Democratic senators Harry Reid and Barbara Boxer as well as conservative gurus like columnist Charles Krauthammer. Other regular segments include “Deep Thought of the Day” and “Lie of the Day.” Ingraham also makes great use of pop culture clips (she plays the theme song from the television show “Flipper” when discussing John Kerry), and her production values are generally superb. Like many other successful hosts, she is often very funny, and her rapid-fire pacing and easy banter with her younger male producers (all three are in their early 20s) has more in common with the liberal “Stephanie Miller Show” than the hard-line commentary sometimes heard on conservative talk shows. At a deeper level, however, despite the comedy, Ingraham takes what she does quite seriously.
The rabid nature of her assault against immigration reform is a good example. Ingraham has perhaps been more strongly anti-immigration than any other talk personality except Michael Savage. Her show even features a regular segment called “The Illegal Immigration Sob Story” alert, in which she reads news pieces she feels are biased toward illegal immigrants. When she had White House spokesman Tony Snow on her program, she began by asking him why the Bush administration was dragging its heels on immigration reform. After sarcastically apologizing for interrupting his talking points, she said, “69 percent of Americans, 85 percent of the GOP, 55 percent of the Democrats want the border enforced. Does that affect you guys, or do you guys just blow it off?”
In the two-for-one combination that all too often serves conservative radio well, Ingraham once claimed that the immigration bill was an attempt by the mainstream media to make more people liberals. Anyone who still wonders whether talk radio had an influence on the bill’s defeat should look at Ingraham’s numbers; with more than 5 million weekly listeners, she is tied with Glenn Beck as the fourth most listened to radio talk show host in America. Alterman wrote that Ingraham’s popularity is due to her having “something more important than knowledge or experience. … She has star quality.” She is also fearless: She once confronted CNN host John Roberts for calling her “outspoken,” saying, “Do you guys introduce liberal commentators that way?”
She’s more aggressive than Limbaugh, more blatant than Hannity, and more rational than Beck or Savage, and although she often supports many of them (erroneously stating, for example, that Limbaugh never claimed the Clintons murdered Vince Foster), she is equally willing to call them out. She walked out of a “Hannity & Colmes” installment after the Don Imus “nappy-headed ho’s” controversy was twisted into a discussion of Democratic vices, and once asked on her radio program after an appearance on “The O’Reilly Factor,” “Why is Bill O’Reilly afraid of George Soros?” (In the same broadcast, Ingraham accused columnist Helen Thomas of working for Hezbollah, which has been identified by the U.S. government as a terrorist group.)
Ingraham was born and raised among the wealthy in Glastonbury, Conn., one of the state’s richest suburbs, although her mother worked as a maid to support the family. She went to Dartmouth University and became the first female editor of the conservative Dartmouth Review, where conservative author Dinesh D’Souza, a former boyfriend, also worked. While there, she secretly sent a reporter with a tape recorder to a campus gay students association meeting; she then outed the students in print and sent tapes of the meetings to the students’ parents. In the magazine she called association members “cheerleaders for latent campus sodomites.” (In 1997, more than a decade later, she wrote an article in the Washington Post detailing how she had changed her views in light of her brother Curtis’ coming out as gay.)
After graduating from Dartmouth, she went to work for the White House as a speechwriter; like her peers, conservative radio talkers Mark Levin and Hugh Hewitt, Ingraham began her professional career as a Reagan employee. She also obtained a law degree from the University of Virginia and clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. In 1995 she appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine — wearing a friend’s hip, leopard-print miniskirt — to illustrate an article about rising young conservatives. She then became both a regular MSNBC pundit and a commentator on the “CBS Evening News,” where she once asked Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres if the United States should bomb Libya or Syria in retaliation for a TWA flight explosion whose cause was unknown. Ingraham argues politics the way lawyers argue cases, as if there can be no possible interpretation other than her own. She is a class-A schmoozer who understands and exploits her verbal gifts to the fullest. Her skill for networking, along with her willingness to go for the jugular, has allowed her to break into the boys’ club of conservative radio.
