THE BEST IS YET TO COME



My visits to the WSJ Editorial Page are few and far between, as befitting the instructions given to me by my gastroenterologist.

Nevertheless, occasionally my curiosity gets the best of me, and I wander over to Bartley-Gigot-OJ Fund land.

And on this day, James Taranto serves up a softball for us, attempting to make a comparison on the firing of the Savage Weiner.

First, here are the comments for which Savage was fired:

One caller began discussing his experiences, and after an unintelligible part of the call, Savage asked him "So are you one of those sodomists?"

When the caller said, "Yes I am," Savage, reclining in a chair with his arms folded and wearing dark sunglasses, responded, "Oh, you're one of the sodomites! You should only get AIDS and die, you pig!" in a clip of the show hosted on the Web site of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

Taranto tries to make a comparison to the Dixie Chicks hoopla from a few months ago:

Even so, remember all the hullabaloo awhile back about the Dixie Chicks? After one Chick made an obnoxious comment about President Bush while on an overseas trip, some fans were outraged. Clear Channel Communication ordered the Chicks' tunes off the playlists of its radio stations. A Louisiana radio station held a "Chick Bash," where fans threw their Chick CDs into a pile to be run over by a tractor.

The Guardians of Democracy were apoplectic. It's the crushing of dissent! A corporate conspiracy to destroy America's freedom! Another Kristallnacht!...

Now, this is all nonsense. The Dixie Chicks have a perfect right to say whatever they want, but their detractors also have a right not to play their songs, or to engage in "symbolic speech" by crushing their CDs. Likewise for Michael Savage. He has the right to say whatever he wants, but MSNBC is under no obligation to provide him a forum. But will the sanctimonious hypocrites who wailed about the criticism of the Dixie Chicks utter a peep of protest now that Savage has been Dixie Chicked?

Taranto seems to think there's a double standard here. Let's look at the content of what was actually said. Did Natalie Maines, or either of the other two Chicks (whose names slip my memory, clearly I'm more of a rocker myself) say anything about wishing harm, physical or otherwise, on Bush? To say you're "ashamed" to share a home state with a president whom you strongly (and patriotically) oppose on the issues, that's tantamount to wishing terminal illness and death upon someone? While political views have been part of popular music for decades, wishing death on a caller (and not only that, but packaging it with severely bigoted comments) doesn't have a place anywhere. That's why there will be no outrage here.

For Taranto's analogy to work,
1) His daily radio show will have to be boycotted and cancelled across the country
2) A coordinated, top-down effort by major corporations will need to be conducted to smear Savage, as well as to accomplish part 1, such as with Clear Channel and the Chicks, and
3) Savage will have to pose nude on the cover of Entertainment Weekly. (shudder, hardly seems worth it to me)

UPDATE: I neglected to notice that the Savage quote was incomplete. It also includes the charming "Go eat a sausage and choke on it!"