Adjust your screen and also see the entire first season of the Outer Limits...

As a former devotee of right-wing radio, I am saddened and even somewhat horrified whenever I attempt to listen to those radio talk shows today. Their tone and timbre of voice allow me to listen to no more than 5 or 10 minutes. The only thought that repeats in my mind while listening is "the voice of hatred, the voice of hatred, ...". I'm pretty conservative, but all coins have two sides. No one is always right, or always wrong. You'd never know that, listening to these guys! They offer a nonstop stream of high-volume accusations and hatred, nothing more.

Hate radio exists because Americans are too pussified to anything but scream from the confines of their cars. We need more hate radio bread & circuses not less.

is that you ever went to talk radio for "stimulation and expansion" of your thinking.

My low opinion of Paglia not withstanding, I am continually blown away by the apparently intelligent people I meet who profess to be wavering fans of talk radio who are in a continual state of disillusionment with vitriolic neopopulist rage rhetoric which seems to have been a "brand new thing" to the medium for about a decade and a half, now.

Where was I when the faceless blowhards of the airwaves were out there preaching reason, pragmatism and a thorough examination of factual discourse?

Luckily, I averted my eyes in time, having caught the author's name.

Every time this idiot writes something on this site, I ask the editor to stop publishing her. Seems like the vast number of letters to the same effect is not moving Ms Walsh to take action. One just has to wonder what kind of personal relationship exists that allows this ignoramus full use of Salon's prestige to unleash upon the world her raging intellectual pablum... Ms Walsh, stop pushing this idiot onto us. We deserve better.

Minor: I think part of Salon's contract with Camille must require her to write at least one unbelievably ridiculous line per article, maybe to drum up letters and thus hits and thus advertisers. This week's "winner": "The degree to which Obama is or is not a stealth socialist remains to be seen." I'd say this is one of the dumbest things I've read in a long while, but, well, I've read Camille's other columns.

Major: As Dave Neiwert has documented with incredible thoroughness and effectiveness on his blog and in his books, this kind of eliminationist rhetoric is not only not new to talk radio, but has been central to it for at least a decade and probably longer. The fact that Camille has listened for all that time without hearing said rhetoric says much, much more about her own willful deafness than about any shift in the medium (although I'm sure being in the minority party isn't helping any).

Ben

NOT!!!

Yesterday, Xrandadu Hutman, on the comments after Joan's latest, predicted Paglia's latest would go like this:

"I was bemused and controvanklemuddled by Wanda Sykes' classless disembowabblement of Rush Limbaugh at the

narcissistic White House Correspondents Dinner. Whereas Limbaugh, that rapaciously churlish master of spoken-word artistry, has a highly successful radio program, what has Sykes done that's left more than a fleeting fingerprint whorl on the collective political consciousness? Limbaugh proves why Republicans lord over the airwaves like Marlene Dietrich vamping for a gape-jawed audience of dilglumptious potanicals; Sykes shows why liberals can't even attend dinner without choking on the arrogant wanklinobbishness of their insouciant bilfonkery. Did I mention that I wrote a book called 'Sexual Personae'?"

What's the difference between this and what she actually wrote? This one is at least funny.

Need I even bother asking Salon again to please, for the love of God, Kick. Her. Out.

And as usual the media will be too cowardly to call a spade a spade. That shooting in Knoxville last year should have prompted a real investigation into what talk radio is encouraging it's listeners to do but of course because the media is so cow-towed by the right wing minority, they didn't. This is the real reason these idiots are getting away with what they say, no real opposition anywhere else. So we end up with Ann Coulter being invited on the TODAY show where she can hawk her latest "book" and basically accuse the person intervewing her of hating America. The idiots in the media and the FCC better wake up before more people get killed!

I think it’s very possible that Camille Paglia is insane. For the past few years she’s been twiterpating over how visceral and insightful right wing talk radio is only to do an about face in this week’s column to say that:

“Talk radio has been seething with such intensity since Barack Obama's first week in office that I am finding it very hard to listen to it.”

Then she continues with this gem of abject stupidity:

“As a longtime fan of talk radio...I want stimulation and expansion of my thinking -- not shrill, numbing hectoring and partisan undermining of the authority and dignity of the presidency. Rabidly Bush-bashing Democrats shouldn't have done it to the last president either, but that's no excuse for conservatives, who claim to revere our institutions, to play schoolyard tit for tat.”

Wait, let me see if I understand you correctly, you just noticed that right wing radio “seethes with intensity” and it took the “hectoring” of a sitting president that the right wing hates with a passion for you to see what talk radio has always been about?

Seriously Salon, listen to your subscribers and give this harridan the boot. Her monthly bloviations are becoming more and more disjointed and the magazine embarrasses itself by keeping her on.

Are you kidding me? After lauding conservative talk radio all these years, you've just now come to see its rancid and hateful nature? Ms. Paglia, with all due respect, you have for a long time now been part of the problem, not (as you no doubt believe) a crusading intellectual in search of the solution.

Your epiphany is funny, pathetic, and sad. Salon may choose to provide you with a forum but it's been quite a while since you're really had much to say.