And Kathy Wurzer is a

And Kathy Wurzer is a Harley Chick - NPR can't tell the difference between Hugh Hewitt and Howard Stern:

"SHOCK JOCK? Shock jock? Yes, that's how NPR referred to me this morning in an account of Arnold's campaign trip yesterday: 'AM radio shock jock Hugh Hewitt quickly prompted the crowd to see what they thought about the Los Angeles Times.'"

By NPR terms, a "shock jock" is anyone who's more animated on the air than Terry Gross or Ira Glass. Michael Feldman is shockier than Hugh Hewitt.

But there's a larger point here. Notice the taxonomy the left applies to opinion on the right:

• Rush Limbaugh leads a vast conspiracy (when he's not a big fat idiot, and I'm sure we can look for "Drug Addict" shortly here)
• Hugh Hewitt? Shock jock, with all the baggage that carries (around a place like NPR, anyway).
• Bloggers (below the stature of an Andrew Sullivan, anyway) are drooling knuckle-draggers.
• The vast right-wing audience? Mindless dittoheads. .
• Gun owners? Rednecks who are making up for some sort of sexual problem

Notice that nowhere in there is "fellow citizen" mentioned.

These are all symptoms of the most worrisome development I can think of in American society; to the left (and yeah, to the lunatic fringe on the right) we are no longer a free association of equals working from both sides of a temporal ideological divide to try to build a society that is better than the sum of its parts. We're now the "englightened" and the "unwashed masses". It's a war.

And the first thing you want to do in a war is to dehumanize your opponents.

Because you don't have to feel guilty about horrible things you do to mere drooling knuckle-dragging dittoheads with phallic obsessions.

Posted by Mitch at October 6, 2003 06:01 AM