The Semantics of Right and Wrong

Some Rhodes Kill
I have listened to Randi Rhodes for a year now, mostly impressed with her comments, though not at all hog wild over her every comment, and in particular her comments about the relationship of We the People and the US military. Randi toots her own horn excessively, though I understand her approach since I've heard her say more than once she patterns her radio personality after that of Howard Stern, the dude who it looks like now has sunk Sirius Satellite Radio into a 500 million dollar hole that it seems to be able to only get out of by merging with the XM, the other satellite radio.

Stern's idea for contentious radio is based on his theory that if you want high radio ratings you get on the air and act like a know-it-all asshole no matter the subject and no matter the controversy or salacious aspects of your position. Randi approaches radio from the same starting point; it's an approach that Stern used to utter success--the highest yet success in the FM radio market and, of course, now in the satellite radio market, currently claiming over a million subscribers at $14 a month, a sum that hardly covers the 500 million they paid Stern to leave reg radio and joint the superfuture radio.

One way Randi constantly blows her own bullhorn is in the fact that she claims she was once a member of the US Air Force--a noncombat ground job. She claims a strong relationship with the bimbo kids who are "sacrificing" their youth and lives in a rotten war based on total lies and absolute deceit and "evil" sort of conniving in Afghanistan and Iraq. She believes you don't say anything prejudicial against our military personnel and if you do, then Randi gets hostile and threatens to cut you off, calling you a Repugnican lapdog as she does.

A couple of days ago, she got a call from a guy in Pittsburgh. This guy started trashing Randi by first off saying she wasn't a progressive because a progressive cannot support any military attempt at righting the world nor can they support any kind of military action or the troops used to carry out those military actions. Progressives, in the post-VietNam War sense of the word, are totally opposed to war and thereby totally opposed to anything military, volunteer soldiers included. His point was that Randi Rhodes by bragging about her military service is a two-faced hypocrite, a babbler for peace and ending the war on the one hand but a mocking at true progressive ways to end the war on the other hand, her values being more in what we progressives jokingly call "liberal" values.

This guy went on to say people who volunteer for the military can never be progressives. Randi got her hackles up. "You creep, you Republican freak..." The guy interrupts her and says, "I'm not a Republican, I'm a Progressive, and as a Progressive I'm totally anti-war and that means I anti women and men volunteering for the military--that's their careers, their jobs, and that's why I say these soldiers are getting what they signed up for--WAR" [I am paraphrasing]--and this guy, in order to make his point stick, then blurted out that he thought "it serves you right" every time he read about one of our soldiers getting whacked in Iraq and Afghanistan, to which Randi responded by hanging up on the dude calling him a Nazi and blah, blah, blah..."I suppose he's anti-Semitic, too," at which time the guy called back and said no he wasn't anti-Semitic but he did feel if you are Jewish and you, like Joe Lieberman, are so hide-bound stuck on supporting the Israeli government and military in their intent to wipe out all Aaa-rabb dogs who don't look up to Holy Heaven and say, oh yes, please Israel take my land, my home, my farm, my wife and kids and blow it all to Kingdom Come, even at the risk of the annihilation of all of mankind, that you can't be a progressive no matter how unorthodox you say you are. I knew what the dude meant, but Randi took it personally, I think she's Jewish, and called the guy an anti-Semitic asshole and hung up on him again then proceeded to ridicule the guy for two days in a row--she was still going after him on today's show.

This guy was simply saying, according to his way of thinking as a progressive you couldn't join the military if you really were a progressive and in that sense, people currently in the military or ex-military-type politicians (Murtaugh, McCain, Kerry--nutjobs) cannot be progressives nor should they be welcomed to participate in high roles within a progressive political movement; once you've been to war and identify with the dog soldiers, or the jarheads, or the flyboys, or the swabbies--it's an ego thing with males--their military service--even I kind'a brag about my military service, your perspective is out of tilt in terms of the gung-ho killer attitude you were taught on joining the military--that "kill or be killed" one-way street-way of thinking. What I'm really trying to say is, though I am unable to really ID what a true progressive is (I think Teddy Roosevelt was considered a Progressive; so was, believe it or not, Herbert Hoover). Progressives are given credit for the anti-Trust laws, for getting women the right to vote, and Prohibition. Some old Progressives, like Ida Tarbell, weren't absolutely opposed to Capitalism, though they were opposed to corporatism and giving corporations the same Constitutional rights as an ordinary old US citizen, though they weren't for the overthrow of the corporations just the Federal regulation of them--notice, the very opposite of Conservative intent--even a shade off left of Liberalism.

What this dude was trying to get across to Randi was that since the VietNam Peace Movement, a progressive has come to be thought of as totally antiwar, totally for social change--a constant change, by the way; Progressives mean to clear the highway ahead of roadblocks and military checkpoints and overproduction and cheap labor and shit like that. How can a member of the waring military be progressive? How can a Vietnam war vet be progressive? How can a hillbilly governor's wife who then became a president's wife who then became an ineffectual senator from her adopted State of New York--she's done absolutely nothing for the people of NY State since she's been in Congress, running for president the minute Slick Willie beat his impeachment rap ("I did not have sex with that woman") and she started squeezing his tired-old balls--"You bastard, you owe me big time." "OK, Hill, I'm sorry, I mean, honey, you wanna be president--I'll make you president, Hill--will that get me off your meat hook?"--Hillary "Dennis Rodman" Clinton is no progressive; in fact, she's a Conservative in Dumbocrat pants suits--just as conservative as Joe Lieberman and just as likely to turncoat on us when we stupidly elect her president. She'll carry on Bush's failed policies, that I guarantee you.

A Zionist Jew can't be a progressive either.

God, it's all semantics. I remember sitting in a Sociology theory class one time and the teacher, a stone evolutionist-Midwest progressive--said he loved Communism but without the Communists, suddenly looking up to heaven and saying, "You know, the wonderful thing about theories, you can define them any damn way you please since it's all semantics anyway."

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Progressive: "Support our troops, disband the military."