Comments on Michael Savage's TV debut

I give the show three months, tops.

The Savage Nation Debut Program (5:00 EST) Live Thread ^

326 comments

do the keyword Savage and you will be taken directly to the live thread running during the show : )

savage calls it like he sees it he is no lock stepper!

He did a fine job, but will be much better in three weeks.....

technically they need to turn the phone off right after he starts to answer

The real question is not Michael, he's only going to get hotter each week as he relaxes...the question is PMS....will they have the guts to stand behind him when he hits the beast and teddy and the other cryers

"....I give the show three months, tops...."

You might be right, especially if the censor nazis have any impact.

I still think Savage will do a lot of damage to the Left in the meantime.

The producers should fine-tune the format a little. Savage also looked a little stiff; not like he comes across on the radio. Hopefully he'll relax.

I thought it was great the way he kept showing the Iraqui carnage and blasting Dan Rather for not showing the other side of Saddam.

Great, thanks for the link.

I dunno why it didn't come up in a search.

I am a big fan of Savage and I watched the show. But I think Savage's show will fail for the same reason that Rush's show failed. Television is an inherently trivial medium. You cannot juxtapose pictures of the dead Kurdish children with advertisements for kitchen tools and hope to impact the audience. The seriousness and passion Michael brings to the radio show are marginalized by the nature of commercial television. This is not Michael's fault it is the nature of television. Radio does not suffer from this even though it also has commercials. Unlike television, radio relies on the listener to supply the context. It is therefore much easier for the listener to "gain up" the intensity during the program and "gain down" the intensity during the ads. Michael works on radio. He will always work on radio. But he should leave the wasteland of television to the foolish.

trek

Savage's TV show was just like his radio show; therein lies the problem.

Does anyone out there know if the program will be repeated today on MSNBC? I checked their programming schedule and didn't see it listed. I didn't even see it on their list of programs.

Savage also looked a little stiff; not like he comes across on the radio.

No, he'll keep being stiff. TV is not radio, period.

And it has nothing to do with "censor nazis"; it's just that he won't be able to keep an audience beyond his loyal coterie of the "perpetually p*ssed-off" who adore him.

He'll be a novelty for a little while, then MSNBC will move on.

I was very pleased and surprised that he didn't tone it down for TV.

any word yet on the rats take of it?

Did you see when he pulled out his Bible? Classic TV.

I am a Savage message fanatic and am so grateful he has the guts to say what he does. I love his bluntness and his humor, and a day w/o Savage for me is boring.

I believe, however, that you have to be of the mindset to WANT to overlook a lot about him personally. From the thread that ran here yesterday, one can tell that even many conservatives have a rough time doing that, much less "independents" or libs.

I don't hold a lot of optimism for his TV venture. Hope I'm wrong.

We need all the effective voices for conservativism we can get ... where ever they are to have media exposure

Give him a few days to settle in and find his grove ...

Michael is going to pave a lot of new roads and raise a lot of eyebrows along the way.

At 5:00 PM on Saturdays? He may pave a sidewalk and raise 7 eyebrows.

Television is an inherently trivial medium. You cannot juxtapose pictures of the dead Kurdish children with advertisements for kitchen tools and hope to impact the audience. The seriousness and passion Michael brings to the radio show are marginalized by the nature of commercial television. This is not Michael's fault it is the nature of television. Radio does not suffer from this even though it also has commercials. Unlike television, radio relies on the listener to supply the context.

You see it...

Plato's Euthyphro and Apology are a great illustration.

Socrates advances the argument to Euthyphro that, piety to the gods, who all want conflicting devotions and/or actions from humans, is impossible.

Likewise, morals are such a construction of idols used by the Left as a rationale for them to demand compliance to their wishes in politics, which most often are a skewed mess of fallacies in logic. Morals are a deceptive replacement for the avoidance of sin. If a person believes in a God, it is the conviction of the Holy Ghost by which they are guided and not by the idolatrous vanities of morals constructed by others.

Plato's Apology is a drama that portrays the current Left wing frustration with talk radio in America. The people of Athens (the Left) are demanding that Socrates (Rush) be silent. Socrates refuses and the elite of Athens demand the execution of Socrates. The modern Left wants a figurative execution of Rush Limbaugh and others like him (although 'figurative' would be quickly made actual if the Left ever had the unchecked power they desire).

Radio is the focus of only one of the five senses. A listener has to really tune in to the subject matter and focus on the content of the ideas.

Television is a combination of sensory focus and it is far easier to distract and misdirect viewer attention from essential topics presented.

Considering that 90% of people tend to be more influenced by the visual, television has become a new religion. It is analagous to Plato's cave allegory. Television as a propaganda tool helps create visual phantasms (or as Thomas Hobbes called them, 'phantastical images') of the brain.

There are three ways people are influenced according to the school of behavioral psychology - - visual (sight), auditory (sound), kinesthetic (emotion). The kinesthetic or 'feeling' is also based on olfactory and tactile sense, much like Pavlov's salivating dogs. Visual images and sound portrayed can be used to anchor emotional and/or conditioned responses desired by those that present them, which in the case of television, is the Leftist television media, actors who create phantastical images in film, and Leftist politicians who pander to symbolism over substance (like Rush always says about them).

The visual aspect of that phenomenon is also used by the print media to a degree. Interactve talk radio requires thought, television does not and relies on this as a means to influence viewers...

They worship for gods 'those appearances that remain in the brain from the impression of external bodies upon the organs of their senses, which are commonly called ideas, idols, phantasms, conceits, as being representations of those external bodies which cause them, and have nothing in them of reality, no more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a dream...'

