Printer Friendly

Email to A Friend

Friday February 15, 2008

Michael Savage: Have you no sense of decency?

How typical of Michael Savage’s character to pick a fight with a dead man.

How typical of Michael Savage’s competence for him to lose.

In the vitriol-spewing radio host’s latest calculated foray into uttering something vile and basking in the free publicity, he slammed Rep. Tom Lantos on Feb. 11, only hours after the congressman’s death. Savage referred to the only Holocaust survivor in Congress as a “scoundrel” whom he “detested” and accused him of using the Holocaust as “a weapon.”

This is, of course, a mean-spirited and somewhat nonsensical thing to say. No doubt all the Chinese dissidents, Tibetans, Soviet and Ethiopian Jews and Sudanese refugees Lantos fought for are outraged he bullied the People’s Republic of China, Soviet Russia, et al. He had some nerve.

And yet mean-spirited and nonsensical statements are what Savage does best. Parsing his comments is an exercise akin to searching for deeper meanings at a professional wrestling match. This is, once again, a Savage publicity stunt. Riding the coattails of a dead man might put off most people, but not Savage.

Rather than reacting with a predictable finger-wagging chorus the next time Savage disgorges a racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic zinger — and his persistent bigotry and peculiar anti-Semitism are rampant — media outlets (including this one) should stop playing Savage’s game.

The next time Savage, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin or Norman Finkelstein makes a transparently outrageous statement in hopes of stirring up a self-serving media frenzy, we shouldn’t just report it. We should refute it.

For many years, whatever Savage has said, be it ever so vile, has resulted in dollars flowing his employers’ way. It’s no coincidence his foes, including the problematic Council on American-Islamic Relations, are targeting Savage’s advertisers.

This is simply a matter of dollars and cents. But lost among free speech arguments and economic warfare is a sense of decency. And when Savage saw fit to spit on Lantos’ grave out of pure self-interest, he displayed, once again, a stunning lack of it.

The line attorney Joseph Welch used to stagger Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1954 is every bit as appropriate half a century later:

You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

Did you find this article interesting? Subscribe to our FREE newsletter and you'll be notified each week when "J." goes online. We'll tell you about the most important stories of the week and give you a link to each one.

This page contains a BETA version of Amazon contextual links. They are marked by the dashed underline.  Your purchases support our site. At times they point to items which are not related to the actual link. Please alert us by email if you discover objectionable links.