The L Word | Baltimore City Paper

Political Animal

The L Word

By Brian Morton | Posted 2/20/2008

After WYPR sacked Marc Steiner from his public radio show recently, I noticed something interesting on the Baltimore Sun's comment board following the paper's story about the whole sorry tale.

As Barbara Mikulski put it after soundly beating E.J. Pipkin in 2004, "We are a blue state, we are neon blue, we are cobalt blue, we are blue in the face." And Baltimore is the blue hub in the middle of it all.

But if you read the comments board, you would think that it's not legitimate to be a liberal in Maryland, especially on the radio. Amid the regrets posted there, every now and then there's a comment by someone essentially saying, "good riddance to another liberal." Now, if you look across the Baltimore airwaves, you'll note that historically there has hardly been a shortage of conservatives on talk radio--talk radio is virtually wall-to-wall right-wing talk. But when one talk-show host with a liberal bent--a local one at that--gets the axe, the right wingers come out of the woodwork as if to say that liberals have no place being on the air. Yet all a Republican has to do is lose a race for governor in this state, and there's a seat waiting in a studio at WBAL Radio for at least a year, from which to opine about the liberals of Maryland.

Conservatives have built their towering media machine, starting with the message mavens on K Street and the $25 million-plus budget of the Heritage Foundation, onto the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal, through the radio shows of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Michael Savage (the top six talk radio hosts in America are right wingers, according to Talkers magazine), and with the help of Fox News and Bill O'Reilly. They know there's no shortage of places to find their particular brand of political ideology. So what's with the rancor that liberals have a place on their airwaves?

It was only in 2006 when the powers-that-be at MSNBC started seeing the rise in popularity of host Keith Olbermann--not someone you could classically call a liberal, but someone who insisted on using his platform to hold the Bush administration to account for all of the excuses and shifting rationales behind the Iraq War, the fired U.S. attorney scandal, the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, among others. But in 2003, when the Dixie Chicks were made persona non grata in the world of country music (and the larger world of pop radio) and questioning the administration was considered tantamount to treason, Olbermann said that his superiors at the network were angry with him when he featured two liberals on their air back-to-back.

It's now 2008, and we have both a Democratic House and Senate--but unlike five years ago when Olbermann pissed off the network brass by having Janeane Garofalo and Al Franken on one after the other, you don't see that kind of programming happening on the air.

Despite the sea change in public opinion after what Republicans have done to the country over eight years, the media is still living in the frightened grip of pro-business conservatives and right-wingers who do not see liberal points of view as legitimate ones. In some places, and predominantly in the media, "liberal" is a word to be avoided as much as it was back in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan first made it a dirty word.

By the time George W. Bush took office, the entire mechanism was in place to not only deny liberals a seat at the table (I'm not being hyperbolic here--remember Rep. Bill Thomas calling the police to throw Democratic House members out of the Capitol library back in 2003), but to deny them a place in the public process of democracy. This begat the rise of what blogger Dave Neiwert calls "eliminationist rhetoric," in which it isn't enough to push liberals out of the discourse--better to render them illegitimate altogether.

It wasn't long before any argument made could be dismissed simply by saying, "she's a liberal." Ann Coulter has made a fortune selling books with increasingly escalating claims--"godless," "slander," "treason"--that launched a tidal wave of other authors writing tomes that speak of progressives as if anyone to the left of Joe Lieberman should be driven into the sea. The latest, almost a comic reduction ad absurdum of the decade's worth of right-wing rhetoric, is Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, which attempts to tie almost anyone who has ever worn Birkenstocks, eaten a salad, or pulled a lever for the local Democratic candidate for dogcatcher to the political traditions of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

It would be nice to think that there is a place on the radio for a liberal like Marc Steiner and a seat at the table for the party whose authors don't write books linking political parties to mass murdering war criminals. I'd like to think there might be something called "the loyal opposition" again in America.

Then again, Fox News Radio host Tom Sullivan was just saying last week that listening to Barack Obama speak was like listening to Hitler rousing up a crowd, so maybe we're in for more of the same.

Liberally Yours

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MarkNewgent

2 comments.

Member since 2/20/2008

Quite obviously you have not read Liberal Fascism or you would know that Goldberg is not tieing "anyone who has ever worn Birkenstocks, eaten a salad, or pulled a lever for the local Democratic candidate for dogcatcher to the political traditions of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis."

But you're a liberal and you wouldn't judge a book by its cover now would you!

Posted 2.20.2008 12:49 PM

alfred

11 comments.

Member since 8/30/2007

what?

Posted 2.20.2008 6:18 PM

Zachary

1 comments.

Member since 2/20/2008

Excellent article.

Posted 2.20.2008 8:13 PM

shaggy

12 comments.

