Ted Rall on Clear Channel and Stern

First They Came for the Shock Jocks
by Ted Rall

NEW YORK -- During the Fifties, actors and screenwriters sympathetic to progressive and radical causes found it nearly impossible to get work. Though they couldn't prove it, blackballed Hollywood talent knew why their telephones had stopped ringing. Somewhere behind the scenes, someone powerful, someone who believed that America was composed only of two kinds of people--communists and right-thinking souls like themselves--was working to silence them.

We tell our kids that America learned from McCarthyism, but a new version of the Red Scare is being born in this new century. Powerbrokers connected to what Hillary Clinton clumsily called the "vast right-wing conspiracy"--the Bush-Cheney's neoconservative war profiteers, the Christian Right and their media allies at Fox News and Clear Channel Communications--operate out in the open. Their goal: to crush personalities whose influence and eloquence threatens their plan to recast the United States in their white, heterosexual, pro-business image.

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http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0311-08.htm

Puts things in a good prespective.

They didn't learn. They still argue in defense of McCarthyism. It's honestly becoming frightening, to see how sick these people are and how they will justify anything that fits their agenda.