In Tom Daschle's eyes I guess I'm a ``Rush Limbaugh wannabe,'' so I have to respond to his ever-so-1995 diatribe against talk radio.
Does Daschle know who Harry S. Truman was? He's the president who said the buck stops here and if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen, both of which apply to Daschle's pathetic whining Wednesday.
But there's an even better Truman quote, from back in 1948 when he was running for president. He was on a whistle-stop train tour across the country, and at one stop, somebody yelled up to him, ``Give 'em hell, Harry.''
``I never give 'em hell,'' Truman replied. ``I just tell the truth and they think it's hell.''
That's Daschle's problem. We just tell the truth and he thinks it's hell.
He's disturbed how ``entertainment becomes so much a part of politics and if that entertainment drives an emotional movement in this country among some people who don't know the difference between entertainment and politics . . .''
As one of my listeners e-mailed, ``A guy who takes memos from Barbra Streisand says we can't differentiate between entertainment and politics? Rush Limbaugh is both. Al Gore on SNL is neither.''
My question is, how come Daschle is only worried about talk radio?
Was he concerned two years ago when CBS ran a freeze frame of Gov. George Bush at the GOP convention with a caption underneath that said ``Snipers Wanted''? How about when Alec Baldwin suggested that Rep. Henry Hyde and his family should be stoned to death?
That was all good clean fun, I suppose, just like when some woman on NPR said she hoped Clarence Thomas' ``white wife'' would feed him enough fatty foods to kill him.
What about the DNC ad last month of Bush pushing an old-timer in a wheelchair off a cliff? Did Daschle ask the NAACP to pull its TV ad in 2000 that basically accused Bush of lynching a black man in Jasper, Texas?
Then there was Harry Belafonte calling Colin Powell an Uncle Tom, or was it a house slave? And the lefty talk show host in Miami who derided Condoleezza Rice as a ``mammy.''
Oh, I forgot. It's only hate speech when conservatives attack liberals. When students at Harvard Law demand a ``speech code,'' they're celebrating diversity. When conservatives try to defend the First Amendment, they're ``the Taliban.''
When Republicans went after Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice, that was ``the politics of personal destruction.'' When Larry Flynt and Hustler nuked Newt Gingrich's successor as House speaker with accusations of adultery, liberals shrugged and threw out the old line about how politics ain't beanbag.
What's the problem here, Daschle? You and your comrades control most of television, Hollywood and the big newspapers - the lame-stream media, as it's known on our message boards. The only medium they don't dominate is talk radio. Ergo, talk radio must be a threat.
They've tried to take us on, you know. On radio (Jim Hightower, Mario Cuomo) and on TV (Phil Donahue, Chris Matthews, Charles Grodin). What do (or did) all these shows have in common?
Ratings lower than whale droppings.
There's an undeniable double standard for liberals. Bill Moyers gets pulled over for OUI in Vermont and it barely makes the wires. The boss of the NAACP, Kweisi Mfume, has five kids out of wedlock, and it's a state secret. Rep. Dan Burton's one love child is mega-news.
It's not talk radio's fault that the Democrats blew the election, nor is it our problem that more and more Americans don't trust the lame-stream media. How many times can you pick up, say, The New York Times and read that Clinton pardoned not terrorists but ``nationalists''? How many times can they call illegal aliens ``undocumented workers'' before you just . . . turn on the radio and the computer?
I could make a few jokes about the 66-inch-high Daschle - ask him if he had any ``reservations'' about voting fraud in his home state on Nov. 5. But why bother? Let me just give him one final piece of advice. If the Democrats can't turn out a big enough graveyard vote on the South Dakota reservations in 2004 to save his Senate seat, then I think I know what Daschle should say in his concession speech:
``You radio talk-show hosts won't have Tom Daschle to kick around anymore.''
