Of Autism and Assholes

I was very reluctant to even post this, because doing so completely supports my supposition. Oh well.

Over the last couple of days, radio shock jock Michael Savage has generated yet another firestorm with his comments about autistic children. Not surprisingly, his comments were ill-informed and inflammatory and have caused an ENORMOUS outrage in the press. And people should be outraged. But we need to keep our mouths shut.

See, the Michael Savages of the world LIVE for controversy. I doubt seriously that Michael Savage believes a word of what he says, but he hasn’t been in the news much lately and I’m pretty sure he lives by the old saw, “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

It’s funny, because it seems to be a right-wing idiot fear factor thing. These conservative assholes say the darndest things. But really, they just want to get a rise out of people, mostly because their ego demands it.

Before he became this hate-spewing rightie, Michael Savage was a seriously tree-hugging liberal, albeit with an ego that wouldn’t quit. When he realized that most tree-huggers don’t get their 15 minutes (unless they’re chained to a tree in protest, and even then we don’t usually remember their names) he reinvented himself as an uber-conservative. And shot to celebrity.

Shock and awe! And pretty fucking convenient, eh?

So, wouldn’t it be awesome if the press and the good guys of the world just ignored these people. The hate spewing “preachers” and inflammatory radio “personalities.”

Sure they’d still maintain a following among a small, dedicated group of crackers and dip shits, but my guess is that most of these haters would fade away, because the attention is really the driver here, not the message.

But, as I said in the opening line, I can’t even practice what I preach.