Online Blogintegrity

Our good friend Noel Sheppard is at it again. This time he's mad at USA Today for not realizing that Spocko has been ordered by Nancy Pelosi to destroy the few remaining outposts of conservative expression left on Earth, 'cause she's, like, Sauron, and Spocko's, like ,the Nazgul, or some shit like that.

I've been gazing in wonder at NewsBusters lately. Sheppard n' the NB gang seem to spend most of their time watching The View so as to gasp in delicious horror at Rosie O'Donnell, which is I suppose Noble Work, though one wonders if Elmo were not the Graver Threat to the Union. Or maybe Twinkie the Kid. I suppose, though, that when your whole gig is warning about the evils done by an imaginary beast like The Liberal Media, you have to do something to justify drawing a paycheck while you sit on your ass all day, and you might as well TiVo The View. I just hope Sheppard doesn't have too much trouble laundering the Nacho Cheez stains out of his house dress.

Anyway, his latest is pretty stupid. He wants to claim that it's really the Liberals who are against free speech because they support the Fairness Doctrine, which would censor conservatives by requiring radio stations to present both sides of political issues. Because nothing says censorship like hearing both sides.

But the Fairness Doctrine stuff is irrelevant to the real issue here, anyway. It's meant to distract from the ridiculous crap the KSFO hosts have been spewing -- the delight in testicle torture, the odes to genocide:

Now you start with the Sears DieHard, the battery cables connected to his testicles, and you entertain him with that for a while, and then you blow his bleeping head off.

Indonesia is really just another enemy Muslim nation. ... You keep screwing around with stuff like this we are going to kill a bunch of you. Millions of you.

That and the "call Allah a whore" fun.

Sheppard desperately wants for this to all be an abstract wrangle about Free Speech, and not about the KSFO hosts being held accountable for what they say. Which is understandable: when you set out to defend the indefensible, you have a lot of bullshitting to do:

After all, one of the positions of the liberal bloggers concerning this Spocko issue was that ABC/Disney had no right to try and stop him from using audio clips from KSFO’s broadcasts, a position that I likely agree with. However, at the same time, these folks are trying to stop KSFO from making the statements present in those clips.

As such, these folks are fighting to allow bloggers to copy and air statements made by radio personalities that they themselves object so strongly to that they want said personalities to not be allowed to make. In effect, the bloggers are saying that they should be free to disseminate examples of what they feel is hate speech at the same time that they are trying to invoke a boycott of those committing the act.

Anybody see an extraordinary hypocrisy here?

Yeah, yours, buster. Nobody has ever said KSFO doesn't have the right to have its jocks babble about killing millions of people and hooking dicks up to batteries. Go ahead. All we're saying is, you want to say shit like that, and, say, the California State AAA might not particularly like having the genocide joy up next to their ads. Particularly insofar as what has motivated the organizations who have pulled their ads is not the threat of a boycott, but their sense that what the KSFO idiots said was genuinely obnoxious:

MasterCard and the state-run Michigan Economic Development Corp. say they advertised on KSFO talk shows last year but won't place new ads. "It's hard to listen to those clips and not be offended," says Mike Shore, spokesman for the Michigan agency.

No shit. Anyway, fair use is a wholly different legal (and moral) concept than is hate speech -- a revelation that will not surprise anyone who isn't a wingnut desperately seeking a way to make delighted lubrications on genital electrocution a legitimate source of pleasurable meditation for the multitudes. Or, in other words, stop pretending that people who want to connect gonads to Diehard batteries aren't sick little freaks, and we'll leave you alone, you dishonest little prick.

Oh, and since Sheppard started with the grammar flaming:

As amazing as it might seem, our liberal brethren on the opposite side of the aisle don't understand that the more they look this horse in the mouth, the less freedoms they might find they have in the future.

Not "less" -- "fewer." Dumbass. (The mixed or even miscegenated metaphors aren't a grammatical but a stylistic lapse, so I let them pass, indulgently.)

(Cross posted to Whiskey Fire)