Compassionate Conservatism

If you haven't heard of Michael Savage, well, you're lucky. If you have, you know he's a rabid right-wing radio talk show host. Here he is talking about the tsunami relief effort:



We shouldn't be sending as much as we're sending. Bush has a lot of gall writing a check for 135 million dollars. This is more a UNICEF deal, it's a U.N. deal, it's a Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, George Soros, Bill Clinton bleeding-heart-liberal deal. I don't want to send them any money. You know, a few airplanes with some medical supplies and a little lip service would have been fine for me.



Note that this was before the administration was shamed into upping its aid to $350 million. But Savage has more to say on the subject:



If you are a God-believing, God-fearing person . . . You could argue, maybe this is God's hand, because some of their brethren struck Christian America. Maybe God speaks the truth but waits. Seeks the truth and waits. I don't know. You could argue: God struck them. Now, I don't argue that because I'm not a theologian. Nor do I believe that God is omnipotent. I believe God is omnipresent. But I don't think God has control over every act because there would be no free will and I don't believe in that. ... But then again, who knows? I'm one man amongst billions of people, with one man's opinion.



[...]



Many of the countries and the areas in these countries that were hit by these tidal waves were hotbeds of radical Islam. Why should we be helping them destroy us? ... I think what we're doing is feeding our own demise. ... I truthfully don't believe in foreign aid.



[...]



We shouldn't be spending a nickel on this, as far as I'm concerned. ... I don't want one nickel of my money going over there. ... I am sick of being bled to death by every damn incident on the earth.



David Neiwert, author of the excellent blog Orcinus (where I got these quotes), dissects the Savage commentary:



The ignorance that abounds here really is astonishing . . . The epicenter of the quake was near Sumatra, one of the islands of Indonesia, a largely Muslim nation. (In case anyone has forgotten, it was also a noteworthy victim of an Al Qaeda attack, namely, the bombing in Bali.) Most of the rest of the victim nations are Hindu or Buddhist.



What's dangerous about these remarks is the way they play right into the hands of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. As I long ago remarked, people who make all of Islam out to be our Enemy are furthering bin Laden's hopes, which is to draw us into an all-out global religious conflict pitting Islam against the West.



Neiwert also recognizes that Savage represents an ominous trend in more ways than one:



Fortunately, no one really takes Savage that seriously. He remains firmly embedded in the public mind as a representative of far-right conservatism.



The flip side of this caveat is the fact that he's the third-most popular talk-show host on right-wing radio. If he's on the fringe, it's become a mighty big damned fringe.



The amount of hostility, and the rhetoric of outright violence, being directed against anyone perceived as "liberal" in this country is increasing significantly. And "liberal" is increasingly being defined as a) anyone who criticizes the administration, and b) therefore synonymous with the "enemy."



How long until the fringe becomes the center of public discourse?