Sometimes, I treat myself to little gifts. I will see something and say to myself,  "Do you deserve this and so much more Daylin? Yes Daylin, I think you do."  My team of psychiatrists thinks I should put into my mind a "new tape". One that focuses more on "others" and less on "self". So I tried that. When I saw my friend had a new Satellite radio installed in his car, I played the new tape: "Do others think you deserve this and so much more Daylin? Yes Daylin, I think they do". And you know what, my psychiatrists were right. That did feel better.


So I got the Sirius Satellite Radio, which includes thousands of channels. For music there are all kinds of niche channels, including one that plays Bruce Springsteen and another that plays the Grateful Dead non-stop. My personal favorite is the Wang Chung channel where everybody gets to Wang Chung tonight and every night, all night long. But when I'm not listening to Wang Chung (or Wang and Chung individually, after the breakup) I find myself listening to a channel called "Sirius Patriot". This is the right-wing talk radio channel.

I expected to disagree with the commentary on the Patriot Channel. I'd heard Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly before. Sure, they brought the crazy with them in a big green duffel bag. But nothing prepared me for what I heard on Patriot. This was crazy unplugged. This was the unrated director's cut. This is not only your crazy uncle off of his meds, this was your crazy uncle on meth in a circus cannon. And when I start using metaphors that even I don't understand, you know things are getting out of hand.

The hosts on Patriot do not feel bound by the admittedly loose rules of broadcast television or radio. They feel no need to preface the list of people they hate with a pro-forma "I'm not saying I hate anybody". For example, there is a host named Andrew Wilkow who I sensed was possessed of some reluctance to support gay rights. My first clue was the fact that he refers to gay people as "Filthy Sodomites". At first I thought he was being ironic, like when I refer to Larry King as "an attractive youngster" (yeah, I do that a lot). But nope. He calls gay people "filthy sodomites" because, as he explains it, "they are filthy and commit sodomy". At least he's linguistically consistent.

One thing Mr. Wilkow is not is open to different perspectives. The slogan of his show, screamed at every commercial break is "We're right, they're wrong. End of Story!!, which I must say is more punchy and effective than the liberal equivalent often whispered on NPR, "We're intrepid, they're Jejune, lets start a dialogue!".

Subtlety is also elusive on shows hosted by people like Mark Levin and Mike Church, who feels that "Obama-bot-Zombies" (a great name for a ska band incidentally) are leading this country towards a "Nazi, Maoist Hellhole" with such radical proposals as marginally increasing the gas mileage of cars in a way the car companies have agreed to. I had no idea this was what Maoist Nazis were all about. I knew the Maoists liked hats, and massive, violent transfers of city-dwellers to agrarian collectives, using summary executions and planned starvation as a tool.

And as a Jew, I thought I was pretty clear on what the Nazis were all about. Who know both of these groups had, as their true agenda more accessible health care and better oversight of industrial pollution? I guess my German was just too poor to realize that "Mein Kampf translated into "My Arts Funding". Also, when you think of the jackbooted thugs of dictatorship, does Harry Reid really come to mind? Do you remember the old Romper Room game "Which of these things is not like the other"? Lets try that now. Which of these things just isn't the same:: Genghis Kahn, Caligula, Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, Russ Feingold?

Of course, while hate courses through these shows, the Patriot hosts get very offended when you blame them for threats and violence. They are shocked and appalled by the suggestion that if they tell millions of people of varying degrees of sanity that Obama and the Democrats are trying to take their guns so they can round them up, steal all their money, give it to gay welfare recipients and then heard them, their families and all Christian "True Americans" into labor camps to support the Socialist Utopian Leviathan, that somebody listening might get pissed!

It's like when I was in third grade, and I'd tell the schoolyard Bully (which was his actual name) that the weakest kid in the class called him a wuss and said he could take him (I also did this in law school incidentally). The Bully would then beat up the weak kid to a pulp, and I would stomp on his glasses. I would then act SHOCKED when the teacher accused me of contributing to the violence. Then I'd cry, and the bully would beat me up, and the teacher would stomp on my glasses. Hence the team of psychiatrists we discussed earlier.

The simple fact is that the Andrew Wilkows and Glen Becks of the world are just ignorant demagogues who foreseeably, if not intentionally incite people to violence (and Sarah Palin is their less intelligent but more perky enabler) There have been others in history, but I had hoped and thought that America had matured beyond their ilk. Clearly I was wrong. But do we have an obligation to continually call these people out for what they are? Yes Daylin, I think we do.