In the late 1990s, she briefly hosted her own MSNBC cable television show, “Watch It!” (17 months and three time slots later, she joked that it should have been called “Watch It Get Canceled!”), and then, in 2001, launched “The Laura Ingraham Show” on radio. Ingraham’s particular blend of humor and argument apparently translated more effectively on radio than on television, and the Talk Radio Network now syndicates her show on nearly 325 terrestrial stations (it’s also available on Sirius and XM satellite radio). She has survived both a breast cancer scare and a broken wedding engagement, and continues to mock the establishment sardonically for three hours daily.
Ingraham has made more than her share of controversial comments, with frequent guest appearances on television affording her as much prominence as her radio work (for someone whose own television show was relatively short-lived, she spends a tremendous amount of time on other people’s programs). She’s no Neal Boortz, but she’s certainly more outrageous than, say, Hugh Hewitt. In one of her most famous incidents, on Election Day 2006 Ingraham encouraged listeners to jam the phone line of a toll-free Democratic Party service for reporting voting problems. No tangible consequences came of it (the Democrats won anyway), but it did put Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy up in arms.
Perhaps the greatest controversy of Ingraham’s career, however, came from comments she made about the Iraq War. In March of 2006, Ingraham went on a six-day tour of Iraq, visiting hospitals, orphanages and Iraqi villages. Upon returning to the United States, she appeared on NBC’s “Today Show” to criticize the mainstream American media for its unwillingness to report “the truth” of the Iraq situation. She said that NBC had focused on programming “Where in the World is Matt Lauer?” and that “to do a show from Iraq means to talk to the Iraqi military, to go out with the Iraqi military, to actually have a conversation with the people instead of reporting from hotel balconies about the latest IEDs going off.”
Washington Post writer Jonathan Finer later reported that Ingraham “rarely, if ever, spent a moment outside the protection of U.S. forces or a night outside a military base.” Finer compared her experience with that of the Iraq-stationed journalists she criticized, “almost all of whom operate without military protection.” While the National Review’s Tim Graham applauded Ingraham for bringing out the “facts the media self-defense teams ignore,” MSNBC host Keith Olbermann said on his show “Countdown” that Ingraham had dishonored the memory of the 80 American journalists killed and others kidnapped in Iraq, and that her comment “was not only unforgivable of her, it was desperate and it was stupid.”
Ingraham’s stance on women’s issues is divided at best; around the time of Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court appointment, she joined with a conservative group called Independent Women’s Forum that formed a committee to attack and discredit Anita Hill’s sexual harassment testimony against Thomas. (Independent Women’s Forum’s other activities included testifying in Congress for defunding the Violence Against Women Act and against affirmative action.) While she has criticized Fox for gratuitous, sexually explicit programming and helped lead a media campaign against the misogynistic rapper Akon, she also co-hosted a three-part PBS special on “the gender wars,” which explored “whether the advancement of women in virtually all areas of society can be achieved without a retreat, in some way, on the part of men.” One need not guess where Ingraham, a convert to Roman Catholicism, stands on a woman’s right to choose.
Among prominent female political figures, Hillary Clinton in particular provokes Ingraham’s ire. Her first book, The Hillary Trap, tried hard to make the case that Clinton was actually setting women’s rights back by arguing for special status for them. “The complaints of Western feminists look like petty self-absorption when you line them up against human rights abuses in Third World military dictatorships,” Ingraham wrote.
Ingraham also argues that a vocal minority — the “elites” — is threatening American values, and they should pipe down for the majority’s sake. Elites include anti-war demonstrators and university professors (”It’s well known that in the 1960s, leftists conquered the academies”). There is also no love lost between Ingraham and Europeans, who she believes fail to understand and appreciate America’s love for “God, guns and the death penalty.”
