News - All mouth, no brain

Rush Limbaugh is a hypocritical pill popper. Sean Hannity barely knows how to count. And Bill O’Reilly seems to view himself as something akin to Jesus.

But, for 30 years, Atlanta’s airwaves have been blessed with our own contribution to the bloviating universe of talk radio: Neal Boortz’s hallmark is uncontainable, blubbering anger, which seems quite popular among his listeners. In fact, tens of thousands of the most dull-witted among us listen religiously to the Cox Radio blowhard ... and actually believe him!

The other day, Boortz topped even himself. Based on no evidence at all, he falsely claimed that the people behind a liberal website were — horrors! — Communists. And, if his callers are evidence, many of his sadly ignorant listeners are parading around town irate, thinking that the rest of us fools don’t know this fact.

Before we get into Boortz’s latter-day imitation of Joe McCarthy, I have a confession: I occasionally listen to him. I try not to, but I’m a news addict and there isn’t much public-affairs programming on the dial after 9 a.m. So if I’m running late and don’t feel like WRFG’s “Good Morning Blues” show, I switch over to Cox Radio — for as long as I can stand it.

My one recent pleasure in listening to Boortz has been to scribble down his errors (and he spews so many that I’ve become a bit of a hazard to the drivers behind me).

Some of those errors are so basic that you gotta hope the guy’s just a liar. Someone this stupid shouldn’t be given a driver’s license. For example, on Nov. 12, he said: “The deficits under Carter were bigger than they are now.”

C’mon. The shrub in my back yard knows Boortz is wrong about that. During Jimmy Carter’s four-year term, the federal deficit weighed in at an annual average of $63 billion. This year, the White House says Bush’s deficit will top $477 billion; next year it’s projected to hit $521 billion. No matter how you cut it, you’d have to be an All-Mouth-No-Brain Dumbass — well, I guess you’d have to be Neal Boortz — to think $63 billion was greater than $500 billion.

Some of Boortz’s misstatements are about basic facts, like earlier this month, when he claimed, while arguing for corporate tax cuts, that the “average profit” of a Fortune 500 company is “4 or 5 or 6 percent.” Funny guy, that Neal.

Many of Boortz’s errors are misleading political broadsides, like when he ranted on Feb. 4 that John Kerry “wants to treat terrorism as a law-enforcement issue.” Never mind that Kerry voted for the war in Afghanistan and to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq.

My favorite piece of recent Boortz buffoonery was his defamatory strike at the liberal website MoveOn.Org — “a preponderance of members who came from various factions of the communist movement.” He ranted on and on about this fiction, and indicated that he was referring primarily to the website’s organizers.

Boortz seemed simply to be exaggerating an already bizarre interpretation of one lonely fact. Last fall, a Texas fruitcake named Peggy Venable began complaining about a “hard link” from the Communist Party USA website to MoveOn.Org. This, she said, was evidence of a “link between” the two organizations.

Mind you, we’re talking about a one-way street here. MoveOn wasn’t linking to the Communist Party, nor did the organization have any reason to know that communists were linking to MoveOn.

The logical lesson to take away from this is that Peggy Venable is a complete loon. Instead, the conservative grapevine swallowed her story whole and began to play that old game of telephone (with a paranoid twist), culminating in Boortz’s claim that the organization’s “members” were reds.

MoveOn — which was in the news this week because it’s organizing a petition to censure Bush for misleading Americans about the war in Iraq — actually was founded by two capitalists. Joan Blades and Wed Boyd made loads of money on a software company. Unlike Boortz, they developed products, found a market in which to sell them, made their payrolls — did all the things that small business people do to make America strong.

MoveOn also gained notoriety last fall when a truly great American named George Soros, announced he was giving $5.5 million to the group to fund anti-Bush ads. Soros escaped from communist Hungary in 1947 and made billions of dollars as a manager of investment funds. He’s now a very thoughtful philanthropist, best known for the Open Society Institute, which exports democracy, freedom and other American ideals to foreign lands. Sounds like a pinko to me, Neal.

Since all you have to do to be called a Communist is have a link from the Communist Party website to your own, I’d hoped to convince the real Communists to link to Boortz. Then, I could have taken a picture and called him a Commie. But they wouldn’t go for that. Marxists never did have a sense of humor, anyway.

In Neal Boortz’s world, the whole interaction might prove I’m a Commie. After all, I talked to Communists — there’s the “link!” In Boortz’s world, all negative stories about liberals (and even moderates) — no matter how ridiculous — are to be unquestioningly accepted, embellished and amplified.

And here’s the really ridiculous part: In Boortz’s world, the pour souls who listen to Boortz and actually believe him are told that the rest of us are “ignorant.” Go figure.

ken.edelstein@creativeloafing.com

Ken Edelstein is the editor of Creative Loafing.