I have a friend who is white, very rich and obscenely conservative. Once or twice a year we meet for a holiday dinner at his sister’s house where he and I are an appreciable portion of the entertainment when our political debate inevitably kicks off. Although most of the dinner guests are liberal, in his mind, he almost always wins because his approach is to shout—fast and furious--right-wing platitudes.
My friend is not uninformed, just doctrinaire. But his approach to discussing all things political are straight from the right's play book: Logic or real facts be damned. I say real facts because this generation’s crop of conservatives navigates within an arena of gerrymandered facts that they spit out mindlessly.
One of the gears in the right-wing echo machine is “experts” that research, not to discover truth, but to find facts that support a predictably backwards world view. One of those conservative experts, Kevin James, was exposed for the ignoramus he actually is by Chris Matthews on Hardball. James is a talk show host on KRLA-AM, “Intelligent, Conservative Talk Radio.” If James is representative of his Los Angeles station's stable of gab jocks, then KRLA's talk is about as intelligent as Fox Cable’s news is “fair and balanced.”
James was screaming on Hardball in support of President Bush’s disingenuous, poorly disguised political charge that Barack Obama is an appeaser for the “evil-doers.” Attempting to elevate the debate above typical conservative code-wording and name-calling, Matthews asked James what did Neville Chamberlain, prime minister of Britain in the 1930s do. “It’s appeasement,” James said, parroting Bush’s words.
Matthews repeatedly tries to get the blow hard James to provide some historical facts behind his right-wing jingoism. The radio talk show host couldn’t do it. As it turns out, James had no clue that Chamberlain had signed the Munich Agreement, conceding a portion of Czechoslovakia to Adolph Hitler and his Nazi regime. He had no clue as to what appeasement meant in the historical context President Bush was misusing it in. Matthews had to turn to Mark Green of Air America for some historical perspective.
And to think James gets paid to pollute the airways with his ignorance.
Here’s the Hardball exchange. You’ll find it amusing if you’re progressive, depressing if you’re not.
Stumble It!
