Sore Losers

Having spent the last two days listening to conservative talk radio (without medication), I can tell you that this has not been a fun week for right-wingers of all shades. For them, this election was about as much fun as throwing up in an outhouse.

What's going on is a bunch of fractious finger-pointing underpinned by shock and fear. The far-right blames the moderates. The moderates blame Sarah Palin. The libertarians blame everybody. The fiscals and evangelicals seem like they've had enough.

However, in a revealing display of their carefully-hidden selfishness, the voices of talk radio aren't interested in knitting the Party's broken bones. They're not discussing a filibuster strategy or plotting a House coup in 2010. Rather, they're crying about the Fairness Doctrine.

Official FCC policy since 1949 (and upheld by the Supreme Court upon challenge), the Fairness Doctrine more or less mandates that those license-holders who utilize the public airwaves must provide equal time for opposing views where strictly editorial content is concerned.

Conservative talk radio is strictly editorial content. The Fairness Doctrine doesn't really apply to, say, a sports station. It doesn't mean a religious station would have to book time for the Church of Satan. But those programs that pander to the base don't want these liberal fact-checkers in the next time slot - understandably so.

Really, though, the tone turned quite nasty this election. Violence has been done by people who are hooked on the line of thought that has for so long dominated the airwaves. Even so, I don't think the Fairness Doctrine, which has been squelched since the Reagan-Bush era, should be applied in this instance.

Admittedly, not imposing it would be a lot like letting Osama bin Laden slip away in Tora Bora, but I don't see these AM gas bags as a threat anymore. Given unfettered access to programming, they threw everything they had at President Obama. Every name in the book. Every card in the deck.

Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month they hammered away. And their audience soaked it up. They bought every line, believed every word and obeyed every breathy, intoned instruction...

And got slaughtered.

Let these lemmings have their Pied Pipers (as if they need them). Leave them in their dark corners, their lower bowels of conservative media. It doesn't matter now. The Fairness Doctrine, alive and well, has just been enforced by the electorate.

pH 11.o7.o8