Letters to the Editor
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Can't compete with Hannity?
Wasn't it Hannity who "cut and ran" from a one-on-one debate with Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson just last month? Of course Liberals can't compete with him. How do you compete with someone who hides in the locker room instead of coming out onto the court?
I saw a radio show host named Tom Hartman on one of the C-Span channels just before the November '06 elections and his take on the Fairness Doctrine was that while hard to sometimes work within it's guidelines, it ensured a necessary balance in that for private enterprise to be granted access to airwaves they had to provide a benefit for the public at large and that benefit was real factual news. He stated that even in his rather small market station it was not uncommon to have six people just in the station's news dept. and that the station was able to write the added cost of so many people off as a tax loss at the end of the year.
Although I have nothing but contempt and utter disgust for the current crop of hate radio bigots and most of it's listeners, I don't think Dems could or even should try to ram legislation through Congess to restore the Doctrine. At this point I think it's better that it come from the grass roots support so that if and when the day comes it will be done by the will of the people. I wonder had the Fairness Doctrine been in place the last 15 years and had there been news with real facts at critical junctures instead of Ken Starr's witch hunt, Judith Miller's and Michael Gordon's stunningly incompitent articles rubber stamping Bush administration propaganda as truth, and Al Gore "inventing the internet", if just maybe things would be a whole lot better for a majority of Americans today.
Besides, the more Limbaugh has had to raise the stakes lately to pander to that idiot base of his, the better chance he has of hanging himself just like the original king of fear-mongering parasites, Joe Mccarthy. I mean it just didn't get any better than when good old Rush went into that all-time clown act mocking Michael J. Fox, and in the process hanging Republican Jim Talent out to dry while control of the Senate hung in the balance. If that pill-popping blowhard wants to torpedo another one of his own party's Senate candidates in another down to the wire election in '08, I say Liberals are better off not competing with that.