The Savage Nation vs. the Bushbots

Since 11-28-05

By PAUL MULSHINE STAR-LEDGER STAFF

Al Franken and the other liberals are probably still wondering why they had such little luck in their efforts to start a talk-radio network to bash George Bush from the left. They didn't consider the obvious explanation. George Bush has his left flank nicely covered. It's on the right that he's weak.

That is the theory of Michael Savage. Savage is the most right-wing of the right-wing talkers on the national airwaves at the moment. He is based in San Francisco, but he can be heard in the New York area on WOR in the evenings. He is a welcome change from those Karl Rove clones Hush Bimbo and Sean Vanity.

"Hush Bimbo" and "Sean Vanity" are the names Savage has pinned on Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity of WABC. In doing so, he has sparked a war between the members of his "Savage Nation" (slogan: "Borders, language, culture") and the so-called "Bushbots," that sizable number of gullible Americans who can be convinced that whatever policy Bush adopts is a conservative policy.

"What makes Bush a conservative?" Savage asked when I got him on the phone the other day. "On the economy, Bush has got more governmental workers than anybody before him. He's ballooned the government."

As regards the so-called "war on terror," Savage points out that you can't win a war when you're afraid even to name the enemy.

"He's never mentioned Islamofascism," said Savage.

No, he hasn't. Even the French have been more willing to defend their borders, language and culture than Bush. He's a multiculturalist and a mushy one at that. Instead of reducing the reach of Islamic fundamentalism, Bush has managed in Iraq to get 1,700 Americans killed in a war that will create yet another Islamic republic. Just yesterday we learned that the new constitution in Iraq will incorporate sharia, Islamic law.

That's why we right-wing commentators believe the Iraq war has been the biggest blunder in America's military history. As for Bimbo and Vanity, if I may employ Savage's labels, they are simply too uneducated to realize that the Iraq war represents a failed liberal exercise in nation-building.

"There is no college in Rush. There is no college in Hannity," said Savage. "He's a high school dropout. It's like listening to an uneducated, unthinking man on the radio."

Savage has a Ph.D. from Berkeley in epidemiology, an extremely challenging field. That makes him a bit overqualified for the verbal pro-wrestling matches that make up talk radio. But it also makes him interesting.

The Bushbots don't think so. On their Web sites, they call Savage a bigot and a racist, two terms the employment of which generally indicate that the speaker is losing an argument. Savage is a hero on those Web sites that attack Bush's open-borders approach to immigration. "Rush Limbaugh is a direct link to his president, El Traitor, Senor Bush," wrote one blogger. "The invasion by illegals has been going on now for a long time."

"You are 100 percent correct," said another of Limbaugh and Hannity. "They are nothing but blind, rubber-stamping followers of El Presidente Bush."

All of this is a lot of fun if you don't take it seriously. I certainly don't. But I do find talk radio to be a good barometer of the nation's mood. And the nation is slowly figuring out that the Bush-neoconservative-Troskyite- internationalist view of foreign affairs has not worked out so swimmingly for the good old U.S. of A.

"Bush is melting down our borders and making us into a polyglot nation in which no one speaks the language," says Savage.

Savage hears a lot from people who say that any criticism of Bush is a mark of disloyalty to conservatism.

"I can't stand listening to people who want me to be a lapdog for Bush," he told me. "We're supposed to be watchdogs, not lapdogs."

As for the rest of the radio talkers, "They may as well work for the Republican Party. There's nothing interesting if you can predict what a man's going to say by just going to the GOP Web site."

He's certainly got that right. Listening to an endless rehash of Karl Rove's talking points, leavened by a few Teddy Kennedy-is-a-drunk jokes, is not very entertaining.

As for the Al Franken approach, how can a nation-building, internationalist multiculturalist get any traction by criticizing another nation-building, internationalist multiculturalist? John Kerry had that problem as well, you might have noticed.

When you attack the Bush-Rove spin from the right, however, you realize that the neocons' grand social experiment has been tried most visibly in Iraq and has failed most visibly there.

People are starting to notice.

Eventually even the Bushbots may get a clue.