Member since 2/20/2008

I liken conservative pundits and hosts to the shock jocks of talk radio. They say outrageous things to garner attention and the ratings, and I'm sure that callers are lining up to join the emotional charged attacks. What great entertainment!

Except of course, these shows are also helping shift American attitudes with one-sided stories and Bill O'Reilly's strange logic. My hope is that the cultural pendulum will one day swing the other way.

Posted 2.20.2008 11:59 PM

Joe Compton

2 comments.

Member since 2/22/2008

Brain thanks for this and your recent article on Sen Mikulski's immoral stance on FISA legislation. Marc Steiner created a valuable discussion center for marylanders of a progressive bent and open-minded thinkers of all stripes would discuss the world as it really is, not how Rush and Sean want it to be. For his nuanced discussions of the complexities of the Middle East alone, WYPR should have honored him, not precipiticiously fired him by email. But Tony Brandon just isn't a man, he's a disaster who walks like a man.

I am sure Tony and the above commenter Mark N would enjoy many a beer talking about liberal fascism and avoiding the real time real life fascistic convergence of bushco govt, corporate media, and big bizness interests they are participants in. It would not be truthful, it would have any hsitorical understanding of the rise of european fascism among the right of that continent, and it would be skewered by his listeners if it would be broadcast as part of a Steiner show. Tony and Mark N inhabit a fact free world and they like it that way- sadly their is a real world and their BS an their ignorance damages and diminishes us all.

Bring Back Marc!

Posted 2.22.2008 12:18 PM

Joe Compton

2 comments.

Member since 2/22/2008

typo last half of next to last sentence of my post should read as follows:

-sadly there is a real world and their BS and their ignorance damages and diminishes us all.

Bring Back Marc!

obviously Liberals can think, but can we type?

Posted 2.22.2008 12:41 PM

Mac

1 comments.

Member since 2/25/2008

Now, I'm certainly no fan of the Bush administration, the war, or any of that business, nor am I familiar with Marc Steiner or his radio show, but it strikes me as a little silly to act as if the strength of the Democratic Party/Left in Maryland is threatened by a few poorly written sentences on a Baltimore Sun web comment board. I'm actually searching through the comments on the article announcing his resignation right now, and have hardly found anyone saying anything terribly unkind about him, much less outright criticizing him on a political basis.

This article here in the Citypaper disturbs me, though. Is the leftist establishment in Maryland so intolerant of any dissenting opinion that a few web comments (which I can't even find) from some no-name right-wing slackers warrant an angry editorial like this? I'm not defending the political right here, I'm just saying that if we're going to apply this critical eye to the political right, we need to apply it just as much to the political left, especially in Maryland, where the left really holds all the cards.

While I've not read this "Liberal Fascism" book and won't comment on that, the quote from Mikulski does have something of a disturbingly ideologically conformist, authoritarian ring to it that really speaks volumes about the attitude of Maryland's Democrat powerful. As someone who doesn't typically identify with the political left, especially in this state (I'm a registered independent who's more or less libertarian), I find it quite unsettling. Lockstep rigidity in political thought in one's home state is not something that one should be proud of, and the entire "Red State/Blue State" concept is thoroughly repugnant, quite frankly.

At this point in time especially, it's no mystery that the right wing in this country is hypocritical, corrupt, and extremely powerful. The solution, though, is most certainly not to adopt leftism unquestioningly. The political left is just as much an establishment with its own self-interests in mind as the political right, and warrants just as much scrutiny.

Posted 2.25.2008 7:02 PM

MarkNewgent

2 comments.

Member since 2/20/2008

Joe,

Fascism, properly understood, is a movement of the left not the right. Mussolini was a soaked-to the-bone socialist, he is famous for saying "everything within the state and nothing outside of it." The speech that first attracted Hitler to national socialism was titled "By What Means Shall Capitalism be Destroyed." The acronym NSDAP (the Nazi Party) stands for National Socialist German Workers Party. Obviously there is a more thorough argument to be made, but a comment board is not the place.

Fascism and communism are competing offshoots of socialism. Fascism is a nationalistic form of socialism, while communism preached international socialism.

You and the rest of the left do not use the term fascism with any intellectual honesty. You prove Orwell's point that the left has so abused the word fascism that has no meaning other than to describe something undesirable.

Conservatism, professes individual freedom, limited government, property rights, and free markets, is the exact opposite of statist fascism.

This is not to say that conservatives are immune to the temptation. In fact if you bothered to even peruse Liberal Fascism, you would note Goldberg's final chapter "The Tempting of Conservatism" where he deals with Bush's compassionate conservatism and Huckabee's compasionate conservatism on steroids.

But that would require you to actually read the book and seriously deal with all the terrible skeletons in the intellectual closet of liberalism/progressivism, which include, support for both Mussolini and Hitler, corporatism, blatant racism, and eugenics.

Posted 2.27.2008 12:00 PM