Ingraham’s third book, Power to the People, was released on Sept. 11, 2007. The patriotic timing was deliberate; the book is partly memoir but is mostly devoted to annihilating what she calls the “pornification” of America, an increasing cultural tendency toward flaunted sexuality and the loss of traditional values. She calls the book “a rallying cry for common sense and good old-fashioned American ideals of patriotism, family, faith and country,” one that encourages people to take matters into their own hands. In its first week, the book ranked third on the Amazon.com best-seller list.
“We are the government,” Ingraham said in an interview promoting the book. Controlling people by telling them how to think for themselves is a nice piece of demagogic trickery, though hardly original among the conservative bloc that crowds talk radio today. Ingraham has proved to be a master at such trickery — and like her or not, she’s every bit as funny, as appealing and as dangerous as each of her male peers and friends.
Laura Ingraham demonstrated how style instead of substance governs her radio show when she used English King Henry V’s “St. Crispin’s Day Speech” to illustrate why we need to stay in Iraq until victory. Ingraham movingly recited the speech, which resulted in the English victory over the French at Agincourt in 1415, as though all that was needed were fine words. In fact, the speech was actually written by William Shakespeare for a play, and although the English won the battle they weren’t able to maintain their occupation of France–losing–everything but Calais by 1453. Ingraham also referred to “the British,” when in fact the Scots were in alliance with France.
June 9th, 2008 at 2:14 pmAlso, as a Catholic Ingraham seems to have forgotten that the French heroine Joan of Arc was made a Saint in 1920. So she’s going against her own church in favor of the despicable English who burned Joan at the stake in 1431. Yeah, Ingraham is a real deep thinker alright.
I couldn’t make it past the first paragraph.
‘Chalk on gravel’
Talk about mixed metaphors!
June 9th, 2008 at 3:36 pmBe careful.
June 9th, 2008 at 4:50 pmYou’re at the precipice.
One more word and you’ll be giving this aging ventriloquist too much credence.
Ultimately a somewhat glibly helpful article but as is usual with Rory’s kind of journalism we get the endless what of who Ingraham is but not insight as to why she is right wing attack bitch full of anger and hate. Little depth psychology would be interesting but as usual no journalism seems capable of identifying the psychological DNA of vicious, hate ridden, angry miserable souls like this girl with dirty underwear. Her religion is compensatory to quell the dirty demons within. She believes in a god and the Baby Jesus to point that her hate and anger will be forgiven so she can sit around with the Catholic god for eternity? Give us a journalist who just for once can give us sense of the psychic why of right wing hatred, anger, fear, dishonesty. Always the description of the pathology but never a clue as to cause! Whole realm of writing and thinking awaits to be done to get us beyond the endless surface of American fascist sickness.
June 9th, 2008 at 6:50 pmWe all know Laura is a right wing extremist and a dirtbag. And she’s not bright at all.
But the key talking point to take out of this is what she did at Dartmouth. A) She dated Dinesh D’Souza, who calls for the US to align with Bin Laden, and B) she published the names of every person at a gay rights meeting and mailed tapes to their home.
Says all you need to know.
June 9th, 2008 at 8:21 pmLaura Ingraham, another fine example of hate speech radio, whose parents should’ve been spayed and neutered.
June 9th, 2008 at 11:28 pmWhy do you want to legitimize her by calling her a “high priestess? IMO, she is a high “skank,” more deserving of a sex club dance pole than a career as a writer.
If you continue to give credibility to such filth, then please remove me from your mailing list. I don’t need to waste my time reading about such garbage.
June 10th, 2008 at 10:45 amJust like other right wing idiots she spouts the “do as I say and not as I do” mantra…if she is so holy about other people’s personal lives then what about hers???? Has anyone not seen her nude pictures on Bartcop.com, oh I am sure she would blubber that she was young, but so were the gay people she outed. First class bitch in my book!
June 10th, 2008 at 12:55 pmI guess somebody has to write about them, but I find reading about right wing talk show hosts as boring as listening to them.
