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My dad is a brilliant self-educated man, a dramatist, recipient of prestigious awards for his art. When I was a teenager, I turned him on to old-school cranks like Nietzsche; he in turn made me aware of modern radical thinkers like Noam Chomsky. He was an armchair radical, for God's sake, whose reserves of contempt for George H.W. Bush seemed limitless.
What happened? It had something to do with contempt for Clinton, which I shared to some degree, but which grew in him to exceed all rationality; it had something to do with the pat smarminess of the P.C. academic/media types of that era ... the vagaries of radical feminism, yadda yadda, the humorless intolerance of certain types of leftist idealogues, sure, gotcha, but George W. Fucking Bush? And these fundamentalist hillbilly retards (mixed in with a few fat industrialist pigs) they claim as their "base" (a double meaning there, I'd say)?
Sweet balls of Jesus, it's anyone's guess what happened, but it's grisly is all I know. I try to stay mum; not worth it. Political discussions have been our bread and butter for so long, and we live in such politicized times, that silence on the matters at hand feels like about a four-ton hippo. He doesn't resort to personal insults, aside from the occasional patronizing tone, but he does grow bulge-veined and spit. You'd think the Democrats were armed Stalinists, to hear him.
How do O'Reilly, Limbaugh, et al, hippa-mo-tize otherwise intelligent people? The "got-something-to-lose" explanation doesn't quite add up, since this is more than, if you will, your grandfather's conservatism. This is a collective red-faced harrangue. Maybe Bill O'Reilly is like a Barney for the middle-aged, he sends some kind of awful thought waves that glaze the sensibilities.
