Letters to the Editor
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Are we to live in a police state where everyone is forced to watch the O'Reilly show regardless of our own beliefs?
>>Oh, wait, you don't watch his show all the way through...>>
Well, why should I? That's a foundless criticism. I've seen enough to know who I like and who I don't like and I DO have the freedom to watch what I want! I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't watch Opera, Rap, Reality TV, or whatever, but feel free to state that they don't like it, and thus, that's why they don't watch it.
Are we to live in a police state where everyone is forced to watch the O'Reilly show regardless of our own beliefs? Where the mere choice to not watch a certain news show becomes grounds for criticism and snide comments? Am I not a good citizen if I chose to turn off the TV?
Why should I be forced to watch a TV show I don't like? Is that why so mnay 'conservatives' watch porn so much, because they're monitoring the 'bad' TV?
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Wil, I feel your pain
I've had similar experiences with my dad and stepmother as they moved to the right over the last couple of decades. My father completely buys anything Rush says, even when I refute the phony statistics with actual statistics.
During the 90s, he moved out of California because he got sick of all the "fags and colored people" and now lives in a gated community in Arizona. He feels "safe" there because the guards keep the "riff-raff" out. Ohhhhhhkay.
We had a moment at a recent family dinner that was eerily similar to your father's explosion. I had just seen "Good Night and Good Luck," and brought it up as a terrific film that I thought was well-made. My dad interrupted me and started in on how the country was full of Communists in the 50s and that McCarthy was a great patriot.
Whoa. Silence at the dinner table as my siblings and I looked at each other with stunned looks on our faces. As my sister and I did the dishes after dinner, she whispered to me, "Was dad defending McCarthy?" Ohmigod, we both thought.
Apparently O'Reilly went off on the movie during his show; when I looked up his comments on his website, I found nearly the exact words my dad used at dinner.
How -- and why -- did our parents get brainwashed? I have trouble finding anything to talk with my father about any more because he will twist it all into something political.
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Parents Weren't Brainwashed
They just shifted from a radical hippie view to a radical conservative view. What they like is being angry radicals. The content is less critical to them than the stance. It's a personality characteristic not a policy decision.
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no effort to verify facts
The article isn't really about the parents' new conservative views and the author's displeasure with them.
Rather, his problem is with:
(1) Their antagonistic manner, and
(2) the repetition of O'Reily's lines without any indication that it reflects their own thoughts, and no effort to verify facts before accepting them as "truth". No effort to compare propaganda with known facts. ("now that doesn't sound right; I haven't heard anyone try to outlaw Christmas; where is the proof of this War on Christmas?")
The mindless repetition and acceptance of propaganda without any verification from previously critical thinkers--that's what's so hard to accept.
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RE: The real war on Christmas
Americans love to label themselves and be part of as group - I'm a Packers fan, I'm a liberal, I'm a Republican. Makes me think of sheep. Gotta support the home team, not matter how bad the quarterback, or president. Wil's Dad IS a right wing wacko, but so are 75% of Americans. This is country where 40 million (or some number like that) people do not have access to affordable health care, a country that tortures people and says it's okay to do so, a country that spies on its OWN CITIZENS, and that killed 65 of its OWN CITIZENS in 2003. Sounds a lot like the so-called Axis of Evil countries that the U.S. is so hell bent on destroying.
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A Certain Wisdom.
"Can America survive this epoch of misrule? Of course not. The most casual student of history knows what happens when a country overstretches its economy in foreign adventures, makes enemies, alienates its allies, and teaches its citizens to value entertainment over achievement, and celebrity over virtue.
A Republic can survive anything but the death of the love of Liberty in the hearts of its people. When that happens, no amount of blood spilled, speeches made, or treasure squandered can bring it back. This week the President told us that he will set aside the rule of law whenever he thinks it fit to do so."
There is a certain quietness is your post that makes one stop, look and think.The message within is truly frightening, but that does not mean it is not right.
Frankly, you would be staggered about the depth of the erosion of civil liberties that is happening here in the UK.
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Thanks for sharing and being so insightful!
This is a pleasantly insightful piece about the crazed extremes to which our political/social/cultural systems have gone...
You speak of the inability of many folks to disagree amicably. And you do a decent job of pointing to one of the why's this is so.
I wish more people were this insightful -- we'd all be a whole lot richer for it.
I've sighted this in my blog as well -- it's well worth sharing.
As someone who's watched the father that raised her in Berkeley by choice, who taught her to question *everything*, who taught her to read the *good* science fiction and who encouraged her to protest when she found intolerance or indignity in the world, but who now votes so far to the right that she barely recognizes his politics, I have some understanding of your issues. While mine hasn't had quite that level of melt down, the woman he married (2nd wife) certainly has -- in front of my thoroughly confused husband. Family is never easy -- but like you, I still love him and all he gave me. Birks and all :>.
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Bill O'Reily isn't pro-death penalty.
Perhaps someone can correct me on this, but I've heard Bill O'Reilly say on more than one occaision that he's against the death penalty.
So, Will, believe it or not, O'Reilly would have agreed with you. Rush certainly wouldn't have, but O'Reilly would have.
Other than that, when did the topic of politics turn from casual conversation to "my way or the highway"? It seems that somewhere along the line, political commentators turned politics into the new morality. Ruch may be the most popular, I'm sure there's plenty of blame to go out to all the talkradio pundits out there, lineral and conservative alike.