June 10th, 2008 at 9:22 pmWhat they say gets old and boring rather quickly, I agree. But, are the fascist Nazi monsters any less dangerous if we tune them out? There are still a lot of angry people out on the far right side of the political fence, and the practicioners of hate speech radio fuel the flames of that anger with their deceits. If we ignore them, much as we’d like to, they won’t go away. They will just keep egging it on and on until someone does something they shouldn’t. And then, they will do their usual pass the buck and disown any responsibility for their fires. Rush and company did a hasty retreat in ‘95 when Timothy McVeigh bombed the Murrah building in Oklahoma City. To hear Limbaugh and others talk, McVeigh was a disgruntled left winged liberal and the hate speech jocks and right winged conservatives had nothing to do with the bombing. Never mind that McVeigh was angry with the Clinton presidency over the David Koresh/Waco tragedy the year before and never mind that Rush and company had been flaming the Waco story in the wake of the tragedy.
June 10th, 2008 at 11:19 pmAnyone who listened to Limbaugh knew just how badly he hated the Clintons and the Clinton presidency. His rants and tirades against the Clintons started before Bill even was running for the nomination and continued after the Clintons left the White House. That much hate and to this day, I’ve never quite figured out just what the Clintons ever did to him. Limbaugh - like Hannity, Savage, O’Reilly, Ingraham, Coulter, Murdoch, Ailes and all the other fascists like to stir the pot of hatred as long as they can keep their hands clean but have someone else dirty their hands. Free speech is important for all political sides, even those on the far right and those on the far left. But, if we don’t guard the freedoms for everyone, the extremists on either side are all too willing to take it from you, And true freedom is too precious to let any one group take it from other groups of people.
Self-righteous prig who hasn’t had a deep thought her whole life. Better to think of her as a case study than as a journalist.
June 11th, 2008 at 1:54 amAnother angry soul, preaching to a choir of angry souls.
Outing college kids to their parents. That’s real classy. You want to know the psychology behind such behavior. It’s called narcissism.
Narcissism - # Excessive love or admiration of oneself. See Synonyms at conceit.
June 11th, 2008 at 10:07 am# A psychological condition characterized by self-preoccupation, lack of empathy, and unconscious deficits in self-esteem.
# Erotic pleasure derived from contemplation or admiration of one’s own body or self, especially as a fixation on or a regression to an infantile stage of development.
Laura Ingraham rules. And if you want to really focus on on-air hate speech, focus in on Randi Rhodes, Mike Malloy, Sam Seder, etc.
June 12th, 2008 at 9:16 pmI listen to Rhodes and the majority of the Air America jocks. What hate? Except for the fact they (except for one) did the right winged nuts a favor by torpedoing Hillary Clinton’s campaign, which I thought was very wrong. And very much like the kind of garbarge that would be uttered by Ingraham, Rush, Savage, Hannity, O’Reilly, etc. If they don’t like your side of the fence, well, you’ve got to remember your side of the fence has never been respectful of anyone who was the opposition. The far right wants respect? You want respect? You have to give it in order to receive it. As far as hate speech is concerned, the right winged conservative radtio-TV talk show hosts spew so much hate and lies in their venom, that even a rattlesnake would go out of its way to avoid them. By comparison, I haven’t heard much from the Air America group as far as any hate speech is concerned, Hillary being the sole exception. They don’t make up lies about the opposition the way the conservative talk show hosts do - and I’ve listened to both sides enough to know that those heads on the right side of the political fence still believe that being hateful and spiteful and lying about the opposition is okay because the ends justify the means. Is it better to keep things stirred up, so nothing ever gets done? Are we better off with a my-side-but-not-your-side? The left has been complaining for years about the things that were said on conservaative talk radio but nothing was ever done to amend the wrongs. That smug lack of respect, that ‘ha ha, screw you, we don’t have to give you any air time to present your side, so get lost!’ comes back to bite. Rather than focusing on what the opposition is saying, how about focusing on those you agree with, what they are saying and call them down when they say something hateful or spiteful or lying about? True conservatives and true conservatism doesn’t need the fascist goosesteppers of radio and TV championing their cause. I remember during President Clinton’s Monica scandal, that many conservative Republicans stated they’d never stand for one of their own lying as Clinton had done, yet Bush’s presidency has been one lie after another. Where were the majority of the Republicans on calling Bush down? Nowhere to be found on that point but dishonestly and disingenously standing behind the White House liar.
