"The Coming Rise of Liberal Talk Radio"

Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode CLXXIV

A work of genius.

An hilarious, brilliant, dead-pan, tongue-in-cheek article at The New Republic Online, posted yesterday, dated Feb. 16 (embedded ellipses in original):

Every weekday, from three in the afternoon until seven in the evening, Randi Rhodes delivers her brief against George W. Bush. Much of it is standard anti-Bush fare: He stole the 2000 election, he wrecked the economy, he led the nation into a disastrous war under dishonest pretenses. But sometimes Rhodes takes her critique into less familiar territory. Citing a book titled George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography, Rhodes alleges that in the 1940s Prescott Bush, the president's grandfather, sold raw materials to the Third Reich. And then there are the Bushes' business ties to the bin Ladens, which, Rhodes says, go back decades and even involve the president himself, who as a young oilman in Texas was partners with Salem bin Laden, Osama's older brother. Indeed, Rhodes contends that it is the Bush-bin Laden relationship — not an anti-American jihad — that accounts for the September 11 attacks. According to Rhodes, Osama bin Laden, disgusted with the corruption of his own family and the Saudi royals, decided to seek revenge against their most prominent American partners: the Bushes. Bin Laden, in other words, doesn't want to destroy the United States; he just wants to destroy Bush.

Crazy as Rhodes's theories may sound, they do not just disappear into the ether. Broadcast by WJNO, an AM news and talk radio station in West Palm Beach, "The Randi Rhodes Show" is the highest-rated program in the local market's afternoon drive-time slot. Rhodes has more Palm Beach listeners than even Rush Limbaugh, whose show immediately precedes hers on WJNO.

And it's likely that Rhodes's anti-Bush brief will soon reach audiences well beyond Palm Beach. In the past year, two groups have formed to develop national liberal talk shows — and both are interested in Rhodes. One, a nonprofit outfit called Democracy Radio, wants to syndicate Rhodes's show across the country. The other, a for-profit venture called Progress Media, is creating a national liberal talk radio network and is considering Rhodes for its lineup. Either way, Rhodes hopes that, sometime in the next few months, listeners from New York to Los Angeles will be able to hear her smoky, Brooklyn-accented voice rail against the president.

One afternoon last fall, I visited Rhodes at WJNO, which broadcasts from a low-slung concrete building in an industrial section of West Palm Beach. Rhodes often jokes on air that she works in radio because of her "bad hair and blotchy skin," but, in person, she turns out to be an attractive bottle-blond who wouldn't look terribly out of place in the front row at an Aerosmith concert. (This is perhaps unsurprising given that, before she became an AM talk-show host in the early '90s, she'd worked a dozen years as an FM rock deejay and managed bands on the side.) As a radio veteran, Rhodes knows that each hour on the air requires at least another hour of preparation, so about two-and-a-half hours before airtime, she was sitting in a darkened studio, poring over a sheaf of articles she'd printed off the Internet. The clip that had her most excited--and agitated — was the transcript of a press conference President Bush held earlier that morning. "These are clearly scripted news conferences," she complained, waving the transcript in the air, "and that's dangerous, because there are a lot of serious questions that need to be asked." Rhodes didn't say what these questions were; instead, she proceeded to read some of Bush's answers aloud in what can only be described as a doofus voice, chuckling to herself.

A couple hours later, Rhodes was still on the same topic, this time with a microphone cradled in her right hand, addressing not just me but thousands of listeners throughout Palm Beach. "You had to actually be married to the Republican Party to believe the president today," she declared. She ridiculed Bush's explanation that the people attacking American troops in Iraq "hate progress": "People are willing to strap bombs on their bodies because they hate electricity ... and they hate school?! This is the explanation we're getting?!" Then she raged over the president's contention that it was the crew of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, not the White House, that hung the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED banner as a backdrop for his May speech aboard the ship: "Today, he even went as far as to blame the troops for putting up an off-message sign! I can't believe he does that, using the guys that really fought." As she neared the end of the show, Rhodes was still rolling: "The president is a bald-faced liar. Even about little things like a banner, he can't tell the truth." ....

What? You say it's a serious treatment of the subject? Surely, Faithful Reader, you jest.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 02/10/04 07:23:37 AM
Categorized as Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode & Media.