Posted on 06/06/2003 2:37:16 AM PDT by kattracks
Washington (CNSNews.com) - Talk radio and cable news outlets were blasted by liberal activists during a seminar in Washington, D.C. Thursday, with one speaker describing the followers of conservative-dominated radio programs as "drunks."
The three-day "Take Back America" conference is being sponsored by the Campaign for America's Future, which states as its goal pushing the Democratic Party to the left. Several Democratic presidential candidates addressed the group Thursday - but noticeably absent was Connecticut U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who is trying to appear more moderate than his rivals for the party's 2004 nomination.
Activists pulled no punches in attacking not only conservative-dominated media outlets, but also the Bush administration.
Jeff Faux, distinguished fellow at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, lashed out at the culture of talk radio during a panel discussion entitled "Shrubbed: The Radical Project of George Bush."
"I turn on the radio, and I hear these talk shows with right wing drunks calling in, and I ask myself, where are our drunks?" Faux said. But, he added: "The advantage of being a progressive is that you don't have to get drunk to make your speech."
Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, charged that "Rupert Murdoch [and his] cronies" are "stifling our messages and keep our messages from being heard, and when we get them out, they are drowned in a sea of lies." Murdoch is chairman of News Corp., which owns the Fox News Channel.
Gandy described her reaction to being seated near Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, host of The O'Reilly Factor, at this week's Congressional Correspondents' Dinner in Washington.
"As I looked over at him at the next table holding court, I thought of the fact that there are literally millions of people who get their news from Bill O'Reilly," Gandy told the audience. "[They] actually think that he is telling them the truth about what is happening in the world.
"They get their perspective on the world from The O'Reilly Factor and from Stupid-borough Country, uh...Scarborough Country," she added, a reference to MSNBC's Scarborough Country, hosted by former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough.
Gandy believes conservatives control the media in America.
"It's gotten to the point that Pat Robertson can just retire from his television career because his job has been taken over by Fox News and MSNBC and Clear Channel Broadcasting," Gandy said.
She praised the country music singing trio, the Dixie Chicks, who received a torrent of criticism from conservatives after challenging the wisdom of President Bush's decision to go to war with Iraq. "Can we hear one round for the Dixie Chicks?" Gandy asked to loud applause. "They have lots of new fans all over the country."
Thursday's panelists also laid into the Bush administration and its allies in Congress. Bush is running "the most right wing administration in modern American history," according to Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way.
"George W. Bush, Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, Trent Lott, [John] Ashcroft - they are the schoolyard bullies, and what do we do with schoolyard bullies? We stand up to them, and we stand up to them and fight," Neas said.
Neas had pointed criticism for the president's federal judicial nominees, warning that the U.S. is "facing one of the greatest constitutional threats to our constitutional scheme of government since the Founding Fathers.
"We are going to block any right wing nominee in the mold of Scalia and Thomas," he vowed, a reference to conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, blamed "ideological extremism on the right" for making bipartisanship "impossible."
"You can't have bipartisanship when one side treats you like a tornado treats a trailer park," Henderson claimed.
Maude Hurd, president of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), said liberals have been "bushwhacked" by the president.
"George W. Bush has pushed so many right wing proposals through Congress that many progressives have begun to despair," Hurd explained. "Bush's endless demands for tax cuts for millionaires are so willfully blind that he reminds me of a substance abuser," Hurd added.
Deb Callahan, president of the League of Conservation Voters, asserted: "This is undeniably the worst administration that we have seen in the history of this nation on [environmental] issues."
Callahan lamented the opposition that the green agenda encounters in the current political environment and said she yearns for a return to the 1960s.
She told the audience that she once asked former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall how it felt to be able to pass environmental regulations during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations without much opposition.
"I asked: 'What was it like when you were running the Interior Department, and you all created the Endangered Species Act, you protected amazing lands, you did these new and insightful and far-reaching things to protect our natural environment?" According to Callahan, Udall answered: "Basically, if you could think it up, you could do it."
Gandy observed: "I have come to realize that is my guiding principle. I want to return to a time in this country when if we can think it up, we can do it."
E-mail a news tip to Marc Morano.
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It's evident this jerk never saw "High Noon".
Dream on Ralphy!
1) Turn the station if you don't like it!
2) All "progressives" are drunk, taking prescription or illegal drugs, and sound like they are blasted when they talk.
3) Your "drunks" are on TV everyday. Trust me, they honestly sound drunk.
Yes, please, come out of the closet and openly go left so more people can see what you truely are.
At this time, there are innumerable TV stations and newspapers with a leftist slant. There's one TV network -- Fox -- with a rightist slant. There are a bare handful of newspapers that are right-inclined. Yet, according to the invaluable Kim Gandy -- fellow FReepers, if she hadn't sprung out of the ground, we'd have had to invent her -- the Right controls the media.
And of course, Dubya and Tom DeLay and so on are "bullies." How? Why? What have they done? Silence reigns.
For quite a while, I've been championing the cause of courtesy in political discourse. Events like these make it obvious that that's going to be hard to achieve, no matter how willing conservatives might be to try it.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason:
http://palaceofreason.com
you're old.
forget about the fact that audiences stood and cheered gary cooper at the end of high noon when it showed.
today, he would be immediately arrested, arraigned, etc. with lots of background of his belonging to white supremicist groups (or whatever).
this is not the fifties, pal. this is not your father's america anymore.
ugh.
"You know when it's springtime in Massachusetts when the Kennedy's are driving on the sidewalks"
Well, at least one of them is a Senator from Massachusetts.
She's a big poo poo head.
This kind of liberal ranting reminds me of one of my favorite recent quotes by Eric Alterman, media critic for The Nation, and author of the book "What Liberal Media?":
"No matter how much you flip through the channels, you'll be hard pressed to find one liberal commentator on broadcast TV."
No, you must, by nature, be philosophically inebriated and ideologically incoherent to be a progressive, leftist, collectivist, hater of man.
The adolescent jackasses are so angry that the 'jig's up' that they do not know what else to do, but throw tantrums. Not only are they being exposed for the vacuous nature of their non-concepts and irrational approach to everything, they are also being forced to the realization that they, the so-called 'intellectual elite' are being trounced and humiliated by the right... people whom they consider to be metaphysical insects. Let them continue to think I am drunk. I love it when the left under estimates. Every time they do it, we should hit them that much harder. And now that they are obviously on the ropes, keep slugging. We will not win this fight on points. The left must suffer TKO in the next round.
pound, pound, POUND!!!
HomeSchoolers should run for local schoolboard offices to blunt the assualt by the big teachers unions.
Retired Freepers should run for city and county offices to blunt the leftist at the local level and some of us should run for federal office as well.
The left is attempting to go back to it play book of the 1970's of winning hearts and minds at a local level then running for federal offices a few years later and we have to beat them at their own game.
This fellow's last name is telling....
That's right! We're all a bunch of stupid, patriot-types that prefer the truth to the latest Liberal spin!! /sarcasm
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