June 13th, 2008 at 4:24 pmI am proud to have been featured as a “shock jock” in Mr. O’Connor’s book. Trouble is, I almost lost count of the things he wrote about me that just aren’t true. For beginners .. I am not now nor have I ever been a carpenter. Where in the world did THAT come from? I seriously doubt that Roy has EVER listened to my show. If he wants some details on his errors, he can email me. He has the address.
June 14th, 2008 at 7:32 pmNeal Boortz
Nice to hear from you, Neal, and I’ll certainly be in touch about those alleged errors about you in my book. Perhaps you should have agreed to my requests to be interviewed for the book in the first place instead of dodging me?
By the way, on the subject of errors — my name isn’t ‘Roy!” One hopes you are more accurate on your radio show…
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June 15th, 2008 at 11:04 amWhen it is someone on the right, it is hate speech, but when it is someone on the left, it is considered outrage. GOD BLESS AMERICA, AND GOD BLESS LAURA INGRAM!!!
June 17th, 2008 at 8:26 amIf you’ve truly listened to either side, M Poet, you know that those on the rabid right foam at the mouth, have never been respectful towards those of us (including some conservatives) who disagreed with their views, yet who demand respect but are so unwilling to give it. The fact is, Ingraham and her sorry lot are fascist Nazis masquerading as representing your conservative values but who, in reality, have nothing in common with you. They wouldn’t be caught dead in the same space as you and others like you. Sorry if that sounds a little harsh but I don’t believe true conservatism should be best represented by the aristocratic, theocratic fasicist goosestepping snobs of talk radio/TV. I happen to believe true conservatism is better than that, just as true liberalism is better than some of those who espouse it. This isn’t your country and it’s not my country. It’s our country and everyone has a right to have a say in how it’s run. But, when all one side has been hearing is “my country, my beliefs but not yours” and has had difficulty getting the other side to debate their issues instead of preaching to their choirs, what should they expect when the opposition finally gets a chance to speak of their values? Love letters from the left to the right? It’s known as what goes around comes around and if the right-winged radio/TV talking heads and their listeners can’t take the same kind of abuse they’ve dished out, perhaps they’re too thin skinned.
June 17th, 2008 at 2:32 pmI’ve never read more misguided, idiot, liberal comments then in here. You people need to quit smoking so much pot and actually start reading stuff instead of drinking the democratic party cool aid. Laura Ingraham never posed nude for anyone you NIMROD…. it’s was Dr. Laura…. if you actually had more than 3 functional brain cells you might understand they are two different people.
Liberalism is a mental disorder and this site is just more proof of it!!!
June 18th, 2008 at 9:23 amWith either Laura, Jeff, when they want your opinion, they’ll give it to you! You’re not allowed to think for yourself; you’re only allowed to parrot what they’ve told you and no more.