Like the necromancy of the Wellstone funerally, the use of Martin Luther King Day, or constantly invoking the "spirit of the '60's," the Left attempts to raise spirits of the dead as a totem for worship.

Marxism and their forms of Cultural Marxism are a religion, a collection of cults. In many cases they worship a dead Karl Marx like some (and I stress some) Christians worship a dead Jesus, and not a living God. This is no more apparent than in the practice of enshrinement and regular grooming of Lenin's corpse in the former Soviet Union.

It is the religious fervor associated with the pro-abortion advocacy. The societal practice of abortion is ritual mass murder upon the altars dedicated to idolatrous vanities, a collective human sacrifice to pagan idols. It has a similitude to the Teutonic paganism of Adolph Hitler, whose idolatry was the idea of a "master race." In effect, this genocide was a mass human sacrifice to those pagan idols.

The Left is properly identified with a 'confederacy of decievers that, to obtain dominion over men in this present world, endeavour, by obscure and erroneous doctrines.'

Part of this whole thing is the promotion of "public radio." The government funded NPR and other "public radio" non-profit Leftist crap is not making it.

While I am not enamoured with some of the canned music formats of much commercial radio, I am no fan of the Leftist non-profit NPR like stations that play third world, grass skirt, bone-in-the-nose voodoo music either, with the touchy feely multi-cultural, anti-USA Leftist commentary of the hosts.

Also part of this is the loss of broadcasting licenses by "public radio" stations to a company that is buying licenses to broadcast Christian programming. This is pushing many Leftist public radio stations off the air.

There is more to this issue than most people realize and it is not exclusive to the attack on talk radio (although that is a big part of it). Why else does the Left complain about what others watch and listen to?

The fantastic is, of course, most closely related to the imagination (Phantasien), but the imagination is related in it’s turn to feeling, understanding, and will, so that a person’s feelings, understanding and will may be fantastic. Fantasy is, in general the medium of infinitization…
Kierkegaard, Søren. The Sickness Unto Death. Trans. Alastair Hannay. New York : Penguin, 1989.

See also:

Part IV. Of the Kingdom of Darkness
Chap. xlv. Of Demonology and other Relics of the Religion of the Gentiles.
[10] Another relic of Gentilism is the worship of images, neither instituted by Moses in the Old, nor by Christ in the New Testament; nor yet brought in from the Gentiles; but left amongst them, after they had given their names to Christ. Before our Saviour preached, it was the general religion of the Gentiles to worship for gods those appearances that remain in the brain from the impression of external bodies upon the organs of their senses, which are commonly called ideas, idols, phantasms, conceits, as being representations of those external bodies which cause them, and have nothing in them of reality, no more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a dream. And this is the reason why St. Paul says, "We know that an idol is nothing": not that he thought that an image of metal, stone, or wood was nothing; but that the thing which they honored or feared in the image, and held for a god, was a mere figment, without place, habitation, motion, or existence, but in the motions of the brain. And the worship of these with divine honour is that which is in the Scripture called idolatry, and rebellion against God. For God being King of the Jews, and His lieutenant being first Moses, and afterward the high priest, if the people had been permitted to worship and pray to images (which are representations of their own fancies), they had had no further dependence on the true God, of whom there can be no similitude; nor on His prime ministers, Moses and the high priests; but every man had governed himself according to his own appetite, to the utter eversion of the Commonwealth, and their own destruction for want of union. And therefore the first law of God was: they should not take for gods, alienos deos, that is, the gods of other nations, but that only true God, who vouchsafed to commune with Moses, and by him to give them laws and directions for their peace, and for their salvation from their enemies. And the second was that they should not make to themselves any image to worship, of their own invention. For it is the same deposing of a king to submit to another king, whether he be set up by a neighbour nation or by ourselves.
[14] An image, in the most strict signification of the word, is the resemblance of something visible: in which sense the fantastical forms, apparitions, or seemings of visible bodies to the sight, are only images; such as are the show of a man or other thing in the water, by reflection or refraction; or of the sun or stars by direct vision in the air; which are nothing real in the things seen, nor in the place where they seem to be; nor are their magnitudes and figures the same with that of the object, but changeable, by the variation of the organs of sight, or by glasses; and are present oftentimes in our imagination, and in our dreams, when the object is absent; or changed into other colours, and shapes, as things that depend only upon the fancy. And these are the images which are originally and most properly called ideas and idols, and derived from the language of the Grecians, with whom the word eido signifieth to see. They are also called phantasms, which is in the same language, apparitions. And from these images it is that one of the faculties of man's nature is called the imagination. And from hence it is manifest that there neither is, nor can be, any image made of a thing invisible.
[15] It is also evident that there can be no image of a thing infinite: for all the images and phantasms that are made by the impression of things visible are figured. But figure is quantity every way determined, and therefore there can be no image of God, nor of the soul of man, nor of spirits; but only of bodies visible, that is, bodies that have light in themselves, or are by such enlightened.
[16] And whereas a man can fancy shapes he never saw, making up a figure out of the parts of divers creatures, as the poets make their centaurs, chimeras and other monsters never seen, so can he also give matter to those shapes, and make them in wood, clay or metal. And these are also called images, not for the resemblance of any corporeal thing, but for the resemblance of some phantastical inhabitants of the brain of the maker. But in these idols, as they are originally in the brain, and as they are painted, carved moulded or molten in matter, there is a similitude of one to the other, for which the material body made by art may be said to be the image of the fantastical idol made by nature.
Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan: with selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668. Ed. Edwin Curley. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994.

I am sure MSNBC planned it that way...5 o'clock on Saturday when no one is watching TV except for sports.
It's just so they can say they have a conservative.
I have not had the opportunity to hear Michael Savage (he is not on the radio here) so I was pretty darn happy.