If you ever are turning the radio dial somewhat early in the morning and you come across radio-live silliness that you have a hard time understanding, you have probably tuned in to the Stephanie Miller Show (SMS).

And you will just as promptly want to continue turning the dial.

Stephanie and her background team are among the cacophony of talk radio hosts whose schtick is advocacy for the political extreme left.

Being a liberal myself, I gave her show a large share of my morning time. She's an attractive woman, after all, if you have seen her as a guest on the cable news channels. She is also a single woman, never having been married in fact—and a word of warning to all you bachelors out there who think you can win the hand and the heart of a woman who has never been married and reached mid-age, and would likely put you as #11 of the 10 Most Important Loves of her life.

But I digress. For the important topic here is about what would get Stephanie and myself in the same room, which is our politics. And even though we are both ostensibly liberals, it is the nature of the politically opinionated eventually to start shouting at each other. To make a big thing of the small differences, and little of the things that we share in common. If only my last woman would have seen the things that should preserve a marriage rather than the picayune which make us scream Divorce!

Divisive Politics

Stephanie has not made any secret that she supported Obama for the 2008 Democratic Party nomination.

I myself had long ago decided to support Hillary but only because I thought she could win in November, not because I thought Obama was unworthy of the office.

But that was not the case for Stephanie and her fan base. It was not enough that Obama was good and (the most) qualified.

It had to be the case also that every other candidate was awful and rotten and even belonged in jail.

Stephanie and her sycophants had to take it to that level. Hillary was compared to Bush and even to Hitler by those contributing comments to her show and to her web site content. New levels of nastiness and pettiness were being defined daily on the SMS. Whereas the Obama lovers among them seemed to think that Obama walked on water, continually rationalizing his faults and broken promises, Hillary was evil personified.

I know the severe faults of Hillary. I was angry that she had not fully and properly repudiated her 2002 vote in support of a crime against the peace, the authorization of the use of military force to invade and occupy Iraq. Dozens of other senators were not so misled as Hillary seemed to be. And the ego of senators, and particularly when they become presidential candidates, is unstoppable. And so Hillary had rationalized her contemptible action.

But Hillary's shortcomings, both the degree and number of them, were never so horrible that she should have been compared to the likes of right wingers, Republicans like Bush and McCain, and fascists like ole Adolf himself. You saw this demonizatioon everywhere online, and this coming not from the usual right-wing suspects, but from the supposedly more-enlightened-than-thou Obama group.

The bizarre thing that resulted from liberals and the left choosing to support Hillary was not that they would be attacked by the Bush- and Mcain-supporting right. That's a given. The bizarre thing, the outrage, was that they would be attacked from the Obama supporters.

Obama supporters—no, Obama worshippers—had already declared Obama the nominee by early January although he had just won Iowa. They were insulting and name-calling Hillary throughout March, April, and May, even though Obama barely finished with just over half of the support of the party behind him in the end. Where do Obama's supporters get the utter and complete gall to think that their candidate was the overwhelming choice of the people, when clearly he was the choice of only the bare majority of his party?

No Tolerance for Different Opinion On Stephanie Miller Show

With the right wing kooks like Limbaugh, Hannity, Hewitt, Ingraham and Prager out there, no one is truly surprised that these ignoramuses will not feature a forum either on their shows or on their web site for opposing opinion or alternative views.

Intolerance is a distinguishing trait of the right winger, in fact. Sure, that does not mean that these idiots will not go through the pretense of seeming tolerant and open-minded, but it's not truly hard to realize that even principles that are not core principles for these morons of the airwaves are beliefs from which they will not budge in the slightest. When a position they support is found to be disastrous, they get on the air and try to make it seem that the position they held was a position that their political opposition in fact held, and then try to appropriate the view held by the left as their own.

But what is truly shocking—or maybe it is not shocking in fact—is that those who lean on your side of the center point in politics could themselves be those same intolerant and close-minded invdividuals as those on the right wing.

Indeed, the Stephanie Miller Show runs a live blog on her web site wherein online users of the service can log in and write short entries of what they are thinking or doing during the broadcast of the radio show. These entries rank from the truly as-if-anyone-cares trite and insipidly self-centered—such as what a user is eating for breakfast or planning for his activity of the day—to contributions that are more on topic and astutely so, such as issues of politics and subjects discussed on air.

Naturally since Stephanie has declared her overt support of Obama, the contributers to her live blog have been a near unanimity of Obama worshippers. Politically oriented blogs tend not just to attract the run-of-the-mill person, but typically the more politically opinionated extreme. The SMS live blog is no exception, attracting the most radical, the most intemperate, and the most intolerant of Obama worshippers. There were perhaps just a smattering (two or maybe three) contributors to the SMS live blog other than myself who were staunch Hillary supporters, and who said as much.

Of course the discussion—meaning the insults and name-calling—on this live blog were quite intense. There is no more childish behavior or filthier mouth you will ever find than in the Obama-supporting fanatic, who was not just an Obama supporter, but ipso facto a Hillary hater too. And it was not just enough to hate Hillary, but also her supporters as well.

The contributions of myself and the one or two others who steadfastly defended Hillary's candidacy were not at all welcome. There had been calls by Obama-supporting blog contributors to the blog administrator, who apparently is also one of the on-air personalities on Stephanie's show, to have the login privileges of myself and other Hillary supporters removed. A blog at a political talk web site is thus probably not what you might expect: a forum for wide-ranging, often heated, discussion of political issues with many different points of view. Rather, a blog—at least at The Stephanie Miller Show web site, is basically a chat room where those who are allowed to enter must be extremely like-minded and conform to the thinking of Ms. Miller and her minions. Again, nothing of the slightest difference is tolerated.

And so it happened. For no explanation given to me whatsoever, I found that login privileges to the live blog forum at the web site of The Stephanie Miller Show disabled, no reason given. So I must conclude that by that act, my Hillary-supporting dissenting opinion was no longer welcome apparently.

Truly there is nothing wrong when a blog administrator and the larger group of like-minded members shout at certain dissenting contributors to take a hike! After all, a blog is truly not a venue for free speech at all. There is no requirement that blogs must accommodate dissent. Even a political blog.

And they don't. Go to many of them, and pretty much the unanimity of comments made to a blog are the unanimity of sycophantic ass-kissing to the blogger's opinions or ideology. The blog administered at the Stephanie Miller Show is no different in that regard.

But while these bloggers and blog administrators are entitled to permit just the sycophantic to post their typically inane and peevish comments on the bloggers' (broadcast) content, they should never be allowed to represent themselves as a forum for free speech, uncensored opinion, and tolerance of a wide array of views.

For this is not factual, and because it is not true.

Stephanie Miller and her sycophants may be entitled to their opinions and only their opinions on their web site. But they are not entitled to their own facts. And the pretense to tolerance and open-mindedness is just such the case.

Mavi Gözler

23 June 2008