June 18th, 2008 at 4:27 pmRush, Laura, Sean, Glenn; why do you insist they are hateful?? MY GOD are you and you so called common sense GONE?? Truth, like Nicholson said,”You can’t handle the TRUTH!!” That is why you have to BLAME others as hateful. Truth, I know IS scary, so to make yourself feel “strong” one must condem and critsize truth finders”. Sad commentary on the BLIND follwers of the Georbel mentality!! I would say, “G-d have mercy on you, but you probably want Allah”
June 18th, 2008 at 7:50 pmReread your own words. Intolerance is a form of hate. You make the argument that only the conservative radio or tv talk show mouthpieces and their followers are truthful. And that anyone who dares to disagree with them or you or others like you lack common sense. Well, TRUTH IS SCARY when you can’t handle the truth. And the inability to deal with the truth and lack of common sense is just as applicable on the conservative side. Why else do you suppose all these fabulous tellers of truth on the radio have people screening their calls? They only want people who agree with them. People who don’t think for themselves but rely on Rush and Sean and all the others to do their thinking for them. That’s not to say the liberal side doesn’t have screeners but at least they’re willing to take on callers who disagree with them and are willing to argue their case with the dissenters. If by chance, a liberal gets through to Rush, he’s not capable of arguing his point. Instead, he tries a lawyer trick of twisting their words around into saying something they didn’t say and get them to agree to that. Sometimes, it worked, other times, Rush fumbled so badly over his own response when the caller caught him in his own trap. As for the others, to make their point, they have to rely on shouting the caller down. Shouting doesn’t mean you’ve won the point, much as they or their followers would like to think. It just means they are extremely rude and disrespectful to people who disagree with them. They demand respect but are unwilling to give it. This country isn’t their country and it’s not your country or my country. It’s OUR country, ALL OF US. And each and every one of us has a right and a say in how our country is run. But, the only ones who seem to have trouble with that concept are the extremists on either side of the political fence. Don’t get me wrong: I’m liberal and proud of it but I don’t agree with everyone who call themselves a liberal. Do you agree with everyone who call themselves a conservative? Just because we dare to criticize the people you mention, you taake that as condemning truth finders. Rush wouldn’t know the truth if it bit him on his rear. What else can you say about a man who made the claim that President Clinton arranged for Sonny Bono to smack into a tree while skiing, killing him? And Rush did say that. I was listening to his show as he said it. That’s your truth finder? You want as your spokesman someone who doesn’t seem to grasp reality? Sean and Bill are all EGO. Bill will allow you to argue your point before he tries to twist it around and has to shout you down if he can’t make you give in to his superior thinking. And Hannity is so vain. When 9/11 happened, Hannity did his part by taking his act out on the road and it was almost all about Sean! Sean! Sean! He occasionally brought up the twin towers and the victims but his primary purpose was serving as cheerleader for his beloved Bush’s war in Iraq. Bush had no argument from me when our focus was on Afghanistan and finding Bin Laden but we didn’t need to be in Iraq settling old grudges. Sure, Hannity and others were all in favor of it; they didn’t have to be the ones doing the fighting and dying. But, I suppose it’s as okay with you as it’s okay with the conservative radio-tv mouthpieces that Bush’s nation building war is expected to ultimately run around a trillion dollars or more. All the while, you want your taxes cut as much as possible - let the future generations pay for the war. You want all the privileges of our great country but you want none of the responsibilities. That’s the truth you can’t handle!
June 19th, 2008 at 10:16 amPlease, Laura Ingram is as phoney as her hair color. Power to the People, yea right, she doesn’t care what the people have to say, she doesn’t shut up long enough to listen. I enjoy listenting to AM 560 in Chicago, especially John & Cisco, but as soon as her screechy, grating, voice starts polluting the airwaves, I changes the station.
August 6th, 2008 at 8:45 amIve only just discovered Ms Ingram and I found her to be very arrogant and abusive of her guests, simplistic in her thoughts, and had a very big chip on her shoulder.
As soon as she stops hating the world she might have something to say, but she has many years of deep introspection ahead of her, or a horrific accident untill she might achieve some empathy.
Im not holding my breath.
August 6th, 2008 at 11:38 pmWow, how she made fun of Obama for suggesting that people check their tire pressure. DOESN’T keep her from doing commercials for companies suggesting the same thing. PHONEY! HIPOCRATE???? ALL SHE CARES ABOUT IS MAKING MONEY… WAKE UP PEOPLE
August 29th, 2008 at 12:48 amCenturion,
September 5th, 2008 at 10:32 pmYou need to get some fresh air! You know, get in touch with the real world as you spend way too much time blogging.
Laura Ingram delivers a concise, articulate, conservative perspective. What is wrong with civil discourse? Agree or disagree on the substance but avoid the personal attacks as they add nothing to the debate.
By the way, have you looked into Biden’s history? I am just beginning to research him. By his own admission he is a liar. Kind of stupid choice for a candidate that is interested in “Changing the way we do business in Washington” wouldn’t you think?
