Monday’s chores entailed much driving around our sprawling town, and as we’re not the sorts to sit in silence at the interminable traffic lights we spent much of the afternoon scanning the AM radio between the old folks’ station where they play Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra and the country oldies station that occasionally plays some pre-80s tears-in-my-bear honky tonk worth listening to and the local right-wing talk station that broadcasts Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Mark Levin and assorted other right-wing ranters. Despite the unpleasant distractions of the day, we couldn’t help noticing a slightly heartening diversity of media views.
So far as we can tell from our occasional stoplight encounters with right-wing talk radio, Limbaugh still hates the presumptive Democratic nominee and is resigned to offering helpful rationalizations for the Republican nominee’s latest “tweets,” Hannity hates the presumptive Democratic at least as much and is at least is fully on board with the presumptive Republican nominee and ever eager to explain — “literally,’ he always annoyingly adds — how the presumptive Republican nominee’s latest “Tweets” don’t contradict every position he’s ever taken on anything from adultery to public health care, and Levin is just as loudly and cacophonously as ever opposed to both the presumptive Democratic and Republican nominees, which would probably strike us as the most the most reasonable position if he weren’t shrieking it with all all those capital letters. In between all the ads are for gold bug businesses and doomsday food suppliers and people eager to help out with your problems with the Internal Revenue Service and your credit card debt, and except for an old friend or ours who runs an excellent local hat shop and a couple of other daring local business and some company that makes what it bills as the world’s greatest pillow that’s about all you’d hear on our local right-wing radio station, except for those American Broadcasting Company news updates that come at that the end of every hour and always sound exactly like what those deranged right-wingers predicted they would say.
On Monday afternoon the mainstream media feed into our otherwise reliably right-wing media was reporting that some Democratic Senators had bravely advocated some surely well-intentioned legislative proposal to restrict people’s rights to defend themselves with firearms, and it came right out and said the congressional Republicans were “un-moved” by the past weekend’s tragedy in Florida and therefore callously moved to vote against a bill to to deny gun sales to anyone on the federal government’s “no-fly” list.
Those nasty establishment Republicans did indeed vote against the proposed legislation, but just as the right-wing talkers predicted the ABC news feed at the top of the hour made no mention of the unavoidable matter that almost anyone, including the late “liberal lion” Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, could win up being denied his Second Amendment rights as a result of a more cockamamie bill if it were ever passed and signed. Nor was there any mention anywhere on the radio dial that the presumptive and proudly anti-establishment Republican presidential nominee is entirely on board with this nonsense, and promises to talk with his new-found friends at the National Rifle Association about it, and seems quite eager to have his very own federal government deciding who and who does not have Second Amendment rights. All in all, we’d have to call it perfectly imbalanced coverage of the day’s events during an afternoon’s chores, if not at all satisfactory.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 