Talk Show Over the Edge?

When does a talk show go over the edge? Well, we got to hear "when" on Wednesday, Oct. 29, in Buffalo.

I was listening to WBEN (930 am) on my drive to Fredonia in the morning. It's been fun lately because the conservative talk show branch of the Republican party has been squealing louder and louder as the election nears and polls show Obama ahead.

But on Wednesday, talker Tom Bauerle went over the edge. OK, he's just being ignorant when he refers to Obama as the Kenya-born Marxist Barack Hussein Obama. He's refusing to recognize evidence Obama was born in Hawaii, he's showing an ignorance of Marxism and he's stoking anti-Muslim resentment (and suggesting Obama is Muslim, which he isn't). In other words, it's typical talk show bottom feeding.

But on Oct. 29 (or earlier today if you're already reading it), he made comparison's between Obama's potential election and Hitler's rise to power in Germany. Then he made a statement to the effect, "not that Obama's planning to send Jews to concentration camps ... not that I would put that past him." For approximately 10 minutes afterward Bauerle continued on a hate-filled diatribe in which he tried to explain how Jews and Catholics should never vote for Obama.

He did everything but call for a sniper to put Obama out of his misery -- Bauerle's misery, that is. His talk show sank into hate speech -- not hate speech in the legal sense, but in the sense that encourages hate of those who disagree with you. Talk show hosts aren't good winners, and they're something much worse as potential losers.

WBEN is a commercial venture and has the right to put anybody it wants on the air, but I would humbly suggest that people start complaining to the sponsors of a show that has gone this far beyond responsible speech. Why would any company want to sponsor this kind of talk?

Involvement

One of the advantages of no longer being on staff at the Buffalo News is that I can get politically involved, if I want. ... For the most part, I don't want.

But I may just throw $25 into an online fundraiser for Barack Obama. It isn't because I'm crazy about Obama. I simply put very little faith in p0liticians as a whole.

But it's just infuriating seeing what McCain & Co. have been doing with the whole ACORN issue. It seems like they're laying the groundwork for their protests if, as projected, the lose on Nov. 4.

As I understand it, in most states ACORN is required to turn in whatever registrations are collected -- accurate or not. That's the call of the local Board of Elections, not ACORN's. And even if people are illegally registered, it doesn't matter unless they try to vote -- in which case, Elvis Presley or Dale Earnhardt or whomever they're registered as will be liable if they're voting illegally.

So the Republicans seem to be doing their best to take the vote out of people's hands -- particularly if those people were registered by ACORN and happen to be black and likely to support Obama. By going after ACORN, they can scare people away from the polls for the vote and then challenge the results later.

And I can send my $25 to the Obama campaign.

After further review...

One of the things about writing a review right after a show is that you invariably think of things later that you wish you had put in, or things that you had planned to put in and forgot.

Last night I went to the Fall Acoustic Showcase put on by WYRK-FM at the University at Buffalo's Center for the Arts. The place was sold out. The review is at http://www.buffalonews.com/entertainment/story/464965.html

What things didn't make it into the review? Well, I was using a horse racing handicapping metaphor and I wanted to refer to Ashton Shepherd as "the mudder, I mean, mother of the field. After all, she's got a 3-year-old son." That one didn't make it; maybe that was a little too much pun-ishment for the reader.

And I wish I had done more to describe Jamey Johnson's voice. Phrases that came to mind included, "a sounds as gnarled as a live oak, with a powerful bass thrum like a locomotive rolling through the night ... Or like Hank Williams Jr. or Waylon Jennings on depressents."

Nontheless, it was a fun show and a good one to review. I think that other than the Sportsmen's Tavern, the UB shows are my favorite forum to hear country music.