Jill, I have listened to Laura Ingraham on several occasions. Her message is like all the other far right extreme conservatives radio-TV talking heads, in that they do nothing but complain and denigrate all those who disagree with them. They are an intolerant bunch and I see them as being part of the problem that has turned many of our country into having an us-vs.-them mentality. Ingraham and all the other far right radio-TV talking heads want nothing more than for our people of our great country to be polarized, afraid to find common ground and unity. They wallow in the stirring the pot of hatred, contempt and fear. They don’t want John McCain and Sarah Palin to win in November; they secretly cheer for Obama and Biden to win, as that will only give them so much more to complain about. Before Ingraham, did you ever listen to Rush Limbaugh in the days before Bill Clinton ran for president? Limbaugh was running Clinton down on a daily basis for well over a year. And every day that Clinton was president, mighty mealy mouth Limbaugh’s talk show was almost all about running Clinton down. Never a good or kind word. And then, when Bush stole the election in 2000 (and he did), Limbaugh said the liberals couldn’t say anything bad about Bush as conservatives had to deal wuth Clinton for eight years. Well, I guess ol’ motormouth drug dependent hypocrite (who said people on drugs should all be in prison, no compassion for them but his case was different) must’ve forgot his daily talk show was nothing but a long running diatribe against Bill and Hillary Clinton. The Bush presidency has wrecked our economy with his war in Iraq. How funny that one of the complaints I hear from the far right is the harping of Washington spending billions of the taxpayers’ dollars on pork, yet the Iraq war is the biggest pork project of all, $10 billion per month, $120 billion per year and nothing from those same far right conservatives but the sound of cheers. That $120 billion per year could go elsewhere, such as hunting down Usama bin Laden in Afghanistan (or wherever the hell he is hiding out) and nailing his sorry hide to the wall. It could also go a long way to establishing a national health care system for those of us who have no health insurance but are in need of health care. When Bush and Cheney leave office in January, we will have had eight years of their long trainwreck to deal with. And good luck to whoever wins in November as they will be the one left to clean up that mess. You really want someone who promises you more of the same failed policies of Bush? Someone who won’t clean up the mess but only add to it? Of course, Obama might do the same. I supported Hillary for president as I believed she was the right person for the job. I don’t always agree with her views (surprised?) but I felt that if she won and didn’t know what to do about a certain issue, she at least had Bill to rely on for advice. And say what you will about Bill, but he was a great president. And you will or the far right conservative talking heads will, because for every problem that Bush caused, it wasn’t his fault but Bill Clinton’s fault. Bush was and has never been held accountable for his actions or of those working for him. That’s the hypcrisy of many conservatives on the far right as during the Republicants attempt to impeach Clinton over the issue of whether or not he lied about having sex with that woman, those same far right conservative voices said they’d never stand for one of their own lying. And how many of them have stood for Bush’s constant lies on the reasons for the war in Iraq, the outing of a CIA agent because they didn’t like her husband’s book criticizing them? Bush’s presidency has been one lie after another and where are these stalwart far right conservatives calling for his impeachment in the congress or the senate? Nowhere to be found.
Buth, Ingraham, O’Reilly, Hannity, Savage, Limbaugh and all the other right wing mealy chattermouths are nothing but Bush’s cheerleaders and attorneys for the defeat of Obama in November. Listen to what they say, Jill, but don’t accept them at their word. Check out what they say as with the internet, youtube, myspace and what have you, the things they will claim about Obama should be easy to look up and verify. I don’t like Obama but I like McCain far less. Just to give you a clue, yes I’m liberal and proud of it, but all my former girlfriends have been conservative Republicans. My last girlfriend was from Arizona, on the very far right end of the conservative scale, from a very religious family. But, she didn’t like McCain at all, saying he couldn’t be trusted. That, to me, was saying something about a far rightee that I would never have believed. You want McCain and Palin? Vote at your own peril - and ours!
September 7th, 2008 at 1:36 pm