by Barry Crimmins

http://www.barrycrimmins.com

The only security the Department of Homeland Security provides can be found in the fact that we can rest assured our rights will be trampled anytime the Court-appointed Bush Administration feels like stomping on them.

Time for a new acronym around here: Court-appointed Bush Administration = CAPBA.

For instance: In the United States it used to be that before you wound up in prison, you had to be found guilty. Under the CAPBA, you need only be found.

The Democrats have shown they can roll over but it's becoming harder to find one that can speak.

Tom Daschle screwed up, he should have never given Rush Limbaugh the satisfaction of letting him know that his listeners have harassed the Senator.

Now Limbaugh will spend the next several weeks spinning himself into an innocent victim cocoon.

Poor delicate Rush!

Limbaugh will avail himself of the other side of the Bush era justice coin and find himself innocent without allowing the prosecution to present the case against him.

Actually Ashcroft's Justice Department is based on the model of the Rush Limbaugh Show.

Conservatives are better lemmings than liberals so when some blowhard like Rush Limbaugh tells them to listen each day at a certain time, they do.

So a reason reactionary talk does better than progressive radio because conservatives make better lemmings than liberals and one lemming counts just as much in the ratings as one free-thinking person. Unfortunately, it's easier to organize lemmings into audiences.

But companies that sponsor reactionary shows might best remember that progressives organize better boycotts than conservatives.

Only a conservative could be thrilled to wait years to get on a radio show to simply say "ditto" when his or her big moment arrives.



Liberals and progressives (a distinction I make as way of enlarging the proverbial liberal tent to include actual leftists) recognize a more complex, detailed world and are not afraid to argue the fine points. This makes liberal talk show fans seem less devoted because they will sometimes call and disagree with a liberal host.

This is not to say there isn't a place for progressives in talk radio, there is and they do fine when given a chance. But the field is tilted to the right because lemmings make loyal listeners and the corporate media nourishes reactionary views because reactionary talk hosts stick the script the bosses want heard. So the listeners say "ditto" to the host and the host says "ditto" to the corporation and it all looks like one big happy family.

Of course, Leni Riefenstahl made Hitler's Germany look pretty happy , too.

If Leni were just a few years younger, you just know Roger Ailes would rehabilitate her and put her in charge of the FOX Film Forum.

Limbaugh is an abusive blowhard and many people are trained from birth to respond to abusive blowhards. If there were less child abuse, Rush would have a much smaller crop of self-loathing lemmings to harvest.

The Rush Limbaugh Show is just a big national lint screen. People lacking the courage to think for themselves all collect together in a rather meaningless (except for its size) aggregation that is then perversely interpreted as some sort of profound national statement.

I suppose it is profound but only in a very sad and terrible way.

It's harder to program for progressives because we don't respond to one patriarchal blowhard voice, except to turn it off.

And when we get our chance to speak we certainly might agree but we aren't going to waste our day dialing the telephone just so we can reiterate points that have already been made.

Progressives aren't sitting by our radios, waiting to have our every bigoted fear rationalized, we are out interacting and changing the world that so scares reactionaries.

So Rush Limbaugh will impatiently tell his fearful audience that we must return to better days, when twits like Rush Limbaugh controlled everything and no one was permitted to so much as make a peep in protest.

If there's a bigger bunch of hooey than the idea that conservatives have won in "the marketplace of ideas" because they dominate talk radio, please don't tell me about it because I already am suffering from near lethal level of hooey.

And just because the Republicans won a few close races that tipped the balance in an election in which "none of the above" could have easily won control of the federal legislature if all of the people who didn't vote went out and confirmed their disgust with the "choices" they had, it doesn't mean we have suddenly entered an era in which we all must bow and scrape to some sort of emerging Republican majority.

Mom & pop stores are no longer welcome in the marketplace of ideas.

Have you ever noticed that the same people who tell us we need to 'get over" the "ancient history" of Bush's theft of the Oval Office, still blame all the world's ills on Bill Clinton?

Why blame "prehistoric" Clinton for our troubles when we have so many contemporary cavemen running our government today?

Considering the Army's plan to incinerate thousands of old shells containing nerve gas, mustard gas and other deadly agents at the Anniston Army Depot in Alabama, I guess we have to launch a preemptive strike on ourselves.

If you are a sea creature, an oil tanker is a weapon of mass destruction.

I'm waiting for the CAPBA explain why the Spanish oil spill makes drilling on the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve all the more imperative..

The CAPBA has reached a tentative free-trade agreement with Singapore but only after both sides acknowledged their repugnance for the word 'free.'

Now Bush will push for school vouchers that can be used for the purchase of some of those fabled Singapore canes.

The upside of the internet provisions in the Fatherland Security Bill? Several thousand new readers of CrimQuips! Government snoops, welcome to my little marketplace of ideas.

2002 Barry Crimmins