Posted on 03/17/2009 12:04:42 AM PDT by Scanian
Pretty much everyone I respect in media and politics recommended I not go on HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher." But on Friday night, I defied that wisdom and had the time of my life.
I sparred with Mr. Maher, Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson and a MoveOn.org audience from hell that booed my sentences before they were completed. Unfortunately, my wife and in-laws, who watched from the green room, were not as enamored with the experience as I was.
Since the salad days of ABC's "Politically Incorrect," which minted countless right-wing pundits and best-selling authors, conservatives have rightly assessed the HBO version of the Maher show as R-rated and shockingly hostile to their worldview. So most opt out.
I totally see why. But I think that's exactly the wrong strategy.
The problem with the withdrawal approach is that it cedes the popular culture debate to the other side. We figure talk radio, a certain cable news network and some independent Internet venues will allow for us to get our ideas out to the masses. Well, those few outlets are greatly outnumbered. They are also isolated and targeted for destruction by the activist left. The sitting president (using taxpayer money) is now leading the charge.
In my neighborhood at least, this strategy of avoiding engagement with the other side isn't working out so well.
People who have never turned on Fox News or tuned into Rush Limbaugh have strong and defiant negative opinions about those outlets. When one tries to reason with them or call them out when acknowledging they watch and listen to neither, they become emboldened by their admitted ignorance. "Why would I listen to that racist, sexist, homophobic, fill-in-the-blank claim of cultural prejudice?"
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
“The problem with the withdrawal approach is that it cedes the popular culture debate to the other side.”
Pop culture is an even bigger threat to this country than liberalism and should be delegitimatized in every possible way.
How will their Utopia go down then?
Talk about coginative dissonance. What will they do but whine and line up, while we conservatives hunt, garden and celebrate ourselves through the Obama presidency until he is gone, a bad over-reaching dream that has become a failure, a nightmare.
bookmark
One can never go wrong avoiding liberal self love ins. Remember how Maher’s show did in the free market when it was on ABC? Viewers had him ran him off the air. I say let them have their own circle jerks without good guys there as stooges to give their show some semblance of being fair.
You can’t have informative debate if one side is dishonest to the core and controls what is ultimately viewed.
bookmark for later.
I carried on an hour long discussion with a co-worker recently in which the Liberal fellow insisted that by listening mainly to Rush and other conservatives, I was somehow ill-informed and poorly educated. I had to note at the end of the conversation that he had never heard about the Fairness Doctrine (and how it was moving to limit my freedom of speech), Obama’s slighting our friends the British, Biden’s repeated gaffes (often larger than Qayles’ ‘potato’, which the press NEVER let him forget) and several other news items that he had never heard of by listening to the MSM. Yep, poor little uninformed Conservative me!
“The mainstream media is the only watch dog that decides what it is going to bark at.”
Breitbart did a great job on Maher’s show. However he needs to learn how to shut down race hucksters like Dyson. When asked for examples of limbaugh’s racism, Dyson hit him with the classic “code words” argument. Breitbart should have told Dyson that “code words” is a phony argument used to brand as a racist anyone who disagrees with a black liberal. The argument is made whenever no true examples of racist language are available. Instead the target is accused of using a secret language of racists. No one knows what the “code words” are, in fact they can be are anything the black guy says they are. They are a linguistic mine field used to trap their opponent. Code words are part of the racist paranoia of blacks, enabling them to imagine racism where none is visable.
Exactly, “you used some ‘code’ words that hurt my feelings, therefore you are a no-good racist SOB.”
That’s getting very stale and some people are no longer cowed by it. Rush isn’t. Breibart evidently still is.
Well, I disagree...How many seeds of doubt were planted by Alan Colmes? Being a punching bag serves no one but Hollywood liberals...
There is something to be said for being seen as the sane and reasonable one in a debate with liberal lunatics. That’s often creates the first wedge of doubt in those who simply go along and think that liberals are reasonable and conservatives are not.
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