Bill O'Reilly touts this year's Academy Award as a soapbox to get out liberal Hollywood's message that gay equals good. Ipso facto, "Brokeback Mountain" is a lock.
But if the far-left wackos in Hollywood could do a Diebold on the Oscar vote and truly push the liberal agenda, it wouldn't be a gay humanizing film that would take home the Golden Gal. It would be the true dark horse, "Good Night, And Good Luck," for that is the one film that reminds us how the "liberal agenda" sounded in the years prior to the takeover by today's broadcast Lords of Loud, like O'Reilly.
In a recent OpEd, NBC's Brian Williams lamented that Army counsel Joseph Welch's two sentence soliloquy to Senator Joseph McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" which was loud enough to quiet the nation's bully, "might be lost in today's cacophony of broadcast choices...because our attention is elsewhere."
What Williams missed is that the real danger today is not whether we'll ever hear a Welch-like moment as much as what shape it would be in by the time it reaches our ears.
Momentous events don't go unheard. Today, Welch's testimony and Welch himself would be sliced, diced and served up as fatuous comfort food for the hungry choir. Reality gets swallowed up and digested by all manner of unelected representatives in the media and what we're left with is their waste; rancid sewage that they purport to be the truth. No need to go through the usual suspects, but we would be left to sift through their routine distortions, mind reading, cherry-picked facts, demonizing of the messenger with any other conclusion than theirs -- spinning masquerading as no spin at all - to find out if Welch even existed.
"An anti-American, communist kiss-up lawyer telling an elected official of our great country about who's decent? He wouldn't know decent if decent hit him in the face. He's a lawyer, folks. Worse, he's a card-carrying member of the ACLU."
"Word out of Washington is that it was Welch's wife who actually suggested him to represent Communists. Next up, Dick Morris tells us why Hillary Clinton may be behind Welch's obviously coerced speech."
"If you wanted to reduce communism, you could abort all communists represented by Joseph Welsh, we could wipe out most of communism. It would be an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do but the communist rate would go down."
Even sympathetic hosts would edit his historic recording as lead ins to their shows..."Have you no sense of decency...Stephanie Miller...at long last?"
Of course there is the ever-popular, "...and you can get all the facts of the Welch testimony, that you'll hear no where else, but in my new book, that I will hawk ad infinitum until it hits the best-seller list, when all of my listeners - the only real American patriots - buy it."
Talk radio is not so much about listening to someone who already agrees with you as much as listening to someone who tells you what you should think. Anyone with a microphone and ten watts becomes an instant expert on politics, morality, law, child-rearing, weather patterns, etc, and tell us there's no need to read papers nor watch the news because they're "all you'll ever need." That they protect themselves under the guise of being entertainers neglects that even vice-presidents feel them important enough to go on their entertainment shows to explain a Supreme Court choice that's not being received well. Did Hubert Humphrey go on Ed Sullivan to push President Johnson's nomination of Abe Fortis?
Today, we would hear a bombastic cluster of agendized-distorted halves of the two sentences. Before Welch's actual words reached our ears, 50% of America would think McCarthy was a fascist and 50% would believe Welsh wanted the Russia to take over America. The problem is, 50% of the truth is no truth at all.
Edward R. Murrow would be spinning in his grave. Everyone else would be just spinning.
And as Sunday's awards are handed out, it's not so much gays -- or even liberals -- that O'Reilly fears might be humanized. It's the truth.