Evil or Stupid: Second Round!

I watch a lot of CSPAN. Like, a lot. I probably spend more time watching Washington Journal ("Where People Who Haven't Mastered The Telephone Yet Tell You How Often They Vote") than I do sleeping, and this is not coincidental what with me being on the coast that apparently does not exist as far as programmers are concerned. (Suck it up, East Coasters, you know damned well you're convinced you run the world's clocks.)

Anyway, Washington Journal is CSPAN's call in show ("You'd Be Amazed At The Correlation Between People Who Want To Talk About Fiat Money And People Who Forget To Turn Down Their Televisions"). Three hours of a host and three phonelines (Republican, Democrat and Independent), about half the time a guest. Brian Lamb used to read the newspaper at us a lot, and in fact someone just mentioned how much he missed that. I assumed it was some sort of chemical imbalance on my part. Nowadays people tweet and email comments as well. This is clearly one of those arenas where the char limit on Twitter is a good thing, if you've ever heard an Informed Voter try to explain about the Pan-America World Order. Frankly, if you can't explain your feelings on The Gold Standard in a tweet, you aren't trying. I'm almost positive those views have reference numbers by now.

So this morning they opened with "Tell us what you think the most important story of the day is". Which gets pretty quickly to my biggest complaint about CSPAN: Even screamingly egregious disinformation is almost never corrected by the hosts, and you have almost no chance of calling in to explain why the person who just explained that Most Homosexuals Are Pedophiles is a twerp before the end of the segment. This morning, Francis/Frances from Ft Lauderdale wanted to share with us, as the most important news story, that Planned Parenthood doesn't even do mammograms! They're an abortion factory!

This shit makes my head hurt, and not just because it was not one of the "most important story" choices. Honey, this is sandwich board and streetcorner territory, not Washington Journal ("Can't You At Least Wait Till The Sun's Up Before Screaming Invective At The TV?") fare.

Anyway, the second segment had the Grand Chancellor of PBS Totebag Technology or something on. Don't get me wrong, I love PBS. But holy shit are their executives and spokespeople boring. I assume on purpose. In fact, I assume for the same reason that WJ hosts respond to "We should just ship all the Muslim people back where they came from" with nothing more confrontational than "And we'll leave it there, in the papers this morning..."

Apparently they were deluged with tweets asking more or less the same thing two callers said, which was, I swear to God almost word for word, "Besides William F Buckley, can you name even one conservative you have ever had on PBS? Ever?"

The third time around, we were informed that "David Brooks doesn't count". Because I guess he's Silly Party or something.

Thing is, all of these callers and tweeters and emailers were awfully confrontational and clearly somewhere on the far side of annoyed though only one seemed to be actually angry. (That would be the guy who demanded to know "Where are your Tea Party voices?" He was reminded that before he went to Congress and started explaining that Postcards From Buster is theft, Rand Paul spent a good deal of time on his local PBS station ranting about runaway nanny-state government. This did not suffice.)

Don't get me wrong, fuck knows I spend a lot of time angry at CSPAN myself ("This weekend on Book TV, guy-you've-never-heard-of will be asking if Barack Obama wrote his autobiography, The Thing About My Dad."). PBS, not quite as often but it happens. Actually, I can answer both that question and the question of the day with four words: Tucker Carlson. (Oh, you're gonna go math on me? Apparently you don't mutter "That Prick" under your breath every time you say his name, and I think the problem here is your common sense, not my math skills.)

All of this is basically my long form version of asking if these people, vibrating with apparently sincere outrage, have actually not noticed, in their blind rage and persecution complexes, the other conservative views in the media, or if they're just gaming the ref. Because every time they said something like that, the Archduke of Non-Caillou-Related Programming explained that he felt conservative voices were represented but that he wanted and expected more of them in the fullness of time.

Me, I'd have just laughed. But I suppose there's a reason I'm not the Mayor of Sesame Street.

So, Conservatives: Self-Martyred or Disingenuous? (Both is an acceptable answer.)