Politics

Beware the Secret Communist Muslim Anti-Trade, Windfall Profits Tax Guy

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Via Matt Drudge, I see that Camille Paglia has discovered that the AM airwaves ain't so friendly to the Democratic nominee:

Meanwhile, conservative talk radio, which I have been following with interest for almost 20 years, has become a tornado alley of hallucinatory holograms of Obama. He's a Marxist! A radical leftist! A hater of America! He's "not that bright"; he can't talk without a teleprompter. He knows nothing and has done less. His wife is a raging mass of anti-white racism. It's gotten to the point that I can hardly listen to my favorite shows, which were once both informative and entertaining. The hackneyed repetition is numbing and tedious, and the overt character assassination is ethically indefensible. Talk radio will lose its broad audience if it continues on this nakedly partisan path.

Judging from my exhaustive data set of listening to Neal Boortz for about 53 seconds this weekend, I can second that observation ? the ominously pondered Obama's-secret-agenda shtick will be a main feature for the next six months, as Dave Weigel has already been documenting. You can almost hear the soundtrack of The Shadow playing in the background.

What this heavy breathing might end up obscuring (much in the way that Obama's "McCain = Bush" strategy obscures plenty that is troubling about the GOP nominee) is something that has received precious little attention this election cycle: The Democrats, while eyeing the prize of a unified Donkey government, have jerked themselves to the significant economic left of John Kerry and even Howard Dean of 2004, not to mention Gore 2000 and the two Bill Clinton terms. Here, I'll let Dem blogger Matthew Yglesias say it:

[T]he "center" wing of Democratic Party economic thought has shifted substantially left over the past few years. You can see that as many members of Clinton's economic team have grown more populist, in Bill Galston deciding that the era of big government is back, in any given Paul Krugman column, etc.

As for Paglia noticing just now that conservative talk radio engages in "hackneyed repetition" and "overt character assassination," the most charitable reaction might be that everyone's ears hear their own unique frequency.