A Liberal Deconstructs Conservative Talk Radio: 03/12/2019

Each day I listen to random conservative talk radio shows to get a sense of the mood of conservative voters. And to get a heads-up on what the "Fox & Friends" morning show will be discussing tomorrow. Plus, it's just pretty damn funny.

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This Is Clearly Going To Be A Long Day
Even before today's talk show round-up began, we've kicked off the stupid. President Trump tweeted about a segment he saw on "Fox & Friends," which featured a young woman named Elizabeth Pipko, who bills herself as the spokesperson for "Jexodus." Aside from the awkwardness of claiming to be the spokesperson for a movement, Jexodus isn't a thing. Anymore than "Blexit" was a real movement. Jexodus is supposedly this movement of Jews away from the Democrat Party because of their alleged anti-Semitism. 

There are a couple of problems with this premise, aside from the obvious ones. Jexodus is a obviously a too-cute-for-its-own-good play on words combining Jew and Exodus. But Exodus was literally a movement of Jews out of Egypt. So calling this made-up movement Jexodus is pretty much  the same as screaming "Hey, non-Jews made up this thing that's pretending to be Jewish!" Secondly, Elizabeth Pipko isn't exactly an unbiased spokesperson. She worked for the Trump election campaign out of Trump Tower in 2016 and she married Darren Centinello, who works on the 2020 re-election campaign for Donald Trump. Even better, they were married at the Trump-owned faux southern White House Mar-A-Lago. So she's essentially a Trump campaign surrogate pretending to lead a movement of people out of the Democratic Party.

I prefer to think President Trump knows this is all a scam and is just doing a bit of media trolling. But you never know. Regardless, I guarantee this pretend movement will pop up quite a bit today on conservative talk radio.

Mike Gallagher Is Unhappy
Mentioning that Mike Gallagher is annoyed with the media and Democrats is like noting the sun is putting out light today. But he's on his now daily screed about his go-to rookie Congressional Democrat women, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He keeps repeating the "she called America garbage" talking point. Which for the record, was not the case. The quote in question comes from a talk she did at SXSW, in which she argued that America had moved away from its core values:

"I think all of these things sound radical compared to where we are," she concluded, "but where we are is not a good thing. And this idea of like, 10 percent better than garbage, it shouldn’t be what we settle for."

Which isn't anything like saying "Hey, America sucks." But it's a good talking point and if Republicans have shown anything in the past two years, it's that while they aren't especially good at governing, they are master-level trollers.

But Gallagher uses the comments from Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Ilhan Oman to argue that if Nancy Pelosi can't rein these new kids in, it's going to be a Trump landslide in 2020. Which sounds....unlikely. I mean, I'm all in favor of encouraging Republicans to believe this, but I don't know of anyone involved in the actual election process in either party that actually believes it. Once again, this is really a case of the conservative echo chamber convincing itself that something is a fact because it's all they hear people discussing.


Prepared For Monkeys To Fly Out Of My Butt: I Sorta, Almost Agree With Rush Limbaugh
Rush spent the first 20 minutes of his show ranting about this story, in which about 50 people have been charged with spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their hapless kids into the college of their dreams. He makes sure to mock the hypocrisy of rich, white Hollywood liberals who don't have a problem gaming the system. And we liberals deserve it. It certainly illustrates that despite the political gap between the Left & Right, one thing that brings together rich people of any political persuasion is the willingness to spend money to cut in line ahead of much more deserving folks. 

But while it's funny to mock the Hollywood Left, let's not lose track of the fact that this is not a crime or a practice that is limited to just one side of the political spectrum. Although usually rich folks on the Right are usually smart enough to just get their kids into college by funding a new building project. In these cases, the scam generally involved getting a fictitious sports scholarship for something like the tennis or the crewing team and then having the student claim they were injured before the squad's first practice.

And before I forget, I chuckled when Rush was explaining the sport of crewing by saying "you know, it's rowing...like you would see at the beginning of episodes of "Banacek." Not that he's an old white guy or anything like that...




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