“Like Williams, Skoda is a local talk radio host in love with the sound of his own voice.”
Is there a problem with having a “radio talk show host” as head of the movement? Limbaugh and Beck are both, essentially, radio talk show hosts. Here in NJ, NJ101.5 is articulating the anti-tax sentiment.
Okay, these guys all make money by driving their Arbitron ratings higher. They are all doing their jobs for straight-out profit. But at least they are up-front about why they have their jobs: for the money. And if they make money by leading the movement, is that a bad thing?
Can someone explain to me why having radio talk show hosts as leaders of the Tea Party is wrong?
The “Tea Party” is like the Unitarian Church. Leaderless, welcoming anyone who wants to be a Unitarian, and from the outside, opaque.
There is no "leader" or "leaders". The radio hosts have a bully pulpit, so they are naturally more in the national spotlight than the rest of the tea partiers, but they aren't the leaders.
Not a problem, until they start posting material that creates big, national political problems for them and the movement they somehow think they represent. Obvious to everyone else, except the blogger and his/her followers.
Maybe that will help...
Because the Tea Party has no leaders. It is individual dissent aimed at a grand goal of effecting real change.
I'd recognize JimRob as a leader of the Tea Party before this Skoda guy. Whoever he is.
Have we sunk so low that many of our revered major political philosophers seem to be former disc jockeys (and high school dropouts)? To me this is a sign that the Republican Party is truly dead, or ought to be.
These guys boost their ratings by talking tough. In the meantime, our elected Republicans speak softly and carry no sticks at all. There's a lot wrong with that picture. In order for the Republic to be saved, conservatives must capture the Republican Party. Or a viable third party movement must gather the conservatives from both parties.
Neither of these events is likely. And neither is there a guarantee that our Republic would last forever. Or that there will never be another civil war.
I don't know anything about this Skoda person but I do about Mark Williams.
My opposition to him has nothing to do with being a talk show host....it's that he's a jerk.
Williams got fired from KFBK in Sacramento (which is the same station that helped to launch Rush and where Tom Sullivan had his radio program).
At one point, he even got involved in a public and online fight with another radio host from a competing station that was just plain idiotic and immature. He became an embarassment to the station.
When I went out to the Searchlight Tea Party, I was very disappointed to see that Williams was affiliated with the TPX.
IMO, it was just a matter of time before he did something that would get him "fired" again.
Strong leaders with different views lead to rifts and in-fighting. They also become targets by the left. A grass roots movement can be destroyed much more easily if the leaders are under attack. Look at the Palin family and the hell they went through.
One guy posts, “The NAACP is racist.” Darn right they are. That could draw in more of a following. But since he was allegely part of this national thing, he was ostracized, and now a troublemaker grows in power.