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fta: you dont actually think ustwo is making a serious or informed point about "liberals" above, do you?
all he does above is reiterate in a backhanded kinda way the extent to which "liberal" is a conservative projection, a fantasy that circulates within conservativeland as the mirror image of the right---it has no content independently of a series of minus signs stuck in front of attributes that conservatives claim for themselves.
so in conservativeland, and this despite all evidence, folk like ustwo fancy themselves as "having ideas" and so it follows that the inverse, the "liberal" does not....in the end all he is saying is that in conservativeland, other rightwingers are "us" and those who do not agree are not us, or "them"--there is nothing more to it.
there is never much more to ustwo's positions....the same crude procedure is repeated ad infinitum.
the talk format worked pretty well for the right during the clinton period. its central function really was the framing of information around conservative talking points, the collapsing of the latter into the former; the endless repetition of the same memes, the illusion of interaction generated by the call-in segments, the illusion of unanimity as a function of the meager amount of dissenting calls allowed past the screeners---these general features would be streamed toward ends that were often wholly absurd---remember the far right's vince foster paroxyms?---that in the end were little more than radio orwell type group hate opportunities directed not only at clinton but at everyone and everything that opposed the extreme right. strangely, talk radio from rightwingland also benefitted from much wider distrubtion than did any other political media format at the time, conservative paranoid drivel about the "liberal media" not withstanding.
air america was formed to counter this kind of thing, but i think it had a number of problems, not least of which was that air america is not trafficking in an ideology predicated on identification with the "us" with a hallucination of "nation" with the person of the Leader like that which is central to conservativeland, so the other tricks that radioheads like limbaugh worked out to use talk radio as to reinforce a sense of identification were not in place or functional-nor could they have been.
short version: air america was set up AS IF the conservative fantasy about the political context it operated in was an actual description of that context, as a weapon in a trench war against the right that was close to doomed from the outset because it was set up on the wrong strategic grounds.
one thing that the difficulties air america is having demonstrates is the arbitrariness of the conservative construction of american politics beyond ever-shrinking borders of conservativeland.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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